A couple of weeks later, at his house, he was relaxed. Not calm, as such—his cock was straining at the fabric of his jeans—but he was much readier to fuck.
‘What do I do?’
‘Whatever you want.’
‘Can I do this?’
‘Yes. Please.’
‘What if I’m crap?’
‘You’re not.’
He ran his fingers nervously over my body, touching wherever he thought he was allowed. I pulled up my top, unhooked my bra, guided him. I wanted to show him he wasn’t just allowed, he was needed. I needed his touch, needed him inside me to quell the aching hurt in my cunt. He didn’t need to make me come, he just needed to be in me, to give me some release.
He struggled to take off his jeans, his hands shaking with lust and frustration. I helped him get them off, wrapped my legs around him, and held myself up, nice and wide and easy so he could slide himself in.
With his hands each side of my head, he pushed his cock into me—deep and rock hard. I felt it stretch me out, open me up, scratch the itch that he’d created during those long nights of furtively stroking my nipples. The itch he’d created with that anguished desperate moan.
The sex itself was good, but the best thing was that as I sighed with satisfaction he finally understood that I wasn’t exchanging sex with him for anything: sex itself was the goal. I wasn’t fucking him because he wanted it, but because I needed it. I need sex like I need music and dancing and chocolate cake. And I was no more ‘letting him’ have sex with me than I’d ‘let’ someone give me a birthday present.
I grinned as he sped up, and thrust angrily against him so he could feel every movement. As he got closer he let out a strangled cry, and I squeezed my cunt and thighs extra tight around him as I felt him come hard inside me.
It was possibly the best five seconds of my entire fucking life.
It’d be a pretty short story, and a pretty boring life, if we all lived happily ever after at this point. So, not content with just fucking each other, number one, number two and I set about breaking each other’s hearts.
It makes sense, of course. I’d learned how to fuck, and how to have a relationship, how to be polite to partners’ parents and avoid answering too many questions from my own. It was only logical that the next lesson I should learn would be the one I couldn’t do the research for: how relationships end and why it makes you feel as if the whole world has crumbled around you. Or, as my mum rather succinctly put it: the heartbreak thing.
I sound callous when I talk about number one. First Love had hooked me with his beauty and his wit and the fun we had together, but number one’s main attraction was his geographical convenience and willingness to actually get naked with me. To be honest, given his propensity to lie down and let me suck him off, I’d probably have fallen for him even if he’d had three heads and a drinking problem. But although he gave me fluttery feelings and brought me toast in bed on Saturday and called me ‘pretty’, he was clearly never going to hold my attention when other guys showed an interest.
At school I’d looked enviously at the girls who had boyfriends. Not just mates who they flirted with, but genuine boyfriends, who’d pass them notes in class and kiss them at breaktime and admit to their friends they were ‘going out’ with. I’d spent most of my childhood being one of the kids whose name was frequently a punchline, the one who boys would approach, say ‘will you go out with my mate?’ and then run away laughing when I naïvely accepted. Having not just one but two guys who wanted me felt unusual and fragile, as if someone was playing a long-winded trick that would end with them both running away shouting, ‘Ha! She said yes! What a loser!’ I was convinced that, having been unfuckable for so long, being fuckable couldn’t possibly last for long enough that I’d be forced to choose between one and two. I held on to both of them because I assumed that soon I’d have neither.
What’s more, beside these immature calculations, I genuinely loved number one—his soft, shy, easy-going nature and the way he looked at me with adoring and exhausted eyes. Even as I held number two and whispered filth into his ear and gripped his cock and rubbed myself against him, I knew I loved number one. He was special to me because he was the first, the one with whom I’d learned and played and experimented and practised. He expected nothing more of me than that I just keep doing that with him. And I couldn’t bear to break his heart.
I began fucking number two in more risky places. Many of my friends knew that I was cheating on number one, but none of them were quite willing to tip him off. They were either as scared as I was of breaking his heart, or afraid of the bolshy goth persona that emptily threatened to crush them if they spoke up.
So, in the absence of anyone to stop me, I kept going.
