'It is a dream, a frightful dream, life is...'

He had not wanted to teach me to ride a horse. I wanted him to learn to dance slow with me.

You know how it is. A memory can come at you and you can get lost inside it if you really try.

I can remember the look on his face when I said I'd trade him: I'd ride a horse so I could go out with him when he roams the fields around this land we have begun to claim as ours; and, in return, he'd learn to slow dance so he could have a new way to capture my lust. We neither of us, I guess, were suited for what the other wanted. But, no, I don't think that's the metaphor for our life together. I think maybe the metaphor is that we enjoyed trying.

The sun was barely lighting up the day. He put a saddle over the top rung of the fence next to the stable. He picked me up and put me in the saddle. I felt like a total idiot sitting there with Ralph snickering from the stable's wide doorway.

Maximus.

I can see your face. You tsk'ed at me. You told me to concentrate. I can almost feel how your skin felt that day. The softness of your beard. I wonder what you'll remember of that moment?

It's finally April. We've been married now for seven months. About time for the honeymoon, don't you think? I bet you anything, his first go round in marriage, he had the honeymoon right away. I bet everything was according to form, in order, and done the way it was supposed to be done.

I have kissed Buck goodbye. I have given Ralph strict instructions to water Max's fig trees every other day if it doesn't rain. My mother called the night before we left and threatened to send me a chastity belt if Max didn't keep his hands off me for just a few minutes. She knew he was touching me because I wasn't saying much. I said I had to go since we had an early flight. She said to tell Max to store it up for the honeymoon.

When I told him, he pursed his lips, looked off in deep thought, said my mom was right and to turn off the light and go to sleep.

He yanked the blanket up over himself, turned over and went to sleep.

I could have killed him.

Except just before I dropped off to sleep, he turned over, put his hand around my waist, drew me up to him, whispered in my ear about how he was going to wait until we were on the honeymoon ... and then he would take his time ... he would be patient ... tender ... and potent. That nothing I'd ever experienced could prepare me for what he'd do for me. And that above all things, he loved me.

We have a stop over in New York. It's for five hours.  I don't know why I think of that. I know him good and well enough by now to know that I won't be able to entice him into sex on the way. I know he has that stoic mind of his made up and that he won't touch me like that until we're in Rome.

Not that he won't torment me with suggestive gazes and fevered incantations into my ear about what he's planning for me. He enjoys the power he has over me that way. So do I.

But I have my own powers over him. He may deny himself but that doesn't mean I can't make it hurt for him to do that to himself.

When I think of all the ways I've never been what he expects, I wonder what perversity in him makes him love me anyway. He says he loves me all the more for how I surprise him, how I keep him on his toes ... how I annoy him.

I taught him to slow dance by making him watch a DVD of that show Allie McBeal. 

Who else would do something like that with the General of the Armies of the North?

I fast forwarded to the spot where John Cage is in the bathroom. Max asked why he was in there with Elaine and Allie. I told Max just to watch. Barry White's voice came in. John found his rhythm. He started moving his arms. Then that strange walk he does in time to the beat. Then he really got into that thing he does. And you can see he's into his groove.

See how simple it is if you give yourself over to the music and just move to it, I said. Max got up and walked away. I dragged him back. We watched John in another bathroom scene, dancing to another Barry White. I was laughing. Max was walking away again, disgusted.

I dragged him back again. Told him to close his eyes this time. I cranked the sound up ... Ralph had helped me sync the stereo speakers into the TV's sound. I flipped the switch over ... and the sound came through all around us. Loud. Bass full. Barry White sighing and talking ... and then ... he sang the one song that made us move together ... The First, The Last, My Everything.

My kind of wonderful, that's what you are, Maximus. You're my first, my last, my everything.

Maybe that sentiment is simpler for me.

After all, Maximus, you truly are my first. And you truly will be my last.

You are the first man I've ever truly loved. I will never love another man like you. There is only one you. If you had not fallen through some rift in time, I would never have known love. I would have been created and turned to dust, never having met my match.

You, on the other hand, have loved before. You have loved better, I think. I truly believe your first is the one that all others are measured against. That's human nature. I will never be the love of your life while you will always be the only love in my life.

