*
In between having sex they talked. “You should do maths,” she said one evening without thinking. Sitting on the bed with a pizza box, eating. “Compsci is a bit of a waste of time for a doctorate.”
“Yeah, right,” he said.
“Meaning you’re not, or I should fuck off?” she said.
“I’m probably not.”
“If you do, you should do maths.” She sat there for a moment chewing. “Um, don’t tell anyone I said that though. Or where I was when I said it, or what I was wearing. It might look like a really dodgy way to poach students.”
“I won’t.”
“So why not? Why aren’t you?”
“I don’t have the grades.”
“Yeah you do. You’re fine.”
He seemed to be thinking.
“Shit,” she said. “I’d supervise you. Even without all this.”
“No, you wouldn’t.”
She grinned. “No, I wouldn’t without all this. But I would now.”
“Really?” he said, like he was thinking over an offer.
“Ah,” she said. “Hold on.”
He looked at her.
“I would, if it happened,” she said. “But it probably isn’t a good idea.”
“Why not?”
She didn’t look at him. “Because as far as I know we’re just fucking, and at some point between now and ending a doctorate we might stop doing that.”
“Why?”
She thought about that. “Do you want something other than this?”
He shrugged.
“It’d be complicated,” she said. “Me supervising you.”
“Yeah,” he rolled over and kissed her. “Not what I meant. Are you happy with this?”
“For now,” she said, then, warning, “Don’t.”
“I know,” he said. “I’m not saying anything. But I don’t think it’s a given we’ll have stopped in a couple of years.”
“Okay. But don’t say anything.”
“I’m not.”
“So don’t.”
He was grinning at her.
“Anyway,” he said. “Isn’t there something you can do if you have a big shitfight with your supervisor?”
“Fail.”
He looked up, like he wasn’t sure.
“Nah,” she said. “Not fail. You can switch. It’s just a hassle, that’s all.”
He nodded.
“Hey,” she said, and got up, and went downstairs. She got a book from the shelf in the hallway, came back to bed and opened it to page eighty-seven, which she knew from memory. She pointed.
He took a while. He was trying to read the equations, and you couldn’t do that cold, in the middle of an advanced theory book, without seeing the rest of the chapter.
“Look at what they’re developing from,” she said, and pointed again.
He didn’t get it at first. She had her finger on her own surname, and he couldn’t quite see what she meant.
“Howard’s work. What’s that?”
She sat there, and he suddenly realized.
“You?” he said.
She nodded.
He looked again for a while. Looked at the front cover. “This guy’s using your proof in his thing?”
She nodded again. “Isn’t that cool? I’m in a book.”
“You are.” He looked at her. Seemed really impressed. “You really fucking are.”
He kissed her, sat there grinning for a moment. Then kissed her again. “Shit.”
He seemed almost too impressed. Like he was mocking her. “You’re really impressed?” she said, suddenly not quite sure.
“I really am.”
She closed the book, relieved. “I’m part of the thing,” she said. “Shoulders of giants and all that shit. I’m like the tiny insect on the elbow of the little guy standing somewhere way down back behind the giant in the group photo.”
“You are.”
“You’re really impressed?”
“I really fucking am.”
She got up again, went and got a copy of her thesis. It was heavy. She’d always wanted to do one like Gauss, thirty pages, one proof, but it wasn’t quite that simple any more. And her supervisors wouldn’t have let her submit it, like she wouldn’t let someone now. You needed heft for credibility. She dropped it on the bed, said, “Have fun.”
He actually tried to read it. He looked at the acknowledgements page, and pretended not to notice Robert’s name, then started reading from the introduction and got about twenty pages in before he said, “I’m lost. I don’t know what half the shit you’re talking about means.”
She’d been lying there, watching him, waiting for that. He’d got further than she’d expected. “It’s sweet that you tried.”
“Yeah.” He leaned over and put it on the floor. “The other guy, who used your proof.”
She pointed to the thesis.
“Right. Was what it did important?”
“Not really.”
“Significant?”
“About ten people in the world probably cared. Me being one of them. Nine others who work in his field.” She grinned. “But I’m still there.”
“Yeah,” Ethan said, and kissed her head. “Yeah, you are.”
*
Late one night in their third week together, when Ethan sat up and said he should get going, Beth said, “Stay. If you want to.”
He looked at her for a while and seemed to be thinking. “Is that what we’re doing now?”
“Do you snore?”
“Don’t think so.”
“That’s all I’d care about.”
“Okay,” he said. “Yeah. Thanks.”
“And we’re both going to the same lecture tomorrow anyway,” she said.
Then she started to think.
There was a silence.
“Um,” Beth said. “Yeah, the lecture.”
“Is that going to be a problem?”
“Let me think about it and I’ll let you know.”
