I have always thought that having sex with your male best friend would have one of two outcomes. Either it would be undisputed disaster, from which your friendship would never recuperate. Or it would be an epiphany. You'd wonder why on earth you'd never done it before.

I'd experienced the first: Eric Yorkie, at Seattle University, 1998. Eric was my best mate on my French course, until a moment of intoxicated insanity, around about the four drink point, the point at which I apparently believed I was alluring and was utterly irresistible; to all members of the opposite sex. That's also the point at which I should have gone to bed, my dignity in one piece; Intact. But no, it was this point I decided Eric Yorkie needed to know this; that my French oral wasn't half as good as that in the bedroom. We went back to my room in halls, closed the blue and pink curtains and poured each other glass after glass of cheap white wine. With each glass, the edges of his face grew more blurred as did any good judgement I'd ever possessed. After over an hour of trying to get a comatosed Eric to maintain an erection long enough to get a condom on, we passed out. When I woke up, my head bounding as if someone was living inside and drilling into the side of my head, the blackheads on his nose somewhat too close for comfort, I knew it had been a big, huge, no…colossal mistake. Excruciating, was the five minute walk across the campus to our first tutorial that day, one of the most excruciating experiences my life so far. I would love to know how anyone could act normal after you spent the night wrestling with your best friend, now ex-friends, and uncooperative penis? Trust me. There is no way; our friendship could come back from there.

But Edward is different; sex with him is never a disaster; but we haven't exactly had that light bulb moment either. It's just, you know, nice. Like getting into a warm bath after a freezing day, or finding a twenty dollar bill in your jeans pocket.

We met in November 1997, in the university library, both of us wading though our very first English essay. At eighteen years old I was a dangerous mixture of ecstatic and terrified to be officially independent. Two years my senior, Edward seemed like he'd been knocking around on his own all his life. He was sitting opposite me his head buried in the same books as mine was (and probably every other first year English lit student there). But it was the intense frown that really made me laugh, it told of utter and total bafflement. My feeling exactly!

'Is that making about as much sense to you as it is to me?' I said, hoping this guy was in need of a distraction too.

Edward looked up.

'You mean none whatsoever?'

'That's the one!'

He smiled, broadly.

That was it, we were off. Couldn't shut us up for two whole hours. We sacked off the work and went for a drink in the end because neither of us could figure out the book and we were having too much of a good time chatting. I felt like we had cracked the secret to something there that afternoon. Secret of life, or maybe that was the alcohol talking. But of all the personality fireworks I didn't fancy Edward that day, still don't, maybe that's why sex with him has never been a big deal. It's not that Edward's un-fanciable, far from it; he's just not my type. But he is most other girls. He facial features are perfect and angular, he has lovely full lips and green sparkly eyes, and hair of such a usual bronze colour. But I've never felt the urge to tear his clothes off.

If you had told me on the day we met or any time during the next eight years and six months, which is how long it took us to kiss, never mind have sex; that one day Edward Cullen and I would be occasional sex partners, I'd never have believed it. But we are and it's strange, most of all because I don't really get why it did take us so long. Until one cold weekend last May to be exact.

It was meant to be two day's hard graft cleaning up my parent's house, in a tiny place called Forks. I'd agreed to give it a makeover in return for a hundred dollars from my dad. I had asked Edward to help as he was the only person I knew who had a power drill, but from the first moment we got there, it felt more like a holiday than hard work.

I've never known larger taste as good as that first, exhausted pint drunk with Edward at the end of the first day. I remember the feeling I'd not been so happy for a long time. I told him about my childhood holidays spent here in Forks. He told me about his summers.

One pint turned into two, into threes, into four, until suddenly it was almost dark and we were surrounded by towers of empty bottles.

Edward sighed. 'This rocks, this is the best day I've had in ages.' Then he turned his head resting it on the wall and he added, 'With you.'

And it didn't feel awkward. I didn't get that feeling I was going to regret this in the morning. I just put my bottle down, threw my legs sideways over his knee and snogged him like we'd been going out for twenty odd years and this was one of those rare romantic nights made for rekindling the flame.

His hands slid up my thighs at a painstakingly slow speed. He started kissing my neck. I gasped, the shots of electricity were flying everywhere inside my body now. I was going to lose control any second. I took off his shirt feeling his ribbed abs and his flat stomach; he slowly started unbuttoning my shirt, kissing every bit of flesh that was revealed. Edward pulled my body against him, much harder than I was expecting. His fingers kept sliding up and down my smooth torso, feeling the slender fabric of my bra on the sides. I felt myself crumbling, forgetting everything but his touch and smell. The world was disappearing around us. All I could see, feel, smell was him. Him. I wanted him so badly. Now. Before it was too late.

"Please, please," I almost growled into his ear, trying to get it out before I was lost to my desire. "Please don't let this ruin anything. Please tell me. Anything. If I go too far." I felt incoherent. "This feels too good. My mind is going..."

He pushed away from me enough to look into my eyes. Before saying "Then just let it go." We'd kissed now, what the hell. Sex seemed like the most obvious next step.

"I've never met anyone like you," said Edward. "I'm probably closer to you than I am to anyone." And the thing was, right at that moment, I felt exactly the same.

"So, Swan that was going to happen all along was it not?" I remember Edward muttering as he stood in his boxers poring coffee into two chipped mugs. And I agreed. "Predictable as death," were the words I mumbled from under the duvet.

After all, if you rate one another highly enough to be close friends in the first place, then chances are; if you're opposite sexes, it's only a matter of time. That's not to say there aren't consequences. A quick of the carnage when I finally emerged that morning revealed my bra was hung on the back of a chair, my knickers up on the hob in the kitchen. There were CDs scattered all over the floor, ransacked in a frenzy of drunken delight, not one in its case. We'd danced to the backstreet boys, to George Michael, to Billy Joel for crying out loud! I'd made five thousand times the fool of myself as I had with Eric Yorkie and yet I wasn't one bit embarrassed.

I don't know what I expected after that night. I suppose I would have been happy to give a relationship a try, but then I was also petrified of ruining what we had. In the end, Edward made that decision for me; I would be lying if I said I wasn't a little deflated.

I called him on the Monday, the night after we got back. "I had a brilliant time this weekend," I said. Good opening I thought, perhaps this is where he says he couldn't agree more and ask me out?

Or not.

"Me too," he giggled. "It was a right laugh. I have particular fond memories of you doing a routine to I want it that way wearing only your pants."

Brilliant, I thought. Absolutely typical. Could it be, perhaps, that I failed to give off the right signals?

But maybe that was no bad thing. Maybe there's a reason we felt no embarrassment whatsoever after our antics. So unembarrassed were we, in fact, that, a year later we seem to have fallen into a habit of just 'Doing it' whenever the need for a little no strings nookie grabs us.

"Think of it as a way of extending the fun we're having," Edward always says, usually naked which doesn't exactly help, "like going to an afterhours bar."

And this suits me too, because I don't think I know what I want. I can't fathom the working of his brain either if truth be told. All I know is that Edward Cullen and I have crossed the line. We no longer purely platonic, but we aren't lovers either. We're just two misguided fools frolicking about in a vast sprawling, savannah sized space commonly known at the grey area.