Bulwer-Lytton inspiration strikes again

I've just sent a reprehensible sentence to the long-suffering keepers of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. I'll inflict it on you here as well:

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For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity's affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss--a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity's mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world's thirstiest gerbil.
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Romantic, yeah?

I originally thought of the gerbil simile while nursing the baby. Though you could write a humorous sentence comparing breastfeeding to pet-rodent water-bottle-feeding, the comparison is slightly too apt to cross the line into Bulwer-Lytton territory. After all, they're both descriptions of drinking something, with a small, hungry mammal as agent. But applying the simile to romance, where everything is supposed to be sensual and tantalizing, catapulted it into badness. And if a sentence of mine wins a place in the final round of that fiction contest, it will be my proudest moment in publishing yet.

I admit it would be kind of fun to write an entire romance novel (or at least novella) in that fashion, actually. Wodehouse would approve.