Retro Wendy: Let’s Talk About Sex, or Not: Sexual Tension For the Win!

This post originally ran at Heroes & Heartbreakers on August 5, 2015

As long as the romance genre has existed, it has had unimaginative critics. Sometimes even before the word “trash” is uttered, we get “Mommy porn.” Women should know their place. If it’s something you enjoy, if it’s something you take pleasure in, it must be wrong, and nothing screams wrong quite like dismissing readers and suggesting they are “dirty” for liking something. What these critics are really reinforcing is the old adage that women shouldn’t like sex, talk about sex, and heaven help them, they shouldn’t want sex. The truth is that if these critics asked a large sample of romance readers why they enjoy the genre, “I read it for the smokin’ hot sex!” is pretty far down on the list, if it’s on the list at all. Oh dear, silly, hopeless naïve critics. We don’t read romance for the sex. We’re looking for all the delicious things that lead up to sex. The tension, the chemistry, the foreplay, two characters who are beginning to realize that taking on the world together is ever so much better than taking it on by themselves.

To illustrate this point, all three of these recent releases, of wildly varying heat levels, illustrate that it’s not the actual falling into bed we love – it’s the journey the characters take to get there.

Charlotte Stein writes erotic romance, a sub-genre that one would think would be “all about sex.” Except, of course, that it isn’t. Good erotic romance knows that it takes more than pages of kink and fetishes to make a story “hot” – to make the romance work. In Sweet Agony, Stein takes anticipation to a boiling point featuring a young woman looking to escape poverty and despair and a young man with a mountain of entitlements emotionally stunted by a past he’s unable to break free of. So haunted by a traumatic past, our hero is emotionally crippled at the mere thought of basic human touch. Which makes navigating a sexual attraction particularly tricky, but leads to a story filled with tension. That old saying about the brain being the biggest erogenous zone? Yeah, that.

He just did the equivalent of throwing everything in on a pair of jacks, so sure I would back down that he barely saw the straight flush lurking in the river. He was too explicit, too rude, too eager to say that word: spanked. He should never have said spanked. Maybe he could have to someone else, someone who cares only a little, someone less like him. But I am not nearly so closed off, nor so silly. And when he pushes, I push back.

...

I glance over my shoulder. I meet his gaze. His face is so pale it could pass for a fainting lady’s. And I say with the most relish I can muster: “Would you like me to leave my dress down, or do you prefer a bare work surface?” followed by the longest silence the world has ever known. It goes on and on and on, and the longer it does, the worse it gets. If nothing happens in the next thirty seconds I am almost definitely going to die. 

In The Fighter and the Fallen Woman, Pamela Cayne is working within a sensuality landscape that is fairly typical for the historical romance sub-genre. It’s in that middle ground between just-kisses and erotic romance. What this story features is a forbidden sexual attraction between a boxer/hired thug hero and a prostitute/mistress heroine who both happen to work for the same dangerous crime lord. The tension between the two hits a boiling point even before the reader is out of the first chapter, when our villain suggests his mistress kiss his fighter for “good luck,” something the hero, King, is reluctant to do.

“Come, King, it’s only a kiss,” Lady said, deliberately pitching her voice low. She would give the kiss and pray her trembling barriers would hold, keep her safe against the desire to close her eyes, breathe in his scent, and feel for one moment that a fighter and a fallen woman had a future together. 

…

“Lady, you should know when it comes to you, it’s never only anything,” he whispered so that only she could hear. “It’s everything.” 

…

He grabbed her hand only for an instant, but it was long enough to brand his touch on her skin before he let go. Lady pulled back and her eyes drifted open, her held breath slipping from her mouth and into his. King was right. This would never be only a kiss. 

Deeanne Gist started her career writing inspirational historical romances, but her most recent books have moved towards secular Americana. This has been a move that has not been met with enthusiasm by all of her fans, and there is criticism, in some circles, that Tiffany Girl is “pornographic.” This is laughable for the most part since the only love scene fades to black while the hero is helping the heroine out of her wedding ensemble….on their wedding night. But upon closer inspection, these critics have somewhat of a point. Gist does more with sexual tension in a “just kisses” historical romance than some erotic romance authors do with an encyclopedia of fetishes and a chest full of sex toys. Things heat up for our hero and heroine when they agree to help a photographer take a series of photographs of them dancing so he can make a phenakistascope.

Now they were cheek to cheek. Flossie’s face, nearest the camera, shielded his. Her ear lobe peeked out from beneath her coif and was within an inch of his mouth. He resisted, resisted, then could resist no more. He took a gentle tug with his lips. 

…

She closed her eyes, her lips there for the taking. He didn’t so much as breathe. “Okay. Ready?” Holliday settled himself beneath his shroud. “Just a few more shots.” Holliday took them through the rest of the dance, one step at a time. When she had her face shielded by Reeve’s, she blew across his ear.

...

