Throwback Thursday #12: Top Five Favorite Sex Scenes

Summer has officially started, and things are heating up here at Dreamer’s Sanctuary! This week, I’m blogging about my favorite “hot and steamy” scenes. I put that in quotes because I don’t write many sex scenes, and the ones I do write aren’t usually very sexy compared to what you’d read in a typical romance novel or smut fic. Admittedly, sex and romance are not really my forte as a writer, but I do enjoy writing romantic subplots and include sex scenes when I feel they will contribute to character development and/or further the plot. Here are my five favorites!

5. Nick and Cary make up for lost time

There’s only one sex scene in Curtain Call, and it fades to black before it gets too steamy. While sex was never the point of that story, there’s a part of me that regrets not writing more romantic scenes with Nick and Cary in the brief windows of time they had together when he was feeling good enough to be physically intimate with her. But adding unnecessary scenes would have made a ninety-chapter novel even longer than it needed to be, and I didn’t want to drag it out more than I already did with my natural wordiness. Instead, I wrote a one-shot called If… that gives Cary and Nick one more night together. It was inspired by Nick’s All American album, which came out four years after I finished Curtain Call. When I first heard the tracks “Cherry Pie” and “Man on the Moon,” which both have a retro sound, I was immediately reminded of Cary. Her character would have absolutely loved those songs, and had they been released four years earlier on Nick’s previous solo album, I’m Taking Off, I would have included them in CC as songs he wrote about her. “If I had a magic wand… I could go back in time…” It was “Man on the Moon” in particular that inspired the idea for If…, which explores a “What if?” scenario in which Cary wakes up to find herself in bed with Nick four years after the events of CC. They may not have had a magic wand, but as a writer, I do! This is one of the times when I used it to write something cute, just for the fun of it, as a little Christmas gift for my CC readers. I took advantage of the fact that Nick was no longer dying of cancer in this alternate timeline to show him getting friskier with Cary than he ever did in the first story. But the fact that Cary still remembers him dying of cancer adds a certain bittersweetness to the sex scenes in If… that fit well with the tone of Curtain Call. I really enjoyed writing these two characters together again, if only for one more day and one more short story.

4. Brian and Gretchen get together

Sex wasn’t the point of Song for the Undead either, but when there are only a handful of human beings left alive on Earth, it’s bound to happen eventually. As I said earlier in these blogs: Those survivors had to repopulate the Earth somehow, right? Brian and Gretchen understood the assignment! By Chapter 88, these two grieving widows have had time to process the loss of their spouses and develop feelings for each other that go beyond friendship, although they’re both afraid to act on those feelings. In this chapter, Gretchen wakes up to hear birds singing outside her window for the first time since the dead rose, a sign of hope that her world is slowly starting to return to some semblance of normalcy. After spending a beautiful day gardening outdoors, she and Brian go inside to take showers – separately – and end up in bed together. For two people who have spent months and many chapters denying and slow-dancing around their feelings for each other, Brian and Gretchen move fast once one of them finally makes the first move. I like the sex scene in this chapter because it’s sweet and sensual without being smutty. It gives just enough detail to get the point across without going into graphic descriptions of body parts. Although, fun fact: Since this story was a collaboration with my friend Rose, who is also not a smut writer, I originally included an extra paragraph full of laughably lewd descriptions as a joke and sent it to her just to get a reaction. That paragraph was never intended to be posted as part of the real chapter, but since I’ve hung on to it for the past fourteen years, I will share it with you here just for shits and giggles.

She ran her hands down his bare back until they found the bony edges of his hips. From them, she tore off the towel. As it dropped away from his body, she looked down and saw that he wanted this just as much as she did. His penis stood at attention, its tip raised in salute. It made for a handsome soldier, big and strong, and she wanted its meat inside her, on the double. Smiling, she threw back her head and arched her back, raising her hips as he lowered himself onto her. His bulbous cock squeezed in between the flaps of her labia and drilled into the depths of her vagina, jackhammering in and out. He rode her like a bronco, straddling her with his thighs while her hips bucked beneath him. She closed her eyes and rocked her body along to the rhythm he set, enjoying every last measure of it. She hadn’t experienced such pleasure in seven months, and in the heat of the moment, she had no regrets. 

Needless to say, I prefer the less obscene version that made it online. It’s a better fit for a couple of fairly wholesome characters.

3. Kevin and Natalie test the water

Sex plays a more important part in The World Will Be Waiting than in the two previous stories. I’ve written more sex scenes between Kevin and Natalie than any other pair of characters, not because they’re my favorite couple but because the two of them figuring things out together is an important part of Kevin’s healing process and personal growth as a character. Prior to his relationship with Natalie, Kevin had been celibate since the accident that killed his wife and left him paralyzed from the chest down, so when he starts dating again, he has to rediscover his sexuality in a body that doesn’t work the same way as it did before. Thankfully, Natalie is more than willing to experiment with him. I had several scenes to choose from for this blog, but my favorite one featuring Kev and Nat is in Chapter 20. It’s the second time they attempt to do the deed and the first time they succeed… sort of. It starts with them taking a steamy shower together and progresses to the bedroom, where they take turns pleasuring each other. Like all of the sex scenes in this story, it’s far from perfect. Not everything goes according to plan. At times, it gets awkward and messy, but they find ways to make it work. The imperfections are what make scenes like this one interesting to me. Kevin obviously faces a lot of physical challenges, from positioning to performance issues, but then there are the emotional challenges that stem from the insecurity and guilt he feels over being intimate with a woman for the first time since his accident. And, despite being able-bodied and conventionally attractive, Natalie’s not perfect either. She has plenty of missteps and cringey moments in this chapter, from using the baby talk that Kevin hates to hand-over-hand moves that make him feel more like a puppet than a person. But she means well, and Kevin recognizes that her heart is in the right place, even when she says or does the wrong thing. The awkward moments add comic relief to this chapter, which is another reason I like it. It may not be the kind of sex scene that will turn readers on, but I hope it makes you smile and maybe even laugh.

