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Girl on the Net: My Not-So-Shameful Sex Secrets
I’m Girl on the Net. You might know me from my blog. This is some stuff I do with my life.
Why did I write an erotic memoir?
The most obvious answer is ‘because I’m a pervert’ – I like sex; I like talking about it, reading about it, doing it, watching other people do it, and hearing other people’s stories.
This is my story. Don’t read it if you’re going to be offended by whips, submission or lots of sex.
Who am I?
Not telling. And if you think you know, please don’t spoil the secret…
Can’t get enough? Join the thousands of readers on girlonthenet.com, facebook.com/girlonthenet or tweet me @girlonthenet
Girl on the Net: My Not-So-Shameful Sex Secrets
Girl on the Net
Copyright
HQ
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2013
Copyright © Girl on the Net 2013
Girl on the Net asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
E-book Edition © June 2013 ISBN: 9781472017055
Version date: 2018-07-23
Born in the south of England, Girl on the Net travelled around a bit studying Philosophy and amassing a spectacular collection of bad habits before settling down in London. She now lives in a small flat with a hoard of books and an impressive selection of dirty coffee cups, and aspires to be the sort of person who visits museums at the weekends.
During the week you might spot her at comedy nights or science talks, and on Friday nights she’ll likely be the first person in the pub, ringing everyone else to see where they’ve got to. If you happen to meet her in real life and think you know who she is, please don’t let on. Like most people, she’s far more fun on the internet.
‘For the one who’s atomic, the one who’s insignificant and above all the one who’s not in it.’
Contents
Cover
Blurb
Title Page
Copyright
Author Bio
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Epilogue
Endpages
About the Publisher
1. I didn’t listen to the lyrics of ‘Teenage Kicks’ because I was far too busy masturbating
If you’d asked thirteen-year-old me what I wanted to be when I grew up, hovering somewhere near the top of the list alongside ‘astronaut’ and ‘writer’ would have been ‘wanker’. When I was thirteen, I wanted to be a wanker.
I suspect the same could be said of many teenagers—that moment when you discover that touching yourself like that can make everything else in the world seem dull, shallow and unimportant, is a moment that many of us spend the rest of our lives trying to recreate.
Since then I’ve been chasing that feeling—that desperate, horny kick you get when something strikes you in just the right way. When a guy says ‘come here and bend over’, when he puts one arm tightly around my waist and uses the other to pull my knickers down, when he leans over and whispers in my ear, ‘I can see your nipples getting hard through that top.’ Every single time my cunt twitches and I feel that stinging lust in the pit of my stomach—they’re all descendants of that initial spark.
The first thing I ever wanked to was a book.
Not a book with any particularly saucy images on the cover, or, as a surprising number of my male friends have confessed, a hardback compilation of ‘arty’ Pirelli calendar shots. To my utter adult horror, my first teenage wank came about via a sadomasochistic novel that belonged to my dad.
Allow me to explain:
My parents were divorced. Not in an ‘oh God, why must they tear the family apart?’ way, but in a ‘well, that seems to have calmed them both down’ way. No doubt it was agony for eight-year-old me, but I’m sure she’d forgive twenty-eight-year-old me for being a bit blasé about it, given that both of my parents subsequently settled down with lovely partners, neither of whom hit me or made me sweep out cinders from the fireplace.
It’s well documented that post-divorce many children cash in, and benefit from having two of everything: two Christmases, two birthdays, two trips to the special cake shop to be congratulated on not fucking up your GCSEs. And it’s also well documented that this isn’t a great idea, and can leave your children well and truly spoiled. Luckily for me my parents read the documentation thoroughly and did their absolute best not to fawn over, bribe, or otherwise pander to any of their children. This means that my brother, sister and I have all grown up relatively balanced, if a little light on presents.
I did get one special treat when I visited my dad, though: my own bedroom. Initially this meant peace and quiet, personal space and the ability to lie in on Saturday and read book after book after book. Eventually, though, as I grew up and discovered the brilliant things I could do to myself given enough ‘alone time’, I started to look on weekends at my dad’s house as simply forty-eight hours in which I could wank to my heart’s content.
During the week I’d share a bedroom with my sister, which was split according to the rule that says ‘she with the loudest voice gets the biggest space’, so I got the crappy space.
Late at night my sister and I would have feisty rows over why I’d borrowed her good hairbrush, then settle into our respective beds to recharge our energy for tomorrow’s big fight. She, I imagine, would fall instantly into a deep and unshakeable slumber, while I would focus on learning to wank without moving the bedsheets.
It’s trickier than you think.
First you have to manoeuvre your body into a position that befits wanking yet also looks like a plausible way for a human to sleep. If, like me, you sleep lying on your front, this means bunching the duvet up around you so you can ever so slightly raise your arse from the bed to make enough space for one hand to fit between your legs.
Don’t jump the gun, though, my hand is not between my legs yet. First, I have to lick my fingers. I have to coat them in spit in a way that makes absolutely no sound whatsoever. Try it at home. In a silent room, in the dead darkness of night, coat your fingers in spit without making any lip-smacking, finger-sucking sounds. Tricky, no?
Having achieved this Herculean feat, next you must move your hand under the bedsheets without a) wiping any of the spit off or b) letting on that you might be about to do something inappropriate. It is impossible to do this without rustling the duvet, so don’t even try. Instead, make sure your movement appears casual and insignificant—a slight shift in sleeping position, a scratch—you’re just getting comfortable, that’s all. Under no circumstances must the movement be done with the gleeful eagerness of someone who is about to have a wank.
Next comes the good bit—the actual wanking. And this works much the same as a full-on, adult, ‘I’ve got my own sofa and I’m not afraid to rub one out on it’ wank, only with much smaller movements.
As an adult I’ll wank openly, joyfully, safe in the knowledge that not only is an Englishman’s home his castle, but that if anyone looks through the window of my particular castle, they have no right to judge me. All I’m doing is having a nice, healthy wank. Like almost everyone does of a Saturday afternoon when something hot strikes them and there’s nothing on the telly. Rubbing frantically at my clit, without guilt or fear of being caught, I can bring myself to an express, functional orgasm within about thirty seconds.
Sadly, it wasn’t so for teenage me. Very slight movements and delicate rubbing built to an infinitesimally gradual increase in pressure as I tested whether the duvet could withstand small vibrations without giving the game away. And I won’t lie—it didn’t always work. Sometimes I’d lie there, tensing every single muscle in my body, rubbing in tiny tiny strokes with just one finger as hard as I’d dare. My nipples hard, my fingers slick, my forehead creased into a frown of agonising concentration … and still I couldn’t come. I knew that with just a bit more pressure it would work. I just needed a slightly faster rhythm, longer strokes, or to have my other hand free to pinch one of my nipples or grab at myself more tightly. On those occasions I’d cough, get out of bed, wrap a towel around myself and retire to the well-lit bathroom with its heaven-sent door lock, and lie on the floor with my legs open, frigging myself to a twitching, guilty climax.
But that was rare. Having had plenty of practice, the silent wanking was usually a success. Fixing a fantasy in my head (pirates tying a willing wench to the mast of their ship, and whipping her with the cat-o’-nine-tails, since you asked), I’d rub harder, push harder, and feel the first waves of orgasm tearing through me.
There were no post-climax sighs, no groans, and very few rustling noises as I took my hand away and shifted back into a sleeping position. Exhausted after the effort, I’d nod off to the sound of almost-silence: the quiet, steady breathing of my sister, curled up tight in bed, definitely not wanking either.
But that all comes later—younger me didn’t quite understand what wanking was. The closest I’d come to coming was when I’d act out scenes with things that happened to be lying around my room—books, stuffed toys, marbles. I’d move objects around like a general directing a battle and inevitably the childish stories—man rescues woman from the clutches of evil kidnappers—would evolve into slightly more adult plays as my mind got that bit filthier—man rescues woman from the clutches of evil yet sexy kidnappers. Eventually, as I started growing up, the players in my games would more frequently end up in contrived situations that gave me a sexual thrill.
There was always a kidnap victim, lost princess, stepdaughter, or pirate’s wench who would inevitably have to be punished. The leaders were eager—never reluctant—to punish the wrongdoer. She was always female. Usually surrounded by a group of pissed-off men. The men would threaten to punish her and she’d be more than stoic—like she’d got into trouble deliberately just because she wanted to hear the word ‘thrash’. As in ‘I’m going to thrash you for that.’
Thrash.
That word still does good things to me. The sound of someone being thrashed, the sight of a guy’s arm, holding a whip or a belt, tensed ready to strike, gives me a dark, hot feeling deep in my stomach.
In more literary books people talk of ‘sexual awakenings’ where the world becomes more vivid, where you notice things you’d never noticed before and suddenly become alive to your sexual sense. It all sounds very poetic and meaningful, without the sordid stains that come with our actual, real-life awakenings. I’m not going to lie and tell you that any of this filth was poetic. The truth rarely is. What I’m telling you is that I lay on my bedroom floor with a bunch of marbles and quimmed my pants at the word ‘thrash’.