The stairwell was silent. The hallway was silent. The rooms were silent. He didn’t know where everyone else was on this sunny Sunday afternoon, but he was thankful they weren’t around.  

He followed her back down to the first floor, narrowing his eyes. Were her hips swaying just a touch more than usual? Or maybe he was simply too attuned to her every move. When she began to enter her room, he grabbed her hand, hauled her to his room, shoved his door closed, pulled her against him, and took her mouth with his. 

All of these authors employ the use of tension to increase the personal stakes for their characters. Cayne introduces it to the reader from the very first chapter, in a first kiss scene the simmers and boils through the remaining early portions of the book and carry the reader to the eventual consummation. Stein and Gist both go a different route, keeping their characters apart by circumstance. Stein, with a hero who abhors anyone touching him and Gist with the social restrictions and mores of the time period. However, in the case of all of these books, something has to give. All of these characters are mere mortals, after all, and tension can only go on for so long until someone eventually snaps. It’s those delicious moments that lead up to the snapping that keep romance readers coming back for more.

The Sweetest Agony

At The Day Job I have a librarian who is in charge of purchasing all of our ebooks.  As a former fiction buyer, when I took my new job I was cognizant of the fact that I didn't want to lurk over anyone's shoulder like a gargoyle and micromanage them half to death.  So while I'll toss out the (very) occasional purchasing inquiry, I sit back and let them do their jobs.  And let me tell you, color me impressed with what they've been buying.  That's right, my ebook buyer picked up Sweet Agony by Charlotte Stein for the library system.  Quite possibly the hottest erotic romance I've read in a long time.  Why so hot?  Because Stein "gets" what makes the sub-genre work.  Throwing in kink and fetishes alone does not make a book "hot."  It's the tension.  It's the characterization.  Holy mother of sweet baby Jeebus, it's the foreplay.  And in the instance of Sweet Agony, it's the tension and foreplay that just about killed me D-E-A-D dead.  Let me put it this way - reading this book in public was uncomfortable.  But I mean that in the best possible way.

Molly Parker is a young woman one step away from slipping completely off the grid.  Desperate to escape a less-than-ideal home situation, and living below the poverty level, she answers an ad for a live-in housekeeper and has the strangest interview of her life.  Cyrian Harcroft has read too much Dickens and his house is straight out of Jane Eyre.  He's standoffish, aloof, and has a series of bizarre rules.  However none of this is off-putting to Molly, who recognizes something in Cyrian immediately, to the point where she's a swooning mess of hormones almost from the get-go.  The fly in the ointment?  Cyrian has "issues."  Quite a lot of them. Cyrian's upbringing, a past that still haunts him, has left him so emotionally stunted that he lives a virtual recluse and abhors human touch.  The mere thought of Molly invading his space and putting her hand anywhere on his person is enough to send him straight from bad mood into indignant rage.  But our hero?  He doth protest too much.  Because even while he abhors touch, and is emotionally stunted?  Molly scares the crap out of him and he can't get enough of being around her.

Cyrian and Molly both have baggage, and it's that baggage that actually feeds the sexual tension in the story.  Molly because she's so desperate to get close to Cyrian, but is frightened that she'll make a horrible mistake and blow any shot she has in reaching him.  Cyrian is so hung up in his anxieties and fears, and yet he cannot let Molly go.  On one hand he wants to pull her close, but on the other he's completely incapable of making that move.  So they tap-dance around each other, and take baby steps towards consummating their relationship in the traditional Insert-Tab-A-Into-Slot-B sense.  I'm talking foreplay folks. Reindeer games. Pretty much everything other than "traditional sex" wrapped around the fact that you have one character who doesn't like to be touched.

Words cannot express how well the tension of this conflict translates into the sexual relationship between the characters. In a sub-genre that can so easily lose it's way, Stein reminds us with this book that erotic romance is the hottest when the characters are doing everything other than getting naked with each other.

That being said, it's not a perfect book nor do I think it will be a book universally loved by everybody.  Stein works very well for me, but she does have writing ticks.  First person (which I personally enjoy), and lots of internal monologues.  I've loved many of her books, but I always walk away wishing there had been more dialogue.  Also, I felt like the author probably could have spent more time on the baggage.  You get the flavor, but not a full course meal of the angst.  Which is kind of good thing, but I wanted a bit more to make the happy ending a bit heftier.  You also need to go into this book with your Erotic Romance As Fantasy Goggles on, given the Gothic vibe that permeates much of the story.

But, quibbles.  I have not had the most stellar reading year thus far, so any book that elicits a strong emotional reaction out of me is worth it's weight in gold.  There were long stretches of this book where I was literally gripped by the text and I couldn't pull my eyes away from my Kindle screen.  The tension, the glorious delicious tension!  In the grand scheme of things this isn't even my favorite Stein offering to date, but it further illustrates what she does so well and why she works for so many erotic romance fans.  Yes, the writing quirks are there, but she's currently saving the genre for me.

Final Grade = A-