What Happens After: Aftercare, in Life and in Fiction

Most erotic fiction cuts away right where things get interesting. Orgasm, a paragraph of heavy breathing, chapter break. Anyone who’s been through an intense scene knows that what comes next has its own name and a lot more weight than it usually gets: aftercare.

The term comes from BDSM and means what it says. Water, a blanket, a hug or some space, talking or not talking, depending on the person. What matters is that somebody takes responsibility for landing both people, because bodies don’t shut off after an intense scene like a lamp. There’s shaking, cold, hunger, a ridiculous thirst, a sensitivity that wasn’t there an hour ago. Nobody walks out of it like in the movies, hair intact, one perfect line ready. They walk out hunting for their phone and wondering where on earth their socks went.

What aftercare is (and why nobody walks out like in the movies)

There’s a less funny part. Sometimes the emotional crash arrives later, hours or even days, once the adrenaline and the chemistry pull back. People in the community call it drop, and plenty of couples agree on a check-in message the next day for that reason. None of this is clinical advice, but it’s worth knowing it exists, since it’s exactly what novels almost never show.

Drop: what arrives after the after

Which is where I get interested as a writer. If the scene is the pact, the aftermath is where you see what it cost. The characters no longer have the script or the roles, and what they do in those ten minutes says more about them than everything before it. Who fetches the water without being asked. Who goes quiet because they don’t know what to say. Who cracks a joke, and who doesn’t let them. That’s where you find out whether the agreed power was a real agreement or just a costume, which is one of the questions I keep circling in these stories. It’s the same question behind why «red» and not some other word: what happens when the pact gets tested.

What a character does when the script is gone

It’s also where consent stops being a box ticked beforehand. Asking «are you okay?» when there’s nothing left to gain from the answer is a kind of care you can’t fake. Nobody does it to cover themselves. I get into consent as something revisited throughout a scene in consent isn’t the opposite of heat.

A practical trick, if you write: take the last sex scene you wrote and add ten more minutes. No action, only what happens once it’s over. If the characters have nothing to say to each other and nothing to do with their hands, maybe the scene wasn’t saying as much as it seemed.

The free story on the site has a stretch like this, a short one: he brings water, checks her wrists, and they barely talk. It’s one of the parts I took most care over, and nothing happens in it. The free story on the site is Through His Eyes.

If what’s left after a scene is what interests you, what literary erotica actually is explains why it’s the test every story has to pass to make it into Say Red.