I had just gotten my pants back up when Jeff and his girlfriend, MaryEllen, walked into the dorm room Jeff and I shared. Jeff went straight in to the bathroom, when MaryEllen smirked at me and said, "If you're going to jack off in this room, maybe you at least ought to do it in the bathroom."
I was busted. I didn't realize it for a second, but a deep breath was enough to tell me how she knew: I could smell my sperm, wrapped up in some toilet paper, in the trashcan, where I'd hurriedly thrown it when I heard Jeff's key in the lock.
Jeff was still in the head when she came closer and sort-of whispered to me, "You know, masturbation isn't good for guys. When you beat off, you're training yourself to get off quickly, but when you're with an actual woman, you want to hold back until she gets off. Think about that, next time."
Jeff came out of the bathroom a minute later, and announced that they were heading down to the cafeteria for supper. At least his girlfriend didn't say anything to him while they were still in the room, but who knows what she'll tell him once they're out of my earshot.
Yeah, guys masturbate: everyone knows that. Still, it's damned embarrassing to get caught at it. Thing is, MaryEllen's 'advice' was probably good, and I kept thinking about it. The problem with that is that I didn't have a girlfriend, never had a girlfriend, and here I was, a 20-year-old junior, and still a virgin.
Why? I'm not the greatest looking guy in the world, but I'm not ugly, either; I'm about as average as average gets. My name is Max, which ought to be a great name for a guy, but I just don't get noticed very much. In a college environment where the 'alpha-males' grab up the good-looking girls, well, nobody every called me an alpha.
Oh, I wanted to be one, wanted to have the confidence to just take what I wanted, and kept playing through my mind how I should have responded to opportunities, how I should have approached the girls I wanted to talk to, but playing them through my mind was as far as I ever got. When I saw the girl of my dreams, dreaming was all that I could do, trying desperately to think of an opening line, and never coming up with one before the opportunity was lost. Even a simple, "Hi," in the cafeteria line, was tough for me, and the couple of times I worked up the nerve to try it, all I got was a "Hi" back, and then the girl would head over to a table with other people.
I was going to go all the way through college, and graduate a virgin. I was going to go through forty years of my career, and retire a virgin.
I'm a math major at Brown University, an Ivy League school in Providence, Rhode Island, one of the most progressive areas in the country. Brown has "gender-neutral" housing - if you volunteer for it - which appealed to me, hoping that I'd get assigned a girl for a roommate, but that wasn't really how it worked. If I had a female roommate, who knows, maybe I'd have gotten lucky. Instead, I got stuck with Jeff, who wasn't all that alpha, but he seemed to have an easy enough time around girls, and he hooked up with MaryEllen the first day in our dorm hall. At least, I guessed that he hooked up with her that first day, but even if it took him a day or three, they've been together ever since, and more than once he told me stories about how awesome she was in the sack.
The weeks passed, and I took MaryEllen's advice: when I beat off - I never quit doing that! - I'd try to bring myself close, and then back off. Training, she called it, and maybe it was, but one thing was certain: if I ever did get a chance to bed down with a girl, I needed to make the most of the opportunity, because who knows when I'd get another chance if I didn't perform well the first time. I stopped looking at pure porn, and started checking out advice sites, trying to study what I really needed to do. I really thought that I was getting better, or at least getting prepared, but I was still getting no opportunities.
November came, and fall can be a miserable time in Rhode Island. The days are windy and raw, the leaves long gone from the trees, and even a beautiful Ivy League campus like Brown's was stuck in autumn dreariness. Then, everything changed!
Jeff asked me, trying to sound casual but with a serious undertone in his voice, how I'd feel about a roommate switch. MaryEllen had talked to Sheila, her roommate, and she was OK with the idea of MaryEllen moving into Jeff's room, and me moving in with Sheila. The dorm was gender-neutral, so there wouldn't be any problems with Student Housing, and the only issue was my consent. One thing Sheila had insisted on: she was willing to share the room with me, but she didn't want to have to pack up, and I had to move in with her, not her in with me.
Me, I barely knew Sheila. I'd seen her in the halls, but that was about it. She was about as far from the gregarious MaryEllen as a girl could be, and I knew nothing about her.
"Anyway, dude, if you're cool with the idea, why don't you at least go talk to Sheila, and see if you'd be comfortable with it. She knows that you don't have a girlfriend, but she's not looking for a boyfriend."
"Yeah, well is she happy about MaryEllen moving out and her getting a male for a roommate?"
"She and MaryEllen got along OK, I suppose, even though they're like nothing alike. I don't know if she's happy MaryEllen is moving out, but she didn't object when MaryEllen made the suggestion to her."
"Is this Sheila waiting for me to talk to her or something?"
"I guess so. Let me call MaryEllen and see if Sheila is in the room." With that, Jeff called his girlfriend, and, sure enough, Sheila was there, and she did want to talk to me. I brushed my teeth quickly, headed down the hall, and knocked on the door.
"Hi," she said, kind of quietly, when she answered the door. "Come on in."
"Hi, I'm Max," I introduced myself. I was nervous, though not as badly as I thought I'd be. "I guess that this is kind of awkward."
