Desire

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  At the YMCA he’d have known all the girls, most of them, anyway. And they’d know him, dance with him, laugh with him, but none of them would feel the way Miri had in his arms. He couldn’t explain it. He half hoped she wouldn’t be there tonight. Because he sensed he was just looking for trouble. She was young. He had to be careful. Above the neck only. And only if she wanted him to kiss her. Only then. And there she was, in that red dress, and her mother’s shoes making her three inches taller, and when it came to kissing, it turned out she was more than willing.

• From Cultish (2021)

  Obedience like Tasha’s promised to yield great rewards. Just learn the right words, and they’d be hers: “There was a mantra to attract your soul mate, one to acquire lots of money, one to look better than ever, one to give birth to a more evolved, higher-vibration generation of children,” Tasha divulges. Disobey? You’d come back in the next life on a lower vibration.

• From Cultish (2021)

  Afraid of gaining the freshman fifteen, Alyssa decided to try joining a gym. She had always struggled with body image, and she was intimidated by LA’s formidable fitness scene. So, over holiday break, when she reunited with a family member who’d recently started a new workout program, dropped a ton of weight, and beamed with the honeymoon glow of fresh muscle tone, Alyssa thought, *Damn, I have to check that out*. The new workout was called CrossFit, and there was a location right near Alyssa’s dorm. Upon returning from break, she and her boyfriend signed up for a beginners workshop. The sweaty, sculpted instructors oozed masculine enthusiasm as they introduced Alyssa to a whole new world of terminology she’d never heard before: The gym wasn’t called a gym, it was a “box.” Instructors weren’t teachers or trainers, they were “coaches.” Their workouts consisted of “functional movements.” You had your WoD (workout of the day), which might consist of snatches and clean-and-jerks. You had your BPs (bench presses), your BSs (back squats), your C2Bs (chest-to-bars), and your inevitable DOMS (delayed-onset muscle soreness). Who doesn’t love a catchy acronym? Alyssa was captivated by how tight-knit all these CrossFitters seemed—they had such a culture.

• From The Girls (2016)

  Anything could be yoga: doing the dishes, grooming the llamas. Making food for Russell. You were supposed to bliss out on it, to settle into whatever the rhythms were going to teach you. Break down the self, offer yourself up like dust to the universe. —All the books made it sound like the men forced the girls into it. That wasn’t true, not all the time. Suzanne wielded her Swinger camera like a weapon. Goading men to drop their jeans. To expose their penises, tender and naked in dark nests of hair. The men smiled shyly in the pictures, paled from the guilty flash, all hair and wet animal eyes. “ There isn’t any film in the camera,” Suzanne would say, though she had stolen a case of film from the store. The boys pretended to believe her. It was like that with lots of things. I trailed after Suzanne, after all of them. Suzanne letting me draw suns and moons on her naked back with tanning oil while Russell played an idle riff on his guitar, a coy up-and-down fragment. Helen sighing like the lovesick kid she was, Roos joining us with a drifty smile, some teenage boy I didn’t know looking at us all with grateful awe, and no one even had to speak—the silence was knit with so much. —I prepared inwardly for Russell’s advances, but it only happened after a while. Russell giving me a cryptic nod so I knew to follow him. I’d been washing windows with Suzanne in the main house—the floor littered with the crumple of newspaper and vinegar, the transistor radio going; even chores took on the delight of truancy. Suzanne singing along, talking to me with happy, fitful distraction. She looked different, those times we worked together, like she forgot herself and relaxed into the girl she was. It’s strange to remember she was just nineteen. When Russell nodded at me, I looked at her reflexively. For permission or forgiveness, either one. The ease in her face had drained into a brittle mask. Scrubbing the warped window with new concentration. She shrugged goodbye when I left, like she didn’t mind, though I could sense her watchful gaze on my back. Every time Russell nodded at me like that, my heart contracted, despite the strangeness. I was eager for our encounters, eager to cement my place among them, as if doing what Suzanne did was a way of being with her. Russell never fucked me—it was always other stuff, his fingers moving in me with a technical remove I ascribed to his purity. His aims were elevated, I told myself, unsullied by primitive concerns. “Look at yourself,” he said whenever he sensed shame or hesitance. Pointing me toward the fogged mirror in the trailer. “Look at your body. It’s not some stranger’s body,” he said evenly. When I shied away, goofing some excuse, he took me by the shoulders and pointed me back at the mirror. “It’s you,” he said. “It’s Evie.

