One Plus Two Minus One (6 page)

“There’s a lot of them.”

Amanda looked
at her.
Beth’s biggest class was forty.
The biggest first-year maths classes were nine hundred.

“
Yeah,” Beth
said.
“So I don’t really look at them
that much. So what?”

“Does anyone else know?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Will he tell?”

“Not if he wants to again.”

“And?”

“He seems to want to again.”

“
Probably
doesn’t matter then, does it?
Just hope
he doesn’t go all stalker on you.”

Beth was
actually reassured.
“You think it really
doesn’t matter?”

“Who’s going to care?”

Beth
nodded.
She supposed that made
sense.

“
What about
the other guy?
The boring one. The maybe
boyfriend.”

Beth sat
there for a while, thinking that she should really be more
concerned about where
Robert fit in all
this.

After a while she said, “He isn’t here.”

Amanda looked
at her and grinned.
Then the stuff in the
beaker started to congeal and Amanda got busy adding new things to
it, so Beth said goodbye and left.

The next day, Ethan turned up at five to six.
Beth had waited for him at the lift.

“We should go somewhere,” she said.

“Okay.”

She’d been
thinking about it.
She couldn’t think of
anywhere that was really safe except her place, and she’d resigned
herself to taking him there.

“I live two minutes away,” she said.

He nodded.

“
But any
shit.
Any weird crap at all, and I call
the police, then call security too.”

He seemed surprised, but said, “Yeah, fair
enough.”

She took her laptop and her bag, and he
offered to carry something but she said no, it wasn’t heavy.

“Let me,” he said.

“It’s fine.”

He tried to
take it, and she held up her hand, looked at him, annoyed.
He shrugged, let it go.

He tried to
hold her hand in the lift, but she snatched it away.
Tried again as they cut across the sports
fields, but it there were still people around and she said,
“Fucking stop it.”

“I can’t believe how much you swear.”

“Oh, fuck off.”

The air
smelled of cut grass and heat and summer.
Dry still air, filled with the buzzing of
cicadas.

They walked
in silence.
Beth knew she was being too
hard on him, but was anyway.

*

Beth lived in
a townhouse one street over from the campus.
She rented because she’d wanted something near,
immediately. That close to the university she couldn’t have
afforded to buy, and part of her was a bit scared by the idea she
could, suddenly, just buy a house. After most of ten years scraping
by on scholarships and grants, she’d come here, got this job, and
was suddenly earning eighty thousand dollars a year. She had
clothes and shoes and some very nice furniture, and one day soon,
when she felt like a grown-up, she’d buy a house. But not
yet.

She opened
the door and let Ethan in, and did the alarm trying to stand in
front of it so he couldn’t see.
She
didn’t think he’d be a problem, but she wanted to be careful
anyway. She trusted people more once she’d had sex with them. That
was just brain chemistry and meant nothing, but it happened, so she
was going to be slightly more careful until she knew him better. It
had already happened. She probably wouldn’t have wanted him here at
all if they hadn’t had sex already, so now she made herself be a
bit cautious because of that change in her feelings. Not to get
robbed, or taken advantage of, or hurt if it went wrong.

She took off
her shoes, dropped her bags, looked at him.
“This is it.”

“
Nice.
It’s really nice. You live alone?”

She
nodded.
It was an open-plan townhouse. A
big room downstairs, entranceway and lounge and dining room and
kitchen all in one. She had more bookshelves than most people, and
her study, the second bedroom upstairs, had one wall completely as
whiteboards. Other than that, it was just a house. He looked
around, like he was curious about the books. Maybe he hadn’t been
somewhere with so many, unless he made a habit of shagging his
professors. She wondered if she should ask if he did. She didn’t
know if she wanted to hear the answer.

She went into
the kitchen, got a bottle of wine.
“You
want some?”

He nodded,
and she got two glasses.
She was glad
they’d fucked the day before. It had gotten rid of some of the
urgency. Then again, that was yesterday, and the urgency was coming
back pretty fast.

She poured
him wine and went over and gave it to him.
He was still looking around, standing in the middle of the
room, halfway in from the door. She realized there was a photo of
her and Robert on the side-table, and didn’t want to explain. She
went over and put it face down.

Ethan
watched.
“Who’s he?”

“No-one.”

“
I already
saw it.
You look like a
couple.”

She ignored him, but he kept looking at
her.

“Do you really care?” she said.

“Just wondered.”

“Are you going to leave if I say we are?”

“Probably not.”

“Going to want to fuck me any less?”

“No.”

“So why ask?”

He shrugged a
little.
“Just so I know where I am, I
suppose.”

And suddenly
he wasn’t an arrogant little asshole again.
She looked at him, and realized it might be a bit rough
being on his end of things. This was fun for her, but for him it
might be meeting someone and finding out she wasn’t as available as
he’d thought.

“
Kind of a
couple,” she said. “Together for three years, but then I got the
job here, and he’s still in Sydney, so I don’t know.
He’s trying to get something here.”

“So on a break until then?”

“
I don’t
know.
We never really talked about
it.”

She talked
to
Robert on the phone. They planned to
go and see each other every month or so, meet in a hotel and fuck
each other senseless, but never had, one or the other had always
been busy. And before she left, they hadn’t been as much of a
couple as they should have been. She’d been distracted by getting
her thesis in and examined, and by finding work. It had been
getting more like they were just comfortable friends.

