The Centurion's Woman

Chapter 12

This chapter is NSFW - Not Safe For Work

...this is a "romance" story, after all.

IXILLIUS WAS STILL mentally tripping on the thoughts swirling in his mind. He'd explained the events of this morning in just a few of the table drawings, and she was now studying his last drawing as the water dried. He used the moments she wasn't paying attention to him to try and digest the mountain of information she'd dumped on him.

        She was some kind of nomad, had come – traveling south? – to Germania Inferior – by herself? – looking for a Roman road on some kind of search for her father – a Legionnaire? – who may or may not be dead. She was some kind of hunter or fighter, he still wasn't sure, and had some kind of education because – although she couldn't read his language – she knew small numbers and understood many more things than he'd have ever expected her to. And she was excessively smart for a woman in the ways of men, most likely a byproduct of having been raised by only a father who was likely a Legionnaire, which then made it very strange that she spoke her mother's language and didn't understand any of her father's.

        Somewhere in the tabletop conversation he learned she'd been married, but the husband had divorced her after just a year because no children had been kindled. Over the past years she had also been sexed every now and then by some casual man she didn't describe, also proving no children, which left him puzzled to her virgin-like modesty. A modesty that was nowhere to be seen as she redrew his faded image of a male and female lying together and becoming one set of legs at the hip. She considered it like any of his other images. She was a confounding creature!

        As he watched her shoulders, the way her hair fell, his father's advice for quickly kindling a wife with child – given soon after joining the Legion – through ensuing a woman's pleasure in sex echoed in his mind. The advice had actually been given as a warning for how to avoid random bastards by self-pleasing with little or no regard for the lady, but suddenly held a much greater value.

                                                                ***

        Alex noticed that Ixillius was staring at her again as she darkened up the man and woman having sex. She thought he'd taken everything she'd told him rather well, and then had shared a few details about himself. She was still a little confused about his level of comfort being naked around her now that she'd found out he'd never been married, and that he rarely got laid. That was a bit of a surprise. Having seen him naked, she'd figured that there were a few ladies around here who were more than happy to see him back in Bonna, or were waiting for him back in Rome (or both, if she was honest). It's not like there was any part of him that was bad looking.

        It had been reassuring that his earlier anxiety had been the result of thinking she would fight him off, rather than agree to get him off. The problem was the picture. She'd had sex often enough, she thought, but not anything adventurous and only ever on her back with her partner groping and/or grunting above. That was the position the people in the picture were in, too, and right now her busted rib wouldn't be able to handle it.

        As the image faded out the second time, she looked up at him and shook her head.

        "No," she said, then placed a hand over where the ugly bruise sat on her ribcage.

        She drew a figure for herself slightly hunched under an empty circle, then another standing straight under a solid circle, a half-circle in between. It took a couple moments, and a few random words, but he got the idea that in a couple weeks she figured she'd be healed enough to handle sex with him. He scrubbed his hand over his face in a gesture that was quickly becoming familiar when he was mulling information over, then looked down at her. Yeah, two weeks and she'd definitely be able to handle sex with him, she thought.