Margot and Robert's Date and Sexual Encounter

Margot and Robert’s date and sexual encounter turns the promise of courtship into a study of how expectation, embarrassment, desire, and social pressure can pull apart. Margot is drawn toward Robert partly through an imagined version of him; when they meet, she experiences real attraction alongside discomfort and, during sex, a growing conviction that she does not want to continue. The encounter matters less as a beginning than as a revelation of the distance between outward participation and inward willingness.

An Uneasy Date

After a break spent exchanging messages, Margot returns to campus eager to see Robert again. He is difficult to reach and explains that work has kept him busy, leaving Margot to feel that their dynamic has shifted against her. When he finally asks her to the cinema, she accepts immediately. She suggests the multiplex outside town rather than the cinema where she works, and Robert collects her in a muddy white Civic with candy wrappers overflowing from the cupholders.

The drive unsettles her. Robert is quieter than she expected and barely looks at her; within minutes, Margot imagines that he might take her somewhere, rape her, and kill her, since she knows so little about him. He remarks that he will not kill her, and she answers with a joke. At the cinema, his attempt at humor about Red Vines falls flat. He does not hold her hand during the film, and she interprets his distance as a sign that he has lost interest. His earlier teasing about her casual clothes now seems possibly more pointed than she had thought.

Robert’s choice of film also becomes a source of doubt. It is a bleak drama about the Holocaust, an awkward proposition for a first date; Margot had initially treated it as a joke, but she later wonders whether her response embarrassed him. She reconsiders the evening through the possibility that his silences reflect hurt or insecurity, and this imagined vulnerability makes her feel newly tender toward him. The date’s emotional balance shifts not because Robert explains himself, but because Margot begins interpreting his awkwardness as something she might soothe.

The Bar and a Turn Toward Intimacy

When Robert asks whether she wants a drink, Margot senses that he expects her to refuse. She agrees, partly disappointed that the evening has gone so poorly after the hopes she built during the break. He takes her instead to an unfamiliar bar that looks like a clandestine operation, with no sign outside and a queue at the door. The bouncer barely examines Margot’s identification before dismissing it as false and sending her aside. Robert has already gone in without noticing. Someone in the queue taps his shoulder and points him back toward her, left alone on the sidewalk.

Margot apologizes, then begins to cry, bewildered that the evening has become so difficult. Robert’s manner softens when he sees her face crumple: he embraces her, comforts her, and kisses her on the head. Margot feels again the impression she had once had outside a 7-Eleven—that she is delicate and precious to him. She laughs through her tears, and Robert kisses her on the mouth. The kiss is clumsy and forceful, but instead of ending her interest, it makes her feel unexpectedly tender toward him. He takes her by the hand to another bar, where there are pool tables, pinball machines, sawdust on the floor, and no one checking identification.

Over drinks, Margot increasingly thinks about Robert’s sensitivity and how easily she might hurt or reassure him. She asks about the films he likes and downplays her own opinions about the art-house cinema where she works, including her unease around her older colleagues. She sees these disclosures affect him, and the sense that she can coax him into warmth gives her both closeness and a feeling of influence. By her third beer, she imagines sex with him as awkward and excessive, like the kiss, but finds that imagining his eagerness and desire produces a sharp physical stir. When she takes his hand and leads him out, his obedient response intensifies that attraction. Outside, however, Robert gives her only a chaste kiss and accuses her of being drunk.

Sex and the Failure of Enthusiasm

At Robert’s home, the sitting room offers Margot reassurance: its bookshelves, records, board games, and framed posters suggest interests she recognizes. That comfort briefly coexists with a fearful fantasy that the room might be a trap concealing bodies, kidnapped girls, or chains elsewhere in the house. Robert is already kissing and groping her, then leads her into a bedroom furnished with a mattress rather than a bed. He takes a drink of whisky and puts on music with his laptop.

As Robert undresses awkwardly, Margot sees his heavy, hairy stomach and thinks that she does not want this. She does not believe he will force her; instead, she cannot bear the social difficulty of stopping after everything she has done to get there. She fears seeming spoiled or capricious, like someone who orders a meal and sends it back. She drinks whisky and tries to overcome her resistance. Robert’s clumsy, avid touching makes her struggle to breathe, and she wonders whether she can go through with it. Changing position helps; she closes her eyes and recalls the tenderness of his kiss on her head. She takes off her shirt and follows his instruction to remove her bra when he cannot undo it. Her attention settles on how intensely he looks at her, and on the imagined version of his desire that excites her even as the physical encounter remains uncomfortable.

During their sexual touching, Robert’s hand becomes too insistent; Margot flinches, and he withdraws it and apologizes. He asks whether she has done this before. When she tries to explain her nervousness, he says they can take it slowly, but he is soon pressing down on her again. By then, Margot has given up the hope of enjoying the encounter and decides to let him finish. His body and the roughness of his movements provoke repulsion, self-disgust, and humiliation; she experiences herself less as a participant than as an object in a scene he appears to be staging for himself. He loses his erection repeatedly, each time responding aggressively, before finally climaxing and collapsing on her. Margot thinks it is the worst decision she has ever made, while also wondering at the strangeness of her own choice.

Aftermath and the Imagined Robert

Near three in the morning, Margot says she should go home. Robert seems to have expected her to stay and offers to make excellent scrambled eggs. She declines, citing her roommate’s likely concern. Before she leaves, he catches her arm and pulls her into one last kiss. Once she is back in her room, he sends a message made up of hearts, heart-eyed faces, and a dolphin. The next day, after sleeping for twelve hours, eating waffles in the dining hall, and watching crime shows on Netflix, Margot hopes he might simply disappear without requiring her to end things directly.

Robert’s next message is an innocuous joke about Red Vines. Margot deletes it immediately, troubled by a visceral revulsion that seems disproportionate to what she believes he actually did. She tries to draft a polite breakup message, adding explanations and apologies until it becomes too long and difficult to send. Meanwhile, Robert continues texting, and she imagines him composing each message on the bare mattress in his room. She also recalls that he spoke at length about his cats, though she saw none at his house, and wonders whether he invented them. Her occasional wistfulness the next day is not, she realizes, a longing for the man she encountered that night, but for the Robert she had imagined during their exchanges over the break.

Significance in the Book

The episode refuses a simple opposition between attraction and refusal. Margot initiates some steps, feels desire, and chooses to continue, but her account also makes clear that these facts do not erase her reluctance: she proceeds because stopping seems socially unbearable, and later describes having abandoned the hope of pleasure. The gap between what she does and what she wants is the event’s central tension, not a puzzle resolved by labeling the encounter wholly as romance or wholly as coercion.

That tension resonates with other scenes in the book without making them identical. In a later encounter, Jacqueline explicitly asks Ryan to punch her and kick her in the stomach before sex; when he does, she vomits, and he continues despite his own alarm. Elsewhere, a collective narrator urges a man to silence a woman and carry on, while he pleads for them to stop. These distinct episodes place bodily harm, expressed requests, reluctance, and pressure in different configurations. Against that broader pattern, Margot’s date shows how the performance of a willing romantic or sexual participant can persist even as discomfort takes over—and how the imagined relationship may outlast the encounter itself.