When I started reading romance novels, about twelve years ago, I asked for recommendations and only read the romance novels that people told me were the best ones out there. This was great as a reading project — some of those early authors remain some of my faves today! — but gave me a skewed sense of the proportion of novels in the genre I should expect to truly excel. Now that I am more conversant in the genre, and reading new releases as they come out, I’m encountering a higher proportion of mediocre books. In particular, I have been feeling so frustrated with these extremely cookie-cutter sex scenes, which follow a well-established set of beats without telling us much — or anything — about the characters and their relationship. Sex scenes are storytelling! Sex scenes are narrative! NOT EVERY PERSON ON EARTH WANTS TO BE TOLD SHE LOOKS SO GOOD TAKING HIS COCK.
Anyway! So I wanted to do a little breakdown of a sex scene that I think does an incredible job of advancing the story and revealing what’s going on with the characters. What follows here is a close read of a sex scene from Cecilia Grant’s A Gentleman Undone — what it’s doing, how it’s doing it, and why I think it works. Enjoy!
The context:
Our FMC is Lydia Slaughter, a sex worker and longtime mistress of this ain’t-shit jackass, Edward Roanoke. She’s also an extremely brilliant card shark who counts cards like crazy, and she needs a partner in crime to help her make the money she needs to attain her independence. Our MMC is Will Blackshear, a traumatized Waterloo veteran who’s trying to earn enough money to support a dead friend’s widow and child. After catching Lydia’s eye in a gaming hell, then lightly defending her honor against some ain’t-shit men (including Lydia’s partner/employer), Will enters into a partnership with Lydia: She’ll teach him to win at blackjack, and he’ll invest her funds for her.
The setup:
Lydia and Will have been at dinner with a drunk, jealous Edward Roanoke, who’s insulted both our protagonists and insinuated that they’re having an affair. (He’s not completely wrong, but!) Baiting him, Will tells Lydia to meet him in his room, and Lydia tells him—in front of everyone—that she’ll go to his room, and he can meet her there in thirty minutes.
Will doesn’t think he’s going to Lydia for sex, and he’s not even sure he should have sex with her (she’s had a few drinks; they’re in her protector’s house). But when he arrives at his room, she makes it very plain that’s what she expects and wants.
He’s falling in love with her, but can’t offer her marriage (cause of Society) or take her as a mistress (he doesn’t have the money to support her). She’s falling in love with him, but trying to protect her heart because she knows that they don’t have a future together.
Okay, let’s get into it!
She was watching him, [naked], expectant and wholly without shame, when he turned to face the room. Her eyes glittered, hard and intent.
Now. Four steps brought him to the bed. He set one knee on the mattress and her legs edged apart. Greedy impatient thing. Just for that, she could wait a bit. He bent and pressed a luxuriant kiss to her kneecap.
“Stop that.” Her knee twitched away. “Take off your clothes.”
A dictatorial drunk as well as belligerent. But to obey this command was no hardship.
He pulled off his boots and his hose. Waistcoat, cravat, braces, shirt, all over his head and dropped helter-skelter on the floor. He stood.
She shifted, propping herself higher on the pillows, angling unabashedly for a better view.
His blood thundered like a river’s rapids as he obliged her, turning himself so she could see. One button after another slipped free and the front-fall of his breeches dropped away. He undid his drawers. He looked at her.
This sets the scene perfectly for everything that’s to come. You know from the chapter previous that both of them really, really want to do this. Will thinks he shouldn’t have sex with her for moral reasons; Lydia doesn’t want to be vulnerable to Will for emotional reasons. So they’re each heading into this super horny but also holding back and trying to shape the encounter to fit their needs and their narrative.
Right off the bat, Lydia’s holding all the cards—this was her idea, and she’s the one pushing for it—and she wants to call the shots. Will tries to coax her into a slightly different sexual register by doing something more sweet than horny (kissing her knee), but Lydia immediately yanks it back into the territory where she’s comfortable: She’s in charge, it’s purely about sex, and vulnerability is not welcome.
“I think perhaps…” She bit her lip, still staring. “Um.” Her eyes came to his, soft and uncertain. “Can you go in very slowly?”
It was beautifully done. But he knew her too well. He stepped out of his breeches. “Flattering minx.” He crawled back onto the bed, parting her knees with his hands to find his place between them. “You say that to every man.”
Her concerned expression dissolved into a deliciously wicked grin. “Every man loves to hear it. Even a man who knows it for flattery.”
