The Accidental Virgin (9 page)

Although Stacy registered erotic pleasure to receive the free breast exam, she was unmoved by the giving. Again with the comparisons (couldn’t be helped): When Stacy was with a man, her biggest turn-on was what she did to him (and his response). Not so here. Stacy’s future as a lesbian was in jeopardy. She had to stop comparing and stay focused.

Taylor seemed to sense Stacy’s mental wanderings and attempted to stop them by descending to her knees. Taylor kissed Stacy’s blouse on the way down. Stacy couldn’t suppress silent panic over makeup stains on her fine fabrics (yet another universe of worldly distractions — did men actively worry about smudges and smears? She’d have to ask Charlie). She snapped back to the present quickly enough when Taylor nuzzled Stacy’s crotch, lifted her skirt, and pulled down her panties.

She nearly stepped away. Instead, she began playing with Taylor’s hair and thinking about Tony McGuinty. She wasn’t quite sure what she’d think about when it was her turn to get on her knees, but she’d deal with that then.

Tony, his lovely muscular body, his arms around her legs, his hands on her ass, his mouth and tongue against her…the rush of arousal seized her, the familiar building, the sensation she’d felt several thousand times and would feel a million more before it ever got dull. It was close. Any moment now, Stacy would receive a standing O. A great, big, huge one. Any second. Any nanosecond. The pressure grew, expanded.

And then it stopped. The pressure ceased, leaving Stacy’s heart flying wildly in her chest, her legs shaking from being so close. What the fuck happened? Stacy looked down to see Taylor sitting Indian style on the floor, her head in her hands. Dear God — Stacy felt a cold-water chill — was Taylor crying? Anything but that.

Dizzy, her blood flow diverted from her brain, Stacy sat on the hardwood floor next to Taylor. Her colleague
was
crying. Stacy put her arm around Taylor’s shoulder and said, “What’s wrong?”

“Who is Tony?” she asked.

Oh. Shit.

“I go down on you, and you’re thinking of someone named Tony. I’m not even gay!” Taylor said weepily.

“You’re not gay?” Stacy asked, aghast.

“I’ve never been with a woman before. But I like you. And you’re beautiful. I’ve always known you’re a lesbian, so I thought I could seduce you into my life. Start sexually, and then become friends. Or maybe I’d be gay just for you.”

“You think I’m gay?”

“And then you called out the name Tony. I’m eating pussy for the first time in my life — and it’s not the most pleasurable thing I’ve done, although I do like your bikini wax — and you call out someone else’s name. Who is she?” Taylor’s tear-trailed cheeks glistened, her eyes swimming with shame. This wasn’t just a sexy romp for her. Taylor actually cared, and now her feelings were hurt. Stacy had inflicted the pain unwittingly, assuming that her little adventure would be emotionally inert.

Stacy smiled beneficently (she hoped), and said, “Tony — Antonia — is my ex-girlfriend. We broke up not long ago, and I admit, I’m still a little in love with her. I guess it’s too soon to get into another relationship. I’m terribly sorry that I misled you. I…I have the utmost respect and admiration for you. I wish we’d gotten a chance to get to know each other better. Best of luck to you at pets.com. I’ll be sorry to see you go.”

Taylor nodded and hiccuped. Stacy kissed her on each cheek and stood. “I’ll tell Fiona you have food poisoning,” she volunteered. After righting her panties and skirt, Stacy dashed for the door. The leering doorman barely looked at her as she rushed out onto the street (clearly, he was a tit man). She scurried back to the office, wishing she could get a tail between her legs.

Wednesday, late afternoon

B
y the time Stacy returned to work, she was already late for a VIM (very important meeting) she knew nothing about. Apparently, there’d been an urgent e-mail memo. She found out when she discovered Janice in her small (now suffocating) office, writing a furious note in all caps with red ink (“WHERE THE FUCK…”). A more appropriate message for Stacy would have been, “Where’s the fuck?”

“I don’t know how I missed the e-mail,” said Stacy.

Janice said, “If I’d taken a two-hour lunch in the middle of the most crucial work week in the company’s history, I might have missed it, too.”