Thrash.
Shudder.
Having worked out that this word did weird things, I experimented with other words. ‘Beat’. ‘Whip’. ‘Spank’. ‘Hit’. ‘Thwack’. Each of them resonates with me, conjures stark and immediate images of men straining at the shoulder, bearing instruments of stinging pain. Beat. Whip. Thwack. ‘I’m going to beat you now.’ ‘I’m going to whip you.’ All so good that just writing them makes the back of my knees tingle. But no other word gives me that kick in the gut quite as hard as the word:
Thrash.
But despite these words giving me that trembling feeling, I didn’t know how to keep it going. Other than repeating the scenes over and over in my head, I was at a loss. Insights garnered from TV shows that I watched late at night had given me the impression that I should stick my fingers in, but I’d done that before when I was practising with tampons, and it had just given me a vague feeling of medical-grade discomfort. Touching my insides seemed wrong, and putting my fingers in my cunt seemed about as arousing as poking at an open wound. Moreover, I had no idea what I was supposed to do once my fingers were there. Should there be a side-to-side motion? A swirling motion? An in-and-out motion? Not a bloody clue. I could have done with a handbook, or at the very least a nudge and a wink and an explanation that ‘fingering’ could be done in many different ways.
So I’d got hot, got wet, got horny, and yet still hadn’t actually wanked—until I found the book.
It wasn’t deliberate, I’m sure of that. My dad is quite a liberal guy, but still prone to saying ‘oh, deary me’ in a jovially uncomfortable way when adverts for sanitary products appear on TV. He left the book in my room, certainly, but I know he didn’t leave it there on purpose.
On this occasion I went to visit Dad, and spotted that things had been moved about a bit in my room. This was reasonably unusual. My room was seen as my space, so unless they’d had guests who needed a bed, no one would go in, let alone start moving my stuff around. Dad felt the need to explain, as I dumped my weekend rucksack on the bed, that he had a bad back and had been borrowing my bed for a few nights during the week.
I found out later that it was because he and my stepmum had had a fight. Not just a ‘why do you never do the washing up?’ fight, but a full-on, storming-out, ‘I can’t bear to share a bed with this twat’ row. Hence the book, I suppose. If I were my dad, and had found myself suddenly and temporarily wifeless, I’d have taken the time to catch up on my wanking too.
I set about putting my things in order—rearranging my room, taking out the clothes I’d packed for the weekend, and putting my own book into the bedside drawer. And that was where I found it—Dad’s.
I can’t remember what it was called, but I’m sure it was something French-sounding. The action was set in Parisian streets, and the images in my mind are of people in vaguely old-fashioned clothes cavorting with each other and talking in strong French accents, but any one of these memories might be incorrect. The key thing I took away, having flipped through a few pages, was that it was dirty. Filthy.
Not dirty like the pictures of shining, pink-mouthed topless women that the boys at school pored over, not even dirty like the scenes of thrashing that whirled round in my head, but dirty in ways I’d never imagined before. On the first page I flicked to, a woman tied a man flat to a board, teased him into a throbbing erection, then encased his cock in a condom-like sheath that had hundreds of tiny spikes on the inside.
I told myself I should put this down. I thought I’d discovered the edge of filth, the world’s end, and that nothing dirtier was possible. I tried to close the book, reasoning that nothing could be worse than the passage I’d just read. Then I read the very next paragraph, in which she sat down upon the sheath, letting it slide slickly inside her, and watched the anguished looks on the guy’s face as his dick throbbed with pleasure and pain.
OK, I should definitely put this down, I thought again.
But instead I settled myself back onto the bed, resting one hand casually on my crotch outside my jeans. Pushing with gentle pressure at the place where the waves of heat were coming from.
‘I’m going to put this down now.’
The woman started sliding up and down the guy’s dick—the sheath smooth on the outside and adding precious thickness to his erection. The book described in detail her arousal—her cold, solid nipples stiffening as she rode him faster. It drew a detailed picture of her muscular thighs, clamping him tight as she rocked back and forth. It went into lengthy detail about the mechanics of the act—how every time she sat down, sliding his cock deeper into her, the tiny spikes would push more heavily into his skin, pricking his prick so he’d moan in pain.
Without making a conscious decision to, I was touching myself. My hand on the outside of my jeans, my legs spread wide so that the seam pressed heavily on my clit, I rubbed hard with my fingers through the strong fabric.
‘I should definitely put this down.’
But I didn’t. I couldn’t. The hot, topless woman was riding the guy with such need, such a desire to come, that she’d hurt him more than she meant to.
I was gripping the book in my left hand, rubbing harder with my right, trying to mirror the passion and the need of the woman in the book. I cared even less about the embarrassment of wanking than she cared about the pain of the guy sat beneath her. I rubbed myself, and I felt what she felt—her clit rubbing against something, her cunt getting wetter, and finally—just before I had to turn a page—that powerful gut-wrenching kick that marked the first rush of the first wave of the very first orgasm I’d ever had.
A few years later, I found another book in my room: the Osborne Book of Teenaged Bodies. Nice try, Dad. Nice try.
Having discovered the dirty book and spent a few happy weekends holed up in my room frigging myself cross-eyed, I eventually came to the realisation that wanking—contrary to almost everything I’d previously been led to believe—was not just for boys.
The references to it were everywhere: jokes about boys being boys, talk of crusty bedsheets, sniggers and whispers if a guy had his hands in his pockets for too long. Not just at school, either. TV programmes and teen flicks were filled with not-so-subtle nods to the fact that boys just couldn’t get enough orgasmic alone-time. I could understand why they liked it so much—given thirty minutes on my own, I’d be able to knock out five orgasms in quick succession and still have time to do my homework. What I couldn’t quite fathom, though, was why no one ever mentioned that girls did it too.
No one ever made jokes about me if I spent too long in the bath. No one questioned my almost constantly jiggling knee—the friction felt pleasantly soothing on my clit, and was a nice way to get through IT lessons until it was time for a bathroom break. Most surprisingly, girls themselves didn’t even talk about it.
I remember spending hours with girlfriends as a teenager dissecting whether this or that particular boy fancied so-and-so, exactly whose hand was where during the slow song at the school disco, or whether Ricky Martin would ever be likely to shimmy his oh-so-hot and definitely-not-gay-just-flamboyant ass over to the UK to do bad, bad things to my best friend.
But never once did we talk about wanking.
We must have all been doing it, and none of us were particularly squeamish. There was just a feeling that no one should ever say. That we’d be breaking some sort of unwritten rule if we owned up. We were demure, delicate creatures. Creatures who were waiting to be defiled behind the bike sheds and wanted to maintain some semblance of innocence so that we could put on a shocked face when boys tried to touch our tits.
We could be in love, we could have crushes, and we could be curious. But we couldn’t actually have desires, for God’s sake. That would be cheating. A whispered discussion about what cocks were like was all well and good, but the powerful, wet, angry lust that we actually felt was a bit freakish, a bit wrong. No one ever had to tell us this, we just knew. We were allowed to have giggles and sleepovers and secret codewords and whispered gossip and posters of be-coiffed boyband members. But wanking? Wanking was for boys.
I’d like to say that things have changed now that I’m a grown-up. We live in a more liberated time, when we can wander into a bookshop and buy filth like … well … like this. Or read magazines that give sex tips alongside fashion advice. Or give a friend a dildo as a ‘sorry you got heartlessly dumped’ present. But I don’t think we’re really much further along the track.
Dildos and rabbit vibrators have made girl-wanking OK, but only in quite a specific sense. Women are allowed to experiment with wanking because now there’s a way to market it. You can have a vibrator or two, you can joke about having some ‘alone time’ with your rabbit, because discussion is no longer about the act of wanking, but about the accessories. We’re still ever so slightly weird about the idea of teenage girls locking themselves in their room and frigging themselves raw through their jeans.
Girls can be horny now; they can be hot and wet and desperate for a fuck. Their cunts can twitch and ache with longing and desire. They can feel that deep, angry kick-in-the-gut that signals something has triggered the naked, rutting, cavewoman instinct inside them. But they must do it all with a giggle and a smile and a wry sense of how liberated they are. They can read Fifty Shades of Grey on the bus, but when their friends ask they’ll say they’re only reading it to see what all the fuss was about, and they didn’t like it and it was badly written and they didn’t rub one out to it, honest.
