One Plus Two Minus One by Tess Mackenzie Page B

did.
    “Bend a bit.”
    “Why?”
    “Just do it.”
    She did, feeling very awkward.
    “Yeah,” he said. “I think that would about
work.”
    “What would?”
    He put the
end of his cock against her, the very slightest part inside
her. She jumped, and almost shrieked, and
then tried to push back against him.
    “You like?” he said.
    “ Shut up,”
she said, trying to get herself onto him. “Shit, that isn’t going to work.”
    “ It
is. Move your feet.”
    She
did. “I’m not tall enough.”
    He put his
hand on her hip and slid into her. She
blinked, surprised and couldn’t believe anyone could fuck her quite
that easily.
    “ Okay,” she
said. “We’re going again.”
    “ Yep,” he
said, and held her hips so she didn’t fall over forwards. She went limp and toppled onto the couch when
she came, and he went with her.
    “ Yeah,” he
said afterwards. “So actually I was going
to get you to lean on the kitchen bench like you were leaning on
the bar that night, then fuck you standing up.”
    “Okay.”
    “Okay?”
    “ Yep,” she
said. “We’ll do that sometime. Dress and
all, if you want.”
    He lay beside
her for while, breathing hard. She slid
her hand up and down his chest, slippery with his sweat.
    “ Tomorrow,”
she said. “I’m not going to see you. I
need to stay here and work.”
    “Okay.”
    “You don’t mind?”
    “Of course not.”
    She looked at him.
    “ We’re
fucking,” he said. “It’s fun. I really
like you. And I’m pretty sure that being needy is going to turn you
off quicker than asking if you’re into bestiality.”
    “Maybe.”
    “Is the guy in the photo a bit clingy?”
    She lay there for a while then said, “Don’t
say things like that.”
    “So it’s true?”
    “Don’t.”
    He kissed her and said, “Okay.”
    “ He is,” Beth
said. “And I’m not.”
    “Not what?”
    “Bestiality.”
    He
grinned. “Thanks for making that
clear.”
    “ Yeah, you
know. Thought I should.”
     
    *
     
    Ethan texted
again when Beth was tutoring. She did
extra tutoring because she’d been around Robert too much, listening
to his complaints about the world being unfair. That annoyed her a
little, that he’d got to her, but she tried to fix it anyway.
Sometimes people had trouble with maths. Bad schools or bad
teachers or not trying hard enough when they should have. Beth had
spent years sitting in rooms where everyone looked the same, and
wasn’t sure she liked that. She wanted to be cold and brutal and
see the world as a jungle where you had to make do or fall by the
wayside, but she didn’t. Sometimes the difference between success
and failure was so small it just needed a little push, and
sometimes that difference wasn’t the person’s fault, but the fault
of this huge overwhelming system so big and complicated you
couldn’t possibly fix it. And if the system was too big to fix, you
didn’t bother. You just fixed the particular problem in front of
you. Beth understood, and fixed problems one by one while Robert
tried to fix them all and never got anywhere. So Beth
tutored.
    She was
sitting there watching a student get his head around Kepler’s laws
and elliptical orbits and areas swept out under a function. She’d been reading, looking through papers she
needed for her research, stopping when the student needed help. She
texted Ethan back. Told him to come up and see her, to knock but
she was with someone, so not to come in.
    After a while he knocked, and she suddenly
had a very good idea.
    “I’ll just be a sec,” she said to the
student.
    She went outside and said hi to Ethan and
looked at him and thought.
    “Want to do me a favor?” she said.
    “ Ah,
yeah. Sure. Of course.”
    “ I’m
tutoring. But I think you’d be better at
it than me.”
    “ Ah… Not really. Not for your courses.”
    “ It isn’t my
courses. This is, ah….”
    She suddenly didn’t know how to explain.
    “ It’s just
someone who needs a bit of help. And I’m
doing my