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instinctively, she whipped around so that her back was to them, then tilted her chin toward the dusty rafters overhead, because she knew that if she did, her long hair would fall low enough to hide her bare butt. Somehow her feet kept moving in the semblance of a dance while she prayed for deliverance and the audience alternately cheered and booed. The manager hissed furiously at her from the wings—she had to show them something —and as she glanced his way her hair had apparently shifted enough to afford the audience a glimpse of the naked cheeks of her behind. The crowd roared approval. Startled, she glanced around at them, affording them another peek. They howled for more. The manager hissed at her again, making frantic turning motions with his hands, inscribing a horizontal circle in the air. Her drug-dulled wits froze, then gave up the struggle for independence. Nauseated with fear, she obediently turned around—but shook her hair forward so that it covered her breasts. The manager growled. The audience stomped its feet. Frightened to death of both him and the crowd, Maggy closed her eyes to shut them all out and swayed to the beat, trying not to hear the thunderous mixture of catcalls and stomping feet and clapping hands that greeted her amateur gyrations. The manager hissed again—“ Show them some skin! ”—and Maggy’s eyes opened. She was out there onstage, there was no way off except past the angry manager on one side and a burly bouncer on the other or through the crowd itself, and if she didn’t perform she wouldn’t be paid.…
    Getting paid was what it was all about, after all.
    Suddenly the crowd was silent. The men licked their lips and sweated and stared as Maggy slid both arms underher hair and lifted the glistening curtain of waves, then dropped it, over and over again, in a somnolent, sensuous sleepwalker’s dance born somewhere in her subconscious. The watching men went wild, but the commotion just barely penetrated the haze of nauseated fear and pot that blunted her senses like an anesthetic. Her body was there, dancing nearly naked for money, but she, the part of her that was Magdalena, was not.
    On her third night, a busy Saturday, Nick walked in during the middle of her performance. She found out later that he’d been tipped off to what she was doing by one of his friends. When he appeared, she was down to her heels and stockings and G-string, her thick fall of hair all that protected her modesty. Her back was turned to the audience, so she didn’t see him when he entered and threaded his way between the crowded tables, didn’t see him when he stopped directly in front of the stage, arms crossed over his chest, staring up at her as—once, twice, three times—she lifted her hair and wiggled her bare butt, as he put it later, for all the world to see. Largely over her initial stage fright by that time and high as a kite, she turned around as the audience roared for more and smiled sleepily into the closest pair of male eyes—only to come to the slow, awful realization that they were blazing green with outrage and all too familiar.
    Nick.
    Shocked sober, she had frozen where she stood. With a single lithe movement Nick jumped up onstage beside her, snatched up her robe from the floor, wrapped it around her body, and picked her up over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry, all without saying so much as a word to her.
    Then all hell had broken loose. The Pink Pussycat didn’t take kindly to having its dancers snatched from its stage right before its patrons’ eyes. By the time the melee was over, twenty-year-old Nick had battled his way through the club’s three massive bouncers and about adozen other assorted pugilists, suffered two black eyes, a bloodied nose, and bruised ribs, and barely escaped being arrested when Maggy dragged him out the door just ahead of the arrival of the cops, who were called to quell the disturbance.
    And was he grateful? Not he!
    Roaring away from the club