The context:

Girlie Delmundo is the most guarded and the most financially successful member of her large Filipino American family. After years of being the best moderator of horrifying content at social media company Reeden, she’s recruited to work on content moderation for Reeden’s virtual reality company, Playground. Girlie always makes sensible decisions and never makes foolish ones, which is why she refuses to be attracted to her rich hot boss, William Cheung.

The setup:

Girlie’s sweet younger cousin has invited William to attend her, the cousin’s, birthday party. Girlie severely wished this would not occur, but once the invitation had been issued, she couldn’t contradict it without being rude. She hopes and assumes that William won’t come. (Un?)fortunately, he does, upon which a brief conversation and a long sexual fantasy ensue.

Finally she let herself ask it. “Why did you come?”

Now William let out a strangled chuckle, still looking down. “Oh, I don’t know—no life, probably,” he said, giving her the second and third thoughts.

Then he returned to her gaze, holding himself still. She watched him choosing to give her the first thought.

“You said—I was welcome,” he answered softly.

This business about second, third, and first thoughts is a callback to an earlier moment in the book where Girlie recognizes that William—who’s very guarded, like her—is giving her carefully considered answers. Not the first or second things it occurs to him to say, but the final, polished drafts. The intimacy of this moment is that she’s asking him a question that she hopes/fears will have a really personal (romantic) answer, and he’s choosing to give her that answer. They’re both taking down walls here, and both recognizing that the other person is doing the same. Which leads to:

One thought, arrow too swift, couldn’t dodge it: I want him to lick me open. She nearly doubled over with the horror of it, the jerky as a heart murmur horror-horror-truth of it.

Just what a great way to open up a sex scene. “One thought, arrow too swift, couldn’t dodge it” doesn’t work grammatically, but it works great to evoke what Girlie’s feeling, the urgency and immediacy of it. The syntax of that opening sentence is itself jerky, just as Castillo describes Girlie’s emotions being jerky. Not just jerky, but “jerky as a heart murmur,” something as vital to your continued being as a heartbeat.

The undodgeability of Girlie’s attraction for William is echoed by the sharp switch in narrative register. Up to this point, we’ve been watching an anxious, uncomfortable conversation, which Girlie and William are both navigating very carefully. But now there comes a hard swerve into an explicit sexual fantasy—it’s as shocking to the reader as it is to Girlie. And then it gets more explicit:

She was thinking, right there, in the modern fusion restaurant terrace: I want to see the tendons in his neck straining when he’s trying not to come in his pants while I’m jerking him off.

Here’s a second very explicit thought from Girlie, and Castillo smartly contrasts it with the setting to heighten the tension. “Restaurant terrace” creates one kind of picture in your head. “Modern fusion restaurant terrace” is much more specific and therefore much funnier—just, really not a place for jerking someone off! It’s the incongruity that makes this moment work.

Castillo gives Girlie one fast, specific fantasy that’s about her pleasure, and then one fast, specific fantasy that’s about the outward signs of his desire for her. As this passage goes on, and Girlie starts thinking more into the details of what she wants with William, we’ll see both of these genres return. She wants William, and she wants to have the clearest possible evidence that he wants her back. His desire for her fuels her desire for him, throughout this fantasy.

It was the acute specificity of the desire that made its horror. It wasn’t just the garden-variety horniness of someone who hadn’t fucked for at least six years, hitting her like a two-by-four across the temples; wasn’t just the baseline stupidity of the as-yet-unorgasmed thinking—knowing—that they’d be good together, that it’d be—good with him.

I love this little hiccup at the end here. The idea that they’d be good together is, in a way, more personal than the idea that it would be “good with him,” which speaks more directly to her experience. Not mutually good, but good for her. That’s a tough swallow for Girlie, because she has made a habit of forgetting what might be good for her and prioritizing what’s good for the people she feels responsible for.

When I read Elaine Castillo’s first novel, America Is Not the Heart, I remember thinking “this woman has written fanfiction.” And I am surer than ever after reading Moderation. The fact that this fantasy sex scene and the kissing scene at the end of the book are actually good and hot and not embarrassing, despite Moderation being a work of literary fiction, is the deadest giveaway. On a more micro level, “hitting her like a two-by-four across the temples” says fanfiction to me. That is a fanfiction-ass phrase.

Knowing it without knowing it, knowing it just because. Which was the stupidest way in the world to be wrong—and at this junction in history, the stupid ways to be wrong were, to say the least, legion.

