62 pages • 2 hours read
Ana HuangTwisted Love
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 16-26Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 16 Summary
Over the phone, Alex assures his uncle that he will achieve his vengeance within a few months. After the call, Alex pulls out his burner laptop and opens his research on Liam Brooks. After Liam assaulted Ava at the gala, Alex has worked to have him fired and blacklisted. Liam is also hooked on drugs and has racked up several charges for driving under the influence, and it is only a matter of time before Liam is ruined for good. Alex gets a phone notification that opens to reveal a video of Ava and Madeline arguing beside a pool. Aware that Ava can’t swim, Alex rushes to Madeline’s house.
Chapter 17 Summary
After Stella drags Ava to a party at Madeline’s house, she finds herself trapped in a pool room with Madeline. Ava recognizes Madeline as the woman she saw Alex talking to at the gala, an incident that consumed Ava with jealousy at the time. Now, Madeline insults Ava by listing all the reasons that Ava is not Alex’s type. Madeline also reveals Alex’s darker, unconventional sexual preferences. Angered by Madeline’s attacks, Ava pushes back, stretching the truth about her and Alex’s relationship to deflate Madeline’s attack. Madeline loses her composure and pushes Ava into the pool, and Ava sinks, convinced that she is going to die.
Chapter 18 Summary
Alex arrives just as the party is ending and learns that Stella saved Ava from the pool and took her home. Alex threatens to destroy Madeline’s father’s company if she ever comes near him or Ava again. Alex finds Ava and apologizes to her on behalf of Madeline. Ava admits, “I thought I was going to die because I can’t swim and I have this stupid phobia and I am so sick of it” (134), then asks Alex to teach her how to swim.
Chapter 19 Summary
Throughout the next few weeks, Alex helps Ava to overcome her phobia of water. Ava acknowledges the shift in her relationship with Alex; she considers him to be her friend rather than just Josh’s friend and accepts that she views him in a non-platonic way. She has been having fantasies about Alex ever since her fight with Madeline. Ava finds herself to be intrigued and attracted by the thought of Alex’s unconventional sexual preferences.
Ava throws Alex a surprise birthday party at Ralph’s house. Alex is shocked by the gesture but relaxes over the course of the night. Following the party, Alex and Ava team up to wash dishes while other guests clean the house. Alex admits to enjoying the party, saying, “This was my first birthday party since my parents died” (140). He tells Ava that a business rival of his father’s hired a hitman to murder his family. (It will later be revealed that the business partner in question is Michael Chan, Ava’s father.) Ava and Alex share a heated kiss in Ralph’s kitchen, but Alex breaks it off and calls the kiss a one-time mistake.
Chapter 20 Summary
After Alex’s birthday party, Ava has been canceling their swim lessons together in an effort to avoid him. Then Alex visits Ava at her workplace, the McCann Gallery, which she takes as a sign that he misses her. She teases him, and his reaction reveals his growing feelings for her, as his narration states, “[M]y heart kicked like a damn Rockette at Radio City Music Hall. I made a mental note to discuss this with my doctor during my annual checkup” (147). Ava suggests they need space after the kissing mistake—a suggestion that Alex dislikes. He buys a $40,000 piece from the gallery, the purchase of which gives her a sizable commission, and instructs her to meet him that weekend at the Z Hotel for her next swimming lesson.
Chapter 21 Summary
Ava stands near the Z Hotel pool, attempting to calm her rising panic. She enters the pool with Alex’s help, but when she dips her head under the water, she is besieged by memories of drowning as a child. She blacks out, and Alex carries her from the pool. Ava leans into his warmth until her panic fades and bravely asks him to kiss her. Though Alex is reluctant to do so, Ava is aware of his attraction for her and continues pushing; Ava admits that she knows what he prefers during sex and that she wants the same things. Alex’s control slips, and “[i]n his place was something hungry and depraved” (155). Alex rises and tells Ava to follow him.
