Eric Ross: Blog

I’ve been traveling lately, spending lots of hours in terminals where time stretches, boundaries blur, and strangers become stories. Airports are liminal spaces-erotic liminal spaces. Everyone’s between things—cities, lives, selves—and that tension seemed ripe for exploration.

So I wrote two stories set in the hum of airport life. Each one plays with intimacy, risk, and surprise. Each begins with an encounter. Each ends somewhere you might not expect.

Security Check

When Ethan opts out of the scanner, he’s escorted to a private screening room by a stern TSA agent with a sharp tongue and gloved hands. What follows is an inspection that’s anything but standard—and he may never pass through security the same way again.

Welcome to Denver

Mia’s flight is delayed. She’s tired, wired, and en route to a new job she’s not sure she wants. When a smoothie spill leads to a sudden, reckless connection in a discreet corner of Terminal C, she grabs hold of the moment—until reality catches up on the other side of the gate.

Two different checkpoints. Two different kinds of risk. One question in the air: what do you do when desire shows up before departure?

—Eric

Tomorrow, the streets will once again fill with voices—raised in protest, in fury, in hope. Americans will march against surveillance, against authoritarian overreach, against the creeping normalization of tyranny dressed as policy. And tonight, I’m releasing a story that was born in the heart of that same unrest.

A Riot of Lust is not just an erotic story. It’s a confrontation with you, the reader.

Set during a protest that turns violent, it follows Lena—a young woman burning with political rage—as she finds an unexpected, visceral connection with a stranger in the smoke-choked aftermath of a riot. What unfolds between them isn’t soft or romantic. It’s raw. Urgent. Dangerous. Two bodies grabbing hold of one another when the world outside is cracking open.

This story doesn’t offer neat answers. It doesn’t preach. But it does ask:

What do we cling to when the air turns toxic and the future snaps under our feet—and someone reaches for you in the dark?

In a world where your government wants your silence, your stillness, your obedience, A Riot of Lust is a reminder: claiming pleasure—raw, messy, ungoverned—isn’t just human. It’s a kind of rebellion.

If you’re marching tomorrow, stay safe. Stay defiant.

And maybe, tonight, let this story remind you that even in the darkest alleys, we still burn.

- Eric

Some days, the world conspires to trap you inside—with rain at the glass, breath fogging the panes, and nothing left to do but face what’s brewing just beneath the surface.

In Chapter 6, Pressing Closer, the storm presses in as Lira and the clockmaker edge toward a line that refuses to stay still. The antique clock waits nearby, its key pulsing with last night’s charge. But it’s not just the machinery of time that trembles—what passes between them is harder to measure, impossible to rewind.

This chapter leans into tension: the way bodies brush without quite colliding, the weight of unsaid things, the allure of pushing too far. Lira turns the key again. The past buckles. The present stutters. And something in the shop—a clock, a memory, maybe a feeling—starts ticking again when it shouldn’t.

For me, this chapter is about resistance: the kind that flares in the space between a near-kiss and a step back. The kind that makes you wonder which moment will finally tip the scale.

We’re past curiosity now. The clock remembers. But what else is it breaking?

—Eric

This chapter lives in the hum between the obvious and the unspoken. The clocks slip again, but it’s not just time that’s turning. There’s a moment here when Lira’s sketch comes back different—complete when it shouldn’t be. The dent was one thing; this is another.

I wanted this chapter to feel like a slow spiral—like their trust deepening even as their certainty frays. He can’t tell her what’s shifting in him. She doesn’t ask, not really. But the questions hum beneath every touch of the key.

“I didn’t finish this,” she says, looking at the sketch that shouldn’t be done. But it is.

This chapter is about the difference between what you remember and what you feel. About how every turn of the key writes something deeper—into wood, into skin, into the quiet that holds them.

Chapter 5: Smoke in the Gears is live.

—Eric

I think of this chapter as the moment when the quiet between them begins to fill with more than just curiosity. There’s laughter, sure—but also the first hints of something unsteady beneath it. The dent in the workbench becomes a kind of proof: not everything resets, not even the smallest things.

Lira tests him here. Tests the clocks, too. The way she says, “Old as the hills,” and the way he can’t help but smile, even as he frowns. These are the small cracks that become something larger—moments that don’t fade, no matter how many times the key turns.

Chapter 4: Held in the Hinge is live. Enjoy.

—Eric