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basement,
the jukebox was blasting lively dance music and kegs of beer were
being emptied at a rapid clip. Daphne rarely refused a glass of
beer during her college days, and every now and then she’d indulge
in a second or even a third glass.
    That night, she didn’t bother to
count how many glasses she indulged in.
    The air in the frat house basement
was warm and humid, and the lighting was kept to a minimum. Bodies
gyrated on the dance floor at the center of the room, where all the
furniture had been cleared away. The volume of the jukebox was
cranked way up, causing the chairs and benches shoved up against
the walls to tremble slightly whenever a bass riff was
played.
    Thinking back on it, Daphne would
remember little else about the party itself. What she would
remember most vividly was that the basement was stuffy and noisy,
that the only two solutions to these problems she could come up
with were to drink more beer and to leave the party, and that when
the first solution began to pall she turned to the
second.
    She staggered out the door and down
a short hallway to the stairs. Brad Torrance was seated on the
bottom step, rolling up the sleeves of his shirt. “Hey, Daffy,” he
greeted her amiably, craning his neck up to view her. He didn’t
bother to stand in her presence.
    “How come you’re out here?” she
asked, pleasantly surprised that she wasn’t slurring her
words.
    “It’s too hot in there,” he said.
He lifted a sweater from the step beside him. “Can you believe I
was wearing this? I came out here to cool off.”
    “It’s much more comfortable out
here.”
    “Yeah.” Belatedly, Brad rose to his
feet. Daphne noticed that he’d opened the top two buttons of his
shirt. He had a nice neck, she reflected, strong but not too thick,
rising elegantly from the horizontal ridge of his shoulders. All in
all, he was a knock-out. A bit too good looking for her, but she
definitely wouldn’t kick him out for eating crackers.
    It dawned on Daphne, as she
contemplated Brad’s wonderfully proportioned physique and dimpled
smile, that Dennis Marlow wasn’t the only man in the world. In her
besotted condition, this thought struck her as a profound
revelation.
    “Well, I’ve got to take this up to
my room before somebody rips it off,” Brad declared, shaking the
wrinkles out of the sweater.
    “I’ll come with you,” Daphne
invited herself. Sober, she would never have suggested such a
thing. But that night, she was drunk and she didn’t care. All she
wanted was to forget about Dennis, forget she’d ever loved him,
forget that her sister was more desirable than she was. All she
wanted was for Brad to prove to her that, despite Dennis’s
rejection of her, she was still a woman worthy of a man’s
attention.
    It was a hell of a lot to want, but
at the time Daphne didn’t think she was asking for too
much.
    Brad weighed her offer for a
minute, then shrugged. “Sure. Come on up if you’d like,” he said,
stepping aside so she could join him on the stairs.
    His room was on the top floor of
the fraternity house, in a converted attic room beneath the eaves.
He’d gone to some effort to decorate it. A framed Modigliani nude
gazed across the room from the wall above the bed, a rug had been
thrown over the linoleum floor and matching curtains framed the
dormer windows. The room was tidy, books and papers stacked neatly
on the desk and toiletries lined up in a row on top of the bureau.
The bed was made. In retrospect, it would occur to Daphne that Brad
might have straightened up his room and made his bed because he’d
been planning to pick up a woman at the party and bring her
upstairs. He’d been planning to score.
    In retrospect, lots of things would
occur to her. But not then. She wanted to be beyond thinking that
night.
    Brad folded his sweater and placed
it in a bureau drawer. Then he crossed to his desk and opened
another drawer. “Would you like a drink?” he asked, switching on
the fluorescent lamp