I’ve heard men complain about this with smiles that say they’re only half joking. ‘Why is it OK for women to read porn on the bus but I can’t flip open a jazz mag without commuters running in terror?’ They can’t sit on the back seat with a copy of Penthouse flipped open, casually perusing the weekly selection of tits on their way into work. And they’re right, they can’t. Partly because—for fear of stating the blindingly obvious—Penthouse has actual pictures, for the love of Christ, and they might terrify people around them. But primarily because men are seen to have a different relationship with porn than women. When a woman looks at porn people raise their eyebrows, and assume she’s just curious. People don’t think about her cunt getting slick or her nipples getting hard or her heart pounding or stomach contracting. They don’t imagine her lingering over the hottest paragraph, the one where our hero finally succumbs to his own desire and bends the heroine over a desk, spanking her as she writhes and moans and pushing his engorged cock into her spit-lubed ass. No. When women read porn there’s a vague assumption that they’re doing it frivolously.
Men can’t read porn on the bus, but that’s not because we hate your porn, or think you’re a filthy pervert. On the contrary, it’s because we feel like you’re the only ones who truly understand it, who get what it’s for. Women can look at porn in public because strangers assume that they must have a motive other than the simple desire to get off. Men: you might not get to read porn on the bus, but at least you have the benefit of the doubt. When you say you’re horny, when you say you like sex, when you get hard over porn, we believe you.
I don’t think porn played a huge part in my teenage years. There was one computer, and it was in the dining room—even the bravest of teenagers would have to take quite a leap of faith to pull their trousers down in confidence that their parents wouldn’t walk in just as you got to the good bit. More importantly, I’d have had to ask permission to actually use the internet. Each minute you used it cost money, and all you’d get for your investment was a clunky image of a woman’s nipples, loading slowly down the screen, line by agonising line.
Whichever way you look at it, the nineties weren’t an ideal time in which to learn about sex, and all the filthy, spunk-covered, hair-pulling ways in which people do it.
But I tell you what we did have back then—imagination. Acres and acres of it.
To this day I rarely watch porn to have a wank. Occasionally, I’ll browse through a few of my favourite websites, clicking through videos to find the best moments, or I’ll read a book with the specific intention of putting it down halfway through, conjuring up the images in my head, gritting my teeth and then coming all over my fingers.
But more often than not I can come up with better images on my own. I don’t need porn to spark them off. Why? Well, the filthy naked people in my head always do just what I want them to do. No one’s going to put me off by saying something dodgy at the wrong time, or changing camera angle just when I was getting into it. Nor am I going to be wracked with guilt and worry that the people in my imagination might be being exploited.
Exploitation makes me careful about the porn I’ll seek out. I wouldn’t want to watch something that looks like it’s been filmed covertly, for instance. There are enough blurred videos of me sucking someone’s dick that I don’t want to encourage any more sex-tape-leaking than there is already. But the main reason I don’t like porn is that it can only take a tiny thing to completely kill my mood.
For instance, using the word ‘pussy’. As in ‘fuck my pussy’ or ‘you’ve got a nice wet pussy’. Just say it—say the word to yourself, and try not to shudder. ‘Pussy’. ‘Wet pussy’. It’s like something you might step in, not something you fuck. Likewise ‘hole’. Everyone has different words that they find hot, but the porn people in my head always talk about ‘cunts’.
Similarly, no matter how hot the porn scene, I can be instantly turned off by a switch to a close-up camera angle. Not that there’s nothing beautiful about a nice, thick, porn-star cock, but when I’m watching two—or three, or four—people fucking, I want to actually see them fucking. I don’t just want to see the bumping, wet smack as one small part connects with another. Just as I wouldn’t go to Disneyland and ride nothing but Space Mountain, likewise with porn I want to see the full show: the slaps, the grabbing, the facial expressions. In real life we know that a fuck is about much more than rubbing the right body parts together, but for some reason pornographers have forgotten that. They show us the dismembered bits: part A fitting into slot B, like a crude jigsaw puzzle. I want to see the whole thing. I want to watch as he bends her over the sofa, see his hand settled firmly in the small of her back. I want to see him reach forward with his other hand and grab at her hair or squeeze her tits. I want to see her throw her head back with desire when he does this. I want to watch her pushing herself back onto his dick, to feel the full, thick length of him. And I don’t get any of this if you just show me her cunt in close-up.
And finally, crucially, the main thing I hate about porn is that it so rarely reflects how actual sex happens. Even with amateur porn, or BDSM porn, or any kind of specialism, most of the videos will follow a reasonably tried and tested formula.
Guy meets girl, guy kisses girl, guy removes her flimsy top and firmly rubs her tits. Girl strips sexily. Guy removes her knickers. Guy plays with her cunt for far longer than the average guy would play with a cunt. Guy licks her clit, she sucks him off, they fuck in a minimum of three positions, he pulls his cock out and wanks onto her face, the end.
With slight tweaks to the details, this story runs through almost every porn film that’s ever been mainstream. It might be popular, and it might do good things for some people, but it’s frustratingly formulaic. Sex, actual sex, just doesn’t work like that. And it’s a bloody good thing, too. Actual sex is hot and fun and sticky and sweaty and it all happens out of order. If we followed a manual like the one they give to the porn industry we’d all die of boredom before we reached the come shot.
But I digress. When I was younger none of this occurred to me. I’d never seen any porn, I’d never watched anyone else fuck, and even the launch of Channel ‘we show tits late at night’ 5 only gave me some vague soft-core humping that didn’t quite press the buttons worth pressing.
My obsession was still with the word ‘thrash’, and derivatives of it, and the stories in my head were far more tailored to this personal quirk.
As I lay in bed with my duvet bunched around me, rubbing gently at my clit with silent movements, full-colour, scripted porn masterpieces would play out inside my head.
Angry, horny men would crowd round a girl and call her a slut. She’d groan with arousal, delighted to be the focus of so much desire. She’d twitch her cunt around the dicks she was being fucked with, or bend over a desk to get beaten with a thick, black belt. The guys around her would be pushing in, trying to get closer—to touch her, to grab her, to slap her arse and see how firm it was. To push their dicks into her mouth, her cunt.
One guy directs them all. He tells them this girl is good, that they’ll all get a chance, but that he has to punish her first.
Thwack.
‘You’re a filthy girl.’
Thwack.
‘I’m going to punish you …’
Thwack.
‘… and then I’m going to fuck you.’
Thwack.
‘Let’s see how wet you’re getting.’
Thwack.
‘Oh, you filthy girl.’
And as he makes the next stroke she cries out in pain, and one of the other men steps forward, tilts her head back by grabbing a clump of her hair, and forces his dick into her gaping mouth.
Thwack.
She’s flagging, the strain of keeping silent, of not making choking noises, is hard for her to cope with. Her breath catches and spit runs from her mouth to her chin to her chest. The guy with the belt pushes down on the small of her back, bending her further, pressing her to the table, squashing her tits against the cool smoothness of the desk while from the other end his friend takes grunting pleasure from her mouth. He draws his arm back ready for another stroke.
Thwack.
At that stroke the leader moves in, using his free hand to rub his already rock-solid dick. She bucks and writhes as he forces it into her, choking out a moan against the cock that’s already in her mouth.
‘That’s it. Take it. Good girl.’ He raises his stroke hand. ‘Are you ready for one more?’
She tries to nod; she wants to nod. She knows that this will be the final stroke of the onslaught, the last fresh wave of pain that might push her through to orgasm. But she can’t nod, her hair’s held tightly in the grasp of the other man, and the leader has her pinned from behind, holding himself and his thick cock still, teasing her cunt while he waits for a response. The guy at the front starts thrusting harder, pushing her back onto the other man’s dick. Making strangled grunts in the back of his throat. She knows he’s going to come, can feel him start to come, can feel his dick twitch deep in the back of her throat as she makes a muffled cry.
Thwack.
So this is what I did through my teenaged years. In between trying to pass exams and not get too bullied at school, I wanked. Frantically, furiously, and with a passion and commitment that the world tried to tell me was just for boys.
I’d sit in lessons and think about wanking. I’d eat dinner on my lap in front of EastEnders and think about wanking. I’d get into the car to visit my dad and spend the twenty-minute journey thinking about wanking. How much can I get done between now and Sunday night?
Perhaps the world’s not yet ready for the slick and desperate wanking power of teenaged girls, but I wish it were. I wish it had been when I was young. Because although it occupied most of my waking thoughts, actually doing it made me feel weird. Not like an excited explorer stood on a cliff-edge of opportunity, but like a lonely hermit in a cave, scared of what the outside world would think when she told them about her discovery.
I’d learned how to wank, which made my life immeasurably more fun. It gave me something interesting and free to do with my spare time, and let me explore the disgusting things that went on inside my head. But I’d also learned to keep as quiet as I could about it. I’d learned not to talk about it or dwell for too long on the things that I did in the dark. Every other thing about me was normal—tediously so. But this secret thing I did was a bit unfeminine, a bit abnormal, and certainly not something I should openly discuss.
It took me a good few years to unlearn that lesson.