• From The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us (2023)

  “Let’s save something for tomorrow,” she says when he tries to reach up under her sweater. In the chapters that follow, the pair engage in the familiar, gendered pas de deux, with Michael angling for more action and Katherine keeping him at bay. What makes her—and Forever —so interesting is that she’s actually enticed by the idea of sex. As their relationship unfolds, it becomes less about if for her, than when . “In the old days girls were divided into two groups—those who did and those who didn’t,” Katherine muses. “Nice girls didn’t, naturally. They were the ones boys wanted to marry.” She continues to say that just because the rules have changed, it doesn’t mean that her entire generation takes sex lightly. “It’s true that we are more open than our parents but that just means we accept sex and talk about it. It doesn’t mean we are all jumping into bed together.” Katherine isn’t jumping into bed with anyone—but in her town, teenage hanky-panky is hardly rare. Her best friend, Erica, lives on a hill, where “she’s always finding used rubbers in the street.” Erica herself is sassy, extroverted, and less sentimental about sex than Katherine is. “I’ve been thinking,” Erica tells her one day, “that it might not be a bad idea to get laid before college.” When Katherine balks because Erica doesn’t have a boyfriend, Erica is unfazed. “We look at sex differently,” she says. “I see it as a physical thing and you see it as a way of expressing love.” In the months that follow, Erica gets involved with Michael’s friend Artie: a promising high school actor who thinks he might be gay. Erica is more than happy to help him figure himself out, though he’s mostly interested in her as a formidable board game opponent. She gets frustrated with him but there’s also a sense that in the world of the book, she and Artie are doing right by each other. By giving Artie the space to understand his sexuality—a plotline that turns tragic when he tries to take his own life—Erica slows down enough to realize that she cares more about sex than she thought she did. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and have decided I don’t want to fuck just for the hell of it,” she writes in a letter to Katherine near the end of the novel. “I want it to be special.” It’s clear that Erica has come around to the right way of thinking about teenage sex. Forever makes a case for the wrong way, too. The novel opens with a shocker of a phrase: “Sybil Davison has a genius IQ and has been laid by at least six different guys.” Sybil is Erica’s cousin, who hosts the New Year’s Eve fondue party where Michael and Katherine first meet. We learn that Sybil is fat and Erica thinks she sleeps around to make up for her low self-esteem.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  For now, I wear clothes because I enjoy fashion and to get warm during colder parts of the year. But as I get older, it’s hard to keep clothing on at home, and what I do wear needs to flow and not make a big deal against my skin or it can’t stay. I also feel this way about the company I keep—that I need people around me who can adapt, have a gentle bright presence, who make me feel free, creative … and beautiful in every aspect. And even though I have this hermit nature, I get down with people and love it. If I am forced to choose labels to describe the ways I move toward people, I say I am pansexual to express who I am attracted to and/or queer for how I relate to sex and the world. Pansexual means my desire is not limited by the biological sex, gender, or gender identity of a potential lover. I would add species, just in case new hot aliens arrive in my lifetime. So far, I have been most attracted to gender-fluid beings, particularly masculine women, effeminate men, and trans men. And I am queer, in the grandest sense of the word. I buck the norms in my sexual life and in the rest of my life. For instance, while I enjoy a solid dose of masculinity in my lovers, it only intrigues me if I can top, bottom, and sideways them, and if they can see the woman and the boy in me. I have tried on monogamy, open relationships, polyamory, and solitude. Nonmonogamy tends to suit me best, even if I am occasionally focused on one lover. A recent lover shared a framework with me called relationship anarchy, which is the most precise articulation I’ve come across so far of my approach to love and sex, basing connection in trust, freedom, change, and honest communication.5 So that’s the sex and relationship landscape … now, onto the drugs! Before I share my drug history, I want to say that I believe that most drugs should be legalized and that there should be safe spaces to use them. I have been privileged and fortunate to safely move through my explorations. Those who are currently incarcerated for getting medicine to people should be released and given opportunities to actually lead in their industry. I have been an active drug user since my sophomore year of college, when I first smoked weed. I have smoked, vaped, salved, and eaten cannabis products since that fateful day and really enjoy the moderation I have been slowly growing, as well as the cultural shift toward legalization that is sweeping the United States.