Flashback Friday: Summer Lovin'

For those of you unfamiliar with Flashback Friday, the goal is to get you to think back to your YA experiences and remember the emotions and actions that kept your nerves in a frenzy during your teen years.  For many of us, it's been *awhile.*  Seems to me, a walk down memory lane can only help...



In honor of summer vacation, let's think back to the blistering heat of a summer romance. Were there days at the beach? Nights around a campfire? Watching scary movies under the covers?

This is an easy one for me. I never had a summer romance. Nope, I was about a hundred miles from my then-boyfriend at my dad's house.  Our only "romance" was in the form of love letters back and forth. And since I was away from my friends and my guy, I had time to write plenty of letters.  As did he, thankfully. I just loved getting those thick envelopes addressed in his scrawl, with pages and pages of wonderful nothingness. Seems like most of it was just stream-of-consciousness, but it was bliss to this lonely girl.

In the only one I remember with any clarity, he wrote a quote from the Eagles' song, Peaceful, Easy Feeling:

I like the way your sparkling earrings lay

Against your skin so brown.

And I want to sleep with you in the desert tonight, 

With a billion stars all around.

Two thoughts simultaneously surfaced in my fifteen-year-old brain. (1) Aww... how sweet and (2) Holy crap! He wants to do "it" already.  There was something electric in that raw moment of panic and power.  Of knowing I was desired, but not wanting to be desired quite so much.

Thinking on in now, it seems the panic is often missing from most YA heroines (at least in the books I've been reading).  They typically dive head-first into romance without worrying that they're going too far.  Maybe it's because the authors know they won't write sex into a YA novel?  But shouldn't the girls angst about it a little anyway?

What are your thoughts? Would YA girls be better represented to want to back off the loving just a little?  Have any steamy YA summer romances you care to share to inspire the rest of us?