She ate breakfast with him, watched him make toast and coffee and was kind of interested in what he did.
She watched him dress. Yesterday’s clothes. He watched her dress and kept grinning. She walked around in her undies deciding what to wear, and took far longer than was sensible to choose. He watched like he was getting turned on by the idea of her in underwear now, and that she’d be wearing the shirt she was holding in an hour.
“Walk over with me,” she said. “But if you touch me, if you even smile at me funny, I swear to fucking god…”
He nodded.
They walked across the field and he behaved. He touched her hand, just once, as they reached the first buildings, smiled at her, and that was all.
He sat up the back in the lecture, and off to the side, and before she started she found him, looked around until she saw him and made sure he was there. She looked at him, and made herself not smile in his direction, but she looked. She wasn’t sure what had changed, but something had.
*
After spending a night together, Ethan stayed at Beth’s place more often. Beth told herself it was less disruptive to her work to fuck in the evening and then go to sleep, and it wasn’t fair to make him get up afterwards and go home, but she knew that wasn’t true. She liked having him around, liked him warm and still in her bed, liked listening to his breathing at night and knowing he’d be there when she woke up.
She painted her nails one evening, had done her feet and was trying to do her right hand with her left, and making a mess of it.
“Let me,” he said.
She looked at him. “Do you know what you’re doing?”
“Give it here.”
He wiped the brush so it didn’t glob, did quick steady strokes. He was almost better than she was.
“Should I ask?”
“Up to you.”
He did the next finger, and she watched him and decided not to. She thought about old girlfriends, and him doing this for someone e
lse, and she was surprised how much she didn’t want to know.
“Hey,” she said, while he stared at her hand. “You can leave a toothbrush here, if you want.”
He looked up at her.
“If you’re going to be around a bit, is all I mean. If that’s easier.”
“Okay,” he said. “Thanks.”
“It doesn’t change anything,” she said.
“I know.”
He brought a toothbrush, and hair goop and a few clothes as well. She made space in a drawer in the bathroom, and another in her dresser.
It was changing, she thought. They were changing. They were turning into something settled, something more stable. When she thought about him, she assumed he’d be there the next day, and the one after, and that was an unusual thought for her.
*
Ethan rang one afternoon and said, “There’s a woman standing in front of me staring at me. She won’t go away.”
Beth took a moment to realize. “Ask if she’s Amanda.”
“She says yes.”
“Right. Um. Yeah, say hi. I know her.”
“I got that. I wondered how she knew me.”
“Yeah,” Beth said. “Ah, she might have seen your ID photo at some point.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, dickhead. Because we’re staff and that’s what we do, is perve at hot boys in the student records system.”
“That would be funnier if it wasn’t so obviously true.”
“I know.” Beth thought, and realized there was no reason Amanda shouldn’t know Ethan. “Tell her to come over tonight. If you both want to.”
“She says yes.”
“And you?”
“I asked her.”
They came over, and they seemed to get on.
*
Beth thought about Ethan, and wondered if she was being fair. They’d never really talked about the situation between them, other than the first day. He seemed to accept Beth was as available as she was, and not to push for more. She put the photo of Robert away, and didn’t mention him again, and if the phone rang when Ethan was there she let it go to her messages.
Ethan realized why, she thought, but didn’t mention it either.
“Hey,” she said once. “I’m giving you as much of me as I can, okay?”
“I know.”
“I just want you to know that.”
“I do.”
“I have a lot of work.”
He nodded.
“And the situation with Robert, it’s more complicated than it seems from the outside.”
“I understand,” he said, and kissed her.
“You’re okay for now?”
“It is what it is. Just wait and see what happens.”
She looked at him for a while, and couldn’t decide if he thought he could win her over, or just didn’t care because he got sex on tap and she still sucked his cock.
“I don’t want you to get hurt,” she said.
He smiled a little. “Me either.”
“I won’t,” she said. “I’ll try my best not to.”
“Me too.”
She nodded, and left it at that.
She had a crush, she knew. She was falling for him badly, and she was having the best sex of her life, and somehow, since he was happy and she was entangled, it just didn’t seem important to talk the whole thing through and decide what it really meant.
*
One afternoon, Ethan said casually, “Are you sleeping with anyone else?”
“Nope,” she said. “Why, are you?”
“No, of course not.”
She lay there looking at him for a while. Stroking his face. “Want me not to either?” she said.
He nodded.
“Not that I am. Not that I was planning to, but if you’d rather I didn’t, then I won’t.”
“I’d rather you didn’t.”
“Then I won’t.”
Silence for a moment. “You too,” she said, a little unsure. “Right?”
“I assumed.”
She looked at him for a moment, then got up, and got the condoms from beside the bed, and threw them into a bathroom drawer.
“Okay?” she said, and he nodded.
