Sex and the Senses

K D Grace

I’ve always been fascinated with sex and the senses. My first novel, The Initiation of Ms Holly, is a modern retelling of Psyche and Eros in which the heroine is not allowed to see her lover’s face. The third book in The Mount series, To Rome with Lust, is based on what might happen if we were more like our animal cousins and better attuned to our sense of smell. What would that mean to us sexually? But what would happen if, in sex, we were denied the mother of all senses, the sense of touch? That was what I wanted to know when I wrote The Tutor, a novel about a haphephobic sculptor who works out his powerful sexual urges through his art. I wanted to experiment with just how dependent intimacy is on human touch and see if I could write a story in which there were viable substitutes. 

The Tutor was inspired in a workshop led by fabulous writer and good friend, Kay Jaybee. I was given the prompt of a tin of pears in heavy syrup. From there, it was non-stop. The Tutor was one of the most interesting, and arousing, adventures in writing I’ve ever had. Here’s an excerpt involving the infamous tin of pears. 

The Tutor Blurb

Struggling writer, Kelly Blake has a secret life as a sex tutor. Celebrated sculptor and recluse, Alexander ‘Lex’ Valentine, can’t stand to be touched. When he seeks out Kelly’s advice incognito, the results are too hot to handle. When Kelly terminates their sessions due to what she considers her unprofessional behavior, Lex takes a huge risk, revealing his identity to her at a gala exhibition, his first ever public appearance. When Kelly helps the severely haphephobic Lex escape the grope of reporters and paparazzi, rumors fly that the two are engaged, rumors encouraged by well-meaning friends and colleagues. The press feeding frenzy forces Kelly into hiding at Lex’s mansion where he convinces her to be his private tutor just until the press loses interest, and she can go back home. They discover quickly that touch is not essential for sizzling, pulse-pounding intimacy. But intimacy must survive the secrets uncovered as their sessions become more and more personal.

Excerpt: A woman feels like nothing you’ve ever touched before

“Was this your idea or Dillon’s? Kelly asked, hoping to relax him.

“It was mine, after Andy told Dillon and he told me. I thought it was something that I …” The muscles along Lex’s jaw looked as though they were made out of iron, and a fine blush crawled up his neck tinting his ears bright pink. “I’ve never touched a woman … in that way.” He forced a laugh. “Obviously. I’ve …” the blush deepened and he avoided her gaze. “I’ve put lube on some of the sculptures – you know — down there, but I … well it isn’t the same.”

“The pears won’t be either,” she said, her heart suddenly aching at the physical isolation this man endured on a daily basis, and it wasn’t just her heart that ached, she felt his lack deep in her core. It had been easier with Andy. She had been almost flippant with him. She was sorry for that now. She spread one of the towels on the Queen Anne chair across from him and settled herself onto it so they were facing each other. “The texture will be different and with the pear there’ll be less give.” She dipped her fingers in the bowl and rubbed the heavy juice between her index finger and her thumb. “If you touch a woman, she’ll be much warmer.” She gave him a conspiratorial smile. “You’ll be amazed at how warm and how soft she’ll be down there when she’s ready to be touched. With Andy, this,” she nodded down to the pears, “was improvisation, this was the best I could do under the circumstances, but a woman, well a woman feels like nothing you’ve ever touched before.”

He was no longer avoiding her gaze. His eyes were locked on her, and he was struggling to keep them on her face, she knew that; she understood the urge for him to drop his eyes to the place of which she spoke, the place with which she was so intimate, the place that couldn’t help but respond to the topic, to the situation, to the strange intimacy they had shared almost since the moment they’d met. “You can look, if you want,” she opened her legs so that he could see the place in between clothed in black denim, completely disguised and yet so very obvious. “And I’ll look at you too,” she nodded down to his own jeans straining to contain him already. “It’s what men and woman are naturally inclined to do when there’s a sexual attraction.”

