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For a while the nightmares held. But eventually the adrenaline of the Profane Sabbath wore off, and John was flung once again--if mercifully less often than nightly--into his familiar cycle of tumultuous, restless sleep and frightening dreams.
Most of the time he would merely jolt awake in relative silence, since so much of the Martin house exorcism necessitated his terrified quiet. In the bed beside his, Father Garcia would merely shift.
But once, he cried out--his memory tonight had brought him somewhere in the conversation with that nameless Being of Light he now knew to be the king of Hell.
“I’ll do whatever you want,” he’d hissed, face a mess of sweat and tears. “Just take me away from here.”
Like a child in the audience of a horror film. Nothing brought John greater shame, even now, with Amy’s soul finally freed.
He awoke to a strong grip on his shoulder, pulling him from shadow.
“I swear it,” John heard himself softly moaning, “I swear, I swear…”
“It’s all right now, hijo . It’s over.” Father Garcia’s warm whisper by the light of the bedside lamp. Great, delicate fingers pushed the mussed bangs from John’s eyes.
“F-Father,” John breathed through the quakes that overtook his body. He was so cold, and yet drenched in sweat. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
“You have nothing to be sorry for. You were only dreaming. But you’re safe, John; God watches over you,” Father Garcia told him, “as do I.”
John reached out from beneath the covers to wipe sweat from his brow, eyes squeezed shut. Weak with terror, his trembling hand found Garcia’s at his shoulder, slipped beneath it. When, seconds later, he realized what he had done, Father Garcia’s grip was tight enough not to let John pull back in shame.
His fingers looked so waifish and small entwined with Father Garcia’s. So pale.
Things got complicated.
-
The second time John felt a shift was a mere two days later, in a motel on the outskirts of Reno. He had awoken from one more nightmare since to find Father Garcia once again seated at his bedside, grounding him with gentle hands, holy words. It didn’t take long for John to ease himself into this new, unexpected intimacy: he was a son to Father Garcia, just as any other child of God. Such was the role of a priest.
Excepting the fact that Father Garcia was no longer a priest, nor John. But how could any man easily shake the training taught at seminary?
Father Garcia caught John fiddling with the bandages that bound his arms and upper body, protecting his burns from the elements.
“You’d better not be scratching.”
“I’m not,” John lied, looking at the pages of a magazine left in the motel room but not reading them.
For a moment, Father Garcia was quiet. John could feel him staring.
“It’s probably time we changed those. Got your wounds cleaned up.” Garcia stood, rifling through his duffel bag on the room’s single, sad armchair. From it he conjured rubbing alcohol, medicated petroleum jelly, and a fresh roll of white bandages. “Run yourself a bath. Call me in as soon as you’re settled and I’ll help redress you.”
Father Garcia spoke with such certain authority that John at no point defended his ability to tend to his own wounds--to do so would be nonsense, quite simply, even without his back equally tender and unreachable; he’d barely been able to lift his arms to dress.
In the bathroom, John sat on the edge of the tub and watched the ceiling lamp as steam swirled through its dim rays. The water rose, and he gingerly unbuttoned and shrugged off his cassock, the trousers underneath. Naked but for his bandages, he slipped into the water, jolting at its heat at first and then sighing as the sting of heat against his skin soothed him into quiet.
“Ready?” Said Father Garcia through the door.
John shuffled to sit upright again, avoiding touching his back to the porcelain. “Sure.”
Father Garcia entered dressed down to the undergarments beneath his vestments. With a little grunt of protest, he sat cross legged on the floor beside the bath, spreading the fresh dressings about him. “Alright, hijo, ” he said, “let’s get these bandages off. Lift your arms.”
Jaw clenched, John obeyed. Father Garcia found the loose end of his dressings tucked amongst themselves by his collar, and began to unwrap them gently, slowing each time John winced at the feeling of cloth pulling at his raw skin.
It was tedious work. John closed his eyes, settled into it.
“How do you feel?” Father Garcia’s voice appeared from the gloom.
“Good,” John murmured. Then he startled, eyes flitting open and fixing pointedly at his feet. “Y-you mean the burns. Um. Bad.” He shook his head, rubbed the bridge of his nose. “No, not bad. They’re okay. Tender. I’m sorry, I don’t…”
Father Garcia chuckled, a comforting sound, even if it made John blush. “If it makes you feel any less embarrassed, hijo , I was a nurse before I joined the priesthood.”
Here John forewent his awkwardness to meet Garcia’s eyes. “Really?”
“I was stationed at a field hospital in Vietnam in the early 70s. Nothing special; much the same as this.” He nodded towards John’s burns, now mostly exposed. His skin had sloughed off in large patches at his shoulders, chest, and back, revealing sticky pink flesh layered underneath. John could only look at the marks for a moment before feeling too sickened to stare much longer.
“They’re a sight now, but they’re slight enough I doubt they’ll scar beyond a year or so,” Father Garcia assured him. “The same can’t be said about most self-immolations. God truly did enact a miracle through you.”
With his wounds prickling and exposed to the motel bathroom’s humid air, John didn’t feel all that miraculous. Even less so when Father Garcia had finally finished undressing him, and apologized heartily before pressing a rag damp with alcohol into each open wound. John could only bite the meaty base of his palm, eyes squeezed shut as furious tears pricked at their corners.
When the burns were finally sterile after a short eternity, Father Garcia went over their ragged edges with a bit of medicated petroleum jelly. “To help heal the uninjured skin,” he muttered, “so they stop catching on your bandages.”
John could tolerate this part. He let himself get lost in it again, the delicate brush of Garcia’s callused fingers against him.
“You didn’t serve, did you?”
“No,” John replied. “They tried to draft me, but I was, uh, medically unfit. Asthma. Bad knee, too.”
“Is that right? Childhood injury?”
“Yeah.”
The worst of the burns, a furious patch between John’s shoulder blades, required the most care: as Father Garcia fixedly worked, he steadied his other four fingers at the base of John’s neck, just below the feather-light wisps of black baby hair petered off into nothing. Index finger, middle finger, ring finger, pinky, came to land one by one while Father Garcia’s thumb spread salve on John’s wound.
