My lord and my love,

Yes, I still think of you as those things, regardless of all that has happened in the not-too-distant past. And I hope that some part of you remembers the love we cherished and held up to light our way when the world would smother us in darkness.

I swore that you were dead to me. But if you are dead then there is no reason at all that I should keep living, for existence without you is a cold prison I cannot bear. Pain and worry and anger drove those words to my tongue but my heart never uttered them. It cannot. It feels the rhythm of yours and beats in accompaniment through time and distance. I can hear your voice in the wind and feel you in the warmth of a fire. My breathing is evidence enough that you are still alive, and somehow I must find my way back to you and right whatever went wrong. You asked if there was any hope left for us. That it was a concern at all tells me that it was never lost- only shoved into a black corner of our hearts, waiting to be dusted off and set in the sun again.

People say that if they could turn back time, they would change many things. Well, the opportunity has been given us after a fashion, but all I really want to alter is the fact that I did not communicate to you nearly enough how much I adore you and all the reasons why you are the only man that I can ever love this way. But I find mere words do not accurately convey what I wish for you to understand. Perhaps what is between us transcends them and renders them inconsequential. I will forever regret that I let you turn away and remain silent when I should have begged you to open yourself to me and not let the pain of your secret fears and anger fester and scab and leave scars on your heart. And while the portals afford us opportunity to traverse time, we can never get back the moments we have lost. They belong to someone else in another dimension when we have passed them by. Only the future can be changed. And if occasion grants, I swear our future will not be as our past has been.

Please understand that I do not begrudge you any love you feel for another in measure beyond friendship. The gods know that you let me go willingly enough to another's arms, even if it tore at your heart to do so, and in ways I am grateful for it. I would be less than loving toward you and even to Uma if I held you back from your own self-discovery. And in this manner too, I atone for my sins. It hurts to think I could lose you to another, but the gods never give gifts without exacting a price, do they? Whatever comes about, you will always be the one I yearn for and I will be complete only when your arms shelter me again.

I know you will be angry with me, but there are things I need to do, dangerous things, out of obligation to those who are suffering. And too, I need to feel useful in some capacity. It has been too long since I have felt the power of self-awareness and I want a taste of it, if only for a while. I think you understand well what I mean.

As for the girls and your brothers, do as you have always done: protect and love them, and now for both of us. Please make amends with Cort and Terry. You may need their companionship someday. Many things change.

My love for you, however, is constant and will bind me to you always.

Until the gods unite us again,

Boudicca

My words stared at me from the email box open on my laptop, a reminder and a challenge to all I hold close to my heart, and a question of whether I still believe the words I wrote months ago to Maximus from inside the gates of time. It seems strange to me, that as I scrawled those thoughts and desperate emotions on a piece of parchment, and as I read them in Maximus' email to me, that both times I was on the edge of the chasm of duty and purpose, clawing at the tattered remnants of an image that has no more existence. And when I scream silently for asylum from the war that rages within me almost constantly, the only refuge I will accept is Maximus. Only he understands the battle for my soul waged by a modern world that has no use for the truths of the past that haunts me and claims me for its own.

One would think I can have it all the same way in this modern, so-called progressive age, with all its privilege that it holds out to women and the permissiveness they enjoy seemingly without effort or consequence. And I suppose I could have much if my skills were not geared to war or the political arena and the mending of broken bodies and spirits that were different in my time. And as Maximus so aptly wrote, my family life extended beyond husband and children and took in the whole of Britannia's tribes and their needs as well. It is this that leaves me displaced in this era and out of sync with my ability to exist in my surroundings. I have always envied Maximus his ability to know precisely what he desires, aside from his duty to Rome. My path was set before I was ever born, and I grew up learning to eschew my own wants for those of a nation.

So now I have time, much time, to learn to want for myself and give myself permission to need what makes me happy. It has been painful to come to the realization that I can, let alone that I should or how to go about it. I do know this, though: the gods keep Maximus and me together for a reason, and I want him with me no matter what else I fill my life with. He is the one need I have that transcends air.

I read through the rest of his mail to me, trying hard to see beyond my insecurity and the idea that I have to let him find his own solution to the problem of his love with Uma and get to the meaning of his words to me. The smiley-face was lit up next to his email address, so I opened my instant messenger to find him and give him my Beltane wishes. In the still of my room (hardly a sound from the other side of the wall), I could almost hear his voice as his words leapt at me from the screen.

