One Plus Two Minus One (4 page)

“
If you
like,” he said.
Giving her a look. “Sure,
any time. But if you wanted to give a little back, that’s good
too.”

And she was
pretty sure he was serious.
Maybe she
should be preying on the students more often. That was a lot
different to what she was used to. Maybe it was just
him.

“I can’t,” she said.

“Okay.”

“Seriously?”

“
Yeah,
sure.
If you can’t, you
can’t.”

He was getting points for not minding that
she’d had her orgasm and then decided to knock him back.

“You really don’t care?”

“I get it. You’re a professor.”

She was
suspicious.
Just outright suspicious.
Couldn’t understand why this guy, unlike all the others, wasn’t
running around holding his balls and complaining how frustrated he
was.

“Why’s it okay?” she said.

“
Next time
I’ll just fuck you before I let you come,” he said.
And grinned again to make it seem like a joke.
Except it wasn’t.

She looked at
him for a long, long time.
Thought about
calling him on the next time, but knew, just knew, he’d smirk and
tell her of course she’d want a next time. Which was probably true.
She’d had crushes on people like him before. Had watched from a
distance, knew how they worked. He’d made her come twice, in half
the time any decent girl takes, and she didn’t want to make his
smugness worse.

Instead she said, “How old are you?”

“
Does it
matter?
Do you care?”

She
shrugged.
She didn’t really. She’d just
wanted to put him off a little, kick a dent in his cockiness. That
hadn’t worked, now he was grinning twice as much.

She knew she
shouldn’t like him, knew his smartass shit probably hid a bastard
or someone deeply insecure or both.
Knew
that ten years ago someone like him wouldn’t have looked twice at
someone like her. But this wasn’t ten years ago, and he was cute
and kissed good and if she was some fantasy he had, then why not
let him fuck her.

Before she
decided she thought really hard about what she was doing.
It wasn’t the rules, exactly. Not the actual
rules on paper. There were other rules, more important rules.
Things everyone understood. She was a woman, and she did maths, and
that meant they were doing her a favor by letting her in, no matter
how good she was and how great she could become. She shouldn’t make
trouble, and this was trouble. This was exactly what you weren’t
meant to do to help your career. She should tell Ethan to go, and
she almost did, except that dozens of male professors were married
to women half their age, and it wasn’t fair they got to and she
didn’t. And Ethan was here, the opportunity was here, so she
couldn’t see why she shouldn’t.

“Are you doing anything tonight?” she
said.

“Not yet.”

“
Have a drink
with me.
At six.”

He nodded
slowly.
“Where?”

She
thought.
The bars on campus were
swill-pits for students, and the staff club was out. That meant
town, she supposed, but she didn’t really want to walk hand-in-hand
across campus.

“
Come back
here,” she said.
“We’ll work something
out.”

He nodded.

“
Hey,” she
said, and kissed him.
“You’re really
fucking good. That was wonderful. I just can’t, during the
day.”

He kissed her back and said, “I know.”

She almost didn’t like him again.

“
Five to
six,” she said.
“The doors and lifts will
lock and you won’t be able to get up.”

He nodded and opened the door and left.

*

Beth sat at
her desk all afternoon and wondered what she was doing.
She was wet. She was wet and distracted and
excited, and kept trying to tell herself what a stupid idea this
was.

She’d spent a
long time working to get here.
She had a
plan, knew where she was going. She’d taken a job at a second-tier
university because they wanted her more, had tried harder to get
her, had let her negotiate less teaching and have more research
time. That was good, but it meant she had to produce something, had
to prove herself to get out. Otherwise, it was here, in this
office, forever. She wanted to be in a research position by the
time she was forty, and although it sounded like a long time, it
wasn’t. She’d started off slow, had more to catch up. She needed to
produce something, and to do that she needed free time, and no
distractions, and Ethan was a threat to both.

She was
almost brilliant.
Only almost. Somehow
you just knew. She wouldn’t set the world on fire, but would have
one or two good ideas and make do. Her life would count, but she
would never be one of the greats. She’d almost not done maths at
all, had failed calculus at high school because she didn’t
understand it, and drifted into an arts degree, had taken a
discrete math course out of interest and realized she was good. As
good as the professor. She’d wasted a year on that, and another
year taking all the core maths papers she hadn’t done the first
time around and needed. She’d got her scholarships and her
doctorate but had always known she was just that little bit older
than everyone else now. That made her worry about time just that
little bit more.

She had to be
where she wanted to be by forty, or it was all over.
And from the age she’d started doing maths
properly, she had already been halfway there. She worried she was
wasting time on teaching when her mind was at its best, that she’d
never get this time back, and now she was horny instead of
thinking. She had to fuck this kid, or not fuck this kid, whichever
it was to get him out her system. One or the other. She couldn’t
afford the embarrassment he could be to her, but she also couldn’t
afford the distracted horny time.

She tried to
work, but couldn’t think, so she marked assignments instead.
She gave out a couple of large projects to cut
down the risk someone good would crack in an exam and completely
fail. With assignments, half the time she could just turn to the
back page and check they had the right answer, then give them full
points and go to the next. She gave out assignments where that
worked on purpose, so marking was quick. It was dull, but needed
doing.

Halfway through she came to an assignment by
Ethan Wilson.

She sat there and looked at it and wondered
what the little fuck was up to.

