Now You Know It All by Joanna Pearson

Author:Joanna Pearson [Pearson, Joanna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780822988618
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

When we began dating each other, part of what I liked about my boyfriend was his odd self-assurance. My boyfriend very quickly began to treat me like a clock or an appliance, something reliable and small. I mean this in a good way. After my relationship with my ex, I’d learned there is such a thing as too much hot blood. My boyfriend had very specific ideas, his mind moving in a rigid and orderly way—cool, impervious to argument.

I mentioned James to my boyfriend one day, although not by name. I called him the Devil Boy, because that was how I thought of him. The title was not pejorative—if anything, I marveled at James. I wanted to talk about him.

“There’s a child I work with,” I told my boyfriend, who was sitting at his computer, sipping a cup of coffee. “I worry he’s being abused.” I mentioned the house that burned down, along with a series of other troubling, inexplicable incidents Tawny and I had since uncovered. I told him about the boy’s current foster mother, who was under CPS investigation. I’d made a confidential report after what James had said to me that first day.

My boyfriend’s hands froze on his keyboard as he listened. He frowned. Although he did not speak of it, there had been other difficulties in his childhood, so he took an interest in the hardships of children. This was one of the reasons, he’d explained to me, that he hesitated to be a father himself: He worried about replicating a pattern.

My boyfriend closed his laptop and sighed. “I’ve told you so many times,” he said patiently, the way a good teacher might reprimand a student. “You don’t have to keep working there. I’m here now. To take care of you.”

It moved me to have someone worry over me, but I shook my head. “I like working there.”

“There are other options,” he said. “Something part time, maybe. Less stressful.”

“I don’t want something part time. I want to do this.”

“Beth Ann,” my boyfriend said, still speaking to me like I was much younger than he was. “You’re too trusting. It’s dangerous.”

I shook my head again. My boyfriend and his computers, his chat rooms and Reddit threads—he had many notions, I thought, but he had no idea.

“It’s fine,” I said, laughing hoarsely. “I have good instincts.”

My boyfriend also made a laughing sound, a hollow one, like someone choking on a bone, and drew me toward him, his hands against my waist in a way that made me feel valuable. A beautiful woman, a person who mattered. Both the subject and the object of desire.

He kissed me.

“A kid like that . . . unhinged. He could start following you home. Stalking you. It could get scary.”

“That’s the nature of my job,” I said. I heard my own stubbornness rise like the blood vivid in my cheeks, my words an official challenge. “I don’t mind being scared.”

My boyfriend grinned at me as if I’d just delivered a flirty dare, pressing himself against me and pinning me to the bed.

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