Before You Knew My Name by Jacqueline Bublitz (books to read for teens txt) 📕

up close. Oh, I’d had sex before, if that’s what you can call it. Fumbling fingers, and thrusts under sheets at various parties, but nothing like this. I’d never been seen until that moment, with Mr Jackson sliding to the floor, looking up at me. The way he said ‘Like this’ as he reached up and spread my legs. On his knees, with those fingers running up the insides of my thighs, pushing them further apart.

‘I want to photograph you like this, Alice.’

The room tilted sideways. He used to watch me in class. I had that same stomach-pit feeling of sinking and floating, and I wanted him to keep touching me, wanted to cover myself, wanted to get up and run. I stayed perfectly still instead, pushed all the shaking deeper. This is what he had said was required of me, after all.

‘I will need you to stay perfectly still.’

I said, ‘Yes, of course. I have done this before.’

He now knows this to be untrue, although I haven’t yet told him my real age. It’s not a lie exactly to keep that from him, not like the lies I’ve told Gloria—when I went back to pick up some clothes, I told her I was going to the lake with Tammy—but more like an omission. Something better left out of the story because it doesn’t serve any purpose. It’s bad enough he knows I lied about my experience as a model, that he could see the way I flinched every time the camera clicked.

I still jump a little now, though I am getting used to our new routine. I thought, last night, wide awake on this couch, how quickly the strangest thing can come to feel normal, ordinary. That first afternoon, as he photographed my naked body, I sent myself somewhere else, somewhere above the lens, maybe even out of the room entirely. I trembled as he took one shot of me then another, sure he was coming too close, seeing too much. But I never once asked him to stop, never asked him to go back to his easel instead, and when Mr Jackson was done taking his pictures, he wrapped me up in a soft blanket and we talked all night about art and God—‘I believe they’re the same thing,’ he said—and we ate homemade nachos, and he never touched me, not in the way that leads to other things. I slept on the couch, wrapped in that blanket, and the next morning when I showered, he photographed me there, through a half-opened shower door and, later, back on the couch he wanted to do it again—‘The light is beautiful right now, Alice’—and this time I didn’t send myself somewhere else. I stayed locked on the lens, that single eye opening and closing on my body. I felt powerful, staring straight back at it. Mr Jackson showed me some of the images later, and the pale exposed skin, the soft triangle of hair between my legs meant nothing to me. I couldn’t stop looking at the way my eyes were blazing. The slight snarl of my lip.

He said I was mercurial and made up my bed on the couch once again.

And now we are a whole week into this new arrangement. Our conversations have ranged all over the house, and when he goes to school for the day, I am happy here on my own, looking through his library of books by men with names I only sometimes recognise. Nietzsche, Sartre, Jung. And someone called Kierkegaard, who says: It begins, in fact, with nothing and therefore can always begin, which I like the sound of, and almost understand.

When Mr Jackson comes home with groceries and beer, we cook dinner, drink a little, and then he photographs me a new and different way.

‘It’s not pornography,’ he says one of these nights. He has asked me to put my hand between my legs—‘relaxed, like this’—and perhaps he has caught my hesitation this time, the confusion around where this might lead.

‘Pornography has its own purpose, its own merit, Alice. Don’t let the conservative claptrap of this town turn your head. But we’re not doing that, anyway. This is about your body, about showing the world how you inhabit your strong, beautiful body. All the incredible things you can make it do.’

Later, he shows me some videos on his laptop, pornography of merit. Women and men coiled around each other, gasping, clinging, looking, for the most part, like they are in some kind of pain.

‘Agony and pleasure. They can look like the same thing,’ he tells me when I start to protest, and it is true I cannot see the difference, cannot understand whether I am afraid or expanding somehow as I watch these scenes unfold. I know I ask to watch more, and I know I am wet, saturated by what I am seeing on the screen. I feel conflicted by this pleasure, the way it both horrifies and excites me.

What Mr Jackson is showing me cannot be unseen, this much I do know. But, as he leaves me alone for yet another night, I cannot for the life of me figure out what he expects me to make of this new world, beckoning.

Later, I see what he was doing, why he made me wait. He needed to know I could be trusted. He needed to know he was safe. As if my safety did not come into it at all.

The night of Ruby’s work farewell, she finds herself thinking much the same thing. Ash had stayed away from her all night, kept to the other side of the bar, so that she spent the whole evening looking for him, forgetting it was her own party, barely registering each ‘I’ll miss you’ or ‘Remember when . . .’ that came her way. By 11 p.m., it was the knot in her stomach, not the cheap champagne, making her sick, and she excused herself, walked home in tears. How could Ash