“There’s something I have to tell you,” she said, and paused. It was cruel to make him wait for what she was sure he knew was a goodbye speech, but she didn’t know how to put into words what she had never actually articulated. She took a deep breath. “I want bad things,” she stuttered. “I mean … I want things you’ll think are bad.”

He looked at her quizzically. “Like what?”

“Like sexual things.” She paused. “I want to be punished.”

He was silent, waiting for more, but she said nothing. “Okay,” he said.

“Do you know what that means?”

The light streaming in the bathroom window was fading, but she could see the discomfort in his shoulders, the way they twitched slowly toward each other. “Um,” he stammered. “Like … spanked?”

“I want to be beaten,” she blurted. The words seemed to somersault out of her mouth and consume the space between them, and he opened his mouth as if he were gasping for air, then shut it, then opened it again.

“Oh,” he said. She knew he was trying to be impartial, but she saw the grimace flick across his face.

“Do you understand?” she asked.

“You mean … you mean like S and M.”

She blushed at the letters. “Disciplined,” she said. “With belts and whips and paddles.”

She saw the words slice through him, and despite the fact that he was trying to put on a brave face, feign understanding, she knew he was repulsed. His body was suctioning in on itself, and she could see his chest concave. “Oh,” he said.

“And there’s other stuff,” she said. “I like to be tied and cuffed and … and shamed.” She felt the word grasp the back of her head, force her chin up, her eyes open.

“Shamed?”

“Made to say things … and do things.” Her body weakened, her mind flooded.

“Okay,” he said.

“No; it’s not okay.”

He ran his palms down the front of his jeans, scratched at the denim. “Well,” he said. “Maybe we can get help … or something.”

“No,” she said quickly. For weeks she had felt like an addict, stealing pleasure as if it were illegal. It was maddening. She had created this life to remedy the last, and now she was backpedaling through spaces she had determinedly left behind. She refused to trade one guilt for another. “I can’t do this anymore,” she said. She was acutely aware of the irony of her words, how she had stared at that scrap of paper with Devesh’s numbers and said the very same thing, but then she thought she could manufacture a life, thought she knew what the new Josie would want. But there was no new Josie. There was only the one that had always been, and this self held many selves, the little girl and the big girl and all the others in between, each snuggled inside the next like Russian nesting dolls.

“You don’t even want to try?” he asked.