She checked her class lists and he was in her
advanced crypto course, and had been coming to tutorials all
semester.

She sat there for a moment, stunned.

She should
pay more attention to her students.
She
knew the best students by name, but Ethan was just below those. She
tried to remember, and was fairly sure he’d never asked a question,
good or bad, so she’d never noticed him before.

She checked
his record.
He was a maths and computer
science double major. Third year, in the pre-honors program. Doing
better at compsci than maths, but doing okay. He wasn’t her, he
wasn’t going to get one of the few academic jobs, but he wasn’t
going to end up a high-school teacher.

She scrolled
up the page and found his date of birth.
He was twenty-one. That made her feel a little
better.

She wondered
what to do.
She wanted to see him. She
wanted sex. She wanted more head like he’d given her, about a month
of that without doing anything else. But his being her student, in
her course, was very bad. It would be painfully complicated if
anything went wrong, and probably end up very public.

If nothing else, she was pretty sure she
should be having someone else to mark his assignment, right
now.

She looked at
the last page.
He had everything
correct.

She
thought.
Right now, her wanting to fuck
him didn’t make any difference to his mark. So probably she should
fuck him. She could get someone else to look at his other work, she
supposed. Say there was a personal relationship, that he was a
family friend. She’d marked for someone else earlier in the year,
checking an exam against a model answer for a professor’s friend’s
son.

After a while
she thought to herself that the worst was already done.
If she hadn’t been too horny to work, and
marking this afternoon, she wouldn’t have noticed until later. So
it didn’t actually make any difference. She could fuck him tonight
then realize again tomorrow and nothing would actually
change.

About five
she went and had a shower.
The building
had a couple of toilets with bathrooms, so staff could bike in or
run at lunchtime. She had gym gear in the cupboard, including a
clean towel. She was still a little suspicious of what Ethan was
doing, and annoyed with him for not saying he was in her class. She
wasn’t sure what she was going to say if he turned up.

She was back by twenty past, then sat at her
computer staring at the screen for half an hour wondering if he’d
turn up.

At ten to six she got up and closed the
blinds.

At two minutes to six someone tapped on her
door.

She stood up,
and opened it.
Ethan.

“Hey,” he said.

“You lied to me.”

“Ah…” he said.

“
By
omission,” she said.
“It fucking
counts.”

She’d been
making herself angry. She was almost going to tell him to fuck
off.
Tell him that whatever he thought
this meant, it didn’t, that she was going to own up to the head of
school tomorrow so whatever his plan for blackmail had been, it was
over.

“
Yeah,” he
said.
“Sorry. I did.”

She pulled
him inside and closed the door.
A lot of
people worked odd hours, anyone could still be around.

“
You’re a
shit,” she said.
“You should have told
me.”

“
I’m sorry,”
he said.
“But you just assumed, and you
were already upset about last semester.”

That was true.

“How long did you think it would take me to
realize?” she said.

“
Ah,” he
said.
“Well, since apparently you don’t
recognize anyone in your class…”

“I would have eventually.”

“
At least
until tonight.
Hopefully longer if I
didn’t go to lectures.”

“You’d skip lectures to fuck me?”

“Of course.”

She liked how
he didn’t need to think about that.
How
he thought wanting her was obvious.

“
And I could
ask you for notes, anyway,” he said.
“Afterwards, when you realized.”

She just looked at him for a while, then
said, “Dickhead.”

“How did you work it out?”

“Marked your assignment.”

“
Ah.”
Grinning. “Um, yeah. That was kind of a fuck-up
of timing.”

“Yep.”

“How’d I do?”

She almost
told him.
Then said, “Find out when
everyone the fuck else does.”

“You swear more than when you’re
teaching.”

“
No fucking
shit.”
She looked at him. “So
what?”

“It’s hot.”

“Hot?”

“
Yeah, it
turns me on.
You’re a real person, when
you’re like this.”

“
You’re a
shit,” she said.
“You really
are.”

He just stood
there.
She didn’t know why she’d said it,
really, but he was. He was too confident, for twenty-one. Too
confident for someone trying to bang their professor.

“
Come here,”
she said, and kissed him.
Kissed him for
a while.

He tried to pull her top down, get to her
tits.

“No,” she said, and grabbed his hand,
“Clothes on, here.”

He got his hand inside her skirt and
underwear, and she sat there and kissed him and let him finger
her.

He knelt down, tugged her underwear to the
side.

She owed him,
she should be getting him off, but he was doing her again and
didn’t seem to care.
He started licking
her, and she melted. Felt herself go all warm and gooey. She closed
her eyes and tried to balance sitting up. Held his head with one
hand and the edge of the desk with the other and wriggled around
knocking things onto the floor. She ended up bent forwards over
him, holding his head against herself, hugging him. Trying to lift
herself onto his mouth. Breathing hard, trying to stay quiet. The
desk was moving, things were tipping over. A few pens rolled off
the side, and fell. A badly-placed book. Her computer hummed and
switched on.

She felt it
very close.
Felt it building up. Her knee
twitched and her tits ached and she couldn’t breathe. She said,
“Shit, oh shit,” very quietly, and came.

And kept
coming.
She was a bit surprised by that.
She’d been doing herself for too long, had forgotten what someone
else felt like when you had the time to enjoy them and weren’t
already pulling your clothes back into place as it
started.