Further brain hiccups from Girlie here—her mind is kind of stuttering over the knowledge she’s suddenly acquired, and she’s trying to intellectualize it. Too bad! You can’t! That’s not how attraction works! I find this bit very funny.

The upcoming bits are very long sentences separated by semicolons, so please bear with me as I break up these semicoloned sentences to have commentary about them. I’m sorry to the text for doing this to it.

It wasn’t just: I want to see what his face looks like when he’s fucking me. But unambiguously: I want to see his eyebrows tight together when it’s that good inside me he’s about to die from it; I want to hear that telltale shaky oh fu-uck when he’s trying not to come in two seconds; I want to see that glassy wet rapture-shock in his eyes the first time he fucks up into me and can’t believe it;

Here comes a whole parade of specificity, which Castillo queues up with the parallel structure of that opening sentence and the first part of the long sentence that follows. I love her unusual punctuation throughout the book—she’s using punctuation for sound, not just sense, which I always enjoy. “It wasn’t just” [colon]…. “But unambiguously” [colon]. Gorgeous use of punctuation to tee up the way Girlie falls into her sudden sexual fantasy.

Castillo zooms in on small details that give a sense of what’s happening big-picture here. They’re having intercourse, she’s on top, it’s fast and desperate—and Castillo’s not telling us those things. She’s giving us high specificity on the small details, like “his eyebrows tight together,” and letting us infer the rest.

I really like “that glassy wet rapture-shock in his eyes.” It captures the fast urgency of the sex they’re having, as well as the fact that it’s good enough sex to take William very slightly offline. This works especially well for these two characters, as they’ve been buttoned-up and guarded with each other. It’s particularly alluring to imagine such a guarded character as William losing control like this—which is what’s getting Girlie hot, in her fantasy.

I want to feel him on a live wire, clawing at then pushing away his orgasm like a needy animal, tensing up, being careful, holding back, wanting to make it last, make it good;

One challenge with sex scenes is that sex is a bit silly, really. All that thrusting! It’s goofy, if you’re not in the moment. As this fantasy starts to build to William’s orgasm, Castillo’s language captures the physical motions of sex with this series of rapid gerund clauses: clawing at, pushing away, tensing up, being careful, holding back. It’s a clever way to do it!

“Like a needy animal” doesn’t quite work for me—I can’t track what activity an animal would be doing that would make it claw at something and then push that something away. However, it’s another very fanfictiony phrase. I have seen it at the devil’s sacrament.

I want to feel the word shudder all through his bones when I say more; I want to hear that agonized oh—fuck when it’s devouring him at last, burning in his blood, want to feel him trying to be valiant, hold on, give me fair warning, I want to laugh a little just to make him relax, then laugh a little more just to hear him cry out at the sweet teasing squeeze of it, tender all around him, ah ah, I want him going to pieces inside me, pulsing apart, straining for it, holding on too tightly, wild for it, hard for it, afraid of it. I want to give him permission; I want him to let go; I want to let him.

More of that syntax that suggests the motions of sex! This passage catches some of the fun and affection that goes into sex, but it also gets at the climbing desperation of getting closer to orgasm, with the repetition of “for it” (four times!) in that second-to-last sentence and the repetition of “I want” in the final sentence. That final sentence is framed as her having, and him relinquishing, control (“I want him to let go; I want to let him”), which previews what’s going to happen in the next sequence, the one focused on her pleasure.

This is so smart! “Inside me” is the closest thing to explicit in this passage, but it feels explicit because you know exactly what’s happening.

Then I want him shattered under me after, shaking, depleted, eyes wide, face new and gleaming like he’s been slapped, shock-laughing from the good of it, the good-good-it’s-good of it.

“Face new and gleaming like he’s been slapped” is another phrase I really like. Rhythmically, this sentence breaks away from the repetitions of the last little bit. The phrases and clauses are all different lengths now; it’s clearly after.

She couldn’t stop thinking, like she’d been holding back the thoughts for so long they’d mutated inside her into something all-consuming, city-destroying, alarmingly narrative— No, before all that:

I’m including “No, before all that” here because I love it as a way to interrupt her beginning to reflect on what it means that she’s having these fantasies of William. Anyway, then we’re back into it:

No, before all that: I want him on his knees, I want him kissing up my tattoos; I want his tongue honey-wet and sure on my clit, I want to come at least five times on the flat of it, I want to be gasping for air, bucking up into the wave; I want to come too much, too quickly, and still not be done, hot as an over-sharpened knife, angry about it, the still-not-enough of it, arching up into the seal of his patient searching mouth, licking down to the core of the comb.