2. Howie and Nick make a hot mess

I looked for any opportunity to include comic relief in Sick as My Secrets, which is otherwise a really dramatic, depressing story. But, as I mentioned in my last blog, there is a fairly light-hearted section in the second half of the novel, when Howie and Nick take their relationship to the next level while temporarily living together. One of my favorite chapters in this section is Chapter 59, in which Nick “helps” Howie paint one of the rooms in his house and ends up making a mess – a very hot mess. The first half of this chapter has a lot of funny banter between Nick and Howie as they argue over paint colors and painting techniques. In the second half, Howie invites a paint-splattered Nick to take a shower with him, which leads to my second favorite steamy scene. While some may argue that this doesn’t count as a full-on sex scene, as it fades to black once they get to the bedroom, I count it because it’s the first time Howie and Nick go beyond kissing, in terms of intimacy, in this novel. I like this scene for a couple of reasons. First, it’s written from Howie’s point of view, so it includes more physical descriptions of Nick. It was around this time that I realized the beauty of writing slash: no matter whose perspective you write from, you can always focus on one of the guys instead of a female character. It’s all the fun of romance without the risk of including original characters that readers may or may not care about. Second, while the shower scene starts with the same playful, flirtatious tone as the rest of the chapter, it turns more serious as Nick grapples with his conflicted feelings over his own sexual orientation and how his relationship with Howie has evolved. I enjoyed the challenge of writing the emotional rollercoaster Nick rode on his journey from denial to acceptance, and this chapter is representative of the ups and downs of that journey. As I implied in the introduction to this blog, I rarely write sex scenes just for the fun of it. They have to reveal something about the characters or move the plot forward in some way, and the shower scene accomplishes both. That’s why it ranks so high on my list.

1. Nick and Claire reunite

When I started planning for this blog, there was no question in my mind about what scene would be number one on this list. It’s what I lovingly refer to as the “mermaid sex scene” in Chapter 194 of By My Side. In some ways, that’s surprising because it’s one of the first detailed sex scenes I ever wrote. I was still a teenager when I started writing BMS, and prior to that, I hadn’t really felt comfortable writing about sex in any kind of detail. In previous romantic fics, I’d always faded to black when writing love scenes. But by the time I got to BMS, I’d read more adult romance, gained more life experience, and felt like I was ready to try writing more mature sex scenes. I remember thinking, I want to write a real sex scene at some point, but it won’t be for this story. Having learned about “devotees” – people with disability fetishes – while researching for the amputation arc of Broken, I was initially concerned that writing a descriptive sex scene featuring an amputee would come across as fetishy. But, at the same time, avoiding writing sex scenes just because my main character was an amputee would have been ableist. One year after losing his leg to bone cancer, Broken Nick was still dealing with some serious body image issues at the start of BMS, and sex seemed like an important part of his journey to self-acceptance. So I eventually got past my reservations and wrote my first real sex scene about him.

The scene in Chapter 194 isn’t the first sex scene in the story, but it is my favorite. Inspired by the pool scene in the Leonardo DiCaprio/Claire Danes version of Romeo and Juliet, it takes place in Nick’s pool on Halloween. By this point in the story, Nick and Claire have been through 193 chapters of drama, including a break-up, during which Nick dates two other women while Claire reconnects with her high school sweetheart, gets married, gives birth to twin girls, and files for divorce from her asshole husband. While they’ve both realized they still have romantic feelings for each other, Nick and Claire have danced around those feelings, both afraid of getting hurt again and ruining their friendship in the process. But in Chapter 194, Nick asks Claire to accompany him to Howie’s costume party, where she gets drunk and loses her inhibitions, leading her to go home with Nick and have sex with him in his pool. The “mermaid sex” comes from the fact that they’re dressed up as Ariel and Prince Eric from The Little Mermaid, although the costumes come off before they get very far. It’s been so long since I wrote this chapter that I honestly don’t remember which idea came first, The Little Mermaid costume theme or the pool sex, but I’m pretty sure one led to the other. Claire is not really the Disney princess type, but she does have red hair, and I thought it would be cute for her babies to be Flounder and Sebastian. Anyway… I love this scene because it’s the moment when Nick and Claire finally let go of their lingering reservations, give in to temptation, and realize how much they’ve missed each other. I still have a special place in my heart for these two characters, so re-reading this chapter put a smile on my face. It’s one of the few scenes where I feel like the “purple prose” phase I was in when I wrote BMS actually worked in my favor. While it’s not explicit, it is descriptive, sensual, and emotional in a way that doesn’t work as well with scenes written in first person point of view, as most of the other scenes on the list are. This is one reason why I’ll probably always prefer writing in third person.

One thing I realized while writing this blog is that I apparently really like writing romantic scenes that involve water. Literally, part of every chapter on this list takes place either in the shower or the pool, and I can think of at least two more scenes I did not include that involve a pool or jacuzzi. I guess growing up with movies like Romeo and Juliet, with its pool scene, and The Notebook, with its passionate kiss in the rain, had a big influence on me. I will probably never be known as a smut writer, but I will continue to write sex scenes when the story calls for them.