One Plus Two Minus One Ch. 04

"Not in the middle of winter, when I'm talking about."

She glared at him. After a while said, "Yeah, fuck you too."

"Why do you swear so much?"

"No fucking idea."

He grinned.

"Okay," she said. "What about you? If we're doing this, tell me about you."

"Same, really. Too smart for school. Not many friends. More than some people because I had music and girls, but not many. College was a big thing. Like starting life over again."

"Same here."

"It's a pity all the same people follow you here though. You know, the ones you've always been hoping to avoid."

"Stay a bit. They'll get bachelor's degrees and piss off. Then it gets better. I never really talked to anyone until honors."

Ethan nodded.

"I hate high schools," Beth said. "Everyone in them. I really fucking hate them. And teachers. I don't have time for people who are just going to end up there.'

"That's obvious."

"How's that?"

"In class. You pretty much ignore questions from people you think are stupid. Don't give them any time. Try and shut them down if they want to talk."

"I'm not that bad."

"Yeah, you are."

She chewed, decided to be honest. "Maths is hard. If they can't do it, they can't. The whole class doesn't need to hear me explain everything two or three times because someone doesn't get it."

"The whole class might not understand either."

"One person does."

"What if they don't?"

"One person always does. That's the one I care about."

"And the rest of us? Me?"

She shrugged.

"Seriously?"

"Yep," she said. "I don't give a shit."

He looked at her and she just looked back.

"It's a university," she said. "I teach at the right speed. I teach the speed I was taught. And the people who taught me. And people before them. All the same, at the same pace, for hundreds of years. We know how to do this, and it's not an evolving field. Most of it doesn't change. Just now we have all this white noise, all these pointless people running around buzzing in the air about how I should do my job."

He seemed to be waiting.

"I teach at the speed you need," she said. "You and three or four others like you. That's who I'm there for. The rest of the class are just high school teachers waiting to happen. They don't need to understand what I'm talking about, they just need to sit there for three years and leave with a degree."

"That's pretty fucking brutal."

"That's what a university is."

He kept looking at her, and she wasn't sure if he was offended or upset or something. "I said I was teaching you," she said, in case he hadn't noticed.

"What if I'm not as smart as you think?" he said. "What if I slip?"

"I'll still fuck you."

"You sure? Because sometimes it doesn't seem like it."

"I'm sure."

He looked at her for a while longer, and she wondered if he was getting insecure.

"Maybe I wouldn't have at first," she said. "But I'm getting used to you. I'll still fuck you if you turn out to be stupid."

He looked at her for a while, then said, "Thanks."

Beth grinned. "Yeah, that might have sounded a bit up myself."

"A bit."

She ate another forkful.

"Don't worry," Ethan said. "I'll give you a really nice teaching survey. Since everyone else is going to hate you."

"No offence, but they're all twenty. With twenty-year-old brains. I'm hot and I'm rude so they give me good scores. And I don't give a shit anyway."

"Sexy," he said. "Great fuck, tastes better than any other professor."

"Don't you dare."

"It's anonymous."

"Yeah, sure it is."

He looked surprised.

"I know all your handwriting. Or I would, if I read the surveys or cared."

"You do. Whoever collects them doesn't."

"And if you write that it means one of my students thinks I'm a good fuck. Or want to find out. They just don't know which one." She thought. "And they'd probably hunt you down anyway thinking you were a danger to me. So don't."

He grinned and chewed and looked at her. "What's with the guy in the photo?"

Beth shook her head. "You don't need to know that yet."

"Another thing about you," Ethan said. "You're controlling."

"No shit. I'm your professor."

She grinned at him and said, "Eat, I want to fuck you again."

*

They went back upstairs and he looked at the vibrators, still on the floor, and said, "Which is your favorite?"

"Nope," she said. "No way. I don't know you nearly that well."

He kept looking at her.

"No," she said again. Sharply.

"Use one."

"Not a fucking chance."

"Please," he said.

"Eat me instead," she said. "Then we'll see."

He made her come with his mouth, then looked at her all expectantly, like she was actually going to get herself off again with a dildo. She shook her head and laughed at him when he reached for one anyway. Reached over hopefully, but didn't really seem to mind when she refused, like he'd known she wouldn't all along.

He was still hard, though, from thinking about that, or from having her in his mouth, or something.

