“Well,” Devesh said. “Freud says all children have a desire to be punished, that it’s a normal stage in development.” He rested his hands under his head. “Don’t you remember wanting to be spanked?”

Of course she remembered, but she never imagined that other children envisioned the same things, soothed themselves to sleep with images of paddles and rulers and hairbrushes. She had thought these things for as long as she could remember and had hated it. What kid thinks these things? What kid wants them? Bad kids, she thought. And she had been a bad kid. Her mother could regale her with stories of her horrendous behavior: “You cut your braids off just to spite me,” she told her. “You once locked Natalie in the laundry room for five hours; your Aunt Steffi had to call a locksmith!” Her mother would laugh and shake her head, and Josie, grown now, would try to manage an amused smile. “Thank God you grew out of that,” her mother would say, only sometimes adding “mostly….”

“According to Freud, there are three stages of discipline fixation,” Devesh continued. “In the first stage, a child imagines a sibling being beaten by his father. In the second stage, the child himself is being beaten by his father, and in the third stage the child watches a number of unknown children being beaten, this time by a supposed surrogate father … a teacher or someone.” He ran his fingers through her hair. “The children who get stuck in that third stage are the ones that grow up to be perverts, turn into sadists and masochists.” He ran his hand down her neck to her belly and tickled her. “Are you a pervert?”

She squealed and pulled away from him. “You’re a pervert.”

“Me? Never,” he teased and rolled on his side to face her.

She wanted him to tell her more, to explain her fantasies away as nothing but a childhood phase. It was a lovely thought—something small and innocent—and she closed her eyes and let him play with her hair.

“But I don’t buy the whole Freudian analysis,” he said. “Submission and domination are too primal. Most likely they’re an evolutionary adaptation that came down through the apes, who built societies on very explicit negotiations of dominance and submission designed to maximize genetic reproduction.”

The scientific terminology was soothing, and she relaxed under his touch.

He grabbed her hands and pinned them over her head. “And what do you think, my little masochist? Do you think you’re still part monkey or did you get stuck in your kid head?”

“I don’t know.” She could hear her voice get girlish, and she tucked her chin into her chest.

“Hmmm?” he said.