I decided to challenge myself to write “cuddle erotica.” This is what I came up with:

It’s easy to seduce me with kisses… The Right Look… Words of desire whispered into my ears… But you have the right touch, and your cuddles are as effective now as when I first succumbed to them long ago.

When you hug me, my heart doesn’t race; I don’t feel my body trembling with desire; I don’t feel fire or electricity flickering across my skin. I have felt these sensations before with others. But you are not seducing me with that aching trembling flash cotton of desire. You are seducing me with the impossibly sexy comfort of the long steady burn.

From the moment I first let you really touch me, your flesh confidently informed me that our bodies belong together. Though my brain futilely resisted it, your body kindly, but insistently, told me of the corporeal certainty of me it already possessed. Your simple embrace embodied the very idea of carnal knowledge, as if your body had already had a conversation with mine about what I longed for. Even with all our clothes on, laying together, I know now that my flesh wondered suspiciously if you were molding yourself to me, or if you really were so well molded to me that no adjustments were necessary.

Your hugs are a paradox of feeling: firm, but gentle; possessive, but open; desiring, but not insistent; loving, but a little nervous. Ironically, I know that hugging me does not arouse you as it arouses me, and yet I feel your desire down deep in my bones when you embrace me. Whether clothed or naked, when you hold me, in that moment, even if just for a moment, I am yours. Everything else holds still so that I can marvel again at the way you know exactly the way I like to be touched. Yet in my heart, I know that it is much more than just my skin that you are touching so thoroughly. You hold me. You hold… me.

At first I worried that you merely tolerated me twining around you in my habitual sinuous fashion. You gently mocked my perpetual need for constant physical contact. But then I saw you energized from it–a glow in your eyes from sharing space with me. Holding your hand is strangely intimate because it feels like you share your entire body with me when you do. Putting my arm around your fully clothed waist in public feels queerly like an excessive display of affection, as though we are actually standing naked with our entire bodies pressing in the middle of the street. I worry that you will feel over-exposed from these simple caresses, and that you will become tired of my curious, fascinated, and revealing touch. But every time I am afraid that I have outstayed my welcome, and think that surely I must have exhausted your patience with my clinging, you literally pull me back to you. You don’t have to force me to stay, of course. I want to; but I also want to be pulled. I feel captured; but I also feel captivated.

With my arms around you, alternately pillowing my head on your chest, and pillowing your head on mine, I am aware of the simple fact of our bodies. Not only that we have bodies, but that we have bodies. I feel how effortlessly our bodies occupy that space together, in spite of how much our brains fret. My wrist can share your back, your thigh can share my thigh, my knee can share your hip. Our bodies intuitively know and understand a shared language of skin, and their fluent communication would take my breath away if I weren’t so busy being relaxed by it. That sentence of skin to skin creates an entire story that I long to hear whispered and shouted again and again.

Ironically, of course, it is perpetually arousing to be so relaxed. Our lust is cozy because it is so easy, a simple fact of the universe of our mutual space. Your body cleverly charms me into letting down all of my guards, and leads me on with the tantalizing whisper, “you get this from a hug… What could you get from a fuck?”