Even as much as you love me, I know my place. 

You have your ghosts and they live with you still. I would have it no other way. I respect my place. I respect you for your allegiances. I have never suffered from lack of love from you just because she will always be the one for you. If not for her, perhaps you would never have learned to love with all you have to give.

Though sometimes, I do admit, I feel as though I am on the outside of a significant aspect of your life, looking in. There are even fleeting moments when I look at you and wonder what it would be like to be that precious to you that you'd never let me go even after I died.

We probably should not have come to Rome for a honeymoon but we did it because you liked the symmetry of creating life where you'd once witnessed and caused the loss of life. So, I shared your romantic longing that while we honeymooned, we would get me pregnant. That you would know the peace that must come from casting out the tragedies of Rome by creating new memories of love and life where for you there'd only been death and pain.

But the closer we come to the place about which you once said, "Rome is the light," the more I wonder how you will ever handle being here in the place where you should have lost your life; where the figurines that are imbued with the spirits your dead wife and son were buried. Where the final thing you ever wanted when you were last in Rome was to die so you could go to them.

This is your first trip back to Rome since then. I will be here by your side. I would never send you here alone. 

We got to Rome about 20 hours after we left home. I didn't know if I was awake or fighting to keep from going to sleep. It was overload. I seemed to zone out as I stood in line next to Maximus at the hotel I'd arranged for us. Originally, I had gotten a reasonably priced place. But Maximus had made the mistake of getting on my bad side just before we were supposed to leave ... I had arranged for us to go at the beginning of April. He had said any time in April, we could go. I took him at his word. And then he went back on it ... though, truthfully, he did have an unexpected case arise.

And I would have been fine with that. Those things happen.

But he was quite odd in how he told me. Very terse. Curt. As if I was to blame somehow. As if I was in his way as he tried to get on with his life.

Who wants to feel that way when she's planning a honeymoon?

When I offered to cancel the trip, thinking maybe he'd changed his mind, he was even curter to me. Just rearrange it, he said, as if that took nothing. As if I didn't have enough to do without having to completely rearrange everything. As if I didn't deserve being treated as if I was more than a speed bump in his life.

So I booked us in at the fanciest hotel I could find that wouldn't be so outrageous he'd have a heart attack. Why hadn't I ever once really thought about the juxtaposition of ostentatious wealth that this represented versus the cruel and harsh misery of the slavery he had been in when last in this city?

That's the thought that woke me, many hours later, not really that long after I'd finally crashed in the suite.

He'd not even blinked at the cost of this hotel. But he had looked about him when we got into this suite as if he was in another world.

Did I make you come here into this future when all you'd wanted was to die, Maximus? Is this all my fault that you are not with them? Did my God have a plan for me that ripped you from where you'd wanted to go in death? Is that why you're here? Because there was a God looking out for me who knew I'd never love anyone but you?

Am I to blame?

Have I this happiness at the expense of your greater desire to be happy with the love of your life and your son?

Is this why you've been unsettled for all these weeks of planning to come here to Rome? If it were me, I'd probably look at this as a chance to honor my ghosts, to show them I was okay now. But I'm not you. Maybe you have realized that the closer you are to Rome, the closer you are to that door you could push open to get to your ghosts. Would you choose that door now, if another chasm opens that allows you to slip between worlds?

Maybe you're here for another reason, Maximus.

Your ghosts never left you; you never left them. They're stronger here, I think. I bet when you're this close, you'll be able to hear them responding to your prayers, the ones you say for them every night. The ones that keep the connection alive. The ones you hide from me as if you truly believe I'd ever object. How could I? This is who you are. This is who I love.

Maybe you're here to apologize to them for every smile, every laugh, every joy you've had since that day you were supposed to die so you could be with them. Maybe you're here to make atonement for not fulfilling their need for you to be with them. Maybe you're here to remind them they come first, last, everything for you.

If so, I will hold you up. Would it crush you again to admit to them that you appear to have moved on? I'll tell them my own tale ... of how you love them so much, to this day and for always, that even though you may love me, she can't begrudge you finding someone who'd love you like you love her.

