Chapter Nine

1. Paragraph begins with: "I live in abject terror of that, you know."

Alexis:I'm kind of taking it as read that this is extremely relatable. I think there's no escaping the fact—and there should be no escaping the fact—that kinky sex comes with inherent risk (it's why, if we have to embrace acronym I find RACK more useful than SSC because what you're doing is unsafe by definition), but living with that is, like most things, complicated. Laurie's take is clearly that emotional vulnerability and kinky sex are analogously risky. My take on Robert is that he, ironically, couldn't deal with the vulnerability of reality: that he is human, flawed, capable of fucking up, and in a sexual dynamic where his fucking up was going to have physical consequences.

2. Paragraph begins with: "Y'know," he said softly, "that sounds like you want to be my boyfriend."

Alexis:Reading this again after however long it's been, it strikes me that, for a book which opens with someone wanking over someone else, it's a weirdly slow burn.

3. Paragraph begins with: "Nobody liked my granddad except me."

Alexis:I know this probably feels like an odd way to, err, honour the character of Toby's grandfather, but he's only on page for a single scene and I wanted to recognise him as a whole person, not just as an abstract embodiment of perfect grandfatherness. I mean in a book that is more than a little bit about time and perspective, it's kind of wild when you stop for a moment and think how much someone has lived through—how many people they've been—by the time they've got grandkids, let alone great grandkids. Like, I can't remember very clearly who I was at the age of twenty. Who am I going to be at seventy?

In any case, I think it's important that Toby's grandfather lived a messy life and made significant mistakes, especially as regards his family. But he came through for Toby, and that matters too.

4. Paragraph begins with: My voice had lost something of its careful modulation…

Alexis:I didn't want to over-focus on the dissolution of Laurie and Robert because I didn't want Laurie to be too hung up on it after, you know, six years. I think for Laurie (and he does admit this directly at some point) the problem isn't so much that he can't get over Robert as a person, so much as he doesn't know how to find the balance of sex/kink/love/partnership he had with Robert. Although, to be fair, that could partially be down to Laurie himself not feeling able to offer emotional vulnerability along with physical submission.

In terms of Robert himself, though, I tend to shy away from making individual characters "the baddie"—or, at least, if they are the baddie, I want to ensure they have an understandable POV. And I think, to me, at least Robert's POV is understandable. Like Grace says, the thought of genuinely harming someone you love—of recognising how severe your mistakes have the potential to be—is terrifying. I can understand why, in that context, Robert basically shut down and ran. I think it was wrong that he did, but I do get it.

Also, I'm getting away from the point of this annotation, which was to say I was glad for an opportunity to touch on ‘cheating' here in the sense that it means something to me—that is, as a sense of betrayal, which may or may not have anything to do with sex. And Robert is lying to himself here as much as he is lying to Laurie.

5. Paragraph begins with: I didn't want to do it, but I wanted him to make me.

Alexis:This is super tangential and super specific even for me, but I actually find the word delta—as an image applied to human bodies—absurdly sexy because of Leonard Cohen's ‘Light as the Breeze'. So I was excited to sneak it here, in a queered context, and with the power dynamics flipped.

6. Paragraph begins with: These were the rosary beads of my submission.

Alexis:Turns out, this scene might be another fish that's come out how I like it.

It's so weird coming back to the things you write so long after having written them, especially since I don't read my work once it's published. It's too easy to get neurotic about things you can no longer change, and consequently self-conscious about whatever you're doing presently.

I think, for me, what makes the, err, particular fish of a sex scene work (and this is by no means intended to be universal—it's just about me and what I like and what I try to do) is when it progresses the emotional journey of the characters (not just in the "had sex now" check box sense but in the sense of telling us something about the characters that could be told no other way) and feels unique to them. This is obviously easier to do if there's an anal hook and a lemon meringue pie involved, but I do try my best to do it even without those elements.

7. Paragraph begins with: "It's fine. Freedom is being able to say yes and no."

Alexis:I'm really glad I was able to include Grace fairly substantially as part of the secondary cast of this book (and, ideally, we'll meet her again in others). Of course, it's meant to be Laurie and Toby's story, not some kind of generalised address to the entirety of kink as a whole. But there's not a tonne of women dominants in romance, at least not in m/f. I think culturally speaking we're a lot more comfortable with dominant women in f/f, but m/f with a dominant heroine and a submissive hero runs into a lot of the same assumptions and preoccupations about power that I basically spent For Real grappling with. Only you also get to add gender into the mix. Woo.

