For Adults Only

by Melissa Bell

This past week, I did something I’ve never done before. Something I never thought I’d have the guts to do. It was really scary, and I drank more wine than I probably should have, and the minute I did what I did, I felt a little like I might have to go throw up. But there was no turning back. The deed was done.

I wrote a piece of erotica and sent it out.

There. I said it.

A few years ago, during National Novel Writing Month, I decided to write a romance. I figured it would be fun. And it was. Incredible fun. Until I got to the sexy bits. Then things got challenging. How far was I willing to let these guys go? And why was I feeling so uncomfortable and hideously self-conscious with my writing all of a sudden?

Flashback to the summer of…well, a long time ago. I was fourteen. My girlfriend, Nancy K., and I had huge crushes on The Hardy Boys. As in the TV characters (we weren’t interested in the books; those were for guys). Nancy swooned over Shaun Cassidy. I was smitten with Parker Stevenson. We spent hours dissecting each television episode, critiquing the stars’ wardrobes, their hairstyles, and sneering with green-eyed envy at the female guest stars who were lucky enough to actually get to stand next to our beloved idols.

We would spend hours together at each other’s houses and on the telephone creating fantasy scenarios involving our celebrity heroes. “Can you imagine if there was a contest to fly to Hollywood and we won and we were walking down the street and we ran into Parker and Shaun?” Or “What if they had to film an episode in Toronto at the Royal Ontario Museum or something, and we were walking down the street and we ran into Parker and Shaun?”

And then one night, during a giggly sleepover, Nancy did something I had never thought anyone could or would do. She put pen to paper and hastily wrote a story about Shaun and Parker and herself and me. I can’t recall what ridiculously contrived circumstances she had invented that threw us all together in that story, but I do remember it was a fun read. Nancy, at fourteen, was a good writer. And such was my introduction to “fan fiction” – I had no idea at the time that such a thing actually had a name, or that anyone else ever did this kind of stuff. I was immediately inspired to join in the fun, and over the next couple of months, Nancy and I wrote pages and pages of scandalously purple prose, our amateur scribbling becoming more and more detailed and “torrid” as our imagined relationships with the young detective duo grew into marriage proposals and families and buying houses in Beverly Hills and attending the Oscars. We knew no shame.

Until the day Nancy’s mother discovered what we’d been up to. And she didn’t like it one bit. I don’t know how Mrs. K. found the notebooks that Nancy and I had been swapping back and forth, or really what was contained within our writing that she found so objectionable – other than what we’d been taught in ninth grade health classes, we were completely uninitiated in anything even closely resembling sex.

But Nancy and I had gotten pretty good at describing passionate kisses, deep longing looks, tender moments of running our fingers through the blow-dried hair-dos of our objects of affection, and whispering sweet nothings of teenage desire into the ears of Shaun and Parker as we watched the sun set on Malibu Beach from the terraces of our fantasy mansions. Mrs. K. phoned my mother who, concerned with my reputation among my friends’ parents, suggested that it was probably best that Nancy and I should immediately stop what we were doing. I was mortified that our “secret” was out. I was also terrifically embarrassed, humiliated, and wracked with shame.

Nancy and I didn’t see much of each other after that. We didn’t know it when were creating our own little fictional world involving a pair of Tiger Beat cover boys, but we’d been “bad girls.”

So I guess it’s no real wonder that, decades later, when I decided to bring a couple of consenting adult fictional characters together for some grown-up-style hanky panky, I choked. As much as I wanted to, as much as I knew a “romance” required numerous descriptive passages of sexy carrying on, I felt ridiculous. Never mind that I’d read umpteen hundreds of detailed paragraphs of lurid prose and god-knows-what over the years, I couldn’t bring myself to create it myself without a crippling sense that what I was setting out to do was somehow wrong. Thank you, Mrs. K.

But now I’m thinking that maybe, just this past week, I’ve finally turned a corner. As a total newbie to the genre that is erotica, I’m not particularly hopeful that my recently-penned submission is going to go anywhere other than directly into the editor’s trash. Or that maybe she’ll read it and think “My heavens! This Mel Bell is a walking cesspool of freakish depravity! I must leave at once and go wash out my eyes with soap!” But you know what? It doesn’t matter anymore. Writing about something doesn’t mean it actually happened. Or that I would even want it to happen. But what I do want to happen is for the Mrs. K.s of my memory to stop telling me what I should and shouldn’t be writing about. “Bad girl,” Mrs. K.? Maybe. Maybe, in your eyes, I was. Maybe I still am. But I’m not fourteen anymore. Thank god. And I can write about whatever the hell I like.