I didn't expect the walls to feel as they did. They were concrete. I don't know what I was expecting but somehow it was coarser than I thought and then I realized that I'd probably thought it'd be marble ... but what it really was, I realized that night when I could not sleep, is that I had not accounted for the passage of time.

Rather, I had not accounted for the ravages of time on material even as tough as stone or cement.

The Coliseum held other surprises for me.

It was the first place I wanted to go with Maximus. It was where everything centered for him in Rome. He wanted to come here to create life in this city where there'd been so much death ... where he'd created a lot of death as a slave but not nearly as much as he'd created in other cities as a General. So, to me, it was obvious that the deaths for which he wished to do karmic trade were those he'd created in the Coliseum.

But it was so much more than that.

Wasn't it also his own death in the Coliseum that he wished to take the sting from by seeing if fate would allow him to assure his place in the immortal line of his family by bringing into being an heir who would grow to man and continue the line with his own heir? No one doesn't ever have complicated reasons, even contradictory ones, for the things they do in life.

So while I wanted to go visit the ghosts in the Coliseum right away and help him face them, Maximus had other thoughts about the itinerary. Surprise, surprise, eh? I had booked a private guide to meet us at the Coliseum the first morning of our stay. Max insisted I cancel it. He said it didn't "feel auspicious" to go to that site on that particular day.

So, what did feel auspicious that day? And the next?

I told him if he didn't stop touching me in that way of his, I'd never walk again. I'd certainly not be able to walk in Rome. That had made his eyes twinkle playfully. And he touched me again. And I let him pull me toward where he rested next to the bed on a cushion he was using as a lounging couch as he nibbled on breakfast. He pushed a pitless date between my lips before rolling me over, covering me with his body. Before I could do it myself, his tongue licked the date's sweetness from where it lingered on my lips. And he was away again, touching me, tasting wherever he wished, inviting me to go with him into the romantic fantasy of a honeymoon amidst opulence while keeping me ever aware of the earthiness of his approach.

There is a subtle quality about his approach that I know now has always been my hair-trigger turn on where he is concerned. I am sure it was what attracted me in the first place. It's his in-your-face manliness. It's that he doesn't seduce you. He confronts you when he is ready to assert himself and when he knows, somewhere deep within him, that you want him. No games, then. He may kiss you but he makes you act on your longing. And he makes you come into his realm, into his body. Only then does he embrace you and take over.

It's like how he kisses when he is aroused and you are his target. He may touch you, light fingers on your face, neck. Then his lips touch yours, lightly. His tongue will be a gentle, teasing stroke upon your lips. His lips will suckle, gently but with increasing familiarity. But he waits on you. He has set a trap, you see? He subtly retreats to force you to advance. You put your hands on his face without thinking. You want the kiss to go deeper. You want to feel his body pressed up against yours. You want to feel his arms around you, his strength as he lifts you to your toes, his grip on you growing rough as he takes you over. But he won't do that until you move into his body and reach for him. And then really you've already surrendered. He's already conquered.

When he is very gentle, when he sighs and speaks softly in Latin as his hands disrobe you ... when he makes you weep before he does nothing more than run his hands over you while he tells you in heartfelt roughness that he will never know desire such as he knows for your body ... and you know he's somewhere else, some other plane, and pretty soon he'll be bringing you there, by force if he has to ... this is when it's hard to begrudge any harsh times in your past if getting past them meant you got to meet him some day.

Should I wipe the smug smile from my face as I admit that every single fantasy he told me about on the long, long trip was one he enacted ... or that everything I teased him about, he enticed me into giving to him?

This is what a honeymoon should be, I told him hours later as we slipped against each other in the large tub in the bathroom. It should be wall-to-wall sex and shagging until we think we will never need to make love ever again only to look at each other and think, "Naahhh. One more time ..."

That night, we finally climbed out of the room and strolled along the avenue in front of our hotel. We ducked down an alley and another one until we found a little dive where they only spoke Italian and I let Max order for us even though he hesitated over some of the words.

We didn't take our eyes off each other. For the first time since I've known Maximus, he held my hand and whispered in my ear and kissed my lips lightly ... in public. But it's because we just were existing in a bubble and we forgot anyone else was anywhere around us.