He couldn’t argue. He couldn’t say anything at all.
I’m obsessed with this. When I was thinking about writing a post breaking down a sex scene, this moment sprang to mind immediately. As before, Lydia’s trying to keep this encounter in a register where she feels comfortable, so she’s putting on her professional clothes (metaphorically) and playing a little game that has worked well for her in her career as a sex worker.
However, we’ve seen throughout the book that Will pays better attention than most men. Here, he recognizes what Lydia’s doing and calls her on it. He does so in a light-hearted way, then makes it clear physically that although he knows she’s doing a trick from her sex work background, he’s not put off by that or her. He thinks she’s smart and funny, and he’s charmed that she tried this on him, and charmed that he caught her trying it.
Then Lydia caps it by calling him on the fact that, come on. It totally still works on him. She’s being really winning here, and she’s also lightly reminding him that he’s not special. Throughout this scene, we’re going to see him trying to get some sign from her that he’s not just interchangeable with every other man she knows, and Lydia resisting.
With all these undercurrents, this exchange is just fun and funny. These are two people who like being around each other, who are having a good time. Sex is fun! It’s supposed to be fun!
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I’ve not included the full text, to save space, but here follows Will making four attempts in a row to be sweet to Lydia, and she rebuffs him each time. The imagery Grant uses in this passage draws sharp contrasts between what Lydia wants and what Will wants. Her skin is soft, but her eyes “glint like agates.” Will tries to touch her and speak to her gently (“with his voice, too, he could caress her”), and Lydia “swat[s] at his hand” and tells him to hurry up.
“I’ll only linger over the parts you enjoy.” Hanged if he’d let her turn this into something quick and brutish and utterly devoid of meaning.
“I’ve told you what I enjoy. You may believe I know my own tastes.” Her voice was growing thin with agitation. She twitched like a cornered animal. “Don’t dare fancy you’ll be the man to teach me the pleasures of tenderness.” Tenderness was a rat whose neck she wrung with her own hands before hurling it over the hedge to rot with feelings.
And of course he’d fancied he’d be exactly that man. Or at the very least, that they’d do this with some acknowledgment of what had been between them. He’d already had intimacy of her in her confidences on their walk outside, in the way she’d trusted him to comfort her last night in this same bed. What on earth did she expect to gain by treating him like a paying customer now?
They are chasing after competing, maybe irreconcilable desires right now. Sex has been a sphere where Lydia can feel in control, when so many aspects of her life are beyond her control, and she really really doesn’t want to feel vulnerable right now. The dinner they’ve just been at was super humiliating for her, and she had no recourse because of her position in society. Fucking Will, and getting her way, is how she hopes to reclaim her sense of power.
Will, meanwhile, has been stung by the things Lydia’s protector said about him, and he’s worried they’re true, and he’s so worried that he’s a bad, unsalvageable person. He wants to be a person of worth in Lydia’s eyes, not just some interchangeable body. He’s trying so hard to get her to admit that he’s a person to her, and specifically a person she’s been vulnerable with; and Lydia won’t.
It’s fine to want emotional connection during sex! It’s also fine to want fun, impersonal, easy sex! Like, both of these wants are reasonable, in isolation. They’re just not reasonable asks of these two specific people in this specific moment. Which is why this scene is doing such terrific work: it’s telling us emotional information that’s particular to these characters and the journey they’re on individually and together.
He drew back a few inches and saw panic flare up in her eyes. She might want only an impersonal fuck, but she wanted it very much. “I won’t try to teach you anything. I wouldn’t presume.” He bent to kiss one nipple, just to reassure her of his lustful intent.
That last moment is so small and charming, omg.
I like this flash of vulnerability from Lydia. She knows all the reasons sex between them is a bad idea—especially the reasons why Will thinks it would be a bad idea—which means she also knows that she pretty much has this one window of opportunity to have sex with him.
“But surely there’s some ground for compromise between what you want and what I want.”
“Compromise is but an over-nice way of saying neither person gets what they want. Do that again. This time use your tongue.”
Leverage, finally. “I’ll do it as much as you want.” He retreated to knees and straight arms, too far away to do anything but talk. “After we settle how we’re both to come out of this satisfied.”
Her eyes narrowed. They shifted back and forth, reading his face. “You’ll be satisfied. Have no fear on that count.” Half promise and half threat, the way she said it. “And if you find any hungers unappeased, we’ll do it again, to your taste this time.”
