Girl On The Net: My Not-So-Shameful Sex Secrets

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:

Step 1: Someone mentions something slightly sexy, as a prelude to some discussion of sex in a general sense: ‘You know that so-and-so and such-and-such are fucking? I’d never have thought it. She does have a lovely arse, though. I’m jealous.’