"Blessed Beltane, beloved," he wrote to me.

"You haven't called me that in a long time."

"I know. But my heart always whispers it." I could not type a response for the trembling that had overtaken my hands. His words, the declaration emblazoned across my screen, held my heart in a vice grip, and I wavered between suspended disbelief and elation. One minute then two passed by while I fought with two very different replies. "Boudicca? Are you still there?" flashed up.

"Yes."

"Are you all right?" Organizing my thoughts, I let him wait a few seconds again. Across the message window ran a series of letters and symbols, indicating he was waiting. It was humorous and I shook my head with a half-grin.

"Be patient. I'm thinking."

"I know. I want to see how many of the keys I get through while you do."

This time I laughed and spelled it, "LOL!"

"Are you not entertained?"

"Getting there."

"Then it's worth the wait." He played with the keys again.

"Yes. And no," I finally decided in answer to his question concerning my state of being.

"Is it something you'll talk about with me?"

"I don't want to take up your time, Maximus. You have a full week planned."

"I always have time for you."

"Where is she anyway? Why aren't you with her?"

"She's at work."  Propriety halted my fingers, while I typed my response. 

"As long as you are not cutting into her time by talking with me."

"I don't think she would mind, too much."

"Aren't you getting along?" I was curious now.

"Sometimes yes, other times, no. You'll read about it, I'm sure."

"I'm sure you have her completely under your spell," I assured him.  

"What time is it on Mona?" he asked.

"Eight, p.m."

"How are you finding it?"

"When you were here, in England, did you feel like you should be home but you were not quite?" I followed with a list of landmarks that should have been there but had not been and the loneliness of not feeling a kinship with the land of my birth.

"Yes, I understand you well. And it is not really your country anymore. That land is gone. I'm sorry, my love."

"Nothing to be sorry for.  It just made me feel trapped is all." I refrained from telling him that I still ache for the gateway back to home. And that unconsciously, I had been looking for a replacement while I had fun with my friends.  All it would take was one step...

Jack told me one night, in a moment of faraway thought and wisdom, that perhaps the past is better left there and the sooner we learn to let go, the better able to find our way now will be. But it is a difficult thing when you leave parts of yourself there. And I know that Jack and Maximus understand that heartache as well as I.

"I know well what you are feeling. I wish the portals could have been a good thing for us but they weren't. It is better this way, even though it doesn't feel like it." My lip trembled and the hot sting of tears blurred his words. For at least the thousandth time since they opened the gates between worlds, I cursed the gods that still love me in spite of my wayward faith.

He changed the subject for us. "Are you alone?"

"Until tomorrow morning. I was going to go wander around the city and see if I could spot bonfires."

"Where are Arthur and Uma? Or do I want to know?"

"Acting out the god and goddess probably. They're quiet at least."

"As we should be doing." Oh gods, the memories...and the separation...

"You should be celebrating it with your current partner.  I'm sure she would love to hear about it and what it symbolizes.  And no doubt enjoy a demonstration."

"This is our day, and I'm missing my woman. Is there something wrong with that?"

"I am trying to give you the way to realize unfulfilled desires with others."

"I have unfulfilled desires with you yet. Help me realize those instead. The rest will fall in place as it needs to. I want to love you. How do you want me to love you?" Cort had once asked me to tell him what I wanted from him when we make love. But I never told him that he had been asking the wrong questions. Or perhaps he just was not the man to share those darker fantasies I harbor with. But Maximus asking was a challenge for me to expose myself to him, to share with him that which I never dared because I did not think it was what he wants from the woman who is the goddess of his heart and must remain pure. A goddess in a gilded temple without doors is worse than a broken-down street harlot, though. Perhaps Cort is right and all I am is a wanton creature with pent-up desires begging to be unleashed with the right partner. And though I choose to think I am able to share with the other women of this little world, I do admit that even the teasing comments about their exploits with my husband hurt because I want those things from him too. I want the complete man, not selected facets of his personality. Brutal, tender, selfish, generous, cold and hot. I will take them all if he will let me free to be the same for him.

"Love me with everything you have and all you are. Show me those things again. I miss my husband and my friend. I want our laughter and the whispers of our hearts when words have no meaning back."

"I will give you it all. I am on my knees. What would you do if I were there before you?"  A fleeting memory of a phone conversation he had held with one of the women and the things they had said to each other burned bright then died away with the advent of my own libidinous idea.

"On your knees? That's a perfect height."

