Chapter 9
9
S o I kissed him again, drawing his body close against mine. I pressed my tongue against his lips and felt a thrill when he let out the faintest of moans.
“I am ashamed,” he admitted when I pulled away. “That dream haunted me. I thought of it again and again; went to confession for it again and again.”
“You looked so beautiful like that,” I told him, and his eyes went wide with the understanding that I had been there. That perhaps it hadn’t been a dream at all.
“I still believe in God,” he told me.
“I am not here to talk about love. I am here to talk about us. Do you feel what I feel?”
He did not answer me, turning away in shame. I reached out and pulled his chin back towards me.
“Tell me,” I urged him. My eyes flickered down to where the bulge beneath his robes was growing steadily in size.
“ Yes.”
I crowded against him, turning his body so we were facing the altar. Then I pushed him up the steps until we were before the pure marble slab, lined with a purple cloth and covered with candles and crosses.
I made sure to disturb none of it as I pressed Oliviero face down onto the mensa. Then I carefully rolled up his cassock until it was bunched around his neck, and his whole lower half lay exposed to me.
His legs quivered. His feet were as bare as our brethren’s, and I watched with desire as he strained on the tips of his toes, calf muscle bulging with the effort. He wore simple black shorts and a white linen shirt. I reached up, fingers gliding beneath the shirt to touch the belt of skin around his waist.
He shivered. “Wait?—”
I stopped moving but kept my fingers pressed to him. “No one has to know.”
“God will know,” he whispered.
“God does not care half as much as you think it or wish it. I called to him for my whole life. Only Asmodeus answered.”
“As is the devil’s way.” He was shivering, straining to look at me over his shoulder. But I wasn’t holding him down anymore. He could have stood and run at any time.
He was just like me.
“I am no devil, nor demon. I’m a man, same as you. And I have wanted you for years.”
He melted visibly, exhaling so shakily that he spread himself further across the mensa. One of the crosses wobbled precariously from a tap of his outstretched arms.
“If you participate and realise you were wrong—that you hated it, and you are full of shame—then repent and tell the truth to the bishop. Tell him a demon of lust took the form of Don Alessandro and, to save your brethren, you gave yourself to ensure their purity.”
Oliviero quivered, “A lie.”
“Is it?” I ran my hands up his exposed legs and tugged gently at the shorts. “Are you telling me you do want this?”
Oliviero gasped, evidently surprised at what he had said—at what he had realised about himself.
“I. . .” he whimpered. His body shifted away from my touch, though at times it would betray him, pressing back into me. His back was arched.
“Let me show you what I tore open Hell for,” I breathed against his skin.
Barely a second passed before I heard him relax. He shivered and turned his face away from me. I knew the urge to hide one’s face and I awarded him that vulnerability. He was regarding the cross, I thought. He was saying his own prayer.
But in the end, he could not resist.
“Yes.” Mouse-like, ever so quiet. “Yes.”
I gently pulled down his shorts.
Oliviero roughly inhaled, gasping as the chill touched his exposed ass. His skin was smooth, the hair fine in both colour and thickness. I gripped him, squeezing against the firm muscle. How good he looked stretched out like that. The swell of his balls hung beautifully between his legs. I pressed firmly against his lower back, encouraging him to spread further, and I caught a glimpse of his quivering hole.
I leaned into the crack between those two muscles and licked.
“ Ah!”
Oliviero bucked in surprise, clenching hard. I pressed his cheeks apart, spreading them for better access. My gaze trickled down the length of Oliviero’s spine. I thought I was well past the days of considering myself a holy man, but I understood something in the alabaster perfection of his body; how easy it could be to worship.