As for me, I felt cut off not just from the people around us but also set free from the sadness that remained in my life after Katrina. It wasn't until I was there with Maximus and we had nothing to pull at us except each other that I realized how much the storm remained in our lives as a palpable presence.

He gave me the ring that night. After dinner.

I was laughing. I will always remember that, Maximus.

The way your eyes regarded me. The peace that seemed a part of you. The way it felt to imagine for just one moment in time that I was all there ever was for you. To know you felt safe within the love we have for each other.

You gave me the ring with no flourish. I was tempting you with a nibble of my tiramisu. I had made up this mad story of the first time I'd eaten it and that I'd had a vision of you as I reeled from the rush of this dessert. You had asked me what made me finally realize I wanted to marry you.

I recognized that moment between us, Maximus. It deserved the truth.

Will you always remember what I said?

"I would not have wanted to go on without you," I had said softly. You lowered your eyes. I remember that. "I contemplated that you may have died in the storm or in the aftermath. And I knew that no matter what else happened, I would never ever love another as I love you. It was just so clear to me that if I'd been waiting for some sign to take the ultimate step with you, I'd been a fool. I wanted to be your wife. I wanted you to be my husband. I wanted to start a family. I wanted to know it had never been a waste, you coming to this time, me meeting you. I wanted it all, Maximus. And I was tired of letting my past interfere with my future. Everything else was swept away by the storm. Marriage? It doesn't begin to describe what we have. But I wanted it with you."

And I remember the way your head dropped. The way you held my hand. The way your other hand opened to show me a ring.

A band.

You ... only you. Only you, Maximus, would think of that. Only you.

It's always you. Always. We have said that more than once, remember? Forever. Always. That's how it is with us. I can't love like this and not know it follows me into the afterlife. You know that ... it's how you feel about her.

That's what the ring means to me. Forever. A circle. Our lives.

You told me, in this shy way you can have with me even now, that you'd ordered it from the same jeweler in Tuscany who'd made my engagement ring.

And I sniffed. Remember?

You blushed.

Oh, Maximus, this is such a perfect memory for me to keep. And I will, I promise you.

The band was perfect. It went exactly with the engagement ring. And I said to you that I wished I'd been as thoughtful ... that I wished I'd had the thought to have the jeweler there make a band for you.

Your eyes touched mine. You smiled at me.

When we got married, we got plain gold bands at a mall jewelry store in Baton Rouge. We stopped there on the way to the courthouse to get married. It didn't matter to me what we put on each other's fingers as long as we did it with gold rings.

I wish I'd thought about getting one made just for you like you got for me, I had said to you that night in the tiny restaurant off some alley in Rome.

You reached in your pocket. Do you know what you looked like when you did? Like a man. Like something that took my breath away. You held the ring you had made for yourself ... you held it in your fingers. You held it out to me.

Would you like to know what I was thinking as I slipped it on your finger? I was thinking that maybe coming to Rome was the right place for this.

I was thinking that maybe it was something you'd forgive me ... that I was so damned happy you were here with me instead of with her. 

When we had talked about coming to Rome, I always envisioned we'd walk up to the Coliseum and we'd see it wasn't nearly the big deal it had always been to each of us for different but parallel reasons.

I expected to be overwhelmed but mainly by the emotional impact of knowing what Maximus went through there. I envisioned us walking up to it, approaching it from the front, from Via Sacra, through the large arch where he'd been taken in the movie. I thought we'd retrace his steps.

And we did. But we did it at night and I had thought it'd be in the daylight.

The outside is lit up at night. It is so beautiful. I was so busy staring up at it that I had to hold on to his bicep to make sure I didn't just fall down.

We walked all the way around it, traffic zipping on the streets that surround it. There was a grassy area; that's where we stopped to just study it.

It was the night after he'd surprised me with wedding bands to take the place of the plain gold ones we'd worn since we'd married. I had thought we'd maybe go that day but the guide was booked so we were going the next day. We'd walked around the streets after eating a very late dinner in a little trattoria nearby.

At some point, he'd pulled me into a little alley and kissed me. He whispered to me that he wanted to see it if I would indulge him. I knew what he meant. I also sensed his conflicting emotions only in the kiss he gave me; he shut them out of his eyes so I hadn't realized before the kiss how he both needed to see the Coliseum and was overwhelmed at the prospect of it.

