The Accidental Virgin (18 page)

Oliver said, “Now that I’ve seen you up close, you look nothing like that girl.”

How could Stanley have done this? Okay, she’d humiliated him on their date. But using her likeness (especially a vastly superior likeness) and
real name
? That was just not right. Although, if he worked out his revenge this way, he might never come near her again. Or not. Should she buy a pit bull? A stun gun?

“Are you upset?” asked Oliver. “You look upset.”

“That’s just the arch of my new eyebrows,” she said. “I understand now why you thought I didn’t really exist.” Stacy was outraged. But she also felt — no delicate way to put this — aroused. Seeing a woman who was supposed to be her, reading a racy tribute to a man who was tormented by his attraction to her? Disturbing to be sure, but exciting. Smut Stacy removed her outfit, and began masturbating with a dildo.

“Turn it off,” she said.

Oliver shut down her computer. After, he said, “I’m sorry about this. You see why I’ve been nervous. I thought you were a fantasy come to life. Except that woman isn’t you. It’s better that she’s not you.”

“Except you’re the only one who knows that!” she said. How many men had seen this? she wondered. Anyone she knew? She would string up Stanley by the balls. She would chop off his dick. Just as soon as she emerged from ten years under a rock.

“I’m glad I do,” said Oliver. “I could never fall in love with a fantasy.”

Love, she thought, was the fantasy. The woman was irrelevant. “You weren’t falling in love with me.”

“Not when I thought she was you,” he said, cocking his head at the computer. “You’re even more beautiful now that I haven’t seen you naked.”

He looked at her, stared really. The desire for her was there, she knew, and not for what he’d seen on screen. If he’d thought she was a fantasy before, he looked at her now as if she were a mystery.

“Oliver,” she said, eyes level. “I’ve never been in love. Not the way you describe it. I’m fairly inept at seduction, too. And I wonder if your attraction comes from misconception.”

“My misconception has been erased,” he said, standing.

“Then you like the proximity,” she said. “Living on the same floor of the same building.”

“Imagine the luck,” he said, taking a step toward her. “You are attracted to me.”

Undeniably. Especially when he moved, silent and smooth. His eyes couldn’t be bluer.

“You have to tell me,” Oliver said.

“I am attracted to you.”

He sprang. The forward motion sent them onto the couch. Then onto the floor with a crash. This kiss, she thought, was real. Unlike the others this week, it felt full of…something. It was the opposite of empty, that much she knew. And his lips were soft and warm, his arms tight against her back, squeezing her like a stuffed animal, as if she had no oxygen requirements. They stopped kissing and looked at each other. Frozen on the outside; kinetic and jumping inside. He opened his mouth, and Stacy covered it with a new kiss.

And then the intercom buzzed. She ignored it. But the buzz kept coming. She counted twenty seconds. Oliver pulled back. “Doesn’t sound like your visitor is going away.”

She tugged her clothes into place and answered the buzzer. “Hello?”

The squawk back: “Stacy! I’m so glad you’re there. It’s Jason.”

Jason, the handsome hairy man? Last time they saw each other, he’d refused to come inside and see her purse collection, muttering about respect in the morning.

“Regretting your decision?” she asked.

“Yes. I want to come up,” he said.

Oliver watched and listened from the floor. Stacy smiled at him, his black hair a tornado on his head, his clothes half on. “I’m vacuuming right now,” she said. “Call me tomorrow.”

“No, Stacy, I have to see you. I made a huge mistake on Monday night. I feel like an idiot.”

She said, “You can tell me what an idiot you are tomorrow,” and turned her intercom buzzer volume to zero. She walked back toward Oliver on the floor.

Sitting up, he asked, “Was that the guy you were arguing with in the hallway earlier this week?”

“You shouldn’t have been eavesdropping.” Oliver shook his head and stood. He rearranged his clothes. Stacy said, “What’s going on?”

“This guy has come to his senses. You care about him. You said you did in the hallway. You’re just using me to get back at him.”

“I’m not!” she said. “I don’t care about Jason!”