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  I preferred the Colonel: At least when he was cranky, he had a reason . In a testament to the power of fatigue, I managed to fall asleep quickly, convinced that the shrieking of dying monsters and Alaska’s delighted squeals upon killing them were nothing more than a pleasant sound track by which to dream. I woke up half an hour later, when she sat down on my bed, her butt against my hip. Her underwear, her jeans, the comforter, my corduroys, and my boxers between us , I thought. Five layers, and yet I felt it, the nervous warmth of touching—a pale reflection of the fireworks of one mouth on another, but a reflection nonetheless. And in the almostness of the moment, I cared at least enough. I wasn’t sure whether I liked her, and I doubted whether I could trust her, but I cared at least enough to try to find out. Her on my bed, wide green eyes staring down at me. The enduring mystery of her sly, almost smirking, smile. Five layers between us. She continued as if I hadn’t been asleep. “Jake has to study. So he doesn’t want me in Nashville. Says he can’t pay attention to musicology while staring at me. I said I would wear a burka, but he wasn’t convinced, so I’m staying here.” “I’m sorry,” I said. “Oh, don’t be. I’ll have loads to do. There’s a prank to plan. But I was thinking you should stay here, too. In fact, I have composed a list.” “A list?” She reached into her pocket and pulled out a heavily folded piece of notebook paper and began to read. “Why Pudge Should Stay at the Creek for Thanksgiving: A List, by Alaska Young. “One. Because he is a very conscientious student, Pudge has been deprived of many wonderful Culver Creek experiences, including but not limited to A. drinking wine with me in the woods, and B. getting up early on a Saturday to eat breakfast at McInedible and then driving through the greater Birmingham area smoking cigarettes and talking about how pathetically boring the greater Birmingham area is, and also C. going out late at night and lying in the dewy soccer field and reading a Kurt Vonnegut book by moonlight. “Two. Although she certainly does not excel at endeavors such as teaching the French language, Madame O’Malley makes a mean stuffing, and she invites all the students who stay on campus to Thanksgiving dinner. Which is usually just me and the South Korean exchange student, but whatever. Pudge would be welcome. “Three. I don’t really have a Three, but One and Two were awfully good.” One and Two appealed to me, certainly, but mostly I liked the idea of just her and just me on campus. “I’ll talk to my parents. Once they wake up,” I said. She coaxed me onto the couch, and we played Decapitation together until she abruptly dropped the controller. “I’m not flirting.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  I’m just tired,” she said, kicking off her flip-flops. She pulled her feet onto the foam couch, tucking them behind a cushion, and scooted up to put her head in my lap. My corduroys. My boxers. Two layers. I could feel the warmth of her cheek on my thigh. There are times when it is appropriate, even preferable, to get an erection when someone’s face is in close proximity to your penis. This was not one of those times. So I stopped thinking about the layers and the warmth, muted the TV, and focused on Decapitation. At 8:30, I turned off the game and scooted out from underneath Alaska. She turned onto her back, still asleep, the lines of my corduroy pants imprinted on her cheek. — I usually only called my parents on Sunday afternoons, so when my mom heard my voice, she instantly overreacted. “What’s wrong, Miles? Are you okay?” “I’m fine, Mom. I think—if it’s okay with you, I think I might stay here for Thanksgiving. A lot of my friends are staying”—lie—“and I have a lot of work to do”—double lie. “I had no idea how hard the classes would be, Mom”—truth. “Oh, sweetie. We miss you so much. And there’s a big Thanksgiving turkey waiting for you. And all the cranberry sauce you can eat.” I hated cranberry sauce, but for some reason my mom persisted in her lifelong belief that it was my very favorite food, even though every single Thanksgiving I politely declined to include it on my plate. “I know, Mom. I miss you guys, too. But I really want to do well here”—truth—“and plus it’s really nice to have, like, friends ”—truth. I knew that playing the friend card would sell her on the idea, and it did. So I got her blessing to stay on campus after promising to hang out with them for every minute of Christmas break (as if I had other plans). I spent the morning at the computer, flipping back and forth between my religion and English papers. There were only two weeks of classes before exams—the coming one and the one after Thanksgiving—and so far, the best personal answer I had to “What happens to people after they die?” was “Well, something. Maybe.” The Colonel came in at noon, his thick übermath book cradled in his arms. “I just saw Sara,” he said. “How’d that work out for ya?” “Bad. She said she still loved me. God, ‘I love you’ really is the gateway drug of breaking up. Saying ‘I love you’ while walking across the dorm circle inevitably leads to saying ‘I love you’ while you’re doing it. So I just bolted.” I laughed. He pulled out a notebook and sat down at his desk. “Yeah. Ha-ha. So Alaska said you’re staying here.” “Yeah. I feel a little guilty about ditching my parents, though.” “Yeah, well. If you’re staying here in hopes of making out with Alaska, I sure wish you wouldn’t.

