That day, our house smelled the way old houses do in July, when a certain steaminess invades the carpets and any breeze ushers in just enough of an aroma to give the air the barely noticeable tang of summer.
I find the steaminess and yearning all too obvious, but never mind.
Artfully constructed, they married a rigor worthy of a nun with the steaminess of a streetwalker.
Mr. Hamelin made the shift from elegant Classicism to Romantic steaminess easily, yet his approach to the two composers had qualities in common.
This bittersweet quartet, written in 1919, balances a melancholy mood with Romantic steaminess and, in the finale, a folksy spiritedness, but Kreisler ties those elements together thoughtfully and, for the most part, satisfyingly.
Despite tentative advances made by my first boyfriend regarding the christening of his Citroen Saxo, the prospect of doing it in a car never seemed as though it would live up to the steaminess of the famous scene from Titanic (the dogging population of the United Kingdom may beg to differ).
And the percentage of the overall audience complaining that there is too much steaminess on the screen has almost halved from 44% 10 years ago to 24% today.
She arrives - shrivelling well - buttoned into her black coat as tightly as Mary Poppins, with a set face and tight voice and just an occasional compulsive Mediterranean fling of the arm to suggest future steaminess.
By the time it was filmed a year later, with Lana Turner, the story was so embedded in the American consciousness that its title was a byword for steaminess, sexual shenanigans and social rigidity.
The soft-core steaminess of "Game of Thrones" threatens to wipe out the symbolic dimension altogether; there is no judicious fall of the curtain.
The steaminess becomes an opportunity to enjoy the cool slither of sweat trickling, vertebra by vertebra, down the length of the spine.
