How to Write a Good Sex Scene
Author Yulin Kuang explains how she gives readers of her novel How to End a Love Story “that pulse-pounding, dry-mouth, flushed feeling.”
Let’s keep Freak Week going! Join the Cut for our first-ever theme-week pop-up event, a one-night-only book club for smut and romance fans at Brooklyn bookstore the Ripped Bodice on Sunday, June 30. More info and tickets here.
Yulin Kuang knows how to write a sex scene. Her debut novel, How to End a Love Story, tracks the relationship between Helen and Grant, two writers in Los Angeles who find themselves working together more than a decade after a tragic accident in their teenage years. Kuang does not shy away from sex scenes, and she doesn’t fade to black right as things start to get hot; she takes readers through to the sweaty, sticky end.
“I feel, especially for millennials, we got a lot of these very toxic ideas about sex kind of baked into us,” Kuang recently told me over Zoom. She was born in China and moved to Kansas when she was 3, which she describes as “the buckle of the Bible Belt during peak purity culture.” She also attended Catholic school in New Jersey for a year when she was 9, where sex was taught as something that could get you pregnant and ruin your life. “The book has been a way of healing that,” she said. Lines like, “He’s still sliding into her, the slickness of her heat making him surge forward faster now” and “She bites her lip to stop from groaning at the delicious friction of his tongue and lace” are woven throughout the novel in several particularly hot scenes.
In addition to being a novelist, Kuang is a successful screenwriter and director. She’s currently adapting the Emily Henry books People We Meet on Vacation and Beach Read for the screen and is directing the latter. Between writing her own books, adapting other people’s, and being an avid reader herself, Kuang is extremely well versed in what makes sex on the page steamy and what makes it cringe. Below, she walks us through her process for writing one of How to End a Love Story’s sexiest scenes (which you can find on pages 226 to 231).
Grant leans back, his jaw tensing, his breath coming out in sharp, ragged pants.
Helen is most sensitive on the soft spots of her inner thighs, knees, and ankles, and he relishes in the knowledge of the discovery. He keeps drawing a slow circle around her ankle bone, unwilling to break contact completely—he feels like he’s just started a new favorite book and he can’t put it down or he’ll lose his place.
“I don’t think you realize,” he says slowly, “how often I’ve imagined this.”
His eyes rake slowly down her body; he can see the rise and fall of her rib cage.
“How often I’ve come into my own hand at the thought of you on this table,” he murmurs, and watches her eyes flare with heat.
Grant pulls his shirt off then and it drops in a heap on the ground.
“Do you ever touch yourself, Helen?”
She watches his hands moving toward his belt with such intense concentration, he can almost feel the heat of her gaze on his knuckles. She nods slowly.
In a few short movements, he unbuckles his belt and shoves his free hand—the hand that isn’t still drawing slow circles on her inner ankle—down his pants. He squeezes himself and lets out a shaky breath. His cock surges against his own hand, as if to remind him there’s a warmer, sweeter place for it right in front of him.
“Take off your bra,” he says, “and cup your breasts for me.”
She watches him as she takes the bra off, finally, finally revealing pebbling brown nipples and peaked globes that make his mouth suddenly water like a man starved. Her hands move up to cup them obediently, her eyes flitting from his eyes to his hand working slowly, rhythmically below his belt.
“Pinch your nipples,” he says, and is gratified to hear her gasp as she complies. She closes her eyes to the sensation as her head falls back, but he squeezes her ankle. “No, don’t close your eyes. I want you here with me.”
Helen opens her eyes then, her lips falling open in a pornographic pout.
“They’re so pretty, I want to lick them while you come,” he says, giving himself a harder tug.
She lets out the softest whimper, and he has to force himself to stay in his seat and ignore the all-consuming desire to dive forward.
“Do you ever think about me when you touch yourself?” he asks.
Helen exhales and nods.
“Show me,” he demands.
One hand drifts down her body, and she slides a flat palm against the front of that maddeningly enticing triangle of black fabric. She hooks a thumb against the elastic, while her other hand continues to work her breasts.
“I thought about you like this,” she says. “Sitting in your chair. Watching me.”
She squirms against her own hand, her mouth forming a perfect O at the sensation, and he can tell she’s close from the glaze of her eyes, the unselfconscious way she rocks against the table.
He drops a quick kiss to the inside of her knee, his hands flexing around her ankle and his cock at the same time. He has to slow down, he knows, but he can’t resist a final tug before he stands up between her legs. His pants fall to his ankles, and he thinks it must be very undignified but can’t be fucked to care when he can feel the heat radiating from her perfect pussy through the fabric.
“Helen, I think you’re going to make yourself come for me now,” he whispers into her ear, his fingers gripping the sides of her thighs. “And I’m gonna lick your nipples till you beg for me.”