With her heart hammering in her throat, she took one of the pear halves into the cupped palm of her left hand, then she brought it down between her spread thighs, feeling the juice of it run over her fingers and drip onto the towel as she spread her legs a little farther and held her palm to mimic the position of her vulva. “Touch it like a woman would touch it, and you’ll always get it right.” She drug her index and middle finger up from the bottom of the pear to the center and felt her own body respond in empathy. “The pear has no folds, no secret valleys, no swollen flesh to be teased open, so you’ll have to use your imagination with that.”

Lex gave a little moan soft and deep in his chest as he shifted to make himself more comfortable. “I know the anatomy,” he said. “I’ve watched porn and I’ve studied drawings. I know how it looks like it might feel. I know the response it elicits.” His tongue flicked nervously over his upper lip. “Of course that’s just acting, isn’t it?”

“Porn is about fantasy, about voyeurism, and it doesn’t matter if it’s real if it gets you off. But when it is real,” she spread her index and middle finger up the sides of the pear’s central opening, “if you’re good, if your sensitive, you’ll feel the spasms of your lover’s orgasm, even see them if you’re using your tongue; and you can feel them gripping at your cock when your inside her. If you’re paying attention.

“The clitoris,” she laughed softly, “Well with Andy I used a Ticktack, but he’s a chemistry major. He likes charts and graphs and periodic tables. You’re an artist, you live in your imagination, so you don’t need a Ticktack. Some women like the thumb stroking and circling while the other fingers work inside. Some women like to use their fingers.” She demonstrated on the pear, and Lex groaned. “It’s always best to ask and be sure.”

“What do you like?” His words were a labored rasp against the back of his throat, and Kelly found herself stunned by the question, and way more aroused than she wanted to be. He shouldn’t have asked. She should have answered. But she did.

“I like it this way.” She shifted her hips and opened a little further so he could see her thrust and scissor, circle and probe technique, and her body responded with the tight grip and release of muscle memory.

“Jesus,” he whispered moving forward on the sofa and leaning closer for a better look. “And when someone uses their tongue?”

She caught her breath in a giddy laugh. “Afraid I can’t tell you what I do since, sadly I’m not that flexible.”

“But you can tell me what you like.” His voice had gone rough.

“I like the flat of the tongue to part me and then probe me, circle my clit and then kiss and suck.” She closed her eyes, finding it difficult to meet his gaze when she spoke about something so intimate, so secret. Come to think of it, she’d never had a man actually ask her how she liked it. The few who had given a rat’s ass about her pleasure had been happy enough to let her order them about, but never quite got the hang of it.

It was the loud schussing sound that caused her to open her eyes. Lex had moved the coffee table out of the way paying no attention to the slosh of pear juice all over the towel V had spread. His eyes were locked on Kelly as he fished out his own pear half and fell to his knees in front of her. When she realized what the man was about to do she dropped the pear she’d been holding with a little gasp of surprise and scooted as far back in the chair as she could. He knelt low, holding the pear in the cup of his hand, as she had, placing it against the edge of the chair between her legs! She gave a little yelp and scrambled back in the chair still further, spreading her thighs over the rise of the chair arms to keep from touching him. He moved forward, the back of his hand so close to her crotch that she could feel the heat of it, and he lowered himself still further until his hair nearly brushed the insides of her thighs. Then, still looking up at her from his position on the floor, he began at the bottom of the open pear half and ran his tongue flat and undulating all the way up, flicking in just slightly in a little circle at the top end before he closed his lips around the apex and she could hear the slurp and suck of the sweet syrup.

“Oh! Lex! Ah!” And then she went non-verbal, holding her breath, tightening muscles deep inside her body, the only muscles she dared to move if she were to keep from touching him. She raised both arms and fisted her hands in a suicide grip around the back of the chair to keep from curling them in his hair. Her thighs trembled from her efforts to keep her legs on the chair arms and not throw them over his shoulders for leverage. She didn’t move. She didn’t breath as he licked and nuzzled and suckled until pear juice ran down his chin and onto his tee-shirt, until his face was damp and sticky, until his forehead was sheened with perspiration, and still he held her gaze as though they were locked together in each other’s orbit neither able to move without the other’s consent.

