The basic set-up is two awkward and insecure people becoming friends and potentially lovers.

But it’s starting to feel like it’s going to just be torture porn - we’re not going to see the MMC find reassurance and grow, but just endlessly suffer and fail. Worse yet it’s started dropping very strong netorare hints lately.

It’s not that I believe it actually is going to just be torture porn, much less NTR (though at this point I can’t discount the possibility), but just that the author self-evidently believes that making the MMC fail repeatedly and giving him good reason to believe that the girl he’s fallen for is in love with someone else are acceptable ways to build tension, and for me they’re not. For me, they’re just unnecessarily cruel and entirely unpleasant.