Asking for Trouble - Leslie Kelly [2]
I would have been better off being left as a baby on the doorstep of some nunnery in the mountains of Austria. At least I might have had a little action from a cute shepherd passing by with his herd once I grew up.
I’m definitely hotter than a sheep.
Lottie Santori, that’s me, the hotter-than-a-sheep girl. Yes, before you ask, I’m one of those Santoris—the big family who owns that great pizza joint on Taylor Avenue. If you haven’t heard of it, I’m sure you’ve at least heard of my brothers. Either because of the way they plowed across the football field at St. Raphael’s or the way they plowed through every girl at St. Raphael’s. Most of my friends included.
And yes, before you ask the next question, I have a dirty mind and a big mouth and I don’t take much crap off anybody.
My brothers, however, still haven’t gotten that through their thick skulls. They’ve been ordering me around, trying to control who I talk to, where I go, what I do and who I do, for my entire life. Tried being the key word there.
Wish I could say they’d failed completely. Unfortunately for me—and my sex life—they succeeded in keeping me about as celibate as a twenty-five-year-old grad student can be.
Oh, sure, I’ve snuck in a few affairs, but there aren’t many men I meet who don’t know—or know of—my family. And I swear, the big jerks are like bloodhounds. Because the minute I do find some guy who is mercifully ignorant about the thousand pounds of male aggression acting as the defensive line on my virtue, one of them finds out and scares the crap out of him.
I kid you not, when I started ninth grade, they put out the word that if their sister didn’t graduate a virgin, they would ban every person from my high school from ever having another slice of my pop’s famous deep dish pizza. Anyone from Chicago knows that’s about as dire a threat as you can make.
Can you believe it worked? They had all my friends making sure my legs stayed shut, and their friends, too. Which really sucked since a lot of those guys were really hot. I ask you, what is the point of having older brothers if you don’t even have the benefit of having a built-in supply of potential boyfriends?
Thank God I’d spent a college semester in an exchange program at New York University, where I’d met Chuck. And Dave. Then…umm…Will. Man, had that guy had staying power, especially in comparison to the other twenty- and twenty-one-year-olds I dated.
I’d probably been thought of as the easiest exchange student NYU had ever known, but I knew I was potentially cramming a lifetime full of sex into those three months. Damned if I wasn’t going to make the most of them.
Of course, from what I’ve learned about sex since that time, I know I didn’t scratch the surface of what can be done. Big sigh, there.
No, I didn’t learn about it firsthand. But having come home a sex maniac, then being forced to peek longingly over my big brothers’ shoulders at any nice piece of male ass—never getting any of it—had left me a little frustrated. Frustrated enough to take things into my own hands. Literally. And since my imagination only went so far—pretty much meat and potatoes on the sex scale, me being the potatoes—I’d had to do some research.
I like research. I’m good at it. Good enough that I’m doing it to pay the bills while I finish my masters degree in journalism.
Solving puzzles and sticking my nose into other people’s stories was something I’d excelled at since I was little and used to spy on my brothers and their girlfriends. What can I say? I love to know things. Not to exploit secrets—and I never resorted to blackmail. Well, okay, once in a while when Mark or Nick decapitated one of my stuffed toys or tied my Barbies to the tracks of their Lionel train set, I might have used my knowledge to my own advantage. Like, you know, to get them thunked in the head with a soup ladle by our mother. But