Oliver’s blue eyes saddened. “You said you did.”

“I changed my mind,” she argued.

“What if you change your mind about me?”

The spell was breaking. She put her arms on his shoulders. “Kiss me,” she said.

He shook his head. “I’m not having a one-night stand with my next-door neighbor. I’d have to move. I like my apartment. I have my illegal DSL connection set up perfectly.”

“It won’t be a one-night stand,” she said.

“I don’t want to be a rebound relationship for you,” he said. “You have unfinished business with this Jason guy. If it doesn’t work out, you know where to find me,” he said.

He kissed her chastely on the lips, and walked out the door. It was 9
P.M.

Saturday night

S
itting on the edge of her unused bed, Stacy held Jorge’s card in her shaky little hand. In her other hand (shakier), she held her cordless phone. By punching seven buttons, she would cross the line into no-woman’s-land. Relinquishing all claims to propriety, knowingly, never to return to a land of undiminished morality. She took a deep breath. Her luck with love was bad. Her luck with seduction was worse. Her quest — to avoid the revirginity thing — had become an albatross, a jinx (a jinxed albatross?). Jorge was the guaranteed way to cut the whole depressing business from her neck, freeing her at last. He was the doormat she’d step across into another world, one that, according to Fiona, abounded with success and happiness. He was the sledgehammer she’d use to break down her enclosing walls of inertia. If nothing more (Stacy did hate to heap metaphor on the heads of prostitutes), he was a sure thing.

All she had to do was dial. So she did.

“Executive Escorts. Jasmine speaking,” said the voice on the phone.

“Is Jorge De Beof available?” asked Stacy.

“Whom may I say is calling?”

“A friend.”

“An anonymous friend, or shall I go ahead and tell him that I have Stacy Temple on the line?”

She nearly dropped the phone. “How do you know my name?”

“We have caller I.D. for our protection.” Jasmine needn’t have explained further.

Stacy said, “Tell him it’s Stacy from last night.”

“Hold, please.”

She held. Instead of music, the phone was connected to NPR, Stacy’s former place of employment. She listened to
This American Life,
and felt a sudden wave of regret and depression. Why had she left? And what was she doing?

She started to hang up, when she heard Jasmine saying, “Ms. Temple? Hello?”

Stacy said, “My sink is overflowing. I’ve got to go. I’ll call back later,” and rang off. Chicken. Shit. She lay back on her bed. Tomorrow she’d be a virgin anew, and there was nothing she could do about it. Maybe that wasn’t too much of a burden, she rationalized. Maybe it was okay to give up, again.

But it wasn’t. She kept picturing Janice’s pleased face in her pink toile bedroom. It was the picture of contentment and exhilaration. She reached for the antique silver hand mirror she kept on her night table, and held it in front of her face as she lay on the bed. Not a good angle. The flesh on her cheeks stretched downward, making her appear drawn and misshapen. This was the face of loneliness, five minutes on the wrong side of young. She lay the mirror down on the comforter and rolled onto her side.

After several minutes of moping, Stacy got up to redress. She carefully (and artfully) applied a masque of makeup (including new eyebrows), and spritzed Obsession on her pulse points. She had one more option to try before giving in completely to failure. Everyone had been telling her all week long to “just go to a bar,” and that was exactly what she’d do.

The bar at the SoHo Grand Hotel was known for three things: 1) hipness, drawing celebrities and supermodels, 2) titanium (the metal of the moment) interiors, and 3) cocktail CoCo Canal, a lethal combination of espresso, Bailey’s and crème de cacao. Stacy had been there only twice before, both times with Fiona for investor-wooing drinking sessions. Fiona had a carefully calibrated gauge for exactly how much money a private investor would be willing to part with. Apparently, this number would rise in direct proportion to the importance of the celebrity sighted. If, perchance, one were sitting on a stool at the SoHo Grand Hotel bar and in walked Jennifer Lopez with an entourage of twenty ridiculously attractive, scantily clad, almond-skinned dancers and assorted hangers-on, Fiona would snag an additional $200,000 on top of the minimum buy-in price of $400,000 (a sighting and cash extraction Stacy was witness to). But if one were on the same exact bar stool and in walked Mira Sorvino with a couple members of the Backstreet Boys, the price would go up a mere $30,000 (that could rise as high as $50,000 if Mira made out with Nick or Keith). No celeb sightings, no good ammo to gun for the sky-high bucks.

