It didn’t happen deliberately. I didn’t make a plan to still be sleeping with my ex. But that’s how it is now…
I was 24 when my ex and I broke up. It’s a hackneyed story – he was emotionally involved with his female best friend, and I was too much in love, too oblivious, too trusting to see it. So, no, technically he didn’t cheat on me considering that they weren’t sleeping together. But it counts as cheating in my book if you’re so emotionally involved with someone that you’re sending each other ‘I love you’ texts all day long. As you can imagine, I was pretty shattered when I found out because of a WhatsApp message that popped up on his phone. Things ended. I went back to being single after three years of having been super-committed to him.
I actually cut off all contact with him and moved back to my hometown when this happened. I’d been feeling like my career was going nowhere as well, so this was just the icing on that cake of disappointment with life. Time to go home and do my master’s, I thought. But two years later, I was back in Bombay. Master’s done, I’d received a fantastic job offer, one I simply could not turn down.
When I reconnected with the friends I’d made during my earlier stint in Bombay, I came across the ex too. It was unavoidable since we were both part the same social set. Since we worked in the same industry too, it would have been weird to pretend like we didn’t know each other. Not everyone knew why we’d broken up and thought it was a mutually decided thing. And I didn’t really want people to start gossiping about what was old news now just because we wouldn’t behave normally around each other.
He and I met for coffee and had a positively grown-up discussion about this. Best to put the past behind us and get on with life, we decided. We wouldn’t make any efforts to hang out with each other one-one-one, but if we bumped into each other at a party or happened to show up at the same industry events, we’d wave, say hi and then walk away.
Three months later, we both got drunk at a common friend’s birthday party. We took a cab back – he was dropping me home before he went home himself. When the cab reached my place and I got out, the driver discovered that the engine had stalled and he couldn’t start the car again. ‘Madam, aap dono hi utar jao, main mechanic dhoondta hoon.’ Well, what could I do but to ask the ex to come up and wait while he called another cab?
As he tried to connect to my WiFi so he could book another cab, I offered him a drink. And as I leant down in front of him to pour him his beer, he pulled my face down to his and kissed me.
It was like…the last few years of misery and negativity hadn’t even happened. In fact, it was like the years before had disappeared, and we were back to the first time we’d kissed. Magic. Explosive.
An hour later, as he slept in my bed, the sheets tangled around our naked bodies, I cried. I cried for the love lost, the trust that would never be ours again…and for the sexual satisfaction rediscovered.
It’s been a year since that first time we hooked up as exes. And we still do so. He wants to get back together, but I don’t want that. While I am okay with him pleasuring my body whenever I feel the need – and he’s pretty damn good at doing that – I like the fact that the decision to sleep with him is mine. Entirely mine, actually.
There have been times when he has called me and asked if I want to ‘hang out’ – as friends, not just for sex. I have said no. Because I will not put myself in his power again, or risk being hurt. I don’t want to care about him again, invest my time, energy, emotions. There have been times that he has also called me for sex, and I have said no – either because I wasn’t feeling horny, or because I had other plans that I would not cancel for him. But there has never been a time that I have called him and asked him for anything – whether company or sex.
He asks, I say yes or no depending on how I’m feeling at that moment and what I want. He thinks I’m being cold to him, that I have no interest in him outside of the bedroom. Well, yes. That’s how I choose to think of him. He might think it’s unfair of me to not ‘make an effort’, to not give him anything more than what it is right now, but who gives a fuck. He should have known before he messed with my heart that payback is a bitch.
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