Before You Knew My Name by Jacqueline Bublitz (most inspirational books of all time .TXT) 📗

Tammy pressed into my hand said: Life models wanted. $200 cash. Potential for further work. My hands shook when I called his number.

‘Yes, I’m eighteen now. Yes, I’ve done this before. Yes, I’m still painting and, yes, it will be good to see you, too,’ I said on the call.

All lies, except the last part, or maybe that was the biggest lie. Thinking of two hundred dollars in cash, and the distance this could buy me.

Now, I am alone with Mr Jackson for the first time ever, watching him look from me to his sketch pad and back again, his tongue set between his teeth as he draws. He doesn’t look like the other men around here. He is slight, and tanned, and he has stubble instead of the full beard everyone seems to grow these days. He’s not wearing shoes, and his jeans, frayed at his ankles, are taut around his thighs. He used to wear slacks when he was teaching. In jeans he looks lean and coiled, and I realise I’m sketching him, too, working out the curves and lines of his body.

Skin and bone and curve.

‘That’s a serious face you had just now,’ he says, stepping out from behind his easel. ‘Just when I think I have you, Alice, your expression changes.’

‘Oh. Sorry. I guess I’m … concentrating. And, um. My arm kind of hurts.’

I let it drop and sit upright on the couch.

‘It’s harder than I thought.’

A slip. My second lie is revealed so easily, and he catches it immediately. Sees what he must have suspected. I have not done this before.

‘You want something to help you relax? It’s after’—he checks his watch—‘two o’clock.’

I nod, and Mr Jackson—Jamie—rolls a tight smoke, then sits down beside me. The couch is draped with a white sheet. Our thighs touch and he doesn’t move away.

He holds out the joint and I take a deep drag, feeling a burn in my throat and nose. It’s better quality than I’m used to, and the second hit makes me cough until I’m doubled over.

‘God. You really are an amateur, Alice.’

Mr Jackson says this affectionately, laughs softly as he pats his hand against my back. With my head between my legs and his hand on my back, I’m afraid to sit up. The room is too small, it’s spinning around me, coming too close. It might be his fingers or the smoke, or what I’m doing here. With my art teacher, who used to look at me in class, and now he’s reaching around, sliding his hand over my belly, pushing me upright again.

‘Can I take this off.’

Maybe it’s a question. Some other day I’ll wonder if it wasn’t really a question at all. I’ll wonder if I could have said no to the weed, and those stained fingers pressed against my skin, pulling the straps of my singlet down. I’ll wonder why I didn’t try out that word, see where resistance would take me. But, for now, I simply close my eyes and nod. Missing the look on his face as he removes my singlet, and then my shorts. Unaware of the gleam when he reaches for a camera sat next to that stack of twenty-dollar bills and fixes the lens on my body.

Does it matter that I never actually said yes? I knew what was being asked of me. Life models wanted. $200 cash—Mr Jackson was clear enough about what he wanted. I don’t suppose I had any right to be surprised by the camera, or what it would lead to, eventually. It must have seemed, to him at least, like a natural progression.

He might even say I asked for it.

Back in Melbourne, Ruby is showing her sister the website of the long-stay studio apartment she has booked on the Upper West Side.

‘It’s small,’ she says, taking a sip of the wine Cassie has poured for her, ‘but it has everything I need.’ Next, they look at maps of the neighbourhood. ‘I’ll run here,’ Ruby says, tracing her finger around the blue of the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir in Central Park, ‘and maybe here’—her finger travels to the western border of the map, to a thick green line that snakes alongside the Hudson River. ‘Riverside Park. I read it’s less crowded there. More . . . local.’

‘Is it safe?’ Cassie asks, and Ruby rolls her eyes.

‘New York is one of the safest cities in the world these days.’

‘Yes, but you’re going there by yourself,’ Cassie says. ‘You have to be more careful when you’re travelling on your own.’

‘I’m always on my own,’ Ruby responds, and now it’s Cassie’s turn to roll her eyes.

‘Yes, well. We know why that is, don’t we! Here’s hoping you do more than run in New York then, little sis. Or’—Cassie tilts her wine glass at Ruby, narrows her eyes—‘here’s hoping you run for long enough that you finally get away from that man, and the hold he seems to have on you.’

I moved in. I supposed you could call it that. The way I just never went home that first afternoon. That first night. We didn’t do anything. Not really. And we still don’t. Although, it has been one week since he slid my singlet off. Since his fingers pressed against my skin as he rolled my shorts from my hips. He’d said ‘No underwear’ during our first phone call, when he told me what time to come over to his house. ‘And wear something soft. No lines, I don’t want lines, Alice.’ I had followed Mr Jackson’s instructions carefully, dressing as if it were ninety degrees outside instead of forty, shivering under my thick winter coat. There wasn’t much for him to peel away that very first afternoon, not much effort required to leave me completely exposed on his small, sheet-draped couch.

A week later, and my stomach still flips at the memory of it. Up until then, I had never been naked in front of a man. Never been looked at