Again, many short breathless clauses all get banged together here to create a sense of urgency, with commas signaling events that are happening together and semicolons marking out progress or forward motion. The use of “honey-wet” early in the sentence predicts and makes sense of “the core of the comb” at the sentence’s very end.

I really like “hot as an over-sharpened knife.” I don’t have anything to say about how she’s using it here, I just think that’s a really smart, unusual simile.

I want to be desperate to come for him again but too sensitized to get back there so soon; scraped-down and thrashing with need, crying out finally from the hungry harrowed tongue-tip hurt of it, the more-more-more hurt of wanting it, the mine-mine-mine hurt of having it. I want to be panting, clutching, electric; I want to finally have to ask him to stop, wait-wait—and I want him to stop when I say.

Girl, don’t we all.

And then I want him to look up and ask, very patiently, in that soft, low, restrained voice of his: red, yellow, or green?

She thought; couldn’t help it, hurt to try: I want to say green. I want to; will want to; I know I will. She couldn’t shut it the hell up—the wet, wrecked, almost-dead heart of her. Murmuring green green green green green.

Just, what a banger of a closing paragraph to this interlude. (Heehee, banger.) The contrast between “the almost-dead heart of her”—because we do know that Girlie is very very closed off emotionally, that she does not consider the needs of her heart as she moves through the world—and the life and health and thriving implied by “green green green green green.”

Why This Scene Works

• Girlie maintains ferociously tight control over herself throughout most of this novel. Even when she’s interacting with a person who’s in no way a threat to her (like her younger cousin, a woman who has no power over Girlie and also worships her), she goes into that interaction with her shields up to ensure that she won’t take any damage. The reader has been somewhat aware of Girlie’s attraction to William, but here it comes bursting out of her like an avalanche, and the reader realizes its vastness and unavoidability—such that it overtakes her at her cousin’s birthday, the least convenient moment imaginable.
• Castillo’s choices of words and syntax are impeccable, and I specifically love how she uses both to control the timing of the reader’s experience of this sequence. The structure of her sentences mimics the action of the (imagined) sex. Her imagery is specific and unusual in ways that make the reader pause over it, and she does a great job of setting up an image in one line and then paying it off a few lines later. There’s a real elegance to her writing here that I just love.

The post Anatomy of a Sex Scene: Moderation, Elaine Castillo appeared first on Reading the End.

I am less charmed by these same romance-unfamiliar critics opining that the show is all sex, no plot; that its quality can’t be judged or understood, because all the sex is throwing off the scale; and that it’s not doing anything new or interesting, just sex. Since I’ve gotten tired of howling the sex is the plot!!!!! at my computer screen, I’d like to take a few minutes to explain how these sex scenes are working to advance the, yes, plot.

Specifically, I want to push back on the impulse to dismiss the skill that goes into creating effective sex scenes. It requires a particular competence to create sex scenes that are hot instead of ridiculous, and a competence on top of that to create sex scenes that tell us things about the characters and the relationship. Each of those things, individually, is hard to do, and Heated Rivalry is doing both of them very, very well. We don’t have a line into what these characters are thinking about each other or their relationship, as we would when reading a romance novel. It all has to come through in the writing, the staging, and the acting.

The first of sex scenes occurs after Shane and Ilya film a commercial together—Ilya’s idea—and cruise each other in the showers after—Ilya’s initiative. The scene occupies a solid quarter of the episode’s run-time, and it establishes a lot of the dynamics we’ll see between these two characters going forward.

The keynotes for Shane here, and throughout all their sex scenes, are that he wants to do a good job, and he wants a break from the rigid self-control that governs his life outside of Ilya. He puts on a suit (!) because it’s a special occasion, changes into casual clothes, sits in the dark, turns on the TV, turns off the TV, turns on a lamp. This is a kid who wants to be the valedictorian of losing his virginity. When Ilya puts his thumb in Shane’s mouth suggestively, Shane takes the hint immediately and kneels down to blow him. He frets about doing the blow job wrong, doesn’t know what to do with his hands (in later scenes, we’ll see him copying what Ilya does with his hands), and folds his clothes after taking them off, like an extremely silly little baby.

