It was almost one a.m. The dance floor was crowded, swollen with an erotic jostling of squirming loins and legs and asses. Angie had been dancing almost nonstop for the last two or three hours. She loved dancing – it made her feel so alive, so sexy. It was dancing that let her express all the latent urges and frustrations that smoldered beneath the surface of her seemingly calm and self-confident appearance. She let herself go on the dance floor as she did nowhere else, sensuously writhing her hips and buttcheeks in their flesh-hugging trousers with the rhythmic abandon of a well-trained belly dancer. In fact she had taken belly-dancing lessons for a few months. But, like so many of her fleeting fancies, that one had soon fallen by the wayside.

At last the hot, urgent number that had been throbbing on for the last fifteen or twenty minutes, hypnotizing the dancers in their own private fervor of rock ecstasy, came to an end. Though Angie knew that her forehead was beaded with a light film of sweat, that her throat was parched, that her exhausted limbs longed for a moment's break, she remained standing, waiting for the next number to start, airily oblivious to the entreating looks of her tired partner.

Angie and her date, Dave Wagner, had exchanged scarcely more than a handful of words since they'd entered the nightclub. And that was just fine with Angie. She had had little enthusiasm for Dave's advances so far, but the handsome real-estate agent had been persistent so, equally bored with the prospect of an evening at home in front of the TV, Angie had agreed to come dancing. When she was dancing, it didn't really matter who she was with. She could enjoy herself just grooving on the hard, insistent presence of the music, her head empty of anything but the beat, her body leading an existence all its own, flying with the band, turning on to their wavelength – and moving.