2. Sometimes it is necessary to give someone crisps so that they’ll grope you
The problem with adult men is that they just don’t touch my tits enough. I’ve never met a straight man who says he doesn’t like tits. And yet as grown men they miss out on a million opportunities to touch them up. I can think of no occasion when I’ve been relaxing with a guy on the sofa that wouldn’t have been immeasurably improved if he’d had one hand idly exploring the inside of my shirt.
Teenage boys were fantastic, for countless different reasons, but the most fantastic thing of all was their obsession—their pure and complete satisfaction—with touching my tits.
I wasn’t particularly popular at school. I was the geeky kid, the one who did well in exams but badly with the boys. The ‘good’ one, for whom detentions were so unthinkable that the one time I did get one my mum reacted as if there’d been a terrible miscarriage of justice:
‘Oh, you poor thing. Is there an appeals process?’
But despite the surface impression of being a good girl who’d pass all her exams with flying colours and have little time for boys in between, I was burning up with lust, with heat, and, above everything else, a desire to have my tits touched by boys.
Many of my girlfriends were the same. To greater or lesser degrees, all of us wanted to find someone with whom we could retire to a quiet alleyway and experiment with a bit of tit-touching. When you’re young, the jolt of electric surprise when a hand brushes a nipple—even through the bra—is as powerful as a passionate fuck might be to someone older.
And yet none of us wanted to be the one who suggested it. No girl could actually say, ‘Hey, guy who is one of our friends but who I don’t technically fancy, would you mind just rubbing my tits for twenty minutes or so until I slick my knickers?’ So we made things happen. Stealthily, subtly, without ever suggesting we might be ‘up for it’, we made things happen.
One summer, my friend Amy and I went on a mission to get our tits touched. We didn’t discuss it but we both knew that was the plan. As reasonably unpopular girls, we understood that no matter how short our skirts or how much make-up we inexpertly applied, we’d never hit the teenaged jackpot of an actual boyfriend. So we settled for the next best thing—we lowered whatever expectations we’d been foolish enough to have and headed straight for the guys who seemed most willing.
At school there was a group of boys rather cruelly known as the ‘untouchables’. These were the guys who would never get slow dances at the discos, the boys who were a bit pervy or nerdy and were generally given a wide berth. The bullied kids always stuck together, so we gravitated towards this group, and would spend countless hours swigging cheap cider with them in parks, swapping the right answers for our homework, and occasionally getting them to touch our tits.
That summer, Amy and I picked a pair of them who were quite good friends, and spent our time engineering situations in which we could get them alone. We didn’t want to shag them, and weren’t even bothered about snogging particularly—an activity which I’d found to be relatively unsexy and to require far too much post-snog facial wiping. So, no shagging, no snogging, as little conversation as we could get away with—all we wanted to do was get their hands on our tits.
Darren had his own bedroom, furnished with a bunk bed left over from the days he’d shared with an older brother, and a cheap TV/VCR in the corner on which he and his friend Rob would watch endless shit B-movies to pass the time until evening. Every morning for a couple of weeks, I’d walk to Amy’s house, knock on her door, and we’d set off to Darren’s.
Plastered with more make-up than was realistically necessary for a day spent sat in a darkened room, we’d knock on Darren’s door and ask him if Rob was around. He usually was.
‘You watching films today?’
‘Uh … yeah.’
‘Can we watch them too?’
‘Umm …’
‘We’ve brought Pringles.’
‘Come in.’
Eagerly, we’d rush into Darren’s room, where a poorly scripted horror film would be playing on the TV and Rob would be reclining on the top bunk of the bed. Even when our visits became routine, he always looked surprised to see us.
By unspoken agreement, Rob was mine, and Darren was Amy’s. I’d swing up into the top bunk, she’d settle into the bottom one, and we’d all sit in silence and pretend to watch the film.
An hour and a half was never quite long enough. It would take half an hour for Rob to get over his nervousness and make a move on me. Long after all of the movie characters had been introduced, and thrown into whichever perilous yet implausible situation the film required, he’d shift slightly towards me and brush against me with his arm. I’d respond eagerly, brushing back against him with slightly more pressure, and angling my chest so that the next move he made would have him pressed against the side of my tits.
‘Are you comfortable?’ he murmured. This was my cue.
‘Not really, can I sit in front of you?’ I replied, so quietly that the rustling coming from the bottom bunk would almost drown out my whispers.
He gulped, nodded, and I slid in front of him, so that his back was pressed against the wall and my back was pressed against him.
With our eyes still firmly on the TV, he’d make tiny, gradual movements to shift his arms so that they were holding me around my stomach. I watched the film, taking in nothing except the feeling of his hands moving ever so slowly towards my tits. The on-screen heroine would scream and flee from the latest danger, and I’d be screaming inside my head, ‘Go on, up a bit.’
I was dripping wet. Feeling the soft, gentle touch of his hands on my top would drive me mad with lust. That kick-in-the-gut feeling of need was eating away at me, and I willed him to go further.
He started breathing more heavily behind me, shaking a bit with the heady excitement that a girl was letting him touch her. She was actually, unless he was very much mistaken, shifting slightly to move her tits closer to his hands. Pushing back against him so that she could feel his jumpy, throbbing erection pressing into the small of her back. He wasn’t watching the film, just seeing the pictures. And as the people on the screen grew more terrified of whatever B-movie monster was chasing them, he was getting ever closer to having both of his hands cupped around the soft, jumper-clad, erotic holy grail—an actual pair of tits.
He wasn’t mistaken. I was doing all of these things. Subtle gestures made way for more direct ones, as I leant back and felt his hard, aching dick pressing into me. My nipples were rock solid and stood out clearly even through a bra and a thin jumper. I wanted him to touch them. I pressed myself against him and shifted to bring them closer to his hands, willing him to feel them, to be determined, to squeeze them nice and hard through the fabric.
Finally, just before the climax of the film, he’d cup his trembling hands around the actual curve of my tits, and I’d shiver with satisfaction, a wave of lust spilling more wetness into my already soaking crotch.
As steadily and silently as I could, I reached my right hand behind me to feel his hardness. I felt, rather than heard, the gulp in his throat as he realised what I was doing, and he squeezed my tits harder, clinging to them as if otherwise I’d move away. And I looked down at him running his hands all over them, as I grabbed at his dick through his trousers.
His cock wasn’t thick, but it was long, and so so hard. It twitched in my hand as I rubbed at it through his thin sports trousers. The fabric was slippery to touch, and I could feel a spreading wetness at the tip as he leaked excitement out through two layers of cotton. He’d grip me harder, using his first two fingers to trap my nipples in his grip. With every touch we’d both get wetter and I’d be willing him to come. I wanted to know what it felt like—to give a guy that feeling.
Eventually, with a sore arm, soaking wet knickers and a desperate need to feel Rob shoot spunk through his trousers, the film credits would start to roll. Everyone sat up straight, moved apart, and pretended we’d done nothing as Darren got up to change the video.
Then the whole process would start again.
I have Rob to thank for a lot of things, but mostly the tit-touching. Having proved to myself that no matter how thick my glasses or how depressingly lanky my hair, some boys would still allow me the pleasure of a mutual grope, I moved on to other boys, to see whether they’d do it too.
To my unending delight and gratitude, they did. Late at night in the park I’d join in games of spin the bottle, hoping whichever boy I landed in the spin would slip a hand up my top while we kissed. Guys at school would give me friendly hugs, and grab my tits in what I was often disappointed to realise was a joke. One boy, who I sat next to in maths classes, would run a vibrating pager over my school shirt, watching as my nipples got hard beneath it. He’d grin and get hard and then turn it on under the table, sliding it under my skirt and gently over the crotch of my knickers. I was amazed, delighted, and desperately horny to find that if I jokingly suggested to boys that they touch my tits or grab my crotch, they would.
Unfortunately, the only one who wouldn’t was the one I wanted most of all.
My First Love was a boy I met in English class. A skinny, witty, Irish boy, who for some reason just didn’t like me at all. I hated him at first too. His wit and his volume were too similar to mine, and I didn’t appreciate the competition. I’d make a joke, then he’d make a louder one and win approval from our giggling classmates. So I’d make a joke at his expense, and get a louder laugh. He’d reciprocate, and escalate, and make me seethe with competitive rage from behind my exercise books. This war continued until he called a truce, and the passion and hatred of our frequent fights developed into a warm reciprocal friendship.
Instead of fighting, now we’d sit next to each other in classes, making quiet, secret jokes to each other. We’d spend hours on the phone at weekends, dissecting what had happened during the week. We’d open up a bit about our habits and lusts, and what our rampaging hormones made us want to do.
Not to each other, you understand—despite my desire for him I knew that he’d never be mine. He was slightly cooler than me—not popular, but cool. And with my high test scores and big glasses and ignorance of popular music, I most definitely wasn’t. I settled for simply being friends, projecting an air of calm platonic happiness, while in secret I fell hopelessly in love with him.