• From The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us (2023)

  As for the old Victorian bugaboo that anything in the vagina had to be ‘stimulating,’ Dickinson said that if there was any erotic stimulus it was both ‘momentary’ and ‘negligible.’ ” Tampon use among teenagers slowly became more socially acceptable. By the time Blume was writing Forever , the vast majority of high school seniors would have at least tried them. Girls teaching each other how to insert them became a typical right of passage, Brumberg explains. During Katherine’s first pelvic exam, when the gynecologist holds a mirror between her legs to help her get acquainted with her genitals, Katherine notes that it reminds her “of the time that Erica taught me how to use tampons. I had to hold a mirror between my legs then, too, to find the right hole.” Tampons helped to temper the cultural importance of the hymen. Even with the assurance that a girl could physically remain a virgin while using internal menstrual products, the taboo of penetration started to lose its teeth. This, along with changing social mores and the rise of heavy petting in cars, all meant that by the 1970s, a girl’s virginity had a lot less to do with her eligibility for marriage. To use the parlance of the time: there were still sluts and prudes, but you didn’t need to stay a cherry to land a husband anymore. Katherine and her family come together around the topic not because she’s in danger of ruining herself, but because they care about the safety and sanctity of her first sexual experience. They want to make sure she treats the milestone with the appropriate reverence, that she acknowledges it as special. Reading Forever through today’s lens, Michael comes off as pushy, or worse. In a TikTok from 2022, a Gen Z–appearing user rants: “Michael is like a predator. This man pressures her so many times into sexual intercourse that I feel like she eventually just gave in… Michael was just so nasty.” He’s not as bad as Katherine’s former boyfriend—the one who gives her an ultimatum—but he’s still written as a “typical” horny teenage guy trying to drive their sexual exploration to the finish line as quickly as possible. After they’ve been seeing each other for a little bit over a month, they split off from a double date with Erica and Artie and start making out in Katherine’s den. When Michael tries to unbutton Katherine’s jeans, she stops him. She doesn’t want to go so far with their friends playing Monopoly in the next room. Michael says he understands but then asks for a minute to himself. “This is really rough,” he tells her. The next time they’re together, Jamie’s the only other person in the house. Katherine asks for privacy to change her clothes but Michael follows her into her bedroom.

• From The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us (2023)

