One Plus Two Minus One

by Tess Mackenzie

  He seemed proud. “But you did,” he said, smirking again.

  “Yep,” she said. “I did.”

  She looked at him, trying to decide.

  “Was it okay for you?” he said suddenly.

  She’d been thinking of him as cocky, but then he asked that. He was nervous, not sure if he’d done well. She actually liked him right then, a lot. She’d been turned on by him until now, hadn’t disliked him, but had thought him young, a bit shallow, a bit of an asshole. Now, suddenly, he was a person, and she liked him. He was confident, but a little bit unsure. There were cracks in his smug asshole armor, just like there were in hers.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Of course you did. You’re twenty-one and you know what a clit is. You did good.”

  He looked puzzled, like he didn’t understand, and she wasn’t sure why. Either he didn’t actually know where her clit was, and it had all been wild good luck, or he did, and it was obvious, and he didn’t know why she’d said it. Maybe they didn’t have clit jokes any more. Maybe they explained properly in schools now, or he’d seen so much porn he couldn’t help but know. She was less than ten years older than him, and she felt crabby and ancient.

  “Never mind,” she said. “Doesn’t matter. I’d better throw you out of here.”

  “You don’t want to again?” he said, and sounded surprised.

  She looked at him for a moment. He wasn’t being cocky, wasn’t being a dick. He was actually just astonished she didn’t want to go twice.

  She had a horrible feeling she was missing out on something compared to women his age.

  “Don’t get too full of yourself,” she said, because she did want to go again, but she was also getting sick of what he could do to her.

  It was a little cruel, but he looked at her and grinned like he knew she didn’t mean it. She had no idea how he could be so sure, maybe just arrogance, or maybe girls telling him he ate good pussy all his life. There were times when his smugness made her want to slap him.

  “You’re great,” he said. “That was great.” His cock moved just a little, like it was getting hard again.

  “Go away,” she said. “I need to think.”

  “Weren’t we having a drink?”

  “You got a fuck. We don’t need to have a drink.”

  He grinned and kissed her for a while. She pushed him backwards. “Go.”

  Her head was clearer. She could chase him away and think about what she was doing, now. Having had him inside her had helped.

  He went to the door, and hesitated. Like he wanted to ask.

  She sat there, looking at him. Swinging her feet, feeling the ghost of him inside her still, the memory of his tongue and hands and cock.

  “Come back tomorrow,” she said. “Same time.”

  He grinned, and nodded, and left.

  *

  Beth decided she need to talk. The next day, at lunchtime, she went and found Amanda. Amanda was a lab rat in chemistry, spent her time setting up classrooms and running banks of experiments for the professors. Beth had never really managed to have a lot of friends, but Amanda got her. Science chicks with tatts had to stick together, Amanda said.

  Beth tapped on the lab window until Amanda let her in, and put on some of the visitor safety glasses from the box beside the door. It was an odd place to work, compared to what Beth was used to. Glassware and extractor fans and pull-chain emergency showers, which Beth always wanted to pull. The air conditioning worked properly over here, though, so that was a good thing. The maths building had a glass atrium that dripped in winter and leaked heat from the vast area under glass into all the offices in summer, a design someone hadn’t quite thought through.

  Beth looked around, and made sure they were alone. The lab was a communal space. It had side-doors through to chemical stores and other labs as well as the locked door into the hallway. Amanda pointed to a chair. Beth checked for spills and sat.

  “I have to wait for this,” Amanda said. “Sorry. No lunch.”

  Beth nodded. “So the guy, from the other night…”

  Amanda had been staring at a something she was boiling, sticky and bubbly, in a beaker. She looked up at Beth.

  “I saw him again,” Beth said.

  Amanda grinned. “Saw him?”

  “Kind of fucked him.”

  “Kind of?”

  “Did. Completely. He found me.”

  Amanda waited.

  “He’s a student.”

  Amanda shrugged. “There’s thousands of them.”

  “In the department.”

  “Doesn’t really matter.”

  “Have you?”

  “Wanted to, sure. Some of the PhD people. Not an actual student though.”

  Amanda slept with who she wanted. That was part of why Beth liked her. The chemistry people were whores, basically. Tended to sleep around a bit at conferences, far more than anyone Beth worked with. From what Beth heard. Amanda said the geneticists led them astray.

  “He’s one of my students.”

  Amanda actually looked a bit surprised. “You didn’t notice that at the time?”

  “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.

  Chapter Three

  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 jo
b, 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?”

  “S
ymmetry. 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.

  He reached down, for the zipper of her skirt, but it was small and fiddly and he didn’t seem to be able to get it. She reached too, got her fingers past his while he kissed her, pulled it down.

  He grabbed her wrist.

  “Hey,” she said, not completely sure she meant it. He held her wrist, just enough she knew he was strong and she might not be able to move. Somehow, each time he did shit like that, it wasn’t as threatening as it should be. Threatening in a good way, and she wasn’t sure she was even comfortable having a category like that.

  He held her wrist in the small of her back with one hand, and shoved her skirt and underwear down with the other. Shoved it all down in a bundle, without a glance. Good undies, she’d picked out specially, but he didn’t notice and it didn’t really matter.

  She still had one hand free. She reached back and undid his jeans. Had to pick at it a bit, distracted by his mouth, trying to do it backwards and one handed, but she got his fly open.