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

ignore her like that? On the one night no one would have questioned their closeness, when everyone at the agency seemed to be throwing their arms around her, confessing their affection. Even then, he kept his distance from her.

He showed up at her apartment twenty minutes later.

‘I have half an hour,’ he said, checking his watch. As if thirty minutes could make up for the whole night she had lost waiting for him. When he leaves that half hour later, booking an Uber from her phone instead of his own—‘Just to be on the safe side’—she wonders if he had planned it this way all along, and simply neglected to tell her. Had he considered letting the night be about her, about what made her feel safe, for once? Or was it only ever about him?

She knows the answer to that, of course. We both do. But at this point, we’re still weeks away from understanding the real consequences of our connection to such careless men.

SEVEN

IT HAPPENS DURING ONE OF THE LAST BIG SNOWFALLS OF the season. Mr Jackson arrives home late from school with little flurries on his shoulders and in his hair. We both stand in the open doorway and watch as snowflakes weave their way to the ground, streetlamps turning on one by one, their glow making it look like it’s the stars that are falling. I’m not wearing a jacket and he puts his arms around me, pulls me in close. We’re there for minutes or hours, I don’t know which. I only know that I am shivering, and he too is shaking when he turns to face me.

‘Alice?’

The kiss is gentle, a question. I try to answer against his mouth, but I am suddenly as slivered as the swirling, falling snow. I am in pieces as he pulls me inside, closes the door, his mouth still on mine as we stumble toward the couch.

We are about to fall when he breaks away and laughs, a sudden, awkward sound that bounces off the walls and puts a distance between us.

‘Jesus. What a cliché I’ve become.’

I don’t know if he’s talking about the snow, or the kiss, or the fact he used to be my teacher, and I am a young woman, his muse. I cast my mind about, trying to find something clever to say, to show him I take responsibility for the kiss, for what it means, but I need more time to make sense of what I am feeling. All I know in this moment is that he should kiss me again, before something is lost. I don’t have the words to say why.

‘It’s okay. I want this.’

This is all that comes out, a kind of plea. I do not want to stay on this precipice any longer.

He sways, glistens, and begins to undress me.

‘Fuck.’

Hands on my breasts, then his mouth. One suck of each nipple, a brand new sensation felt deep in my belly. And then he is kneeling, his mouth moving from thigh to thigh, before his tongue pushes inside me. I don’t move.

‘Alice.’

Two fingers now, his tongue finding nerve. I see a match lit behind my eyes. Still, I don’t move.

‘Alice. You are so goddamn beautiful.’

Harder now. Deeper. His fingers spark, I feel like fire. It’s okay. I want this.

‘Alice.’

He keeps saying my name, only it sounds like someone else’s name now. Some other girl he first saw when she was sixteen years old and he was closer to forty. After her mother had died, leaving her alone and sad, and before he looked at her the way he does now.

‘Please, Mr Jackson,’ I say over his head, because I know I am not going to take that two hundred dollars in twenty-dollar bills, the stack still sitting there on the table. And because I don’t want to be alone and sad anymore. I want him to help me forget my pain, dissolve it. And it does rise to the surface, scatter across my skin, as he enters me slowly, saying my name over and over, the sky now black outside, and me swirling, like snow.

He tells me I’m like the sky. That storm clouds pass across my face, and just as quickly it’s clear skies, bright and shining. He says that’s what he’s trying to capture when he draws me, or takes those pictures, but he can’t keep his hands away long enough now, and there is always another way for us to touch that gets in the way of the art. I’m getting quite good at it, too. I know where to place my hands, and my mouth. He’s teaching me what to do, how to move my hips, what to say. I even let him film me sometimes, so that it’s me with the glazed eyes, twisting and moaning like the women in those videos he showed me a lifetime ago.

‘How many were there before me?’ he asked, that first, next morning.

‘Um. Three.’

I buried my face in his shoulder. Embarrassed. He had taught two of the boys at the high school.

‘How old were you the first time, Alice?’

‘Fifteen.’

Fifteen. My mother had committed suicide just months before and a boy wanted to say sorry. He was careful and clumsy, and it was over in a minute. ‘Sorry,’ he actually said, right at the end, and I was never sure for what, exactly. I felt nothing, did nothing. It wasn’t terrible, it wasn’t even bad. It was just nothing, because I couldn’t feel anything at all back then.

Two and three were about trying to feel something, trying to feel anything at all. Wanting to be like the other girls in my class. Like Tammy, who told me what it was like to come—‘Like your body is a firework!’ That’s what I wanted, to feel like I was exploding, disintegrating, and that’s not what it was like at all. With two and three, I felt heavy, stuck.

‘They weren’t … it wasn’t … very good.’

But Mr