‘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 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.