The sound that pulled from John’s throat, chased by a full-body chill, could only be called a whimper.
He swallowed it back with a jolt, shifting the still water around him.
“I’m sorry,” Father Garcia said, “did I hurt you?”
“Yes. N-no. Sorry.” John swallowed, drawing up his legs and pulling them together as imperceptibly as was humanly possible. “J-just… tender.”
Father Garcia hummed in understanding. “Almost finished.”
For a terrifying second, as Father Garcia turned to retrieve the fresh roll of bandages, John found himself hoping his treatment would last even longer.
-
Despite the conservative streak that seemed to claim every priest at some point in his career--one based deeply upon the sanctity of tradition, after all--John had befriended a sizeable handful of men, most in the seminary, whose affections were reserved for their own sex. Considering the threat of red-blooded violence that loomed over the military, what better place than the priesthood to harbor chaste desires for one’s peers?
For John, there had only ever been two to whom his heart belonged: Molly, after being dismissed from the church--and before her, another young man at the seminary.
Touched hands in the halls between classes and services; knees sat side-by-side in the dorms at night while they sang along to new records. That was all it had ever been.
After the plague hit the news, there was a wave of paranoia among the school--nobody knew how it spread, after all, but they’d read the demographic reports, and they knew the sorts of men that walked among them.
John didn’t know if he counted. Was it enough to brush a fingernail down the palm of another boy in greeting?
Soon enough it became clear that the disease was, in fact, indiscriminate, and there was science to explain that God was not enacting persecutive justice. Women, children, straight, gay. But it was elusive. And there were statistics.
John, quite luckily (or unluckily, depending on his moment-to-moment opinions of these brewing feelings), had actually been recently tested: a day into he and Father Garcia’s drive out of Sterling, John mentioned having been drugged in the dungeons beneath the daycare.
“Some sort of gas?” Father Garcia asked. “Or did they manage to slip you something?”
“An injection,” John said absentmindedly, shaking his head, “in my neck. Hurt like hell.”
Father Garcia was looking at John, then, and finally John caught up.
“Oh, shit.” He was too shocked by his own stupidity not to curse. “I didn’t even…”
“It’s alright, hijo . We’ll pull off and find a clinic when we get into Columbus. Better sooner than later, and it’ll be easier to find someplace before we get further into the Midwest.”
So they drove on in fearful silence--John wondering if he’d survived the Profane Sabbath only to fall prey to the disease at the tip of a dirty needle, Garcia likely fearing he was about to lose his only comrade in the war on Hell. In a rundown neighborhood of downtown Columbus, Father Garcia parked on the street and let John clamber out, alone and ashamed, to the door of a clinic.
They took his blood. Promised they’d send the sample to a lab by the end of the day, and have his results within two weeks. And please try to refrain from extramarital intercourse until you have your results, to minimize risk of spread.
“Thanks,” John snapped, red in the face, “but I’m a priest.”
At a payphone outside, John called Lisa. Explained she’d be receiving a call on his behalf: test results. John offered her about as much as he told Father Garcia; Lisa, ever stone-faced, told him she’d get ahold of him in exactly two weeks when the duo arrived at Garcia’s permanent dwelling in Las Cruces, New Mexico. John ran to the car, got Garcia’s home phone, passed the number on. Somewhere in the fray the phrase out of an abundance of caution came from John’s mouth, which was ridiculous, because his entire existence was an abundance of anxiety, certainly, but an utter absence of caution.
A week was passed holed up in the Las Cruces apartment, John stuck on the living room couch. He weighed himself with the scale in Father Garcia’s bathroom and checked for lesions every time he bathed. When the call from Lisa came, and the results were negative, John broke down and wept on the floor for twenty minutes. At the kitchen counter, Father Garcia was holding a bottle of well-aged whisky and two lowball glasses, patiently waiting for John to wear himself out. That night they celebrated, and John laughed enough to make up for a twelve month lack thereof.
The next morning, they departed Las Cruces to follow a lead, and the following night, John’s nightmares started up again.
That’s when things got complicated.
-
In bed after the bath, John lay stone still with his hand between his legs, unmoving.
Just holding himself, in the hopes of demystifying a part of his body he had, for many years, been instructed to ignore—and more recently, utterly lost interest in. Between the antipsychotics prescribed at the psych ward and the distraction of the Profane Sabbath and all it entailed, John was all but without libido--well and good for a priest, but John had been stripped of his title. His vow of chastity no longer stood, and something told him those old adolescent adages about hairy palms were well beyond God’s concern these days.
So he lay there, and thought of the soft brush of Father Garcia’s fingers at the back of his neck, and was reminded how it felt to have life in every part of himself.
-
He woke to another nightmare, and with it, Father Garcia’s reassurances.
“Hopefully this doesn’t become a more regular thing than it already has,” John murmured.
“I don’t mind,” Father Garcia replied. “If you can fight by my side during the day, hijo , I will fight by yours at night.”
John had his chance to prove himself the next morning. Local Catholic hearsay led them to a home in the city of Truth or Consequences where a demon had made its den: the body of a teenage boy, just a few years younger than Amy had been. Over the course of three hours, the creature was carefully eked from the boy’s body--and, when its form had been made physical, shot against the plaster wall of the basement. Father Garcia and John offered to caulk the holes Father Garcia’s buckshot had made, but the boy’s parents waved their apologies away, shaking the priests’ hands and praising the Lord.
In celebration, the duo stuck around town in another motel. Primarily to investigate further springs of demonic activity, they agreed, but in part to avoid having to get back on the road after a night of raucous celebration. They sat at a bartop and took shots of local tequila, then knocked back imported Mexican beers--John swore he had never tasted anything so sweet. Back in their room, John collapsed, clothed, onto his bed. Absentmindedly, he thumbed his cross.
“Father?”
“Mm?”
“Are we doing something bad, claiming to be real priests?” he asked the ceiling.
“We are real priests,” Father Garcia muttered, working his boots off. “Realer than any of those stuffy sons of bitches in the Vatican. I’d like to see them try fighting a demon.”
John snorted at Father Garcia’s foul language.
“And what is a priest, anyway? Is it a title that has to exist on paper?” Father Garcia shuffled over. “C’mon, make room.”
