One Plus Two Minus One (14 page)

He was
looking at her face.
“I can skip
it.”

“No, I can’t…”

“
It’s
databases.
It’s boring as fuck and I
already read the whole text.”

And she looked at him and remembered that he
had his things he was good at too, even if she didn’t always see
them, and that was sexy as hell.

“
Okay,” she
said quietly.
“My place.”

“Now?”

“
Now.
But don’t follow me.”

And she
walked straight there, didn’t even go back to her office for her
bag.
He must have almost run, because he
beat her there.

She kissed
him on her front path, hoping no-one came along, and was wet and
horny and desperate enough by the time she got to the front door,
she couldn’t get the key in the lock.
While she was fumbling around, Ethan looked around, then
pushed her down onto her knees and took his cock out.

She knelt
there for a second, and looked at it, and couldn’t decide.
She should be horrified, she thought. She really
should.

Then she opened her mouth.

On her front
doorstep.
In the middle of the day.
Hidden from the road, but only just.

He came in her mouth, then pulled her back up
and kissed her.

“Hey,” she said, and pushed him down.

He grinned,
and let her.
She had a skirt, which
helped, but he pushed it up so high she was bare from the waist
down, so not really. Did it on purpose, she thought.

He was grabby
and pushy and a bit too into holding her down, she thought, but he
was always fair.
She got a turn
too.

She came, and
almost couldn’t think to stay upright and pressed back so she was
hidden, then peeled herself off his face and got the door open,
finally, and pulled him inside.
She’d
left condoms in the hall cupboard because it was pretty obvious
neither of them had any self-control, and eventually someone would
want to fuck at the front door.

So they did.

She quite liked how Ethan didn’t seem to know
men were supposed to come once and then go to sleep.

Afterwards, sitting on the hallway floor,
facing each other, breathing hard, he started looking at her all
meaningful and touched.

“
Oh, for
fuck’s sake,” she said, and got up to get water.
“If you’re going to do that you can fuck off.”

“Sorry.”

“Just stop.”

“I have.”

“Fucking do.”

“Can I just say…”

“
Nope.
Don’t. Ever.”

He hesitated.

“I’m serious.”

Because
saying things like this out loud made them real.
The world was an awful place, but you didn’t have to go
around talking about it all the time. You could just do what you
could, and hope a thousand other people each did a little of the
rest, instead of blathering on and on about it all the time. She
didn’t want another Robert. She didn’t want anyone remotely like
Robert, and if Ethan didn’t get that without her saying it they
might have a problem.

He shrugged and said, “Okay,” and told her a
long story about the professor of computer science and a goldfish
tank and someone forgetting whiteboard pens, which she couldn’t
really follow.

He realized she wasn’t listening and said,
“Want to again?”

She wasn’t
getting much work done.
Then again, him
asking was enough to get her wet.

“Yep,” she said, and they went upstairs.

Beth liked Ethan around.
He was
at her place a lot, often fucking her, but also just keeping her
company as well. He was fairly quiet, when he wanted to be. He
would talk to her while they ate, then leave her alone while she
worked, and she was surprised to realize she could actually work
when he was around.

She usually had to fuck him into exhaustion
first, but she didn’t really mind.

The sex was
good, although she couldn’t quite work out where some of things he
did to her came from.
He carried her
around and fucked her up against walls and held her down by her
wrists. One afternoon they finished with her lying on her back
along the kitchen bench with her chest above the sink and the cold
tap running water over her tits. It just happened, and it was kind
of weird, and made enough of a mess she needed a mop afterwards,
but it felt good too. Very good, the contrast of cold and sex and
his body against hers. She’d never really got into untidy before,
but she was starting to learn. He wiped pasta sauce on her tits,
and left condoms on the floor, and didn’t bother washing between
sex and oral. She’d forgotten the arrogance of young guys, and was
surprised sometimes when he just did what he felt like, without
warning her. He grabbed her wrists, or slipped his finger into her
ass, or pulled out of her during sex and turned around to
sixty-nine without bothering to check she wanted to.

She didn’t
actually care, and that surprised her too.
Inconsiderate partners had always infuriated her, so she
assumed the difference was either that it was Ethan, or that she
got to be inconsiderate too. She did what she liked as often as
him, made him wait while she came or changed positions or wandered
off during sex to write something down. That they both took turns
holding the other down and humping their mouth made a big
difference, she thought.

She was still
sometimes surprised, though.
One
afternoon he pulled out of her mouth while she was giving him a
blowjob and pointed himself at her face, wanking.

“Hey,” she said, and pushed him away.

“I want to come on you.”

“No way.”

“Why not?” he said, and actually seemed
surprised.

She wasn’t completely sure she should even be
kneeling down in front of him so much, and now he wanted to blow
his load on her face.

She looked up
at him, and couldn’t decide.
He was being
pushy, but he also seemed to think this was normal. She was only
eight or nine years older, and she seemed to be having some kind of
generational thing, and that annoyed her, a lot.

“You really want to do this?” she said.

“Please?”

Brainwashed
by porn, she thought.
Then realized she
wasn’t that horrified either, so perhaps she was too. And she
supposed she was curious to see him wank, even if only the last
fifteen seconds of it.

“I’ve got a doctorate,” she said. “I
shouldn’t be doing this.”

