The City Without A Name
an excerpt

His body covered in a sheen of sweat, his hand draped loosely over the reclining form of the nude woman beside him, Caelius allowed his mind to drift in post-coital relaxation. He grinned lazily in self-satisfaction. Brisia was a beautiful, satisfying lover, and they had played long and hard this night before he had finally had enough.
This is the fifth time we have been together, and I am not bored yet, he thought wonderingly. Perhaps he had finally found the perfect woman. She must be a reward from Amalisa for my good behavior.
Brisia was married, of course. But her husband Cornelius was aged and infirm and had lost interest in the pleasures of the flesh. When, after 7 years of marriage, his young wife had failed to provide him with an heir, he stopped even pretending to desire her. What little vigor remained in him was now directed toward debate and deliberation with the other esteemed patricians whose objective was to formulate a new government for the city. When Brisia had chided her husband with his neglect, Cornelius had gruffly told her to take a lover and disturb him no more with such nonsense. Not one to curtail her enjoyment of life, Brisia had soon made another arrangement for her own satisfaction--Caelius.
This suited the handsome actor perfectly. After his narrow escape from spiritual death at the hands of the High Council on the Necrodine, and the disastrous consequences of his seduction of the set designer’s wife, he had vowed to Amalisa to mend his ways. He had foresworn using his goddess-given powers of persuasion to seduce the unwilling. He had determined not to cuckold any man. And he had even decided to try to stick to one woman at a time.
Caelius reasoned that, since one could not cuckold a husband who had given his wife permission to take a lover, his liaison with Brisia satisfied the self-imposed rules of his new attempt at virtue. As someone who had developed the habit early of simply taking what he wanted, when he wanted it, he was for the first time enjoying the pleasure of the knowledge that he was capable of restraint and self-control.
The actor slid his hand over Brisia’s smooth stomach to her flank, and pulled her up onto her side. She offered a slight drowsy moan of resistance, but her small, soft body responded to his grip and she turned toward him. He gave her a gentle kiss. She looked at him with the languid weariness of the fully sated, and softly kissed him back. He felt a stirring within him. Since the ceremony on the Necrodine, he had felt physically invigorated, stronger, faster, more alert, with greater endurance. It was a great feeling, similar to that which came from ingesting some of the drugs that one could purchase in the backstreets, but this feeling did not dull his mental acuity or come with any nasty side effects. He hoped that it would not fade. He looked at the sultry woman next to him with a small measure of disappointment. Although his energy and desire were rekindled, her ardor had already flamed too brightly, and burnt out.
“I will see you again, soon,” he whispered. “Good night.” Brisia mumbled a muffled reply. By the time Caelius had washed himself with a sponge dipped in cool water from a washing pot and donned his tunic and sandals, she was breathing heavily. He glanced at his reflection in her bronze hand mirror and, satisfied at his own beauty, blew out the candles and slipped out quietly. The villa was quiet. He padded softly through the atrium to a side door, which let out on a narrow garden on one side of the home. One of Brisia’s household slaves, a young girl, let Caelius out, and shut and locked the door behind him. The night was cool and refreshing, and the man enjoyed the feel of the air drying his damp skin. As he moved to the gate, he pondered the other changes he had begun to make in his life.