I buried my face right in the middle of him, slowly, as if not to spook an animal. I nuzzled, opening my breath to exhale warm breath. It was enough to make Oliviero pigeon-toed, knees turning inward as he fought himself. He bowed his head, and I heard a soft, near-impatient whine. Vassago had made me love this, and how I wanted to see Oliviero melt with pleasure. I grazed my stubble against him, and he bucked toward me. His balls lurched upwards, and I pressed the broad, flat span of my tongue to his hole. Oliviero’s cry was ragged. I dragged my tongue over him in long laps, and then in circling motions, teasing at the knotted muscle as it pulsed and squeezed. The sound grew increasingly sloppy; there was the wetness, my rough breathing, and Oliviero’s whines. But I could draw more out of him: I wanted to hear him beg, to moan my name, to become so wanton and free that he was transformed by his pleasure. I pressed the tip of my tongue to him and pushed, pushed, pushed inside. Splayed as he was, I was the one who bounced back and forth, neck bobbing to fuck forward with my tongue. Every thrust made Oliviero squirm, his knees turning inward.
“Good boy,” I told him when I next stopped for air. “You’re being so good for me.”
“I—” Oliviero started, but embarrassment overcame him. He buried his head into the crook of his elbow and tried to muffle his moans. With my tongue free, I pressed my left thumb into his hole, using the rest of my left hand to grab his ass. With my right, I reached up to his stiff cock, perilously hard. I drew his hips away from the altar so there was room, and I squeezed my hand around his length. Thumb moving, I matched the rhythm to my strokes. Oliviero bucked and strained and moaned, and my mouth welled with drool at the sight of his desperation.
He came fast, splattering the concave curl of his chest, and he collapsed with sudden shame, whimpering on the altar.
I stood and leaned over him, needing to give my own cock a quick, nearly unconscious squeeze to stay me.
I could put him on his knees and use the wet channel of his throat, as I had in Hell, but I wanted more. I wanted to gape him, to make him understand the pleasure of being filled; of being made complete.
“You became an abbot. You dedicated your life to this. But you feel it, don’t you? What I felt?” I rested on his body, moving the mess of blond curls away from his forehead. I kissed his cheek, rubbing my lips against the sweat-coated skin. “Let me inside you. Let me fuck you, Oliviero.”
He let out a low, long buried moan. His body shivered; he was vulnerable post-orgasm, logic stripped away.
“Mhm,” he said, but I need more than that.
“Tell me what you want,” I say.
“No, I. . .” A panicked edge overcame his voice. He half pushed away, gathering the cloth laid over the altar in his fist. “I can’t. I can’t.”
“I need you to.”
I said nothing more, but I stepped forward and rubbed my hips against his ass, slipping my cock between the crack and resting the tip against the saliva-coated hole.
“Oh, hh. . .” Oliviero gasped. He made an abortive roll of his hips before he panicked and looked away.
I wanted to see Oliviero’s face. “Turn over for me.”
He obliged almost instantly. I watched with rapt attention as he lowered himself to the flat of his feet and, melting, rolled onto his back at an uncomfortable arch. He looked—pathetic. Beautiful. Gorgeous and wanting. He looked just as I had imagined him all those years ago. The cassock had gathered excessively around his chest, making his body appear exceptionally small as it emerged from the fabric.
If you’re going to be my bitch, you won’t be wearing God’s dog collar .
Asmodeus had said that to me and forced me to remove it. But I was different.
I liked to know that God was watching.
But I wanted to see more of Oliviero.
Carefully, I raised my fingers to the rounded fabric buttons closing his cassock and undid them one by one. The collar I slipped out with two fingers, and I put the cotton against Oliviero’s lips. “Open.”
He opened, and I pushed in. He bit down hard on the fabric with a whine.
Slowly, I opened the cassock up and tugged him free of it, discarding the garment on the floor by my feet.
He scrambled back onto the mensa, knocking over several crosses. He looked around with uncomprehending horror, fingers shaking as he reached to right them. I stepped forward and pressed my cock against his belly.
Oliviero stopped moving, eyes wide as he regarded me.
“Tell me what you want,” I asked again, reaching down to pluck the collar from his teeth.
He looked up at me with sudden defiance. “I don’t know. I’m scared. I want—” he said nothing, only paused. “But I—I do not wish God to see.”
“Let him see.”
I ran my hands up his thighs and around his slowly hardening member. His eyes stared at my cock, painfully hard against him. He reached for it haltingly.