  Michael—who has only had sex twice, with a girl he met on the beach in Maine—makes a show of testing out the mattress, noting that “soft mattresses are good for making love.” Katherine humors him, but then asks him to leave because she wants to take off her bra. Instead, he tells her he’ll just help her with the hook but then reaches around to cop a feel. “Please Michael… don’t,” Katherine says. Michael pushes back, but then they’re interrupted by Jamie calling from downstairs. Katherine draws a firmer line after another date. They’re fooling around in the den again and this time, Michael reaches down her pants. “I’m not ready, Michael,” she says after he tells her how much he wants her. When he points out that she seems turned on, she clarifies that she’s not “mentally ready… a person has to think… A person has to be sure.” Michael concedes that they can satisfy each other without intercourse and Katherine agrees—just not right then. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were a tease,” Michael says, before dismissing her assurance that she isn’t as “Promises… promises.” Katherine tells Michael that taking it slow “isn’t easy for [her] either,” and she means it. From her internal monologue, it’s clear that she’s genuinely engaging with the question of whether or not to have sex. After Michael accuses her of being a tease, she lies in bed that night contemplating what it would feel like to lose her virginity. “Sometimes I want to so much,” she admits. “But other times, I’m afraid.” This is how Blume carefully modulates the nice girl. As an author, she acknowledges Katherine’s very real sexual urges, but imbues her with the self-confidence, and self-control, that allow her to hold off Michael long enough to make peace with her own desires. She’s waiting for love, for one thing. The first time Michael tells her he loves her, on a ski trip to Vermont with his sister and brother-in-law, Katherine isn’t sure she wants to say it back. “I was thinking, I love you Michael . But can you really love someone you’ve seen just nineteen times in your life?” By the end of the ski weekend—and after Katherine has officially met, and touched, Ralph—she’s ready to reciprocate. She tells Michael that she loves him, too, and when she arrives back home to her parents, they ask if she and Michael are going steady. Katherine gets annoyed as her mom and dad start reminiscing about their own high school steadies and the love tokens they’d treasured at the time. Diana shares that she once wore a classmate’s class ring around her neck on a chain; Roger talks about how he gave a fellow tenth grader his ID bracelet. For Katherine, these comparisons to her own relationship are invalidating, but she stays quiet. “I didn’t tell them that with Michael and me it’s different,” she says. “That it’s not just some fifties fad, like going steady.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  Norma was seventeen, ripe and lovely. Her lips were full and red, always a little swollen-looking as if she'd just woken up, and she moved sleepily too, languidly, stretching often. When she stretched, her blouse went taut and parted slightly between the buttons, showing milky slices of belly. She had the whitest skin. Thick red hair that she pushed sleepily back from her forehead. Green eyes flecked with brown. She used lavender water, and the faint sweetness of the smell got mixed up with the warmth she gave off. Sometimes, just fooling around, thinking nothing of it, she would put her arm around my shoulder and bump me with her hip, or pull me up against her. If Norma noticed my unblinking stare she took it for granted. She never seemed surprised by it, or embarrassed. When our eyes met she smiled.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  Then, blinking and awkward, we would rouse ourselves and talk dirty about Annette. Sometimes, when The Mickey Mouse Club was over, we went up to the roof. Silver's apartment building overlooked California Avenue. Though the street was busy we chose our targets carefully. Most days we didn't throw anything at all. But now and then someone would appear who had no chance of getting past us, like the man in the Thunderbird. Thunderbirds had been out for only a year now, since '55, and because they were new and there weren't that many of them they were considered somewhat cooler than Corvettes. It was early evening. The Thunderbird was idling before a red light at the intersection, and from our perch behind the parapet we could hear the song on the radio—"Over the Mountains and across the Seas"—and hear too, just below the music, the full-throated purr of the engine. The black body glistened like obsidian. Blue smoke chugged from the twin exhausts. The top was rolled back. We could see the red leather upholstery and the blond man in the dinner jacket sitting in the driver's seat. He was young and handsome and fresh. You could almost smell the Listerine on his breath, the Mennen on his cheeks. We were looking right down at him. With the palm of his left hand he kept the beat of the song against the steering wheel. His right arm rested on the back of the empty seat beside him, which would not remain empty for long. He was on his way to pick someone up. We held no conference. One look was enough to see that he was everything we were not, his life a progress of satisfactions we had no hope of attaining in any future we could seriously propose for ourselves. The first egg hit the street beside him. The second egg hit the front fender. The third egg hit the trunk and splattered his shoulders and neck and hair. We looked down just long enough to tally the damage before pulling our heads back. A moment passed. Then a howl rose skyward. No words—just one solitary soul cry of disbelief.

• From The Girls (2016)

  I’d gone into Peter’s bedroom while Connie was showering. It reeked of what I’d later identify as masturbation, a damp rupture in the air. All his possessions suffused with a mysterious import: his low futon, a plastic bag full of ashy-looking nugs by his pillow. Manuals to become a trainee mechanic. The glass on the floor, greased with fingerprints, was half-full of stale-looking water, and there was a line of smooth river stones on the top of his dresser. A cheap copper bracelet I had seen him wear sometimes. I took in everything as if I could decode the private meaning of each object, puzzle together the interior architecture of his life. So much of desire, at that age, was a willful act. Trying so hard to slur the rough, disappointing edges of boys into the shape of someone we could love. We spoke of our desperate need for them with rote and familiar words, like we were reading lines from a play. Later I would see this: how impersonal and grasping our love was, pinging around the universe, hoping for a host to give form to our wishes.

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  "'And next to me was a man with dark, curly hair—quite like yours, Yale, although his face was longer—and as he sat there, he made himself a crown of paper clips. Linked them in a circle and put it on his head. He sat there like it wasn't the least bit unusual, the sun glinting off him. I wanted to paint him, that was my first thought, but the next instant I was smitten. I'd never understood it before, how artists fall for their muses. I thought it was just a bunch of men who couldn't keep it in their pants. But there was something about the need to paint him and the need to possess him—they were the same impulse. I don't know if that makes sense, but there it was.' … 'He smelled right, like a dark closet. So much of sex is in the nose. I do believe that.'"