John was too drunk to question Father Garcia sidling up on the opposite side of his bed. “‘Specially in consideration of what happened in Sterling,” he agreed. “I guess our exorcisms wouldn’t be working if we weren’t still in ownership of some level of…”
“Power?” Garcia finished for him.
“I don’t like putting it that way,” John confessed. “Feels exploitative.”
Father Garcia looked at him.
“Blessing,” John tried, liked the way it rolled off his tongue. “God doesn’t give us power , He blesses us with strength. That’s how it felt, anyway.”
“How are those different?”
“I guess I mean power in… almost a political sense. Influence. Supernatural ability,” John explained.
Father Garcia laughed through his nose. “You wouldn’t call what we accomplished during the Profane Sabbath supernatural?”
John shook his head, nestling into his pillow. “Gary, the demons, the ritual--that’s supernatural. That can’t be explained. But I think the strength God gives us is inside us from the beginning. That’s as natural as can be. It’s… it’s implicit.” Memories swiftly clouded his thoughts. “What I don’t understand is why we elect not to see it, sometimes. I admit I was strong on the Sabbath, but--why couldn’t I be strong during Amy Martin’s exorcism, too? Why couldn’t I tap into even an ounce of that?”
Father Garcia shrugged. “Maybe you weren’t ready to see it, hijo. Maybe, even if you did, you wouldn’t have been able to recognize it.”
John met Father Garcia’s strange, dark eyes, set deep into the dark golden gnarls of his wrinkled skin.
“I wish God saw fit to stop giving me nightmares, at least,” John murmured.
Father Garcia smiled gently. “If you put as much stock into implicit strength, John, it’s only fair you do so with implicit cruelty, too. I don’t think God is giving you nightmares. I think you’re giving them to yourself, as punishment.”
John’s heart ached. He squeezed his eyes shut, held his crucifix close to his chest.
“If that’s true, there’s more cruelty living within me than I know how to bear,” he whispered.
Father Garcia sat up, stretched. “Well, hijo , we fight together.” He leaned low over John and pressed an unceremonious kiss into his temple before clambering off the bed and towards his own, shedding layers of clothing along the way. “That is my blessing, to put the cruelest part of your mind at bay.”
John laughed at that, fingers touching the spot on his head Garcia’s lips had landed. “Thanks.”
Only as John began to ready himself for bed to the sounds of Father Garcia’s snores did he sober up enough to realize what had just transpired--and as such fell to his bed, half-dressed, arms wrapped around himself in the hopes of holding all his feelings in.
-
John couldn’t stop thinking about it, and to some extent, Father Garcia knew.
Because John was being clingy. The nightmares would come, and instead of retreat into himself, John sought Father Garcia at once, reaching into the darkness for the warmth of his hands. Another week passed, and John had to have his dressings changed again; this time, despite the pain having lessened to mere tightness around the new skin, he sat forward with shut eyes and yielded entirely to Father Garcia’s ministrations.
When Father Garcia touched him--a palm on his shoulder, a humorous thumb and forefinger on his chin--John leaned into it.
He came close, in the dark of the night, to submerging himself fully in these new feelings. One pillow beneath his head, another between his legs. Just pressure, soft and solid.
There were no fantasies; to picture anything beyond what little had already happened would be to let his imagination overtake him, yield his innocence in all this.
Happenstance. That’s all this was. John had done nothing wrong.
So when Father Garcia finally prodded further, John was thrown into a tailspin.
It was after another successful exorcism, this one all the way in Phoenix. First, in the car on the way back to the motel, Garcia clapped a congratulatory hand onto the spot where John’s left shoulder met his neck, gripped just so. His rough thumb swiped softly beneath John’s jaw; John was frozen, hot as a ball of fire--and then it was over, and Father Garcia’s hand was back on the wheel.
When the fear passed, John took it as nothing more than another moment to replay. Electric contact, even more exciting than that which had preceded.
Then they were in the room, both shedding their cassocks in favor of the cooler undershirts and trousers beneath. Even in late November, the desert held heat right up until the sun set. Father Garcia conjured a six pack from the minifridge and tossed John a can.
“Put on national news,” Garcia said, gesturing to the boxy TV opposite their beds. “See if anything’s coming out of Sterling yet.”
They’d been paying close attention to the media cycle surrounding Sterling--reporters, once they saw fit to leave their homes after the massacres of the Profane Sabbath, were not without fearful theories of the motivations of the nameless cultists found littering the city. Lisa had been in touch and sharing pertinent headlines from the local papers, but the events of the Sabbath had made enough of a splash to make it onto national news every few nights, if only to keep outsiders grateful they didn’t live in this Connecticut town seemingly crawling with evil.
If only they knew the extent of it.
John flipped through channels until he found NBC’s evening news cycle. A female reporter was mid-sentence when she appeared on screen.
“--discussion surrounding the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ statement released earlier this month: ‘The Many Faces of AIDS’--”
John felt something cold drop in his gut. “Nothing, I guess,” he said, reaching for the remote.
“Hold on. I haven’t heard about this,” Father Garcia replied.
“--continues in dialogue with Reagan administration officials and other right-wing political leaders. Reagan administration commentary on the epidemic has only been provided as of September of this year, following the death of Reagan’s close personal friend, American film actor Rock Hudson, in 1985. In contrast with far-right theocratic beliefs that AIDS is a, quote, ‘gay plague,’ or divine retribution against homosexuality--”
“Father Garcia, I don’t want to watch this,” John uttered, squeezing his eyes shut.
As Father Garcia turned to address him, the reporter went on.
“--the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ statement unilaterally declared that discrimination against people suffering from HIV/AIDS is unjust and immoral, earning them criticism from conservative individuals within the Catholic church. Additionally, the Catholic church is currently the largest private institution working in AIDS healthcare.”
Father Garcia stood and came to John’s side, taking the remote and shutting the television off.
“What is it, hijo ?” He asked softly. “You don’t agree?”
“Of course I do,” John said, a little too quickly. “I-it’s--to call it retributive is to spit in the face of God’s love.” He ran both hands through his hair. “Sorry. I guess I’m still just… feeling… vulnerable.” As the words came out, they sounded incredibly childish, John realized. “I-I mean, after the… y’know.”