I encouraged him with, “I want you to touch me.”
He exhaled loudly and rolled his palm around it. “Oh, Lord.”
I watched as his cock jumped to sudden life.
I worked him slowly, and he worked me, eyes fixated on my cock and the way the foreskin bunched and stretched over the swollen glands. His eyes filled with surprise, with tears, with pleasure.
I reached past him to the anointing oil sitting on the altar. “Watch me,” I commanded him, though he was the most attentive audience I’d ever had. I dipped my forefinger and middle finger inside and drew them out, coated and glistening. My thumb rubbed up and down my fingers, ensuring every inch of skin was slick with it.
“Tell me.”
“I—” Oliviero blushed further. He couldn’t look in my eyes. “I want it.”
With my other hand, I roughly snatched his chin. He hissed, pained, and I shook firmly until I was certain he wasn’t looking away. “ Tell me what you want.”
Oliviero’s lip buckled. The oil slick ran down my fingers and over my third knuckle. He panted, opened his mouth, closed it, his skin blistering red with his shame. “I want you.”
“ Oliviero!” I bellowed, frustrated.
He squeezed his eyes shut. “I want you inside me! I want you to fuck me! I wish I had never become a novitiate; I wish I had lived as other men do! I am full of regret, and if you could just—show me! Show me what my body is meant to feel like!”
I drew him into a kiss so long and passionate I could feel the tears on his cheeks as they fell. Shame did that to you. Release did much the same.
“I loved you ,” he whispered, brows crashing together as he stared up at me.
“I loved you, too,” I said honestly, and I wiped away the tears from his cheek. “Are you ready?”
“I want it,” he nodded, mouth open. “Put your fingers inside me.”
I couldn’t stop myself after that. My body convulsed, and my jaw went slack with submission. I brought my coated fingers to his hole, slotting them in the slightly widened indentation, pushing through any resistance until those two fingers slipped inside.
Oliviero was so aroused my fingers slipped in up to the second knuckle on entry. He moaned, clenching so tightly around them. His mouth hung wide open, jaw slack—completely unguarded. Completely vulnerable. I dropped my grip from his chin and wrapped my hand around his cock, squeezing just once. The motion made him unwind. He slumped against the altar, legs in the air, and I could pulse my fingers in and out of him with ease.
“Relax. Let me take care of you.”
“Yes. Yes.” He somehow flushed another shade darker as he said it, hands flying over his face, covering his eyes and his shame.
“Look at me,” I breathed, pushing another finger inside him.
He convulsed, bucking up, and his hands flew away from his face with the shock of the feeling. I nearly took him then and there—my cock seized at the sight of him and his beauty.
Oliviero met my gaze.
I bucked forward, pressing my erection to the underside of his balls. Something changed in his body and his expression, a shift that moved him away from shame towards desire. I knew it intimately; I’d experienced it myself.
But I wanted to give Oliviero something I hadn’t received that first time. I leaned over him and cupped his beautiful face in my hands. Our bodies pressed against one another. He shivered as if cold. I pressed my lips to his, waiting for his shivering to stop, and then I kissed him deeply, opening my mouth against the warmth of his lips. His legs fell open, and I collapsed on him, drawing myself ever closer as he wrapped his arms around my neck. Between our flush forms, I reached, drawing our cocks together between my fingers until they were pressed from root to tip. I rocked my hips against him, gripping the two of us in my right hand, all the while still kissing him. I pressed my tongue against his teeth, and he opened his lips with a moan. Bit by bit, his body understood what to do, and it wasn’t so much about him relaxing anymore as it was about this bodily instinct; an innate understanding. An intrinsic want. He was like me, so well versed with fantasy and years of longing that, at the moment of reception, he knew what to do.
“ I want it ,” he breathed against my lips.
“Be specific,” I bade him, thumb gliding over his lower lip as if to coax the words from his mouth.
