One Plus Two Minus One (23 page)

*

Beth hadn’t
really thought about how difficult the situation might be for
Ethan, not properly, until he said one day, “I’m going to take your
advanced course.
So I can see
you.”

They were in
her office, in the middle of the day, dressed and talking while she
ate her lunch.
He had been fingering her,
gently, just enough she knew he’d been inside her, not enough to
come. He’d stopped when she started eating.

“
My advanced
course,” she said.
She was torn. “I
wouldn’t.”

“Why?”

“It’s too hard.”

He looked at her.

“
I’m not
being a bitch.
It’s a tough course. It’s
meant to be.”

“I’m not good enough?”

She thought
about that.
“You’re not a maths
major.”

“I’ll cope.”

“
You should
be taking papers to push your GPA up,” she said.
“Not getting side-tracked.”

He nodded slowly.

“
You could
just sit in the lectures,” she said.
“Not
actually enroll.”

“How many students are there?”

“Five, at the moment.”

“So I’d kind of stand out.”

He was right.

“
I don’t care
about the grade,” he said.
“I’ll take it
anyway.”

She decided
he was serious.
She decided he was sweet.
“I’ll help you,” she said.

“Thanks.”

“Go through things with you again, extra
tutoring.”

He
nodded.
“I need you to sign a form. To
say it’s okay for me to enroll without the
prerequisites.”

He looked in his bag and gave her a form. She
wrote her name, signed it.

“
And the head
of department,” he said.
“Could you talk
to him?”

“Just take that to him and say I said it was
okay and I’ll talk to him next time I see him.”

“Will you?”

She
grinned.
“He’ll forget.”

She sat there
for a while and looked at him and thought she had someone who was
willing to fuck up their career to see her.
It was touching and terrifying at the same time.

She kissed
him for a while, longer than was really safe in case someone opened
the door,
then chased him out so she
could work.

*

After two weeks Beth was still horny and
Ethan was already struggling with her paper.

She tutored
him in an empty tutorial room.
There was
a window in the door, but they could sit down the side wall, and be
out of sight. Enough to touch, to hold hands, not enough for
anything more.

Even so,
Ethan just wasn’t understanding.
She kept
going over the same proofs, but they didn’t seem to stick. The
material she taught, her course structure, hadn’t changed much in
two hundred years. You sat down and worked through some equations
and eventually they all fit together, into an evolving structure,
so after a few years you understood the whole thing.

Before he’d
started, Ethan had been vague on some of the basics.
He was sitting in her class, but he wasn’t
understanding the details she was trying to teach him. Maths was a
process, and everything new built on the last thing learned, and
Ethan had never learned the basic things he needed.

He wasn’t just struggling, he was falling
further and further behind, so far he was never going to catch up
to where the rest of the class had been weeks ago.

Beth sat in
their tutorial room, watching him struggle through a proof, and
knew she’d done this to him.
He was going
to end up with a bad B on his record, and since he was barely
holding an A average, that could cost him jobs or scholarships
after he finished. More than that, treading water in her course was
going to take up all of his time, and that might mean he didn’t do
as well in everything else.

“Stop,” she said, and closed the textbook
they were using.

“I’m almost there.”

“
You’re not,”
she said.
“Just stop.”

He looked up at her.

She had no
idea how to say it.
She had no idea,
because she’d never cared about someone who wasn’t as good as her
before. Not someone in maths, where she could compare. He’d be
worrying too, thinking she’d lose interest in him if he couldn’t
hold his own, and didn’t know how to say that wasn’t how she felt
any more.

She took his
hand.
She held both of his in hers, and
he looked worried.

“
Thank you
for trying,” she said.
“But drop
out.”

“I can do this.”

“
No, you
can’t.
Drop out. If you do now, it won’t
go on your permanent record.”

“No,” he said.

“
You can’t do
this.
You can’t keep up.”

He shook his
head.
“I’ll manage. And if I don’t,
seeing you is worth it.”

She looked at him, and couldn’t make up her
mind.

“It is,” he said.

She
thought.
She thought hard. What she was
about to do was terrible, but actually it wasn’t. The point of a
university was to do research, and train new researchers. Despite
all the students as customers bullshit that was taking over,
undergraduate courses didn’t matter. Undergrads didn’t matter.
There was nothing she did in the classes with Ethan counted for
anything, except to select the new research candidates coming
through.

It was a
terrible thing to think about doing, but it actually wasn’t.
Not to anyone who understood why she was really
here.

“
I’ll give
you an A,” she said.
“You have an A right
now. So don’t spent more time on this than you can
afford.”

“No.”

“
Yes.
You’re going to struggle, and it’s going to take
up time you don’t have. And no-one will ever know. So make sure
no-one else in the class sees your work, and hand in what you have,
and I’ll give you an A.”

“What if you get caught?”

“I won’t.”

“Beth, you can’t do this.”

“
One guy in
your class is going on to something else important, and I already
know who he is.
He’s competing with half
a dozen others in the department, and their marks really matter,
and I won’t fuck with those. There rest of you are
just…”

“Future high school teachers?”

“
Not
you.
You aren’t one of those, but you
aren’t going to be a star either. You’re in the middle somewhere,
so your mark doesn’t really matter.”

