To All The Boys I've Loved Before

BONUS: 1.5 Owen Walters

OWEN WALTERS

Ever since Ava was young and of age to understand what sexual relations between two people were she had been obsessed with the subject. She could remember as a young child covering her eyes during scenes her mother and grandma Grace claimed as inappropriate only to peak through the slits between each finger, basking in the sight of two making love on screen before her.

If it hadn't been for romance films including Titanic, Romeo and Juliet, and raunchy films like American Pie (she could thank her cousins for that one), sexual intercourse would have been absentminded from Ava at age ten. But young Ava had watched the films and witnessed the scenes unravel before her of man brushing his thumbs across a woman's cheek, only to press his lips upon hers while sliding her sleeve down her shoulder. Her mind had then, begun to wander and curiosity began to broaden her horizons.

She looked to other televisions shows such as Laguna Beach and The O.C while reading young adult novels at the local library and online – websites and blogs where people could share their own works.

All the stories she read and romance films she watched all related in one special way – the idealization of sex and love. In order to have sex, one must love another then give their body to one as they would mold their love into a whole item.

Sex and love, love and sex.

Were the two the same? Absolutely not, but to Ava Grace they were one in the same, and she fell in love with the fantasy of what it would be like to have her skin pressed upon a boy's nude frame, to have his fingers dance upon her skin, to have him kiss her into a hypnotizing horizon. The idea she obtained of boy meets girl, girl and boy fall in love, boy and girl express their love through sex, is how Ava expected – perceived – with every relationship she held when the time came.

However, what novels and films forgot to portray was that not every boy and girl fall helplessly in love and not every couple has to be in love to have sex. Sex was just sex, and love was something more; but it was possible for both to come in separate packages, not as one item.

Ava often, always, mistook sex for love.

But it was the harsh reality of sex and love at age eighteen that tore at Ava's skin, that wiped her memory of what sex and love could really define. If it was one thing Ava Grace wished she had known, read in her books or watched on television, was that sex wasn't always mutual between two genders.

No, it was possible, and unfortunately the saddened truth, that sex could not always be consensual. Unlike her idea of sex, giving her body to a man she loved; her body could be taken within a blink of an eye, to a man she didn't know who misread radiation of love and tossed her once she woke, only to leave her marks of brown dazzled across her olive skin and stained streaks of red upon her thighs.

***

Growing up with her birthday late in the year, Ava had been known as the baby of her group. While she blew candles of her eighteenth birthday, her best friends were turning twenty and friends were hitting twenty-one. They would all go out together, pre-gaming at home where Ava and her best friends that were under legal age of alcohol consumption could drink just enough of alcohol to get a decent buzz that would last the night while they would go out to restaurant bar and grills.

It had been a nightly weekend routine that Ava would take as many shots and chug as many beers at her best friends' house as she could so when her older friends partied, she too, would be on somewhat of an intoxicated level as they were.

Peeking adulthood, Ava explored different drinks and toxins – mixing beer and liquor while occasionally smoking a blunt of marijuana or two; yet she failed to take notice of her limit. Rather than stopping once her buzz hit her head full force and blurred her vision while warming the tips of her toes and sending needles through her thin frame, Ava continued to lather herself in alcohol until she eventually would black out.