“ You ,” he whispered, all reverent with his tone. Just as I had been with Asmodeus. “ Enter me. Defile me.” Then, louder. “I don’t care anymore. I want?—”
He wanted, and that was what mattered. I wanted. The pair of us, who had been moulded by the church, flogged and scolded and bent into a particular kind of submission to a Lord who never cared— we could submit to a different kind of religion and, in it, find the blissful eternity we had been chasing all our lives. His words disarmed me, the look in his eyes compelling me forward. I ran my hands over his thighs and hauled them up, spreading them wide so he was curled up on the arch of his back, hole exposed for me. I positioned myself against the puckered muscle.
“Let me put the fear of God in you,” I whispered.
Oliviero whimpered, and I pressed inside.
“God!” Oliviero moaned, hand fumbling up to catch my shoulder, the other thrusting out over the mensa to twist in the cloth. His face contorted, rapturous as he took me to the hilt. The pressure on my shoulder twisted to pain as Oliviero’s nails dug in. I stroked his hips, assuring him, “You can take it. You’re a good boy; I know you can take it.”
His body shuddered, hand slipping into the tangle of my dark hair to pull me down. Our foreheads knocked together, both our skin slick with sweat. His hole flexed around my length, and so for many moments, I didn’t move, though it was agonising waiting for him. When his hips relaxed—the tiniest, near imperceptible roll over my cock—I dragged myself out halfway and then clapped back, thunderous with my thrust.
Oliviero threw his head back with a cry, and as I thrust again and again in a slow, heavy pace, the chapel filled with a litany of moans echoing in the marble arches. We were watched by an audience of carved angels, by Jesus’ stations of the cross, by God Himself: we were watched and not smote. Nothing could have pulled me away from the wet warmth of Oliviero.
Every gasp that emerged from him was shallow and airy. His eyes rolled to the back of his head. I splayed my hand over his chest, covered in a light down of blond-brown hair, curling over his tall and aroused pink nipples. I folded into him, tongue roaming over them, sucking at them, thrusting slow and controlled until he was so wanting Oliviero began to squirm impatiently, urging me for more.
I rocked back off him, hands gripping his pale ankles as if they were the reins of a horse tack, and I pulled his ass closer. Then, I drove forward with every bit of strength and desire I possessed in my body.
Oliviero howled, his loud cry petering out to a reedy whine as I thrust again and again into the warm pocket of his body. He was gulping air, crying out, pathetic and beautiful, as his cock bounced between us. Near translucent precum beaded at the tip, dribbling down the sides. It was complete submission; he gave me no resistance nor any help: he was rendered into nothing but a toy for my own desire, a receptacle for my cum. His eyes were heavy-lidded, as if every thrust forced his immortal soul further out of his flesh. I was defiling him. He could never return from this.
“What would they think if they knew?” I whispered, still thrusting hard. I had to shout it over the choral cry of his pleasure. “All the men who entrusted you with their faith? With all their worries and their doubts? What would they do if they knew you were a whore, just like Don Alessandro?”
Oliviero’s whimper was shameful. His teeth slammed together in a desperate attempt to contain his cries. But then his eyes snapped open, and, through tears of shame, I saw his eyes roll back with sudden pleasure.
I didn’t even have to touch him. All at once his cock bucked. His release shot into the air, splattering over my chest, and he clenched so firmly I couldn’t have pulled free from him even if I’d wanted to. Oliviero’s spent cock wobbled between us. Both his stomach and my chest were wet with our shared pleasure. I felt the urge building inside me—that moment where it all changed from good to don’t stop . My body urged me to keep moving in him, but I took my time, dragging myself out so I felt every inch of his hole, every smooth moment, until the tight, puckered opening squeezed my sensitive glands. This rolling motion was an unbreakable rhythm. Not even God could have interfered in that moment. I buried myself all the way to the hilt and dragged out all the way to the tip, finding a perfect pace that let it all build, build, build until my core was tight and pulsing. Sweat drenched me,
“Oliv—”
I couldn’t even form the word.
“ Yes!” Oliviero whispered, astonishment curling in his tone.
With all the force of Hell, my body shuddered, and I came in him, the pleasure rolling in waves until the faintest aftershocks left me twitching inside him. He clenched again over my sensitive member—I had to pull free of him with a sharp, overstimulated hiss.