She lay there and looked at his cock and wondered how to get him off. She'd come a few times, and didn't need sex again, and she'd never quite understood the rules about oral. You definitely didn't have to the first time, if you were a girl and he fucked you, maybe not the first few times, but at some point you started looking like a selfish bitch, and she didn't want that. He was a bit ahead of her on giving each other head, and she wanted to even it up.

"Lie down," she said, and sat up.

He kissed her, and grinned, and did.

She bent over him, then stopped. "It won't be as good as the other times," she said. "In the bar and downstairs."

"Don't care. And it will."

"Nah, not without all the rest of it. All the hurry and horny."

"I don't care."

"I'm just saying. Don't be disappointed. Don't think badly of me."

"I'm not," he said, and looked at her, and she wondered for a moment if she shouldn't have said that, if he was going to worry she'd meant something else, that it hadn't been good for her. He seemed to just be horny, though. He reached up and grabbed the side of her face, and kissed her, then pulled her slowly onto his cock.

She shouldn't let him do that. She shouldn't like it when he pushed her around like that, but she did.

He was hot and hard in her mouth, felt him twitch as she tasted him with her tongue. Her hair kept getting in the way, and she didn't want to stop and find a hair tie, so he held it for her, stroked her shoulders, and told her how wonderful she felt.

She was pretty sure it was some head from the teacher fantasy, but she was starting not to mind. She was here too. She slid off the bed, said, "Over here," and knelt in front of him, on the floor. He stood over her, and she slid her mouth up and down his cock, and kept her hands away, behind her back, except for when he popped out. If she was going to be a fantasy, she may as well do it properly.

He came. He came a lot, even now, so it spilled out onto her lips and chin. She swallowed him and licked him clean and got back up on the bed. Kissed him with some of his come still sticky on her lips, just to see if he would.

He seemed to know what she was doing. "I don't care," he said.

"Good."

"Was I supposed to?"

"Just checking."

He started stroking her. Just to touch her, she thought. He seemed to really like her body, and him noticing made her like him. He started licking her tummy, fingering her gently. Just enough it got her horny and lazy, not enough to bother doing anything.

"What's the kinkiest thing you've ever done?" he said.

"Why?"

"I wondered."

She lay there. "You first."

"Threeway."

She rolled onto her side, looked at him. "Go on."

"Go on what?"

"Details."

"A friend and his girlfriend. Everyone a bit pissed."

"Shit," Beth was actually impressed. Actually kind of turned on. Suddenly, "When? You're only..."

"That's cruel," he said. Then, "Last year."

She kept looking at him. Almost seeing him again like she had at the beginning. A troublemaking player, not trustworthy.

"Shit," he said. "Don't look like that. It was once."

She shook her head. He kept looking at her.

"You like that idea?" he said suddenly, and she was almost embarrassed it was that obvious.

"A little," she said.

"Two guys?"

"Yeah," she said. "I like it. Stop fucking smirking." After a minute. "How does that work. I mean, one after the other, or..."

"Both at once?"

"Yeah."

"That. She wanted it like that."

After a minute. "How? Like, one at each end?"

"Pretty much."

"Shit," Beth said. "I mean, fuck." Another hesitation, then, "So, she's on her back, or side, or what?"

"Her kneeling, was how it turned out. Which was kind of awkward since him and me were looking at each other the whole time."

Beth just looked at him.

"I think she wanted it like that," Ethan said after a while. "Like a turn-on for her or something."

"I get it," Beth said.

Ethan looked at her.

She realized. "I'm not doing that with you."

"I didn't ask you to. Not yet."

She glared.

"What? You're turned on by the idea."

"But it's never, ever going to happen. I mean, shit, imagine the fuss if I got caught having threeways with my students..."

"That might be bad."

"It might."

Silence for a while. "What about you?" he said. "Kinkiest thing ever?"

"Shit, forget it. You win."

"Nothing like that? Not ever?"

"This, here, last weekend and here, is probably the kinkiest ever. Other than that, just, you know, one person and sex."

"I've got a friend whose dad saw her home-made porno," he said.

Beth looked at him. "Ouch."

"Shit yeah. She left it on her computer so she deserves it, but yeah. Ick. That must have been creepy."

Beth lay there. "Imagine if you didn't realize at first, were sitting there watching then suddenly, oh fuck, that mole looks familiar..."

"Except for how you're looking around in your daughter's porn collection."

"Ah, yeah, except for that."

"Have you got some?"

