Can you ‘accidentally’ sleep with someone?

I seem to be going through a rather reckless time in my life. This behaviour includes what I have been doing recently, which is attempting to date Nice Single Guy while carrying on having ‘sleepovers’ at my friend Henry’s house.

Now, as I currently have zero sexual attraction to Nice Single Guy, it seems like a great plan, especially after half a bottle of rum and hours of amazing conversations and just the right amount of bad movies and the smell of rolled cigarettes. Part of me believes, that kissing Henry (who kisses like he is starving, or dying, or both-and so enflames my romantic poetical sentiments like nothing else) will have no bad consequences.

I manage to maintain this illusion until the morning, when Henry insists on giving me a monologue about how he doesn’t want a relationship, but that he feels so guilty after one night stands he oftens falls into them. I’m not sure how I should respond to this. I’ve never asked him for a relationship, butI don’t believe it’s a one night stand when it’s happened more than once. Still, the speech is enough for me to know I have to get out of there with my heels smoking before we ‘fall into a relationship’-which, according to him, is the equivalent of having a bucket full of rats strapped to your chest.

I’m not an idiot, even if I’m a little slow to see that I have put Henry on a pedestal from which I interpret his behaviour towards me as totally explainable and normal. I think I imagined a bohemian free love arrangement by which both parties got what they wanted, nothing cheap, just heavy drinking and sharing of ideas and yes, if we felt like it, sex. It’s just that conversation in the morning that gets me. When he’s looking at me like I am the human version of the ominously ticking bomb strapped alarm clock, I lose my patience with the situation.

Just because I’m a woman doesn’t mean I can’t have sex without feelings. But the fact he’s so AFRAID of this makes it almost impossible for me. I can’t text him because he will think i’m being clingy or needy, but I don’t want to ignore him because he’s one of my best friends.

So I’m continuing to date Nice Single Guy. I really hope I can grow to want him, and that he might learn to kiss me like he will die if he doesn’t. Me and Henry will stay friends, without the benefits part, and part of me that bloomed with hope when I found someone I truly admired and liked again will hide away. The part of me that believed I could have something I really wanted, when I looked at the knobs of his spine felt something stirring of almost-love again that I thought had gone forever after my Big Breakup, that part? I have to realise it’s not the time or the place for it to have a true chance.

But I don’t regret a moment of it.