A nightclub. Flashing lights. Thumping music. Sticky floors. Two people have too much to drink and collide with each other. This is a one night stand. This is two people, who do not know each other, not getting to know each other, just sleeping together and then never seeing each other again. Two lines crossing once and then stretching out in opposite directions, into separate futures.

In this scenario, not calling the person afterwards is almost always part of the deal. Whether the sex is brilliant or the sex is awful does not matter, since there is not enough substance for any continued relationship. There is not enough shared. Not texting them or messaging them or contacting them ever again is expected. It might not be nice, but it’s taken for granted. It’s what the people involved signed up for.

A two night stand, on the other hand, does not really exist. I became convinced of this – the clarity of the distinction between a one night stand and anything else – after a brilliant first date and an evening at his place a few nights later ended in the same kind of silence as almost always follows a night with a stranger. This, I think, I did not sign up for.This is not the same, and deserves a very different kind of response.

“The weather is warm, golden and glorious, so we sit by the river on Coe Fen and drink cheap white wine in plastic cups until the small hours.”

It is on a Wednesday night that I meet the guy in question. The weather is warm, golden and glorious, so we sit by the river on Coe Fen and drink cheap white wine in plastic cups until the small hours. I ask questions about his PhD, which sounds totally fascinating but also incredibly complicated. Neuroscience of some kind. Even though I don’t really understand what he is talking about when he explains his research to me, I listen intently. His voice is like thick honey, and I feel it slide down my throat. He could read me a supermarket receipt, I think to myself, and it would sound like poetry.

Two nights later, he invites me over to his. Again, it is a very sweet evening. He collects me from the street and takes me into his house, up the green carpeted stairs to his room, where he makes a gin and tonic in a pink glass. Sorry, he says, handing it to me as we sit down across from one another, it might not be very cold.

After that night we don’t talk for a week or so. I am too busy rushing from A to B to C to even hear myself think. However, when it gets to the weekend and I have ticked all the other things off my to do list, I begin to miss him. Not properly miss, obviously, because how can we miss people we hardly know? But I miss the feeling of his company, and the excitement of having him there, right there, with his brown curls and his brown eyes and his arms which look as if they may at any moment burst through the sleeves of his t-shirt.

“This time, when I message him, I am greeted by silence.”

This time, when I message him, I am greeted by silence. No reply. Not the day I send the text, or the day after, or the day after that. Nothing. I send him a follow up, but this too goes ignored. Days pass. No notifications with his name.

I decide he must be dead. This is the only option. Nobody is that rude. In films perhaps, or in books, or in London, the big city, where men are older, more brash, and wear suits all day long. Twenty-two year old PhD students in Cambridge who have photos of their grandparents blu-tacked to their walls don’t sleep with people once and then pretend the person does not exist. They might come up with a shoddy excuse, shuffle their feet, sheepishly claim they’re not ready for a relationship, but silence? Silence is something else.

“Now here I am, on the outside again, and perhaps more on the outside than I was to start off with.”

I happen to walk past his house the following week, on the way to see a friend, and his bedroom lights are on. Dead people generally have no reason for their bedroom lights to be on. I’ve been in that room, I think. I’ve been in that room, behind that window, looking out from inside. Now here I am, on the outside again, and perhaps more on the outside than I was to start off with. I tuck my hair behind my ear, and find myself struck with the realisation that I left my favourite hair clip up there, in that bedroom. I quickly become sure of this, because I remember wearing it when I went to see him that night, because I remember the feeling of the hard metal between my head and his pillow, and I know I haven’t worn it since. Maybe leaving the hair clip was what scared him, I wonder. Maybe me, leaving the clip, maybe this is all my fault.

A one night stand is one thing: you go into it knowing that you will come out of it again hours later, unscathed, having enjoyed this wild one-off. However, a date, a proper first date, followed by a second evening together, with talk and laughter and real substance, is not that. It is not a two night stand. Two night stands do not exist.

Even if my silver hair clip had frightened my PhD student, reminding him of the reality of opening up his bedroom – and maybe his life – to somebody else, it shouldn’t have stopped him from telling me the truth. What we had was the beginning of something, whatever that something might have been, and a beginning deserves an end.