She whimpers then, as he presses the hot flat of his tongue against one peaked brown nipple. He licks her like ice cream—slow, dragging, savoring the taste of her.
“I …” she pants, still writhing against her own hand, and it’s the hottest thing he’s ever witnessed. She lets out a tortured sob. “Please, Grant.”
“Please, Grant what,” he murmurs against her breast.
“The other one now,” she breathes, and he complies.
“I’ll give you anything you want, sweetheart,” he murmurs. “You just have to ask.”
She whimpers again, and he suckles her areola into his mouth, scraping his teeth gently against the nipple. She gasps then, and he feels her grind against her own hand once, twice, and her other hand flies up blindly to grip his hair as she comes apart on the table. He feels her shuddering against his tongue, under the iron grip of his hands at her thighs, and she lets out a single tortured groan before her breaths turn to shallow pants.
Her hands pull at his hair and urge him up until she’s kissing him desperately, as desperately as he feels like he’s drowning in her.
“I love your body,” he says, between bruising kisses. “I’m so fucking lucky to be here.”
She reaches down between them, slipping into his boxer briefs and holy fuck her hand is on his cock.
“I want to feel you,” she murmurs into his mouth. “Please.”
A strangled groan escapes his throat as she runs a thumb across his weeping head and squeezes his shaft.
“I have to—” He pulls away from her, thinking of the condom in his wallet, somewhere on the ground.
“I have an IUD,” she says suddenly. “I … please, Grant, I need to feel you.”
He gasps as she tugs him free of his boxer briefs, and tries to clear the pounding in his brain long enough to think. I have an IUD. I need to feel you.
“I had a physical at the end of last year,” he pants. “I haven’t been with anyone since—since—”
He can’t seem to finish the thought, because her nails are raking softly against his balls as she pulls gently against them.
“Fuck,” he says instead.
“Yes,” she says, and lifts off the table slightly to slide off her underwear. He looks down, slightly stunned, and watches as she guides the head of his cock against her folds. “Just—slow.”
He grits his teeth at the feeling of her taking him in, the tight heat enveloping him in slow, sliding millimeters. I’m fucked, he thinks, as he looks up to see her gasping at the sensation of him pushing into her. I’m going to need this forever.
Helen stares at Grant’s face, thinking through the fog, so this is what you look like when you do this.
His jaw is tense from concentration, and impossibly, he’s still sliding into her, the slickness of her heat making him surge forward faster now.
“Oh,” she gasps, as she squeezes involuntarily around him. He groans, as if pained, then jerks and tilts his hips, and suddenly she’s filled to the hilt by Grant. She gasps at the sensation of him inside of her, foreign yet growing more and more familiar—unforgettable—by the second.
His breath expels hotly by her temple, and his hands grip the sides of her hips as she rocks experimentally—once, twice— into him. He drops a restrained kiss on her lips and rests his forehead against hers, his eyes closed in concentration, and she thinks suddenly of how unfairly beautiful he is.
“Mm.” He exhales, and she becomes aware of him slowly pressing her into him, then easing off, then repeating. They both look down at the point where their bodies are joining and rejoining—her breath catches at how primal it looks.
“I … I can’t believe you’re fucking me on this table,” she says, and he lets out a short gust of laughter.
“I can,” he says. “I’ve thought about it so many times, it feels like I was remembering this.”
He runs a thumb down past her peaked nipple and slides himself out a little farther this time, before surging back into her.
“You feel so fucking good,” he exhales into her ear. “How dare you.”
She lets out a throaty laugh that turns into a gasp as he slams into her again.
“Grant,” she pants needily into his ear. “I think I’m gonna come again.”
His thumb slips between them, pinching her clit insistently, unrelenting even as she whimpers. She gasps, arching into him, and suddenly white-hot stars explode in her vision. He groans as she feels the pulsing wave of pleasure sweep over her body, rocking through her, and she’s forgotten to be quiet as she releases her orgasm in racked sobs.
Dimly, she becomes aware of him lowering her back onto the table, and she watches him with lazy fascination as he runs a thumb from her lips down her sternum. She bites her lip as he pulls back, then slams into her, the cold table rocking beneath her, then he pulls back again.
She reaches a hand up, and he captures her hand and kisses the inside of her wrist—a surprisingly tender gesture that catches her by surprise. He slides into her once, twice—she stares with wonder at the sweat on his brow—then he jerks out of her with a groan and she feels a hot stream of his come land in spurts across her stomach.
He drops his head to her neck and exhales in slow, ragged breaths as he comes back into his body. He kisses her shoulder, and laughs in a low, raspy way that makes her belly feel tight with some kind of unfamiliar wanting.
“Let’s do this every weekend,” he says into her shoulder, and she laughs.
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