a lover's reflections

 Realizing Love

by 

Ben Hannigan

He lay there spent in my arms as I traced lines across his skin. His bare flesh warm and comforting. Sprawled on my bed displaying the body I adored and the scratches, the bites that I added. My own stamp on this work of art, he could be carved in stone or cast in bronze, his body so lithe and toned. He is physically perfect to me. I run my hand over his sleeping body and each time I explore I find something new.

He reaches for me in his sleep and I’m here, pulled close as he grips me.  All I can do, all I want to do is just hold him here close to me. The way he touches me when we kiss keeps me here.  The way he holds me through the nights, the way he promises me my dreams and desires. I don’t feel I’m enough for him, but when I challenge him he doesn’t argue.  Instead, he just states what he feels for me. The passion, that drive, and that confidence he is utterly right is enough. Is enough to calm my fears and my doubts and relax knowing I'm his.

As he wakes he reaches for me, I feign sleep because I don’t want to worry him.  Don’t want to admit I stay up to watch him at peace.  He kisses me greedily and I feel myself responding.  My body betraying me in a way I can't be angry about. His kisses flutter across my throat and shoulder, his teeth grazing my neck as his hand wanders lower.  He finds me waiting and wet as I arch towards him my morning nuzzles becoming more strained and breathy.

“Baaaby,” I cry begging, “God please, please just don’t ever stop.” I raise my hips meeting him as he fills me. I’m rolling up his length pulling him close, my lips tugging him into my embrace as I begin to howl.  He is working me. How does he know my body so well after so little time? 

He’s mumbling words I never catch but I feel the intensity of the emotions so well, I don’t need to. I hear his heart race and his breath catch and I know he’s close to that edge and I’m being pulled along behind by his youthful enthusiasm. 

“Come on baby please, I wont break.” This point is always where I take the lead, pulling him close, making him see its OK to want this, to want us as I pull him in deeper. Showing him, making him feel my impending crash and wanting to drag him with me.  He gets his confidence from me here, allowing himself to draw on me to lose himself, to let go.

I pull him close locking my ankles behind his back and allow him to lose his composure as I kiss his chest. And that’s the bit I love most.  That slow hitch of breath, that growl as he fires and the world contracts into just us, just this moment. He lets go and drives me with him as he melts into my body and we kiss. The world dissolves into mumbled words of love, sighs and some small tears as the guilt hits him and I have to be strong to reassure him that it’s OK, that enjoying what I give freely doesn’t mean he is Him. I stroke his back as we cuddle in this moment, realizing I have dealt with my past better than he has.  My years an advantage here and that re-forged determination to teach him and to help him see that this is not only OK, but great.

Oh the end is here, that sweet wonderful end where I’m pulled close and just held.  Where he and I kiss softly. 

“Morning sweetheart” I mumble as I am pulled into his warmth and just allowed to drift into dreams. Secure that I am not alone, not left wanting for at least one more day.

shouldnt really post this as it's drivel about how I write

Ever wonder what the author is thinking about when writing those steamy scenes? What's the difference between pornography and erotica? What distinctions do you make in your own mind? Ben shares a little from his heart on this matter.

 

Sex is something that is always special. Sex holds a power regardless of time, of space, sex can be gentle, sex can be rough, it can hurt, it can heal. Sex is something that I write about often but I would like to think that the focus of my work isn’t sex. Sex to me is something that is both beautiful and terrifying. It opens you up as a person in ways that cannot be foreseen; opening up to a lover in a kiss bares your soul in ways that simply talking will never do. To me if a lover is to cheat, taking them back if they confessed to fucking another would be easy but sharing a slow loving passionate kiss would be far harder and I take these views about what is meaningful into my writing.

The passion, the love, the desire I believe must come from more than sex, more than the simple act of making love. My characters have in my mind an image and a personality before they have their sexuality. In the piece that I am currently writing for this blog, I tried to create not only a plausible relationship but also create characters that are real and more importantly, can draw on the emotions of a reader. The erotic for me as a writer is more about the build-up to the act than the act itself. While the act is exciting; the moments of frantic thrusting, kissing, tasting, biting and the ultimate explosion of release, the teasing passionate build-up of anticipation, the lingering longing kisses and the slow gentle stroking are the things that keep me coming back to a piece, to an author. The foreplay and the lust have to intertwine in a deeper story. Simple sex has nothing in my view, it has no substance, no draw and no interest. If we use an analogy of food, crude hypersexualised writing that is concerned with the reproductive act and nothing more is a fast food hamburger, whereas the full piece focusing on the hunt, the chase and the challenge of courtship as well as the highs and lows of two lives colliding.

Sex without a reason to me isn’t interesting so I try to create a world for my characters. I want them to feel like people. Erotica that doesn’t have that feel of realism for me is similar to porn on the screen, it doesn’t feel quite right, it feels hollow and doesn’t have the same depth to it. For some reason, it doesn’t grab my attention and hold it. For me starting at “he was inside her deep, fast, rough, the sweat dripping down his back as he moved, driving his lover down into the silk”doesn’t appeal in the same was as starting at say, “they sat opposite each other at the bar table, she rubbed her bare foot over the younger girls thigh as their hands touched gently as they moved, reaching for the bread”. That’s not to say that the sex isn’t interesting or something that I want to read about, but it I think requires building up to it.

The role of the author, I believe is to inspire and create a world that a reader can lose themselves in for as long as it takes them to read. To create a world that you can be lost in eagerly awaiting the next instalment. I draw my inspiration from conversations with other writers, friends, things I read or have seen. I start with an image and spend my time trying to put the ‘thousand words’ that image contains onto paper.