Household Gods

When Nicole made love, the world went away. The yammering of thoughts went quiet, and she was spared, for a little while, the constant strain of living somebody else’s life.

Tonight they joined with an urgency that had as much to do with holding fear at bay as with any kind of bodily passion. They clasped each other tight, he driving hard and deep, she urging him on, legs locked about his middle, holding him even after she’d come to climax and felt the hot rush of him inside her.

Only then did it strike her. The twist of wool and the box of resin lay on the chest, untouched, forgotten.

At the moment she couldn’t find it in her to care. Next to the fear she’d lived with since the day in the amphitheater, this was nothing. If she had caught something, so to speak, she didn’t doubt that Julia would know how to take care of it. Unlike the pestilence. The pestilence – it put her in mind of the plague, the great plague of long ago (or a long time coming, from this end of time) – no one could stop.

She was holding him so tight, he gasped for breath. Reluctantly, she let him go. They lay nested in the narrow bed, and he managed a shallow gust of laughter. He groped for her hand and pressed it to his chest. His heart was still drumming hard. “You see, woman? You wear me out.”

Bless him for knowing just what to say, and how to say it, to shake her out of her megrims. She seized on the mood, and let it take her over. It was amazingly easy. She snorted. “Oh, nonsense. If the baths took women every morning and men every afternoon, you’d be over here bothering me every night.”

He poked her in the ribs. She squeaked, then clapped a hand to her mouth. Damn – she’d have bet an amphora of Falernian that Julia was lying in her bed across the hall, laughing her head off.

“Can’t think of a better reason to want to go to the baths,” Calidius Severus said. Nicole snorted again. He went on, “Likely just as well they do things this way. Any man past forty who says every other day’s not easier is lying through his teeth.”

She liked him very much, just then. Loved him? Maybe. But love was easy; it was mostly hormones. Liking was harder to come by. As far as she’d ever known, the handful of men who weren’t convinced they were permanently nineteen would sooner have faced cross-examination by Johnnie Cochran than said as much out loud, especially to a woman. Honesty was novel, and highly refreshing.

Without warning, and without a word, she kissed him. He widened his eyes at her. “What was that for?” he asked.

“Just because,” she said.

He laughed. “Good enough reason for me.”

His laughter didn’t last. Little by little, it leached from his face. She’d been holding onto her bright mood by sheer force of will, but he’d run out of stamina. Slowly, he said, “The attendants had to carry somebody out of the cold plunge today. He had a rash on his face and neck, and on his chest, too. He looked like the woman at the show.”

Nicole went still. If her heart could have stopped, it would have. “Are you sure?” she asked.

“No, I’m not sure,” he answered, but he didn’t sound any more reassured than she felt. “I didn’t see either one of them for very long, and I didn’t get a very good look at them. But the rash is hard to miss – and they both had it.”

“It probably was, then.” Nicole spoke the words like a judge passing sentence. Maybe she was passing sentence – on Carnuntum. She shivered. She’d been shivering a lot lately, though it was summer, and warm enough by Carnuntum’s standards.

When he clasped her to him, she felt the cold in him, too, the chill that had nothing to do with the air’s temperature. He warmed quickly enough, all the way to burning. Over forty or no, he had it in him to go a second round.

“It’s the company I keep,” he said when they’d slipped apart again, each a little more winded than the last time.

“You’re just being sweet,” she said. She could have flattered herself into thinking her own allure made him so randy. So maybe that did have something to do with it. But she knew the sick man in the baths was as much in his mind as in hers.

He yawned. “Now look at me. I’ll want to sleep till noon, and Gaius will have to drag me out of bed to get the day’s work done.” Gaius would tease his father too, probably, about old men and young ambitions.

The lamp guttered abruptly and went out. Nicole cursed: she’d forgotten to fill it before she went to bed. Going to bed with company could do that, distract her from life’s smaller concerns.

Titus Calidius Severus cursed more pungently than she, as he groped for his sandals in the dark. Nicole found her own tunic conveniently near to hand and slipped it over her head, smoothing it down her body. Her hands paused of their own accord. She was all warm still from making love.