One Plus Two Minus One (3 page)

She should
tell him to fuck off and never come back.
She should, but he kissed like a god.

“
Shit,” she
said.
“Shit fuck shit. Come to my
office.”

He stood up,
then looked around.
She stood up too, and
pushed him, got him going the right way.

There were
doors open all the way along the hall.
The older people seemed to like to work that way, to be
collegial. She hated it, had things she needed to do, wanted to
think, not to get distracted by noise and casual visitors. She
always closed her door.

As they
walked, she tried to look calm and bored.
Like she was meeting a student. Like her heart wasn’t
racing, her breath wasn’t shallow, her knees weren’t trembling with
how intensely she needed a fuck.

She held the
door for the guy, gave him an angry look as he went through.
Warning him, she hoped. She closed her door and
put the pile of assignments down. Then leaned on her desk and
looked at the guy. It was summer and warm and she’d been a
professor for most of a year, so she’d mostly given up on looking
professional and gone back to a singlet and skirt. A short skirt
and a strappy singlet, so she probably looked more fuckable and
less like a professor than she really wanted right now.

He was standing close to her.

“Hey,” she said, and leaned back to make some
space.

“I want you,” he said in his normal
voice.

“
Shut the
fuck up,” she said, angry.
Then, “Talk a
bit quieter.”

The walls
were soundproof, but not that soundproof.
You could hear music, voices raised for phone
calls.

“
I really
fucking want you,” he said softly.
“I’ve
been thinking about you all week.”

“Stop it,” she said.

“I remember how you felt,” he said.

She looked at him.

“How you tasted.”

She bit her
lip.
Clenched her hands on the edge of
her desk. Leaned back, and looked at him, and wanted him, all at
once.

She’d planned
to warn him off, to say it was once, sorry, and wouldn’t happen
again.
Go away and leave her alone. She’d
meant to say that as nicely as she could manage, and never see him
again, but she wasn’t saying it. She was just looking at him,
remembering the feel of his mouth on her, the taste of his cock in
hers. She was turned on by the wrongness of him being here, and by
how much he wanted her. She knew she should stop this, should get
him out of here, but she didn’t seem to be going to.

“
Fuck,” she
said.
“You fucking asshole.”

She still
wasn’t sure what to do.
She was probably
just turned on by the situation they’d been in a week ago. Turned
on by the crowd, and the chance of getting caught. He wouldn’t be
nearly as good this time, she told herself, so maybe it was better
just to make out for a while and convince herself of that then tell
him to fuck off.

He kissed
her.
Again. Kissed her mouth and her neck
and made her breath get all shallow and her legs a bit weak. She
grabbed his hair and his shirt and kissed him back. She tried not
to make any sound, but wasn’t sure she managed. Like last time, but
more and stronger and better. He reached up under her skirt,
hitched her forward on her desk and reached up under her skirt and
tugged her underwear down. She had a short skirt, so they were
pretty sensible, but he didn’t seem to notice.

She was
wet.
She was so wet his fingers were
straight into her, and his mouth was hot on her neck.

She couldn’t
believe he had his fingers inside her again, but she wasn’t going
to stop him.
She’d been thinking about
him constantly for the last week, going a bit crazy wanting to do
it again. Not necessarily with him particularly, but not someone
else.

She hadn’t
been keeping up with her grooming.
She
could feel a week’s worth of little stubbly hairs rasping under his
fingers.

He knelt down.

She couldn’t quite believe it.

He knelt down
on her office floor and pushed her knees apart and started going
down on her.
And he was as good as last
time. It hadn’t just been the party. He was so good she couldn’t
bring herself to stop him. She grabbed his head and held him there
and spread her knees and just hugged him against herself until she
came.

She came in his mouth in a minute and a half
flat and had to bite the side of her hand to make herself not moan
out loud.

She sat
there, and he didn’t stop.
She sat a
little longer, as her breathing went back to normal, and he kept
licking her. Gently now, his tongue almost not there. She looked
down at him for a moment. The back of someone else’s head, between
your own legs, that was kind of a hot sight.

“
Hey,” she
said, and he looked up.
“I did
already.”

“I know,” he said.

“So stop.”

He stood up
and kissed her some more.
She kissed
back, not sure what to make of this. Tasted herself, and tasted his
mouth, and felt all warm towards the universe from her
orgasm.

She should do
him.
She should do him, or let him fuck
her, or something. But now she’d come, she needed to think for a
moment before this went anywhere else.

She pushed
him backwards with one foot.
Pushed him
back and put her knees together and just sat on the edge of her
desk and looked at him.

The computer
beeped.
An email arriving.

She slid off
the desk, locked her door and put on some music and went and closed
the blinds.
Picked up her underwear on
the way back and put them in a drawer.

Then leaned
on her desk, where she’d just been, and said, “Sit down.”
And he did.

It was a
power thing.
She wanted it to be a power
thing. She’d just come on his face, and it was her office, so she
was going to tell him what to do.

“
What’s going
on?” she said.
“Is this some prank? A
bet?”

He looked
surprised.
A bit hurt. “No.”

“How’d you find me?”

He looked a
bit puzzled.
Like maybe she’d forgotten
which one he was. Like there were so many guys giving her head in
her office that she couldn’t keep track of which was
which.

