Household Gods

She bent abruptly and blew out the lamp. The room plunged into darkness. “Ahh, why did you go and do that?” Titus Calidius Severus said in a grumpy whisper. “I wanted to see you. Not to mention,” he added pragmatically, “I’m liable to break my fool neck going downstairs without a light.”

“Don’t worry,” Nicole said, with a bit of a snap in it. “We’ll manage. We’ll manage everything just fine.” She couldn’t see her hand in front of her face. Groping along the top of the chest of drawers, she found the wool and the little box. She couldn’t retreat to a bathroom, and didn’t want Calidius Severus watching while she put the twist in place. Maybe that was twentieth-century modesty, but she didn’t care. It was hers.

She squatted and did what was needful, working by feel. It wasn’t any worse than putting in a diaphragm in a hurry while Frank cooled his heels, and certain other parts of his anatomy, in the marital bed.

When she’d done as well as she could, she rose and groped across the room. She heard him breathing and shuffling around – undressing? Probably. Just short of where her skin told her he was, and the bed just past him, she yanked the tunic off over her head and let it fall to the floor. It was a defiant thing to do, even if he couldn’t see it. She slid down her drawers and stepped out of them, and shifted till she felt the bed’s edge against her knees. She lay back on that solid, invisible surface.

She felt Titus Calidius Severus lie beside her: a creak of the bedframe, a weight tugging at the mattress. His bare flesh was warm against hers. They’d have to be careful in what they did; the bed was narrow for two. Nicole, who slept, as Frank used to say, all over the place, sometimes thought the bed was narrow for one.

He slid an arm under her back. “It’s good to be here with you again,” he breathed in her ear. “I’ve missed you. I’ve missed you a lot.”

She couldn’t say the same; it would be a lie. She settled for something that maybe was better. “Titus,” she said, clasping her arms around his neck.

“I love you, Umma,” he said as she drew him down.

It wasn’t as awkward as she’d feared it would be. The body remembered, and the mind wasn’t inexperienced, either. She let him lead, and followed as she could. It was much like living in this world. After a while, the dry tightness went out of it. She relaxed and flowed with it, took the release when it came, and was profoundly glad to have been given the gift.

Afterwards, they lay side by side on the narrow bed, body to body as they couldn’t help but be: one of them would fall out otherwise. Nicole looked up at the ceiling. She could make it out by now, by the starlight filtering in through the unshuttered window.

Titus Calidius Severus rested a hand on her hip. It was an easy touch, undemanding, and strikingly intimate. “Happy?” he asked.

“Yes,” she answered, on the whole sincerely. Given the way the Romans took male domination as an article of faith, she’d wondered – too little too late – if he would climb on, get his jollies, and climb off again, wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am. If he had, she would never have let him see the inside of her bedroom again.

But he hadn’t. He’d taken the time and effort to make sure she enjoyed herself. He hadn’t made it seem like effort, either; he’d plainly been enjoying himself as he pleased her. Entertainment, she thought. If your options for pleasure were as limited as they were here, wasn’t it sensible to string out the ones you did have, to make them last as long as you could?

“Yes,” she said again, more firmly this time. “I’m happy.” In a way, taking Calidius Severus to bed had been like making love for the first time. He knew better than she did how her body – no, Umma’s body – responded; what it wanted, what made its synapses sing. That wouldn’t last, not with her living inside it, changing it, but this time at least it had been true.

Umma’s body was different from her own, sensitive in a place or two – the web of flesh between thumb and forefinger, the fold at the crook of the elbow – where she hadn’t been; less so in the earlobes, which was a pity. The shaving of the pubic hair, the naked skin where she’d been used to something quite different, changed the way she felt. She’d had to swallow giggles once, which she could never have explained without getting into trouble. Razor burn down there?

As for how it felt, scratchy bits aside – she couldn’t exactly tell. Better? Worse? She frowned. More precise, perhaps.

She moved a fraction closer to him, a conscious decision and one she didn’t intend to regret. “And you?” she asked. “Are you happy?”

She’d intended it for a rhetorical question. She had no doubt he’d liked what was going on while it was going on. And he answered, “Oh, yes,” but his voice held a trace of uncertainty that surprised her. After a moment, he went on, “Some of the things you did… you’ve never done before.”