He never quite sees how easily he can take my breath away.

And yet he knows without any doubt that he can do so with nothing more than a gaze or gesture.

It is one of the contradictions of him. The interplay between his male pride and lingering vulnerabilities. It is his contradictions I find can overwhelm me. It would be so much easier if I could have categorized him from the first; that he would have simply been one, simple thing of a person.

But he never has been. Maybe it's that inability to capture his essence in some easy category that appealed to me to look deeper ... and deeper. To go beyond the surface and to keep going until all I ever could do was love him as I do ... for all he is ... the good, complicated, neat, smart, naïve, strong, weak, brutal, stoic, gentle, emotional, stubborn, difficult, generous, fascinating. Loving. Man. There for me. Needing me. And so much more that will never fit any neat category other than one: lover.

"Come to me, cara."

"I thought you would be tired. We can wait."

"Tonight. Now. Come let me show you."

I feel so shy. So exposed. So desirous of reassurance. We have not arrived at this place in time through any easy road. Even now, it came about not without some last minute tensions. I had no idea he would doubt my commitment to what we said we wanted months ago. Yet I now know he does. I wish his doubts about me didn't make me wiggle over a tiny doubt of my own motivations regarding the timing of my announcement tonight. It's that announcement that has him looking at me this way.

He sits in the bed. Our bed. He leans against the backboard, a pillow behind him. He has left the bedside lamp on next to him. He has the sheet pulled over his legs; its edges pool against his groin. His chest is bare. He is not smiling. Yet there is a tenderness to his desire for me that I can see ... it is the set of his jaw. It's in his eyes as he watches me take a deep breath before walking to where he lifts his hand to invite me to go to him there.

At the side of the bed, I pause to lift the chemise I'm wearing over my head.

"Leave it."

"Are you ..."

"I said leave it. Come here. Come to me."

This is when I take his hand and let him pull me to where he is. He guides me until I am astride him, one hand still in his, the other braced on his shoulder.

"We don't have to tonight. I didn't mean to put pressure on you."

"Do I appear under pressure to you?"

Small grin. "No. You look like a god surveying his offering."

His finger on my lip. "Are you sure?"

My thumb grazing his lips. "Make me mother to your child."

His eyes darken. Intensity envelops us both. "Non mihi, non tibi, sed nobis."

No smile. I love when he speaks like this ... in his own tongue, knowing he wants to express something far easier for him to say in Latin than in English. "What does that mean?"

His whisper is softer than mine; his voice so deep I feel it drop around me and hold me. "It means we do this not for you ... and not for me ... but that we do it for us."

Nod. So tiny, this nod. This is a huge step for both of us, but perhaps for vastly different reasons. But they are reasons that can happily co-exist. "That's how it should be. For us."

Smile. Soft. So soft. His face changes with this smile.

A tear. A smile. My only reply to the look he gives me.

He has wanted a child. I wish I could be a better wife for him, a better partner, more what I think he expects and wants. I try. But I fail too often, I fear. But this ... he's right. I do this for him but I do it for me and, in the end, I do it for us. I know he harbors a fear I do this only to please him, only because he wants it. In this moment, I am more partner than ever before, I believe.

I want this child we will create. I never have longed for a child before. Before, pre-Katrina, I fretted over this absence of maternal longings because I knew Maximus was a man who should be a father, wants to be a father, needs to be a father. When the monster storm came and brought death to everything around us, it carved away some shell I must have lived in for far too long. And what I was left with was a realization that I understood for the first time in my life what it meant to hold the power of creating life with someone you love.

It is an awesome power. How was it ever left to mere mortals to wield this power?

His finger plays now with the thin strap of my chemise. He nudges it over just a tiny bit; his eyes never leave mine as he toys with it. But then he slowly glides his eyes down. My skin seems to feel the movement of his gaze. I shiver lightly. I like how he can make me shiver; it always happens this way, when he seems to make time simply stop in its tracks. And the world doesn't exist anymore. Only we do.

He slowly puts a finger under the strap and then slides the strap away, over the roundness of my shoulder, down my arm just a bit. It makes me drop that arm when the strap dragging down demands it. He puts a solid, warm hand along my upper back as he leans in. His mouth touches over where the strap was. He opens his lips; I feel the movement against my skin. He kisses in there. I swallow deeply and gaze down at the top of his head. I know his eyes are closed because he is that kind of man to close his eyes when inside a gesture this sweet.

My fingers trail lightly down the back of his neck.

He lowers the strap still further. His hand drops to the chemise; he pulls the top down to bare that breast. For a moment, all I feel is his hand cupping my breast and his breath coming in restless murmurs across the top of it. Then he bends me back, his hand still on my back for support and to keep me where he wants me. His tongue licks along my breast, from the nipple to the valley in the middle of my chest where I know he must taste the sweat he's already caused to pop out there.