Ilya finds this charming—he rarely smiles as openly as he does when Shane is folding his fucking pants—and he has a good read on when to reassure Shane and when to challenge him. He pushes Shane to admit he likes sucking dick, but when they actually get into bed together, he makes space for Shane to choose what happens next. As much as he’s been performing cocky assholery, Ilya’s very sweet to Shane in practice, and it’s obvious he cares a lot about making sure Shane’s comfortable and having a good experience. He also likes getting a rise (heehee) out of Shane, so after he comes, he pretends he’s going to leave without reciprocating. Shane gets very soft eyes when he realizes that he got got, reminding the viewer that Shane likes it when Ilya teases and challenges him. He’s allured by Ilya’s don’t-give-a-fuck vibe because he wants so badly to give less of a fuck himself. Sex with Ilya is a space where he can cede control and still be safe—something that’s not true in any other area of his life.

After they have sex, Shane gets freaked out. This was fun, a good time was had by all, but he really really cares about being the golden boy of hockey and doing everything perfectly, and he orders Ilya not to tell anyone. Ilya’s sarcastic about it at first (“Yes, Hollander, I’m going to tell everyone”), but gentles when he sees that Shane is genuinely upset. This pattern repeats over and over in their sex scenes: Ilya likes teasing Shane during sex, but only if it’s fun for both of them. Any time he hits on something genuinely sensitive, he meets Shane with sincerity and reassurance.

Their second hook-up navigates slightly more contested feelings and moments of disconnect. Shane is again trying to balance his need to be a good boy against his growing feelings for Ilya. He’s horribly stressed about being in the room next door to one of his hockey idols, but he also really wants to build on the intimacy he and Ilya are establishing. So he can’t quite say that he wants to bottom for Ilya, or that he wants to be in contact with him beyond the context of their hook-ups, but he’s relieved and grateful for Ilya to push on both of those things—for it to be Ilya’s idea and Ilya’s initiative.

We also see a little hiccup in their established dynamic of Ilya challenging Shane, and Shane letting himself be challenged. Ilya asks—very very gently—if Shane wants to try anal:

Ilya: Have you ever?
Shane: No.
Ilya: Do you want to? [Shane doesn’t answer] You are scared.
Shane: I’m not scared.
Ilya: No, is okay.
Shane: I’m not scared.

Ilya clocks that Shane is nervous about anal but does not want to be seen to be nervous about a new sex act (whomst among us). He shifts into a different register, refocuses on a sex thing that’s potentially new to Shane, but not scary to Shane (fingering him), and pulls them back to the familiar territory of him teasing Shane and Shane pretending to be mad about it. It also gives Shane enough space to express that he’s interested in bottoming but also to say a firm no about doing it right now—which Ilya accepts gracefully. Again here, we’re seeing that Ilya’s attentive to when Shane wants to be pushed vs when he needs Ilya to let up a bit.

The first episode’s sex scenes establish Shane as the less experienced one and Ilya as the confident, boundary-pushing one. In the second episode, though, the cracks in that dynamic begin to show. The two of them finally get to hook up again, after two literal years of Ilya relentlessly hitting on Shane via text message. This sex scene is the most happy and relaxed we’ve seen them—they keep grinning at each other in the lead-up, which is especially notable for Ilya, who doesn’t let Shane see a lot of his emotions.

Ilya checks in with Shane before they do anything, and then he keeps checking in with him throughout. It’s sweet and hot, and I am frustrated we don’t see this kind of thing in media more often. Shane feels safe in these encounters because Ilya is doing everything he can to make sure Shane feels safe. After Ilya showers, he checks in again (“worth the wait?), and Shane kisses Ilya’s mouth and then (fatal mistake) his forehead. Alas, this causes the whole train to jump the track.As we’ve seen elsewhere in the show, Ilya doesn’t have a good home life. His mother’s dead, his father’s an asshole who is also getting dementia, and his brother is constantly hitting Ilya up for money. Shane has two supportive parents, and even though he feels anxious about living up to his mom’s expectations for him, he always feels loved, and he responds to Ilya like a person who’s always been loved. The second he does the sweet forehead kiss, Ilya panics, takes off, and doesn’t speak to Shane for six months.

(Being in your twenties is terrible. Nobody should do it. We should all just get to fast-forward those years.)

