One Plus Two Minus One (11 page)

“Was I supposed to?”

“Just checking.”

He started
stroking her.
Just to touch her, she
thought. He seemed to really like her body, and him noticing made
her like him. He started licking her tummy, fingering her gently.
Just enough it got her horny and lazy, not enough to bother doing
anything.

“What’s the kinkiest thing you’ve ever done?”
he said.

“Why?”

“I wondered.”

She lay
there.
“You first.”

“Threeway.”

She rolled
onto her side, looked at him.
“Go
on.”

“Go on what?”

“Details.”

“
A friend and
his girlfriend.
Everyone a bit
pissed.”

“
Shit,” Beth
was actually impressed.
Actually kind of
turned on. Suddenly, “When? You’re only…”

“
That’s
cruel,” he said.
Then, “Last
year.”

She kept
looking at him.
Almost seeing him again
like she had at the beginning. A troublemaking player, not
trustworthy.

“
Shit,” he
said.
“Don’t look like that. It was
once.”

She shook her
head.
He kept looking at her.

“You like that idea?” he said suddenly, and
she was almost embarrassed it was that obvious.

“A little,” she said.

“Two guys?”

“
Yeah,” she
said.
“I like it. Stop fucking smirking.”
After a minute. “How does that work. I mean, one after the other,
or…”

“Both at once?”

“Yeah.”

“
That.
She wanted it like that.”

After a
minute.
“How? Like, one at each
end?”

“Pretty much.”

“
Shit,” Beth
said.
“I mean, fuck.” Another hesitation,
then, “So, she’s on her back, or side, or what?”

“
Her
kneeling, was how it turned out.
Which
was kind of awkward since him and me were looking at each other the
whole time.”

Beth just looked at him.

“
I think she
wanted it like that,” Ethan said after a while.
“Like a turn-on for her or something.”

“I get it,” Beth said.

Ethan looked at her.

She
realized.
“I’m not doing that with
you.”

“
I didn’t ask
you to.
Not yet.”

She glared.

“What? You’re turned on by the idea.”

“
But it’s
never, ever going to happen.
I mean,
shit, imagine the fuss if I got caught having threeways with my
students…”

“That might be bad.”

“It might.”

Silence for a
while.
“What about you?” he said.
“Kinkiest thing ever?”

“
Shit, forget
it.
You win.”

“
Nothing like
that?
Not ever?”

“
This, here,
last weekend and here, is probably the kinkiest ever.
Other than that, just, you know, one person and
sex.”

“I’ve got a friend whose dad saw her
home-made porno,” he said.

Beth looked
at him.
“Ouch.”

“
Shit
yeah.
She left it on her computer so she
deserves it, but yeah. Ick. That must have been creepy.”

Beth lay
there.
“Imagine if you didn’t realize at
first, were sitting there watching then suddenly, oh fuck, that
mole looks familiar…”

“Except for how you’re looking around in your
daughter’s porn collection.”

“Ah, yeah, except for that.”

“Have you got some?”

She didn’t
move.
“Yep.”

“What kind of thing?”

“None of your business.”

Silence for a
while.
He stroked her tummy. Ran his hand
up to her breast, down to her hips, long, slow, silky
strokes.

“Do you play chess?” he said.

“Why would I play chess?”

“Maths professor…”

“
Supposed to
be moving on from that.
And deeply
fucking offensive stereotype, by the way.”

He grinned.

“
I don’t play
chess.
I’m pretty sure I could play
chess, but why? It’s just memorizing shit. You can write software
to play chess better than any human, so why bother?”

“What do you do for fun?”

“
Maths.”
She grinned, stretched.
“And fuck.”

He grinned.

Another silence.

“And you really don’t care about teaching
surveys?”

“
I really
don’t.
Self-selected survey. It’s
meaningless data.”

He grinned.

“
Stop
smiling, it’s true.
And they don’t
correlate the comments against the students’ grades, so what’s the
point. Why would I care about results that include everyone I
failed?”

“Do you fail a lot?”

“Nope.”

He kissed her
side.
“You seem like you
would.”

“My bell curve’s way higher than everyone
else’s.”

“Seriously?”

“
Yep.
Don’t tell anyone, I don’t want to be seen as an
easy course, but yeah. I pass most people, and it’s a theory
course, meant to be harder, so no-one objects. I don’t give a shit
if I pass a bunch of incompetent maths teachers. But your A, you
fucking earned that.”

She lay there
for a while.
He took her hand, kissed her
tattoos.

“
Is this
turning you on?” she said suddenly.
“Lying in bed with me talking about me being a professor.
Since you thought that was hot.”

“I was just talking.”

“Better fucking be.”

Silence for a while.

“There’s something you said in a
lecture…”

“
No,” she
said, and sat up.
“No way.”

He looked at her.

“
Okay,” she
said.
“What? But you have to stop
reminding me.”

“
Linear
feedback shift registers,” he said.
“Why
aren’t they random?”

She lay there
for a minute.
“It repeats. It has a
finite number of possible states.”

“
Yeah, you
said.
But why?”

“
It’s a
function.
But not. Don’t think about
input and output, it’s a sideways shift of the bits. Engineering
rather than maths.”

He looked at
her.
“I don’t get why. Why you can’t just
have an infinitely big register?”