“I had to take Taylor home. She was stricken by cramps during lunch. I’ve never seen anyone in such paralytic pain. I had to carry her, her arms over my shoulders while I dragged her body weight on my back. I’m exhausted. But I do feel some pride in being a friend in need.”

“You’ll be a friend in need of a job if you don’t get yourself to the Turtle in thirty seconds,” Janice threatened as she huffed toward the conference room. This must be serious, thought Stacy. Janice was not the whip cracker. That was Fiona’s favorite occupation (along with Botox and collagen injections).

Stacy dropped her bag, grabbed her notepad, and walked double time to the conference room. When she entered the large (also suffocating) room, Fiona’s gaze hit her like a baseball bat. Avoiding those eyes, she muttered an apology and sat down.

“Hope it wasn’t too inconvenient for you to show up, Stacy,” said Fiona acidly. She was dragon-lady perfection today in a black leather dress. In July. Fiona always bragged that she never felt the heat (having spent her five previous afterlives in hell, Stacy reasoned). “You know Stanley, right?” Fiona gestured toward the man at the head of the Turtle.

Stacy did indeed know Stanley Bombicci. They’d met several months ago at a Silicon Alley party for his company, smut.com, an interactive porn site (formerly, Stanley had been a corporate executive for the New York Giants). He was 35, tall, with a chest the size of a Toyota. He smelled of Old Spice and new millions. At the smut.com party, Stanley had made a short speech about dot comedy and tragedy. He predicted that the only websites to survive the first on-line ice age would be idinosaurs (AOL, Amazon, Yahoo!), or URLs with boobs. He was probably right. When he’d been introduced to Stacy by Fiona (who’d made a shameless play for him, declaring within earshot of dozens that she’d “appeared in an adult film ten years ago, when I was in my twenties” — a statement that raised many eyebrows, mainly because few believed that ten years ago she was in her 30s), Stanley looked closely at Stacy and said, “Only one way to tell if you’re a real redhead.”

“Ask my colorist?” said Stacy, attempting to deflect some crass comment about her collar and her cuff. Fortunately, he was distracted by a venture capitalist from Credit Suisse and ignored her for the rest of the night.

He hadn’t forgotten about her, though. Over the next few days, Stanley had deluged her with calls, e-mails. She convinced herself that it was about time she did some networking. Stanley was connected (in the Italian sense, she’d heard whispered), but certainly with hordes of Internet CEOs. She agreed to meet him for coffee. For the first 15 of their 16 minutes together, he’d delivered self-congratulatory monologues to her breasts along the lines of, “Yeah, I started my first business from my college dorm room at Harvard when I was twenty years old, selling naked pictures of grad students. One or two nights with me, these hot grad students — very hot, the sexiest women at Harvard, and believe me, sexy bombshell-type women at Harvard were tough to find — where was I? Oh, yeah, these women would do anything I wanted. Pose nude, sign a model release. Agree to blow me at the statue of John Harvard in the middle of Harvard Square.”

“Sounds like a rich and rewarding experience, Stanley,” said Stacy.

“I made buckets of cash,” he said, nodding. “The beauty of it was that these girls were real. My customers could see them walking around campus. At Harvard. That’s much better spank material than
Penthouse
for a bunch of horny dorks who couldn’t get tail on a bunny farm. They were nerds, but smart, my classmates. I was challenged intellectually at Harvard, and I need that kind of stimulation. And sexual stimulation. All the time. Like right now. Looking at you. I’d love to reach under your shirt and…”

“Where did you say you went to school?” she asked.

Four months later, Stacy had reluctantly included Stanley on her To Do list of candidates for Sex Emergency Week. And here he appeared, as if by magic, at the head of the Turtle. Was it fate? she wondered.

“It’s good to see you, Stanley,” she said, smiling warmly.

“Great to see you, too,” he said to her breasts.

Fiona called the meeting to order and the group of twelve producers, product managers and marketers turned their horn-rimmed glasses and asymmetrical bangs toward Fiona. “Agenda: finalize terms,” she said. “Thongs.com and smut.com are forming a merchandizing partnership. We will supply unlimited lingerie for Stanley’s models and links to his site. In exchange, he will give us free banner advertising, a click-through on each menu, a plug on the home page, and a featured item of the day on the products page.”

