Household Gods

The crowd by now had thinned quite a bit. Calidius Severus led her back down the rows of benches, sidestepping the debris of a long day’s entertainment. Instead of paper cups and cigarette butts and hotdog wrappers, Nicole made her way past empty sausage casings and half-eaten buns and spilled wine. It seemed an unconscionably long time before they reached the exit, and longer still before the bottleneck of people let go and disgorged them into the sunlit field. The green of its grass was cool and restful after the hard glare of sand in the arena.

Nicole let out a long sigh of relief. Her eyes slid back to the place where the Heidentor didn’t stand. In much the same way, her tongue ran over the broken teeth in her mouth more often than it sought out the whole ones. What was missing and should have been there was more interesting than what was where it belonged.

“I hope you had a good time.” Titus Calidius Severus sounded more like a nervous teenager coming home from his first date with a girl than a middle-aged man out with a longtime lover. He’d been eyeing her the same way she’d eyed the Heidentor: wondering where the familiar had gone.

She didn’t let him see her smile. He’s not taking me for granted, she thought. Good. Aloud, she said, “I enjoyed the time with you, but I’ve lost my taste for beast shows. “

He started to speak. She would have bet a fistful of denarii it was something about womanish weakness. If that was so, he visibly and prudently decided against it, and cleared his throat instead. He walked on for a bit, toward the city gate. Then he said, with some care, “I always enjoy the time I spend with you, Umma.”

Nicole regarded him with widened eyes. “Why, Titus! That’s sweet.” Did he blush? Hard to tell. She found she was smiling. He might smell like ancient piss, but he had more style than most of the California yuppies she’d known.

The moment she stepped through the gate of Carnuntum, Titus Calidius Severus’ familiar stench blew right out of her head. She’d been away from the city stink for a few hours; it was gone from her nose. Now it struck her full force, every bit as strong as the day she found herself in Umma’s body. It was like being slammed in the face with a long-dead salmon.

She must have grimaced. Calidius Severus slanted one of his lopsided grins at her. It warmed her in ways she hadn’t expected, and didn’t, at the moment, particularly want. “Always something in the air that lets you know when you’ve come to a town,” he said dryly. “You do stop noticing after a while, the gods be praised.”

“A good thing you do, too.” Nicole tried her damnedest not to breathe. Yes, dammit, she’d lost the immunity she’d taken so long to acquire.

At least it cooled her down, and let her look at her companion through something other than a hormonal haze.

She let him lead her back through Carnuntum. She was reasonably sure she could have found her way back to the tavern without him; she’d come to understand that the main streets of the city were laid out in a grid, a sequence of large squares. But in between these wider avenues, lesser streets and alleys twisted in a bewildering maze.

Those were, at the moment, dry. For that, Nicole was deeply grateful. None was paved, and few had sidewalks.

Calidius Severus walked her back to the tavern. Outside the door, he hesitated. Nicole hadn’t seen a man hesitate like that since her dates worried more about acne than about five o’clock shadow. Working up the nerve to kiss me, she thought with a glimmer of amusement. If he hadn’t hesitated, if he’d tried to take a kiss as if he were entitled to it, she would have sent him on his way, with a clout in the ear to remember her by.

Because he was so diffident about it, so obviously unsure she’d allow it, she let the kiss happen. He tasted of wine. For all his shyness going in, he knew how to kiss. He was eager, but he didn’t try to swallow her alive.

Something quivered, deep down inside. It wasn’t desire, not quite, but a shadow of it: an awareness that if she wanted to, if she let it happen as she’d let the kiss happen, she could feel desire.

She didn’t know which of them broke the kiss first. If it was Calidius Severus, he was in no hurry to let her go. As close as he held her, she couldn’t be in any doubt as to how he felt about it.

Before things could get awkward, she slipped out of his arms.

He stood flatfooted, still reaching for her, though she’d moved just out of reach. “Umma – “ he began.

She tilted her head. “Yes?” she asked. She didn’t mean to be unfriendly, but neither did she want him to think she wanted to hop into bed with him then and there.

One thing she’d seen before this, and for which she gave him credit, was that he did actually listen to her. He paid attention not only to what she said but also to how she said it.