It Felt Like Love - Eliza Hittman

Fourteen year old Lila envies the ease with which her best friend Chiara, on the cusp of her sixteenth birthday, deals with boys. Chiara has been sexually active, although she has only gone to third base with her current boyfriend, Patrick. With no experience whatsoever on the sexual front, Lila has no adult guidance with her mother having passed, and she and her father often being at odds with each other. Lila's primary exposure to sex or sexual foreplay is being the third wheel in Chiara and Patrick's outings. In her naivety, Lila believes that what she sees between Chiara and Patrick has the potential to last forever. Regardless of her total inexperience, Lila likes to portray herself as having at least gone to third base, she doing so by mimicking what she hears from Chiara and other sexually active teens. In her own mind, Lila wants to lose her virginity, despite, if she was honest with herself, being more closely emotionally mature to her twelve year old neighbor, Nate, than Chiara, Nate who would most likely be her confidante if she were to tell the truth about the issue of her sexuality. She believes the easiest candidate to be her first is Sammy, an older teen, who purportedly will sleep with anyone. As such, Lila begins to insert herself into Sammy's life, he who would not have even known who she was if she didn't do so. In doing so, Lila begins to place herself in situations where she is not emotionally mature enough to handle without being hurt in any aspect of the word.