I started to write rougher sex and softer love once I realized forever is a myth.

I was reading one of my older posts tonight, which I rarely do, and it had an excerpt from my first book that I wrote about four years ago. It was a sex scene, the first time two main characters were together, and I wrote from my own experience a bit. Not wholly, but to say it didn’t have a grain or two of that would be glaringly untrue. In it, you can feel the love between the two characters and you have at least an idea that everything will turn out well for them. It was a bit shocking to read. Not the sex, the realization that I couldn’t separate sex from the shimmering idea of a rosy future attached to it.

What’s different now? Let’s just say I’ve let that shit go.

I no longer even think about the future except to acknowledge that I never want to be in a long-term relationship again. Or at least one that I think will last forever. Just writing the word forever makes me want to shrug it off like a wet fur coat. Is it possible that I will be? Maybe. But I’ll only admit it after the fact when so many years have piled up behind us that I can no longer deny it’s been just that. And no, this isn’t some angsty display of tomboy bravado, I’ve just lived long enough now to know that forever doesn’t exist, at least not for me, and that’s informed how I write about sex. How so, you ask? Because I don’t have the shiny shackles of the perfect, everlasting relationship attached to every naked moment, I can write honestly about the sometimes gritty, life-altering experience that sex sometimes is.

Ready for too much information? If you swoon like a hoop-skirted southern belle at the mere mention of an orgasm, you may want to stop reading now, but I think you won’t. Most of us are attracted to raw edges because we have similar ones we’re desperate to keep under wraps.

So let’s start with the main character in this real-life drama…She’s my age, for starters, with a centered transparency that’s a little dangerous. We were friends for years before we got physical, and because sex wasn’t a factor earlier in our relationship, we’d been emotionally naked more than a few times before she ever unbuttoned my shirt and tossed it on the floor. And this post notwithstanding, for someone as private as I am, that was a big damn deal. I didn’t always like what she said, but it was always the truth, and she lovingly called me on my shit before I even thought about believing it myself.

And it’s that authenticity that made the sex so shatteringly hot. Nothing existed except her eyes holding mine as she kept me on the edge until she was good and goddamn ready to push me past it. And I let her. For the first time in my life, I was wholly experiencing what was happening, not directing it, or thinking about what it all meant, or how I’d feel in the morning. I don’t remember choosing to let all that shit go; it may be that it just happened organically. …But a significant relationship had ended a few weeks before, and I think it’s more likely that I’d finally realized nothing mattered except the moment.

Just that one blindingly intense, life-altering, authentic moment.