Ethan kept
looking at her.
Suddenly it had got all
serious.

“
I’m not
going to tell him about you,” she said.
“If that’s what you mean.”

He drank some
wine, looked at her.
He still seemed to
be thinking.

“
Does it
really make any difference?” she said.
“Right now? Right this second?”

“Not really.”

“
If it ever
starts to matter,” she said.
“To you and
I, where things are at with him, I’ll sort it out. But right now,
it doesn’t. It’s way too soon to worry.”

She
waited.
She’d been a bit unfair, she
should probably have said something sooner. She wondered if he
would make too much of it, and if he did, she wondered if that
meant he was a bit immature and wouldn’t cope with a fling with his
professor.

It was a
test, but it wasn’t.
She wanted him to
decide right, but she also wanted sex. She really wanted sex. She
unbuttoned her shirt. She’d had a meeting earlier, had worn one
with a collar and buttons. For the meeting, and because a dark
little part of her, looking in her wardrobe that morning, had
thought about people with fuck-the-professor fantasies and what
clothes might help.

“Are we good?” she said, as he watched
her.

He didn’t
answer.
She couldn’t tell if he was still
deciding, or just staring at her tits, coming into view as she
unbuttoned. She didn’t think anyone could get that easily
distracted, but he was twenty-one and really into her. And hadn’t
seen her topless before.

“
Hey,” she
said, and threw her shirt at him.
“You
listening?”

“
Yeah?” he
said, exactly like a student in a tutorial who wasn’t.
For a horrible, horrible moment she thought she
remembered him, then decided she just remembered people like him.
She was almost certain he hadn’t said a word all last
year.

“
Listening?”
she said.
He was still looking at her
tits. Watching them move as she reached back and grabbed her bra
strap. “Are we good?” she said.

“
Yeah,” he
said.
“The guy?”

“
Sort it out
later?
You don’t mind?”

“No, of course not.”

“Are you listening?”

He didn’t
seem to be.
She thought about picking up
a cushion from the couch, decided she didn’t really give a
shit.

“
Hey,” she
said, loudly.
“Motherfucker. Pay
attention.”

He looked at her face.

“
You can’t
have me except to fuck.
That’s all. Do
you care?”

“
No,” he
said.
“Course not. Take that
off.”

She decided
he’d been distracted by tits all along.
This must be a moment for him, his daydream professor
undressing for him. It bothered her a little that it turned her on
too.

She undid the
bra, threw it on the couch.
Stood there
and let him look. He did, terribly seriously. Studied her
carefully.

“Well?” she said, but he kept looking.

“Want to play with your professor’s tits?”
she said, then regretted it straight away.

He came
towards her, around the couch, pulled his tee-shirt over his head
and threw it somewhere, and kissed her.
She loved that. She loved that moment, naked chests
scraping together and someone’s mouth opening hers and hands
drifting around everywhere. She liked men’s bodies. The only time
she’d wondered if she should try being gay, she’d realized she
couldn’t. She liked the shape of men. Wrists as thick as her upper
arms, flat slabs of muscle on shoulders and chests that she could
press her hand into, push hard against, and not move.

He kissed
her.
Kissed her for a while then stopped.
“You’re shorter. Than the first night.”

“Bare feet.”

“
Like this
much,” he said, and showed her with his hands.
“Twenty centimeters.”

Not that
much, but, “Big heels.
Tall
heels.”

“Right.”

He stroked
her breasts.
Gentle, like he just wanted
to hold them. He looked at her. She sighed, bit her lip as he
touched her, made herself stop making noises. She didn’t want him
knowing how easily he could turn her on.

He was still staring.

“What’re you doing?” she said.

“Looking.”

She liked
that, watching him get all horny playing with her.
He looked at her third tattoo. Ran his finger
down it, tickling slightly. Numbers along her ribs, under her arm
and beside her left breast. A sequence,
2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23
.

He looked at
numbers, couldn’t not get it.
“Primes.”
he said.

“Yep.”

“Why?”

She shrugged.

“Why stop there?”

“
Symmetry.
Visual symmetry. From 2
and 3 to 23.”

He looked at it for a while, then said,
“That’s cool.”

She
grinned.
“I thought about going all the
way down to my foot, up to a hundred. But they’d show in a skirt,
and I don’t know how serious and grown-up I’m meant to
be.”

He nodded.

“
And it hurt
like fuck and everything.
That
too.”

She turned
around and pulled up her hair, showed him the fourth one.
On the back of her head, at the top of her neck,
where she could cover it with her hair. The two-dimensional faces
of the platonic solids. A triangle inside a square inside a octagon
inside a circle.

“
I know that
shit,” he said.
“Had this professor once
who was obsessed with Greek geometry and kept going on about
it.”

“
Oh
yeah?
Sound like a good
professor.”

“
The
best.
Absolutely the best.”

He traced the
tattoo.
He rubbed his hand down her
neck.

He was behind
her.
They both knew what happened when he
ended up behind her.

He pulled her
hair out the way, and started kissing her neck.
She closed her eyes, and tried not to shake or anything
that might give herself away.