Is my(20F) online friend(27M) grooming me?

So I have had this online friend for about a year. We would talk once every few days but recently since October end we have started talking everyday and I am glad for that cause he is really fun to talk to. We talk by texting.

A few days back some joke I made, made him realise I knew all about inappropriate stuff and he told me how shocked he was, how he thought I was innocent and he had never been so wrong. I asked him if it was off putting and he said,” No I like it. If you were around my age…..”

And since then he would randomly make sexual innuendos or jokes. Telling me things like he wants me to hold him while sleeping, wants to sleep in my lap, wants to make me his pillow, when I would ask him what he was eating for dinner he would say,”You” and joke around. There have been manyyy more such instances but they are too many to list here.

I would joke back thinking that its all in good fun. Cause I have other male friends and we make inappropriate jokes as well but its never to this extent like sleeping in your lap and all that.

Today he was going to sleep and we said goodnight to each other. I checked the chat about 2 min later and these were the messages after the goodnight:-

Love you 🫠 Just kidding I hate you

I thought he was fooling around so I said Awwww and joked that I will ignore his last message.

He replied with a 🙃

And we said goodnight again.

Later I saw he had deleted the love you message.

What do ya’ll think of his behaviour?

Also this might be relevant. I don’t know what he looks like. For most of the year he had lied to me about his country of origin and his height and his age and stuff.

Later when I found a discrepancy when I asked his height again was when he confessed to the lying and kept on apologising to me. When I asked if I could see a picture of him he said he could not send it because he used to post nsfw content on reddit before meeting me and because his job is precious to him.

Am I being naive here? Is he grooming me? Or just showing interest?