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