It sounded… so much like a transaction. A trade. She would use him, and then he could use her. Any man might have taken his place, provided the cock was to her liking, and apparently she thought any woman would do just as well for him.
Ouch, that last paragraph hurts.
Look how they’re using satisfied here to mean slightly different things. Will wants to have sex that he finds emotionally satisfying. Lydia knows what he means, but she insists on reading satisfied to mean physical satisfaction. He’s saying, I don’t want to feel awful about this. She’s saying, Calm down, you’ll get your orgasm—which isn’t what Will’s talking about at all.
Romance uses a lot of alternating POV, which among other things, allows for the dramatic irony of the reader knowing better than each individual protagonist what’s going on with both of them. It can be done in a heavy-handed way. Cecilia Grant is doing it beautifully. In previous chapters, we’ve seen Lydia recognizing that she’s getting too attached to Will, more attached than feels safe to her, and she’s trying to pull herself back from that edge.
Will doesn’t know that, though! He only has Lydia’s behavior to go by. They’ve experienced what felt to him like intimacy, but the way she’s behaving now makes him question whether that was real, or if her treating him as interchangeable is real, and which one’s realer, and which one’s going to win the day.
He could refuse. He could clamber over her and right off the bed, to where his clothes lay discarded. I’m sorry but this isn’t what I want, he could say while buttoning his breeches over his rampant erection. She would probably throw something at him.
Stop thinking. The woman you want is underneath you with her legs apart. Why in the name of all that is holy do you hesitate? Very well, this round went to her.
Throughout this scene, Grant keeps emphasizing that Will wants Lydia physically but also wants intimacy with her; and Lydia explicitly and implicitly forecloses that possibility. One thing that makes the scene hot is that they want each other so much. They’re each keenly aware of the ways in which this is a mistake—but they’re just really, really, really attracted to each other, and they finally have attained a moment where sex is possible between them.
His eyes still on hers, he lowered his mouth to her other nipple and made a circle round it with his tongue.
She arched to meet his mouth and then sank slowly down, as he followed, until her shoulders lay flat on the mattress. “Yes,” she muttered, eyes fluttering closed. “Good. Now put your cock in me. Anywhere you like.”
Debauched past all redemption. He stroked a hand down her belly, through her maiden hair, to the place where he could make her melt like butter. “Right here is where I like.” His voice descended to a growl. “Where you’re wet for me, and hot. Spread your legs wider.”
She liked that, if he could judge by the shiver that ran through her. And, because she was constitutionally incapable of acceding to any of his commands, she did not spread her legs but rather brought them about, by some miracle of flexibility, until her ankles sat at his shoulders. His cock found the place where she opened to him and he slipped in, all the way in, with no effort at all.
Even when he’s asking her to do something she definitely wants to do, she still can’t be vulnerable with him even to the point of doing it. I love that little moment/detail.
He stayed for a moment, just so. His throat had gone tight and his breath unsteady.
Nearly a year, it had been. Some camp follower in Belgium would have been the last, an anonymous and forgettable encounter that left him vaguely ashamed and not at all satisfied. Then had come that feeling of unfitness; the fear that his darkness, his corrupted soul, might somehow leach out of him to contaminate any woman he touched.
And maybe this was what he’d needed all along. Not a pure-hearted woman who could lift him out of darkness, but one who dwelt there herself. Already corrupted to such a degree that nothing remained to ruin. Incorruptible, now, more incorruptible than the most virtuous maiden.
SUPER HEALTHY, WILLIAM.
The two elements of a sex scene are what’s happening physically and what’s happening emotionally. Grant does a stellar job here of writing what’s ultimately quite a traditional sex scene—they’re having missionary PIV sex!—in a way that’s emotionally messy as hell. Will wants to be a hero and save the day for someone. Lydia sees that so clearly in him and doesn’t want it to be the grounds of their relationship.
One reason she’s resisting intimacy is that they’re coming off a fight with her protector, and she doesn’t want to be part of a story where Will is rescuing her from another man. Who would? That story fucking sucks.
A furrow traced itself in her brow, above her still-closed eyes. “Hurry,” she said.
He could do that. He half withdrew, and pushed in hard. Her lashes trembled as her hands came up and took hold of his biceps. Again. She tipped her head back, exposing her throat. Once more. Her lips parted and he heard her harsh breaths as he worked to find the right rhythm.
“Lydia, open your eyes,” he whispered on what breath he could spare. “Look at me.”
