by Todd Gregory
“So why can’t you do it yourself?” I ask as I lick the joint to seal the paper and reach for the lighter. I already know the answer. It can’t be traced back to him because whatever it is, it’s a shitty thing to do.
The president’s hands must be clean.
Phil is just as big a whore as I am, but he’s somehow managed to keep his reputation pure as the driven snow. The only reason the brothers even know he’s gay is because he doesn’t fuck girls. He’s always been ambitious, always wanted to be president, so it’s very important to him to have a good reputation around the house. Everyone likes him.
They don’t know him the way I know him.
“Come back.” His voice takes on a wheedling tone. “It’s so boring here with you gone.”
“It was your decision to spend the summer there, you have no one to blame but yourself. I told you San Felice is no place to spend the summer.” I put the joint between my lips. “Besides, I’m not staying here much longer.” I look at my watch. “I’m taking the red-eye to New York tonight at ten.”
My aunt won’t be sorry to see me go. She didn’t want me to come, and we came to an understanding. She’s not that much older than me—she’s actually my mother’s half sister. But my mother, as the oldest, controls the trusts my grandfather left behind for all of us, and my mother likes people to do what she wants them to. I don’t know what bug crawled up my mother’s ass to throw Aunt Lucy and me together for a couple of weeks—I think she likes to piss Lucy off because she’s young, honestly. Meantime, my mother is off on a cruise with a bunch of her friends and my father is in Europe, I think, with his latest girlfriend, who’s my sister’s age. Maybe.
Lucy and I understand each other. I do my thing, she does hers, and no one’s the wiser.
But I’d forgotten how fucking boring Polk was.
I’ve wasted over a week with Jaden Strauss.
“New York? What are you doing there?”
“I’m going to Fire Island. Jordy Valentine’s rented a house for the summer.” Jordy’s father made more money than God inventing a computer program. Jordy pledged the Beta Kappa house at CSU–Polk before I transferred to San Felice. We fucked a couple of times—he has a big dick—but now he’s all monogamy-minded with a hot architect whose name I can’t ever remember.
Dante! That’s his name. All muscle and olive-skinned with big blue-black bedroom eyes.
But they can’t be that monogamy-minded if Jordy’s spending the summer on Fire Island, on the other side of the country.
“If he’s rented the place for the whole summer you can go anytime, you don’t have to go tonight,” Phil replies. “Come down to San Felice for at least a week before you go. You’ve got to meet this guy. I’ll text you his picture.” There’s silence for a moment, and then my phone vibrates.
I touch the screen. “He’s cute.”
“Soccer player, wants to be a soccer coach.”
Which means he has a great ass. And probably a great body. Soccer players always do. It’s all that running.
“And get this—he was in training to be a priest but dropped out because he’s gay.”
“A virgin?” I yawn. “No thanks.”
There has to be more to this, though. Phil wouldn’t need me to seduce a virgin just because. I wait. He’ll tell me soon enough.
“He’s Rubin Monterro’s nephew.”
Ah, there it is. Phil hates Rubin Monterro. It’s not just because he’s alumni president. It goes deeper than that, but I don’t care. I don’t care about Rubin Monterro, and I’m not interested. “I don’t think so. Fire Island sounds better. Good-bye, Phil. I’ll call you when I get there.” I disconnect the call and put the phone back down on the table. I light the joint and take a deep toke.
He won’t be happy, but he’ll get over it. One of the things about our friendship is we know way too much about each other.
A virgin. That wouldn’t even be a challenge.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with virgins. I’m just not one of those guys who likes to break in new gays, you know? They almost always get too attached and make getting rid of them too hard. They cry. They stalk you. They keep hoping you’ll change your mind.
Closeted guys are much easier to get rid of.
And seriously, if you’ve taught one guy anal hygiene, you’ve more than done your duty. Christ, teaching guys how to be good in bed is so tiring.
Some of them, though, are naturals.
A priest wannabe, though?
I’d have to walk him through every step of the way.
I ain’t got time for that—just like I don’t have the patience to do any more training of Jaden.
I hear the sliding glass door open and shut again. Jaden’s walking toward me stark naked, his little dick hard and bouncing. He’s got a condom and lube in one hand, another frosted margarita in the other one. I sigh. The margarita is welcome, of course, but his damned body is so perfect it’s really a shame about the dick, you know?
Then again, that body will get him laid a lot.
You win some, you lose some.
It’s a trade-off.
He puts the drink down on the table and pulls my bikini down. He gets down on his knees and takes me in his mouth.
“No teeth,” I remind him as I take another hit off the joint.
I’ve been fucking him for over a week and I still have to remind him about his teeth.
He’s lucky he’s pretty.
At least he’s good with his tongue.