One Saturday afternoon, my friends and I met at Amy’s house to hang out. And by ‘hang out’ I mean ‘pool all of our money and get as drunk as possible’. Number one came along, with a group of friends from his college—the loud, swearing kids we’d all known for years.
None of our school friends would have dared suggest that we—one of the longest-term couples in the group—got a room, so I sat comfortably curled up with number one on a sofa, sharing a bottle of something that called itself cider and occasionally leaning in for a snog. I had one of my hands flat on his stomach, feeling the smooth, hard contours that were the result of nothing more than a few sit-ups and a hell of a lot of sex.
By this time Amy was on the arm of a nineteen-year-old who looked down upon us from the lofty height of his two-year advantage. He kept touching her and getting brushed off, Amy being less convinced about the joy of sex when it was about to happen in her parents’ bedroom. Number one and I, unburdened by any Oedipal disgust about Amy’s parents, traded coy smiles and whispered to each other, growing hotter and more desperate to retire to the bedroom with each mouthful of sour booze that we swallowed.
Then the doorbell rang, and my desire for number one dissolved completely. At the door was Jenny, who was now so fully immersed in number two’s friendship group that she’d started seeing one of his friends. She brought her current boyfriend and—in a move that both delighted and terrified me—number two himself.
As an adult I’ve realised that mixing friendship groups is rarely a good idea. The people you know from school are more than likely to bring up embarrassing stories about your childhood in front of your work colleagues, your work colleagues will disappoint you by being hideously dull, and everyone will be left with the vague sense that you’re not quite the person they thought you were and perhaps it’s best to cross you off their Christmas card list. All that’s stressful enough without the added tension of knowing that at any moment you might forget which one you’re legitimately fucking and stick your hand down the wrong pair of trousers.
The same rule of not mixing groups applied equally to our college-aged friends, but Jenny and I didn’t have the maturity to realise it until we introduced everyone. The two gangs didn’t exactly hit it off, as awkward jokes about the kids from ‘the thick college’ were met with an excruciating silence, a couple of multisyllable words were deemed ‘wanky’, and it dawned on each group that they were essentially rival factions.
The main difference, of course, wasn’t one of snobbery but just understanding. The group from the vocational college had what sounded like a bewildering array of potential career paths. Future football coaches, sound engineers and electricians were met with blank looks when they tried to engage with the academic types. Those from the posh college couldn’t comprehend why anyone would want to actually earn money rather than sit in seminars being a smug arsehole, while the vocational kids didn’t realise that there was a formula to life that some of us were rigidly and unimaginatively following:
‘What are you doing after college?’
‘Well … university.’ The unspoken ‘of course’ hanging ominously in the air.
I was definitely in the ‘smug academic’ camp. As far as I was aware, university wasn’t even a choice, it was just what you did after college. So during our brief discussion of the merits of tertiary education, number one gripped me tighter. He was decisively on the other side of the fence. While I snoozed through lectures, he’d complete an apprenticeship in something useful, and get a job that entailed getting off his arse rather than sitting on it. But given that no amount of regular sex with him had prevented me from handing in my UCAS application, he knew that at some point our paths would have to diverge quite drastically. Every day that passed drew us one step closer to the time when I’d pack up my bags and fuck a hell of a long way off.
This tension wasn’t in any way relieved by number two—loud, brash, funny and university-bound. Like me. He was clutching a half-bottle of whisky and teasing me for drinking piss. Laughing at my flushed cheeks and wandering hands and subtly letting me know how much he disapproved of number one.
‘You two look comfy.’
‘We are.’
‘Hey, man.’ A sideways look at number one. ‘That’s an amazing pair of jeans you’ve got. Did you rip them yourself or did you buy them like that?’
‘I …’ I stutter when I’m nervous, he should have said. But he didn’t. ‘I … I d-did them myself.’
But by the time he’d finished the sentence number two had turned away, trying not to notice number one’s hands firmly, possessively around my waist.
As he started to roll a cigarette I pushed number one to the side, and made my way to the designated smoking area—Amy’s garage.