Chapter 22 Summary
Ava and Alex reserve the penthouse suite at the hotel. The moment is charged with tension and mutual attraction as they give in to the desires that have been building over the past several months. Their intimacy is not sweet or innocent, but rather ravenous and possessive. Afterward, Alex brushes his lips against hers. Ava reminds him, “No kissing or face-to-face contact during sex […] I thought those were your rules” (161). They are rules that he had “never once broken […] until tonight” (161), but Alex sees no reason to enforce those rules with Ava.
Chapter 23 Summary
Ava is exhausted after a long, passionate night with Alex. She feels powerful, reveling in the “[s]trength in weakness, control in submission” (162) that the night has given her. Just as she begins to drift off to sleep, she feels Alex’s arm drape over her waist. Ava sleeps through the entire night, free from night terrors “for the first time in a long time” (163).
Chapter 24 Summary
Ava and Alex spend the rest of the weekend in the Z Hotel penthouse. Ava takes pleasure in having sex with Alex, describing it as “[r]aw. Animalistic. Soul destroying in the best possible way” (164). Alex brings out the dark, depraved side of her. As the weekend ends, Ava asks Alex what they are to each other. Alex tells her that they can be whatever she wants them to be, so they decide to date. Their intimacy over the weekend, during which they give in to their deepest, darkest desires, reveals how passionate they feel about one another.
Chapter 25 Summary
Ava informs her friends of her relationship with Alex but dreads telling Josh in person. Ava visits her father, Michael, for his birthday, but their interactions are strained. She recalls her last deep conversation with Michael. In the memory, she is 14, and Michael reveals the truth of the drowning incident to her: that her mother died of an overdose, likely out of guilt after pushing Ava into the lake when she was five.
In the present moment, the day passes in awkward, stilted exchanges, and Ava analyzes her relationship with her father:
I wondered where it had gone wrong with us. My father never had issues talking and laughing with Josh. Why did he act so weird around me? And why did I act so weird around him? He was my dad, yet I’d never been able to open up to him fully (176).
The strain and anonymity between Ava and her father hints at whether they really know each other at all. However, Ava cannot shake the feeling that the problem “[is] something else. Something [she cannot] name” (176). As they eat cake, Ava looks up and catches a fearful, hateful expression cross Michael’s face as he looks at her: a moment of foreshadowing to Chapter 27, when she will eventually learn that Michael, not her mother, attempted to drown her in the lake.
Chapter 26 Summary
Ava and her friends attend Fall Fest, the annual college festival that takes place between midterm and final exams. Bridget’s bodyguard, Booth, has left on paternity leave, so his position has been taken up by Rhys Larsen, who drives Bridget crazy with his gruff overprotectiveness. He begrudgingly allows the girls to attend the festival.
Alex’s appearance at the festival surprises Ava and her friends, and this marks Ava and Alex’s first official outing as a couple, or at least that’s what Ava guesses they are. As she asserts to herself, “We went on dates, talked through the night, and had wild, explosive sex. Alex Volkov and I were a couple” (181). When Alex cuts himself on the sharp edge of a booth, Ava escorts him to the student health center to care for the wound, where the two get intimate in the bathroom. Alex confiscates her underwear and instructs her not to clean up until they get home so that Ava “knows exactly who [she] belong[s] to” (184). Alex and Ava return to her friends, and she invites him to spend Thanksgiving with her and Michael.
Chapters 16-26 Analysis
With the end of Operation Emotion, Alex and Ava need a new reason to be brought together. Thus, Huang employs the character of Madeline Hauss as an antagonistic force to spur the conflict that triggers the “damsel in distress” trope often found in romance and gives Alex and Ava a new common goal: teaching Ava to swim. The addition of a new setting, the pool, heightens the sexual tension between Ava and Alex and pushes the pair to take action on their attraction to one another.
Alex’s deliberate actions to destroy Liam’s personal life suggest the true depth of his feelings for Ava. Although he is hesitant to accept his new emotions of passion and protectiveness, Alex proves to be much more open to the darker feelings that accompany such positive emotions, the most prominent of which is his sense of anger that demands him to seek retribution for the ways in which Liam has wronged Ava. These interpersonal conflicts between Alex’s and Ava’s past relationships intensify Alex’s desire to protect Ava in ways that go far beyond his initial promise to Josh. Thus, Alex’s birthday becomes a critical moment to his continuing character development, for he finally reveals the unresolved trauma of his past to Ava, and his decision to show her his own vulnerability leads to the heated kiss that he immediately labels a mistake. This brief attempt to connect, followed by an immediate retreat, shows how much his beliefs about The Vulnerability of Intimacy damage his ability to form healthy adult relationships.