“Oh God, I’m gonna come.” She barely managed a warning when his own convulsion brought him dangerously near her body. He had stopped breathing, she was sure of it. She practically climbed the back of the chair to keep from touching him as he lost control. Then with a tremendous gasp of oxygen, he straightened, let the pear fall from his hand onto the aubusson carpet and looked up at her.

“I’m going to pass out.” And he did.

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Audacious Literary Technique

by Annabeth Leong

You decide to go for it and write about second person. Other people have covered first person and third person very well already, and you've got a few things to say about second person. At least, you have a few forthcoming stories that you wrote using that point of view.

Second person is undoubtedly a gamble. Some of that is because it can come off pretentious and irritating—as Jeremy Edwards said in the comments, people will often assume you're trying to pull off an Audacious Literary Technique, and that you're the sort of jerk who shows off habitually. Many editors and publishers don't like it either. Now that you're editing an anthology too, you understand. You got a few submissions written in second person that read like too-personal fantasies, the "you" too uncomfortably intimate for your admittedly prickly taste.

That intimacy, though—that's where you think the real gamble lies. You think about the way you talk to friends. Your speech is peppered with a "you" that is meant to mean "I," and that you are secretly hoping will come to mean "we." You take a sip of coffee, squint, then say, "You know how it is when you..." Or you quote Bukowski and say, "You get so alone at times that it just makes sense." Writing in second person is audacious, but that's because it's an invitation, a bid for affection. You are hoping that the reader really is like you, that the reader will accept the intimate voice you use when talking to yourself. You are speaking the language one part of yourself uses with another, and baring that to the world.

The danger, of course, is that the reader will reject you. A story might begin, "You run away for the first time when you're not even old enough to drive," and the reader might think, "I've never run away from anything!" You might write, "You are a girl on the beach under the moon," and the reader might say, "No, I'm not." Then the reader might stop listening to you. When you write in second person, you are hoping the reader will come into a private place with you, but you run the risk that the reader will think you are commanding rather than inviting, dictating rather than describing.

You don't mean to order the reader to be a certain way or to think and feel certain things. Really, you are hoping you can describe the way you are and the way you think and feel, and that this will truly turn out to be universal. You have always been fascinated by things you can never access—what people say about you when you aren't there, the innermost thoughts of others. When you write in second person, you overturn that. You elide those forbidden spaces and boldly declare they are no different from your own hidden corners. That is audacious. It is probably false, but you can't help hoping it is true. You can't help writing in second person from time to time.

Lately, you've had another reason to write in second person. You have been playing with gender, trying to find ways to write erotica that feels deep and intimate but affords privacy to the details of the body. The asshole is helpful when you write this way—everyone has one. It is terribly intimate and sensual, but it manages this while being universal, egalitarian. For some reason, when you write in first person avoiding gender, your work reads to you as feminine still. It is that "you" voice—the voice of one part of yourself talking to another, as you said before—that helps you escape the shape and role you have been given. When you talk to yourself, you say "you," and there is something genderless about that. Second person writing has been a powerful tool for this exploration.

You should admit that sometimes you cheat when you write in second person. In those cases, you are really writing in first person, but you've set it up a bit like a script. The first person narrator is talking to someone, and calling that someone "you." You have a couple stories like this that are coming out soon, and they were interesting writing exercises, but you think now that they don't have the same weird intensity of the true second person.

The true second person is a performance of the division of self. You are not really a single entity—no one is. Most of the time, you go through life pretending that you are unified when you are so far from being so. You suffer conflicting desires, foggy memories, likes and dislikes that don't make sense together. Sometimes it feels as if you are multiple souls riding one body. Still, most of the time, you say "I," as if you are coherent.

The second person at its best is an admission of the fundamental incoherence of being. You admit that you talk to yourself, but you also admit that you are fragmented. You beg others to join you with a sort of desperation that can be mistaken for arrogance. This is too heady a mix for most stories, but there are some that demand it.

As a writer, the great fear is always rejection, lack of understanding. You go out of your way to put words to how you see and feel things, and then you quake, worrying that others will tell you the world isn't like that at all. Second person doubles down on all this. You risk more, but maybe you tell a little more of the truth. When this private voice speaks in your head, it seems essential and authoritative. Sometimes, you think it is the voice of your real self, something deeper and more honest than the being that uses "I."