The last sex scene in these episodes takes place after Ilya wins MVP at that year’s ?hockey awards?, and Shane comes up to his hotel room after. The music is jittery and tense, and the action of the scene is a major departure from what we’ve seen before. Ilya wants to drag the two of them into an emotional register that feels comfortable for him, to maintain the pretense that this is a straightforward, no-feelings hookup, and that Ilya is in control of what’s happening between them. It opens with Ilya dragging a chair through two rooms of his penthouse, with a highly unpleasant screeching sound that mirrors the screaming discomfort they’re both going to feel in the sexy but emotionally terrible experience that ensues.

Superficially, this scene looks like they’re following the same script as always, where Ilya’s pushing Shane, and Shane’s yielding control to Ilya. But for the first time, Ilya doesn’t meet Shane’s trust and vulnerability with gentleness.

Ilya: Touch yourself.
Shane: What?
Ilya: Show off for me. I want to watch you….
Shane: I’ve—never—
Ilya: No shit.

Until now, Ilya’s never been shitty about Shane’s relative inexperience, and you can see Shane struggling to parse it. He’s visibly relieved when Ilya teases him about the Stanley Cup, because that’s in line with a dynamic he recognizes, and he’s hoping it means that Ilya’s going to be normal with him again. Through the rest of the scene, even though he’s nervous, Shane stays open and vulnerable, doing what Ilya tells him and articulating what he wants (“Are you gonna fuck me?” “You. I need you.”), while Ilya tries very hard to remain unaffected. Wide camera shots emphasize the physical distance between the two of them, and we see very little of the actual sex. Instead, the scene cuts quickly to the aftermath, when Shane is drinking vodka he doesn’t like and Ilya is disengaged from him to the point of dissociation. In the elevator on his way home, Shane writes and deletes the saddest little text message: “We didn’t even kiss.”

This is the plot of the show. The plot of the show is the push and pull between these two guys, the things that draw them to each other (Shane’s anxious perfectionism, Ilya’s brash arrogance), and the things that push them away (the pressures of being star hockey players, familial expectations, Shane’s internalized homophobia and perfectionism, Ilya’s fear of intimacy). We’re seeing all of that play out physically between the two characters when they’re fucking. This is craft.

If the viewer were receiving this narrative via a medium other than sex scenes, it would be obvious what was happening. It would be the will-they-or-won’t-they format that critics insist this show isn’t doing. But—and please hold my hands and look me in the eyes when I say this—this is still a will-they-or-won’t-they format. It’s just that the following verb is different than what you’re expecting it to be. It’s not will-they-or-won’t-they fuck. It’s will-they-or-won’t-they find happiness with each other. That’s the thing the show is building up to, the climax it’s building tension for.

If I’ve gone into slightly tortured detail to explain how TV acting and writing work, it’s because I, as a scholar of boning, know how hard it is to produce sex scenes that convey story and character while also being hot. Everyone who watches this show understands that the second thing is happening, but the first part is often elided or dismissed, as if sex scenes are illegible texts from a craft perspective.

Still, I care about this particularly because it’s been reported that the show struggled to get greenlit because of showrunner Jacob Tierney’s staunch refusal to dial down or scale back the sex scenes. We continue to exist in a culture that devalues sex and the work of sex, especially sex that challenges normative heteropatriarchal scripts and structures. Many spheres of cultural production continue to treat sex as an embarrassment or an afterthought, and it’s no accident that romance—which is streets ahead of other genres in its ability to write interesting, sexy, compassionate sex scenes—has long been the target of contempt and dismissal by critics and other cultural gatekeepers.

In their book Dubcon (MIT Press, 2021), Milena Popova writes of the challenge of affective responses to viscerally physical writing: “We feel [the response] in our bodies before we get a chance to emotionally or rationally process what is going on.” I suspect that many consumers of sex scenes simply never arrive at the second step of rationally processing the craft work that’s going on in a well-written sex scene. We often want to disavow the physical response (arousal, embarrassment, disgust, whatever) a sex scene induces by maintaining an ironic distance from it. And while I understand that impulse, I’d like for us not to let it numb all our critical faculties. Showrunner Jacob Tierney is putting so much work and care into these scenes. They’re not just integral to the story he’s telling. They are the story.

The post Anatomy of a Sex Scene: Heated Rivalry Edition appeared first on Reading the End.

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!

*

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!

*

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!

The post Anatomy of a Sex Scene: A Gentleman Undone, Cecilia Grant appeared first on Reading the End.