Champion in Love (bxb)

CHAPTER 11. Bathing in Memories

I stared into the past like it was a winding road disappearing between the hills. "My family didn't sell me, rookie. I became a gladiator because I fell in love with someone above my rank."

"You wanted to be this... what did you call it?" Victor snapped his fingers in the air. "Aha! This perfect lover guy?"

Seemed my first-day pitch left a lasting impression on him. "No. The problem was—"

The problem was... my throat constricted thinking how stupid-young I had been. I couched to clear the obstruction, pretending it was the fumes. "It was a long time ago. I was young and I've changed since."

"You grew old?"

I fisted him on the shoulder. "Not that old."

Mithras' bulls, how long had it been? Ten years? Eleven? Long enough for those days to become fragmented in my memory, a mosaic with missing pieces. But I still could see the entire picture if I squinted at it from a distance.

There I was, working at the villa as a groundskeeper.

"My family was market farmers and nothing but, since the foundation of Fidelium. They never had an ambition to advance in this new world until my father came along. In this regard, he was a maverick. He found employment as a gardener for a Senatorial family, at their country villa. But there his will to grow had ended.

"He gambled away half of what he made and drank away the rest, driving my older brother to join the army and become the hero of the nation. So it fell to me to pick up the slack till my sisters would be old enough to marry."

"You have sisters?" The question was intense, rather than idle.

"Aye." I hesitated. "And you?"

He glanced away. "I did."

I didn't want to ask what happened, because I was afraid that the answer would be that the Imperial legions had killed them. Maybe worse. And my brother was a national hero of those legions...

Suddenly, my throat needed clearing again, from all the cedar-scented fumes. "Why don't you stretch out on the bench, rookie?" I asked after I finished coughing.

He pulled steaming air in through his nose, flaring his nostrils, but after a moment he nodded. Maybe he was tired of picking at the scabs of his soul's wounds and wanted someone else to do it for a change. When he stretched on his stomach, I was reminded how large he was. He barely fit on a bench sized for a Fidelis.

With his blue eyes not judging me for being what I was and had been, it was easier to continue. "At the villa, the way those people lived, things they thought about and talked about... It was a revelation to me. It didn't take me long to fall in love with them and everything they had. I thought it was unrequited until I caught the attention of one of the Senator's kids."

The gaze of green eyes had followed me as I moved around the garden, even when the straw hat overshadowed my face to save the Senator the trouble of finding out that I worked for him in my father's stead.

The owner of these curious eyes had seen through my ruse in an instant and didn't get mad like the Senator would have been, but thrilled. Before I knew it, I was running into my love in the farthest corners of the garden. Once, our elbow bumped—and my pathetic secret was revealed. I confessed the deception to someone who had known only theoretically that it was possible to have nothing to eat in the winter.

Without my confidante, loneliness suffocated me while I worked. I counted minutes by the lurches of my heart.

Faster, faster and faster... till the sun went down and I could leave the villa, then scale the wall for a secret assignation under the cover of night.