Sexual Tension Is Sexier Than Sex

One of the sexiest scenes I've ever read in a novel can be found in Free Fire, a mystery by C.J. Box. In it, Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett teams with Judy Demming, a National Park Service ranger, to investigate a killing in Yellowstone National Park.

Pickett, as usual, is away from home, which has been causing problems between him and his wife. Demming is bored with her job and her husband. The spouses are both good people, and their partners love them, but they are largely offstage while Pickett and Demming bond during their travels through the park. Their shared career frustrations, and clear respect for each other's investigative acumen, lead to a subtly crackling chemistry that neither wants to acknowledge and yet cannot deny.

In a painful, halting moment, they express unwilling vulnerability toward one another — and then mutually decide, with no small regret, that no physical lines will be crossed.

So nothing happens.

And yet, everything happens.

I remember reading the pages of that scene, and almost physically aching for these two people who do not exist. I wanted their chemistry to lead to consummation, and yet I didn't, and I found my pulse racing as Box skillfully sketched a portrait of two people who clearly hungered for one another, clearly needed one another ... and just as clearly needed to back away from one another.

Whether or not they actually had sex, I came to see, was beside the point. No sweaty grapplings or frantic poundings on the page could have compared, in person or on the page, with the exquisite emotional minuet that would have led up to it. It brought to mind something a friend once told me, something I've taken to heart and often repeated myself: What's sexy is what's implied, not what's shown.

The effectiveness of sex in literature, I've also come to see, is directly tied to the context in which it takes place. And there are an infinite number of variations on that. The best, to my mind, feature chemistry generated by character, not by looks. Getting hot for somebody good-looking in the absence of commonalities and conversational chemistry — let alone the necessary conflicts — is like mistaking an eighth-grade crush with mature love. It leads to payoffs that haven't been earned by the standards of publishable stories.

Taken another way: Think about what attracts you to someone in real life. Think about the qualities that person possesses that would lead you to want to have sex with them. Then think about the mechanics of sex in the absence of those qualities. Such as, two people who find each other physically appealing but have little in common, little reason to cross over into each other's orbits, collide over nothing more substantive than their own one-dimensional desires and can't conduct a conversation with any subtlety or subtext.

Wouldn't reading a scene like that bore you silly?

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Jim Thomsen is a news editor at the Kitsap Sun in Bremerton, Wash. He also is a partner in Proof Positive, a manuscript-editing and media-services business, and maintains Reading Kitsap, a blog about the local literary scene. He can be reached at desolationisland@gmail.com ... or found, almost 24/7, on Facebook.