5 Steamy Literary Sex Scenes

"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links."

It’s the steamiest time of the year: Our social media feeds are flooded with ads for lingerie, bodice rippers are taking their rightful place in the display windows of bookstores, and novelty candies are offering cheeky come-ons from the grocery store checkout lines (who are you calling “hot stuff”?!). But if Saltburn taught us anything—besides an, ahem, unorthodox method of drain cleaning—it’s that some things are better left to the imagination, which is why great writing may be the best way to capture great sex, giving just enough detail to enter the writer’s fantasy—and leaving space for you to fill in the rest with your own. Recently, BookTokers have been justifiably foaming at the mouth over chapter 55 in the A Court of Mist and Fury, the second book in the viral A Court of Thorns and Roses series, but we’ve gathered four other scenes that give that one a run for its money. From the sensual and romantic to the (tastefully) smutty, there is something here for every kind of reader—and lover!

Luster, by Raven Leilani (Pages 40-41)

Leilani’s electric debut was a godsend when it was released during the lockdown of 2020, in part because it made being pent-up hot. Edie and Eric meet online and soon grow mutually infatuated. Besides their first names, the two share few similarities. Edie is a 23-year-old book editor with a compulsive habit of sleeping with her coworkers. Eric is middle-aged, white, married, and newly non-monogamous. From their very first date, Edie is ready to consummate their weeks of steamy messaging (she selected her dress for the occasion specifically because it would be “easy to take off”), but unlike Mark from the art department or Vlad from the mailroom, Eric makes her wait. The tension builds, date after date, until Edie is so ready for sex that the accidental touch of a stranger on the train is enough to make her release a “scary, involuntary noise.” And then, on “day fifty-two of our excruciatingly chaste courtship,” the couple finally seals the deal in a breathless 406-word sentence that captures the whole arc of the act. While the sentence is a touch too graphic to reprint here, we can tell you that it begins with a touch so transformative that it makes Edie “consider the possibility of God as a chaotic, amorphous evil who made autoimmune disease but gave us miraculous genitals to cope” and ends with both of them “collapsing back in satiation and horror” at the occasionally freaky and consistently feverish experience they had just shared.

Our conclusion: Some things really are worth the wait!

Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston (Page 15)

Whoever said “One is the loneliest number” has clearly never read Hurston’s 1937 masterpiece. Over the course of the novel’s 219 pages, we see its heroine through a lifetime of sexual relationships, all of which expand her horizons and deepen her self-knowledge—none of which hold a candle to what blossoms (quite literally) in the book’s second chapter: Janie’s sexual relationship with herself. In her grandmother’s backyard, at 16 years old, Janie lays “stretched on her back beneath the pear tree…when the inaudible voice of it all came to her.” Hurston doesn’t articulate exactly what that voice says, but it doesn’t take much reading between the lines to know what sort of language it’s speaking; Janie—oops, I mean the tree—feels an “ecstatic shiver” moving from “root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight.” The experience leaves the young woman “limp and languid,” forever changed by the “revelation” of her own power and pleasure. If that’s not the start of a lifelong romance, we don’t know what is!

Cleanness, by Garth Greenwell (Pages 125-131)

The line “I want to kiss every inch of your body” sounds, well, like a line. But the act itself, as Greenwell tells it, is anything but cheesy. The scene begins with the novel’s unnamed narrator attempting to make his lover laugh. The two have recently returned to Bulgaria after a much-needed vacation in Italy, where—unlike at home—the gay couple could hold hands publicly and kiss freely. The transition back to living and loving in secret is understandably difficult; both men are in need of some levity. Enter: full-body kisses. The gesture may sound cutesy and quick, in the abstract, but in practice, it’s anything but: “When you imagine something like that you don’t think about how long it will take, how large a body is, how small a pair of lips.” The necessarily slow attentiveness of the act opens up “a kind of unhurriedness” in the narrator, “a weird wide patience I sank into.” He finds his lips in “places I had never touched him before, some of them, and this gave gravity to the moment, more gravity.” Humor gives way to eroticism, eroticism gives way to something else entirely. “I whispered I love you as I kissed him, and then two kisses later I whispered it again, which became a new pattern, to whisper it again and again.”

Acts of Service, by Lillian Fishman (the whole dang book)

From the first word to the last, this novel is essentially one long sex scene; erotic power pulses beneath every line, even—or especially—the ones in which everyone has their clothes on. Eve has a loving girlfriend, a killer body, a vain streak, and an appetite for trouble, so it’s not all that surprising that she decides, one night, to post her nudes to an online forum. What is surprising is the response she gets from a shy and enigmatic young woman named Olivia, who invites Eve to join her new and complicated sexual relationship with Nathan, whom Olivia has been obsessed with for years and who also happens to be her boss. What could go wrong? As the dynamic between these three lovers deepens and tangles, each will discover their own capacity both for pleasure and harm. How do you succeed at sex within the universe of this novel? Unclear. But the only real way to fail “is to know what you want and to extract it from another person.” Leaning into this spirit of discovery and surprise, this book will make you rethink everything you thought you knew about sex, envy, consent, gender, and power. Fifty Shades of Grey with a feminist backbone and a queer twist.

On Beauty by Zadie Smith (Page 396)

Often, there’s an impulse to “spice up” a marriage, an implicit assumption that for sex to be hot, it must be novel and surprising (cue the scene of the husband and wife donning disguises and pretending to meet as strangers in a hotel bar). But Smith’s On Beauty captures the true and unique magic of making love to someone you have loved for years: an eroticism built on, not in spite of, familiarity. Howard and Kiki, husband and wife, make “the same journey of so many nights over so many years” slipping easily into their well-worn roles: Kiki whispering into her husband's ear, her accent growing "thick and Southern and filthy” as “for reasons private and old she was now in character as a Hawaiian fishwife called Wakiki. The fatal thing about Wakiki was her sense of humour—she’d bring you to the edge of abandon and then say something so funny that everything fell apart. Not funny to anyone else. Funny to Howard. Funny to Kiki.” Bizarre and intimate, this is not the sort of sex you could have in a hotel bathroom, on the first date or the 50th. It’s the sort that requires years of trust and understanding, of sharing a bed and a life, of experimenting and failing and surprising yourself with what actually works for you—until you don’t crave any surprises at all.

You Might Also Like

• Watch Oprah Talk About Longevity with Dr. Peter Attia

• Why Are Americans So Bad at Getting Old?

• Yes, You Really Can Make Your Skin Cells Younger