She didn't move. "Yep."

"What kind of thing?"

"None of your business."

Silence for a while. He stroked her tummy. Ran his hand up to her breast, down to her hips, long, slow, silky strokes.

"Do you play chess?" he said.

"Why would I play chess?"

"Maths professor..."

"Supposed to be moving on from that. And deeply fucking offensive stereotype, by the way."

He grinned.

"I don't play chess. I'm pretty sure I could play chess, but why? It's just memorizing shit. You can write software to play chess better than any human, so why bother?"

"What do you do for fun?"

"Maths." She grinned, stretched. "And fuck."

He grinned.

Another silence.

"And you really don't care about teaching surveys?"

"I really don't. Self-selected survey. It's meaningless data."

He grinned.

"Stop smiling, it's true. And they don't correlate the comments against the students' grades, so what's the point. Why would I care about results that include everyone I failed?"

"Do you fail a lot?"

"Nope."

He kissed her side. "You seem like you would."

"My bell curve's way higher than everyone else's."

"Seriously?"

"Yep. Don't tell anyone, I don't want to be seen as an easy course, but yeah. I pass most people, and it's a theory course, meant to be harder, so no-one objects. I don't give a shit if I pass a bunch of incompetent maths teachers. But your A, you fucking earned that."

She lay there for a while. He took her hand, kissed her tattoos.

"Is this turning you on?" she said suddenly. "Lying in bed with me talking about me being a professor. Since you thought that was hot."

"I was just talking."

"Better fucking be."

Silence for a while.

"There's something you said in a lecture..."

"No," she said, and sat up. "No way."

He looked at her.

"Okay," she said. "What? But you have to stop reminding me."

"Linear feedback shift registers," he said. "Why aren't they random?"

She lay there for a minute. "It repeats. It has a finite number of possible states."

"Yeah, you said. But why?"

"It's a function. But not. Don't think about input and output, it's a sideways shift of the bits. Engineering rather than maths."

He looked at her. "I don't get why. Why you can't just have an infinitely big register?"

"It's still deterministic. And a just a bunch of XOR gates. Or a polynomial. So either way it can't be arbitrarily infinite. But even if it was, it's still running through a fixed cycle, even if it's enormous, so eventually it repeats."

He lay there for a while.

"Still no?"

"Sorry."

"An example?"

"Maybe. If that isn't too weird."

She tried to explain drawing equations on the sheet, then realized he couldn't see them like she could, couldn't imagine them and fix them in his mind and keep track of what she'd said a minute and three lines ago. She got up and found paper and a pen and wrote out a whole proof for him, then did a worked example, step by step.

"Clear?" she said, and he nodded.

She tore off the sheets and gave them to him.

"Study for my homework?"

"Really fucking creepy," she said. "Watch it." After a moment. "Weirdest tutorial I ever gave."

"Sorry."

"Nah, I like it. I think number theory's sexy. I like to fuck and then talk about maths."

He started laughing.

"Seriously," she said. "I really do. I never have before, not like this."

"Not with that guy?"

"Fuck no, he's a political scientist and I think he's a little bit threatened because I'm so fucking clever."

Ethan rolled over and kissed her. Said, into her mouth, "What's the proof of the square root of two?"

"That's fucking cute."

"Tell me."

She looked at him for a moment, then said, "The cool one? Assume it's rational. That means two distinct positive integer divisors exist. Do some basic algebra and it turns out they don't. Contradiction."

He pushed the paper towards her.

"Shit," she said. "I can't believe no-one ever showed you," and started writing it out. Lost a symbol halfway through and had to do it again. Threw it at him.

*

It was dark outside, was getting late. The rain had stopped, but it would be cold. Beth didn't need to look, she'd got used to the weather here. Rain and wind and seething cloud for the rest of the evening.

"It's getting late," she said.

He looked at her, then sat up, and looked around for his clothes.

"Have you got a car?" she said.

He shook his head.

She wondered if she should ask him to stay, She probably ought to offer, but wasn't sure she wanted to. Eventually they would fuck each other to exhaustion and run out of things to say, and then it would just be awkward. And that would spoil it all.

"I can give you a lift?" she said in the end.

"Nah, I can walk. It's okay."

"The weather's shitty."

"I don't want to put you to any trouble."

She lay there for a while, then said, "Take the car, bring it back tomorrow."

He looked at her.

"No biggie," she said. "I know who you are."

