The Night I Became a Cheater

This happened a long time ago.
I’m changing names and identifying details because the people in this story are real. Some of them were relatively well-known, and I have no interest in turning an anonymous confession into a guessing game.

I’ll call the first girl Oreo.
I met Oreo after coming home from university.
She was a model and had recently won a fairly prominent beauty title. She was the sort of girl who walked into a room and people looked.
And to me, she was fucking gorgeous.
Smoking hot.
We met through social events in my hometown. At first we were just two people who kept ending up around each other. Then we started talking more. Talking became flirting. Flirting became touching.
Every time we met, the distance between us seemed to get a little smaller.
Eventually we started fucking.
And somewhere in all of that, I fell completely in love with her.
At least, that’s what I called it at the time.
I couldn’t get enough of her.
The secrecy made everything even more exciting. Because Oreo was recognizable, we couldn’t always behave like a normal couple. We had to think about who might see us and where we could go.
She also liked being filmed.
Sometimes during sex, she wanted the camera on us.
Maybe it came naturally to her because she was so comfortable in front of cameras. I don’t know. I just remember that from fairly early on, filming ourselves fucking occasionally became part of our sex life.
Back then, the sex felt fun.
Dirty, but fun.
I wasn’t trying to prove anything.
I just wanted this ridiculously beautiful girl I’d fallen for, and she seemed to want me too.
Then I discovered she had a boyfriend.
A real boyfriend.
Not an ex.
Not a guy she was “basically done with.”
She was fucking me while she was in a relationship with another man.
That discovery absolutely fucked with my head.
I was heartbroken.
But more than anything, I was furious.
I confronted her.
If she loved me, I told her, then end it with him.
Her answer?
“How could I? He didn’t do anything wrong.”
I remember how fucking angry that made me.
Exactly.
He didn’t do anything wrong.
That was the whole fucking point.
If this guy was some abusive asshole, maybe there would have been something I could wrap my head around.
But according to her, he hadn’t done anything wrong.
So why the fuck were you sleeping with me?
And if you supposedly loved me so much, why couldn’t you leave him?
I tried to end it.
Then Oreo would come back.
She’d tell me she was going to end things with him.
We’d talk.
We’d flirt.
We’d touch.
We’d fuck.
And I’d fall straight back into it.
Because the embarrassing truth is that I was already deeply in love with her.
I wanted to believe every promise because believing her meant I got to keep her.
So I stayed.
But the way I fucked her started changing.

Before I discovered the boyfriend, sex had mostly been about desire.
Afterward, sex became mixed with resentment.
I wanted proof.
If Oreo wasn’t willing to choose me in the real world, I wanted her to prove in private that I was the man she really wanted.
And the more powerless I felt about her relationship, the more controlling I became when we fucked.
I started handling her harder.
I wanted her listening to me.
I wanted her submitting.
I deep-throated her. I fucked her rougher than before. I’d cum on her face. I’d creampie her. I’d make her crawl to me and beg me for my cum.
And somewhere inside my fucked-up brain, those things became evidence.
If she let me fuck her like that, she must want me more.
If she’d let me finish on her face, I mattered.
If she’d let me cum inside her, I mattered.
If she’d let me control her sexually, maybe I wasn’t really the other guy.
Maybe he was.
Obviously, that’s bullshit.
But it didn’t feel like bullshit at the time.
It felt fucking incredible.
Because during sex I could get something I couldn’t get outside of it.
Control.
Outside the bedroom, I couldn’t make Oreo leave her boyfriend.
I couldn’t make her choose me.
I couldn’t even get a straight answer about when she was supposedly going to end things.
But while I was fucking her, none of that seemed to matter.
For those moments, she was doing what I wanted.
And I confused that with winning.
We became reckless too.
Discrete hotel rooms weren’t always enough anymore.
We fucked in cars.
We fucked in places where getting caught was a possibility.
The sex became dirtier and rougher as the relationship itself became more fucked up.
And I liked it.
That’s important to admit.
I wasn’t standing outside myself thinking, Look at this unhealthy coping mechanism.
I was horny.
I was angry.
I was jealous.
And dominating Oreo sexually made me feel fucking good.