‘Can anyone tell me what the difference is between weight and mass?’
I daydreamed during science classes. It was one of the few lessons in which First Love would sit further away from me and I could watch him from my desk, as he laughed and wrote notes to the guy sat beside him, ignoring the teacher until just the moment when he’d be called upon to answer.
‘Come on, anyone? Mass versus weight, anyone?’
It was during a science class that I realised I loved him. I was watching him writing notes, admiring his long, quick fingers, his thick forearms accentuated by a chunky watch. I looked at his hands and was struck by a powerful image, of him pushing me roughly against the wall in an alleyway on the way to school, using both hands to push at my tits as I hiked up my school skirt.
I felt that deep, throbbing lust and I squirmed on my stool. I could feel myself getting wetter, as I kept my eyes on his hands and wished I could be alone to touch myself. That quick snapshot—the roughness of his grip and the force of him pushing me against the wall—was the first genuine fantasy I’d felt for a real person. I don’t think I imagined us fucking at that point, I just pictured how desperate he’d be to come, how hard he’d rub himself against me, and how his hands would stray from my tits to grab my arse through my knickers and pull me forward against his dick.
I ran straight home from school that day, not speaking to him, or even to my friends. I waited until my sister was safely settled in the lounge, unlikely to return to our shared bedroom, and I wet my fingers, touched my clit and thought of him, him, him.
‘You need to be careful,’ said Dad. ‘I know it might seem like a platonic relationship to you, but boys are different. It’s hard for a boy to stay platonic. He’ll be thinking of you in other ways, so you need to make sure that he knows how you feel.’
Listening to my dad telling me that First Love wanted to fuck me was almost as painful as hearing First Love tell me he didn’t.
Both of us would protest if asked whether anything was going on. ‘Oh no, we’re just friends. It’s not like that.’ But I’d watch him during school, I’d speak to him whenever I could, I’d hang on his every word like each one was a magical secret, and I’d go to bed at night wishing he would touch me. ‘Honestly, we’re just mates. Nothing’s going to happen.’ But God I wanted it to. He was as interested in girls as I was in him, but for some reason I could never give him that feeling. We’d play-fight and we’d hug and sometimes we’d sit so close on the sofa that I was scared he’d hear the throbbing of my cunt, but he never touched me.
Other girls were more interesting to him. My friends. My girlfriends. Amy. He’d snog Amy with slobbering, desperate passion then turn to me, with a semi-hard dick, and let me know all about it. And I’d smile, and congratulate him, my potent, lucky best mate. Well done, man. Good on you. You got some. And then go home to sob silently into my pillow, and relive the times when—in my head—he’d fucked me.
Dad, again: ‘It’s not that boys are only after one thing. It’s just that they’re often thinking about this one thing. They want sex even if you don’t, so you have to be careful not to lead them on.’
I sat through the lecture with gritted teeth and a determined smile. I smiled as hard as I could to stop myself from crying. My dad was telling me how inevitable it was that First Love would try to fuck me, and I was replaying in my head all the times he’d told me, ‘No, I don’t feel that way about you. Let’s just be friends.’
My dad told me that, as a woman, I’d be irresistible to anyone with a penis and a pulse. Men have erections and they need someone to fuck. And of course First Love had erections, and he wanted to fuck too. But no matter how fun I was, how young and horny and wet and eager I was, he still wouldn’t fuck me. As I listened to my dad telling me to push First Love away if he made any advances, I remembered all of the ways in which this boy had rejected me, and I felt an actual physical pain in my chest.
‘What I’m getting at here is that he’ll be thinking these things about you all the time. I want you to be careful. It’s not that I don’t want you to be friends with him, I just don’t want you to break his heart.’
And it broke my fucking heart.
After years of friendship and countless hours of longing, First Love eventually moved away. I still spoke to him every weekend—languid hours spent lying on my bed, one hand comfortably down my knickers, listening to him tell me about his new life, his new school, the girls who were much prettier than me who might or might not be interested. But I could at least forget him for a while during the week and focus on finding that lustful feeling elsewhere.
I made rather awkward friends with a gang of laid-back stoners. Although I wasn’t keen on everyone in this new, scruffy group, it opened up plenty of new opportunities to have my tits touched. I still thought about First Love, and whenever I met a new boy I’d be looking for elements of his character that reflected Him—a quick wit, a dirty smile, lovely big hands or a penchant for chatting about wanking. And he remained the only real-life person who had ever featured in one of my fantasies. He’d left an impression on me that I realised would never go—the first person who’d got me hot and wet and then fucked off without giving me any release.
But my new friends were fun as well. We’d hang out in shy groups after school, arguing over the artistic merits of Kurt Cobain, smoking lopsided joints and feeling better than everyone else.
They introduced me to a lot of new things, some of which (like smoking and super-noodles) I’ll never forgive them for. But they also helped me to lose my virginity.
‘Ow … ow … ow … please sto— oh, you’ve stopped.’
I lost my virginity in a shed. That’s right, I was classy. But I wasn’t that different from others in the group. Without parents willing to host big parties, we spent most of our evenings swigging cheap cider in parks and frotting in darkened alleyways until the tension would build up and we’d find a place to fuck. Any place to fuck. Fussiness about these things was considered bad form. At the time you’d be seen as ‘stuck up’ if you insisted on a place that had walls, let alone an actual bed.
I met number one just before my sixteenth birthday. He was tiny—around five foot five—with soft skin and bright green eyes. He wore torn jeans and smoked roll-ups and spoke with a slight, shy stutter. Best of all, though, he was not fussy. He was horny and willing and desperate to have a girlfriend. He didn’t just want to hang out on the outskirts of parties and kiss the girls who were drunk enough to fancy him; he wanted to be at the centre of it all, one of the couples. The couples didn’t have the same rules as everyone else. They didn’t have to get wasted at the beginning of the evening and then try to pick out the second drunkest person on which to try and experiment. The couples would just drink for pleasure, occasionally excusing themselves from the group to go and fuck in someone’s parents’ bedroom.
The first time we had sex was at his birthday party, the night before my own sixteenth. Friends milled around in his garden exchanging dares and competing to see who could be the most visibly drunk. Number one and I joined in for a while until my desire and his pressing erection made it difficult for us to sustain conversation. We slipped away from the party and into the shed.
It sounds drab, but really it wasn’t that sort of shed. We weren’t dodging spiders and secateurs. It was effectively a converted room—painted walls, carpeted floor, and enough cushions strewn around that eight or nine teenagers could sit in a huddled circle with a reasonable degree of comfort. I’d been in the shed with number one many times before. We’d go there with friends after school and he’d sit awkwardly behind me to hide his pressing erection. When they’d all drifted home for their dinner, we’d snog for endless hours, enjoying the distraction that meant we didn’t have to talk. But this time when we entered it felt more purposeful. We weren’t just going to snog, it was his birthday, after all. Something different, something better was going to happen.
We took the key.
I locked us in from the inside and settled down on a pile of cushions. He double- and triple-checked the door, then lay awkwardly on top of me. We could still hear the party going on outside.
As with all teenage sex, it began with some excessive and enthusiastic snogging—dripping tongues, heads moving frantically from side to side, jaws working against each other. We sank into the familiar rhythm of the kiss, and I pushed myself against him, parting my legs to rub myself on his dick. He frotted back, pushing urgently against me, running his hands up under my clothes. He pulled down my bra and slid his fingers over my aching nipples.
I unzipped his trousers and rubbed him incompetently. He pulled at my tights until they were halfway down my thighs, trapping my legs together uncomfortably, but affording him just about enough clearance to push his fingers into my cunt.
I sighed. I squirmed. I wished he knew how to do this with more purpose. Not just a fumble or a feel or a token gesture, but to actually fuck me with his hands. To make me come. It takes time to learn that there’s more to first, second and third base than just ticking off a box on the way to a home run, and neither of us had quite realised this yet. Although the contents of someone else’s pants is unrelentingly fascinating when you’re that age—and, if I’m completely honest, it still is now, even though I should be concentrating on more adult things like mortgage payments and regrouting the bathroom—the fun of touching them is far outweighed by the fun of rubbing the contents of your own pants against them. Eager though we both were, neither of us could be said to be giving a proper ‘hand job’—at best we both pulled off a ‘mediocre-rub-job’ accompanied by a lot of belt-jangling and catching of zips.
I moaned with one part desire and at least four parts frustration, and he pulled away, reaching for a condom in the pocket of his jeans.
OK, I’m going to lose my virginity now.
This revelation was not particularly nerve-wracking, but it was a surprise. Despite my status as the least experienced person in my group of friends, few people I knew had actually had sex. It seemed unfair that I’d get to be the first one.
‘Are you sure about this?’