“No. Harder.” Her lip drew up at one side to show her teeth, again the cornered animal. Her fingers dug into the bunched-up muscles of his arms.
Here we’ve got a straightforward narration of what’s happening physically, capped by Lydia again refusing a more intimate connection. Notice that where Grant zooms in on physical details, they’re almost tangential to the sex: eyelashes, biceps, throat, teeth. It makes the sex scene feel vivid and sensory without having to deal with the problem of what words to use for sex organs.
He thrust on, but desolation began to trickle through him in chilly drops, one by one from that icicle of desolation he kept somewhere inside. She didn’t care to look at him, to be with him. He’d thrown away whatever remaining claim to honor he had in order to bed this woman, and he might as well have been with a camp follower again. An imperious, ill-tempered camp follower who meant to leave no doubt of her contempt for him.
“Faster. Don’t slow down.” Her eyes half-opened and glared at him, from between her ankles, without the slightest glimmer of warmth.
Confound her drunken hostility. He would stop this. He would haul himself out of her and flop down beside her and tell her: I’m not your enemy. I’m not your punishment. I won’t play that part for you.
Any minute now, he would do that. For now he clenched his teeth to hold back the tide of pleasure and made his strokes swift and shallow.
Look how Grant is keeping us, the reader, from fully diving into this as a sex scene. This is a close close third person, and she wants our reading experience to mirror the experience Will’s having. Grant spends some time on physical pleasure, in the previous passage, but then pulls us back to Will’s mental state, which is miserable. Trickle, chilly, and icicle are all very unsexy words (no matter what Bella Swan might think). “Without the slightest glimmer of warmth” calls back that set of imagery, so Lydia’s behavior matches Will’s interior state.
The recollection of the camp follower again speaks to the idea of interchangeability that Will is trying to escape.
“I’m not your enemy. I’m not your punishment. I won’t play that part for you” lays out the stakes of the scene explicitly. Again, Lydia’s coming off a really risky decision—telling her protector that she’s having sex with another man—which she knows will probably lead to him withdrawing his financial support. She feels vulnerable on that front, and vulnerable because she really likes Will, and so she’s trying to keep the sex on the impersonal, adversarial territory that feels safe for her. This isn’t a true representation of what they are to each other, though, and “I won’t play that part for you” makes it clear that Will understands what Lydia’s doing (or trying to do).
Again, this works because it’s specific to them! From the very first moment he sees her, Will has seen Lydia (“Three of the courtesans were beautiful. His eye lingered, naturally, on the fourth.”). His awareness of who she is cuts through all her pretense. It’s crucial to their romance overall, and crucial to this scene.
“Harder. Hurt me.” Her voice was a feral snarl and her face half contorted with loathing.
“I can’t. I don’t want to.” There was a way to ask for such things, and it wasn’t the way she’d just done. He’d tell her so afterward, if she was still inclined to speak to him then. At the moment he couldn’t spare the breath.
She writhed under him and took a new grip on his arms. “You said you’d do what I wanted. My way first, your way after. We agreed.”
His patience snapped, then, and with one monumental effort he halted, half inside her. Her narrowed eyes flew wide with outrage.
Please note that Will did not say he’d do what she wanted. They did not agree. That is untrue. Lydia said they’d do it her way first, his way after, and proceeded as if that had been agreed upon. It’s another way she’s exerting control over this encounter.
“Listen to me.” His chest was heaving, and one wrong move would make him spill, but he kept his voice steady. “Against my better judgment and all my principles I am fucking you under your protector’s roof.” One great swallow of air. “I’m plowing you harder than I’ve ever plowed a woman in my life. I’ll probably end with bruises and I won’t be surprised if I make myself ill.” One more lungful. “I’m sorry it’s not enough for you, but this is all you’re getting. I suggest you find a way to like it.”
Her eyes flicked back and forth on his face, as though he were some new adversary whose measure she must take. And devil take her, she got hotter for him. She took her legs from his shoulders to wrap them round his back and tilted her hips to take him deeper. Her whole body roiled under him like molten metal in a blacksmith’s cauldron.
Hell. She’d wanted rude handling and she’d goaded him into it. She had what he wanted and he had… his cock in her wet quim. And he was too near his crisis now to complain, particularly as she’d set some muscles in there to doing things he hadn’t even known a woman’s body could do.
This is such a smart alignment of what’s happening physically and emotionally! As they’re getting close to orgasm, they’re also hitting the emotional endpoint of the scene, the thing it’s been building to all along, where Lydia “goad[s] him into” playing the “adversary” role that she’s been angling to put him in all along.