He didn’t
answer.
He was thinking.

“
I’m taking
something from the high-school teachers, and giving it to you,” she
said.
“It’s a little unfair to them, but
I’m not going to cost you your future. I’m just not.”

He opened his mouth.

“
I’m doing
this,” she said.
“You can’t stop me. All
that matters is whether you waste time studying for a mark you’ve
already got.”

He opened his mouth again.

“So don’t fucking argue,” she said.

“
Okay,” he
said, after a while.
“Thank
you.”

“
This is my
fault.
So I’ll fix it.”

*

Over time,
Beth found herself becoming more and more obsessed with sex.
Where to have it, and when, and how to meet. She
was being fingered in empty lecture theatres, and in odd corners of
the campus around behind the maintenance buildings, she was getting
head in her office, and giving it empty tutorial rooms, and
masturbating in the shower most mornings which made her too happy
to work properly for the next few hours. She was filling her day
trying to work out how to have sex with Ethan, and not with Robert,
and it was getting far too complicated.

She was
getting mopey too.
She was organizing her
day to see Ethan in a lift, or a stairwell, somewhere she could
touch him for a moment, and that was costing her research
time.

She was
supposed to be a rational person.
This
kind of horny shit wasn’t meant to take over her life, but it
was.

“
You’re going
to have to come to my place,” she said in the end.
“I can’t think of any other way.”

“Okay.”

“
Can you deal
with knowing
Robert’s there?”

“I think so.”

“
And we’ll
have to be careful.
Fucking
careful.”

He nodded.

“
All right,”
she said, and kissed him for a minute, until she couldn’t
breathe.
“Soon.”

She went home
and told
Robert she was going to start
tutoring one of her students there, that she’d do it when he wasn’t
around. Then she sat down with Robert’s timetable, and hers, and
Ethan’s, and worked out four hour-long slots a week when she and
Ethan were free and Robert wasn’t.

She started
dashing home in those four hours, meeting Ethan, fucking him
frantically for forty minutes, then rushing back to college before
anyone caught her.
At her place, often in
her bed, since Ethan didn’t seem to care if he fucked her where
Robert slept.

They met in
her office at the weekend, or in the evenings, when she couldn’t
stand to not see him for a whole extra day.
When Robert asked, she said she needed the mainframes in
the department for her work. Like everyone else, she wasted time
big-prime hunting as a hobby, and she needed the department’s
mainframes for that. Not as much as the analysis people did, but
sometimes.

Robert
was too proudly technophobic to point out she
could have logged in from home.

She saw
Ethan, and breathed and moaned and panted into his mouth, and felt
his skin against hers, and tasted him in her mouth, and they still
hadn’t talked about what they actually were, what this thing
between them should be, but it didn’t seem to matter any
more.
It just was. They both understood
that, and needed it, and she kept going, with a kind of madness,
needing to see Ethan.

*

Amanda
met
Robert, at Beth’s, by accident one
afternoon. Robert came home early, and Beth didn’t chase Amanda out
because she didn’t want Robert to wonder what the problem was. Beth
told her to be careful, and watch what she said, and Amanda said
she would.

Amanda talked politely for a few minutes, and
then left, and outside, getting into her car, she whispered to
Beth, “I like the other one better.”

Beth looked
at her.
“Shut up.”

“Just saying.”

“
Shut the
fuck up.
Just don’t.”

Amanda looked at her face, and saw something
there.

“
Yeah,” she
said.
“Sorry.”

“
It’s fine,”
Beth said.
“But don’t. Be careful,
okay?”

Amanda nodded.

“
Please,”
Beth said.
“I mean it.”

Amanda hugged her quickly and said, “I will,
no shit, okay?”

“Thank you.”

Beth went
back inside and listened to
Robert and
wanted to strangle him.

She was finding him annoying, so annoying she
couldn’t stand him, and she knew it was only because she wanted him
gone so she could fuck Ethan, and that wasn’t fair.

Being unfair
to
Robert made her feel guilty, and guilt
made her annoyed, and that made her even more of a bitch. She
wasn’t sure where it would end.

*

There had
been a man with a drill outside Beth’s office for an hour, and she
couldn’t think with him there.
The tempo
was just erratic enough she’d decide it had stopped, and then it
would start again. She was trying to be patient, because she knew
she was in a bad mood all the time, and didn’t want to take it out
on bystanders.

Then he got a phone call, and stood right
outside her door, talking about his weekend to a friend.

She opened it, and said, “Go somewhere
else.”

“
Hold on,” he
said.
“I’ll just be a minute.”

“Go away,” she said. “Please.”

He looked at her but kept talking.

She closed
the door, furious, then decided that actually, she was going to
make a fuss after all.
She opened it
again.

“Hold on, love,” he said.

“
Go the fuck
away,” she said.
“Right fucking
now.”

He looked at
her for a moment.
“You don’t need to talk
like that.”

“
Hang
up.
Pack up. Fuck off.”

He hesitated, then started packing up his
tools.

“And if you call a woman in this university
“love” again, I’ll have your fucking job,” Beth said.

“I’m going,” he said.