He nodded and put the condom on with an ease that showed he’d been practising with the free ones. After only a bit of fumbling with my tights, he slipped inside me, gasped, and I wasn’t a virgin any more.
Apart from the thought that I was no longer a virgin, there were plenty of things to occupy my mind for the five or six seconds between penetration and ejaculation.
Am I bleeding?
Does it get better?
Has he ripped my tights?
What should I be doing?
I can’t wait to tell First Love about this.
Treacherous thoughts. I tried not to think about him, about how I’d wanted it to be him who was doing this. It wasn’t that I needed the moment to be special, but I was sure his hands would be steadier, his cock thicker, his arms even tighter around me. I held my legs as far apart as my tights would allow and tried to push thoughts of First Love right out of my head.
It hurt a bit, he grunted a bit, and then it was finished. I hadn’t come but I had felt his cock nice and deep inside me, scratching an itch I hadn’t realised I could scratch. He’d replaced my virginity with an interesting, different feeling. For the first time ever I felt full, satisfied.
He kissed me and pulled out, careful to hold the condom on tight to avoid telltale spillages. We awkwardly rearranged our clothes, smiled shy smiles and walked hand in hand back to the party. Despite first-time nerves, it had been a roaring success. We’d fucked without embarrassment, tears or noticeable staining on the carpet. No one’s mum had burst in, no one’s friends had shouted ‘Oi! What are you two doing in there?’ and above all neither of us had been too drunk to remember what happened.
He picked up a two litre plastic bottle of cheap cider and offered me the first swig. I took a gulp, passed it back to him and we joined in the chat. Whenever we’d catch each other’s eye we’d smile conspiratorially, delighted that we’d thrown away our virginities together, astounded that we’d done so well, and aching to do it again.
OK, he wasn’t First Love, but he’d do.
3. Apparently there are things you can do with a boyfriend that don’t involve sex
Inevitably, number one and I set about having as much sex as was humanly possible in the often very short times we’d be together. I’d head straight to his house after school, and had a curfew of nine p.m. This meant we had roughly five hours in which to consume as much as we could from the all-you-can-fuck buffet.
Naïvely, I’d assumed—based purely on a passing reference in that classic educational film Grease—that sex took around fifteen minutes. My assumptions around that were shattered in the five seconds it took number one to jizz away our virginities, so I modified my expectations and assumed that fifteen minutes was the average recovery time between quivering ejaculation and the next enthusiastic hard-on.
I was swiftly proven wrong.
‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m sucking you off.’
‘But … we’ve only just had sex.’
‘Yeah, about fifteen minutes ago. Now can we have sex again?’
‘Umm … how about we watch telly for a bit?’
To paraphrase everyone’s parents: I wasn’t angry, just disappointed. Everything I’d ever read, seen and heard about sex, including the rather memorable chat from my dad, had promised me that men were constantly on the boil. Sure, they’d occasionally neglect their erections to leave the house and hunt for food or Xbox games, but realistically there was very little chance that a man would turn down sex with a woman he fancied. Some publications—notably FHM, which I devoured as if it were The Idiot’s Guide to Men—even went as far as to suggest that your chosen man didn’t need to fancy you that much. Consequently, I believed guys just needed a spare half-hour and a structurally sound erection and Bob’s your undiscerning horny neighbour, a shag would be all mine.
Poor number one.
Not only did he have to cope with a girlfriend who was far more confident—and for ‘confident’ read ‘loud, horny, and unafraid to mention it’—than him, he was also solely responsible for battling years of ingrained stereotypes about his gender.
Sometimes he had a headache. Sometimes he was tired. Sometimes it would get to eight p.m. and he was simply empty of spunk, having managed to successfully live up to my expectations for a good four hours already. He’d shyly ask me if I wanted to watch TV or listen to some music. He’d offer me food, cigarettes, a refreshing walk in the sunshine, or if things were getting desperate he’d play his guitar, staring earnestly at me to try and tap into a romance that neither of us was old enough to be comfortable with. Occasionally, when all else had failed, and his attempts at distracting me simply led to comments about how I loved watching his hands as he strummed his guitar and could we have sex now pleasepleaseplease, he’d lead me into the kitchen and encourage me into protracted conversation with his parents just so that he had a chance to rest.
It’s not that I’m insatiable, I’ve never been insatiable. Thanks to my superlative wanking skills, I’ll happily go without sex for a while. And as an adult I’d see this situation for what it was—a slight mismatch in sex drives that could easily be solved by a bit of conversation and compromise from both parties. But I wasn’t an adult, I was sixteen, and as such I was devastated. I was a sixteen-year-old girl who had been told that all men would want to fuck her, that they were only after that one thing, and it was I who’d have to feign headaches and manage expectations just to get a decent night’s sleep.
Having been conditioned to believe this, it was humiliating to find that this man—my man, my teenaged boy—who should by all rights be an insatiable sex pest, was immune to the sexual temptation I threw at him.
I’d whisper filthy things, dress in cheap Ann Summers lingerie, strip naked for him and beg him to touch me. My attempts at seduction were as ham-fisted and incompetent as his undiplomatic rejections, but that just made things worse.
Late at night, after another failed attempt to tease an erection out of his exhausted cock, I’d lie next to him in his single bed, beneath a poster of Shirley Manson looking like teen-punk sex made flesh, and cry myself to sleep.
As an adult I know these lies for what they are—not all men want sex all the time, and not all women will punch the air in celebration if they receive a ‘get out of sex free’ card. People are just different, with different drives and needs and desires. I didn’t understand that back then, but I wish I had. It would have saved me the misery and heartache of trying to work out why I wasn’t sexy enough for my boyfriend, and it would have saved him the humiliation of having to explain to his sixteen-year-old lover why he couldn’t maintain a fifth erection in one night.
It’s important to challenge the assumption that ‘men are only after one thing’, because publicly recognising that it is definitely not true helps all of us feel a bit more normal. If young women grow up thinking that all men want to sleep with them, we’re not giving them the gift of insight, we’re telling them an outright lie. A lie that will lead to humiliating disappointment for our daughters, and—most importantly for my poor first boyfriend—give our sons a reputation that they could never possibly live up to.
But I shouldn’t complain about number one. As I say, it was mostly the fault of the weird expectations I had about male libido that led to my sexual frustration. I don’t mean to cast aspersions on his manhood—he was actually incredibly good. I am gobsmacked that we managed to have quite as much excellent sex as we did given that neither of us knew much beyond what we’d been told by teachers, parents and the aforementioned well-thumbed copies of FHM.
So although the sex wasn’t quite as copious as I’d have liked, it was certainly decent, and I won’t complain just because the poor guy hadn’t yet managed to overcome the limitations of biology and started producing six gallons of jizz per day from a permanently erect penis. We’d still shag a lot—at his house, at my house, at parties. In sheds, behind bushes, in tents. We learnt enough about each other’s body that we could frig each other to simple, gleeful orgasms during snatched moments—on buses, in his parent’s kitchen and, of course, in the darkest corners of the local park. On one memorable occasion we shagged in a treehouse, learning two lessons at once, namely that a) sex is much better when your friends aren’t standing nearby shouting ‘Timbeeeeer’ and b) it’s impossible to remain aroused when you’re within three feet of a garden spider.
Our parents soon learned what we were up to, and were given ample opportunity to lecture us about condoms, carelessness and conception. The Talk came earlier for me than for him, and certainly far earlier than my mum would ever have expected:
‘Can I stay round his house this Friday?’
‘What, in his bed?’
‘Yep.’
‘Umm … we need to have a talk. I don’t want you sleeping with him until you’re completely ready.’
I thought it appropriate to cut the chat short early to save embarrassment. ‘I already have.’
‘You have? But … when?’ For some reason as soon as they have children parents forget that sex can be had in places other than beds, and at times other than night time. I have not yet met a single teenager whose parents haven’t insisted on placing restrictions on couples sleeping together. As if without the sleeping there can be no sex.
‘Yesterday. And a few days before that. And every time I’ve been at his house for the last few weeks.’
‘Oh. Well, are you using condoms?’
‘Yep.’
‘That’s good.’
In hindsight, it might have been cruel to spring things on her so quickly. My sister, who was eighteen months older, had showed no signs of wanting to rampantly hump anyone, and I felt like I was jumping the queue.
I was clearly opening doors that my mum hadn’t quite been ready for me to see behind, and I got the distinct impression that she felt like she’d let me down. Like she’d missed out on the chance to talk to me about sex before I actually did it. Still, after she’d shed a few tears for my lost innocence, and warned me to be careful, I hopped up and went to get ready for a night at number one’s house.
‘I’ll be careful. We’ve got loads of condoms.’
‘Well, that’s good. But it’s not just the pregnancy thing. It’s the heartbreak thing.’ She didn’t hold me back, just let me breeze out of the room with a ‘good point’ hanging in the air, but she was right. No matter how many packets of Durex you have, the heartbreak thing can still get you.