His interest was all but written. "For what? What do you want for me to do?"

Biting my lip from nervousness and more than a modicum of keen passion, I typed the first words of cyber sex I have ever written. "I would have you slip my panties from my body and kiss me in those places you know are most sensitive." I even helped him out.

"I am doing it. I can see you naked before me, almost taste your honey."

"Will you bring me to my knees with your tongue? Will you circle it slow around my center until I am falling from dizziness?" The first waves of lust-borne adrenaline surged through me, brought on by the sensuousness of what we were trying, but left in their wake a host of thoughts to send to him as we played with each other.

"My hands will hold you upright. You need have no fear of falling."

"And where will those hands be?"

"Tight around your upper thighs. Red marks on pale flesh. Parting you for me."

"Slide your tongue inside my walls, taste my love for you." The room fell away at that point, I think, and images of twining my fingers through his dark locks as we wrote our visions of foreplay and the idea of him loving me with his mouth filled the space.

"Gods, I want to be there...I need to be there."

"You are, my lover. I only need to open the windows of my mind to see you here... I want to take you in my mouth, suck the last drops of pain and loneliness from you and swallow them down." It was as much a visceral need as the thing I knew would bring him deep into this game.

"I can hardly bear to hear those words, they fire me too much. I burn for you." As if all that was between us was air, I could hear his breathing- deep, ragged, and feel its warmth across my lower body.

"I will cool you with the waters of love. But first I will ask other things of you."

"Anything. I would do anything. Tell me what you want." Much. I want much. But a few things that I have wanted to try came to mind. "Do you want to play love games?"

"Many of them."

"Teach me to play with you." I thought he was doing quite well so far. As fun as the chat was becoming, it really is no substitute for the real thing. But it was Maximus, and of all days, Beltane seemed a perfect day to throw a new element into our lovemaking. And perhaps at the core of all our troubles is that basic truth. New adventures, new ways of loving each other keep a man and a woman alive in their love. Am I really blind to that that often?

"I will have you take me anywhere the whim strikes us. I want to trust you."

"Outside?"

"Oh yes." My favorite place of all.

"In the fields? Or in a car?"

"Under a raining sky."

"yes. i will shelter you and keep you warm." I saw the absence of capital letters and knew one of his hands was busy. I grinned wickedly at the idea of him loosening his belt or the buttons of his jeans while he tried to type. But knowing nothing provides a barrier between the denim and what lies beneath caused tremors to course through my stomach and wetness to flow. I wanted to watch him pleasure himself, and cursed myself for not buying web-cams for our laptops. Microphones would have been good too.

"I want it in public places where anyone can see but they do not," I answered him.

"near enough for there to be the danger of discovery" then, "can't use both hands, this looks imperfect."

"Don't worry about it," I assured him. "Just do what you must."

I continued the fantasy. "So close that if they but turned slightly they would miss nothing."

"i would hold you to me in a crowded room and bring you to ecstasy with my hands." My own hand strayed over my tingling flesh in imitation.

"And I will press so close you would swear you were inside me, though we are clothed. Then I will lead you through dark places where the lowest of humankind dwells and beg you to fuck me until I am sure I am dead."

"i will push you against the walls of filthy alleyways and take you like a Suburan whore."

"On my knees? Will you use me as if I were a bitch in heat?"

"is that what you want of me"  He made me think a moment. Did I? A terrible memory of being taken without my permission by this very man, regardless of how well I understood the pain behind his actions, stalled my fingers on the keyboard.

"At times," I began hesitantly, "I want you to be as gentle as you would with a newborn. At others harsh and domineering as though I am nothing to you. But I want the choice or a warning."

"i dont want to dominate you- unless that is what you want at the time. lead me where you want to go, make me a slave with you to our lust. but you must tell me. i am a man, i need to be told sometimes. i dont read your mind."

"I do expect you know my desires, don't I?" How easy it is to expect someone you know so well and who knows you equally as much, to just understand what you need and how they should go about pleasing you. It is a common enough occurrence in most marriages. I thought again how much easier it would have been to try something like what we were doing long before. For all my knowledge, sometimes I am quite the fool.

"you're not the only woman who does. but i want to hear your voice when you tell me your secrets. do you want crude sex games or romantic wooing" a pause. "i try one and you cast me off, another, and you accuse me of dominating you. i am never certain."

"My desires change as the wind. Teach me to tell you."