Night gave us the shadow we needed to confront the Coliseum. It was where he'd been meant to die. It was where his abasement had been complete. It was also where he transcended from abasement to heroism. It was a transcending moment he still never saw, I think.

He's told me that he feels he failed in his life. In that life. More so the hero, I always think. If it were easy, it would not take a hero to rise.

So we walked to the Coliseum that night. We were very quiet. He watched over me. I watched him doing that and knew it was to give him something to concentrate on that wasn't his own emotions.

And then at some point, we'd circled it. We stood on that grassy area. We hadn't yet said anything about how it felt to be here. He was holding my hand. I waited for him to make me understand what he felt. We were so close to what we'd come all this way to experience. The Coliseum is closed at night. We knew that when we walked over there. I suspect it's why we came then.

I became aware of the boys only after Max tensed. They approached from the side. Max moved me behind him. I put a hand on his back.

But they were not robbers or assassins. Their pitch was simple and delivered with appropriate dramatics. For a price, they could get us inside that night.

"Inside the Coliseum? At night? When it's closed?" I asked Max as he drew me along with him, following our two teen guides. "What if we get arrested? What if ..."

"Let me simply see what their arrangements are and judge the danger from there," he said softly.

"I read somewhere about this," I said back. "There's supposed to be a ladder ... Max, I don't want to do this."

But I did. Yes. For him. Because he wanted to go and he couldn't leave me standing there by myself. And because Maximus is a power all to himself when he wants something this badly. He really doesn't give you many choices but to do what he wants.

There was a ladder. They pulled it from some bushes. Max went over after the first boy. He looked down at me and motioned me up. The boy who stayed on the ground outside, with the ladder, got an eyeful under my skirt as I climbed the ladder until Max barked something at him and he turned away.

It was in the moment of sliding down into Max's arms, coming over a grate, that my hand grazed the stone the first time. It was so rough, pitted. 

The boy with us had two flashlights; he gave one to Max and kept the other. We hugged the walls and were silent as we followed behind him. 

The floor of the arena ... where Maximus fell to the sandy surface ... it's gone. It caved in long ago, of course, leaving the below ground sections exposed except for where they have constructed a small wooden covering over one end section and a wooden walkway down the center. It stabbed me to look down into the cavernous darkness of the underbelly ... and to feel the power of this overtake me. To be here, touching this place. To be looking down where it was dark and mysterious and know this was where he was penned to await his fights, where he was tortured, where he was beaten, where he was stabbed.

A shiver wracked me, head to toe. I turned to look at Max, who held my hand as if he were using me as an anchor to stay here. Or maybe he simply sought to keep me from running away from him. He stared down into the same place I'd been studying.

"How does it feel to be here?" I asked him softly. Our guide was too far to overhear if we kept it low.

"It feels like nothing," he said. His face rose and he gazed around him. There was enough light to discern shapes in some detail now that our eyes were more used to it. "I never had this view."

"I guess not," I said, imagining him down there, looking up to where we stood at a low wall.

"This was the Emperor's box," he said, drawing me with him toward the middle of the space. "The first time I saw it, I wish I'd climbed the walls to get to him."

He looked down at me and shrugged, smiling softly.

"However, I was far too awestruck by the immensity and grandeur of the Coliseum. I'd never seen anything like it," he said.

"Plus there was that little thing of having your life on the line."

"Yes. There was that."

"You suffered here. It hurts to be here. I'm not sure I expected to feel this way. But I'm glad we came."

He touched at my cheek with the back of his fingers. A tiny loving gesture of possession. I slid my arm around his waist. A tiny loving gesture of the right to comfort him.

We left just then. The guide was anxious to get us out. Maximus paid them handsomely for the extra time inside.

What can you say after that kind of experience? And knowing it is nothing compared to going there in the daylight, when you could really see? When you could see well enough to picture his suffering?

I had a dream that night. It was a disturbing dream. I remember my hand was on one of the walls, inside the Coliseum. Even now, I can remember that inside the dream, the feel of the stone of the Coliseum was vivid and startlingly real. And I remember the stone crumbling beneath my hand. It frightened me, the feeling of losing everything solid around me and just falling with the Coliseum as it turned to sand. I woke to find him standing before the door that led to the room's balcony. He had his hands braced on either side of the door. His head was hanging down. He was crying without a sound. I could see his shoulders shaking.

