He had met Nora, and known immediately that this was the girl he wanted for a wife. She was perfect for him. She had the correct ethnic, religious, and political backgrounds. She was pretty in a subdued and ladylike way with her soft trusting eyes and her pageboy hairstyle. She wore a powder blue cashmere sweater set, and a strand of dainty pearls about her neck. She was an only child, innocent, carefully sheltered. She wasn't stupid. In fact she was very intelligent, but she was unsophisticated. Her girlfriends told her how lucky she was to have attracted a guy like Jeff Buckley, and having fallen half in love with him that first night, she believed them. And she believed Jeff Buckley. A pat from him, a flash of his smile, and she was lost.

But most important of all to Jeff was that Nora was a virgin. And he made sure that she stayed that way until he married her. The word went out on the campus that pretty Nora Edwards was the property of Jeff Buckley, quarterback of State's championship football team. On her birthday, November 30, he gave her his fraternity pin. She was serenaded by his fraternity just before the Christmas break, while standing in the cold before her dorm wearing the long dark green velvet formal gown she had worn to the Christmas dance at his fraternity house. Candles burned in the windows of the dorm, and the shadowed figures of the other girls could just be made out. She had almost frozen to death, but she had never shivered because she wanted him to be proud of her.

Nora had gone home with a cold, desperate to get well, as she was to spend New Year's Eve at Jeff's parents' home. His mother had called her mother and invited her. And on New Year's Eve Jeff had put his hand in Nora's underpants for the first time, fingering her clitoris until she almost fainted. When she had whimpered with her pleasure, he had stifled her cries with his kisses. At the fraternity's spring formal he had asked her to marry him, and put a ring on her finger before she might answer, but of course he had known the answer would be yes.