Not sure if my friend likes me more than a friend

[TobiasPelagiad]

Hello! I’ll try and break this into sections and keep it as brief as possible:

Backstory

I am a straight male, and have a straight female close friend – we’ll call her Sarah for the purposes of this. We’ve been very close friends for nearly 4 years now, and we originally met at work about 7 years ago (although no longer work together, but we still keep in contact). I’m single (have been for a while now). Sarah’s in a long term relationship, but she’s told me recently this year that there’s no real affection between them anymore, so instead they agree to just stay together almost like a partnership. She says she’s happier in part because there’s “no more pressure”, but at the same time she wonders if she’ll now ever find “actual love”. I’ll be honest, I don’t quite understand it myself. Even she herself says she doesn’t quite see how it will work long term, but I think at the moment it’s just preferable to how it had been previously, so she’s not thinking too far ahead about it. I just have to work with the information I have, so as far as I’m concerned, they are still a couple.

Me and Sarah don’t live close to each other lately, but we still keep in contact with Whatsapp messages and voice notes every week (and the odd video), and make the effort to meet up for a day out every couple of months. I won’t go into every aspect of our friendship, mainly because I can imagine it will bore the heck out of you all, so all I’ll say is we are very close, but only as friends….at least until recently.

Incident

So, to keep a long story short, a month ago Sarah and I both went to a mutual former work colleague’s house warming. We both drank too much, and so at the end of the night I took Sarah home in a taxi to make sure she got home okay, with the plan being we'd drop her off first at her Mum’s first, before the driver taking me home second. I was pretty drunk but not so bad, but Sarah was pretty far gone. When we got in the taxi, we both sat in the back, but she immediately moved next to me, into the middle seat, butted right up against me. For pretty much the whole car journey she held my hand, and for large portion of the journey she kept sort of rubbing her head into the side of my head, almost like a cat. I jokingly asked why she was doing it and she said drunkenly said something to the effect of “If only you knew”, as if she wanted to say more but was holding back. She also kept giggling and smiling to herself, and when again I light-heartedly asked why she’s smiling so much she said something like “I’m just happy” and started butting up against me again. She even sort of lunged at my face for…..something….I’m not sure, but she missed and landed into my neck. She also drunkenly slurred words about how she loves me into my ear, but to be fair, being drunk myself I couldn’t really judge properly if it was just the usual  drunken “I love you mate…hic” type stuff friends say, or something more.

At the end of the journey I got out the taxi to help get her out. This is the point where she stole a kiss from me, on my lips. I say stole: I can’t be 100% sure I didn’t also, if not initiate it, then at least not just go with it with no resistance. After the kiss I left her to go into her Mum’s house, and I went away in the taxi alone. Midway through the journey she phones me and asks if I’m still in her street because she “wants to come home with me”. At this point I am nowhere near her Mum’s house, so I say I’ll call her when I get home. When I do, though, she’s now in the hangover stage, so the conversation goes nowhere.

In the week after we don’t message as much, until there’s a bit of an ice-breaker where we both sort of acknowledge and apologise to each other about how drunk we both got. She alludes to being “Inappropriate” but says she can’t remember exactly what happened in the taxi, and she doesn’t want to remember. Later on in the week, in a phone call, I do try to bring it up again, but again she can’t remember and didn’t really want to be reminded of it, to avoid the embarrassment. I suppose you could say she was evasive. We agree to just move on, and since then we’ve been back to pals, as it was before.

Aftermath and Thoughts

But I can’t get it out of my mind. About a year ago I did develop feelings for her, which I made sure to bury as best I could out of respect for her relationship and our friendship. And I actually did this successfully! Up until the incident above, I was comfortable being best buds, and was under the impression that in terms of looking for love I’d have to be going elsewhere. I’d made a form of peace with it, or at least so I thought. But everything from that night onwards has reopened old feelings I thought were long gone. I’m now analysing other moments over the past year: when we meet up she’ll often point out some new clothing she’s wearing, and ask me what I think of it; the random arm and hand touches she’ll do; she’ll send me videos of herself with her various projects and hobbies. Even on the day of the above incident, she’d asked to come round to my flat first (which she’s never done before), and even introduced me to her mum for the first time, that day.

Therefore, I’m here and asking: do we think she might like me more than a friend? Or am I just reading too much into what was just her being drunk – i.e. would she have just behaved the same if I’d been a cheese sandwich? What complicates things more is this relationship she’s in. Straight up, if she was single I’d have just been forward by now and asked her how she felt about me, and what my feelings are. But because of her situation and my lack of real understanding of it, I feel more tentative to delve further. I don’t want to misjudge and overstep the mark and lose this friendship (because it means so much to me). By the same token though, it’s not as if there’s been zero signals from her, and I'm just wanting to blunder in, selfishly. I actually feel a little hard done by, because I have the memory of that night and now the “what ifs” that I have to carry about with me, whereas she can just reset and go back to as it was before, blissfully unaware or troubled by anything that went on.

Any advice is appreciated  

Edited December 2 by TobiasPelagiad