Spotless by Camilla Monk Page A

wrong with that. It’s just that I wasn’t used to seeing that sort of thing. To the best of my knowledge, muscular, ripped males belonged exclusively on TV and in sports magazines. I had sometimes met guys who looked like they worked out a lot; however, overly conservative social boundaries had restrained me from tearing their shirts open in public to check the goods. So, shape-wise, this was actually my first close encounter with a male body that looked . . . well, that fit.
    The second detail that left me a little uncertain was the hair. Since Joy’s conquests always seem to be unrepentant chest-shavers, and 98 percent of all males I saw on TV flaunted these baby-smooth chests as well, I had come to perceive this as the norm—something especially true since the remaining 2 percent formed a heterogeneous group that included Alec Baldwin and the Ewoks. In this particular case, March’s chest didn’t really disgust me. I just found it . . . weird. As crazy as that may sound, the soft-looking chestnut hair covering his pecs and running in a diffuse line down his stomach seemed unnatural to me. Real men didn’t have hair, in my opinion.
    Taking in every detail, from the scary washboard abs to the way his biceps rippled under his skin when he moved to finish a spot on his chin, I discovered that he sported more than a few scars on his body. While some were little more than a thin line made somewhat paler by sun exposure, others looked like deeper dents in his flesh. One of them particularly stood out, because it wasn’t a scar . . . but rather a scarification. I hadn’t noticed it at first because it was on the back of his left shoulder. However, as he moved to finish his left cheek, I caught a glimpse of a frightening series of marks that formed an emblem forever engraved in his flesh.
    It looked like a large disc with an intricate ethnic pattern—African, maybe?—and a fierce lion head in its center, taking most of the surface. Apart from the fact that merely looking at these ridged white lines hurt, I found it at odds with the rest of his persona. With his impeccable shirts and grandpa quirks, he hardly seemed like the type to go for tattoos or body modifications.
    At any rate, March was a bit battered but overall a fine male specimen, and, as much I hated to admit it, his half-naked figure wasn’t entirely without effect on me. I averted my eyes, feeling a full blush bloom on my cheeks when I realized that my fingertips were itching to cop a feel of that damn chest hair.
    Now, that was . . .
Wrong
. Yes, with a capital W. True enough, since the age of sixteen or so, I had failed each stage of my sexual development, but this . . . This was a new and spectacular low.
    —Braces and zits until the age of nineteen? Check.
    —Silently stalking a gorgeous law student until you catch him kissing his girlfriend? Check.
    —Spend an entire night crying and eating ice cream? Check.
    —Trying online dating? Check.
    —Giving up altogether and reading romance books instead? . . . Check.
    —Daydreaming of fondling the chest of a sociopath who kidnapped you? God . . .
Check
.
    Ladies and gentlemen, I give you . . . Rock Bottom!
    Now that I’m thinking about it, I realize that those ten years searching for love—please stop laughing—hadn’t been entirely lost. My Yaycupid dates did provide me with fascinating behavioral data, which I later compiled into a chart
(as follows)
.

    We can observe that, up to a certain point, the more you wait to confess you’re still a virgin, the higher the chance that the candidate will agree to pursue the courtship process anyway (as evidenced by the fact that 90 percent of the men who were informed I was a virgin upon calling me to schedule a date chose to interrupt said process immediately). Results, however, show that while only 50 percent of the participants who received this critical bit of information after a hug decided to call it quits, 100 percent of those who