“I know,” he said, grinning.

“I’m a professor.”

“Yep.”

“Okay,” she said, and leaned forward to suck
him a little more, to make up for the pause.

He pushed her
back when he was ready, held her head, aiming, and came on her lip
and cheek.
She kept her eyes open,
watched him, and saw his face get all intense and focused on her.
She liked that. She really liked how he reacted to her. He was
always tender, even when he was doing shit like this. She was
starting to realize that nothing of itself had to be meant badly.
Some men were pricks, and did mean things because they were pricks.
Ethan wasn’t necessarily being mean. Sometimes he was just having
fun.

Ethan was
still looking at her, at the semen all over her face.
He stroked her hair, gently. She could feel
semen starting to drip. Some slid down her chin, went off towards
the floor.

“Could you get me a tissue?” she said.

“Wait.”

She sat there
a moment and grinned.
She really liked
how he looked at her sometimes.

He was still
hard, still holding himself without realizing.
Maybe keeping the end up, so he didn’t drip. She kept
forgetting he didn’t necessarily have to go soft when he
finished.

She leaned
forward and sucked the end of him again.
He tasted more, and more salty. She sucked, and he closed
his eyes and put his hands back on her head.

After a while she stood up, and pulled him
against herself and said, “Lick it off my face.”

He
did.
She didn’t know why, but that really
turned her on.

*

Ethan came on
her face more often after that, and while she didn’t mind, she also
didn’t quite get why.
It seemed like her
pushing his mouth away from herself just as she started to come,
like a waste of sensation rather than anything else.

“You really like doing that?” she said one
afternoon, wiping it off her cheek.

“I really do.”

“Why?”

He shrugged.

“
Because I’m
me?
The lecturer thing?”

He looked at
her for a while.
“Maybe a little. But not
really.”

“I don’t get it.”

He shrugged
again, like he didn’t really mind if she did or didn’t.
“I just do.”

She nodded,
and didn’t ask again, but kept an eye on it.
She noticed that after the first time he did more often
after sex, rather than oral, and usually after tender, intimate
sex. Like he thought it was a deeper bond between them than just
coming inside her, or something.

She wondered
if she should call him on it, but decided not.
He might not even realize, and she didn’t want him
realizing he was feeling tender towards her.

That would just complicate everything.

*

Ethan started
studying at Beth’s place.
The first time,
after sex, he’d suddenly pulled out a textbook in her bedroom and
asked if she minded, and she’d given him a really long, nasty look,
thinking about professor fantasies and doing his homework at her
place, until he’d said he had a tute in a couple of hours and
needed to do this, but he could go over to the library or something
if she’d rather. If she didn’t want to fuck again.

“
Okay,” she’d
said.
“Fine,” and went to have a shower.
And shouted, “But you’d better not run out of time before you
actually fuck me.”

He didn’t run
out of time.
And after that, because she
didn’t mind, he’d sit on her bed, or her couch, and look at
textbooks that looked vaguely familiar, like she’d seen other
students in her course carrying them around.

Once, curious, she went and sat beside him,
and glanced at the page he was working on.

“
Please,” he
said, without looking up.
“I need
help.”

“Not a chance.”

“It’s not your course.”

“
Not
that.
It’s differential equations. I
can’t do those.”

He looked at her.

“
Seriously.
I’m a number theorist.
I haven’t got a clue.”

“Could you look?”

“Shit no.”

He looked a
bit desperate, so she picked up the book and struggled through
it.
She remembered half of it, had made
herself do this at one point because not knowing was stopping her
doing research, but she’d never actually done a calculus course
because she hadn’t wanted a failure like this screwing up her
GPA.

“I can’t do calculus,” she said.

“What do you mean can’t?”

“
My brain
doesn’t believe in real numbers.
Or
complex numbers. Or limits as things you do equations with, rather
than use as defining parameters.”

He looked at her.

“
No idea
why.
I can look at a polynomial and see
its curve in my head, but I can barely solve those fucking min-max
equations. Don’t know where to start. I don’t even know what half
of this means, and it’s painful.”

“Like a headache?”

“
No, you
dick, because I’m not an insane genius with stabbing head
pains.
Just awkward painful. I sit here
like I am now and it’s embarrassing.”

She took his pen, started writing on the back
of one of his pages.

“What are you doing?”

“
Trying to
turn it back into a set of fields.
Then I
can understand it.”

“Don’t worry too much.”

“It’s okay.”

He watched her for a while, and probably knew
enough to understand how utterly silly it was to do what she was
doing.

“You really can’t do calculus any other way?”
he said.

She shook her
head.
“Failed it in high school. I almost
didn’t do this. I can get through ODEs when I have to, but it’s a
lot of work. I don’t get integrals and limits at all. Because
they’re approximations. I don’t believe in them.”

“You don’t believe in them?”

“
Nope.
Like how people believe in god or don’t. I don’t
believe in approximations. So I can’t do calculus. It isn’t real
like algebra is real.”

He was staring at her.

“
Hey,” she
said.
“Don’t look at me like
that.”

“I’m not.”

“
You’d better
not be.”
She worked a little longer. “I
failed first-year statistics,” she said. “The same year I got a
prize for maths. A lot of people thought that was pretty
funny.”

He looked at her.