The Birthday Party
One of the craziest examples happened at my birthday.
I invited a bunch of friends.
I invited Oreo too.
And I invited her boyfriend.
He came.
Think about how completely fucked up that situation was.
The guy was at my birthday party.
Probably drinking, talking to people, celebrating with everybody else.
And I was looking at his girlfriend knowing exactly what she and I had been doing behind his back.
At some point, Oreo and I slipped away.
We found a back room.
Her boyfriend was still outside.
He didn’t know where she was.
And while he was out there at my fucking birthday party, I was in the back fucking his girlfriend.
There was something incredibly twisted about it.
This wasn’t me discovering afterward that I’d unknowingly slept with somebody’s girlfriend.
I knew exactly who he was.
I’d invited him.
He was right fucking there.
And I still took Oreo into another room and fucked her.
Then afterward we had to go back outside.
Back to the party.
Back to him.
Act normal.
Like nothing had happened.
I don’t remember feeling particularly guilty about him.
What I remember more is the feeling that Oreo had chosen to sneak away with me while he was right there.
That mattered to me.
She arrived with him.
But she’d gone into that room with me.
My younger brain turned even that into proof.
See?
She wants me more.
I was treating it like I’d won a round against him.
The ridiculous part?
The poor bastard didn’t even know we were playing.

Eventually, though, sexual proof stopped being enough.
I still wanted the actual thing.
I wanted Oreo.
Not secretly.
Not whenever she could get away from her boyfriend.
I told her again:
End it with him or we’re done.
And again, I got essentially the same answer.
She couldn’t.
So I finally ended it.
I was disgusted with her.
Her lying.
Her cheating.
Her ability to go home to this guy after doing everything we’d been doing together.
For a long time, that’s how I remembered that relationship.
Oreo was the cheater.
I was the guy she’d fucked over.
Conveniently, that version didn’t spend much time thinking about the birthday party.
Or about how many times I’d knowingly fucked another man’s girlfriend.

About a year went by.
Oreo and I occasionally crossed paths through work or events, but it stayed strictly professional.
Then I got another girlfriend.
I’ll call her Pudding.
The fucked-up thing is that I already suspected the relationship wouldn’t last.
I went into it anyway.
For about three months, things were good.
Then Pudding’s jealousy started showing.
She was jealous of fucking everybody.
Female friends.
Female colleagues.
Just any woman I talked to.
If she existed and had a vagina, apparently she was a potential threat.
Eventually I started avoiding people just because I didn’t want to hear Pudding nagging me about them.
I’d work all day and tell her:
“I’m tired. I’m going home.”
And she’d say something like:
“You’re probably going to meet some girl.”
I’d get pissed.
And then I’d go see Pudding anyway just to prove I wasn’t.
Meanwhile, she wanted to drink constantly.
Beer.
Wine.
Bars.
Clubs.
She wasn’t working then.
If she came home at four in the morning, she could wake up whenever the fuck she wanted.
I couldn’t.
I’d take her home, go home myself and still have to be at work before nine.
Sometimes we’d be doing this four nights out of seven.
Eventually my body couldn’t take that shit anymore.
I started refusing.
“You go. I’ll sleep. Call me when you’re done and I’ll pick you up wherever you are.”
That became evidence I was cheating too.
She’d check my phone.
Find nothing.
Then tell me I’d deleted everything.
How the fuck do you defend yourself against that?
Apparently I was such a sophisticated cheater that even having absolutely no evidence of cheating was evidence of how good I was at cheating.
I became exhausted.
Then I became angry.
Then came one particular night.
There was a party at the club.
Pudding and I fought before it.
Women.
Again.
Of fucking course.
She wanted me to go to the club.
I refused.
“I’m not going to a club filled with women just so you can say more shit to me.”
She went with her friends.
I went somewhere else.
Alone.
There was a bar I used to visit regularly with a bunch of friends.
The manager knew me.
When I walked in alone, he looked around and asked:
“More people coming tonight?”
“Just me.”
That question hit harder than it should have.
Later he asked whether I was okay.
I nodded.
“I’m fine.”
Then I proceeded to get absolutely fucking drunk.
Drink after drink.
I wasn’t fine.
I was miserable.
I was sitting alone in a bar where I was used to laughing and drinking with friends, thinking about this relationship that had somehow reduced my life to defending myself against accusations all the fucking time.
At some point, drunk and alone, I started tearing up.
And that’s when Oreo entered my head.
There was no plan.
I didn’t stare dramatically at her contact.
I didn’t weigh the moral consequences.
I was far too drunk.
My brain said Oreo.
I called Oreo.
After almost a year.
I asked her:
“Are you still with him?”
Yes.
Still the same fucking guy.
A year earlier, that answer would have destroyed me.
That night?
Nothing.
I didn’t care.
No heartbreak.
No jealousy.
No “When are you going to leave him?”
Nothing.
I basically told her:
Let’s meet and fuck.
And she agreed.
We met near her place.
It had been about a year since we’d been together privately.
She was still fucking smoking hot.
That hadn’t changed.
But the way I looked at her had.
There was no love anymore.
That became immediately clear to me.
I didn’t want to hold her.
I didn’t want her telling me she loved me.
I didn’t give a fuck whether she’d ever leave her boyfriend.
I wasn’t there because I wanted Oreo back.
I wanted to fuck this smoking-hot girl who I already knew would let me do the things I wanted to do to her.
So we got into the car.
And I fucked her.
Hard.
There wasn’t anything romantic about it.
I handled her roughly, just like I had toward the end of our relationship.
All that old sexual familiarity was still there, except whatever tenderness we’d once had was completely gone.
I wasn’t making love to an ex.
I was drunk, angry and fucking her because I wanted the release.
I creampied her.
And when it was finished, I didn’t suddenly become affectionate.
Oreo looked at me.
“Are you okay?”
For a second, I wanted to say no.
That’s the detail I remember.
I wanted to tell her:
No.
I’m fucking miserable.
I’m drunk.
My relationship is fucked.
I’m sitting here fucking you again after a year because apparently this is what I do when everything inside my head goes to shit.
But I didn’t say any of it.
I didn’t want to talk to Oreo.
I didn’t want her sympathy.
I didn’t want to lie there discussing feelings after I’d just used sex to avoid dealing with them.
So I told her I didn’t want to talk.
I told her to leave.
It was so abrupt she didn’t even really have time to clean herself up properly before getting out of the car, with my cum still leaking out of her.
Then she was gone.
And I was alone again.