• From Hot Daddies: Gay Erotic Fiction (2011)

  “We’ll gut him now and pack him back to camp to dry out a little.” “Uh…okay. Will he be all right tonight? You know, he won’t go bad?” “No. It’s cool enough. He’ll hold for a couple of days.” We hauled the buck away from the kill area and strung him up in a tree. After a couple of false starts, Markey slit its belly with a grimace of distaste. When that job was done, we hauled the carcass back to camp where we hung it again, washed out the cavity, and left it to dry. Then I grabbed a bar of soap, stripped, and waded into the lake. Ignoring the shock of cold water, I lathered up while Markey stood on the shore staring at me in disbelief. After all, it was November. “If I’ve learned one thing in the last ten years, it’s to keep clean,” I called. “Keeping clean is half of staying healthy. Coming in?” I watched as he undressed in the late afternoon sun, revealing a long-limbed, clean-muscled physique with unblemished skin and little body hair except for a pubic bush. Visibly embarrassed, he turned with his flank toward me, which merely silhouetted a long cock sprouting from curly hair. He rushed into the water and gasped aloud at its frigid grip. I continued lathering, well aware of black eyes studying me closely. I rinsed and repeated the process until my skin squeaked. When I tossed him the soap, he seemed frozen in place. Then he floundered frantically until he recovered the bar. As Markey scrubbed, I could tell my inspection bothered him, so I swam out into the lake. Sufficiently warmed by my exertions, I silently submerged and covered the distance to the shore underwater. When I surfaced beside him, Markey was frantically calling my name. “Right here,” I said quietly, startling him. “Damn, Daniel! I thought something happened to you. You were under for a long time.” “A fifty-yard underwater swim is mandatory for SEALS.” I laughed. “You’d be surprised how many tadpoles had to have water pumped out of their lungs after their first try.” Markey’s teeth were chattering, so I crawled out of the water, knowing he would follow. To spare him further embarrassment, I kept my eyes averted as we dried off and dressed. I did the cooking, a trade-off for him cleaning up the gear afterward. Later, as darkness was wresting supremacy from light, we sat at a campfire and sucked on long-necked bottles of beer. “How was it?” he asked out of the blue. “You know, the SEALS.” “Great! Best time of my life.” “Why’d you get out?” I swallowed the temptation to tell him the truth. “Found out there was more money to be made outside the navy for doing the same thing.” “I heard you were a soldier of fortune, but I didn’t believe it.” “Why not?” “You were so gung-ho.” “You grow out of that pretty quick.”

• From Hot Daddies: Gay Erotic Fiction (2011)

  He grinds his boot deeper into my balls until the pain is too much and I begin to cry. He chuckles as he rams his boot between my legs harder. Tears drip onto the boot in my mouth. “Good boy. Feed my boot with your tears. Now I need to feel your mouth on my leathers.” I lift my head to meet his eyes, surprised. He has never let me do that before, though I have dreamed about it. “Yes, that’s right, boy. You are going to lick your way up to the only cock that matters. Daddy’s cock. Start with my chaps. It’s your job to please Daddy with your mouth, boy. If you do, you just might get to taste Daddy’s dick tonight.” I begin to lick, savoring the feel of the buttery leather on my lips. My eyes close and I breathe in the scent of it. Daddy begins to speak in a slow deep soothing voice. “You did very well tonight, boy. You stood still for Daddy. You took everything I had. You fed Daddy right. You have earned the honor of worshipping my leathers.” My sole purpose in life is to please Daddy with my mouth. I open my mouth wider, licking intently along the leather of his chaps. My head between his calves, I writhe on the floor, intent on savoring every inch. I lick up to the knee on one and then switch legs, worshipping with luxurious strokes of my tongue. I can feel myself flying, airy. It is trancelike, and yet I’m completely focused. He groans when my mouth reaches the back of his knee, and his other leg clamps down onto my head, holding my mouth there as I continue to stroke him with my tongue. “That’s Daddy’s good boy. Use that tongue. Make Daddy happy. Your mouth feels so damn good, boy.” His leg releases me, and I continue my journey up his thighs. Muscle shifts in response to my tongue. His hand snakes down and grips my hair before stroking my head. My cheek is against his leather jock. I can smell him. I am in heaven. “Such a good boy for Daddy. Such a sweet mouth, so eager, so open for me. That’s my good boy. Get your mouth over here.” He pulls my mouth onto his jock. I almost cum, right there. His boot slides between my thighs and the heel grinds into my cock. Tears well up in my eyes. His hand again grips my hair tightly, pulling it as he drives his boot heel into my cock, harder. I whimper, and tears fall onto his jock. He grips my head, rubbing my eyes into the jock to soak up the tears.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  I took a minor sip, and as soon as I swallowed, I felt my body rejecting the stinging syrup of it. It washed back up my esophagus, but I swallowed hard, and there, yes, I did it. I was drinking on campus. So we lay in the tall grass between the soccer field and the woods, passing the bottle back and forth and tilting our heads up to sip the wince-inducing wine. As promised in the list, she brought a Kurt Vonnegut book, Cat’s Cradle , and she read aloud to me, her soft voice mingling with the frogs’ croaking and the grasshoppers landing softly around us. I did not hear her words so much as the cadence of her voice. She’d obviously read the book many times before, and so she read flawlessly and confidently, and I could hear her smile in the reading of it, and the sound of that smile made me think that maybe I would like novels better if Alaska Young read them to me. After a while, she put down the book, and I felt warm but not drunk with the bottle resting between us—my chest touching the bottle and her chest touching the bottle but us not touching each other, and then she placed her hand on my leg. Her hand just above my knee, the palm flat and soft against my jeans and her index finger making slow, lazy circles that crept toward the inside of my thigh, and with one layer between us, God I wanted her. And lying there, amid the tall, still grass and beneath the star-drunk sky, listening to the just-this-side-of-inaudible sound of her rhythmic breathing and the noisy silence of the bullfrogs, the grasshoppers, the distant cars rushing endlessly on I-65, I thought it might be a fine time to say the Three Little Words. And I steeled myself to say them as I stared up at that starriest night, convinced myself that she felt it, too, that her hand so alive and vivid against my leg was more than playful, and fuck Lara and fuck Jake because I do, Alaska Young, I do love you and what else matters but that and my lips parted to speak and before I could even begin to breathe out the words, she said, “It’s not life or death, the labyrinth.” “Um, okay. So what is it?” “Suffering,” she said. “Doing wrong and having wrong things happen to you. That’s the problem. Bolívar was talking about the pain, not about the living or dying. How do you get out of the labyrinth of suffering?” “What’s wrong?” I asked. And I felt the absence of her hand on me. “Nothing’s wrong. But there’s always suffering, Pudge. Homework or malaria or having a boyfriend who lives far away when there’s a good-looking boy lying next to you. Suffering is universal. It’s the one thing Buddhists, Christians, and Muslims are all worried about.” I turned to her. “Oh, so maybe Dr.