“We’re getting in bed with a porn site?” asked Stacy, dumbfounded (had this information been in the memo?). An “intellectual erotica” site, sure. A matchmaking site, even better. But a URL that unapologetically called itself the “best wank material on the web”? Surely, their partnership was counterproductive. Thongs.com had been pushing the mass-market cart from the beginning. The idea was to differentiate itself from the upscale lingerie retailers on the Internet. Hitching thongs.com with a porn site would send their cart careening down-market, downhill, down the toilet.

“I say this with the deepest respect for Stanley’s business acumen,” said Stacy, “but isn’t smut.com kind of smutty?”

“I’ve addressed and dismissed your concern,” said Fiona. “We can be classy and sleazy at the same time. This isn’t hard to pull off. Just look at me.” The room full of people looked at their fingernails. “Our burn rate is two hundred thousand dollars a month. We need more traffic. Smut.com gets five million unique hits a day. We should thank Stanley for choosing us to be one of his partners. And he’s generously offered to give us a signing balloon loan in exchange for one million shares of company stock at four dollars per share.” The current stock price was $7 per share (the 52-week high was $67).

The loan sounded like a fool’s bargain, even to Stacy’s non-fiscally sensitive ears. Was thongs.com that desperate for cash? It had to be an offer Fiona couldn’t refuse. Stacy could see her rationalizations at play. Thongs.com would be in good company. Stanley already had partnership/cross-promotional deals with at least 20 websites, including a $1,000,000 arrangement with AOL (keyword: “smut”), an automatic promotional window when anyone bought “adult literature” at Amazon, and another instant prompt when any male (aged 18 to 70) registered with Yahoo shopping. A partnership with the “personal touch” king of Internet porn might bring in more traffic. But how much would teenage wankers spend on panties? Besides which, the idea of a thongs.com logo emblazoned across the barely covered asses of models who lounge on daybeds and masturbate on demand to a disco beat for $1 per minute was embarrassing. It was just one more reason to get out of this job.

Come January, I’ll take the money and run for the hills,
Stacy vowed.

Stanley, sensing acquiescence from every woman at the table, put his hands behind his head, fanning his pecs like a condor, and said, “Thanks for the declaration of love, Fiona. But we’re not settled just yet. A couple things before we sign. The models might use the merchandise in an obscene fashion. This a problem?”

Fiona shook her head.

“And I want to personally approve any stock offerings, options, transfers, and loans made by this company in perpetuity.”

Janice and Fiona looked at each other and frowned. This was news. Could it mean that Stanley planned to dismantle the options ladder? Was this a sell-out deal? Couldn’t be. Each of The Women nodded, staring right into the other’s face, giving away none of her feelings (but, possibly, a lot of the store).

“One more thing,” said Stanley. “This won’t go down, especially not the loan, unless Stacy Temple has dinner with me tonight.”

Stacy, face aflame, gasped. Fiona said, “That would fall under the
quid pro quo
statute of sexual harassment law, Stanley.”

“I suppose you could convince a judge to see it that way,” he agreed.

“Very well, then,” said Fiona. “Stacy, you’re having dinner with Stanley. And do whatever he wants or you’re fired.”

Stanley suggested Aromantique, a cozy French spot a few blocks away. Stacy agreed, and went back to work for a few hours while Stanley and Fiona toasted each other in her office. At around six, Stacy and Stanley walked to the restaurant. He didn’t seem drunk, despite his afternoon champagne. In fact, he seemed stone-cold sober. The maitre d’ greeted them at the door of the restaurant with kisses, and directed them to a formally set table — bottle of wine, a glorious bouquet of Casablanca lilies, a basket of warm bread.

“This is lovely,” said Stacy, placing the napkin in her lap. Across the table, Stanley looked pleased and subdued. Perhaps she had been wrong about him. Especially now that she was inclined to give any potential de-revirginator the benefit of the doubt, she gave it to Stanley. The whole porn impresario thing, she decided, it was just a business persona. The braggadocio about his Harvard days, that was coming from a deeply insecure place. His ruthless climb to the top of his profession, this had made him a lonely, sad man desperately in need of human connection and, simply, a friendly face across a table, some benign conversation. And the effort he’d gone to tonight, the table, the flowers, the “everything has been arranged” from the maitre d’ — Stacy was flattered. She wasn’t sure about his plans for thongs.com, but, from where she sat, candlelight playing across Stanley’s fine nose and chin, Stacy was ready to be taken over. For one night. She couldn’t see herself long term with a pornmeister. She couldn’t see herself in the morning with him (must go to his place so she could sneak out after he fell asleep, she thought).