My first coherent thought wasn’t about cheating.
It was:
I’m too fucking drunk. I need to get home safely.
Eventually I made it home.
I showered.
And standing there under the water, some part of my brain started waking up.
What the fuck have I done?
But I was too drunk to really process it.
So I slept.
Then my fucking phone rang.
Pudding.
I was half asleep.
She was finished at the club and wanted me to pick her up.
I told her to give me some time.
Then I dragged my groggy ass back up and went out again.
To pick up my girlfriend.
After I’d just fucked Oreo.
The irony is almost too perfect.
For months, Pudding had accused me of fucking other women.
I’d been furious because she was wrong.
I’d defended myself over and over.
I’d let her check my phone.
I’d watched her find absolutely nothing and then accuse me of deleting the evidence.
And now I was driving to pick her up after actually fucking another woman.
Not just any woman either.
Oreo.
The woman I’d once been in love with.
The woman I’d spent months fucking behind her boyfriend’s back.

I picked Pudding up.
She was drunk.
And horny.
So we ended up fucking in the car.
Again.
Except I’d already fucked Oreo not that long before, so obviously my body wasn’t responding exactly the way Pudding was used to.
I was taking much longer.
She noticed.
She actually commented on it.
For a moment I remember realizing how fucking close she was standing to the truth without knowing it.
The woman who suspected absolutely everything had finally picked up on something real.
She just didn’t know what she’d picked up on.
I told her it was hot and that the position was uncomfortable.
Technically, I wasn’t lying.
It was hot.
The position was uncomfortable.
I just left out the part where I’d already fucked my someone else that night.
Pudding accepted it.
We finished.
I took her home.
And she went inside without knowing anything.
Oreo knew she’d fucked me.
Pudding knew she’d fucked me.
Neither woman knew I’d fucked the other one that same night.
And Oreo’s boyfriend presumably knew none of it.
I was the only person who knew the entire fucking picture.

