In a flurry of discarded clothes, linens, leathers, buckles, and boots the two collapsed in an intertwined coupling to the stony tesserae of the mosaic floor. Their limbs interlocked in alternating strategies of domination, submission, and rude intimacy above the floor's mosaic design of Greek hoplites at battle with scantily-clad Amazons.
Antinous was now enveloped in an increasing wildness. His bodily resistance to his grappling combatant was waning. This was no concession of defeat; it was his recognition of the exhilaration of close proximity to someone thrilling. He vividly imagined he was melting inexorably into the other's flesh as they bound tightly together. He was besieged by the rough caresses and wet urgency of Hadrian's mouth, felt the brush of trim bristles graze his jaw, and inhaled the salty aroma of a day's sweat. Yet he gave as well as he received.
While wrapped together in abject intimacy he discerned the rigid shaft at his partner's groin searching the nooks-and-crannies of his limbs to locate a susceptible portal into his interior being. Its determination in sliding ever closer to its intended target was tenacious. He felt his pursuer's lust press relentlessly forward towards its goal.
The driven urgency was so unashamedly flattering, his resistance willfully relaxed to open his defenses to the incursion. It was a gift to his companion's previous generosities with a dash of prurient curiousity.
Hadrian's resolve pressed his arms and limbs apart to hold him firm to the mosaic tiles. The militant strategist maneuvered a forward assault at the intended target. The younger man threw caution to the winds as he opened his heart and body to the incursion. What the heck, he thought.
A myriad mixed feelings, thoughts, needs, fears, and bodily sensations swept Antinous as he realized his body was happily succumbing to a very intimate corporeal invasion. His partner held him firm by a feigned wrestler's hold whose determined power maneuvered him to utter vulnerability. Yet it was a consensual vulnerability which happily savored its own helplessness.
Hadrian spat several times onto his palm and applied the lubricious balm to his member. Antinous emitted a surprised gasp as the penetrating organ found its target and eased into its intended berth. Yet the zealous invasion was a careful, benevolent assault.
Antinous was overcome with contradictory feelings of victory and submission, joy and discomfort, honor and shame, as Hadrian engulfed him in a carnal embrace. He also realized he had succumbed to the driven power of another man's lust, while equally recognizing he was strangely untroubled by it.
After tense moments of wary expectation the Bithynian gradually perceived a spreading sensation of elation coupled with inner serenity suffusing his organism. An entirely unfamiliar feeling of bodily wholeness was aroused and acknowledged by his perception. He had to concede he felt pretty good.
Antinous hadn't experienced such a novel sensation since the time several years earlier when he first stumbled upon the cascading sensuality of self-induced orgasm. But no brief, excited spasms at the hand of his more lurid fantasies bore comparison with this new experience. Its glow pervaded his entire being, head to foot, as he subsided into a mysterious rapture emanating from the dark inner world at his body's center. It thrilled his mind, it enlivened his muscles, and it pleasured his organs. It induced whimpering, toe-curling contentment.
The feeling automatically cemented a convergence with his all-engulfing companion. Their face-to-face, eye-to-eye proximity invoked an enclosing cocoon of radical intimacy. While Hadrian's rhythmic bodily action undulated above him, Antinous's natural inner solitude acknowledged how he was now accompanied in his sense-of-exile by a like-minded fellow explorer.
Hadrian's searching eyes hovered above him to monitor the minutiae of his sensory responses. The younger man's entire organism radiated waves of exquisite delight from his inner core. Hadrian sported patiently, teasingly, adventurously, with these sensations to fine-tune their playfulness.
He manipulated himself this way and that, slowly entering and withdrawing in leisurely alternation, slowly pressing ever deeper or holding still in steadfast confirmation. He toyed deliberately with the febrile responses of tissue, muscles, nerve end, interior node, and the conscious psyche too, to exact maximized gratification. Both parties smiled knowingly to each other's responses.
Hadrian lifted the young man's frame high for greater penetrative power, or doubled him over to bring himself into closer eye-to-eye intimacy, all the while playing his physicality with inventive pleasurings. Antinous was consumed by an animal relish which compelled him to emit plaintive squeaks of sublime delight. His habitual, protective, impassive guard was being demolished as a newfound openness to personal connection was rebuilt on its foundations.
In the process he began to appreciate facets of his father's revelations of a few months earlier. This intense closeness to a person for whom he held such high regard created an unanticipated concord within him. Hadrian was engaged upon an active, radical intimacy far more deeply personal than anything Antinous had ever practiced upon himself. Now two decades of emotional curbing, restraint, discretion, and conscious personal distance were being crumbled away in a rush of acute physical sensation. Antinous felt Hadrian and he had melded into a single human organism.
Is this, he wondered, what Achilles and Patrocles, or Alexander and Hephaestion, had experienced? Is this what they call love?
His friendly tormentor's rhythmic pacing increased in tempo and ferocity. The pulsing rise and fall of the interlocked bodies grew in ardor and heat. Beady sweats on glistening surfaces shone wetly beneath the chamber's flickering lamps. Muscles distended, limbs became malleable, bodies entwined aggressively. Antinous heard himself sigh his companion's name again and again. His companion reciprocated.
Eventually and inevitably, the torrid fervor burst in a shower of exclamations, gasps, shudders, and cries of delighted anguish. The two collapsed across the mosaic tiles in a pile of exhausted energies and spent body moistures.
Antinous felt becalmed in a manner unlike any previous occasion of his life. His abyss of solitude had dissolved into memory.
Minutes passed in silence before one retrieved a wine cup to share between them. They sipped alternating draughts.
'You learn quickly, Ant,' Hadrian rasped breathily.
Antinous raised himself on one elbow to eye his sweaty, naked companion lying outstretched beside him. He smiled his most ingratiating, calculating, charmer's smile. It was loaded with intent.
'Yes, I do Hadrian. But it's your turn now,' he murmured softly.
The maturer man baulked. He looked to his companion questioningly.
'A ride there for a ride back,' was the immediate response.
'Are you sure you have a sufficient lion-heart to do it? And so soon, Ant?'
'Yes I do, Hadrian. Turn over.'
Hadrian's lazy smile widened into a knowing, if faintly insecure grin.
'You do learn quickly,' he said.
Antinous good-humouredly grasped his companion's pelvis at the hips and mock-pressed him to roll over onto his belly. It was time for the assailant's driven fury to be turned back onto itself."
Geta fell silent once more to sip his wine. His eyes returned to Surisca more often than seemed necessary, Suetonius sensed, as he conveyed his testimony to the group of listeners in the morning sunlight. He began his account again.
"You may wonder how I know all these intimate details, gentlemen — and Lady Surisca. I learned most of them from Herodes' steward who kept watch outside the shuttered andron so Caesar's needs would be immediately provided if demanded. He kept an eye on things through a join in the shutter leaves, but has kept his tongue to himself ever since, except with me. I learned of the others from Antinous himself over wine in later conversations.