What’s Love?

by Eve Louise Makoff


All summer Chantel and I met guys on hot sandy beaches, in the swirling flats of Santa Monica, 
and sometimes just driving Pacific Coast Highway. But that night we met you in a car full of 
salty blond guys on Main Street near the art deco condos whose front patios licked the ocean, 
and we followed you home. All summer we had sex on your shag carpet, me on top, because you 
scraped all of the skin off of your hands and legs when you rode the asphalt half a mile on 
the 10 freeway instead of your motorcycle. It didn’t matter that my car got towed or that my 
mom got mad. All summer I came to you because I was scared to leave home. I wasn’t ready to 
go to college across the country, to be out on my own. Seventeen, scared, and stupid, I needed 
my mommy who wasn’t really there. All summer you made fun of the layer of fat on my belly. 
This from the booze older sunburned guys from the beach bought from the Tex Mex place where 
they took Chantel and I to get mid-day drunk on stools over sawdust. And all summer I didn’t 
realize you were jealous, because when we heard “What’s love got to do with it?” everywhere- 
you hummed it with a smile, and I believed you every time. 


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Eve Louise Makoff is an internal medicine and palliative care physician and a writer.