She wanted so badly to collapse to the floor, to place her hands between her legs and feel the heat. She hadn’t realized how little she had felt inside her own body since she arrived, and the want was almost painful. Before she’d met Devesh, she had needed to make do with the fantasy, but now she could have anything her perverse head imagined. She wished she had her cell phone in her pocket right now. She would pay the huge phone bill, wake his family up in the middle of the night. She didn’t care. She needed to tell him she was sorry for being a brat, that he should be sure to take her over his knee when they both were back in the safety of his bedroom. She would be good, and repentant, and obedient, a tiny kitten, and she would take every punishment he gave her. “Punish me,” she would say. But this was exactly what she couldn’t say. Bad girls were punished; good girls were disciplined. Punishment was something unpleasant; discipline was pleasurable. He had drilled this into her head the night he had sent her home, and after her first actual punishment, she was sure there would be no others. On the plane, she had needed to sit balanced on one hip to avoid the pressure of the seat on her backside, and when she dressed this morning, she saw the ugly green mess her skin had become, but now none of that mattered, and she thought she would like him to beat her until she was close to passing out from pain. Her body warmed at the image, and she had the startling thought that she needed to immediately lock herself in the sitting room, drape herself over the chair, and imagine things Devesh would never do to her. The shame of it all seeped through her skin.

Her head was now pounding from the alcohol, and she needed to lie down.

“Alex, let’s go,” she said.

“I just started,” he whined.

“You can play again later.”

He ignored her and kept playing.

“Alex,” she said.

He kept his eyes on the blinking lights and didn’t acknowledge her.

“Alex. Now.”

He did nothing, and Josie could see how easy it would be to make him Tyler. It was all punishment, whether she inflicted it directly on herself or not. If she thought she could separate the “good” punishment from the “bad,” she was sorely mistaken. The need traveled the same well-worn track—from her head to her sex to her heart—and it sprang from the same place, the same wicked place. So what if her mother could no longer pry her open with a single look? This ugliness was always there, not because her mother knew it, not because Devesh beat it into her, but because it was hers.

“Alex, I’m leaving, I’m going,” she said and turned right and walked down the hallway.