He let me lead him to the couch. I poured brandy into a snifter and pressed it into his hand. He sipped it as I knelt at his side and held him to warm his chilled body.

Eventually, we shifted; he slipped down until his head was in my lap. The empty snifter rested on the coffee table before us. I watched it until I gathered my nerve to look down into his eyes. He watched me watch him. He closed his eyes when I touched his face.

"Where are you?" I asked him.

He shrugged his shoulders.

"In your head, where are you right now?"

"Caught between my past and the present."

"But not your present."

"When I was there, before, in the Coliseum ..."

"Yes?"

"It was ... magnificent. It was Rome. Even in its cruel ways to slaves, it was still magnificent."

I blinked and looked around this room. Lush colors. Fine fabrics. Gilding. A vibrancy that comes with life even if the objects are inanimate. I closed my eyes and imagined the Coliseum as it had been in the film. It was magnificent. The ruins are still, of course. But they are ruins. Whatever life was there, it's been gone for so long that time has ravaged it.

"What does that feel like, Maximus? Intellectually, of course you knew it was a shadow of what it was ... but ... tonight, you stood there ... the monster you were expecting ..."

"I am here. I live. They are all dust."

"Shadows."

"That's where I was when you woke to find me just now, cara. In the shadows of my life."

"Did you wish none of this had happened to you? That it had ended there for you? That it was just me tonight, looking down at the floor of the arena and feeling an odd sense of grief that I could never imagine was because I never got to know you?"

"There was a time, yes, I was angry to be here in this time. But now, that past was another life. It was our fate to meet in this life."

"Maybe so," I whispered as he snuggled his face in against my tummy. 

Do you want to know what I was thinking as I stroked your back, my love? I was wondering why it is that sometimes we could say so many things to each other but times like this, we couldn't either of us find the words.

Your pronouncement was too easy, too safe, too uncomplicated.

I knew you were lying to me. I knew you were protecting me from how you really felt.

In the morning, I made love to him. I wanted to make him feel our connection was strong enough to give him whatever shadow he needed to slip into in order to look at this painful place of his past in the full sunlight.

We met our guide in the lobby. We drove in his car to the Forum area. For hours we wandered with scads of other tourists among the ruins that led inexorably to the Coliseum. We'd walked this way the night before but it is so different in the daylight. The guide was sweet and very smart. He answered all my questions. He let Maximus wander off when his attention would be taken by something along the way. The guide and I would pretend we had not just been surreptitiously left behind by Max.

By the time we got the Coliseum, our reserved time to enter was close at hand.  I took a deep breath before we entered. Maximus walked ahead with the guide, leaving me to trail in their wake. This time, we spent the majority of our time on the wooden platform that spans much of one end of the arena floor. We walked across what feels almost like a bridge that spans its length. I could look down into the recesses of the bowels. I tried not to see the ghosts of slaves and soldiers. I tried not to see his ghost selecting a helmet.

At the other end, Maximus stopped suddenly and then turned swiftly to look back.

I asked the guide to give us a moment alone. I stood beside Maximus and looked at my feet. Scenes raced in my head. He had so many more memories of this place than I ever would, of course, and I wondered if he was racing through them.

"What ever happened to them, do you suppose?" I said without even realizing it was aloud. He looked at me. I swear he must have been thinking the same thing. He practically glowered at me over my intrusion into his thoughts. But I also sensed he would have given a lot to track them down. "I was thinking about the figurines of your wife and son. The ones Juba buried here after you ..."

"After I died."

"After they carried you out."

"I died. It was another life."

Maximus.

What I wouldn't give to understand what was the right thing to do just then. I didn't mean to cry. I didn't mean to force you to comfort me when it should have been me comforting you.

Can you begin to understand the jumble of my emotions? The strength of my conflicting wishes - one wish that you'd died as you so fervently wanted and the other equally strong wish that you'd want to be alive with me as much as you'd once wanted to die to be with her? How it felt to imagine you, the man I now love, dying not far from where we stood ... I'll never put that into words.

