Nicole thrust herself to her feet and turned her back on the bloody spectacle below. “I have no interest in watching gladiators,” she said firmly.
“All right,” Calidius Severus said equably. “If I have time to go, I’ll go with Gaius. He’s always been more interested in the finer points of the fighting than you have, anyway. “
He didn’t sound annoyed at all, or even particularly disappointed. It was like a father taking his grown son to a football game and leaving his girlfriend at home.
And what did they show of football on the news? Half the time, it seemed to Nicole, they showed players getting spectacularly, if not usually bloodily, hurt. Maybe the gap between Carnuntum and West Hills was narrower than she’d supposed.
No. She shook her head. Football injuries were incidental to the game. They weren’t the point of the exercise. Boxing? That was legalized mugging, pure and simple. But people didn’t usually die in a boxing match.
But that wasn’t all Calidius Severus had meant. He was a veteran, an ex-legionary. He’d really used sword and spear and shield. (And… killed people with them? Nicole didn’t want to think about that. Not just this moment.) Fine points in his line of work weren’t just about winning a game. They were about staying alive.
When in Rome… Nicole shook her head again, and shivered slightly as she always did when she caught herself understanding how the Romans saw the world. Things made sense if you looked at them in that particular way. It didn’t make them any more right.
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.
His frown, right now, said he understood perfectly well that that yes didn’t mean, Yes, let’s do it. “You’ve been funny lately,” he said.
Nicole laughed. Once she’d started, she found she couldn’t stop. Part of it was the wine. Part was the sheer magnitude of Calidius’ understatement, and how little he knew, or could know, how great it was.
He waited with commendable patience for her laughter to run down. When at last it did, he said, “I didn’t think I was that funny.” His tone might have been wry, or it might have been bewildered. With a shrug that matched it, he turned away from her and headed across the street toward his own shop.
She watched him go. She didn’t know what she was feeling. Regret. Relief. A little guilt — and that made her angry, because she’d wished herself into this place to get away from just this kind of emotional bullying. She hadn’t wanted him. Why should she feel as if she’d done something wrong?
She turned abruptly, pivoting on her heel, and stalked into the tavern.
It was empty except for Julia, but, from the looks of the cups and bowls that the freedwoman was scrubbing, business had been brisk just a little earlier. Bread was baking, fresh and fragrant. The aroma of garlic and herbs wafted from the pot over the hearth. Julia had made one of her pot-dishes for the evening trade.
Julia didn’t seem to notice anything odd in Nicole’s face or gait. She was grinning, in fact, and clapping her hands. Nicole wondered dourly what Julia had been up to while she was away.