Father Garcia nodded. “I know you were scared. I was scared for you. But it’s over now; your blood test came back clean.”
When John didn’t, couldn’t, reply, Father Garcia sat.
“It’s been challenging for all of us,” he began. “For those among us that aren’t themselves homosexual, we all know priests who are. Hell, just… people in our lives. I’ve lost friends I served with. Family, even. I’m sure you have, too. And it’s easy enough to chalk it up to divine intervention. Too easy, in my opinion.”
“Why else would it be happening?” John whispered.
Father Garcia shook his head. “I don’t know. But the God whose word I’ve studied wouldn’t take vengeance on a whole populace of his people, some of whom follow him as dedicatedly as any clergyman I’ve met, let alone with women and children as casualties. Something about… correlation and causation, right?”
John stared at his can of beer on the nightstand, barely touched. He reached for it and took a long, slow draw.
“It is our duty, more than anyone else, to not forget our fraternity with all God’s children. And to remember that human connection is all we have, the most beautiful thing we have. Even with this… added risk factor. Whatever the church says, protecting ourselves can’t mean God wants us to refrain.” Father Garcia leaned a mite closer, lifting a hand and letting it fall, feather light, atop John’s knee. “Right?”
John shriveled, exploded, bloomed, wilted. A nauseous wave of salt slicked the back of his throat.
“Don’t,” he croaked.
Father Garcia pulled back, moustache downturned in a worried frown. “I’m sorry, hijo , I thought…”
“I’m not--” Teeth chattering with fear, John hid his face behind his wrist, dragging a tight fist against his fever-hot forehead. “I’m not gonna be able to say no.”
Here Father Garcia’s concern opened into surprise. He placed his hand back in his lap, leaned back in his seat. “I’m sorry, John. I didn’t realize--”
“Don’t lie. I know,” John muttered. “I know you know. You wouldn’t have done that if you didn’t.”
Father Garcia cast a guilty smile down at the floor between their beds. “I suppose not.”
For just a second, John moved his hand from his face, allowed himself a cautious glance at his companion before looking away again. “I knew, too. You--y-you wouldn’t have touched me like you have been if… if you weren’t…”
“I’m so sorry. I thought you liked it.”
“I do ,” John hissed. He put his face in his hands. “That’s the problem. I like it so much-- want it so much that it--it terrifies me.” He felt the telltale ache of suppressed tears welling up behind his eyes. “I’m so scared, Father.”
“Of--?” Father Garcia jerked his head back towards the TV.
“All of it. Getting sick. Being punished.”
Garcia crooked his brow. “Don’t tell me you believe that archaic nonsense.”
“Why wouldn’t I? It’s all we were taught, isn’t it?”
“The Bible was written by man, John, not God. Translated from Hebrew, Armaic, Greek. I know God put us on this Earth to enjoy its pleasures. Why would He create that one only to deign it conditional? Why would He create us with animal instincts still intact? Just to test us? You think He’s that cruel?”
“We can’t. We can’t do this. We’re both men. We’re both priests,” John moaned. Before Garcia could interject: “And don’t start with your nonsensical reasoning on that front. I worry we’re blasphemers; you say we’re more priest than the whole Vatican put together. I worry about breaking our vows, and you say they no longer apply. Which is it, then? Do we or don’t we still have to follow our doctrine?”
Father Garcia opened his mouth, shut it again. He ran one thumb over his opposite palm, thinking. “I don’t know, hijo ,” he finally conceded. “What I do know, I think, is that… when you want something, and that something is being offered to you, maybe… you can take it. Because it has to mean something that you and I are… alike in this way, in so many ways, and found one another through God.”
John looked at him. Hard brown face usually so certain, now soft and shy. John willed himself to move, to speak, but could only stare with eyes blown wide like a cornered animal.
“What about this?” Father Garcia murmured, reaching forward. He found one of John’s hands, and--and that was it. He just held it.
John felt himself melt slowly back into the pillows behind him. He pushed his hair out of his face while Father Garcia slowly scooched forward to sit beside him, against the headboard, keeping a hold on him all the while.
John couldn’t stop shaking.
“Do you think this is worthy of punishment, too?”
“God knows our intentions,” John replied numbly.
“You’re right. He does,” Father Garcia said. “Do you think He knows the future?”
John couldn’t see where Father Garcia was taking this, but he was grateful for the distraction, however small. “I… do, definitely. I think He can see futures , at least. Possible outcomes. If there is free will, it exists only because God can’t see which of any given set of outcomes will actually transpire. I don’t know. I think that makes some kind of sense.”
“So if God knew you and I doing this --” Father Garcia tightened his grip on John’s hand minutely--“was a possibility, and He hated the very thought of it, why would He still have brought us together?”
John closed his eyes. “Maybe we just made the wrong choice.”
Father Garcia scoffed. “You should ask. You’re one of His favorites; maybe He’ll tell us.”
John shot Garcia a scowl. Tension still knotted his gut, but the gentleness of Father Garcia’s touch, the sound of his breath so close beside him, calmed him slightly. Maybe there was something to asking outright.
With a frustrated sigh, John shifted, rotating his body slightly to face Father Garcia’s. Garcia mirrored him.
“Give me your other hand,” John said.
Garcia did. John took it in his opposite.
He closed his eyes.
“Lord, my Shepherd, lead me to… to know if this is right.” His voice grew weaker with every word. “Be with me as I decide whether to make my desires known. Please, please, send me a sign. If I’m falling off the edge of a precipice, one there’s no coming back from, tell me. I’m listening. I pray in your name.”
“Amen.” Father Garcia’s voice was so close. Delicate, John felt a pair of lips grace his forehead, between his brows.
He kept his eyes shut, weathering a wave of warmth and thrill that seemed to overtake his whole body.
“If that was meant to be a sign to stop, it isn’t working,” John mumbled. He pricked an eye open, waited for the lights to go out, the ceiling to fall, locusts to start crawling through the vents.
“Maybe one more try,” Father Garcia suggested.
John nodded.