He likes to lick my dick, which is good since he’s so bad at sucking. He can’t deep throat for shit, and his next fuck can teach him how to properly suck cock, you know? But he’s good at worshipping. He likes having a dick in his mouth. I look over at my phone and pick it up again while Jaden licks and slurps and gets my cock nice and wet with his spit.
The guy is more than cute, really. He’s pretty good looking—better looking than Jaden, and he’s pretty.
I wonder for a minute why Phil wants me to fuck him—it doesn’t really make sense. Why would Rubin care if his openly gay nephew was having sex?
But I forget about it because Jaden is putting the rubber on me and guiding me inside him, and he needs my full attention. I reach down and push him down on my dick while I shove up with my hips at the same time. His eyes open wide and he gulps for a minute.
“I’ve been too easy on you,” I growl at him. “You want to get fucked like a little bitch, don’t you?”
He nods, his eyes still bugging out. “Uh-huh,” he manages to gulp out.
I shift my weight and get my legs down on the tile. I’m bigger than he is—he’s maybe five-eight, one forty, and I’m six-three and about two twenty pounds of hard-trained gym muscle—so standing up with my dick still deep inside him isn’t easy, but it’s doable.
He’s gasping and moaning as I get up. The movement is driving me deeper into him.
And he likes it. Oh, yeah, he likes it.
His eyes look into mine as I carry him over to the side of the house and lean him back against it. “Put your hands on my shoulders, bitch, and hang on.”
I start pumping him, pulling out as far as I can with his legs wrapped around me and then trying to drive my cock not into him but through him as hard as I can. Every time he gulps and gasps and he’s having trouble catching his breath and I just keep on, working a rhythm to match my heartbeat, out then in, out then in, and I can feel it starting inside me, and he is shooting cum all over my torso but I keep fucking him, fucking him deep and hard and he’s trembling and gasping and drool is coming out of the side of his mouth and tears are running out of his eyes and he comes again and then finally I am, shuddering as I squirt my load into the condom. Sweat is running down my forehead as I slide out of him and lower him until his feet are on the ground. I keep holding him because he sways, like he can’t stand by himself while his cum is running down my torso.
“Lean against the house,” I say, letting go and walking over to
get the hose. I wash his cum off me, pull the condom off, and neatly knot it, tossing it into the garbage can right outside the sliding glass doors. I rinse off my dick, turn off the water, and go back to the chair. I pick up my towel and wipe myself dry.
“Wow,” he says, still leaning against the house, smiling at me. “That was amazing, Brandon.”
“You’re welcome.” I slide my bikini back on, then my board shorts. I pull on my T-shirt and put my watch back on.
“You’re leaving?” It finally dawns on him that I’m getting dressed. “But I thought—”
I slide my feet into my sandals and put the pinched-out joint into the baggie, which I toss into my gym bag. I put my sunglasses on.
He really isn’t very smart.
“I’m going home, Jaden. I’ve got to pack.”
“Pack?” He looks confused.
“You look so cute when you’re confused,” I reply.
“You’re leaving?”
“Yup. Flying to New York tonight, heading out to Fire Island for about a week.” I sling the gym bag strap over my shoulder.
“When—when are you coming back?”
I shake my head. “I’m probably not.” I walk over and bend down and kiss him on the forehead. “It’s been fun, Jaden.”
“But I thought—”
I put my index finger over his lips. “Don’t think, Jaden. It’s not your strong suit.”
Okay, that was a little mean.
“But—” He looks like he’s going to cry.
“Don’t cry, it’s for the best.” I kiss him on the nose this time. “Your girlfriend never has to know. And isn’t that what you want?”
He starts sniveling. He is going to cry.
Time to get out of here.
“Good-bye, Jaden.”
The gate swings shut behind me as I walk out to the car.
RICKY It breaks my heart to hear my mother cry.
My brother Sergio thinks I shouldn’t have told her, but how could I go on living a lie?
It was making me crazy, making me unhappy. And God knows what is in our hearts, doesn’t he? So I wasn’t fooling God. How could I become a priest knowing what was in my heart, knowing that God knew what was in my heart?
I know what the Holy Father says, but I could not serve God with that on my conscience.
Father Romero, as always, was so kind and understanding. “You’re having a crisis of faith,” he said to me when I confessed everything to him at long last. “The feelings aren’t a sin, the act is a sin. Yes, you sin in your heart when you think those lustful thoughts, but maybe it’s best for you to go out in the world. If your calling is true, you will find your way back to God.”
If only he had been the one to tell my mother.
Her parish priest is not so understanding. Father Juan refused me the sacraments.
I hope I won’t have that problem in San Felice.
