She hadn’t been the least bit interested in sex, with Titus Calidius Severus or anyone else, since she came to Carnuntum. She’d felt anything but sexy herself. She was grubby all the time. She was lousy. She had a yeast infection that didn’t want to go away, which left her generally unenthusiastic about her private parts. She never got anywhere near enough sleep. It was hard enough to live in this body every hour of every day, without trying to warm up right good and proper, too.
And yet… It wasn’t that she wanted Calidius Severus. It was that she might have wanted him. Her mind and self might not remember him, but her body too clearly did. It had memories, it seemed, small yearnings, tinglings that woke when he looked at her or touched her or, as he had just now, kissed her.
With thoughts as disturbing as these, and leading in even more disturbing directions, she was almost pathetically glad to greet the dripping customer who blew in out of the rain and loudly demanded bread and honey and wine – so loudly, in fact, that he woke Julia.
She started bolt upright, eyes enormous with terror, a deer-in-the-headlights look if Nicole had ever seen one. Nicole could read her face as if it had been yesterday’s newspaper. Oh, gods – sleeping on the job. What would her mistress do to her? How would she talk her way out of it?
Then, as Nicole tried to watch and serve the customer at the same time, the truth dawned on her. Nicole – Umma – wasn’t her mistress anymore. Her relief was as strong as her fear had been, swept over it and drowned it, and let her stand reasonably straight and make her way over to the bar, where she dipped a cup of the two-as wine and brought it to the still dripping, faintly steaming customer.
After the man had paid and left, Nicole said, “Julia, if you doze off on me tomorrow, you will be in trouble.”
Julia grinned at her. “Oh, yes, I know that,” she said. She carefully did not include the title that she’d always put in before. No Mistress, not any longer. “Today was special, though. With the wine and the loving and all.” She stretched with a sinuous, sinful wriggle. Then she hiccuped, which made her laugh. She was full of herself, bubbling over with freedom – and, Nicole caught herself thinking, license. Nicole had known women like that. Girls, too, in high school. There, they were called sluts – even called themselves that, like a badge of pride.
Julia’s straightforward sluttiness – all right, earthiness – had always irked Nicole. Now it made her jealous. And that made her angry at herself, because she was jealous.
She covered both jealousy and anger with work. Of that there was always plenty and then some. She washed cups and washed cups and washed cups; she’d almost run out of clean ones. Julia ground flour to bake bread. She and Nicole took turns at the oven, keeping the fire even and gauging when the baking would be done. Time was when Nicole had thought the labor-saving devices in her kitchen in West Hills didn’t really save labor – that was just hype. She knew much better now.
And today was a slow day. Because of the rain, it looked as if the tavern would get by with one baking, two at the outside, instead of the usual four. It didn’t help the cash box much, but it made life easier for the staff – all two of them.
Maybe that was why, when Nicole went upstairs as gray day turned into black night, she was only tired, not exhausted. She lay down, but did not fall asleep as fast as she usually did – as fast as if someone had whacked her over the head with a club. The wine had worn off long ago. If she’d had a hangover, it had dissipated somewhere in between customers. So that was how to do it: get drunk in broad daylight and work it off. She’d have to remember that.
Except for the chirping of crickets, the buzzing of mosquitoes, and, somewhere far off, a dog that would not stop barking, it was eerily quiet behind her barred door. No distant racket of TVs and radios, no hiss of cars going past as was commonplace in L.A. even at three in the morning. Nothing. People were snug in their warm buggy beds, and would be till sunrise.
She was snug, too, snug but restive. She tossed and turned. Side to belly to back. Back to belly to side. Of itself – or so she thought till it got there – her hand slid between her legs and crept under her loincloth. It was the first time since she came to Carnuntum, the first interest she’d had in anything but falling flat on her face in bed and waking up however many hours later in some new state of misery or other: itching, griping, cursing dirt and vermin and discomfort.
It had been a long while. It was still strange to find herself smooth down there, except for the small itching scab where she’d cut herself shaving at the baths a day or two before. The difference aroused her. On the fantasy screen behind her eyes, where Mel Gibson and Adrian Paul had used to play out their little dramas, a completely new and different face took shape. It wasn’t, God forbid, Titus Calidius Severus, but it wasn’t not, either. He had a beard; bearded men had never fed her fantasies. He had warm dark eyes and a smile that had never known orthodontia. His shoulders were broad, the skin of his chest warm and shaved smooth: she could feel the faint catch of the stubble. He shaved below, too, around the noble loft of his organ – not huge, not as a man might imagine a woman would want, but a good size, a comfortable size, like the ones she’d seen on the gaudy statues in the market. She felt the shape and hardness of it, the heat that mounted as he smiled at her, smiled and smiled, and – wise man – said nothing at all.
Her hand quickened. Her breathing matched pace with it. Caught; paused. A little moan escaped her.
She relaxed all at once, let her body go limp. Oh, that was good; that was what she’d needed. And yet she shrugged as she often did afterwards, alone in the dark. It was good, but she knew better. The real thing could be as lonely as this, if he did what he wanted to do and then rolled off her, snoring before he hit the pillow. But when it was good, there was nothing like it. No, nothing in the world.
This would do. It had eased the worst of the tightness out of her, which was what she had wanted. She could sleep now.
As she drifted off, she felt one last, small stab of jealousy. Lucky Julia, who didn’t bother her head – or her body – with such frettings.
Nicole woke to total strangeness. For a terrible instant, she knew she’d been yanked out of time again, to who knew where. Then she recognized the familiar bed underneath her, the familiar itch and skitter of her personal vermin, and the familiar septic stink of Carnuntum. The strangeness was in the light. It was just sunup – and there was a sun to light the sky. The clouds that had lain so heavy on the town for so long had tattered and torn. When she got up and stumbled to the window to look out, she saw patches of pale blue amid the scudding gray. The air that washed her cheeks was damp still, and cool, but no rain fell. The rain had gone away.
She yawned and stretched, arching her back like a cat. A good hot shower and a Thorough delousing would have done her a great deal of good, but even without them she felt as good as she’d felt since she came to Carnuntum.
She was smiling as she went downstairs, a smile Julia returned – up before Nicole as usual, baking the morning bread. Freedom didn’t seem to have done much damage – yet – to her work ethic. She might even work harder, now she worked for wages: now she had a stake in working well.
They did their morning chores as they’d come to do, moving through and around each other like partners in a dance. There was a kind of pleasure in it, the pleasure of a pattern well executed. The first customers – a handful of morning regulars – came in with their usual greetings: a smile and a cheery wave, a rheumy scowl, a hungover wince, depending on the individual. They settled in their usual places with their usual breakfasts, wine and fresh bread for the most part. Some liked to banter with Nicole or Julia.