No. 10: 🛼🎱🍒

You are a virgin, shaken and stirred. The subtle world can sense it, the potency of your desire, the innocence of your tease, the pulse of your blood raced raw with need.

You’ve still never kissed a man but for scene partners. Your current scene partner is a 21-year-old boy named Jon, bright as day inside and out. You play lovers but are only good chums in real life. When your storyline reads that you take your relationship from crush-at-the-roller-rink to secret-girlfriend-in-his-parents’-basement, making out under a pool table in the darkness of night, you become acutely aware of the reaction your body has to his. It’s not like with other love interests when you both stayed vertical. Horizontal with Jon, a new realm of wonder is provoked.

It’s not love, nor even a crush. It’s chemistry. You observe your body’s responses to Jon’s with a detached fascination—how interesting, you think, that goosebumps appear with the brush of fingertips, that heartbeats quicken with entwining of limbs, that breath alters with the gliding of lips. How funny that pelvises know what to do without ever having done.

It’s not cheating, you pray to your future husband.
It’s my job.

Your job requires the closeness of Jon’s stubble to leave a rash on your face he feels terrible for. Your job requires Jon’s hands on your bra straps and his chest against yours, you on top. Your job requires breath mint after breath mint for nearly 12 straight hours of kissing. Your job is to convince the audience the lust you are feeling is real. Your body doesn’t know the difference.

And so your pheromones reek of fertility. You go home from work that night not in love with Jon, but dizzy-drunk-struck by a primal and unfilled need you carry in your hips across Melrose Avenue the next day. Eyes catch, whistles pucker, lips bite. They can smell it on you from five blocks away, the fruition of a ripe young girl. A man left his scent on you and suddenly other men know: You are mate-able. Aroused. Hungry.

Don’t awaken love until it so desires, you were charged, O daughter of Jerusalem. What if desire awakened love first?

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Alice in Hollywoodland is a memoirette series started on Instagram by Alice Greczyn, written with creative liberties such as changed names and timeline forgetfulness, alternately thought of as Los Angeles & Me: Two Decades in the City of Angels. All rights reserved by Alice Greczyn.

NOTE: Special thanks to @JonFoster for setting the highest of bars for every future love interest. Your respect, consideration, and talent always made work seem more like play. Thank you for such a high standard of professionalism in art. 🙏🏽