Something desperately powerful took hold of us when we next stood alone in our hotel room. We hadn't said more than cursory words on the trip back. We thanked our guide by taking him to dinner. I was convinced Maximus had suggested this as a way to keep his distance from me. That he needed time to deal with what he'd felt in the Coliseum that day.

But then we got to the room.

I was ahead of him going through the door. My fingers went to switch on the room light. His hand closed over mine to stop me. The next thing I knew, he had an arm around my waist and his mouth at my neck.

"I need you so," he panted against the shell of my ear.

"I am here for you," I murmured back as his hands held and caressed my breasts from behind. "I always will be, my love."

"Surely the fates meant for this to be ... For you to be with me today was everything."

"There is nothing that matters other than that for us, really."

It should maybe have scared me ... the intensity with which we knew what the other meant ... that we meant the same thing. And, like me, I would bet anything he couldn't have verbalized it inside his own soul until that moment his hand touched mine inside the room.

If only it could be, Maximus! It would be a sign from the gods, would it not? If that was the night that it would happen ... that we could love a new life into existence.

We certainly gave it the old college try that night.

You were so tender with me. You were unrelenting. I would have stayed time in its tracks that night just to live it forever.

If after we return home, I am to find out that I am pregnant then I will always hold fast to the belief that it happened this night.

That night we took comfort in the other.

How I wish you could feel what you are capable of doing for a woman, Maximus. That you could just once be in my body, loving you, and feel the way I come with you.

Do you have any idea of how your hands feel so large on my body? How it feels to have them spread my thighs?

I remember the sound of your impatience. And I remember the sight of you, holding my panties, smelling them. Of you sinking to your knees before me, where I sat in the armchair I'd dropped into when my knees turned to water.

Did you hear me whimper when your hand first touched my knee? Did you feel me clutching your head to keep you where you then burrowed into me? What do you think when I do something like I did next ... hips raising from the chair, thrusting myself at you, unaware I've even moved when you have driven me to that point where all I can do is react to the crudest desire any women knows when she is determined to come? And keep coming?

When you finally stopped, I know my eyes were closed. I didn't see what your face looked like until after you picked me up. You should have seen how magnificent you looked. My hand was on the back of your head, dragging your mouth to mine.

You should know, I will never tire of you. I don't imagine I could ever deny you. I will forever remember your face as you crawled toward me and I scooted up the bed, gesturing for you to come and get me if you wanted me badly enough.

I teased you as you knelt over me on all fours. You dipped down to kiss me ... I shook my head and gave you my neck to suck. You licked first. I love when you do something like that.

And then ... oh, you have your ways, you wicked man ... and then you did nothing more than take one hand and run it down the front of my throat, over my left breast, skimming over my ribs, lingering in circles around my tummy, tangling fingers in my soft hair. You swallowed so deeply just before you nudged my thighs apart.

Use your hands. Oh, Maximus. Your hands. They made me cry. I remembered your hands on that sun-blinded sandy arena floor as you scooped dirt into them even as you staggered to your inevitable death. My hands clutched your shoulders, drawing you down where I could keep you safe ... from memories ... from the ghosts you do not love ... And you let me.

Did you understand? Is that why you put your forehead against my shoulder and thrust in an increasing rhythm? The way you sounded ... the way your voice wavered as you came.

Please let it have been that night for us.

That fractious moment of the day ... the time when night's darkness is fighting against the day's light ... that is so often when I come aware that I've entered life again from dreams. And so it was the next morning; he was asleep behind me.

His breath padded against my shoulder. I could feel it drift down the back of my neck. His arm flexed, spasmodically, where it draped across my hip.

Did he really tell me what he had a few hours earlier? When we'd wrapped ourselves together in the aftermath?

This arm of his, the one that moved during his dream state ... this was the arm that had wielded his sword. It was also the one that had caressed me as we'd talked, our voices lazy and defiant of our bodies' desire to rest.

"It was dead a long time ago," he had been telling me. Even with my eyes open to the dawn, it was as if I heard his words of the night before being uttered yet again. He had been musing aloud. He so mesmerized me when he shared himself this way with me. "I never expected to feel that way, to feel its death. Now, I feel I can wipe it to its foundation and build my future from a clean slate."