She went with a direct opening statement, saying, “Before we begin, you should know the truth. I’m in a bit of a pickle. In four days…”

He interrupted her. “Isn’t it the other way around?” he asked. “You need a bit of a pickle in you. Fiona told me that you’re trolling for tube steak. And I’m available. Maybe.”

“Fiona said…?” Stacy asked.

“She reads your e-mail,” he explained. Stacy and Charlie had been corresponding copiously about her travails.

“I’m sure Fiona has been thoroughly entertained,” said Stacy. That
bitch
! At least Stacy wouldn’t have to spell out her predicament to Stanley. He knew it already. And he was going to help. But what had he just said? “Did I hear ‘maybe’?”

“Start with an apology,” he said. “Last time we went out, you made some belittling crack, got up and left me alone at Café Dante midway through a double espresso. That’s only six ounces of fluid. It doesn’t take too much of your time to sit with a man and wait until he’s finished a six-ounce drink. You were rude, Stacy. I was embarrassed. The
barista
gave me a second double on the house because he pitied me. You hurt my feelings. And I really like you. You’re smart; you’ve got great tits. If you want a piece of me, you have to apologize for the way you treated me.”

“I’m sorry, Stanley,” she said. “I wasn’t aware that you…I didn’t know you had feelings to hurt.”

He seemed satisfied, and said, “Relief is washing over me.”

“I’m so glad.”

“We can make a fresh start now.”

“Why don’t we?”

“Let’s toast.”

They toasted and drank. Stacy sipped prettily. Stanley gulped down the entire glass of Ravelwood Merlot, seemingly without tasting a drop. Good thing it cost $40 a bottle. Wouldn’t want to spend less on wine without tasting it.

“You must be thirsty,” she said.

“Okay, down to business,” he said, putting his glass down. The sommelier shuffled over to refill his glass and departed. “I’ve been thinking about meeting you like this for months. I wanted the setting, the wine, the food, all of it, to be perfect. I have a very clear vision of this night, and I want to stick to the script as much as possible.”

She nodded apprehensively. “Why don’t you tell me how you’d like the evening to go and we’ll see if we can approximate it.” Stacy was nothing if not accommodating.

He smiled smartly. “No, you misunderstand me. I have practiced this night in my head hundreds of times. I want it to go
exactly
as I’ve imagined it. We’re up to page two.”

Reaching across the table, Stanley handed Stacy a thin manuscript with a laminated cover. The top sheet read “My Date with Stacy.” Almost too afraid to look, she turned to the first page and read. Right there, in 12-point Geneva, was an exact description of the two of them entering this very restaurant, sitting at this very table, Casablanca lilies, warm bread, Ravelwood. The short bracketed paragraph that read: “Stanley explains how the night will unfold, and Stacy complies happily. She is radiant with purpose, knowing that she will fulfill the enduring hopes Stanley has harbored about her since she wounded him so deeply the last time they met. Jumping at her chance to set things right, Stacy agrees to play her part in his fantasy, TO THE LETTER.”

She turned the page. It was a script, with her lines highlighted in yellow. She read her first line to herself, and then looked at Stanley, astonished.

He smiled and whispered, “It’s just a game.”

She put the manuscript down on her plate. “I want a guarantee that my stock options won’t be affected by the partnership with smut.com.” Stanley agreed readily.

Not yet registering Stanley’s potentially dangerous obsession, and how stepping into the role he’d written for her might take his fixation to new heights, Stacy opened the scene. Reading with emotion (
Hmm, this might be kind of fun,
she thought), Stacy began: “I can’t believe I’m on a date with you, Stanley Bombicci. You are the handsomest, richest, most impressive man I’ve ever met — or ever will meet. I can’t believe how lucky I am to be seen with you.”