"whisper in my ears and i will be any fantasy for you."

"And will you let me fill yours in the same manner?"

"that is what i want above all."

"Then I will shed the skin I have outgrown and be woman, wife, and lover for you as you wish me to be."

"shed it now. i want you to show me what you are."

"Will the shirt I stole from you work?" I teased.

"which one?"

"The red one that I love so much." It is faded and worn, but it is a keepsake that I take with me when I am gone from him. Sometimes I wear it around the house and flirt with him in it and little else. He loves it on me. That much he tells me. In so many ways. Generally while he makes love to me as I lay tangled in its roominess beneath him.

"no wonder i can never find it. are you wearing it?" It had taken forever for him to type that, and I could only imagine the state of his cock over the idea that I was dressed just for him, however inadvertent it had been. Was his passion already seeping from the slit at the tip? Did he imagine me kneeling between his knees and drinking it from him, as I was?

"Yes. I love the scent of you against my skin."

"nothing else"

"No. You slipped my underwear off, remember?"

"i remember. let me rest my head against your naked belly where our babies were made. caress your breasts."

"You'll have to unbutton the shirt first. But don't take it off."

"it's open. i have opened it but it's resting on your shoulders. engulfing you as I wish to engulf you with my body." And thus freed and naked but for the shirt that lay half on and off my body and the chair I perched on, I could let 'his' hands roam my breasts. Large, strong, farmer's hands, scarred by battle and worn by love of the earth, stealing over each nipple and running a callused thumb around them until they were beads of puckered flesh aching for his mouth to complete their joy...

"I sleep in it at night and pretend it is you wrapped around me."

"i wish i was wrapped around you right now. i am so hard it hurts. i need to feel your hands on me. hold me. would that it was your hand about me, right now. my hand is scant replacement," he complained.

"For mine? Or my mouth? Or would you rather be sheathed inside me? Shall I stroke you? Feel the velvet grip and test it's heat?" Were it in my grasp, it would be warm and pulsing with his power and that helplessness that is a man's desire.

"first your hand. i need your healing touch. and then your lips, sweet and warm to succor me. but then i want to rest between your thighs. i will not spend anywhere but deep inside you." A force of want for him to be buried that deep within me and to be clutching him close when he came arched me right off the chair, and I fell back with a sigh. I have been stupid. So very, very stupid.

"Maximus...I cannot speak or breathe for want."

"i cannot type so imagine my troubles." I collapsed into giggles. But in my mind's eye he was bringing himself to his pinnacle while I looked on spellbound.

Apparently the vision was distracting me because the bell of a new line of message brought me back to our play. "talk to me and touch yourself." Already there, my love, I thought while my fingers made lazy circles around the center of my being. "bring me relief from this burning desire."

"I am imagining your long fingers stroking up just inside me on that sacred spot. And you are bathing me outside with my own wetness and your tongue."

"they are, but I wish to enter you...push inside...feel the tight warmth of your walls pulsing around me."

"I feel helpless, light. I want the thickness of your cock; my fingers are not enough."

"come for me...veni..."

"You are so long, if you are any deeper in me you will split me in half."

"envision my mouth on your bud...stroke yourself. as I work myself for you." If I but glanced down, I could see what his lips and teeth and tongue could do, his soft beard tickling my skin while my fingers made trails through his hair and down his shoulders. My fingers worked faster, and I threw one leg over the arm of my chair. The only sounds that broke the moment were the tinkle of the IM window, and my breath as it chanted in short pants. And then there was the picture of him sliding his foreskin over the head and shaft of his phallus faster and harder as our words scrolled across thousands of miles to each other. But our minds had already gone to another place where there was no distance and no barrier of metal and glass and wires. We were joined by memory, by need, by mutual love and desire that have no physical boundaries.

I whispered his name to the emptiness of space. "Your name is the only word I remember."

"i am so close."

"Kiss me. I cannot just be joined to you by your cock, I must have your tongue, too."

"kissing you, adoring you, wanting you. come, my sweet woman, for I cannot hold back..."

When the intermittent shocks of orgasm became an earthquake that left me heaving for air and unable to think or move, my scream shattered the world. It was all my fear, all my love, everything I have ever been and want to be and will be, and it was all for him.

"I want oblivion, I need you..." the words flowed from my heart to my fingertips, to the keys in front of me. "Come inside me, fill me with all of your dreams and all your promises. Surrender to me and conquer me."