The next kiss landed lower, on the apple of his cheek just below his right eye. Again, John felt his whole body fill with ecstatic, terrifying bliss.
“A-are you feeling that too?” he whispered to Father Garcia.
Garcia smiled. “Yes. Does it feel like a message?”
“Not the kind I expected to get,” John swallowed.
“Maybe if we gave God more to work with.”
“Okay.”
John’s heartbeat raced at full horsepower as Father Garcia propped himself up on an elbow and leaned closer, closer, so close the sour heat of their breaths mixed.
The feeling that chased Father Garcia’s lips, the tickle of his facial hair, felt like a sign, alright.
Garcia had barely pulled away when John asked him to do it again.
They pulled apart again, and Father Garcia adjusted his angle to press a kiss against John’s jaw, then just beneath it. Further and further down, Garcia’s lips pressed into the shy crook made by John’s angled neck.
“Ticklish?” Father Garcia whispered humoredly against his skin.
“Apparently,” John said shakily back.
Their entwined fingers finally broke apart as John freed both arms to drape around Father Garcia’s neck, pulling him closer. Father Garcia’s hand found John’s hip--despite his short stature, his palms were so wide compared to John’s, and his body felt dwarfed beneath Father Garcia’s touch. It made him think of his smallness, his weakness compared to all these forces so much greater than him--and as much as that frightened John, it also excited him in a way that was unfamiliar.
“Father, um--” John’s voice came out wispy as Garcia’s kisses dipped beneath the neckline of his tee-shirt--“you can… take that off, if you want.”
Father Garcia pulled away to laugh. “You don’t have to keep calling me Father, John. My name is Rafael. You can just use that.”
John looked up into his humored gaze, then elsewhere. “I-if it’s all the same to you, I… kind of like it.”
Father Garcia laughed again, sitting back to find the bottom of John’s shirt and ease it up past his bandages and over his head. “I wonder what the bishops would have to say about that.” He cocked his head, eyes crinkled in a smile, and his voice softened to a murmur. “Look at you.”
John did; he looked down at his sternum, still mostly covered by bandages. Flushed. What skin was exposed was still red and inflamed from the radiative heat of the burns, and that which had gone untouched by the fire was soft and flabby, loosened by malnourishment, bruised all over. “What’s there to see?”
“You lovely thing.” Father Garcia came close, sat beside him against the headboard so that their hips and shoulders were touching. He leaned over and placed a hand on John’s cheek to turn him.
“You’ve already seduced me, Father; you don’t need to flatter me, too,” John snipped, resisting just so when Father Garcia tried to urge him closer.
The soft hand on his cheek became a pair of fingers gripping his chin. “What I say, I mean, hijo. But don’t pretend you don’t love the flattery regardless. I know you like it when I praise you.”
John’s face neared boiling.
“You are a beautiful man.”
Beautiful. This time, when Father Garcia leaned in to kiss him, John didn’t pull away. No one had ever called him beautiful. It wasn’t something men often heard; John didn’t know he’d wanted for it.
Father Garcia reached over John’s body to rest his hand on his hip again, rotating his body a little, then leaned back in to draw his mouth over John’s neck, collar, and shoulders, skirting the edges of his dressings. Satisfied to live in this feeling, John rested his cheek against the side of Father Garcia’s head, feeling the prickliness of his coarse gray hair, smelling musty frankincense and the faded cedar of his aftershave.
Father Garcia was right. How could this not have been in God’s plan, when both their bodies, all their angles and curves and areas of roughness and plush, fit together so perfectly? How could God have seen this future and not known it to be the one they would choose? Two followers, plagued by guilt, so in need of one another?
“You’re beautiful, too,” John said, belatedly.
Father Garcia laughed against his skin, a sensory combination of sound and feeling that made John feel as though he were glowing with the light of heaven. “Now you’re the one doing the flattering.”
“Glass houses.”
Father Garcia came up to give John a wry grin before taking his face in both hands. “Come here,” he rumbled.
Their mouths met once more. John felt a brush of teeth against his bottom lip, Father Garcia testing new waters, and a heat that had been tempering steadily in John’s belly blazed anew. Blindly, his hand reached up to find one of Garcia’s. He took it in his and pulled it down from his cheek, back to his hip--and inward, until it landed flat against the soft curve of his belly just before it dipped down towards his thighs, at the elastic edge of his breeches.
Father Garcia pulled back just enough that their eyes might meet, and rested their foreheads, the bridges of their noses, together. Their breaths mingled in slightly labored pants. “Do you want me to touch you?”
John remembered his first night with Molly.
Desperate and more than a little drunk, they had come together in a supernova on the night of his unexpected release from the psychiatric institute--at first merely in search of the comfort of his only remaining friend, when Molly had kissed him, John was lost. Acting on instinct as an animal might, as ready as though it were his umpteenth time bedding someone and not, in truth, his first.
This was different. With Father Garcia, it felt like the reverse--like John was a virgin, still.
It was an incredible feeling, a terrifying freefall.
“Yes, Father,” John whispered.
He closed his eyes in shyness as Father Garcia slid his breeches over his hips and down his legs, gently discarding them on the floor.
Warm, callused fingers graced the surface of his thigh, moving upwards.
Father Garcia took him in his hand, and John slammed back into his body as suddenly as he had drifted out, overcome with the heat, the moisture, the beautiful grotesqueness of living.
Just a gentle palm lifting him up by the shaft, at first, running fingers along its underside, testing his sensitivity. Whimpering, John curled into Father Garcia, hiding his face in his neck.
“You’re not shy, are you?” Father Garcia chuckled, running his thumb over the head’s lipped edge. “What’s a brave man like you got to be shy about?”
“I-I’m not… shy,” John breathily managed, a shudder working its way up his spine. “I just haven’t… touched myself in--a-a few months.”
“Oh, hijo , that isn’t right.” Father Garcia’s voice was liquid velvet. “Facing the things you do, you’ve got to let out your tension somehow. I can help you.”
“Please,” John murmured, lifting his hips up towards Father Garcia’s hand. When those fingers brushed against his skin again, he practically felt lightheaded as all the blood in his burning cheeks seemed to rush between his legs, stiffening him beneath Father Garcia’s touch.