I collapsed against him, and he let me. Oliviero’s hands spun through my hair, the sweat of my brow pressed to the sweat of his heaving chest.
We held each other for minutes until the heat of desire evaporated, and we were left chilly from our cooling sweat. And we cried.
They weren’t tears of shame. They were great, heaving sobs of relief. Something had been taken from my back, a pressure I hadn’t realised had been pressing down on me for a small eternity. Unburdened, I pressed my face into his neck and held him tightly.
“Thank you,” I told him. “Thank you.”
When I uncoupled from Oliviero and looked down at him, his eyes were staring off into the distance. His red-rimmed eyes could not see me.
I cupped his cheek and urged him to look at me. His head rolled limply.
“Do not do this to yourself,” I told him. I could recognise shame clawing back into his body.
He flickered back into himself and blinked rapidly, brows crashing together in a weak frown. “What am I meant to do now?”
He sounded—accusatory. Upset. It was a misplaced anger, but I knew it well.
I leaned forward, and he let me kiss him, slow and languorous. When I pulled away, his cheeks were flushed again.
“You are beautiful,” I told him. “And I have always wanted to do that to you. Maybe I should have, years ago; maybe I wouldn’t have gone to such extremes to ease the suffering of my body if I had. But I will tell you this, Oliviero: do not be like me. Do not give yourself to an institution that won’t repay you. It will take and take until you are a husk. You may still believe in God. You may still love Him—I will never fault you for your faith. But people corrupted His love for us. They made laws in His name. You do not have to follow them.”
“How can you say such a thing when you have seen Hell?” he whispered, voice tiny.
“All I have experienced in Hell is my true self,” I murmured. “All I have experienced is pleasure. I know myself better than I ever have.”
He blinked at me, unconvinced, though with his body spent and latent pleasure throbbing behind his belly, I knew he would think on these words.
“Why did you come back?” he whispered. “Just for me? Have I failed a test from God?”
“It was no test for you. It was a test for me,” He didn’t know what to say to this. I kissed him again. “I feared what you thought of me. I know most of our brethren outside will doubt I was ever a good man.”
He was still flushing as he looked at me. “You are a good man.”
“Perhaps. But I am also a man who desires the pleasures of the flesh. In the eyes of the church, I cannot be a wholly good man.”
“Then I. . .” his voice went high. I shushed him.
I pulled away from Oliviero. With the lack of contact, exposed as he was on the altar, he bolted upright and off. His body shook. The shame was eating him alive.
I pulled him into an embrace and waited for the shaking to stop.
“You can be absolved because God loves you. But so too can you enjoy your body and worship God if you so wish.”
“Then why haven’t you done so?” he sounded desperate. He clung to me, burying his beautiful face against my shoulder. “Stay. Stay here with me. Or we can leave—together. Let us go and find a place where we can worship God and share love with one another.”
And I tell you, I was tempted. I imagined worshipping and loving Oliviero unabashed.
But I knew it wouldn’t work. Not for me, not for someone who had worked to rid himself of the institution’s foul grasp. Not when I imagined a life with Vassago and knew there would be no true freedom in a world that despised my love.
I looked Oliviero in the eye and told him, “Because God never answered my call. Only Asmodeus did.”
I knew this was where our paths would divulge. Oliviero would never follow me into Hell; nor did I want him to. It was my path, and he was part of that path as I was on his.
“What will you tell them?” I asked.
He looked towards the door, frowning hard. “I do not know.” Then, a visible swallow. “Not the truth. Only God will know the truth.”
I nodded; it was for the best this way.
I turned to go, and he reached out for my hand. I paused, looking back at him.
“I don’t know what I’ve done,” he said, and for a long moment, I didn’t expect him to say anything more. Then, quietly, he whispered, “But I thank you for it.”
I slipped my hand free, turning it to plant a gentle kiss on the back of his hand.
“You deserve pleasure without shame,” I told him, told myself.
And I left the abbey behind for good.