"i surrendered long ago...i'm coming, filling you with my love..."

My invitation went out: "Fall into my arms and let me hold you safe..." For a short eternity I waited while he emptied himself of his juices and calmed a little.

"Maximus?"

"I am here."

In close physical proximity, while we lay together and let our bodies recover we would have said little, only reveled in the touch of the other. And truly, it was no different on the other side of the screen. "I am not sure what to say," I confided to him.

"Nor I, beloved. Do I shame you?"

"No. You honor me. And leave me speechless."

"Then perhaps there is hope for us?"

"Always. I love you above life."

"I love you, my woman." A long pause and then, "A memorable Beltane for us, don't you think?"

"The gods have nothing on us."

"Then let's remember that...nothing can come between us, only ourselves." And gods forbid we ever come between ourselves again. This time was more hurtful than any hell a god could dream up to put us through.

"Yes."

"Have your men. Take the job, but you are always mine. The rest is only illusion."

"And will you do the same for me?"

"I will do the same. I will see the other women for mere experience."

"I want you to be their friend, Maximus. A shield to hide behind when they need it of you. And I need you to work out things with Uma. Make me no promises that you may not be able to keep, but love me still." If my mind had not been made up already to do what I must, my requests would not have carried the weight of my deepest fears. But the truth was, my time as a carefree woman was getting shorter and I had already begun to ensure things were in place if for some reason I was yanked away from my family by the strong arm of Fate.

"You need not worry, the past is gone. She will never see me again. That chapter of my life is over."

"The future is always in motion. You do not know what tomorrow will bring. No one can."

"Then let us live for now and face the rest when it happens. One day at a time, beloved. "

"Well enough." I had no wish to argue and I know he did not, either. For the first time in many months there was nothing else in the world but the two of us and the fast-kindling flame of our love as it began to blaze back to life. The light that we hold up to guide us in the dark world that would consume us. I began to feel the warmth of being a woman adored seep back into my bones and thaw the frost of pain. And in my heart, and in my fantasies, I again lay my head on Maximus' stomach as his arms slipped around me to shield me from my enemies.

"For today," he wrote, "it is good between us, and I am happier than I have been in a long time."

"As am I. I miss our love. You said in your journal that you want to see me smile again. When I am with you and the world is at rights again, I will."

"The world is coming to rights. Smile for me now."

"But you cannot see it."

"I can where I need to see it most. Can you feel mine?"

"Yes. Where I need to." And his laughter, and his low thunder against my skin when he spoke his heart. The numbness was fading and leaving my soul alive.

"Do you tire of sending me off to do what I must?" It was going to be so long before emotion and assurance could be made the reality of touch.

"I would rather have you fulfilled than live a half-life. But yes, I do tire of it. You know I would have you with me every day of our lives and never let anything harm you."

"And I, you. Would that I were as settled on what I need as you are."

"Someday you will be. I understand your search. Just don't forget what waits for you at home."

"I won't. Too many reminding me that I have one. But I have to do this, Max. For everyone".

"I hope that you are listening. You are not all knowing. Let us be your light to guide the path. No one travels alone who is conscious of the dangers. Do you understand?"

"Yes." I would tell Cort in IM later, that when I needed the voices of reason most as I stole away into a black hole of unknown danger, that it was quite possible that what I would hear would be the words of wisdom and tender thought of my family rather than my gods' voices.

"I will be waiting at the end of the road, waiting to finish the journey with you. I love you, my queen."

"I love you, General."

"Strength and honor?"

"Strength and honor."

"Good night, beloved."

"Good night, my lord and love."

"Do you know how long I have waited to hear you call me that again?"

"Too long." After we logged off, and he went back to his visit, I stayed at my laptop for a bit longer. Bringing my email back up, I reread his note to me that had accompanied the painstaking recreation of my own letter from the portals.

Sometimes I take this letter out of the box I keep it carefully put away in and read it when it seems I can't reach you and will never hear the lilt of laughter in your voice when we speak again. I try to remember that you are hurting and that you have to find the way out of your pain on your own, but I worry that you no longer mean the words you wrote to me. I am afraid that I hurt you too deeply and you might never forgive me. That something is broken between us and can't be fixed. That you no longer love me and that hope that we will find the way back to each other's hearts is lost. When you read your words to me, think of them as mine to you. I need you. I love you. Life is meaningless without you.

Maximus

Nothing disturbed my rest that night as I slept wrapped in his red flannel shirt.