Father Garcia wrapped his hand around John at the base, then stroked his way up his shaft, increasing the pressure of his grip, tightening, tightening--
John sucked in a breath of air. “Shit, stop,” he croaked.
Father Garcia’s hand was off him in a second. “Are you alright?”
John rode out a full body tremor, groaning with glorious discomfort as he gripped himself restrictively. “I was going to--I--” He let out something that resembled a pubescent laugh. “I-I would have… I would have finished if you’d kept doing that.”
Father Garcia, bless him, didn’t laugh. Just smiled in good humor, reaching out to pat John’s thigh. “ Hijo, that’s fine. Like you said, it’s been some time.”
“No,” said John, shaking his head, hiding his blush behind his forearm. “I don’t want to stop yet. You just… can’t touch me like that.” He laughed again. Embarrassed as he was, elation made him want to do nothing but make fun of himself. “Sorry.”
“You apologize too much.” Father Garcia leaned close to press a peck against the side of John’s mouth. “Alright, another way, then. What about this?” His palm slid down John’s hip and over the soft swell of his rear.
“What abou--oh.” John swallowed. “In… inside?”
Now Father Garcia did laugh, and John felt hotter than a boiled lobster. “That’s an eloquent way of putting it. Yes, if you’d like. I’d only use my fingers; I don’t have a condom, and something tells me you don’t, either.”
John shook his head.
“Have you ever been fingered before? Or fingered yourself?”
What vivid language for such an unfamiliar context. He’d used his fingers on Molly, of course, and he knew, Biblically and through hearsay, anal penetration was within the realm of possibility.
“Of course not,” John mumbled.
“Well, I don’t know,” Father Garcia said, putting his hands up in surrender. “Who am I to assume? I have.”
“You have?” John stammered.
Father Garcia nodded. “Given and received. On my own, too, here and there. I find it very enjoyable.”
John was too busy working through the former half of Father Garcia’s statement to get to the latter just yet. “R-received,” he repeated. Before he could consider his tact, the question slipped out: “You’ve… been with other men before?”
Father Garcia was patient. “Yes. All before I entered the priesthood, of course; mostly in Vietnam. I enjoy the company of men and women both, hijo . Like you, I would imagine.”
Like him . To be pinpointed like this made John’s heart drop into his gut. Suddenly this all became very real, a moment of his life that would have ramifications beyond the walls of this motel room.
“Yes,” he admitted. “B-but I’ve never done anything with men before. I’ve only ever been with one woman, at that.”
Father Garcia assessed him gently. “Well, you’ve kissed a man now. And let him touch you.” He reached out, placed one hand on John’s cheek, returned the other to his thigh. “And if you want, you can let him make you come without even laying a hand on your dick.”
John’s head exploded.
Well, not really, but it certainly felt that way.
Father Garcia leaned back in to kiss him, and when he pulled away, John whispered, “Will it… I don’t know, hurt?”
“It will feel strange,” Father Garcia answered frankly, “but if you talk to me, help me make you feel good, no, it won’t hurt. Not just with fingers, anyway.”
John thought hard about the trust he would put into this veritable stranger—they’d known each other just under a month now.
“Tell me what you’ll do. Every step,” John demanded.
Father Garcia snickered. “Alright. Well, I’ll wet my middle finger—I don’t have lubricant, so likely with spit. Mine or yours.”
John took a deep breath, settled back amongst his pillows. “Okay.”
“And I’ll let you get used to the feeling of your ass being touched. Trace my finger around it.”
Sounded doable.
“And whenever you feel ready, I’ll put it inside. Again, give you a little time to get used to it. And then begin to move, slowly at first, like you would touching a woman that way.”
Being likened to a woman sent John into a dizzy fog of dissociation, the best kind. He could feel his erection reimposing itself, newly flush with warmth.
“When I reach far enough up, I’ll be able to press against the backside of your prostate. That’s the organ that creates your semen. It’s very sensitive, and putting pressure on it will feel…” Father Garcia looked up at the ceiling, smiling mischievously to himself as he mused. “If I haven’t lost my touch, hijo , it will feel intense, and hopefully very good. And if I do my job right—“ his finger traced the underside of John’s cock, yielding from him a surprised gasp—“you’ll come without any need for this.”
“Do it. Touch me,” John blurted, grabbing Father Garcia’s hand. “Before I chicken out. I-I want to feel it,” he croaked.
Father Garcia let out a kindly laugh. “Alright.” He kissed John again, quick, but wet. “Alright, hijo .” His fingers found John’s cheek again and brushed down along the gritted bulge of his jaw, thumb coming to land on his chin. Suddenly his middle and ring fingers rested upon John’s lips, applying the lightest touch of pressure. “Open for me.”
John did. Just like that, Father Garcia’s two hot fingers were at the tip of his tongue, requesting entry. Uncertain but desperate to do this as properly as he could, John looked to Father Garcia’s patient gaze for silent guidance, and sucked the fingers into his mouth.
Father Garcia searched him, or so it felt. John’s tongue caught between the two fingers; he jerked with a small gag when they filed back against its base.
“There you go,” Father Garcia was murmuring, “good and wet. Good boy.”
Good boy. Like he was a dog. John would gladly pant at Father Garcia’s feet. The image came into his mind unbidden and made him moan around the intrusion of the digits.
“You like this?” Father Garcia smiled. “It figures; priests should be good with their mouths.” He pulled his fingers from between John’s lips with a slick pop, pulling them apart to investigate the string of saliva that stretched between them. With his dry hand, Father Garcia gave John’s buttock a gentle pat. “Move down for me; I need you to be able to lift your hips a bit.”
John shuffled. Father Garcia caught his thigh as he moved closer, waiting until he had settled to push his left leg up towards his stomach.
“Again, all I’ll do now is touch you to get you used to the feeling. I won’t put anything in until you tell me you’re ready,” Father Garcia was saying, though John was mostly distracted by the fluttering in his stomach at the experience of the priest all but manhandling him, pushing and prodding his body into position for use. Almost procedural, medical. Newly spread open, Father Garcia had access to John’s hole, and reached down to press the wet pad of a finger against its surface.