"Okay," he said. "Thanks."

She nodded. He started getting dressed, so she got up and found him the keys. Went to the front door with him wearing a sheet. "The red hatchback," she said, and pointed. "Just bring it back tomorrow afternoon sometime. I'll be here."

They stood there. She actually didn't want him to go. She only realized that, standing at the door. She'd had fun, she'd enjoyed this. She wanted him to stay. It was an odd thing to realize. She didn't think she'd ever really felt like that about someone she'd just met before.

He kissed her for a while.

"Hey," she said. "Do me a favor. Stay unobtrusive in lectures. Don't start sitting up the front or asking questions or anything that'll make me blush or say something stupid."

"Yeah, of course."

"Thanks."

He kissed her again. "Can I have my assignment mark?"

She looked at him. "Don't be a dick."

More kissing.

"Go," she said, and he did.

She stood in the door and watched until he got the car started and drove away.

Giving him her car had pretty much guaranteed he'd be back. Like leaving a coat behind in someone's house. She wondered how much she'd meant it to work out that way.

*

Beth felt a bit guilty. She phoned Robert, just to see if he was home.

Phoned while wearing a sheet she'd just fucked another man in, with the feel of him still inside her, and the smell of him on her skin.

Robert was home, and they talked for a while quietly, about nothing.

Once Robert had meant the world to Beth. Once he had been everything, the first person she'd really been serious about, and the only one she thought she'd ever love. For a while she had, utterly. Then something had gone wrong, slowly, over a year, and she still wasn't completely sure what it was. They'd both moved on, and done it in ways that meant they picked other things over each other. Careers and jobs and finishing degrees. And somehow that counted. Somehow he resented her having this job, and she resented him not coming with her, and everything had gone slightly wrong, like they were both pretending not to care when actually they both did. Pretending meant they weren't close any more, and the fact she was even willing to go told her a lot about how it had ended up.

She still felt a lot for him, though. They weren't what they'd used to be, but they were something. She was fond of him, and felt kindly towards him, and would probably spend the rest of her life with him, eventually, if he wanted her to, because it was comfortable and safe and gave her time to work.

She felt a lot for Robert, but she didn't know if she wanted to fuck him. Not like she did Ethan. And she didn't know how much that mattered.

She wanted to talk to Robert, and one day be with Robert, but she didn't want him around right now. She was sitting there with the taste of someone else in her mouth, the dampness of another man's sweat still on her skin, and she wanted to talk to Robert.

But not to actually fuck him.

She didn't understand herself sometimes.

She wondered if Ethan was just something she could get out her system, then move on with her life, be happy. With less sex.

She and Robert were different. He was political, in a way she wasn't. He cared about things she thought were pointless, a bit silly. She always had, and she usually didn't tell him. He wasn't doing as well in his career as her, and was sometimes a little bitter, at the world rather than her, a little frustrated in a way that came out as insecure, but she loved him all the same. Even though sometimes it felt like he was the chick in the relationship, talking about feelings and talking problems out, when sometimes she'd rather just ignore them, let it go. In an awful way he wasn't strong enough for her. He didn't push back, he didn't stand up to her. Part of why they'd ended up like this, she thought, was because of that. He didn't call her on her shit and tell her to just stop.

She thought about Robert and strength and about Ethan and sex. She thought about Ethan holding her wrists, and why she was okay with that. She thought about men and sex and what sex was to her.

She was smart. In a very small way, she was important. She was almost a brilliant mathematician. But at the end of the day any guy she slept with was going to end up on top, in charge, sticking his dick into her while she lay there and got fucked. The fact she got fucked was really important too. At some point it stopped being fucking, stopped being both of them doing it together, and became her getting fucked. It always did. It shouldn't matter to her. Everyone else had sex the same way and seemed to like it, but somehow it mattered to Beth. Like in a strange way it cheapened her.

Ethan was different because he was a student. And because he was so into her, but mostly because he was a student. It was a power thing, the worst, most grubby kind of power thing. Ethan was younger, and more desperate, and under her control, and she had to admit that to herself if she was being truthful. He was someone she could tell what to do, and that meant she could have her wrists held, and could get fucked doggy, and be just like everyone else out there. She could kneel down and suck his cock and not care in the slightest, because no matter what she did, she was really in charge. And with Robert, and anyone else her own age, she wasn't. And being in charge, underneath it all, meant she could relax and not think so much and just fuck.