One Plus Two Minus One (30 page)

“
This is
nice,”
Robert said.

“Yeah,” Beth said, and actually meant it.

“
You look
like you’ve lost weight,”
Robert
said.

“
Yeah,
maybe.”
Hours of sex a day for months.
“Not eating properly.”

“
Take care of
yourself.”
He seemed to be looking at
her. “Are you wearing a bra?”

She
wasn’t.
She’d been with Ethan in her
office, had only dressed enough to get to the supermarket and home.
It was in her bag.

It was the
strangest thing.
She felt grubby and
awkward, like her dad had caught her without one on, and that was a
really worrying sign for how she felt about Robert.

“Nope,” she said.

Robert
just that there. He seemed to feel awkward
too.

“Just trying something,” she said.

He nodded.

They talked
about work for a while.
About where
they’d always wanted to go on holidays. Beth wondered if they’d
ever get to travel together after all, then realized they wouldn’t,
and realized that planning those trips they’d never taken might
have been the strongest connection they’d ever actually
had.

“
Hey,” Beth
said, because she’d been needing to say it for days, and they were
actually talking.
“Don’t say anything
about Ethan and I won’t say anything about rape.”

“
Yeah,”
Robert said. “I
know.”

She looked at him for a while.

“
Of course
that’s what we’ll do.
I assumed. I know
you. I haven’t said anything.”

“What do you mean of course?”

“
You’re kind
of calculating, Beth.
Of course you don’t
care what I did to you, and of course you’ll use it to get what you
want.”

“I care,” she said.

“You’re using it to get me to do what you
want.”

“
I’m not,”
Beth said, astonished, unsure where this had even come from.
“You don’t know me at all.”

“And yet I’m right about that.”

She sat there
for a moment, hurt and angry and filled with this horrible darkness
inside herself.
“I wish I’d never loved
you,” she said quietly. “I really do.”

She’d had
enough to eat.
She wasn’t hungry any
more. She put what was left of her dinner in the bin.

Robert
was watching her.

She was about to go upstairs to bed, then
changed her mind.

“Get the fuck out,” she said.

“What?”

“
Go.
Fuck off. I want you out my life.”

“Beth…”

“
I’ve had
enough.
I want you to go.”

He looked like he couldn’t decide if she was
serious.

“
You heard
me.
Get the fuck out of here. I tried to
be nice, but I don’t want you around any more.”

“I haven’t got anywhere to go.”

“
I don’t
care.
Get a fucking hotel. I had to, when
I wanted to fuck Ethan.”

He didn’t move.

“
You’d better
start looking like you’re going,” she said.
“I fucking mean it.’

“You want me to go right now?”

“
Yeah.
I don’t want you in this house. I don’t want you
in the house tonight.”

“What difference does it make?”

“It does.”

He stood up
and walked over and put his plate in the sink.
He looked annoyed, and she decided she might be being
unreasonable. Now he was doing what she wanted, she gave a little
ground.

“
You can stay
tonight,” she said.
“But you have to pack
first. You have to be ready to go first thing in the morning. And
you actually have to go, just fuck off, without making a
fuss.”

He stood there looking at her like he didn’t
know what to say.

“
Do it my
way, or fuck off,” she said.
“How is this
hard to understand?”

“All right,” he said.

He went over to the couch, and started to
pack, to pick up clothes and put them in his suitcase.

“Do you have to be in control all the fucking
time?” he said.

It was meant
to be a last jab, an insult, and she looked at him and wondered if
he knew her at all.
“Of course I do,” she
said. “Fuck.”

She stood
there long enough to make sure he was actually putting his things
in the suitcase, was actually packing, and then went upstairs and
texted Ethan,
tomorrow
.

*

In the
morning
Robert had left before she woke
up, and she was actually surprised.

He’d left the key on the kitchen bench.

He left a
note.
He said he’d get in touch about a
few things he’d left, and some he didn’t know if they were his or
hers. He said goodbye.

He’d still be
around, she supposed.
He’d still be
somewhere on the campus, and she might run into him, but he was
actually gone from here.

She felt relaxed for the first time in
weeks.

*

Beth was going to meet Ethan.

She’d
realized a while ago that she’d never worn the dress for him again,
the one she’d had on the night they met.
She realized she’d never let Ethan fuck her in it, or even
see her in it again, and that she wanted to do something good and
sexy and nice with him, and forget Robert and his weird and
threatening shit.

She needed to
be her as she started with Ethan, or at least the her she was
becoming, and wanted to be.
It didn’t
quite make sense, but it seemed right. She put on the dress, and
heels, but not the actual heels. These ones she could walk in
easily. She texted him when she was ready and said to come and meet
her outside the maths building.

She wanted to
be somewhere new for this.
In the dress,
and some different place, without all the memories of sneaking
around making it sordid.

