The Accidental Virgin Read Online Free PDF Page B

harassment.
    She couldn’t face him — not in this pitiable state of impotency. She glanced in the deli window and saw him, her tormenter, spatula in hand. He noticed her, too, and shot a wink and a pucker.
    Shame renewed, embarrassment refreshed, Stacy scuttled toward her Park Avenue silver tower. Stumbling on a grate, she managed to remain upright, but broke the heel of her sandal. Since she had several pairs of spare shoes in her office, a trauma of this magnitude wouldn’t ordinarily reduce Stacy to tears, the hot kind that shot from the ducts like liquid bullets. Ordinarily, no. Today, in her mire, yes.
    Stacy hobbled into the up elevator of her office building to discover Taylor Perry, thongs.com’s employee number four, vice president in charge of production. A dirty blonde — hair still damp — in an unevenly hemmed orange halter dress (despite the fact that a woman of her proportions should never be seen in public without a bra), Taylor took one look at Stacy’s makeup streaks and proposed a theory.
    “You must be PMSing,” she said, adding, “I am. We all are. The meeting today will be a bitch.”
    Taylor Perry, 22, formerly a political science major at Dartmouth, was the one person without whom thongs.com could not exist. Stacy’s eyes glazed over whenever Taylor started talking about servers, uploads, caches and cookies, but without her kind of know-how, thongs.com or any Internet retail company couldn’t do business. “Creatives” — like Stacy — were a dime a dozen. Tech people — like Taylor — were rare and in demand.
    Upon seeing her colleague Stacy immediately became posture conscious, straightening her back as if pulled by an invisible string from the top of her head. She smiled weakly at Taylor and said, “What brings you in so early?” It was just after 8 A.M. Stacy had hoped to grab several minutes of alone time to organize her thoughts and her list of de-revirgination prospects before her bosses arrived and began issuing orders.
    “I’m late actually. I’m usually here at seven,” said Taylor. “I get up at five thirty, run six miles, and come right over. I like the quiet. Can’t get much done with The Women prowling the halls.” The Women — as the staff called them — were Janice Strumph and Fiona Chardonnay, the founders and leaders of the company.
    Stacy nodded as her colleague spoke, imagining Taylor’s predawn exercise and the gargantuan sports bra she would need for restraint. Taylor graduated from college only last year and, in a recruiting binge, had been courted by dozens of Internet companies before choosing thongs.com as her first job. Stacy imagined the stock options package Fiona and Janice must have offered to woo Taylor away from (premerger) AOL and (pre-bottomed out) Amazon.
    Despite the gossipy atmosphere at thongs.com (inevitable with the late hours and free cappuccino), Taylor was tight-lipped about her life away from work (as if there was time for such a thing). Stacy had gathered enough droplets of information to fill a birdbath: Taylor had had a boyfriend in college, a geek like her (said with admiration, not derision), who’d moved to Grand Cayman after graduation to create a hugely profitable Internet gaming site. His partner was another Dartmouth grad, a woman who was neither a geek nor blessed with Taylor’s commodious curves. Stacy and Fiona had visited the site, casinoroyale.com, and examined the photograph of the two gaming tycoons, waving on a white-sand beach: he, a chubby, shirtless, tan, baseball-capped piña colada drinker; she, a skinny, bikinied, sunburned, arch-eyebrowed brunette with several anklets. If giddy good luck could be captured digitally, this grainy photograph was it.
    Whenever Stacy felt jealous of Taylor (she was impossibly young and talented), Stacy thought of the ex-boyfriend in all his sun-drenched joy with a woman he’d met the day before he dumped Taylor and disappeared into paradise. No wonder Taylor claimed to