John shivered, let out a raspy hum. What he felt was discomfort, no doubt about that--to feel Father Garcia’s finger against a previously untouched part of his body, bare and vulnerable, deeply shook him--but the sort that begged further exploration, from which one could not turn away.
“Not too bad, is it?” Father Garcia said gently, tracing his fingertip slowly in a circle around John’s rim. “Just strange at first.”
John took a deep breath to steady himself, then nodded. Father Garcia was right. Any sense of wrongness was amended by the thought that every part of his body had been untouched at one point in his life--from his genitals and his lips to even his hands, his hair. Places inside of him had been met with human touch, even: his shattered kneecap and the muscle surrounding it as a mere child, his innards when he had his appendix out in high school. When consent was granted, no part of him was sacred, and every part was sacred, the Spirit dwelling in every corner and crook.
Father Garcia was stroking his finger against him, increasing pressure when his finger slid over his entrance. Just once, Father Garcia pushed hard enough that just the tip of his finger slipped in; John gasped.
“Alright?” Father Garcia asked, returning to meditatively stroking the pinched muscles around the entrance while John felt himself twitching in reply.
“Uh--yeah.” He swallowed. “Sorry, it’s just… that didn’t hurt.”
“I told you it wouldn’t,” Father Garcia smiled, leaning down with his head cocked. “It’s only natural you feel it should--it’s not a part of our bodies we often find ourselves touching with all that much attentiveness.” Again, his fingertip dipped inside John, this time remaining there. “But it’s very sensitive. As much as our sex organs, if not more so, for some.”
John breathed again. In, out. He found the gentle pressure was pleasant when he relaxed his muscles around it.
Father Garcia’s finger came in further. Breathe in, breathe out. The wetness of his own spit slicking his insides. With his eyes shut, he didn’t see Father Garcia lean in to softly kiss his chin, the side of his mouth, his lips pursed in focus.
Further still. John felt tension, then release, as what he gathered to be Father Garcia’s second knuckle pressing inside him. Far within, Father Garcia’s top digits hooked, prodded quite suddenly at something that John felt like a staticky echo just behind the base of his dick. Half-conscious, he softly groaned.
Father Garcia chuckled. “There we go. You felt something, yes?”
John nodded, looking down between his legs as if any clarifying information were within his view. “It felt--good. Weird.”
“Mhm. Not bad, right?”
John felt a shy smile creeping across his lips. “Not bad,” he murmured. “Could you, um… touch it again?”
Father Garcia pulled his finger back, and then pushed it in again, a little faster than he had before. The drag made John’s breath catch, and the spark of electricity that met his fingertip pulsed through his pelvis, even more intense. John’s instinct was to let out a trembling laugh.
“Oh--G-God in Heaven, hear me,” he croaked, covering his hot face with a palm, “if sodomy is indeed a sin, I need another sign, a real one. B-because this might be your last chance before I forget to ask again. Amen.”
“Amen,” Father Garcia parroted him, grinning. And as if in Godsent reply, there was another sharp press deep inside him, a drum being struck.
“ Oh , Father!” John moaned. His cock bounced, rigid and red, against his belly as his body jerked. “Again. Please.” And so again the feeling came, seemingly growing in intensity each time Father Garcia’s finger yielded it. John gasped, every follicle prickling upright as a chill shot through him.
“You really want to feel it now?” Father Garcia purred. “You want me to fuck you, hijo?”
“Yes,” John hissed, clenching around the finger as though his muscles might implore it to move again. “Yes. Fuck me.”
Even the word tasted good on his tongue. Father Garcia leaned down to catch it in a kiss, chaste at first before he opened his mouth and slipped his tongue between John’s lips.
John felt a deep tug as Father Garcia pulled out again, this time far enough that only the fingertip remained. Again he pushed it inside, this time in one smooth motion rather than in gentle, halting pulses. He crooked his hand to pull back and then--softly at first--John began to feel the heel of Father Garcia’s palm thumping steadily against his ass. Deep within him, the stimulation blossomed, building pressure. Soft grunts scratched the back of his throat, and he felt his body begin to minutely rock the bed frame, hips and back microadjusting in time to meet Father Garcia’s hand as it worked him.
The finger slipped all the way out but for its tip, then, and a second appeared alongside it against the surface of John’s hole.
“Can I put another in?”
John let out a breath, nodding. “Yeah.”
Immediately, the stretch was noticable--Father Garcia’s fingers were not thin, and while John’s body had accepted one with relative ease, two put a strain on inexperienced muscles. John let out a long, low groan as Father Garcia inched his fingers in deeper.
“Does it hurt?”
John shook his head. “It j-just feels--overwhelming.”
“Need to take a break?”
“Mm-mm. Keep going. Please,” John added in a whimper.
Finally, he felt the heel of Father’s Garcia’s palm again as his fingers bottomed out. Father Garcia flexed his hand, and everything inside him, it seem, shifted--his ribs, his lungs, his heart--as he took in a great breath of air and exhaled it in a sigh. Father Garcia didn’t wait for John to recover. A slick sound, near silent at first, was audible from further down John’s body, hastening. Father Garcia’s fingers moving in him, working in him. Stimulating some long-hidden biological secret that John could not fathom being anything but a prize for God’s most exploratory souls. He felt it like a heartbeat, a tense cord thrumming in rhythm behind the wall of his abdomen--John had only ever been touched the one way before, had only believed there to be one way, as far as orgasm went. Sharp and centered in the overstimulated head of his dick. This was different, utterly: almost unrecognizable but for the telltale way his cock was reacting, twitching beneath the swelling tide of promised pleasure. The discomfort, if it could still be called that, was present--a sort of foreign fullness that set off panic signals in John’s brain--but he was quickly coming to like the thrilling stretch of it.
He didn’t even feel the drunken smile on his open, panting lips until Father Garcia leaned in to kiss them again.
“Feeling good, hijo? ”
“So good,” he rasped. “I… n-needed this.”
Father Garcia laughed. “I’m sure. After all the work you’ve done saving the world as we know it…”
“Stop; I know you’re buttering me up on purpose,” John exhaled.
“Maybe I am,” Father Garcia murmured into his neck. “You are blessed, John. God’s chosen warrior. He loves you. He sees you.”