Sweet holy mother of… He wasn’t going to last. He would disgrace himself, and leave her wanting. He squeezed his eyes shut, and slitted them open again to see how she arched and gritted her teeth on his every thrust, to see the face that went with those rapturous sounds she was making in her throat. “Come, Lydia. Hurry.” The words rasped out like a death rattle. But at least he was speaking her peremptory tongue.
And this command, thank the fates, she obeyed. She whipsawed under him, head thrown back, and snatched her hand up to her mouth, sinking in her teeth to stifle her cries.
Not a second too soon. Two more thrusts he gave her before climax seized him in its unforgiving talons, bearing him up and away with no regard for his sensibilities, his better nature. This coupling had been so far from what he’d wanted, and pleasure swamped him all the same. He pushed up on straight arms, his head thrown back, and spent himself to the sound of Miss Slaughter’s muffled cries.
“But at last he was speaking her peremptory tongue”: Will recognizes that he’s lost the fight they were having about what this sexual encounter was going to consist of.
“Miss Slaughter” is so interesting. For the whole course of this sex scene, Grant hasn’t used Lydia’s name in the narration at all. Will has called her by name a few times, always in moments where he’s trying to entice her into greater intimacy. The use of “Miss Slaughter” in the narration in this moment emphasizes the distance between them—distance that she has worked hard to put there.
He’d never spilled in a woman before. A gentleman always withdrew. This ought to have been…uncharted bliss. Unlooked-for privilege. Something, anything, more than it was.
Pleasure left just enough room for that thought to sidle through. Then pleasure rolled out like a spent ocean wave and nothing rolled in to take its place. He lifted his body clear of hers and settled to the mattress beside her, limp and unspeaking and utterly barren inside. The whole thing had been just an exercise in her pushing him away. She hadn’t said his name in the end, or if she had, she’d withheld that gratification from him by smothering the syllable with her fist.
He lay on his stomach, head turned away from her, breathing slowly in and out. He had nothing to say.
I love “sidle through”! That’s a clever choice of words.
“Utterly barren inside” is doing some heavy lifting here: Lydia has been described as “barren” before, and her infertility is top of mind for Will at this moment, since he just came inside her. “Barren” also works as a contrast with the image of a “spent ocean wave” in the previous sentence, as Will contemplates how empty this all feels.
“She hadn’t said his name in the end, or if she had, she’d withheld that gratification from him by smothering the syllable with her fist.” I’m not sure Will’s gloss on the fist thing is correct! As we know, from being inside Lydia’s head in previous chapters, she resists letting on that he’s particular to her because that would be emotionally risky.
“The whole thing had been just an exercise in her pushing him away” is such a good and devastating line!
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Why this sex scene works:
- It is incredibly specific to these two characters. From Lydia we’re seeing her enjoyment of impersonal sex, her fear of intimacy, and her need to assert control any time she feels vulnerable. Will wants to be a hero and fears he’s an awful person, and he’s certain he’s not a hero, and feels the allure of being an awful person; we’re seeing the push-pull of those things throughout. All of their actions, every single thing, arises from and reinforces what we know about who the characters are and what they need from each other at this point in the story.
- What’s happening physically is put into really nice alignment with what’s happening emotionally. The sex is building in tandem with Will’s frustration and disappointment. The idea that Lydia smothers Will’s name in her fist when she comes is a perfect encapsulation of all that she’s been holding back throughout the scene.
- Grant is doing some smart things with word choice. She chooses physical details that create a sense of immediacy and make the sex feel explicit even when she’s not being You’ve got water imagery (river rapids, dripping icicles, ocean waves) at the beginning, middle, and end. You’ve got a bunch of imagery of Lydia as a predator animal, including the “unforgiving talons” of Will’s orgasm. It all works together beautifully.
- The scene advances the story and the relationship, and more importantly, it leaves the characters with somewhere still to go. I get frustrated when sex scenes don’t do any narrative work. This one speaks volumes about where Will and Lydia are, and it sets up a ton of possibilities for where they can go next. In the next chapter, they’ll have a better sense of how to navigate each other’s desires and boundaries, and they’ll end up having more mutually satisfying sex.
This has been: Anatomy of a Sex Scene! Stop by the comments with additional thoughts and ideas about this scene, or let me know if there’s a particularly great sex scene you’d like me to cover next. I am thinking about making this a series!