There was a door to the garage through the kitchen. To get there, I had to walk past everyone in the lounge, cigarette packet on display to show that I was just off for a smoke. I walked quickly, willing no one else to jump up and say, ‘I’ll join you,’ or ‘Grab me a lager while you’re in there.’ I didn’t look once at number two, steadily rolling a cigarette on the coffee table.
I settled in the garage and sparked up. With one hand I steadied myself against the workbench and with the other I clutched my cigarette between trembling fingers. I breathed deeply, knowing he was on his way. I pictured him walking in the door and grabbing hold of me in exactly the same spot number one had, pulling me towards him by the waist, pressing his instant erection hard against the crotch of my jeans.
He came in. Shaking just as much as I was, he took the cigarette from my hand and put it in the ashtray.
He grabbed me just where I wanted him to, fitting his bigger hands in the curve just above my hips. As he pulled me towards him, I could feel his dick pressed up tight against me, hear his shallow breathing and feel the rapid beat of his heart.
‘Can we?’ he asked, fumbling to open the zip on my jeans. I nodded, but pressed a finger to my lips. We were both scared that someone would come in, but incapable of stopping ourselves.
There wasn’t much room, just a narrow corridor between shelves of paint tins and the workbench where my cigarette was still burning in the ashtray. He turned me around, placed a firm hand on the back of my neck, and bent me over the workbench. I could hear that wonderful sound—the clink as he undid his belt buckle—and I slid my jeans down until I could just feel the waistband tight against the back of my thighs. I pulled my knickers down to meet them, presenting him with my backside and my slick, naked cunt.
As he pushed himself inside me there was another of those killer lustful moans. His legs started trembling and he held tighter on to my hips to keep his balance. I gripped the workbench and pushed back and up, filling myself with his dick.
With each thrust I held my breath, bit my lip to stop myself from gasping. I could smell the smoke and his aftershave and hear the workbench rattle with every stroke of the fuck. Everything was heightened by the worry that at any minute the door could open and we’d be exposed: my knickers round my thighs and his cock jutting out of the gap in his tight black boxers.
It didn’t last long—longer than the five seconds that marked our initial success, but not quite long enough for me to come around his cock. With a stifled grunt, he pushed into me one final time, and I held back a sigh of lustful satisfaction as I felt him shooting spunk hard into me.
I straightened up and turned around to see his eyes shining with satisfaction. He picked up the dying embers of my cigarette and took a final drag, barely suppressing his filthy smile.
We hadn’t been caught. We were safe.
For the rest of the afternoon I sat on the sofa with number one, crossing and uncrossing my legs, jiggling my knee when I felt the crotch of my jeans rest tight up against my clit. When number two caught my eye I had to stop myself from grinning. I could feel his spunk drying on the inside of my thighs, and number one’s hand resting on the back of my neck. I loved them both, and I felt lucky. And I felt invincible.
Cheating on someone is like breaking a particularly arduous diet: knowing that what you’re doing is bad makes it all the more delicious. The stronger your moral feeling against it, the sexier it is to be fucked by someone who isn’t your boyfriend. Of course, it doesn’t help to explain this to someone whose heart you’ve just broken. I’m far less likely to fuck other people when I’m in an open relationship, but for some reason when I’ve tried to explain this to boys I love they have failed to appreciate the irony.
Fucking boys who aren’t my boyfriend is hot. It doesn’t always have to be a risky fuck, where I’m holding my own hand over my mouth to try and avoid moaning and giving the game away. Sometimes all it takes is the knowledge that what I’m doing is wrong.
And it is wrong, I know that. I’m no more going to engage in an ethical debate with a heartbroken lover than I’m going to show him framed prints of my own infidelities. Everyone knows cheating is wrong, even those of us who have done it. I could tell you that I was young and inexperienced and desperate to be loved, and none of that—despite being true—would make anything that I did OK.
Cheating is bad: you’ve made a promise to someone that you’re not keeping. You’re breaking one of the very few promises that they genuinely care if you keep. You’re lying, you’re sneaking around, you’re potentially humiliating them: you’re sipping cider and watching your secret lover roll cigarettes while your boyfriend casually fondles your arse. It’s mean and it’s wrong, of course, but it’s also searingly, painfully, moan-out-loud hot.