When Alex and Ava give into their sexual desires, Alex finally embraces intimacy. While there is a vulnerability in such a connection, he also finds a paradoxical strength in the ravenous and possessive quality of their first sexual encounter. The power of this connection causes Alex to break his own rules, kissing Ava and pressing his forehead to hers afterward. Alex’s decision to enter into a relationship with Ava thus illustrates that she is slowly becoming a key priority in his life. While this decision causes complications with his plans to seek revenge upon the business partner who had his family killed, Alex finds it increasingly difficult to resist his emotions.
Ava’s character development is propelled forward by Madeline’s literal push into the water, for the information that Madeline provides about Alex’s darker sexual preferences opens Ava to a new direction in her budding relationship. Accordingly, the desire she feels to embrace this aspect of sex and the power she gains from it are transformative. Additionally, the deepening emotional connection that develops between the two during the swimming lessons provokes Ava to seize what she wants.
These chapters also introduce the contrast between swimming and drowning and illustrate that Ava’s own choices dictate how she perceives her own success or failure. With Alex’s help, however, Ava’ acquisition of the literal skill of swimming also allows her to start metaphorically swimming rather than drowning in the pattern of her own life, and thus, the lessons empower her to pursue what she really wants: sex and a deeper connection with Alex. She will continue figuratively swimming forward as her relationship with Alex spurs her to make even more daring decisions on her own. In this way, having sex with Alex helps Ava find the “[s]trength in weakness, control in submission” (162). By “choosing to let go, [she had] never felt more powerful” (162), and this pattern demonstrates a vital discovery that allows her to reclaim her identity and regain control of her life. As they continue to have sex, Ava calls it “soul destroying in the best possible way” (164), further proving that the experience is transformative for her. For the first time, Ava learns that intimacy and connection are not supposed to weaken her or exacerbate her insecurities. Instead, the experience of intimacy can be healing and empowering.
In stark contrast to the successful image of swimming, moments of drowning also tend to coincide with periods of fear or regression, such as when Ava lets her past prohibit her from deciding her next move, and when her lack of confidence in her own strength results in either Josh or her friends taking over her life. While Ava finally starts swimming in this section, Alex acts as her metaphorical lifejacket. She does make progress, but eventually, she will need to learn to swim without the “lifejacket,” or else she will always be dependent on others rather than on herself.
Ava’s visit with her father, Michael, denotes an important mood shift in the narrative. Whereas the previous chapters developed a more adventurous and romantic mood, the narrative now turns dark and foreboding. Both the inability of father and daughter to connect and the ongoing strain in their relationship emphasize the lack of love that Ava feels from her family. Occurring right after an intimate weekend with Alex, the juxtaposition of this loveless scene with Michael is jarring and evokes Ava’s sense of distrust in him even if she cannot quite justify the feeling. The subtle foreshadowing when Ava wonders why her father connects with Josh more easily that with her will eventually come to fruition later in the narrative, when she learns that unlike Josh, she is not Michael’s biological offspring. Although this revelation will not occur until subsequent chapters, the mood even in this early encounter quickly turns from merely uneasy to downright ominous when Ava catches Michael staring at her like “he didn’t know [her]. Like he hated [her]. Like he feared [her]” (177).
The rapid mood shifts throughout this section of the novel illustrate the internal conflicts that both Ava and Alex feel. On one hand, they are developing a romance that feels like a beacon of hope, a light in the darkness. But on the other hand, The Lasting Effects of Childhood Trauma are closing in on them both, increasing the overall tension of the narrative as the story approaches its climax. While Alex grapples with his obsession for vengeance and his new relationship with Ava, Ava herself is making progress by slowly eradicating her phobias and developing her connection to Alex even as memories of her past threaten to upend her newfound connections.
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By Ana Huang