Impressions of Hands

I don't remember faces well, but I remember hands. When I'm speaking to a person, I often keep my gaze a little low, fixed on hands rather than eyes. For many significant meetings in my life, my primary impression is of hands.

When I met my ex-husband, we were sitting beside each other at a table. His left hand rested on the table next to his plate, and there was a large wart on one side of his thumb. As we talked and I realized I was attracted to him, I paid more and more attention to that wart. It became the center of my internal sexual questioning. I wondered what it would feel like and if there was anything bad about it entering my body.

I have always been attracted to people with long, delicate fingers, skillfull fingers. I spent countless hours watching people play guitar, and, later in my life, watching people hack computer hardware. The steady sureness of familiarity turns me on—someone who can position a piece of fabric under a sewing machine just so or precisely administer a dot of solder.

With men, there is something sexy to me about certain sorts of hair on the hands. I like when the arm hair is thick and impinges onto the back of the hand. I also like tufts of hair on the backs of the fingers.

With women, I am fascinated by fingernail choices (I would also be for men, probably, if there was more variety there). I notice the remnants of a sea-green polish and can tell the difference between tip wear and something that's been picked at methodically. I can often distinguish a DIY manicure from a salon manicure, decals from paint, and treatments such as shellac from traditional polish. The other day, I was stunned into extreme arousal by the sight of a woman's long, slim dark hands accented with gothy deep plum nail polish.

On both sexes, I love calluses and scars. I like to know the stories behind them or just to feel them. I also love seeing signs of work on hands–the incredibly stubborn grease that clings to a mechanic's hands, for example.

There are also the smells. It's sexy to catch the iron-tipped aromas of machines. I also enjoy a cook's hands, often wreathed with remnants of garlic, onion, and oils.

I'm not crazy about lotion. Living in New England as I now do, it's an occasional necessity, but I try to use unscented, fast-absorbing varieties. The lingering scent of lotion often strikes me as overbearing and it creates a slimy, too-soft sensation on the skin. I've been very put off in the past by hands that felt too soft to me. I enjoy the sensations of the sort of hand massage that comes with a nice manicure, but I always want to get the lotion off afterwards as soon as I can. It's always seemed like a cruel irony to me that nail techs' hands are often deeply affected by the chemicals they work with so that their skin is overdosed on lotion and their polish melted by contact with remover.

In moments of attraction, I often grow obsessed with the positioning of hands. They can be so close together that they brush accidentally when walking side by side, and yet the distance between that and taking a person's hand can seem like an immense cavern. The tentative hook of pinky finger around pinky finger can take my breath away, hit me solidly in the gut with disproportionate force. There is the deep awareness of the aura of heat coming off the hands, which sometimes creates a reactive frisson when one hand is in another's proximity. Sometimes, it's different. Sometimes, it's like there's no distance or barrier at all. When I met my current husband, I walked up to him in a club and put my hand on his shoulder as if I had every right to do so. I remember the breathlessness of that night, the way I couldn't get over how bold our hands were being and how it seemed as if there was nothing stopping them.

When I'm with an old lover or an interesting friend who can't become a lover, what will often make me sad is the way our hands must behave, the way that I must keep my hands to myself and not give in to the urge to close the gaps between us. And for so many of the romantic near-misses in my life, I was left with the memory of hands to comfort myself. There was the girl who invited me to her house and took my hand and explained that she had struggled with herself and questioned but she just didn't think she was interested in women that way. There was the boy whose hand I held at a party in an innocent fugue, but for some reason neither of us made any further moves.

I tend to think about sexual possibilities very frequently, and sometimes I walk through the world with a weird sense of freedom, realizing that I could take anyone's hand if I wanted to see what would happen next.

I don't. I've written this romantic meditation, but I'm usually reluctant to touch people I don't know. I am the person who downgrades hugs to handshakes, or doesn't step in close and satisfies myself with a wave. If I end up holding someone's hand in a supposedly innocuous way (in a group prayer, for example) I'm often consumed by my awareness of that person's body. The jolt I feel when I brush hands with someone else is too intimate for casual contact.