Is he lying to himself? Is it really possible he can wipe it clean after all this time? That he's truly able to have a clean slate now? Just because we came here for this visit to Rome?

Should I have told him how little I believed it was ever going to be that easy for him? That his ghosts would leave him just because he decided he now "felt" the death of his past life?

Or should I be glad that he seems to realize that he never really had a clean slate?

My hand drifted as I enjoyed the laziness of waking before him. I held my right breast idly. My thumb grazed languidly around the nipple. I shifted along with him as he did in his sleep, his knee seeking a spot between my thighs. My hand moved in response ... down to my sex, to where it was wet and sticky with residue of making love with Maximus.

He inched closer, just enough to let me know that he was in half-sleep and was seeking to press into me. My hand drifted up my body. My little finger dipped into my belly button. It just felt good when my hand sprawled across my tummy, as if I was guarding my insides from harm.

His arm flexed again and then his hand touched my elbow, followed my arm down ... his fingers played in and amongst my splayed fingers. He gave a snort behind me ... that rough noise of him waking and ready to take on the day.

I felt his lips on my shoulder, his groin pressing hard into me from behind, his body stretching behind and around me. It felt as if I was being taken over by an invading force. It always does. I love witnessing him waking. It's an embodiment of his dominating force in my life.

When he made love to me, after he whispered crude endearments and lustful reminders of my own needs, I let him guide my body. He does it effortlessly but if I ever fight him, wanting something different, he has a way of getting me there as well. But I was beyond all that in that morning. I just wanted to be touched and loved and lingered over as if I was a woman captivating enough in my own right.

And in the moments of him entering me, still so slippery from the night before, and hearing his words turn from English to Latin ... I lost myself inside the memory of what I'd said to him the night before, after he'd mused to me about his revelation of his own reaction to facing his past in the Coliseum.

"You've made me think about the future in another way now," I had said to him.

"Because of what I have found?"

"Yes, in a way." I had been facing him. I was looking at his chest from where I was snuggled under his chin. My hand stroked his arm. "Do you remember telling me, not long ago, that I should just not accept the life I was in because it was easier ... that I should choose it? Fight for what I wanted?"

"I believe this is how life should be. Not easy. Too often not up to you. But what you have control over, you should control."

"So you're talking about wiping the slate clean, how you feel that's what you will do. And I was thinking ... I have a different perspective."

"Do you, cara? Tell me."

"I am realizing that just as you wanted to be sure I was actively choosing to be your wife, mother to your child ... that this was my choice and not something you were pushing on me ... I want to know that you've made a similar choice."

"And you believe I have not?"

I remember swallowing, very deeply, before saying anything else. I remember the stillness of his body, the way his fingers no longer ran in light circles upon my back.

"I believe our child needs to feel he or she comes first in your life. That you have actively chosen to place him or her before any obligation you have to your past."

You didn't respond right away, Maximus, and I wonder if you were surprised that I knew this about you.

"It's one thing for me, Max, to know your real family comes first ... but our child shouldn't know that. Remember, I know something of what it's like to not be really wanted by a father."

"You are my real family, Anna," you had said to me and your voice was hushed with warning.

"Just think about it, Maximus. That's all I ask. Just choose. Like you wanted me to choose. To know I'd made the choice. That's what I want from you. Choose to put this child first. Imagine growing up knowing that your father's love for you is absolute? That you were brought into this world because your father wanted you so completely?"

"Have I ever made you believe that I would not?"

I moved then, so I could look in your eyes. So you could see into me. "Today. It just occurred to me when we were there ... no, I don't really doubt that you won't love this child as absolutely as you can. I know you will be an incredible father and I am counting on it because ... well, I wouldn't have the least desire to do this otherwise. I just want to know that it's your choice. Am I worrying for nothing?"

You made me feel all you feel for me in that moment. Maybe you read still another fear in my eyes. Maybe that's why you told me that you chose the future you and I have been building. That our child will be the center of your life and will never feel less than that. Ever. Maybe it's the finest gift I've been given.

Remember that feeling, Maximus. Feel it always. It is my faith in you. It is my trust. It is my joy.