“You couldn’t do that,” she said, but she wasn’t sure. There had been a handful of times where she was pretty certain he had wanted to make love to her the way millions of people in millions of bedroom around the world made love, or at least he wanted to try, but she had turned it dark. Once, he had placed his hand on her chest and then raised it, a quarter inch away, and traced her body. She had closed her eyes and felt the heat of that concentrated love, but within moments she grew too hot, too close to him. She could feel him begin to slip under her skin, begin to root around her insides, and she kept her eyes closed and said, “You don’t beat me hard enough.” There was a moment of complete stillness, and she hoped and waited for him to bring his hand down hard on her thigh. Instead, he pressed his lips to her forehead for a long, long time.

Now the memory breathed bitterly into her lungs. “You need it,” she said.

“No, I don’t,” he said.

She could hear the same desperation in his voice that she had heard in her own the day he threatened to take it all away. It made her feel enormous and powerful, and she hated him for this.

“You’re lying,” she said.

“I’m not.”

“Yes, you are. All those toys. You think you could give this up like it was cigarettes? Go fuck someone else,” she said, and got up.

He grabbed her strongly by the wrist, and for a moment she could feel that familiar pull in her belly.

“That’s enough,” he said, and stood.

“It’s true.”

“What’s true? That I have those toys? That I like using them on you? Yes, Josie, it’s true, but what do you think is happening between us? Do you think this is just lust? Is that what you think?”

She didn’t know what to think.

He tightened his grip, and as much as it ached, she couldn’t pull away. She could feel her bones disintegrating, her body somehow held up by just his hand on her. “Why?” she asked.

“Why what?”

“Why do you want to beat me?”

Immediately he loosened his grip. He looked at her, and for a fragment of time, she thought she saw what she had only felt in herself, that tidal wave of shame that clogged her head and made her chest dense and heavy, but then it was gone.

“We’ve discussed this before.”