Not that I think that justifies it, of course. The hotness comes by way of explanation rather than excuse. For now, the conclusion of this episode comes in the form of some restorative justice: I got my comeuppance.
It wasn’t nearly as dramatic as it should have been. Number one didn’t burst into the garage while two and I were fucking, or find his underwear on my bedroom floor. There were no screams or recriminations, no public shouting matches and no dramatic fist fights. There was just a text message, a brief moment of panic, and then the end of my world.
I was in number one’s bedroom with him, sharing a quick catch-up and the obligatory post-college blow job before we set off for dinner. It was his eighteenth birthday, and I was excited. His family were taking us both out for a posh meal and I was excited about giving him his present. I’d bought him a Zippo, which sounds like a crap gift until you remember that:
We were just kids, who back then were still labouring under the impression that smoking was anything other than idiotic.
He’d been gagging to have a Zippo for ages, seeing it as an adult gift that marked a commitment to smoking which he thought was cool (see above).
I’d had a romantic slogan engraved on the side, designed to mitigate a little of my guilt about number two and also—hopefully—let number one know that no matter how inadequate my love for him, it was at least genuine.
Guys doing Zippo tricks are hot. Watching him slap the lighter closed with a quick flip of his fingers drew attention to his hands and made me melt. I wanted to watch him do that more often.
I was sitting on his bed, jiggling my knee with a mixture of excitement about giving him his present and residual arousal because he’d just come in my mouth. He was getting dressed for the evening. Watching guys get dressed has always been one of my favourite things. It’s like a striptease in reverse, and I can take my time and drink in every inch of his body, without the pressure of having to pretend that I’m not thinking about his dick.
He’d just pulled on a shirt when my phone went. Loudly.
There was a pause as I realised that he was closer to it than I was. It should have been in my bag, stowed safely so that he wouldn’t be tempted to rifle through it to read texts. It struck me as odd that it wasn’t where it should be, but dumped on the floor in a pile of clothes that he’d cast aside earlier. I sprang forward quickly, aware that I was in the danger zone. The possibility that the text was, in fact, from number two had my head swimming.
I dived for the phone, only realising as I picked it up that number one had dived with me.
Nowadays we’d no more read someone else’s texts than we’d rifle through their knicker drawer, but back then no one had had a mobile for long enough to build up an etiquette around them. No one we knew had yet been caught cheating because of something as modern as an SMS, so grabbing someone’s phone to read them their text was as natural as letting them copy your homework. So it didn’t surprise me that he’d reached for the phone, but it did surprise me that he’d done so with such speed. I wondered if he could sense why I needed it. Or, more realistically, why I needed him not to see it.
‘It’s OK, it’s mine,’ I said, probably a little too defensively. ‘Yours has that stupid ringtone.’
He didn’t say anything, just stared at me. My sinking feeling grew stronger as I watched all the colour drain from his face. He wasn’t jealous or suspicious, he was guilty.
The phone was his.
Not just something that belonged to him, but something that was so utterly and completely his I didn’t even know about it. A different phone. A different number. A text from a girl called Carly, and what felt like the end of the universe.
He looked at me with terrified eyes, mouth slightly open and straining for words. He wanted to say something—anything to stop me from understanding what was going on. But I understood. This beautiful, adoring boy who I’d spent two years taking for granted had found someone who gave him exactly that filthy, kick-in-the-gut of lust that number two had given me. Someone who was missing him and loving him and making him feel all the things I couldn’t. She—this someone, this other, this girl who had the temerity to not be me—was calling him ‘sexy’ and asking why he hadn’t been round to see her at lunchtime.
The boy who’d make me buttered toast in the mornings, who’d share cider with me on the sofa, the boy who once painted a plastic rose purple then left it on my doorstep: this boy was gone. Someone else had a phone number that he’d never given me, and when she called it, he’d go.
As I lay on my bed that night screaming thick, deep lungfuls of despair into my pillow, there was no self-pity or sense of unfairness. There was pain, an aching pain that sent spasms through my chest and introduced me forcefully to the reason they call it ‘heartbreak’, but it was a pain that I knew I deserved.