On that particular Saturday night, Stacy was only mildly eyeballing the bar entrance for a famous face. The bulk of her scanning was for a clean-shaven man, unmarried, if at all possible (after disconnecting with Executive Escorts, Stacy was back on the morality high horse). He would have to be searching the bar with his eyes as well, cruising with intent, not at this particular location for any reason other than meeting an attractive female for a mutually pleasurable exchange.

She sat alone at the bar, sipping a vodka martini, slightly embarrassed but confident in her attire (Stacy was not one to bare a midriff lightly, but tonight, she wore a low-rise pencil skirt and a high-cropped baby T, all black). She surveyed the packed, sweltering room once, twice, thrice, until she settled on a pair of long legs in stiff jeans. The fellow (brown hair cut short, choppy bangs grazing his forehead) was sitting at a window-side table. His booth mates, loutish boy/men, were laughing loudly, mugging at the harem of young women who surrounded them. But not this guy. He was amused, pleased to be there, but not a full participant. He had the cute, crooked smile she loved, and a bashful air about him that made him approachable. He seemed like the kind of man whose feelings were easily hurt. Since offending men seemed to be Stacy’s special skill of late, she believed he was the perfect guy for her.

She smiled at him. He noticed and grinned shyly back (adorable!). She sipped her drink, licking the glass a bit. The man stood up (tall!), and came over to her. Okay. She steadied herself. This was more like it. Smile, flirt, and you’re halfway there. Who cared that he was a complete stranger, a million degrees of separation from her universe? As he got closer, Stacy saw he was wearing a Supertramp T-shirt (unpretentious!), and his eyes were brown and deep, as if, within them, you could find the love of a thousand golden retriever puppies.

“Hello.” His voice cracked unmistakably.

“Sweet Jesus,” she responded. No wonder she’d been instantly attracted to him. “You’re Tony McGuinty.”

“And you are?” he asked.

“Stacy Temple,” she said, shaking his movie star hand. Fortunately, she had the self-control not to follow up with what she was thinking:
I am your biggest fan. I worship you. Every sexual fantasy I’ve had in the last year has featured you. You’ve been a fireman, a policeman, a scientist working on a cure for your own insatiable lust, an icecream truck man, and a chauffeur. And here you are, delivered to me by the Goddess herself, in my hour of greatest need, to bolster my confidence, deliver me from revirgination, and take me to the highest realm of the senses. Praise be, Goddess! You haven’t deserted me.

Instead, she simply stated, “You look nice.”

“So do you,” he said. “I’m here with a bunch of friends. Would you like to join us?”

She looked over to where he’d been sitting. The faces came in more clearly now, and she realized the puffy-faced blond was Nathan Decapulet, the straggly-haired, lanky guy was Luke Hasson, and the burly, bearded, swarthy one was Daniel Blake. Reports in the
New York Post
and
Daily News
had widely covered the titty-twistings and ass-grabbings of this crew, a group of young, rich, heterosexual, drunken movie stars known as the Pussy Posse.

“I’m comfortable right here,” she said. He smiled (charming!), and bought her another martini. She said, “I went to a screening of
Chemical Attraction
earlier this week.” Had it really been only several days before? “You were incredible. I can’t stop thinking about you. I mean, I can’t stop thinking about it. The movie. Oh, what the hell. I can’t stop thinking about you in the movie.”

“Thank you so much for saying that,” he said (polite!). “I’ll be even happier if you’re a movie reviewer.”

“I’m a lingerie peddler.”

“A far more worthwhile occupation,” he said.

She was
in love with him
. He was The Perfect Man. A gust of profane laughter and the shattering of a glass turned their attention away from each other and toward the Pussy Posse table.

