Her aunt had wondered how her mother had done it, how she could so easily get Josie under control. It was a simple thing, really. You just saw things and understood things and never spoke them, but you knew. And like a bullet, her mother’s knowing went straight to the tight bundle of shame in Josie’s heart. But what was hard to admit was that along with the pain came a speck of pleasure, a pinch of blissful intoxication at being controlled, and the two sensations, swirling around in her body, more often than not made her crawl to the bottom of her bed and imagine far more horrific punishments. In college, she had taken a physiology class where the professor lectured on the amygdala. It sat nestled in the middle of the brain, and its job was to prompt good feelings in response to behaviors like eating or having sex. Josie was taken by the concept. To survive you needed to have sustenance, you needed to reproduce, and the brain knew to encourage these behaviors. How logical. How clever. But why had her brain paired punishment with pleasure? Why was this need in her so essential? It wasn’t for Devesh. His need for domination was not an addiction. Sure it was a natural urge, but ultimately he could choose not to give in. He had made that clear. If some kind of Darwinian theory was correct, this giving and receiving of pain was merely an evolutionary adaptation. But more than likely, Devesh said, there was no explanation, and her job was not to try and fasten one, but rather just to accept what was. She wished it were that easy, but her needs insisted on forcing themselves outside herself. She thought briefly of Tyler. Her mother wouldn’t have even been surprised. “Yes,” she would have said, “that is something you would do.”

She looked at the clock. It was 2 P.M. in Delhi. She would have to do it eventually, and so she dug the number out from her discarded jeans’ pocket. There was no phone in this bedroom, so she crept down to the kitchen and sat at the table with the slip of paper in front of her. She looked at the number—his handwritten twos and nines so distinctly non-American, and above the number, an uppercase “D.” To anyone else that “D” was just an initial, and the number just digits dialed to contact the owner of that initial, but Josie saw the capitalized “D” and knew that if he had written her name besides his, it would have begun with a lower-case “j,” a little “j,” a submissive “j.” But Devesh’s “D” was enormous. “D” for Devesh. “D” for Dominance. And the number—it belonged to him. It made her stomach pitch.