Cheat codes

The body is a live performance

After a few false starts, crush season begins in earnest with Michael, an Irish filmmaker with wild, curly hair. I show my partner a picture of him and he observes, with a smirk, that I always go feral for boys that look like my brother.

It’s mortifying to be this known. Right on cue, my obsession with Michael takes hold. I’m drawn in by his ‘I want to but I shouldn’t’ kink, specifically around cheating. He tells me stories from his early twenties of a fraught, all consuming affair with an unavailable actor he was working with. Of long nights talking and never touching, that gave way to furtive meetings when his girlfriend was at work. It’s a big roiling mess of mutual anguish, shame and desire, so naturally, I’m into it. I tell him all the ways my own adolescent sexuality was constructed around being so desirable that seemingly older and wiser men would risk blowing up their relationship to fuck me. When you’re non-monogamous, the symbolic thrill of an affair gets completely kneecapped by all that openness. Where’s the excitement in a sordid little indiscretion if no one actually minds who you fuck?

But it doesn’t mean you can’t pretend. Soon, we’re roleplaying these shared scripts, historically reenacting our younger selves. We build the lore – fake partners (we give them names), raised stakes. We spend afternoons pretending to be just friends, holding our bodies unnaturally apart in space. I stay over and he says he can sleep on the sofa but I tell him no, it’s fine, we can share his bed. I lie next to him wearing a borrowed t-shirt and boxers and he thinks we should probably go to sleep. I feel the slightest press of his leg against mine and hold my breath, filled with the type of longing I vibrated with back then.

“Is it bad that I think about kissing you? I whisper innocently into the dark

“I can’t” he mutters. “We can’t”

“So you do, too?”

We fuck furiously and quietly, so as not to wake his hypothetical parents.

Perhaps it’s the potency of nostalgia or the fact Michael really understands dramatic tension, but the more we re-stage the cheating fantasy, the more I slide into a state of erotic fixation. I can’t focus on work; I cancel plans to meet a friend’s new baby. The time between his messages stretches out unbearably, so I post pictures online to bait him. He sends me voice notes of him jerking off over them, mumuring my name as he comes.

When we’re together, I’m gripped by his oddness. The little patches of eczema on his shins; the way he licks his lips when he concentrates; his teeth. He doesn’t want me to touch his hair, because he feels self-conscious about the curls going frizzy or losing their shape. ‘Please’ I beg him, ‘I’ll be gentle’. He concedes, so I straddle his lap and pull them delicately with my fingers. Pout for me, baby, I command. He obliges and my cunt tenses. Later he sends me a mirror selfie where he’s shirtless, staring down the lens with his hair all springy and his tongue slightly out. It feels so indecent I instinctively snap my phone shut.

After, as I look again at the photo I wonder: do these boys – the slightly queer, once-bullied ones, with their soft-edged masculinity – know how perfect they are? Do they not feel the pull to perform their boyish beauty? To play the role of some horny little cherub wearing nothing but a bashful half blush, their cock hardening in their hand for me? I fantasise about their embarrassment, their pliancy. Their willingness to degrade themselves in stupid ways for the mere possibility I might touch them. Really, I want them to play some stylised version of me when I was younger, back when I was more desperate for my lovers’ approval. Prove it, I want to say to them. Perform for me. But they never get it right.

Sometimes, when I’m feeling more dominant, I ask men to undress slowly and seductively for me. It’s intended to remind them I’m calling the shots, and perhaps also faintly embarrass them through exposure. Except it never works, because men are almost entirely at a loss at the difference between stripping and getting undressed. All they know is a quick scramble to be naked, punctuated by the jangle of change in their pocket as they drop their trousers on the floor. They remain stubbornly impervious to my gaze, leaving me fascinated by those sexualities constructed only from inside out. What must it be like to not derive some pleasure from your own performance? To fuck as if you are unobserved?

Cast always as perceiver rather than perceived, straight men rarely comprehend the erotic possibility inherent within that performance. They would like it, I think, if only they could pin themselves down. To put on is also to take off, to become something entirely of your own fashioning. There is an alchemy in producing another’s desire through your body, a making (or unmaking) that proves Lacan’s assertion that “desire is the desire of the other”. Desire compels us to become, not to be.

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The next time I see Michael, he’s running late and asks to push our date back by an hour. I say of course, but truthfully, another hour feels impossible. I consider telling him to hurry up because I’ve already spent the entire morning studiously resisting masturbating for this, but I can’t quite face the indignity of it. Instead I arrive at his house 15 minutes early and wait on the doorstep like a horny Paddington Bear. It’s a muggy evening, and small trickles of sweat make their way down the backs of my thighs.

When he finally gets home and leaps off his bike, we’re kissing before he’s even got his keys out. Our pantomime of infidelity has created a frantic, furious energy between us, our wanting a runaway train. I slip my hands under his t-shirt, pulling him into me, collapsing any possible space between our bodies. He wants a shower, he’s cycled home, but I say no, now. No more waiting. I fear my body might collapse in on itself without him inside me.

We make it to his bedroom, just, and then he’s on top of me, pulling my legs over his shoulders, practically folding me in half. We fuck like our lives depend on it, like we’re being pursued. I barely have a sense of myself at this tempo, but as he moves deeper into me I notice an unfamiliar feeling unfurling inside me. It’s a quickening, a tightening, a pressure applied somewhere undiscovered. It’s as if I’m learning how to pronounce a new word.

I’m caught between naming the sensation or being carried away by it, before settling on surrender. I allow it to rise and roll through me, losing track of how I sound and what my face must look like. I get out of my own way.

It’s the noise I notice first: the slap of wet skin on skin. Looking down, I realise that we’re both soaked, the sheets clinging to my thighs. As he fucks me, liquid pours out of me. There is suddenly so much of it, a lush obscenity blooming around us.

‘Fuck’, Michael says. ‘Does this normally happen?’

‘No’, I say, incredulous. ‘I didn’t know I did this’

We slow down then, he wants to test what else I can do. He slides his fingers into me instead and curls them upwards. We watch as I pour down his wrist.

‘I’m so wet’, I tell him, although this feels instantly inadequate to describe what’s happening. My generic porn-y aphorism is washed away. I am a broken levee, a burst fire hydrant, a biblical fucking flood.

We finish, and lie, slick, amongst the mess, stunned at the absurdity of it all. Our skin smells sweet and brackish, the breeze from the open window glancing over our limbs. After decades of fucking and hundreds of partners, you start to believe that you know all there is to know about your body. But the body is an idea, not a static object, and its meaning is constantly up for grabs.

Later, Michael messes about as he dries his mattress with a hairdryer, pretending to be a feudal lord inspecting a newlywed’s sheets. I cannot stop laughing. I feel brand new.