Someone recently suggested that the character of Archer in my short story, Anytime, Anyplace was based on Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory and noooo. Sheldon is asexual for one thing. I might slash a straight character but sexualizing an asexual one seems unfair. There aren’t enough asexual characters out there for me to go around corrupting them.
But Archer does have an inspiration character, and that’s Dr. Aiden Sharp from Hide and Keep by K. Sterling. Aiden and Archer don’t have all that much in common. Aiden is a forensic psychologist on the autism spectrum while Archer is a geeky physics major, a little more awkward than most. But I loved Aiden’s scientific devotion to the art of sex and the way that Lane, a relatively macho cop, is enraptured by it. So that was what I tried to capture in my story.
Hide and Keep‘s sex scenes are phenomenal, but that’s not all there is to the story. Lane is trying to end a sex-only tawdry affair with a co-worker, and the scene where Aiden helps him do that is sweetly righteous and full of the potential that will lead to the two of them falling in love. Aiden, meanwhile, is running from a more dangerous ex.
But what really makes the story is the adorably specific way these two fall in love. Not being autistic myself, I can’t say whether Aiden’s character is an accurate depiction of autism or not, but I can say that Aiden is drawn with love and is given love, and that feels like good rep to me.