One Plus Two Minus One (21 page)

Beth pulled
Ethan over and told him everyone’s name, and felt like she was
fourteen and introducing her first boyfriend.
They said hi, and Amanda said they knew about him, but he
didn’t seem too worried.

“Hi Doctor Dimitrova,” he said to Sofia.

“
You know
each other?” Beth said.
Sofia was looking
blank too.

“
Last year,”
Ethan said.
“Information
theory.”

“
Right,”
Sofia said.
“How did you do?”

“
Shit,” Ethan
said.
“Not you as well.”

Everyone looked at him.

“
Yeah,” Beth
said.
“Her too. I asked him
that.”

A few smiles.

“So how did you do?” Anna said.

“
An A.
In both.”

“
Good,” Anna
said.
“Can’t let Beth have a sub-standard
toyboy.”

For a
horrible moment Beth thought this was going to come unstuck.
Ethan stood where he was, surprised. The others
looked at him, wondering what to do.

Beth grabbed his hand, and squeezed, a bit
worried.

“
Fair
enough,” Ethan said, and kissed Beth.
“I’ll try not to be.”

Anna
grinned.
Sofia looked annoyed, like she
was jealous. Ethan seemed to be okay. Beth decided she’d had
enough, and pushed Ethan into a chair, the one next to hers. “Sit,”
she said. “Play. You know the rules?”

“I’ll remember.”

Beth got him
beer, poured him a whisky, stuck a cigar in his mouth and lit
it.
Then sat down, and pushed a stack of
chips towards him.

He looked at
the cash in the chip box.
“Are we playing
for money?”

“I paid yours,” Beth said.

He took out
his wallet, and she wondered if she should have warned him about
that.
She leaned over and whispered,
“Don’t be a fucking asshole in front my friends.”

“I should pay.”

“
We all earn
a lot.
A lot more than you. And we’re
playing for a fair bit of money.”

“How much?”

She held up a
chip.
It had a ten printed on
it.

“Dollars?” he said.

“Yeah.”

He looked at
the rest.
Some fifties, one or two a
hundred. “How much is on the table?”

“
Don’t worry
about it.”
She kissed him. “We’ll talk
about it later.”

He didn’t
seem sure, but let her talk him into it.
They started playing, and played fast. Ethan was the
slowest one to make decisions for the first few hands. Beth
wondered if she should have warned him. About the money, and that
they did this a lot, and were all quite good. Part of her wanted to
see how he’d react. The others had brought guys to poker night
before, despite Amanda making a fuss. Most of the guys got sulky
being beaten by a bunch of girls, even the sensitive academic ones.
Robert wouldn’t take it very well, Beth was pretty sure. The couple
of times they’d played strip poker she’d got him naked while she
was still mostly dressed.

Ethan lost
money for a few hands, and people folded a lot.
Then Beth beat Amanda, bluffed Amanda while Amanda tried to
bluff her back.

Ethan was
watching, and thinking.
Beth could see
him out the corner of her eye, and it was a bit
distracting.

“What?” she said.

“You’re good.”

She was
pleased, but didn’t let it show.
She
sucked on the cigar. “Yep.”

“
How?
Why?”

“What do I do?”

He looked at
her for a moment and didn’t understand.
She liked when people didn’t think this through. Everyone
know probability theory was invented by eighteenth-century card
hustlers looking for an edge. They knew it, and they never thought
about it when it really mattered.

Beth looked at Amanda and smirked.

“
Hey Beth,”
Amanda said. “What’s the odds of getting dealt a full house in
five-card poker?”

“
Six hundred
and ninety to one.
Roughly. Hey Amanda,
what’s the odds of getting dealt two pairs?”

“Twenty to one, about.”

They both looked at Ethan and grinned.

“Oh, fuck,” he said.

Beth liked
that.
She liked it a lot.

“I thought you hated statistics?” Ethan
said.

“This is combinatorial maths, that’s
completely different.”

“No, it isn’t.”

Beth kept grinning.

“
It’s much
worse,” Amanda said.
“Hey Beth,
seven-card draw. What’s the odds of completing an inside straight
draw on the turn?”

Beth sat
there for a moment and worked it out.
It
was a pretty basic binomial calculation,
n
choose
k
where
n
was the
outcomes you wanted and
k
was the cards left in the hand.
She’d expect any of her grad students to be able to do it, but she
was the only mathematician in the room so she could impress. “Ten
and a half to one,” she said. “Ten point seven, maybe?”

“Is that right?” Ethan said to Amanda.

“No fucking idea.”

“It’s right,” Beth said.

“
Which is why
we play five-card draw,” Amanda said. “We can all memorize these
odds.
Otherwise, she wins all the time,
just sits there looking expressionless so you can’t even bluff.
Because she knows she’s the only one at the table who can work out
the odds as she goes.”

“
Shit,” Ethan
said.
“That’s awful.”

“
Isn’t it?”
Beth said.
“Play cards.”

Anna shuffled and dealt.

“I thought you didn’t like real numbers,”
Ethan said to Beth.

“
This is
probability.
One minus some shit. It’s a
fraction.”

“I really don’t think it is.”

“
That one
multiplies out to eight hundred and fifty-one over a
thousand.
That’s a fraction, not a
fucking real number.”

He looked at
her.
Just sat there and stared. There was
something in his face, like there had been the first few
days.

“What?” she said.

“
I really
fucking like you, you know that?
I really
do.”

