What’s Cheating For You

I kissed Tina at fifteen in the concrete stairwell of her apartment building on some hot summer day. Nothing complicated about it—we wanted to, we did it, she went inside. Walking home I knew I’d just ended things with Jasmine, and I was right. Jasmine never forgave me for it, like one kiss somehow negated everything else.

Things with Susanne were different. We spent a year and a half cheating on each other constantly, some kind of revenge cycle where we’d fuck other people and then come home swearing eternal love and meaning it, at least for a few hours. I can’t remember who started it. Maybe it doesn’t matter. What I remember is how much we both seemed to enjoy the destruction of it, how we kept pushing to see what we could survive. By the time we split in my early twenties I was worn out in a way I didn’t have words for yet.

Then came Sabrina, Regina, and Steffi, each with her own definition of the line. Sabrina said a kiss was cheating. Regina said thinking about someone else was. Steffi’s threshold was somewhere else again, and I kept crossing it because I was the kind of person who never learned where the boundary was until I’d already smashed through it. With my scattered, erratic nature, I just kept failing tests I didn’t know I was taking.

None of them talk to me anymore. Jasmine never forgave the Tina kiss. Susanne… I guess we both lost whatever weird game we were playing. Sabrina, Regina, Steffi—I burned through those too, same pattern every time.

The thing I should have figured out earlier, the thing I’d ask if I ever started something again: what’s cheating for you? Not as some relationship test, but as actual information about how not to hurt someone. I kept expecting that wanting someone badly enough would somehow bridge the gap of never actually talking about what mattered. It doesn’t work that way. You have to know the rules before you can break them, and by then you’ve already broken them.