She sucked it momentarily then whispered, “I can’t have a boyfriend.”
I continued stroking, my orgasm nearing. Her lips nuzzled the underside of the fleshy tip, sending jolts of electricity directly down my shaft, through my balls and up my spine. With a groan the dam burst. White lines of cum jetted across the bridge of her nose and caught in her heavy lashes. She pulled me into her mouth and I came some more. When I was finished my knees felt weak.
“I can’t have a boyfriend,” she repeated as my seed dribbled slowly from the corner of her mouth.
I offered her a towel to clean up. Nico climbed wearily into my bed and pulled the covers over her. I watched her sleep for a while before I got dressed and went back to my desk. I touched every item on the desktop exactly seven times in the proper order before I could resume my calculus homework, letting her sleep for an hour before I woke her gently.
“Nico, you have to get back before curfew,” I said softly. She mumbled an acknowledgement and pulled me into bed, her buttocks pressing up against my growing erection. We lay there for several minutes, me lightly stroking her hair. At last she rose from the bed and dressed.
She looked me steadily in the eye. “I can’t have a boyfriend.”
“I know,” I said. “Come on, I’ll walk you back to your dorm.”
This time, I remembered to get her phone number.
The next evening we were sitting in a booth at a busy coffee shop. Alternative music played overhead as students studied and writers pretended to write the great American novel on their laptops. I’m not the type to go out in public but Nico had succeeded in dragging me out of my room. I surreptitiously tapped the handle of my mug the correct number of times before I drank. Nico took a sip of her coffee and carefully set it down.
“How come you don’t have a girlfriend?”
The question caught me off guard. I thought for a minute then shrugged. It couldn’t hurt to tell her the truth. “I have an anxiety disorder that makes it hard for me to meet people, especially girls.”
She frowned. “You didn’t have any problems talking to me that first night.”
“That’s partly because of the beer,” I explained, “and mostly that you talked to me first. You broke the ice and you carried the conversation. If you think back, I just went along for the ride.”
“So,” she shrugged, “why don’t you meet girls at parties or bars?”
I fidgeted with a stirring straw, twisting it into knots. “Crowds make me anxious, I mean, really anxious. There’s a reason I’m sitting with my back to the rest of the room, so I don’t know how many people are here. I can’t go to any athletic events, and if a campus bus is crowded I’ll wait for the next one which sometimes makes me late for class. Even big lectures give me a buggy feeling.” The straw finally snapped between my fingers on the forty-third twist.
There’s a name for what I have: Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Why I didn’t tell Nico I have OCD I’ll never know. Maybe it’s because I’m keenly aware of how crazy I am. My main obsession is numbers. I count everything, how many twists it takes to break a straw or how many steps I take to and from class. My compulsion is having to touch things seven times to make everything all right. The anxiety on top of OCD was just a perk.