“
It’s still
deterministic.
And a just a bunch of XOR
gates. Or a polynomial. So either way it can’t be arbitrarily
infinite. But even if it was, it’s still running through a fixed
cycle, even if it’s enormous, so eventually it repeats.”

He lay there for a while.

“Still no?”

“Sorry.”

“An example?”

“
Maybe.
If that isn’t too
weird.”

She tried to
explain drawing equations on the sheet, then realized he couldn’t
see them like she could, couldn’t imagine them and fix them in his
mind and keep track of what she’d said a minute and three lines
ago.
She got up and found paper and a pen
and wrote out a whole proof for him, then did a worked example,
step by step.

“Clear?” she said, and he nodded.

She tore off the sheets and gave them to
him.

“Study for my homework?”

“
Really
fucking creepy,” she said.
“Watch it.”
After a moment. “Weirdest tutorial I ever gave.”

“Sorry.”

“
Nah, I like
it.
I think number theory’s sexy. I like
to fuck and then talk about maths.”

He started laughing.

“
Seriously,”
she said.
“I really do. I never have
before, not like this.”

“Not with that guy?”

“Fuck no, he’s a political scientist and I
think he’s a little bit threatened because I’m so fucking
clever.”

Ethan rolled
over and kissed her.
Said, into her
mouth, “What’s the proof of the square root of two?”

“That’s fucking cute.”

“Tell me.”

She looked at
him for a moment, then said, “The cool one?
Assume it’s rational. That means two distinct positive
integer divisors exist. Do some basic algebra and it turns out they
don’t. Contradiction.”

He pushed the paper towards her.

“
Shit,” she
said.
“I can’t believe no-one ever showed
you,” and started writing it out. Lost a symbol halfway through and
had to do it again. Threw it at him.

*

It was dark
outside, was getting late.
The rain had
stopped, but it would be cold. Beth didn’t need to look, she’d got
used to the weather here. Rain and wind and seething cloud for the
rest of the evening.

“It’s getting late,” she said.

He looked at her, then sat up, and looked
around for his clothes.

“
Have you got
a car?”
she said.

He shook his head.

She wondered
if she should ask him to stay,
She
probably ought to offer, but wasn’t sure she wanted to. Eventually
they would fuck each other to exhaustion and run out of things to
say, and then it would just be awkward. And that would spoil it
all.

“I can give you a lift?” she said in the
end.

“
Nah, I can
walk.
It’s okay.”

“The weather’s shitty.”

“I don’t want to put you to any trouble.”

She lay there for a while, then said, “Take
the car, bring it back tomorrow.”

He looked at her.

“
No biggie,”
she said.
“I know who you
are.”

“
Okay,” he
said.
“Thanks.”

She
nodded.
He started getting dressed, so
she got up and found him the keys. Went to the front door with him
wearing a sheet. “The red hatchback,” she said, and pointed. “Just
bring it back tomorrow afternoon sometime. I’ll be
here.”

They stood
there.
She actually didn’t want him to
go. She only realized that, standing at the door. She’d had fun,
she’d enjoyed this. She wanted him to stay. It was an odd thing to
realize. She didn’t think she’d ever really felt like that about
someone she’d just met before.

He kissed her for a while.

“
Hey,” she
said.
“Do me a favor. Stay unobtrusive in
lectures. Don’t start sitting up the front or asking questions or
anything that’ll make me blush or say something stupid.”

“Yeah, of course.”

“Thanks.”

He kissed her
again.
“Can I have my assignment
mark?”

She looked at
him.
“Don’t be a dick.”

More kissing.

“Go,” she said, and he did.

She stood in the door and watched until he
got the car started and drove away.

Giving him
her car had pretty much guaranteed he’d be back.
Like leaving a coat behind in someone’s house. She wondered
how much she’d meant it to work out that way.

*

Beth felt a
bit guilty.
She phoned Robert, just to
see if he was home.

Phoned while wearing a sheet she’d just
fucked another man in, with the feel of him still inside her, and
the smell of him on her skin.

Robert
was home, and they talked for a while quietly,
about nothing.

Once
Robert had meant the world to Beth. Once he had
been everything, the first person she’d really been serious about,
and the only one she thought she’d ever love. For a while she had,
utterly. Then something had gone wrong, slowly, over a year, and
she still wasn’t completely sure what it was. They’d both moved on,
and done it in ways that meant they picked other things over each
other. Careers and jobs and finishing degrees. And somehow that
counted. Somehow he resented her having this job, and she resented
him not coming with her, and everything had gone slightly wrong,
like they were both pretending not to care when actually they both
did. Pretending meant they weren’t close any more, and the fact she
was even willing to go told her a lot about how it had ended
up.

She still
felt a lot for him, though.
They weren’t
what they’d used to be, but they were something. She was fond of
him, and felt kindly towards him, and would probably spend the rest
of her life with him, eventually, if he wanted her to, because it
was comfortable and safe and gave her time to work.

She felt a
lot for
Robert, but she didn’t know if
she wanted to fuck him. Not like she did Ethan. And she didn’t know
how much that mattered.

She wanted to
talk to
Robert, and one day be with
Robert, but she didn’t want him around right now. She was sitting
there with the taste of someone else in her mouth, the dampness of
another man’s sweat still on her skin, and she wanted to talk to
Robert.