The next morning, my brain finally started functioning properly.
Then it hit me.
What the fuck did I do last night?
And eventually:
Have I become a cheater?
There was no clever answer.
Yes.
I’d cheated.
I felt guilty.
Really guilty, at least initially.
Because for months I’d been telling Pudding she was wrong.
She’d treated me like a cheater when I wasn’t one.
I’d resented the fuck out of her for it.
And now she’d finally become correct.
Then my brain did something impressive.
It started negotiating.
I don’t remember every justification I gave myself.
I remember something along the lines of:
Maybe she fucking deserved it.
After all the accusations.
After checking my phone.
After isolating me from female friends.
After making me go out night after night when I was exhausted.
After treating me like a guilty man no matter what I did.
Maybe she’d earned this.
Maybe our relationship was already fucked.
Maybe if you accuse somebody of cheating often enough, you lose the right to be surprised when eventually they do.
I don’t remember exactly what argument won.
I only remember that eventually the guilt went away.
That’s fucked up when I think about it now.
I didn’t confess.
I didn’t suddenly become overwhelmed with remorse.
I found a story that allowed me to live with what I’d done.
And then I believed it.

The End
Pudding and I didn’t last much longer.
One night she got drunk and swore at me in front of my friends and colleagues.
I’d fucking had it.
I grabbed her wrist and told her she was drunk and I was taking her home.
When we reached her house, I told her:
We’re done.
And this time we actually were.
I never went back to her.
I never called Oreo again either.
That was the last time I fucked Oreo.
For years afterward, I could have told this entire story in a way that made me look considerably better.
Oreo cheated on her boyfriend and lied to me.
True.
Pudding was controlling, jealous and exhausting.
Also true.
But there’s another truth.
I knowingly fucked Oreo while she had a boyfriend.
I fucked her in a back room at my own birthday party while her boyfriend was outside.
I turned rough sex into a fucked-up measuring stick for how much she supposedly wanted me.
I told myself that getting her to submit sexually meant I’d somehow beaten another man.
Then I dated Pudding and became furious that she constantly accused me of cheating.
Until one night, drunk and crying alone in a bar, I called Oreo.
I fucked her.
I came inside her.
I sent her away.
I went home.
Then Pudding called.
I got back up.
Picked her up.
And fucked her too.
The next morning I felt guilty.
Then I decided, somehow, that Pudding deserved it.
And the guilt disappeared.
That’s probably the ugliest truth in this whole story.
Not that I was surrounded by fucked-up people.
Not that I made fucked-up decisions.
It’s how easily I could make those decisions feel justified.
Looking back, I think I treated hurt like credit.
Someone hurts you?
They owe you.
Someone lies to you?
Now you’re allowed to treat them worse.
Someone falsely accuses you?
Maybe eventually you’re allowed to make the accusation true.
That was how my moral accounting worked.
And once you start thinking that way, you can justify almost anything.
Oreo’s boyfriend didn’t deserve what she did to him.
He also didn’t deserve what I knowingly participated in.
Oreo being dishonest didn’t make every way I treated her automatically okay.
Pudding being controlling didn’t force my finger to press Oreo’s name on my phone.
Pudding didn’t make me meet her.
She didn’t make me fuck her.
Those were mine.
That’s something I couldn’t have admitted back then.
Back then, I needed somebody else to be the asshole so I could remain the good guy.
Now?
I don’t think there was a good guy in this story.
There were just people hurting each other, lying to themselves, fucking each other, getting jealous, getting angry and finding increasingly creative ways to justify the next bad decision.
Oreo was responsible for her shit.
Pudding was responsible for hers.
And I was responsible for mine.
The strangest image that stays with me isn’t even sexual.
It’s that morning after.
Pudding didn’t know.
Oreo didn’t know the whole story.
Oreo’s boyfriend definitely didn’t know.
I was the only person who knew exactly what I’d done the previous night.
And within hours, I’d already figured out how to tell the story to myself in a way that made it hurt less.
That’s what scares me more than the cheating itself.
Sometimes you don’t become someone you dislike all at once.
You move the line a little.
Then a little more.
Then somebody hurts you and you move it again.
And every time you tell yourself you had a reason.
Until one day you look behind you and realize the line is so fucking far away that you can’t remember where you originally drew it.