Beth liked Ethan around. He was at her place a lot, often fucking her, but also just keeping her company as well. He was fairly quiet, when he wanted to be. He would talk to her while they ate, then leave her alone while she worked, and she was surprised to realize she could actually work when he was around.
She usually had to fuck him into exhaustion first, but she didn't really mind.
The sex was good, although she couldn't quite work out where some of things he did to her came from. He carried her around and fucked her up against walls and held her down by her wrists. One afternoon they finished with her lying on her back along the kitchen bench with her chest above the sink and the cold tap running water over her tits. It just happened, and it was kind of weird, and made enough of a mess she needed a mop afterwards, but it felt good too. Very good, the contrast of cold and sex and his body against hers. She'd never really got into untidy before, but she was starting to learn. He wiped pasta sauce on her tits, and left condoms on the floor, and didn't bother washing between sex and oral. She'd forgotten the arrogance of young guys, and was surprised sometimes when he just did what he felt like, without warning her. He grabbed her wrists, or slipped his finger into her ass, or pulled out of her during sex and turned around to sixty-nine without bothering to check she wanted to.
She didn't actually care, and that surprised her too. Inconsiderate partners had always infuriated her, so she assumed the difference was either that it was Ethan, or that she got to be inconsiderate too. She did what she liked as often as him, made him wait while she came or changed positions or wandered off during sex to write something down. That they both took turns holding the other down and humping their mouth made a big difference, she thought.
She was still sometimes surprised, though. One afternoon he pulled out of her mouth while she was giving him a blowjob and pointed himself at her face, wanking.
"Hey," she said, and pushed him away.
"I want to come on you."
"No way."
"Why not?" he said, and actually seemed surprised.
She wasn't completely sure she should even be kneeling down in front of him so much, and now he wanted to blow his load on her face.
She looked up at him, and couldn't decide. He was being pushy, but he also seemed to think this was normal. She was only eight or nine years older, and she seemed to be having some kind of generational thing, and that annoyed her, a lot.
"You really want to do this?" she said.
"Please?"
Brainwashed by porn, she thought. Then realized she wasn't that horrified either, so perhaps she was too. And she supposed she was curious to see him wank, even if only the last fifteen seconds of it.
"I've got a doctorate," she said. "I shouldn't be doing this."
"I know," he said, grinning.
"I'm a professor."
"Yep."
"Okay," she said, and leaned forward to suck him a little more, to make up for the pause.
He pushed her back when he was ready, held her head, aiming, and came on her lip and cheek. She kept her eyes open, watched him, and saw his face get all intense and focused on her. She liked that. She really liked how he reacted to her. He was always tender, even when he was doing shit like this. She was starting to realize that nothing of itself had to be meant badly. Some men were pricks, and did mean things because they were pricks. Ethan wasn't necessarily being mean. Sometimes he was just having fun.
Ethan was still looking at her, at the semen all over her face. He stroked her hair, gently. She could feel semen starting to drip. Some slid down her chin, went off towards the floor.
"Could you get me a tissue?" she said.
"Wait."
She sat there a moment and grinned. She really liked how he looked at her sometimes.
He was still hard, still holding himself without realizing. Maybe keeping the end up, so he didn't drip. She kept forgetting he didn't necessarily have to go soft when he finished.
She leaned forward and sucked the end of him again. He tasted more, and more salty. She sucked, and he closed his eyes and put his hands back on her head.
After a while she stood up, and pulled him against herself and said, "Lick it off my face."
He did. She didn't know why, but that really turned her on.
*
Ethan came on her face more often after that, and while she didn't mind, she also didn't quite get why. It seemed like her pushing his mouth away from herself just as she started to come, like a waste of sensation rather than anything else.
"You really like doing that?" she said one afternoon, wiping it off her cheek.
"I really do."
"Why?"
He shrugged.
"Because I'm me? The lecturer thing?"
He looked at her for a while. "Maybe a little. But not really."
"I don't get it."
He shrugged again, like he didn't really mind if she did or didn't. "I just do."
She nodded, and didn't ask again, but kept an eye on it. She noticed that after the first time he did more often after sex, rather than oral, and usually after tender, intimate sex. Like he thought it was a deeper bond between them than just coming inside her, or something.
She wondered if she should call him on it, but decided not. He might not even realize, and she didn't want him realizing he was feeling tender towards her.
That would just complicate everything.
*
Ethan started studying at Beth's place. The first time, after sex, he'd suddenly pulled out a textbook in her bedroom and asked if she minded, and she'd given him a really long, nasty look, thinking about professor fantasies and doing his homework at her place, until he'd said he had a tute in a couple of hours and needed to do this, but he could go over to the library or something if she'd rather. If she didn't want to fuck again.
"Okay," she'd said. "Fine," and went to have a shower. And shouted, "But you'd better not run out of time before you actually fuck me."
He didn't run out of time. And after that, because she didn't mind, he'd sit on her bed, or her couch, and look at textbooks that looked vaguely familiar, like she'd seen other students in her course carrying them around.
Once, curious, she went and sat beside him, and glanced at the page he was working on.
"Please," he said, without looking up. "I need help."
"Not a chance."
"It's not your course."
"Not that. It's differential equations. I can't do those."
He looked at her.
"Seriously. I'm a number theorist. I haven't got a clue."
"Could you look?"
"Shit no."
He looked a bit desperate, so she picked up the book and struggled through it. She remembered half of it, had made herself do this at one point because not knowing was stopping her doing research, but she'd never actually done a calculus course because she hadn't wanted a failure like this screwing up her GPA.
"I can't do calculus," she said.
"What do you mean can't?"
"My brain doesn't believe in real numbers. Or complex numbers. Or limits as things you do equations with, rather than use as defining parameters."
He looked at her.
"No idea why. I can look at a polynomial and see its curve in my head, but I can barely solve those fucking min-max equations. Don't know where to start. I don't even know what half of this means, and it's painful."
"Like a headache?"
"No, you dick, because I'm not an insane genius with stabbing head pains. Just awkward painful. I sit here like I am now and it's embarrassing."
She took his pen, started writing on the back of one of his pages.
"What are you doing?"
"Trying to turn it back into a set of fields. Then I can understand it."
"Don't worry too much."
"It's okay."
He watched her for a while, and probably knew enough to understand how utterly silly it was to do what she was doing.
"You really can't do calculus any other way?" he said.
She shook her head. "Failed it in high school. I almost didn't do this. I can get through ODEs when I have to, but it's a lot of work. I don't get integrals and limits at all. Because they're approximations. I don't believe in them."
"You don't believe in them?"
"Nope. Like how people believe in god or don't. I don't believe in approximations. So I can't do calculus. It isn't real like algebra is real."
He was staring at her.