“Get a fucking room,” Amanda said.

“
Stop trying
to distract me,” Beth said.
“Play the
fucking cards.”

They were
loud.
They swore too much. They drank a
lot. Anna sat there and blew smoke rings and looked smug while
everyone else tried. They were all themselves here, with each
other, and Beth watched Ethan out the corner of her eye and hoped
he liked them. It almost mattered more than if he liked
her.

It was hard
being them.
It shouldn’t be, and it was
easier than it used to be, but it was still a little hard. They
were all pushing into places that some people assumed they didn’t
belong, and the little irritations grated sometimes. When people
asked about Beth having children and how long she’d be around, as
if her career didn’t actually matter to her. When she was asked why
she’d chosen the field she had, as if it was something unusual, but
no-one ever thought to ask the guy standing next to her. They were
tiny irritations, nothing more, but they became a burden when it
was day after day. She pushed back. Everyone had their own way of
pushing back. Beth was rude and bad-tempered, to show she was an
unstable genius, and it actually worked, people treated her as if
she was. The others all had their tricks too. They all kept up a
pretence a lot of the time, and then they came here, and had their
monthly game, and were loud and themselves, and it was
fun.

The strange
thing was, Beth had noticed, the average woman in science was
always slightly smarter than the average guy.
You didn’t do this if you were a girl and only average, you
didn’t even try.

She watched
the game, and decided Ethan was able to deal with them.
She liked him a lot more for that. She poured
another round of shots and put her feet up on his lap, and smiled
when he looked over.

Ethan seemed
to be able to cope.
He could cope with
fucking his maths professor, and he seemed to be coping with
drunken high-stakes bra-less poker with his compsci professor too.
He was trying to blow smoke rings while Anna told him what to do,
and as far as Beth could tell he hadn’t glanced down
once.

Robert
wouldn’t have managed. He wouldn’t have been
able to fit in. Ethan was younger and a student, and that might
have made a difference, but it was probably mostly because he was
him. He didn’t have to control the room, like some guys did. He
just went along with everyone else.

Beth looked
at him and wondered if she’d found the only smart guy who could
stand her in the whole world.
The only
one without an ego so big it got in the way.

They played
more cards.
Ethan was slowly losing but
didn’t seem to mind. They reached a hand in which everyone folded
except Beth and Ethan. Beth kept bidding, pushed out a couple of
hundred dollars in chips, all the time looking at Ethan and
pressing her foot against his leg. He got the hint and kept going,
right up until she folded.

“
You bitch,”
Sofia said.
“That’s cheating.”

The others seemed to think so too.

“What? I decided I was wrong about what he
had.”

“You never fold.”

“I did that time.”

“Because you’re fucking him.”

“Maybe because I know him better.”

Anna tried to grab Beth’s cards, turn them
over, but Beth snatched them up and shuffled them into the
deck.

Two hands later, Beth and Ethan ended up in
another bidding contest and this time, because Beth had given Ethan
a stack of chips, it was her who was running low.

“You’re out of chips,” Ethan said.

“You’re playing with my money.”

“So?”

The others laughed.

“
How do you
guys do this?” Ethan said.
“Do you go all
in or something?”

“
Nope,”
Amanda said.
“You can take an IOU if you
want.”

Ethan
grinned.
“Yeah,” he said. “I don’t think
so.”

“
Low,” Anna
said
“Really low.”

“I want to call,” Beth said.

“You don’t have enough,” Amanda said.

“
I
know.
I call with me.”

Everyone
looked at her.
“How do you mean you?”
Ethan said.

“You win, you get me.”

“Don’t I anyway?”

“Probably not if you’re going to be a
dickhead playing cards,” she said, but grinned.

He looked at her.

“Shit,” Beth said. “You get me anyway, just
in less of a trophy kind of way.”

He thought
about that.
“So put something in the
pot.”

Beth looked around the table.

“Dare you,” Ethan said.

Beth pulled
her top off, and threw it on the table.
Sat there with bare tits, grinning and puffing on her
cigar, while everyone else laughed.

Ethan was staring at her.

“What?” she said.

“You’re the sexiest thing I’ve ever
seen.”

“
Good,” Beth
said, and took the cigar out her mouth.
“So we’re all in?”

He nodded.

Amanda stood
up.
“I really want to see how this ends,
but you know, I don’t. Time to go I think.”

She started
counting chips, cashing herself out.
The
others did too. Ethan and Beth sat there and stared at each other.
Everyone left, and he kept staring.

“
Go on,” she
said.
“Dare you.”

He leaned
over and kissed her.
Pulled her shorts
down and tipped her backwards onto the table and ate her out, then
fucked her, with the cigar still in her mouth. Beth kept wanting to
giggle, right up until she came.

When they
were done, still beneath him, she reached over and picked up his
cards and looked.
“You shit,” she said.
“I’d have won.”

“I know,” he said.

“You just did that so I wouldn’t call,” she
said.

“Yeah.”

“Dickhead,” she said, grinning.

“
You’re a
cool fucking woman,” he said, looking down at her.
“Dude.”

“I am,” she said.

“I really fucking like you,” he said, then
stopped quite suddenly.

She
understood.
“Don’t,” she said.

He kept looking at her.

“Hop off,” she said, and pushed until he let
her up.

He was still
watching her.
She started picking up
chips, putting them back in the box.

“Beth…” he said.

“
Not yet,”
she said.
“It’s too sudden.”