Ummm….OK. This one really _was_ Chris Humphreys’s fault. A couple of weeks ago, a number of game (and fairly uninhibited) people kindly took part in the Late-Night Sex-Scene readings at the Historical Novel Society conference in San Diego. Owing to circumstances I claim not to remember {cough}, I’ve been Mistress of Ceremonies for this now-traditional feature of the conference _twice_.

This time around, I had a lively lineup of volunteers, including Laurel Corona’s sweetly naïve French teenagers reading pornography, Deni Dietz’s drunken-sex-on-horseback, and Maggie Anton’s hot Talmudic sex scenes (as I remarked afterward, I had no idea what I was missing, being born Catholic…).

Anyway. At some point in the proceedings, Chris writes me to say that he and Gillian Bagwell would like to team-read a scene from her book, THE DARLING STRUMPET, which he describes as “the best blow-job in literature.” This being a scene in which the Earl of Rochester instructs Nell Gwyn in the, er, art of…um, well. Yes.

“Great,” I said. “You can be the—you should excuse the expression—climax of the evening.”

So we’re all set with our stellar lineup of readers—when I’m informed that Gillian and Chris have decided that the scene would work best with an outside narrator to carry the description, while _they_ do the dialogue, and would I kindly oblige? Gillian had kindly written up the script already, so I blinked and said, “OK. Why not?”

So that’s where this came from. I don’t vouch for the quality, either of the video or the performance (though Chris and Gillian both seemed to be doing very well, from my unusual vantage point)—but fwiw, here it is!