What Killer Yap didn’t get to see

I didn’t make the random cut for Miss Snark’s crap-o-meter, so I thought I would float my entry here instead. You may unleash your own crap-o-meters on me, if you like. Apologies to my beta readers — you’ve all read my first page, so this is nothing new.

Here goes:

Dear Ms. Snark,

I am seeking representation for my completed 90,000-word romance novel, _Technical Virgins_. Similar in style and humor to the work of Sandra Hill or Jennifer Crusie, _Technical Virgins_ concerns two surgeons-in-training who have been too busy/distracted/emotionally whacked to have a normal romantic life – but that is about to change.

I am uniquely qualified to write this story, as I

*am a surgeon who trained at a busy community hospital, just like my protagonists,
*share many of my hero’s obsessions and interests, kinky and otherwise,
*was a virgin for longer than I care to admit.

This is my first novel, but I have several e-zine and print-zine publications to my credit.

Attached, you will find the first page of _Technical Virgins_. I look forward to hearing from you.

Best,

(Me)

This is not entirely accurate, since the manuscript is neither finished nor polished, so I’m not ready to float it to agents. But I figured the point of the exercise was to pretend the manuscript was ready and go from there.

First page below the cut.

Twelve inches separated Dr. Brad Berkowitz from heaven.

Twelve inches, a tightly coiled lifetime of anxiety, and a little thing called medical ethics.

Twelve inches from the loveliest vulva he had ever seen: creamy brown, just the way his cafeteria coffee looked after he’d added enough milk to make it drinkable; a miracle of perfect symmetry. God himself would weep to see such a beautiful vulva. Heat flowed from Angelica Gonzalez’s crotch, burning Brad’s face.

_Heat._

He backed away from her bed, the Foley urinary catheter bouncing in his hand like an inquisitive earthworm, and grabbed her bedside chart. Last temperature, taken one hour ago: 104F. Ms. Gonzalez’s fever had spiked and the nurse hadn’t bothered to tell him. Useless

Back to the business at hand. He had to insert the urinary catheter into the unfortunate kid. Kid? He checked her primary chart once again, glancing at the first line of his second-year resident’s admission note.

19yo Hisp F G1P1 c/o RLQ pain x 7 hrs, +N/V

_Nineteen-year-old Hispanic female complaining of right lower quadrant abdominal pain for the last seven hours along with nausea and vomiting._ Nineteen, and she had already been pregnant and delivered one child. Brad checked her left hand. It squeezed the life out of her bed sheet and she issued a long, low moan. His breath caught in his throat, hearing that moan, but then her wrist turned and he saw a plain gold band on her finger and a curlicue tattoo at the base of her thumb.

_Smooth, Berkowitz. She’s married to one of the knife-and-gun club’s finest, and you’re salivating over her vagina._

_No, I’m not. I have to place this Foley. This is entirely innocent._

Only when he moved in – once again to try to do what he _had_ to do, what he’d been ordered to do, what in any REAL hospital the nurse should be doing, what their team’s med student, Wilbur or Winslow or Winnebago should have been doing except he was upstairs, holding retractors while Brad’s second-year resident cut out a hot gallbladder – only then did he remember to breathe, and in doing so caught a noseful of an intoxicating musk.

Sick people weren’t supposed to smell that good.

_Find her damn urethra. She has to have urine in there somewhere. Stop putting the catheter up her vag _

“_Con permiso_,” he said for the umpteenth time, and took her throaty _Ay, ay_ as permission.

The light on this ward was horrible. He took out his pocket penlight, turned it on, and placed it on the bed between Ms. Gonzalez’s legs. Then he leaned into the bed’s side-rail and realized he had a wad of mahogany between his legs.

Shit. An erection wearing scrubs was not good. Not that Ms. Gonzalez would notice; she lay there as still as she could. (A bad sign, that. Earlier, she had been writhing, but now she tried her best not to move. Not good at all.) Moaning. _Moaning._ It didn’t help with the erection.

No, wood-in-scrubs was bad news because eventually he’d have to leave her bedside.

D.