What was his deal?

I’m hung up on an old friend/relationship. There’s this guy from my childhood and we had a weird thing going on for a while there and to this day, I can’t figure out what his deal was with me.

To start off, we met in 6th grade. We didn’t like each other very much. Fast forward to freshman year and we finally started getting along thanks to another guy friend. The three of us became pretty much inseparable. I met my first husband that year (obviously didn’t marry him that year) and still spent time with my guy friends but obviously significantly less time.

4 years later, I had a baby, I was already divorced (my first husband became abuse the night we got married, like he became an entirely new person) and I was left feeling pretty broken. I was only 19 and felt completely alone.

My two guy friends are the ones that saved me. When my ex was hitting me and wouldn’t let me leave the house, they showed up with two cops and helped me move out. Then the one friend in particular started hanging around a lot more. We’d watch movies, talk, eat, he’d hang out with my daughter and was really awesome with her. But he had a girlfriend so it was kind of weird for me and I kind of kept him at a distance...physically and emotionally.

A year of hanging out later, he and his gf broke up and he continued coming over every weekend. Things evolved a bit. We started cuddling in bed when we’d watch movies. We did that for months and then one night he just started kissing me! He stopped, asked if it was okay and we went full make out mode. It stopped there. We cuddled some more. He fell asleep with me and the next day we didn’t talk about it.

From then on out, we kept hanging out, kept cuddling, kept kissing but never talked about where we stood. There were no labels. We didn’t tell others about it. We just had each other and that was that.

So, about another year (not sure on the timing) later we got a little more physical. We kind of started exploring each other a bit and he ended up fingering me. That was the furthest we got. Again, we never talked about it. There was no relationship, really because we’d never decided to be exclusive and it seemed like about two weeks later we both met what would end up being our long term partners.

So, to this day we’ve never talked about what was happening with us for over two years. It would be weird to ask him now as we both have other people in our lives.

My question is...what the heck was going on there? On one hand, I feel like he had feelings for me and it was more than a friend thing because...well, that’s obvious. But on the other hand, there were never any labels or discussion and it took over two years to get beyond kissing and never got to sex. I don’t know if he was just like filling the void for me when my ex and I split because he knew I was hurt or what. And before anyone asks, no, it doesn’t matter what it was. It was years ago and we’ve not seen him each other in forever. It’s just that he’s the one guy that I never really knew where the heck I stood with