There was a waist-high concrete retaining
wall around the front of the building, and the students sat there a
lot, waiting for each other.

Ethan was
there, waiting for her.
There were a few
other students around, but none of them were hers.

She walked over, and he looked at her, and
the dress, and grinned and said, “Fucking wow.”

That was
enough.
That was exactly, perfectly
enough.

“Help me up,” she said, and he held out his
hand and let her pull herself up onto the wall beside him.

She sat there
for a minute and swung her feet.
It was
the middle of a winter day and the air was cool on her
skin.

“
He’s gone,”
she said.
“It’s over. I have lots of time
again.”

Ethan leaned over and kissed her.

“
Hey,” she
said.
“Don’t.”

“We can’t do that?”

She looked around at students and the
building and decided she didn’t care.

One of the students was looking at her, a
woman, but Beth was pretty sure it was the dress getting noticed,
odd here in the middle of the day, not her.

“
Yeah,” she
said.
“We can do that.”

He kissed her
again, and looked really happy, and she was pleased.
He looked like waiting for her was worth
it.

He kissed her for a moment, then tried to
take her hand.

She moved
it.
“Don’t get carried away,” she said,
and he grinned.

They sat for a while.

“What happens now?” Ethan said.

“
Yeah,” she
said.
“I was meaning to talk to you about
that. I hadn’t really got a plan from here on in.”

He looked at her and grinned.

“
You want
me?” she said.
“You really fucking want
me.”

“Yep.”

“
Like be a
couple and live with me and get all my crazy all the time.
Like me leaning over your shoulder telling you
when you’ve made a mistake, and everyone looking at you thinking
you only got where you are because you’re the teacher’s
pet.”

“Yeah, I do.”

“You’re sure?”

“I don’t mind you fixing my mistakes, and I
don’t really care what a bunch of maths professors think.”

“And the rest?”

“You’re not that crazy.”

She sat there for a while, and felt
tremendously relieved.

“You wondered?” he said.

“Of course.”

“
I told
you.
Crush since your first
lecture.”

“That might have changed.”

“Nope.”

She kissed
him, then slid forwards, wriggled off the wall.
“Something I need to do,” she said.

He
nodded.
He didn’t look disappointed. She
was pretty sure he really didn’t mind how much she
worked.

“
You’re glad
it got to this?” she said, wanting to check one last time.
“You don’t want to change your mind?”

“I’m glad.”

“
Okay,” she
said.
She took a folded sheet of paper
out her bag, rummaged around and found a pen. “Sign
that.”

He
looked.
“I’m out your course?”

“
Yep.
You don’t need it to see me any
more.”

“So I don’t get an A?”

She looked at
him for a moment.
“Nope. Do you
care?”

“
Shit no,” he
said, and scribbled his name.
“Didn’t
want it in the first place.”

She was
relieved by that too.
“I’ll make sure it
doesn’t go on your record, okay?”

He nodded, gave the form back to her.

“
Now we’re
honest,” she said.
“No more
secrets.”

“Except…” he said.

“
Yeah,” she
said.
“Thinking of which. I’d better go
talk to the head of school. There’s a couple of things I need to
sort out.”

He grinned, and kissed her again, right
there, outside the building, and she didn’t mind at all.

“
Bye,” she
said.
“Come over later.”

“
Yeah,” he
said.
“I will.”

“
Do,” she
said.
“I really fucking want you right
now,” and then went inside to own up.

# # #

Hey, this is Tess. Sigh. Don’t bother
scrolling back to the cover, I wrote the book okay?

So the internet marketing guru people say I
should do this, and I’m going to. Because they may be right. Even
though I suspect that if you can read, you can probably work out
that sometimes people write more than one book, and go look for
them on your own.

But I’ll make it easy.

I have a
website blogy kind of thing. It has stories on it sometimes, and
deleted scenes from this book, and some other bits and pieces. I’ll
say stuff about what I’m writing there now and then. Do come and
visit.
It’s
here
.

I wrote some other stuff too.
There’s a
book
.
There’s some stories listed
here
as well.

Um. Big favor
to ask, if you’ve read this far. If you like a story and
only if you’re not embarrassed to do
this
could you leave a rating or a review
or whatever on the website you got it from? Those same internet
marketing gurus say it’s a big deal for emerging authors, and I
should ask you to. Because it lets other people decide whether to
try my work, and moves me up searches too, on some websites. I’d be
really grateful, and it might actually help more readers find
me.

And thank you
for reading this. Like I keep saying at every chance, I’m really,
really fucking grateful to all of you out there, and I’m really
pleased and flattered that people are actually interested in
reading what I write, and I’m even more of those things to everyone
who’s throwing money in the tip jar as they leave. So thank
you.