He said, “I may be thrown out of here soon.”

Do you want to go to my place?
Stacy wished she’d the balls to say that. What she really said: “That’s too bad.”

He pulled on his bottle of Bass. “I like your hair.”

“I like yours.”

He squinted. “Did something happen to your eyebrows?”

She said, “Bizarre barbecuing accident.”

“What are you doing alone at a bar?” he asked. “Don’t you know that men are going to hit on you if you sit here looking like that? It’s indecent. You should be home, where it’s safe.”

“Actually, I’m on a mission,” she confessed. He was so easy to talk to. She felt completely comfortable with him, even though he was famous.

“A mission impossible?” he asked.

“So it seems.” She sipped her drink. “I have one more day before I’ve gone a complete year celibate. I came here with the hope that I’d meet a man. I’ve heard bars are a good place to do that. I haven’t had much luck so far this week out of bars. In fact, I’ve had nearly a dozen disastrous encounters, all of which have been embarrassing and/or soul killing.”

He smiled (disarming!) and said, “Sounds like a movie.”

“Comedy or tragedy?” she asked.

“The perfect ending would be if you wound up having sex with a famous, handsome movie star,” he said. “It’d be a divine reward after your week of pain and suffering.”

And how. “Is that an offer?”

“Give me a minute.” He walked back to his table and bent down to talk to his friends. She couldn’t hear what he was saying, but at the same second, every face at the table turned toward her. The men all started laughing. Then Nathan Decapulet himself scooted out of the booth. He was much taller than she’d thought. Tony and the Most Promising Actor of His Generation walked across the room (women swooning and kaveling everywhere), straight toward Stacy Temple, red of head, pink of cheek — the chaste, over-30 lingerie peddler. She felt blessed.

Tony said, “This is Nat.”

The Sexiest Man Alive held out his hand. She shook it and smiled.

Nathan said, “So you want to have sex with a handsome movie star?”

She wouldn’t put it quite so crassly. “I didn’t say…”

“Because every woman in this bar — every woman in this city — wants to sleep with a famous, handsome movie star,” said Nathan in an understated tone of purposeful detachment. “I’d like to know what makes you so special that you think, of all the women in this bar — of all the women in this city — a famous, handsome movie star should sleep with you?”

What a nasty little shit, this (g)Nat,
she thought. Stacy would have to remember their conversation verbatim, to tell Charlie so he could post it on noir.com.

Before she could respond to what she hadn’t realized was a rhetorical query, Nathan said, “I’ll tell you what makes you special. I can sense that you are the kind of woman who loves to suck dick. I bet you’d be willing to suck the dick of every guy at our table. And if you’re half the woman I think you are, you won’t settle for just one movie star. Tonight, you can have all four of us.”

Tony, meanwhile, was standing behind Nathan, shaking his head as if (
as if
) he were astonished by the antics of his more famous friend.

“I’m flattered,” said Stacy, fingers fluttering to her collarbone. “And I certainly do love to suck dick. But, to be honest, I may be only half the woman you think I am. And there are four of you. So that would mean I’d suck two of your dicks? Then again, maybe I’m just a quarter of the woman you think I am, and I’d suck only one dick. And, even if I were the woman you think I am, is this an all-or-nothing offer? I need to know, because I’m not exactly sure how much dick I want to suck, or how much famous, handsome movie-star cock I can stuff into one night. If it were spread out over four nights, that would be a different story. But, to tell you the honest truth, I’m really just an eighth of the woman you think I am. Which means just half a dick gets sucked. I’d be willing, but it could take a while. Is the possibility of sucking half of one of your dicks per night over eight nights out of the question?”

Nathan blinked. He said to Tony, “This girl is crazy.”

Tony said, “But good at fractions.”

They snorted and left Stacy sitting just as she was, alone at a bar, sipping a fancy schmancy ten-dollar cocktail, feeling like one sixteenth of the woman she was when she’d walked in a half hour earlier. Pride required her to finish her drink. And then she left, her midriff and misery exposed.