I don't want to dig into this too much because it's way out of my lane, and would take more words than I could comfortably fit into an annotation, but I think there's this persistent stereotype of submissive men as weak and unattractive, and dominant women as cold and contemptuous. And, obviously, it's fine to be any of those things, if that's what floats your boat. The problem here is that it's perceived as the default and that it revolves around a specific flavour of male pornographic fantasy, largely centred on humiliation. To put it shortly and bluntly, we essentially have a cultural concept of female domination that "belongs" to and caters to men. Which…I mean. No wonder that's discouraging to women who might otherwise be interested in getting a hot bloke on his knees for the sake of her own pleasure.

In any case, with Grace I wanted to present someone who had found a way to live authentically and happily both as a sexually dominant woman and, you know, a person, with a long-term partner and a pretty ordinary job.

8. Paragraph begins with: "His name's Robert," I said.

Alexis:I think one of the things it's impossible not to think about, like, a lot as a writer of kissing books is the ‘what to do with the emotional nadir'. I can understand why readers get frustrated sometimes with what can feel like the inevitability of ‘and they break up at 70 percent'. Especially because being hyperaware on a meta level that two characters are going to, at some point, get into a conflict that feels irresolvable can make the conflict, when it does appear, feel inauthentic or routine.

The thing is, though, I do stand by the work performed by the emotional nadir of a genre romance: I think it's important for the couple to have a reckoning with their own fears and insecurities, and to demonstrate the long-term viability of their relationship by continuing to choose it, and fight for it, even in the midst of crisis, betrayal, misunderstanding, whatever.

I think, to me, what makes an emotional nadir challenging to suspend my disbelief through as a reader is not when it happens, or even that it happens; it's about what has preceded it, what triggers it, and how it's resolved. While I do return to the seventy percent breakup fairly regularly as a writer (though I have written books without it—A Lady for a Duke, for example, has the emotional nadir about the forty percent mark and the rest of the book is the couple overcoming it), I do try to make it specific to the book and the characters involved.

With For Real, I think I do a fair bit of, err, edging, I guess? There are repeated moments across the course of the book that could be about to trigger disaster—like the scene in Oxford, where we're not sure if Toby is going to fit in, and then not sure how Laurie is going to deal with him fitting in too well, and this one, of course. But I think it's part of the weird slow burn of the relationship that the emotional nadir gathers about them gradually and then finally catches them when Toby, for various reasons including grief, is at his lowest.

9. Paragraph begins with: I gazed at Robert, mute and pleading.

Alexis: I know I've spoken a bit already about whether Robert is a baddie or not. I mean, beyond just being someone who has behaved badly.

I think here he's genuinely oblivious. Or rather still doggedly living his own lies. Which means he keeps treating Laurie as if there's nothing, good or bad, between them. That the part of their lives they shared is so over it might as well never have happened. Because that helps him keep pretending he never fucked up. Never hurt Laurie. Was never broken by that himself.

Yikes, he was never much on my radar as a central character, but I think I might want to write Robert's book now?

10. Paragraph begins with: He couldn't have said anything worse if he'd actively tried.

Alexis:I, err, I honestly don't think this is an unreasonable concern on Laurie's part. I think we live in a world all too keen to police the identity of others, and kink is not immune to that. You can always find someone ready to tell you that you're being a dom/me wrong or judging you for not being a dom/me in exactly the way they are. If you ask me, we'd all be a lot happier if we had enough grace to believe people when they tell us who they are. Or, if we can't manage that, at least accept it's none of our fucking business.

11. Paragraph begins with: "Or"—a different voice—"he could just use something better suited…"

Alexis:I brought Dom the Dom into this scene because, having decided it wasn't fair to treat him as a symbol for shit I personally don't like, I wanted to show him in a better context. One that, essentially, proves his quality for all he isn't the right partner for Laurie.

This was the moment I knew I wanted to write him a book. Challenge some of his rigidities and give him a complicated, messy, wonderful HEA with a partner who is perfectly wrong for him.