• From Apprenticed to Venus: My Secret Life with Anaïs Nin (2017)

  Still, she had been reluctant to try intercourse with Hugo again because he was too large and would hurt her when he pounded too hard. Fortunately, he was sympathetic, and with great tenderness they found a way to share affection that worked for both of them, returning to their pattern of the first two years of their marriage, when they were both virgins. When they went to bed, they caressed, kissed, and held each other, sometimes for an hour before Hugo would roll over and go to sleep. At twenty, this kissing and cuddling had frantically aroused her, but she had not known what for, whereas now the heartbreaking past sexual disappointments with Hugo had spoiled her appetite. Reading what she had allowed her hand to write freely, she admitted to herself that she wanted to experience lovemaking with Rupert one more time. She needed to know that despite the hysterectomy, she could still feel sexual fulfillment. Only Rupert could give her that reassurance. He would intuitively respond to her desire for him to be gentle. She needed Rupert’s lovemaking to restore her. One last time. When Rupert picked her up at LAX and brought her to the cabin, the fireplace was ready to be lit, a mattress positioned in front of it, a bottle of wine and glasses set on the hearth. She felt shy. She’d forgotten how beautiful Rupert was: his golden skin, his ardent, sensitive face lit by the now-blazing fireplace. He offered her a massage, and she placed herself in his hands. Under his touch, her skin became smooth and elastic; her body came alive as he explored its curves and muscles. Her tightly knotted nerve endings released like sea anemones unfolding. He turned her over and played his hands over her breasts, her stomach, her inner thighs. As he was entering her, he called, “Anaïs, be my wife, my beautiful wife.” She tensed with guilt, but as he continued to caress her, as he moved inside her, she lost all thought. Their bodies spoke only pleasure, only desire mounting, rising, and ringing its great cathedral bell, high and low, proclaiming all the joy in the world. From the perspective of the body, this jubilee was everything, the only truth that mattered. All the rest was a lie. Rupert ran his fingers over her skin again, bringing her down. She watched the glowing embers in the fireplace. She listened to her slow, relaxed breathing and had no regrets. Rupert had given back to her the life of the body. Now she had to give back to him his whole life, to free him for what he wanted and deserved—a wife, a child. Her lies were standing in his way. Her best hope was that after she’d told him the truth, he would allow her to remain his friend, that the love between them would not be completely destroyed.

