Eventually, Dan and the other guy went outside and Dan beat him up. Dan had beaten him until the other man, who was in his late thirties and getting a belly, had screamed. Sarah had never heard a man scream before -she never wanted to hear it again. They had to leave quickly because the bartender saw how it was going and called the police. She would have gone home alone that night (oh? are you sure? her mind asked nastily), but it was twelve miles back to the campus and the buses had stopped running at six and she was afraid to hitch.

Dan didn't talk on the way back. He had a scratch on one cheek. Just one scratch. When they got back to Hart Hall, her dorm, she told him she didn't want to see him anymore. “Any way you want it, babe,” he said with an indifference that had chilled her-and the second time he called after the Brass Rail incident she had gone out with him. Part of her had hated herself for that.

It had continued all that fall semester of her senior year. He had frightened and attracted her at the same time. He was her first real lover, and even now, two days shy of Halloween 1970, he had been her only real lover.

She and Johnny had not been to bed.

Dan had been very good. He had used her, but he had been very good. He would not take any precautious and so she had been forced to go to the university infirmary, where she talked fumblingly about painful menstruation and got the pill. Sexually, Dan had dominated her all along. She did not have many orgasms with him, but his very roughness brought her some, and in the weeks before it had ended she bad begun to feel a mature woman's greediness for good sex, a desire that was bewilderingly intermixed with other feelings: dislike for both Dan and herself, a feeling that no sex that depended so much on humiliation and domination could really be called “good sex,” and self-contempt for her own inability to call a halt to a relationship that seemed based on destructive feelings.