“
I knew who
you were the other night,” he said.
“When
I saw you at the party.”

She thought
about that for a while.
“You knew who I
was?”

“I was pretty sure.”

She wanted to
be angry.
Part of her did. “You didn’t
tell me.”

He looked
surprised.
“Yeah I did.”

She realized
he might have.
He’d said a lot she hadn’t
been able to hear.

“
The first
thing I said was you were my professor and I wanted you
anyway.
Something like that.”

“
Oh.”
After a moment. “Yeah, I couldn’t
hear.”

She liked
that.
She really liked that he knew she
was her and groped her like a bimbo anyway. She shouldn’t, but she
did. On half the days of her life it would really piss her off, and
on the other half she’d be pleased. Today, he was lucky.

He pointed to
her wrist.
“Euler.”

“
Yeah.”
She rubbed it without
thinking. There weren’t so many tattoos like that around. She
considered that then lifted up her arm. Had another on the back of
her bicep. Three semi-circles, three lines crossing
them.

“
Yeah,” he
said.
“Bisecting angles. We all noticed
last year when you talked about it.”

She liked old
Greek geometry.
In her first abstract
algebra lecture she’d showed her students bisection and trisection
as a gimmick, showed them you couldn’t do trisections with a
straightedge and compass, then the algebraic proof, then that you
could trisect with origami because it left marks on the
paper.

“I think it’s incredibly hot that you’re a
professor and have tattoos.”

She looked at him and didn’t really know what
to say.

“And go out to get picked up,” he said.

“Not exactly,” she said, but not very
firmly.

“
I spent all
of last year watching you.
Wanting to do
that to you.”

“
Yeah,
right,” she said.
“You sat there wanting
to give me head in my office?”

“Yep,” he said, and got all smug.

She looked at him.

“
And fuck
you.
I mean, obviously. But head,
definitely.”

She looked at
him and wondered what she was getting into.
She couldn’t quite decide if he was serious. She tried to
remember if she’d ever wanted someone so much she’d have blown them
with nothing back, and she thought maybe she had. Perhaps it was
different for guys, anyway. They kind of had to give
head.

She sat there
for a moment thinking.
Trying to decide
whether this was creepy. Whether he was a stalker, and him
following her to her office was incredibly hot, or incredibly
dodgy.

After a moment she realized what he’d just
said.

“
Ah,” she
said, belatedly.
“You were one of my
students last semester?”

That made it
worse.
She was pretty sure that was
actually worse, if she’d taught him rather than just he was here,
where she worked. He looked at her, and nodded, and seemed a bit
puzzled. Students got that way, forgot there were lots of them
looking at one of you. Especially since Beth was bad with names and
faces and didn’t really care anyway.

“Your intro crypto course,” he said.

She took that as meaning he wasn’t a student
any more, and nodded.

She had two
undergrad courses, the second-year intro one, and third-year
advanced cryptography that followed from it, but she’d lost a lot
of them over the break.
The engineers and
computer scientists did the intro course to get an idea,
disappeared before the theory got too intense.

She was more
relieved than she wanted to admit.
She
wasn’t afraid of the grey little people who ran the university,
except a little part of her was. They could get in the way, be
obstructive, make her life difficult. Beth stayed out their way as
much as she could, but she was a little worried. Fucking a student
probably wasn’t that bad, but it definitely wasn’t good
either.

“
What’s your
name?”
she said.

“
Ethan
Wilson.
But, um…”

“
I don’t
remember you.
How did you do?”

“Does it matter?”

She looked at
him really cold, really herself.
“It
matters.”

He was cute
enough.
Had a kind of charming grin that
probably got panties off. She liked that. But she was smart and
pretty and not that hard up for sex, and she’d spent too much of
her life getting into this room, getting this office, to fuck it up
for nothing. Apparently he wanted to fuck smart and pretty, and
good for him. If she was going to be fucked, then she wanted to be
fucked by smart and pretty too. Smart like she meant smart, smart
in a way she could deal with.

“An A,” he said.

Which was
better than she’d expected.
She felt a
little mean. “Okay,” she said. “That’s an okay mark. There were
only two A-pluses, last year.”

They looked at each other.

“
I pass?” he
said.
Said it like he knew he wasn’t
joking.

“Maybe,” she said.

He stood up
and kissed her again, but she turned her face away, pushed him back
again with her foot. “Wait,” she said.
“Let me think.”

“I want you,” he said.

“I got that.”

“I want to make you come again.”

“
Yeah, I
fucking got it.
But just
wait.”

He looked
around her office.
Looked at equations on
the whiteboard, but probably wouldn’t understand. She’d been
explaining something to someone else’s honors student. He glanced
at her books and seemed surprised she had as many non-specialist
books as maths ones.

“I’m not going to fuck you in my office in
the middle of the afternoon,” she said.

He
nodded.
“Yeah, fair enough.”

“I know I kind of owe you now.”

He
shrugged.
Like he wasn’t saying that, but
he also wasn’t dumb enough to make a case against it.

“
What,” she
said.
“You’re fine, any time I need it
just call, that kind of shit?”

He grinned,
and she liked that he didn’t jump, or get nervous, or get
annoyed.
Even though she’d sounded a bit
bitchy. She sounded bitchy half her life and couldn’t stand to be
around people who didn’t understand she didn’t really mean
it.