One Plus Two Minus One (16 page)

“
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 else, 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.