His mouth kisses, suckles, moves back to the nipple. He takes it lightly between his teeth; his tongue circles it, caressing it. He suckles now in earnest.

I let my head drop back just enough to feel the arch in my neck. It feels good to do this for I can close my eyes if I wish. I can shut off the sense of sight in order to focus on the sense of touch as his mouth moves over my breast.

Long moments later, he repeats the treatment with my other breast. This time, though, he pulls the straps down further so I can pull my arms up through each one until I am free of the straps. I am glad he has. There are times I like being captured by something as simple as a negligee's fallen strap that restricts my movement and makes me rely upon Maximus to take charge of us both. But this night, I want to move as desire moves me. And what I desire is to touch him.

I would touch his chest, his back. I would stroke his rear, his groin. I would play with the hair along his legs, over his chest, down to that trail from his abdomen to his groin. But right now, I follow his lead and I can only touch what I can reach as he tastes my breasts. I finger through his hair. I clutch in at his shoulders. I hold firm to his neck.

He lets me catch my breath for a while. He nuzzles into my neck as he pulls me upright, his tongue lazily stroking over the base of my throat. My hands are on his back, pressing him into me.

When he breaks away from my hold, it is to look up at me before kissing me. He feels so incredible. I am gathered in his arms. His mouth opens to mine a long lingering time after he suckles my upper lip.

We kiss. It is long and firm. It is raw. It is tender. It is consuming.

He's holding me tightly to his chest. He growls ever so lightly inside the kiss as I rub over his hardness.

As if it is nothing to him, he slowly rises before lowering me to the bed. All the while, he's kissing me. We end up, side by side. It is not good enough for either of us. My leg climbs over his; his knee rams up into that now-damp space between my legs.

My fingers grab into his back. His hand grabs into my rear. I feel his fingers move, flex, dig in. They near my anus. I tense. I always do. Even when I want it, this will make me tense. It is a good tension, a tension of heightened awareness, of anticipation, of forbidden wants that only he has ever been allowed to fulfill for me. It is tension he likes me to have. It makes him feel that much more powerful.

And that's when something hits me about what is happening with him this night.

He is even more intense. Is that possible?

But it is.

And it dawns on me with lightening clarity why it is.

It is because this is the first time he is going to try to impregnate me. This is a night for every bit of intensity he can muster to be that much more. 

This thought makes me hyper aware of his every movement. Of his firmness with directing our movements. Of his dominance that allows for my participation because he wills it so. Of his tenderness that will not take this for granted, that feels things for me that no man ever has. That receives things from me I've never known I had in me to give to a man.

He moves then with passion imbued with all that he is. He is a man. The only man I've ever really loved. The only man who's ever really loved me. The man who came along to open my heart to possibilities that never existed before him. The man who commands me with the lightest touch and the toughest will.

Now he moves from the kiss. He turns from me. He shoves a breast in his mouth. I feel my body arch toward him. I lose my handhold on his shoulder as he nuzzles in at my tummy. I feel tears well up at this gesture as he rubs his cheek there and caresses over my womb with his big hand.

My other hand is on his shoulder. I run it down over the top of his arm. My fingers feel the smoothness, wide and cold, of his scar.

The scar he carved into himself. The scar he made when he dug out the remnants of the tattoo that had once marked his loyalty to Rome and its ideals. The mark of the Legion is gone from his skin; it never really left his soul or his essence.

He tenses when I touch the scar. He always does. I think it's that he's awkward at the reminder. I think it's that he still finds that one gesture of his in carving the tattoo from his arm to still be filled with so much meaning, so much reflection of the darkness that had eaten him up at that time of his life. I also think he has no regret, never will, but that he is also unsure how to explain it to himself. Because when he did it, he was doing it to have it gone when he faced his gods, his family in the afterlife. And yet he didn't go into the afterlife. He came here. And he is now with me.

I feel the tension in his body. He slows in his movement the longer I touch the scar. I lean my head to the side and look at where I'm touching.

It moves me. It looks ugly. It has never repulsed me.

I put my lips to his scar. He stops moving. If possible, he is more tense, alert. I kiss there, my lips enveloping the scar. My tongue strokes it, lightly.

It is a reverent kiss.

For I do revere him.

And I like that I do. Along with so many other incredible and mundane things I feel about him. I realize now that I could only love a man I feel this way about. Life together is tough enough ... love isn't everything because it must be for a reason or it won't last, I think to myself. Love has to include a million other aspects of how you feel about each other. It has to be. How else would it last forever?

