When It's Love Read Online Free PDF

home life was not the only life. Kids were old enough to know that not having two parents wasn’t the end of the world. Sheila’s parents were divorced. Taylor’s father walked out on the family a few years back. Everyone had some sort of family issues. I felt like just another kid from a broken home. Of course, my family was more mysterious, but by the time I was fifteen I’d learned to accept that. My focus was not on trying to figure out why my mother seemed to hate me, or who my father was, but on friends who were old enough to drive and take me out to the mall, or a lake, or anywhere but home. Before school in the mornings, I’d tie my long yellow hair into a ponytail, line my pale blue eyes in black eyeliner, put on mascara, high shine lip gloss, slip into something that showed off my body, and wait for one of my friends to pick me up and drive me to school.
    As a teenager I did a good job of making up for all the physical contact I hadn’t had as a child. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I was a slut, but before I started going out with Jake Tennenbaum at the beginning of 12 th grade, I’d gone pretty far with a few boys from my school. I went further than the other girls I knew – or at least I was the one who admitted to going that far. I craved human touch. And I liked boys. I couldn’t help it. I just did.
    Jake and I had known each other for years, but never really talked until we were assigned as lab partners in science class. I’d always had a little crush on him, but assumed he was way out of my league. At the time Jake and I started dating he was almost 6 feet tall and, although he wasn’t yet a man, had strong wide shoulders that signaled great physical strength. By the end of the year he was 6’2”.
    Jake was one of the good guys, the kid who volunteered at our local home for the elderly, and worked as a day camp counselor during summer vacations. No one had a bad word to say about him. He was so honest that during a science test he hadn’t studied for, when I tilted my paper his way so he could copy my answers, he shook his head at me. He’d gone bowling with his friends the night before the exam instead of reviewing the biology material. Jake had made a decision not to study and he was going to live with it, not try to cheat his way out. He was noble in the way he owned up to everything.
    Jake asked me out for the first time in the middle of a squid dissection. He was doing most of the work because I swore I would throw up if I had to touch any bits of squid. He held the little scalpel in his hand pretending it was a chef’s knife and he was in the middle of preparing a fine dinner of dissected squid for me. “Would you like your squid in butter or wine sauce?” he joked. “Would you like it whole or with tentacles on the side? And would you like to know the gender of your dinner? I believe we’ve got a female here.”
    We were laughing so hard our teacher gave us a warning: one more guffaw and we’d be kicked out of class. Jake and I settled down and then very quietly he said, “If you don’t like this Lady Squid, can I take you out for a real dinner?”
    I was completely taken aback. Jake could have had any girl in school and I couldn’t fathom why he’d want me. Of course, I agreed to dinner and he took me to the only Italian place in Clarksville. It was pricey and not often frequented by high school kids. The tables were covered in white tablecloths with little red candles as centerpieces on each table. After we were seated, and before we received our menus, a waiter came over and placed a basket of fried calamari in front of us. “What’s this?” I asked as I looked up a Jake. He winked at me and burst out laughing. “I called ahead so you wouldn’t have to wait any longer for your platter of Lady Squid.”
    “I don’t know whether to laugh or throw up,” I said.
    “Go with ‘laugh’,” Jake said.
    I did.
    After that dinner, Jake quickly became my everything, which