Number one taught me a lot. Other than how to shag, and how to stop asking him for a shag when he was knackered, he taught me that I wasn’t going to die alone. This was comforting, as I’d spent the previous year chasing plaintively after First Love and staring into the mirror wondering what, exactly, was so horribly wrong with me that my love was destined to be unrequited. I’d begun to wonder if perhaps the reason First Love wouldn’t fuck me was because I was just fundamentally unfuckable. Glasses, bushy hair, puppy fat and a tendency to correct people’s grammar did not really work to my advantage when trying to convince anyone I was a sex kitten. But although First Love remained resolute in his decision to Just Be Friends, number one seemed to like whatever limited charms I had to offer.
And, curiously, as soon as number one started liking me, other boys did too. It began gradually. Those boys who’d previously laughed at me started to simply ignore me, and those who’d ignored me gave the occasional ‘hello’. It probably helped that, in my relentless quest to make number one have sex with me as often as was biologically possible, I’d taken to wearing clothes that showed off my obvious bits: out went the baggy shirts and jumpers, in came skintight, low-cut tops, and skirts in which I was—for very good reason—nervous to bend over. And it wasn’t just the way I dressed. I started acting more like someone who was a possibility. The guys who’d previously written me off weren’t stupid—they recognised that although I was uncool, I was nevertheless getting laid, which significantly increased the possibility that I’d be willing to lay them. They weren’t all interested—some were still far too cool to consider me. But if you throw a stone into a crowd of seventeen-year-olds you’re bound to hit a good few virgins, at least three of whom will almost certainly have an undiscerning erection.
I wanted so much to talk about fucking. I wanted to talk about it to others who’d done it, and especially to those who hadn’t. Don’t get me wrong—I wasn’t looking for sex tips. Given my age the best I’d have got from my peers would be untried-and-untested playground shite, things that grown adults have long since realised are either faintly amusing or complete turn-offs altogether.
‘Try putting a condom on with your mouth.’
‘Put whipped cream on his dick then lick it off.’
‘Get him to suck on an extra strong mint then stick his tongue in your fanny.’ (This last one, attempted by at least four of my close friends at the time, only ever resulted in either ‘ow’s, ‘euggh’s or ‘meh’s.)
I didn’t want to talk to people to get their advice; I just wanted to hear them talk about fucking. I wanted to know how they felt about it—what they liked and didn’t, what they’d tried and hadn’t. I’d listen to my friends telling stories in voices that sounded much more confident than they were, and I’d imagine them getting hard, getting wet, frotting each other in exactly the way number one and I would. I’d store the tales up for later when I was sucking number one’s cock. Who needs porn when you’ve a headful of teenage orgies and a nice, solid prick in your mouth?
I don’t know if they thought the same about me. I’d like to think so. And I certainly told my fair share of stories. Even if the guys I was talking to weren’t specifically interested in me, they were certainly interested in genuine, honest-to-goodness real-life accounts of sex. This was evidenced by erections they thought I wouldn’t notice pushing visibly at the fabric of their jeans. Or T-shirts swiftly and casually draped so that they covered a guy’s crotch. Alongside those I’ve mentioned already, there was one guy on whom they had an especially satisfying effect: First Love.
We were still speaking to each other on the phone. Once a week he’d call me, or I’d call him, and we’d spend hours lounging around chatting. We’d talk about anything that was happening in his life and, on account of our mutual interests, everything that was happening in my life that had anything to do with sex. I relayed tales of my latest fuck, my worries about number one’s sex drive, my guilty lust for other boys who’d stare openly at my newly displayed tits. And I’d hear him at the other end of the phone getting—if not necessarily hard—interested.
‘What’s it like being on top?’
‘It’s fun, I guess. It depends on what he’s doing.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, if he’s touching my tits, it’s good. If he’s looking a bit bored, not so much.’
‘I think when I start having sex that’ll be my favourite position. Do you keep your bra on?’
‘Sometimes. Most of the time, actually. I like it like that. I prefer to be a bit less than naked. It’s hotter.’
And so on.
‘Has he ever fucked you with your knickers on? Has he ever come on your face? Has he fucked you in the … you know?’
And on. And on. He painted the most vivid pictures for me, of things I could be doing and had done. And I felt vaguely guilty because relaying the sex I’d had seemed ever so slightly hotter than actually doing it, because I was relaying it to him. Guiltily, I’d imagine not number one’s hands firmly gripping my tits while I lowered myself onto his erection, but First Love’s. With his thin wrists and quick fingers and the thick black watch on his right arm. Sometimes, when I tumbled onto (always ‘onto’, rarely ever into) bed with number one, I’d guide his hands to the places First Love had talked about, and imagined how he’d grin at me as he got undressed.
I would have given anything to know if First Love’s cock was hard while we had those conversations. I’m not an idiot—I didn’t expect him to hop on a train and come all the way back to me just for the promise of me writhing around on his dick. But I wanted him to understand that he and I could work together. Not just because we were friends who were capable of holding a conversation for more than ten minutes about something more significant than A-level coursework, but because we’d fit together so well when fucking. That he was the perfect guy for me because he wanted to fuck just like I did. As much as I did. As hard as I did.
While he was chasing girls in his new hometown, playing at being cool and interesting and—I cringe to say it—‘boyfriend material’, all he wanted he had already: a willing, horny girl. Although I’m sure there were any number of these girls in his new town, crucially they’d be unlikely to come out of the woodwork while he was chatting them up by offering bowling, cinema trips and the aforementioned ‘coursework’ discussion. To me he offered filth—dribbling, throbbing, knicker-moistening filth. The fact that he could only have these chats with me made me not only willing and horny, but—to him at least—unique.
I didn’t quite have the words or the confidence to say it at the time, but what I was trying to tell him, and number one as well, is that I like sex. I want sex. Women want sex. You don’t need to take us bowling to distract us from realising that you find us explosively attractive. OK, you might not be best off starting a date by saying ‘Hey, I’ve got a massive erection for you right now,’ but you don’t need to pretend to be a sexless Ken doll. Women like sex, and we want to know that you’re horny. Most of us want to feel desired and lusted after and attractive. Ultimately, of course, if we fancy you then we want to fuck you: we’re not just doing it as a favour in exchange for a cinema ticket.
I was initially too busy basking in my fucklust for number one and my miserable unrequited First Love to notice number two. He wasn’t exactly a friend, just a guy I happened to have a couple of classes with. But apparently he’d been noticing me. One day he passed me a note that read:
‘I’m so sorry I offended you. I didn’t mean to take the piss. I actually think you’re amazing and was wondering if you and your mate Jenny want to come to a house party with us on Friday?’
His ability to offend me combined with his nicely worded compliment had the desired effect. Not only did I want to go to the party, I wanted to sit on his cock and fuck him until he was dry.
I’ll rewind a bit. Number two had exploded into my life by not just offending me but enraging me. It had happened a few days earlier, when I was waiting at a bus stop with number one. I was standing up and number one was sitting on the bin just beside me. He, I think, had one hand down my top, and I was seeing if I could brush one or other of my hands over the erection he was cultivating inside his baggy jeans. I was enjoying the moment partly because of the simple, public hotness of it, and partly because we were in an excellent position for snogging, with our mouths at identical heights.
Height had always been an issue for us, because number one was short, and I have always been a massive girl. I stand at five foot eleven in bare feet, which means that in high-heeled boots I rock a good six feet three inches.
This didn’t cause any major issues between the two of us—after all, I was more than capable of retrieving things from high shelves without assistance, so it had never occurred to me that I should limit my potential boyfriends to those who could reach a couple of inches higher than I could. But for some reason as soon as I started dating a short guy, everyone wanted to point it out.
‘You’re tall,’ they’d say.
‘Why, yes, I am,’ I’d reply.
‘And he’s … well … he’s quite short.’ Usually uttered with a quizzical expression.
‘So he is.’ Usually uttered with an angry ‘when are you going to fuck off?’ expression.
‘Does it make it hard when you shag?’ they’d ask.
‘No. But it makes it hard to avoid spanking people like you who mention it,’ I’d wish I’d answered.
The average height for guys in England is around five foot nine or ten. Using this information, even the young version of me was able to deduce that if I only fucked guys who were taller than I was I’d spend most of my life alone. I decided that this was not a scenario I was particularly happy with.
Even leaving the practicalities aside—I didn’t fancy carrying a measuring stick around with me and wearing a T-shirt that said ‘you must be at least this tall to ride’—there is genuinely nothing wrong with a male/female coupling in which the guy is shorter. The only reason we think it’s weird is because cretins point out that society has expectations about height. It’s a way to make people feel self-conscious about things they have no control over—playground bullying that grown-ups should have grown out of.