It’s all very well saying ‘cheating is bad’, and understanding in the abstract just how much potential pain you’re causing your partner by fucking someone else. It’s easy to admit that I’m selfish and horny and incapable of hearing ‘Do you want to have sex?’ without dropping my knickers before the rising inflection, but any understanding of this prior to that day was entirely abstract. Being on the receiving end of someone else’s infidelity hammers the point home with much greater force than any stern lecture I could have given myself before.
Number one was never going to be for ever. The chances of us clinking glasses at our fiftieth wedding anniversary were vanishingly remote. I was always going to leave town for uni, putting him more than two hours away by train at a time when neither of us were rich enough to pay for a four-hour round trip each weekend. If you’d asked me a week before how I felt about number one, I’d have given you a long-winded explanation of why we were so different and how, despite being fun, it was never going to last.
But as I lay on my bed, hiccupping irregular sobs and generally acting like the emotional wreck that exists beneath the skin of almost every teenager, I imagined things had been far better than they were because I realised that I couldn’t have any of that lovely stuff any more. I remembered the wild and passionate fucks rather than the routine or incompetent ones. I focused on the songs he’d practised for weeks just because he knew I liked to sing them while he played guitar. How he’d save roast potatoes from his Sunday lunch—my family were vegetarian and therefore incapable of achieving the superior flavour of potatoes made in the meat pan—and present them to me with a flourish later in the evening. I remembered a time when he’d drunkenly, and with as serious a face as he was capable of wearing, asked me to marry him.
Number one wasn’t The One. He wasn’t First Love or even one of my greatest loves. But he was the first person to utterly break my heart, and leave me in the tattered, twitching, zombie-like state of the newly depressed, and that’s a pretty valuable thing to be.
At the time I hated him, and wanted to rip up everything he’d ever given me, every photo he’d ever taken of us, stoned and grinning and surrounded by friends. I wanted to stamp on the cheap jewellery he’d saved his meagre allowance to buy, and cut the strings on his stupid guitar so he couldn’t play any of ‘our’ songs to ‘her’. But now, as a grown-up who can barely remember exactly which songs were ‘ours’ and which ones just remind me of fumbling shed-based sex, I’m grateful. Because number one gave me a taste of misery and made me a bit more understanding. It’s not as if I lacked empathy before my heart broke, but I certainly couldn’t see, with such visceral clarity, exactly how hard my own actions could come back on other people. Empathy is important. It stops us rutting each other willy-nilly and killing our enemies on the street. It’s the thin line between telling someone they’re wrong and telling them they’re a stupid and disgraceful waste of brain cells.
I stand by what I said before: cheating is hot, even if it’s also immoral and cruel. The fact that crack is illegal doesn’t mean it makes you any less high. However, like most things that give you an adrenalin rush or slick knickers, there’s a certain amount of risk involved. The hot, angry tears that wrecked me that night were shed in the knowledge that it could easily have been me who was found out. It could have been my phone, my text, and his shuddering sobs.
Number one’s cheating didn’t detract from the fact that, when I was huddled in the garage with two, the feeling was exciting and sexy and dangerous. But what it did show me was that the danger wasn’t as simple as just ‘getting caught’—a phrase that sounds giggling and insignificant. I’d imagined the naughtiness of ‘getting into trouble’ or the childish ‘getting dumped’. I’d thought that number one would be a combination of angry and upset, but I hadn’t pictured anything that came close to this level of despair.
So although cheating is hot, and the burning lust is, in some situations, worth taking a certain amount of risk for, the level of risk it stands up to is almost vanishingly small when you know exactly how much it hurts. If you’re offered something from someone new, it’s tempting to weigh it up against the surface-level consequences: your partner’s tears, their rage or what they’ll say if they burst in on you, writhing naked with your bit-on-the-side. But when you have to imagine what they’ll actually feel: the wrenching, pulsing agony of betrayal? Suddenly the risk seems so much greater.
My mum declared him a bastard and wouldn’t have him in the house. My stepdad, never usually one for dramatic emotional outbursts, told me he was a ‘little shit’ and that I deserved someone more faithful.
