It started, for the most part, when I was a little girl. I vaguely remember being at my cousin's wedding when I was about 7 or so, and an obscure relative or friend of the family told me to go upstairs with him and from what I remember, did something ….not right. I'd pretty much done what my therapist calls "blocking" and just pushed it out of my memory because it was so scarring, and it surfaced later on (about 10 years later), creating a world of problems. Then I had the obligatory pregnancy scare that all girls have to have in order to be considered a woman: Me and my current boyfriend were messing around, I was a week late, and worried myself sick over it until I got my period the next Friday. No biggie, right? Ha.

Well, it started to snowball. That one emotionally and physically scarring event was brought up when the anxiety of the pregnancy scare took over me, and it was like something inside me snapped. I couldn't touch my boyfriend because I was afraid that one thing would lead to another, and I might run the risk of pregnancy. Then I couldn't touch doorknobs that I know I'd used after becoming sexually active or sit on chairs that I'd sat on before… got so bad that I was washing my hands almost 50 times a day. They were raw and red, cracked and bleeding, but I still did it, out of necessity, that little voice in my head going, "Well, there's still a chance that you could have gotten pregnant because you were sitting on his lap and messing around…" Even as I write it now, it looks like the stupidest, most irrational thing I've ever heard of, but that's what OCD is all about: Irrationality.

I began seeing a doctor about 4 years ago, and now, at the ripe old age of 25, here I am. I'm on a medication that makes the irrational thoughts kind of subdued, but they still come and go. It's not so much a sexual fear anymore, or a fear of pregnancy, but a fear of men. I love them, there's nothing more beautiful to me than the male form, don't get me wrong… but it's like men are the bearers of this contamination, this frightening thing that I have no control over. And it kills me.

It really kills me. My boyfriend at the time left me, unable to cope with "a girlfriend he couldn't touch", and unable to cope with my problem or my therapy either. So I moved on, and for the past 5 years, it's been more or less looking but no touching. A few times, I came close to "more than friends", but always got scared off and ran away.

I moved from town to town, just kind of observing other people. I knew there were other people like me out there, and tons of people had it worse than me, I knew that too. But I couldn't stay at home, with the same people that called me crazy from day one, no matter what the doctors said. I just kept running and running.

Until I met Vann.

**

To support myself in the newest town I'd moved into, this little town called Old Bridge, I worked part-time at a roadside diner called The Colonial. I'd waited tables before, it was nothing new. It was actually how I usually made most of my money in whatever town or city I moved to and from: I picked it up in high school and never quite lost the talent I had for carrying innumerable plates, glasses and trays with one hand and writing a bill with the other.

Waitressing was actually how I met most of the guys I came "that close" with. They were these cute younger guys, college freshmen maybe…some were older men, in their mid thirties, maybe… all of them unattached as I was, and looking at me with the same smiling faces, eyes saying "I know what you want, and it's okay, I'm the guy to give it to you." If they were handsome, even the least bit attractive, I would slip them my local number with their check and that would be it. One date or two, then I'd clam up or realize that they were just horny and still had that thing I was afraid of: that unnamable thing that I'd been on medicine because of, and in therapy for years due to.

But back to Old Bridge.

I had been there for about 3 weeks, which was relatively long, considering I'd stayed in the neighboring towns of Woodbridge and Freehold about a week each before getting antsy and leaving. I kept the night shifts, mainly because the other women that worked there had kids and husbands to go home to: normal lives that were more important than who ordered the tuna melt and who had the side of fries, and more normal than I could ever hope to be.

All until, like I said before, Vann showed up.