• From Hot Daddies: Gay Erotic Fiction (2011)

  “That’s right, boy. Cry for me. Cry on my cock. That’s my good boy. That’s what Daddy needs. Your tears. Be a good boy for Daddy and cry onto his dick. Daddy’s dick is the only one that matters, isn’t that right, boy? The only dick in the world is the one you are crying on, boy. Daddy’s dick. Do you want to taste it, boy? You better lick that jock real good if you want to feel Daddy’s dick in your mouth.” I move my mouth eagerly. I breathe in, savoring the scent and taste of Daddy. My whole being becomes centered on this small piece of cowhide separating me from Daddy’s dick. It’s my job to please Daddy with my mouth. I will succeed. I ignore my dick. The only thing that matters is pleasing Daddy with my mouth. I am in the zone now. Nothing will distract me. Daddy’s hand strokes my hair. I hear his growling groans faintly as I work my mouth on his jock. My focus is so intent that I start to whimper when his hand grips my hair, pulling my head back. I blink open my eyes and as my vision clears, I see it: Daddy’s dick. “Do you want it, cub?” “Yes, Daddy. Please, Daddy. Please let me suck your cock.” “You have earned it, boy. You may suck my dick.” I eagerly move my mouth to him and take my time, licking around the head, taking it into my mouth to suckle, wiggling my tongue into the slit. I lick my way up to his balls and take them into my mouth, laving them with my tongue, sucking on them, gently running my teeth along them, breathing in the musky scent of Daddy. “You do a good job pleasing Daddy, and you just might get a reward, boy.” I lick my way along the shaft, coating it with my spit, and then I start taking Daddy into me. I moan as I thrust my lips onto him. My eyes lift to his, and I begin to take him down my throat. All I care about is sucking him, for as long as he will let me, with as much skill as I can muster. He is hitting the back of my throat, and I struggle to take him down, gagging a bit, my eyes tearing, and then he’s there—deep inside my throat, my nose in his fur. I swallow around him, rippling my throat on his cock. I could stay like this forever, my mouth locked on Daddy’s dick.

• From The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us (2023)

  Up until this point, she’s spent a lot of time around Michael’s older sister, but she hasn’t met his parents or even been to the family home. Michael describes his mom and dad as “a little stuffier” than Katherine’s, but “basically they’re good guys.” Still, she’s hesitant to come over, even though Michael assures her that his parents will be out until midnight. “We don’t have to do anything… we can just go there and talk,” Michael tells her. This time though, the charade has been dropped and Katherine isn’t even pretending to fall for it. “I think I’ve heard that before!” she jokes. Once she’s through the door, Katherine is fascinated by what she sees. The furniture downstairs is “big, heavy and dark.” She has fun inspecting Michael’s bedroom, where he displays his team pennants and trophies. She even goes through his medicine cabinet, laughing that he “use[s] more junk” than she does and has “at least six different kinds of aftershave.” They banter back and forth about it until Katherine raises the stakes. “Do you ever put it on your balls?” she asks. Michael says no, and then wonders if she would like to do it for him. Katherine accepts the challenge, then boldly inspects Ralph in the light of the bathroom. They have sex right there, though Katherine remains unsatisfied. But an hour later, they try again, this time in Michael’s bed. For the first time, he’s able to last a little longer, giving Katherine a chance to get into it. “I grabbed his backside with both hands, trying to push him deeper and deeper into me,” Katherine says. “I spread my legs as far as I could—and I raised my hips off the bed—and I moved with him, again and again and again—and at last, I came.” Katherine isn’t ashamed. Far from it—she’s celebratory. “I actually came,” she tells Michael afterward. “I’ve never felt so close to you before.” Then, “Can we do it again?” Michael says he needs to rest. They go out for hamburgers and Michael brings her home, where they sit in the den for a while. “I thought how nice it would be if we could go upstairs, to bed, together,” Katherine says. “I was hoping we’d make love again but Michael said he was kind of exhausted.” By this point, Katherine’s sexuality has been fully awakened. In the logic of the novel she’s done everything right, and her reward is getting to enjoy her intimate experiences. The next time they have sex, after Michael’s high school graduation, she doesn’t just let herself go—she actively pursues pleasure. Back in the den, Michael notes that she’s being “aggressive” as she kisses him all over his body. She straddles him and asks if it’s okay to do it “this way,” with her on top. “Any way you want,” Michael answers. Katherine describes finding the rhythm between their bodies and savoring every moment. “I couldn’t control myself anymore,” she says. “I came before he did.