I didn’t correct them, because I couldn’t see any way of defending his honour without admitting the truth:
‘Yeah, he’s a dick but I’m not exactly Julie Andrews myself, Mum. Did I tell you about the time I fucked someone else while he was in the next room? Then later I fucked him, so I could feel two boys’ spunk mix together inside me. Shall I put the kettle on?’
So I let them continue to slander a guy who barely deserved it and instead sought advice from people who knew me a bit better. My friends, knowing that I was at least seven shades of bastard myself, refrained from telling me what ‘all men’ were like and instead focused on advising me on how to go about taking my mind off him. Their unanimous conclusion was that I should go and get spectacularly laid, so that is exactly what I did.
Like most good things, sex is best had in abundance. This is my way of saying that numbers three, four and five happened at the same time.
It was summer, just a week before I was due to leave town for university. I’d like to say that one thing led to another but actually, having a three- or—in this case—foursome takes a lot of effort, determination, and some seriously liberated friends.
It started, as most groupfucks tend to, with a very small amount of flirting and suggestion in just the right places. Very rarely does one head out for the night expecting to end it shagging three of your friends into collective exhaustion. It starts, as everything does, with flirting.
I’d already told Kate that I fancied Andy. In fact, I’d fancied Andy even while numbers one and two had held the majority of my attention. He was tall, dark, and so ordinary-looking that it took a good few glances before you noticed the charms he did have: broad shoulders and huge hands, beautiful scruffy hair, which he didn’t slick back with the expensive goo that most boys his age felt was compulsory. He wore his jeans hanging just a little way off his hips so you could see the angles of his hipbones, and he smiled modestly like the virgins used to back when they were in the majority. Although not a virgin himself, he was clearly horny enough to do a passable impression of one—he used to hug me tightly so my boobs would squash satisfyingly against his chest.
Imaginative members of our group of friends called him ‘spunk arm’ because, during a drunken fumble with my friend Jenny a year earlier, he’d spunked up her arm. But he’d also shown that he wasn’t particularly shy. While he was busy pumping teaspoons of jizz into the sleeve of her pyjamas, there’d been six other people in the room giggling at the rustling noises and the sound of his laboured breathing.
I had my eye on Andy.
Kate was different—a much closer friend who I’d got to know during countless nights spent spinning and giggling after necking plastic tumblers full of vodka and Coke. Our friendship was cemented one dramatic evening when I emptied at least three pints’ worth of the sickly substance out of my stomach, through her window, and down the side of her otherwise pristine house. Kate was like me: loud, brash and confident, with a similar gothy look and a penchant for squashing her tits into the nearest eager-looking guy. I told her that I fancied Andy and she confessed to a similar infatuation with Si.
It was short for Simon, but Simon was not a name that fitted this guy at all. Skinny, troublingly pale, Si looked like he’d been raised in a cupboard with no light, oxygen or fun. His dark hair and bright blue eyes would probably have served him well in the Twilight generation, but when I was a teenager that only drew odd stares in the street and the occasional ministrations of an equally pale gothic girl.
Kate was just one of those gothic girls.
Si’s house was immaculate, a shrine to minimalism and money. No one we knew had white carpets or a glass coffee table, because most of our friends’ parents recognised that there is a direct correlation between how much something costs and how likely it is that your children will destroy it.
So: shoes off, sober faces on, Si, Kate, Andy and I tiptoed into the lounge. Beers were placed carefully on coasters on the coffee table as he did a quick tour to establish that his parents were not only out but, having taken their overnight suitcase, likely to remain so until we’d cleaned up the remnants of our intimate party the next morning.
Formalities thus observed, we settled into the leather sofas and began to earnestly and conspicuously not talk about sex.
As adults, if a threesome is on the cards, I like to think that we’d be mature enough to be able to discuss it beforehand—not only to establish what people don’t like, but ideally to ascertain what they do. After all, if you’ve never spoken to someone about sex, you have very little idea what will send them into violent fits of ecstasy.
But sadly this kind of communication frequently stumps even the most liberal of adults. When trying to start a threesome, my adult self has been disappointed to find that the scenario hasn’t changed much since I was a teenager:
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