The Last Meal (Parts I & II)

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Rhianus and Gennadius discussed the matter quietly as I interviewed the slaves. My heart wasn’t in it, however. I had all the background information I needed.
Narcissus had disappeared sharpish amid the confusion, and now, as the guests were calmed and packed off with tales of ungrateful slaves and punishments to be meted out, I wanted answers from the men who could give them.

‘Why would anyone want to poison that particular imperial spy?’ I asked.
Rhianus fluttered his fingers. ‘Please, I must demand discretion!’ he said.
Gennadius gave me the glare of disappointment.

Suddenly furious, angry at the hideous loss of life mounting around me, I seemed to feel the blood boil inside my normally cool head. ‘Discretion be damned, sir.’ I seethed. ‘How many more are to die like that.’ I pointed to the limp corpse of the slave being dragged from the kitchen the waste collection area by the toilets.
‘Unavoidable, I fear,’ Rhianus adopted his imperious tone. ‘You’re a soldier, man, you should know death. And the collateral damage a struggle can bring.’
‘I am a soldier, sir,’ I growled. ‘That is part of the problem here. This is terror, not war!’ My voice raised beyond my control until Gennadius touched my elbow.
‘I understand your frustration,’ he soothed. ‘We both do. But getting to the bottom of this will stir up a lot of mire, Titus Pelius. We all want to get it sorted.’

The unfamiliar use of my familiar names sounded like a rebuke, and I took it as one. I nodded. ‘It’s true,’ I accepted the inevitable messiness of life, ‘but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.’
‘No one is asking what your personal taste is,’ Rhianus whispered, drawing me close, ‘just do your job, manfully, and keep me informed through the Primus.’
‘But what is my job in this mess, sir?’
‘Apart from keeping a discrete eye on things, that will surely unfold.’

I felt my flesh creep with cold grasping fingers as Rudio and I returned to the Barracks. The thing that nags at the back of your neck, when you know you’re being watched secretly, leapt out from every shadow and each breeze in front of us.
Opening wide its toothless jaw, it even barked at us, and then again. I thought over shouting aloud at it, but what difference could that have made. ‘The password for the guards, sir.’ Rudio egged me out of my thoughts. ‘Then we’re home.’

We were there, but I was no further along in sorting out the whole nasty business.
‘Sir!’ My Optio Agelastus struck his breast in salute.
‘What the fuck is this?’ I howled, not turning around to look at Agelastus but pushing my way passed reports from the Bathhouse and the Sewer, the Synagogue and the army hospital. The last one made me stop. I waited, the terrifying thing I knew almost like a brother seemed set to lunge at me and wreak havoc on all about me.

Instead, it mumbled a few soothing words on Vilmes’ condition. I nodded, very slowly at first, then stopped. My mind was buzzing so loud that I was sure everyone around me could hear it. ‘Poison,’ I said aloud.

The medic shook his head, then looked through his pile of wax tablets. ‘No, sir,’ he said with confidence. ‘The surgeon says the wound is fine, the inflammation is good.’
I tried to see where my mind could go with all the information I had, but I couldn’t take it far. The whole thing was a bloody jumble.
Rudio gazed at me deeply with his piercingly intense eyes. Perhaps I had become a mystery to him, like something suddenly strange and new to him. ‘Maybe we could visit Vilmes tomorrow, sir,’ he said, covering my distraction. 'I know you are glad the military Tribune arranged for Vilmes to be treated there.’

‘Yes,’ I said finally taking in the medic and his report. ‘My thanks to the hospital administrator and his staff.’ I accepted the reports from the hands in front of me, and smiled as nicely as I could manage while my rooms slowly emptied.

Rudio balanced on a footstool to help me undress and he began to lay teasing nibbles down my neck and onto my back. The feel of his warm lips on my flesh jerked me into a spasm of pleasure. When he bit down more firmly into my skin, I had to let soft moans escape with my breath.

Grabbing my arms at the biceps, he drew me back, and pinning them against his body, he forced access to the side of my face. Behind me, he stretched forward so that he could breathe soft kisses ever closer to my lips. I couldn’t move my body, without breaking from Rudio’s hold, but as his kiss drew nearer I turned my head to meet him.
After he finished stripping me out of my tunic, he began to kiss me once more. This time he licked across my chest, tenderly nestling at my nipples before sliding down to kiss my belly. And with a look, he came upward to my armpits and began licking there.

The caress of his face in there thrilled my senses, and I shrieked, almost reaching a scream, as the sighs shivered over my flesh. Yet I enjoyed the mood of surrender, of letting him do as he pleased.
When he drove the tip of his tongue once more across my chest abd back down around my navel, biting it, sucking it, I groaned. But now I had to resist him, struggling against his teasing breath, because each sigh at my belly sent me into body-twisting contortions.
‘You big girl!’ Rudio said, and smacked my backside.
‘But it really tickles,’ I had to admit, in shame.

He pulled me in toward him, reaching up to explore my mouth. Holding him close to me, I watched his eyelids close with such a tender expression that something seemed to choke my heart in a sweet pain that still defies description.

My cock beat with my heart. Playing through my undergarment the shaft patted against his belly. I knew what would happen next as soon as Rudio put his hands around my cock. He looked down at the bulge, then bent to chew the hairs on my belly and continued downward until he reached the pubic area. Taking hold of my cock with one hand, he pulled it toward him so he could bite it through the cloth covering.
‘I love this piece of meat.’