“Want to try?” she said, and he jumped on her, and came in about a minute, and spent the next hour telling her how good she felt like that. She liked it too, him flooding her and filling her, almost so she thought she could feel it spurting inside her when he came.
He didn’t come on her face for a week after that, or in her mouth, seemed quite taken by the idea of doing it inside her.
*
They went to a bar. They went to a bar because Beth wanted to do something outside the house for a change, and because she wanted to see how people reacted to them. No-one reacted at all. Ethan had been telling her that if she wore normal clothes they didn’t look that far apart in age, but she hadn’t quite believed him. She felt older. She felt a bit seedy, like people were going to point and call her a cradle-snatcher. She sat in the bar and looked around and realized, after a while, that this thing could actually work. There was no reason she couldn’t go places like this with him. The only time who they were mattered was at the university. The rest of their lives could be like this. It occurred to her that as time went on, the age difference would matter less. That right now was the worst it was going to be. That thought unsettled her, since it implied she was planning on keeping him for years, and she wasn’t sure why she’d think that.
They went out again, and she kissed him once, at the bar, and held his hand under a table. She liked it. She actually liked being out with him, and that bothered her enough she took him home and fucked for an hour until she couldn’t think.
“What do you want?” he said once. “Where do you want to be in the end?”
“Trinity at Cambridge. You?”
“I used to say Google, or the Google that’s coming that they don’t know about yet.”
She caught something in his tone. She asked, thinking maybe she shouldn’t, “And now?”
“Trinity at Cambridge,” he said, not meeting her eye. “With you.”
She nodded slowly, and kissed him, and didn’t say anything more.
It was turning into something more than fucking, and Beth wasn’t sure she minded. They seemed to be friends, had become friends fairly easily. They got on, and they had good sex, and there was something comfortable about being around him. She was surprised how much she liked him even though they spent most of their time in rooms alone, and that normally made her hate people almost right away.
He was good for her. He reminded her who she’d used to be, before she’d started worrying about teaching and her career and what Robert thought. She skated again. In the middle of the day, no tricks, just up and down the street. She tried to remember why she’d stopped, and had an awful feeling it was Robert’s idea. She couldn’t put her finger on it, but it seemed like something Robert would have wanted her to do. Robert had ideas about what she should do, and told her them, and then kind of guilted her into doing what he thought was best without her really noticing. Ethan just watched her skate. Watched, then followed her inside and pushed her onto her knees, grinning, on the hallway floor, and stuck his cock in her mouth. Then made her come with his, halfway up the stairs, too horny for her to wait until they reached the bed.
She couldn’t work out why kneeling in front of Ethan with his hands twisted into her hair made her feel less controlled than just listening to Robert talk, but it did. Ethan didn’t want her to do anything particular, she thought, and that was the most important thing about him. Ethan let her be who she was, and he was who he was too, and part of being him was pushing her around during sex. But it was just him being him. Robert wanted her to be someone else, to be who Robert was, and that just pissed her off.
Beth was happy. She wasn’t used to being happy, and she started to like it.
She didn’t really notice time passing until it was the week she had
to hand out her mid-semester assignments and she hadn’t actually written them yet. Then she realized it had been most of two months, and she was still spending whole days with Ethan, fucking Ethan, doing Ethan’s homework for him, and she still wasn’t bored.
Then summer ended, and the leaves turned, and Ethan was still at her house all the time. One morning, as they walked to their lecture across the sports fields, the grass was white with frost, and they were wearing coats and scarves, and their breath was misting in the air, and Beth let Ethan hold her hand until they reached the actual campus, and she realized she’d been in this thing, this sort-of relationship, for so long the semester was almost over.
It was good. She needed this. She wasn’t bored with him, and usually she got bored with people very quickly. He gave her space, and the sex was good, and other than his being a student, everything was right.
They might actually get through this, she thought, and was quite surprised how much she wanted to.
Chapter Seven
One day Beth looked at her phone and saw she had two missed calls from Robert, two hours apart. She hadn’t answered the first because she was in a lecture, and hadn’t answered the second because she was fucking Ethan. Robert rang again, a third time, after they’d finished, but by then Beth was worried, wondering why he kept calling back, and didn’t want to pick up and find out.
Robert left messages saying he needed to talk to her, but not what he needed to talk about. She’d hoped he’d get clearer as he left more messages, but he didn’t. Just the same thing three times.
In the end, wondering what was wrong, she went outside and phoned Robert and said hi and sorry she’d missed him earlier. Her breath was misting in front of her face and she needed a scarf and a coat just to stand outside, but she didn’t want Ethan listening, and didn’t want him to leave either.
Robert said he was interviewing for a job in the polisci department. He’d applied months ago, but hadn’t told her because he didn’t think anything would come of it. What he’d heard now was that an internal candidate had pulled out, and now they were actually interviewing for real.
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