When I finish the kiss, he moves. His body turns until he is again face to face with me. There is a look in his eyes. He doesn't understand what I've done but he understands it was done with love and meaning.

"I would wish that one day, I could make all your scars, all your wounds not hurt. I wouldn't want them gone, I just would like them to not hurt you anymore," I whisper to him.

His eyes linger on mine. He draws a finger along my cheekbone, pushing a stray bit of hair from before my eyes. "We have a saying. Post tenebras lux-after the darkness, light. You are my light, cara."

"Oh, Maximus," I whisper, my voice husky with emotion. I bury my face in his neck as he holds me, rocking me, his knee still between my thighs. "This is what I feel you do for me, my love. You seem to see my wounds and find the way to make them not matter anymore, to not hurt. I never even knew I carried some of them, they were so deep and old, but they were there. They closed my heart off from so much it now yearns for. I want to do that for you. I want to be someone who takes away what hurts you and makes it not matter anymore."

"Why would you think you had not, Anna? Of course you have." His thumb finds and caresses the pulse point in my throat. "If I have done this for you, I am glad for it. I would wish nothing more than to give you all you deserve. All you yearn for. Will you let me? Let me care for you as a man such as I must do for the woman he loves."

"Yes. Always yes. As I would do for you ... I would ..."

"Open to me now, Anna. Once more, open to me. I will reward you with passion only I can ever give you."

When he says such things to me, in a voice rough with desire and chilled with testosterone, I would give him anything. I open to him. My hand reaches involuntarily, to stroke his hardness where it is pressed against my thigh. He brings my lips to his for a kiss that lasts through all the tantalizingly slow writhing against each other that we do.

He turns us over. My hand on his cock. His hands on my ass. His thigh between mine. My cunt grinding over his leg.

We turn again. And again.

My hand travels up then down his body as we lay face to face. I turn to follow my hand with my mouth until he rolls onto his back and lifts me over him. I lick and suckle his length as he fingers me. His thumb goes in; I swallow his head. His hands on my hips drag me down to his voracious mouth and his tongue goes deep inside me. I hear him moan with pleasure. I moan as well, in reaction; my lips down further around his girth as I suck and bring him in further.

I come. Eyes closed. Tears squeezed out the corners of my eyelids. My hand leaves his cock. It grips in at his thigh. He thrusts up into my mouth. I come back to the moment.

He pushes me away; I flop on my back; I am breathing hard and murmuring his name. My eyes are still shut. My hand goes between my legs. I feel the bed shifting as he crawls up, hands and knees, over me. He waits for me to open my eyes and look up into his face. He is sweating. I am, too.

I reach up for his face. Pull him to me. Make him wait before I kiss him. 

He shoves my knees apart and moves between my legs. He takes one of my hands, my left one. He moves it; he smoothes my palm over his cock. It is still wet from my mouth; his pre-cum feels smooth, slick, arousing to me. I gather it in my hand. He tells me, "More ..." So I do.

When he presses his hand over mine, he does it at the same time he dives deeper into a kiss even as he slows the urgency of the kiss.

I memorize his every move; I heard someone once say that every writer does this ... is putting into words how to describe the act of love even in the midst of it. I do that ... sometimes. Not always. But sometimes, I confess that I do. Maybe it's because it is so powerful a human experience and the writer inside me is so moved that she must find the way to remember it as only a writer would ... in words.

He moves his hardness nearer my softness. I whimper inside the kiss. He groans. He swipes his head into the track of my wetness. I hold my breath; he holds my hand over him as he inserts the tip inside me. He releases my hand; his slick fingers touch my hip and then slide beneath me to lift me slightly, to tilt me to receive him. I hold his arms and will myself to open fully.

His movement coming into me is slow, measured. He kisses in the same way.

When he hilts, after all this in and out movement to make his girth easier for me to accept ... when he hilts, I gasp and shove up against his groin. I pant into his mouth. He releases me from the kiss. Our eyes are on each other's mouth for a while as he adjusts himself inside me.

He begins to pump, slowly. My legs rise and wrap around his waist, slowly.

Our eyes rise to meet. Slowly.

He is so serious.

I think I am, as well.

Do you know, I could watch him fuck me. I could. When he makes love to me, his face can move from determined man to sweet boy in the timing of an upstroke and retreat.  Sometimes I wonder what the rest of his body looks like when he is moving thus. The clenching of his buttocks that I can feel under my hands. The flexing of the muscles of his upper back as he braces on his arms and bears the force of his pumping up into me, hard and vicious. The way he moves his legs each time he tries to assure he's in the best position. The way his neck looks, corded and arched as he struggles to take his time even as he knows he is to that point where it will take every bit of his awesome willpower to not come yet.