All that came out of John now were heady gasps pulled from his open mouth.
“He sent me to help you, to guide you. To lessen the burden on you.”
“Y-yes,” John managed, syllable coming out sticky with the saliva flooding his jaws.
“Through me He rewards you,” Father Garcia murmured sweetly. “Through me He thanks you for everything you’ve done. You have every right to be gracious.”
John didn’t know he was crying until Father Garcia’s lips were there to kiss the salt from his cheeks. Dully, he felt callused fingers brushing up his thigh and into the dark tangle of hair above his throbbing dick. Father Garcia took him in his hand again, gently.
“You can come, hijo. You deserve as much.”
A squeeze, a stroke, and what felt like a bolt of lightning originated in John’s pelvis, deep below the surface of his skin. Heat, blossoming; psychedelic colors marbling behind his eyes as something white-hot and fluid burst against the skin of his belly, his bandaged chest, even--he thought--his chin, once. Someone somewhere was moaning in steamy exclamations, in time to the bursts of pleasure; only belatedly did John realize it was he, crying out like a slut beneath this older, more experienced man’s warm, massive hands.
How fucking hot was that?
Endorphins had him high as he peeled his eyes open, grinning, chest heaving.
“Good boy,” Father Garcia was praising him softly, thumbing away the ejaculate that had nailed John’s chin. “You definitely needed that.”
John was laughing, wheezily. “I did.” He lifted a shaking hand and drew it through a rope of cum painting his stomach. “Oh, God in Heaven. Amen.”
Father Garcia shuffled to recline beside him, shaking out his labored wrist. John groaned, stretched, turned sideways to meet his eyes.
“Can I--is there something I can do for you now, Father?” John was full of directionless bliss, manifested in love, affection for Father Garcia. His hand tracked lazily over the bedsheets between their bodies and landed on the priest’s thigh, still clothed. “I can’t promise I’ll be any good, but if you’d have me…”
Father Garcia placed his hand over John’s. “You’re sweet. At my age, I don’t need it nearly as desperately. Rest, hijo . Then we’ll get you cleaned up.”
John was too wiped to argue further. “Would you let me another time?”
A wry smile upturned Father Garcia’s silver mustache. “What, pray tell, would that other time entail?”
John blushed, looked elsewhere. “I don’t know. You said you liked being fingered; I could try that. Or you… said priests should be good with their mouths, so…”
Father Garcia’s smile split into a grin. “You liked having my fingers in your mouth that much, did you? If I didn’t know any better, John, I’d say you’ve thought about sucking cock before.”
Face fiery, John hid a smile behind the side of his hand.
“Whose?” Father Garcia prompted. His eyes were half-lidded, unjudging. “If anyone’s.”
“There was, um… another guy at seminary,” John murmured. “Nothing ever happened. He’d take my hand if we were near, scratch my palm with his nail. We listened to music in our dorms and sat close together. I thought about him, so much, but--wh-when stuff started coming about about AIDS, it petered out.”
Father Garcia nodded. “Was he the only man?”
“Yeah. Didn’t really get to know any more after I graduated and got ordained. The joy of serving my parish felt like enough.” John shifted his jaw, wetting a dry mouth. “Then there was Molly, and then… well, here we are.”
“Your wife?”
“Yeah.” John’s voice dropped low. “She… she was just a friend. I mean, I was attracted to her, but--we shouldn’t have…”
“How did you meet?”
“She tended bar at a place near the seminary dorms. My classmates and I would go in the evenings, and she always liked me. Wasn’t shy about it. It was like a joke between us; the lovers that could never be. It sounds strange, but I was happy with it. She was so kind to me, and chose to stay my friend even if she would’ve liked us to be more than that. The night I got out of the psych ward, I went to her. We were drunk, and she kissed me, and…” John shook his head, nestling into the pillow as he felt his eyes sting with guilt. “I knew I’d made a mistake as soon as we woke up the next morning. It wasn’t about the sex; more… everything that preceded it. I was so unmoored without my priesthood. My calling, my greatest love, taken from me. I adored Molly; I always will. But my heart was empty without my work, and I relied on our commitment to each other to fill what really only could be by my faith.”
John exhaled. Absently, he stroked his thumb over Father Garcia’s thigh.
“I don’t feel that way now. I guess having broken my vow of chastity once before means doing it a second time, with somebody new, is child’s play by contrast.”
Father Garcia chuckled, finding John’s hand and taking it in his own. “Your faith was at its weakest when you left the psychiatric hospital. You may as well have been a different man entirely.” He pulled John’s hand up to his lips and gave it a kiss. “I’m sure you know now that the conditions of God’s love are far graver than whether you have sex, and with whom you have it.”
John’s chest felt warm and fluttery. All that Father Garcia had given him--this night, his care, his words--had John feeling more secure in his status than he had in years. He was a priest. Maybe not in the eyes of the Vatican, but certainly in the familiarity of his God, so generous with the beauty He put upon the Earth.
“Can I come closer?” His voice came out soft, fluttery with excitement. “Can you hold me?”
Adoration in his eyes, Father Garcia only held his arms open. John shifted forth until the tips of their noses nearly touched, and Father Garcia closed his hold around him, enveloping John in warmth. He buried his face in the crook of Father Garcia’s shoulder and extended his arms around his back, locking them together with softly breathing chests and interwoven legs.
“I’m so happy,” John whispered. “I haven’t felt this way in… years. Maybe ever. Closest I’ve come was being ordained.”
“I’m glad I’m up there with the clergy,” Father Garcia chuckled, such that John could feel the shakes of his body against him. Quieter: “I’m happy too, hijo. You’re in afterglow; I don’t know what my excuse is.”
“Well, where two or more are gathered in His name…”
Father Garcia’s hand found the back of John’s head. He began to brush his fingers through his hair, and John hummed at the feeling.
He is there among them.
Eventually, John would be gently roused and reminded that he should get cleaned up. He would change into clean undergarments and crawl into bed beside Father Garcia, the two of them coming together again to tiredly kiss before sleep took hold, their skin pressed together. In the warmth of their contact--the promise of more to come--John felt unquestionable grace.