Virgin
I don’t need the perfect guy.I don’t need candlelight or roses.Honestly, I don’t even need a real bed…Ellie Kolstakis is a twenty-one-year-old virgin.She’s not religious. She’s not waiting for marriage. She’s not even holding on for The One.Ellie’s just unlucky.But with her final year of university coming to an end, she’s determined to shed her V-plates, once and for all.And she’s ready to try anything - from submitting to her domineering Greek mother’s matchmaking skills to embracing the world of nether-waxing trends (no-one wants a ‘Hitler’) and even YouTube tutorials on how to give a ‘blow gift’ (it should never be a job).After all, what has she got to lose? Well, besides the obvious.Praise for VIRGIN'Laugh out loud…Bridget Jones could take a page from this novel' - Joan Rivers‘An entertaining romp’– Emma Barnett, broadcaster and women's editor of The Telegraph’Bridget Jones and Carrie Bradshaw, meet your wisecracking, vagina obsessed match. Sanghani's debut is a hilarious, irreverent look at smart-alecky, painfully self-conscious, 21-year-old Ellie's relentless mission to rectify a disastrous first attempt at performing oral sex, get deflowered, find the perfect Brazilian wax, avoid her tradition-bound Greek mother's nagging, graduate summa cum laude, be a writer, and fit in…This story for millennials is a wonderful blend of modern agnst with old-fashioned sweetness.” -Publisher's Weekly
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RADHIKA SANGHANI is a twenty-three-year-old journalist. She works full-time for The Daily Telegraph’s Women’s section, where she writes about politics, health and trends that make her editors blush. She grew up in London, but spent time working in Chile and Barcelona, where she fell in love with the Spanish language. She studied English Literature at University College London, followed it up with a Master’s in Journalism at City University London and now spends all of her time writing.
You can find her tweeting at @radhikasanghani.
To anyone who has ever gone through the pain of a Brazilian wax
I could not have written Virgin without my girlfriends—you all know who you are. Your honest confessions about masturbating, finding semen in bath tubs and battling with your pubes have given me so much inspiration and endless laughter. Thank you.
To everyone who read Virgin when it was just the slightly weird book I was writing to cheer myself up—thank you so much for your invaluable feedback and for loving Ellie. That’s you, Sarah Walker, Bex Lewis, Ella Schierenberg, Sarah Johnson, Rhiannon Williams, Olivia Goldhill, Andrea Levine and even Kim Leigh. Thank you, Rory Tyler, for being the only male I know who was brave enough to read Virgin. I know you’re still not over the Mooncup.
I also really want to thank my parents. You had no idea I was writing Virgin until I told you it was being published. I know a lot of it has been quite a surprise to you and not what you expected I would write, but thank you for still being so proud of me and supporting me.
Thank you to my editor, Anna Baggaley, and everyone at Harlequin for carefully editing Virgin and loving it so much from the very start.
Lastly—none of this would have happened if it wasn’t for Maddy Milburn, my agent. Thank you so much for believing in Virgin and making this all happen!
Table of Contents
Ellie Kolstakis
21 years old
Non-smoker
VIRGIN
I STARED IN HORROR at the words on Dr E Bowers’ computer. The status of my hymen was plastered across her screen in capital letters.
V-I-R-G-I-N
The letters glowed luridly on the green computer screen, the kind used before Steve Jobs figured out Apple. They imprinted themselves into my mind in an eighties blur. A lump of anxiety lodged itself into my throat and my cheeks started burning. I felt sick.
My humiliating secret was all over my medical records and Dr E Bowers was going to see it. I didn’t even know what the E in her name stood for but she was about to find out that in the two and a half years I had spent at uni, not a single boy had wanted to deflower me. Not one. I was twenty-one years old, and I still had my V-card.
‘Ms Kolstakis,’ she asked, pushing her rimless glasses up her nose, ‘you’re a final-year student at University College London, and you’re here to register, is that correct?’
I forced my paralysed face into a smile and tried to laugh politely. ‘Yep, I don’t know why I didn’t join earlier. I, uh, I think it’s because I just didn’t ever get fresher’s flu, you know?’
She stared blankly at me.
‘Um, also, you can call me Miss Kolstakis, or just Ellie, if you want,’ I added.
She turned her head back down towards the forms, creasing her brow as she struggled to read my messy attempt at writing in block capitals.
I wiped the sweat from my palms onto my jeans and told myself to be calm. She was a doctor. She wasn’t going to be shocked by meeting a twenty-one-year-old virgin. Besides, she was probably just going to ask me about the Kolstakis family history and the worst thing I would have to tell her would be about Great Granddad Stavros smoking a pack of cigarettes every day from the time he was nine. He didn’t even die from lung cancer in the end; he choked on an almond at the age of eighty-nine.
She breathed in sharply. ‘Mmm, oh dear—this isn’t very good at all. You drink more than twenty units of alcohol a week?’
Oh, God. If she figured out I had deliberately rounded down by five units I would probably be on the first bus out of here to rehab.
Dr E Bowers cleared her raspy throat.
‘Oh, sorry.’ I giggled nervously in a way I hadn’t since Girl Guides. ‘I don’t always drink twenty units a week. Obviously it’s just during term time. We normally go out on Thursdays. Oh, and Mondays. Sometimes Wednesdays, but that club night is kind of full of freshers these days so we don’t go as much.’
Dr E Bowers furrowed her forehead and pursed her lips together. She started tapping away at her keyboard and I held on to the edges of the chair with anxiety. I focused my gaze on her computer. The six letters were no longer there. She had scrolled down the page without commenting on them. I breathed out an audible sigh of relief.