With his free hand, Rudio cradled my ballsack. Squeezing it hard occasionally, he started to message my balls as he tried to swallow my rock hard cock underwear and all.
I couldn’t help but squirm under his grasp. Closing my eyes I curled into a tight arch over Rudio as he covered my knob with his mouth. I curved my back even further and yelped aloud, he’d pulled so hard on my nuts. But his beautiful warm mouth chewed across my cock shaft, giving the kind of pleasure you don’t find outside the company of the Olympic gods.
‘Stand up,’ I commanded, already pulling at his shoulders.
‘Why?’ Rudio questioned me, looking into my eyes and giving me a cheeky grin.
‘I’ll show you.’ I tugged his tunic over his head, and loosened his loincloth. Pressing him to me, we kissed, then I told him to turn.

I went straight for his smooth round butt; spreading his ass cheeks apart with my hands, I dug my tongue inside of his crack.

The touch of my tongue at his hole made Rudio twist his spine in to low sweeping hollow, so I could get better access. Once inside his asscrack I offered a little divine magic all of my own. Rudio made no effort to avoid squirming in response to my licks and the thrust of my tongue, but placing his hands on the sides of my head he kept me firmly in place. He panted for breath when he started to wiggle his arse to get into his own rhythm of pleasure.

‘Use your fingers to circle around my asshole,’ Rudio gasped. ‘Yeah! It’s like a fiery hot ring quenched by your tongue.’
I did as I was told.
‘Fuck me, master’ he whispered, just about under his breath.

At first I didn’t act. But thinking I hadn’t heard him, Rudio straightened, turned, then snatched hold of my waist and squeezed up tight to me.
His lithe, firmly muscular young body pressing against me drove me back and pinned me up against the nearest wall. Finally, amid breath-stealing kisses, he forced us down onto my couch. I smiled up at him. His total determination to have me felt so good.

Rudio kissed the side of my neck while he eased between my legs. There his hips ground against my wide-open groin. Sliding in between my thighs without trying to invade my crack, he humped me. Rudio lowered his face to my ear, whispering he was ready for me. I could only hope Rudio was right; doing this for me not out of duty as a slave, but truly meaning the love I beheld in his eyes.
Maybe that’s the way it is meant to be. Not the brute grunting of anonymous animal craving, nor the faceless exchange of seed with a passing acquaintance. Maybe I just felt that was the way I wanted it then. But it was then I thought once more of Alcibiades, in his pool of blood; and Vilmes, pale and sleepy in his hospital bed...if he hadn’t already died.

I interrupted this nasty change in my thoughts by a sudden jerk, shocking Rudio into a natural self-defence reaction. I hauled him from me, towered over him, and held tightly to his rigid arms.
The sensation of Rudio at first trembling then sliding into acceptance was Eros at his most devious. My cock already hard, sprung to it fullest attention when pressed through Rudio’s thighs and into his butt crack.

‘Do you want me inside you?’ I asked him, staring at his sparking grey eyes.
‘I want you, my master,’ Rudio raised his head to reach my lips.
I felt my eyelids flicker closed as our lips touched, soft but sure. Drawing his legs apart, and pressing his knees up to his chest, I went down on his cunt. Sweetly it nestled like a delicate pink bud in a fuzz of fluffy down.

I fingered spittle on to that tender spot, then drove it in. Slowly, with gentle little kisses between each attempt.
As I did it, my cock oozed pre-cum over my legs, its trickles turning in a stream the more his arse bit tight against my probing fingers. The thought of my mass of meat going into hthat tiny hole sent a shiver across my back.

I had fucked men and boys many times - and I’ve fucked women more than once or twice - but it had never felt like the first time. When as a young soldier we’d had to rape two young girls before we slit their throats, because we could not kill a virgin - even in the household of traitor to the emperor - without the ire of the gods descending on us, yet all of it felt old, used, tarnished to me; not just wrong but wasted.

Yet each time I entered Rudio’s clenching cunt with my fingers, I felt like this was the first time I was ever having sex. My heart raced, my hands quaked, and sweat broke out across my body.
I pushed my cock up to his asshole, slowly driving passed its resistance and Rudio’s swallowed cries. Somehow knowing that I needed it to be tender with him, change the whole sensation for.
Normally I enjoy letting it go, once I’ve worked my way in. But when I first felt myself inside Rudio, I heard a sigh rise deep from my body.

As Rudio tried to relax and allow some more of my thick inches slide into his ass, I softened the rigid tension of my body, bending to breathe soft words near him. Biting a tuft of material clenched in his hands, Rudio waited for the discomfort to go, but it didn’t. My increasing penetration only brought more unsuccessful attempts not to cry.

When I knew that I was more than that lovingly trustful face could bear, I stopped rocking into him, and took my knob out then pressed it in again for a few moments. I closed my eyes as I kissed his lips and jerked furiously on my cockhead.

He too wanked on his dick, moving faster and faster as I bore down on his puckering cunt. In and out, for what seemed forever. Then body quaking wanking followed until I was ready to explode the wrenching contents of my nuts.

I melted into the touch of his body, so warm against mine. Surrendering to the way he groaned softly before he came, I too let go of my spunk in a gushing torrent spewed between his legs. And folding together, we joined as one in a kiss-filled hug.