I would even like to know if his toes dig in to the bed to give him a bit more traction ... I think about how he once told me my toes curl just before I come. He said it to me one day when he was giving me pleasure and teasing me that I could not resist him ... that I could not hold out if he put his mind to it. I was panting hard and swearing I could stop myself from coming ... and he said he knew I was close because my toes were curling. And I just lost it ... I started laughing and before I knew it, I was coming ... I had lost concentration, he told me later, so my body did what it desired.

My body desires his.

We are murmuring to each other. I tell him my toes are curling. He says he will show me no mercy. Even as I am arching into a coming I feel swell through me like it will roll forever ... God, how does he make it so good for me? ... even at that moment, I am whispering against his ear, in time with how he is thrusting ... even then, I am whispering to him that I love him ... over ... and over ... until it is lost to his rumbling cry of his own coming.

His tears are on my cheek as he rubs his face against mine. He makes soft noises of a man soothing a woman still feeling aftershocks that grip around his hardness as it softens so slowly it seems I will keep him inside me forever.

But I cannot.

When he withdraws, that familiar gush of fluids feels like every bit of his essence is getting away. Even hazy and sated, I try to put my hand down between my legs and shove it all back up inside me. It is a thought; I want to do it ... but all that happens is that my hand rubs the sweat upon my tummy and my tongue licks my lips and I feel him settle in next to me and he puts his hand over mine and I look over at him as he kisses my shoulder and he looks as if he knows it was all it ever took, this one time.

His eyes are dark and there is a depth to the light that glows in glitters deep within them. I put a hand on his cheek. 

Later, we are spooned together. The wet spot is beneath my hip but I don't complain. Another night, I'd kid him about it, about how it's always me that has to lay in the wet spot ... a comment I could swear he's maybe never heard from another woman, though I doubt it. I mutter his name and my eyes open to darkness.

He pulls me in closer and mutters back with a grunt to say he'd rather be sleeping.

"I just want to warn you," I say softly, my fingers playing with the hair of his arm.

"Warn? Me?" His voice is invitingly grumpy with sleep.

"No matter how much I want this to happen ... you need to be prepared that I am going to have moments of being so scared when it does."

"I would expect nothing less of you," he teases loosely.

"Maximus. I am serious." I turn in his arms so I can look at him, touch his face. "I don't want you to ever think I don't want this. But I am sure I am going to get scared at times. I know I will. And when I do, I want you to just stand in there with me. Promise me? What am I saying ... of course you will. I could never do this with you if I didn't know that."

"I will keep you safe."

"I'm already scared."

"Of what possible reason would you be scared, Anna?"

"I don't know if I'll be any good at this. I don't want you to regret this. I think maybe I'll be a bad mother, you know?"

He smiles. Indulgent. "This is how life should be. A man and woman making a life together and creating a family. Together. Cara, I will be with you. You will be a wonderful mother ... I have faith in you."

I hope he's right.

That evening, when I told him that my doctor had cleared me to begin trying to get pregnant, things had been odd between us. But I think now that it was mostly me. It was lingering reactions of unease from the disagreement we'd had the night before. Disagreement caused by the restlessness I'd felt ever since meeting Hando in the pub and reacting to him in a way not at all expected and not at all funny. Maximus does not know this, of course, because he wasn't there. I tried to tell him but it was impossible to tell him and not admit why I was so unreasonable with him over his reasoned response.

I fear, deep inside me, I do fear him reading into me enough to understand how much that encounter with another man has disturbed my sense of self. 

If I am a woman as deeply in love as I know I am, there should be no room inside me for any other man to make me feel as I felt when Hando took my bantering and made it into something provocative. I should have told Maximus that Hando upset me because he came on to me. Max would have done something about it.

Maybe that's what I fear.

Maybe the fear is that Max would have not have confronted Hando over his actions but that he would have confronted me over my reaction. Maybe he would have been angry with me. Maybe hurt. Maybe revolted. I can face about anything but not disappointing Maximus.

Maybe what I fear is that I don't understand why I feel guilty even though I haven't done anything wrong. If I am who I thought I was, how could I have felt moved at my core by Hando doing nothing more than baiting me and making a crude, sexist pass at me?

But as I look into Max's eyes in this moment after he has loved me and I have loved him in the first time we have tried to create life ... I find my center again. It is here. Between us.

And inside me, I will lock away forever the way it felt when he said there was nothing he would rather do than make a child with me. 

It makes me feel I have understood the meaning of the saying he told me earlier. Out of the dark, light.

He has had his dark times. I have had mine. We have shared the dark times of the storm.

We are out of the dark.

Out of it, there is light.

We found this together. That particular light would not exist if we had not found each other. He says I am his light. I would say he is mine. We want to create life. A new light will be ours.