Number one stood just a bit higher than my shoulder, but I got used to it after about a week. From then on the only time I noticed it was when judgemental strangers would make snide comments. ‘Don’t you get a sore neck?’ ‘Isn’t it hard to fuck up against a wall?’ They’re not really interested. They just want to discuss it and point out how ridiculous it is that we don’t conform to the exact physical expectations that they’d have regarding gender and height. Ha fucking ha.
I later learned that it wasn’t just height. People feel like it’s their business to comment on almost any aspect of your taste. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve told someone how hot I find a particular guy only to hear them reply, ‘What, him?! But he’s so old/fat/short/bald/pale/scruffy.’
The only possible response to these people is ‘fuck you.’ Whoever you choose for a partner, there’ll be some weapons-grade bastard looking sideways at you with raised eyebrows, wondering what on earth it is you see in each other. If you listen to them the only people you’ll end up dating are the bastards themselves, while all the nice people look on from the sidelines, far too polite to ask why you’re dating someone whose idea of ‘compatibility’ is based purely on a size ratio.
Number one taught me my first lesson in ignoring the hell out of these people, and a bloody valuable one it was too.
So, back to the bus stop and the bin. Number one and I were snogging in full view of an understandably disgusted band of students. My black lipstick was smeared halfway across his face, making it look like he had a big purple bruise, and every now and then someone would mutter ‘Get a room,’ demonstrating how thoroughly the majority of people miss the fact that the only reason people frot in public is because they rarely have a room to go to. But neither number one nor I gave the tiniest of shits. We were young, and happy, and so horny it hurt. My cunt would twitch and I could feel the pain deep inside me as I pulled him closer, willing the bus to come quickly so we could head to his house and retire to the room our fellow students were so keen that we should get.
And then the bus drew up at the stop, and we turned around to get on. Two boys I vaguely knew were sitting on the upper deck, pointing down at us and laughing. I caught the eye of one of them, recognising number two from the classes we had together at college. As he caught my eye he laughed even louder, gesturing through the window to hammer home the point—unless it hadn’t been hurtfully obvious enough—that it was my boyfriend he was laughing at.
I gave him the finger, and then took the boy back home to fuck.
The next day I tackled him head-on. I didn’t mind being laughed at, but I wanted to know exactly why this borderline stranger felt he could comment on—or point mockingly at—the boyfriend I was so proud of. I confronted him in the only way that seemed fitting to a dramatic prick like me: loudly, angrily, and where I knew everyone would see. I wanted number two to feel as humiliated and pissed off as I did. I wanted him to feel sorry. I wanted him to know exactly why I was angry, and how he’d made me feel. And, because he was quite attractive and I was never one to miss an opportunity, I wanted him to get a good look at my tits.
‘What the FUCK did you think you were doing yesterday?’
‘I … umm … I just thought it was funny.’
‘What was funny?’
‘Your boyfriend.’
‘What about my boyfriend?’
‘He’s … umm … short?’
‘True. But he’s also a very good fuck.’
‘…’
‘If you ever do that again I will drop-kick you off a pier.’ I don’t remember my exact words, but I’m sure they were at least as obnoxious as these, if not more so. I tossed my head like an arrogant shit, put my hands on my hips, puffed my chest out just to make utterly sure that he had a good opportunity to look at my boobs, then turned on my heel and walked away.
Clearly what I deserved was to be taken down a peg or two. No matter how right I was—and I was—to tell him off, number two wouldn’t have been entirely to blame if he’d never spoken to or of me again, except for perhaps the occasional mention of ‘that shouty goth girl’. But he didn’t: instead he sent me that note:
‘I’m so sorry I offended you. I didn’t mean to take the piss. I actually think you’re amazing and was wondering if you and your mate Jenny want to come to a house party with us on Friday?’
Of course I went to the party.
Almost everything about number two reminded me of First Love. He was intelligent, he was witty, he was funny, he was more than willing to take the piss out of me. But best of all, he was a virgin. A genuine, honest-to-God, never-even-fingered-a-girl virgin.
Number two was tall—he’d have to be—and blond. He had big shoulders and thick wrists and soft, fat fingers. I was fascinated by how different he was to number one: loud and brash and extrovert, while number one hid shyly behind me. His height and bulk was a welcome change from one’s lithe nimbleness. It made me feel small and delicate in a way I hadn’t experienced before. I was curious about how it would feel to have him lie on top of me, pinning me down with hands that were stronger than mine. He felt different, acted different, smelled different.
Where number one had grown used to my almost constant need to fuck, number two was practically shaking with a need for it. His wide, terrified eyes pleaded not ‘I can’t’ but ‘can I?’ It was desire coupled with fear—the fear that if he actually tried to fuck me we wouldn’t be friends any more. He’d play the short-term game and try to cop a feel only to find that me and my tits would walk away for ever. I’d look at number two and will him to make a move, and he’d look at me and will me to let him.
It was a frustrating friendship. We’d joke, and play, write filthy notes during English lessons, and brush up against each other on the bus. When we hugged I quivered at the feeling of his hard-on digging into my hips. And yet all the time he was holding back because he thought I wouldn’t want him. While I’d spent my childhood being told that men always want sex, he’d had the lesson from the other side: women didn’t want sex, and that was that.
These lessons are still being taught, despite the material being dramatically out of date. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve shocked a guy by admitting what is not exactly a revolutionary truth: I like it when guys come in my mouth. I like anal. I like that thing boys do late at night when they nudge me with their erection as a means of testing whether I fancy a shag. That it takes time for a new message—women like sex too, dickheads!—to be disseminated isn’t particularly surprising, what’s surprising is that the message took hold in the first place. It doesn’t do us much good as a species to maintain the belief that fifty per cent of the population doesn’t enjoy something that the other fifty per cent is desperate for.
As far as number two was aware, there was some magical formula that consisted of flowers, fun and flattery and if you got those things in just the right quantities then a girl would reward you with a grudging fuck.
But he was wrong.
I wanted him so badly I utterly ached. His tentative touches would leave me trembling—hot and wet and desperate for him to do more. And it’s so hard to say ‘do more, please do more’ when you’re seventeen and insecure and only just getting to grips with the fact that you’ve got boobs, and puppy fat, and legs you’re apparently supposed to shave at least once a sodding week from now on. As an adult I’ve got over this problem, and will happily open my mouth to utter a ‘please, please fuck me’ when the situation demands it. But when I was younger I was still nervous—of rejection, of being labelled a slut. So I waited, and I writhed, and I masturbated vigorously thinking about his touches and praying that he’d become a bit bolder.
We’d spent countless nights together already, having fallen onto adjoining portions of floor when house parties wound down. Ever aware of the potential for gossip, we’d touch each other up in the dark, breathing as quietly and as infrequently as possible to avoid waking those who were sleeping nearby. I’d lie next to him panting with longing, while he tentatively ran his fingers over my nipples. He never tired of the feel of them, the miracle of keeping me on a knife-edge of desire for so long. By the early hours, when we finally managed to sleep, my nipples would be red-raw and throbbing with pain.
Eventually I realised he wasn’t going to make a proper move. Having never experienced sex, he was happy to stick to whatever we were doing—touching each other gently to facilitate future wanks—until one or other of us was driven completely insane. So I got a bit bolder myself.
One night, in a bed with a few others asleep beside us, he slipped his hand tentatively into my knickers. I was slick with frustrated desire, wet as only a teenage girl can get. He was trembling with fear and so hard I worried I’d hurt him if I squeezed his dick with any kind of vigour.
When his hand reached my cunt and he realised how wet I was he couldn’t keep silent—he moaned.
Just remembering number two’s surprised, lustful moan is one of my hottest memories.
After hearing his stifled cry, I couldn’t leave without doing something. At that point I’d have traded my money, my youth, even my as-yet-unfinished A-levels just to have him inside me. I whispered to him and grabbed his hand. We left our friends sleeping and scurried into an empty bedroom, where we fell onto the bed—me in a panting, aching heap and he in a trembling, terrified one. I kissed him; I told him I wanted him. I fluttered my seventeen-year-old eyelashes and begged him to fuck me.
But he couldn’t fuck me.
He was so scared that he couldn’t get hard. I sucked him gently, I told him he was hot, I told him I was desperate for it, and eventually I got him just hard enough to roll on a condom and try. I climbed on top of him, slipped him into me, and sat down slowly on his semi-hard cock. But it was clear that it just wasn’t happening.
He’d lost his virginity—just. But he’d mislaid a fair portion of his dignity, too, and it broke my heart to think that instead of remembering me with a gleeful nostalgia, he’d look back on the whole thing with shame. The idea of that made me desperately sad. And, OK, the idea of not actually getting to fuck him at all made me sadder. He believed sex was a gift I was bestowing on him, to have him open it only to find the sexual equivalent of novelty socks was more than I could bear.
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.
4. Life would be much easier if we didn’t have any of these pesky ’emotions’ to contend with
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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