Father Juan wasn’t the one who found—no, I can’t think about that now. It wasn’t my fault. Father Romero said so, no one blamed me for it.
And of course I couldn’t tell Mama about it.
“Don’t be stupid, Sergio, hard as it is,” says my oldest sister, Lupe, who’s twenty-five, as she lights a cigarette. She puts down the window of the old Buick she is driving so the smoke can go out the window. “It doesn’t matter why he left the priesthood. Mama had her heart set on one of us going into the church, you know that as well as I do.” She grins at me over the headrest.
“I think maybe if he had told her before—”
“She would have told him to stay at seminary.” Lupe sucks on her cigarette. “And Father Juan can go fuck himself. Sorry, Ricky.”
I smile back at her. “Say ten Hail Marys.”
We all three laugh.
She goes on, “But it was sneaky, Ricky. Transferring schools and everything without telling anyone until it was a done deal.”
“No one could talk me out of it once it was done,” I reply.
I’m not proud of doing that. But it’s true. I know myself better than that—I am very self-aware.
I knew I was gay when I was a little boy, and I also knew it was a sin. I know that one of the reasons I was so eager to please—so determined to be a good boy, to study and get good grades—was because of the fear that people could tell. It was why I played soccer, which I didn’t like at first, but I knew if I was good at it people would like me. Playing soccer got me a scholarship to a good Catholic school—St. Anthony of Padua—and I thought, I thought and believed if I was a good Catholic boy, if I was able to make my mother happy, became a priest, joined the church, devoted my life to God and celibacy, everything would be okay and I would go to heaven.
But no matter how much I prayed, the feelings never went away.
I couldn’t stop myself from looking at other boys in the locker room.
I couldn’t stop looking at magazine ads with muscular male bodies.
I couldn’t stop thinking about them, dreaming about them.
Prayer did not help.
No matter how many nights I prayed before sleep, I still dreamed about boys. I still dreamed about kissing boys and doing things to them that were against God. I still dreamed about what their skin felt like and how their lips tasted and how it felt to press their bodies up against mine. I dreamed about the guys in perfume ads and underwear commercials and sweaty athletes whose wet shirts clung to their bodies and professional wrestlers with their glistening muscles and the other boys on the soccer team with me, and sometimes I woke up in the middle in the night with my underwear wet and my—my cock hard and aching and my balls hurting with the urgent need and I would get a towel to wipe off my sheets and my body and change my underwear and pray again, pray to Jesus My Lord and Savior and Mary Queen of Heaven to forgive me, to take these horrible dreams and fantasies and sins and filth away from me.
Father Arturo would wrap my knuckles with a ruler when I would tell him about my torment, threaten me with purgatory and hell and Hail Marys and Our Fathers, eternal damnation unless I stopped, and I tried and tried but no matter how much I prayed about it, Mother Mary never answered me, Jesus never answered me, they just left me in torment.
I always felt so unclean, so dirty, so unworthy.
So I prayed.
And decided to enter the church. I couldn’t give in to my sinful desires, ever, so a life of celibacy, praying for forgiveness, praying for the sinful thoughts to be taken from me…The only thing to do was dedicate myself to God and never give in to the lusts of the flesh, to never give in to desire.
It was hard but I managed. I managed to never put my hands on another man, to never give in to the need, the desire, that festered inside me.
“Are you going into the Church because you love God and want to serve him, or are you hiding from your desires?” Father Romero asked me when I finally confessed all to him, about the…the wanton desires that consumed me, the lusts, the Satanic desires. “That’s not what being a priest means, my son. You can’t hide from the world inside the Church.”
He was the one who convinced me that I needed to go out into the world, to see if my calling was true.
I was afraid, so afraid. I am still afraid. I don’t know what the future holds for me.
I don’t know if I will be able to stand strong against sin. Against fornication.
So I didn’t talk to either of my parents or Uncle Rubin because I know they could have talked me out of it so easily once I decided to face my sinful nature, to go out into the world and see if my calling was a true one.
My mother thinks it’s only a crisis of faith, and cries, and thinks I’ll go back.
For the first time in my life I refuse to give her what she wants to get her to stop crying.
I may go back. I don’t know.
It’s so hard to reconcile the truth of who I am with my faith!
Surely Jesus wouldn’t want me to be so miserable, so unhappy, to live a lie?
How can love be a sin?
Father Romero helped me. He helped me apply for student loans to pay for UC–San Felice if Uncle Rubin was angry and refused to help me anymore. “It’s a lot of money,” he said, “but you want to teach, and there’s a program that will get your loans forgiven after ten years of public service.”
Father Romero helped me with the application process, the transfer, everything.
The only thing he didn’t help me with was breaking it to my family.
“Be brave and remember the Lord is with you no matter what happens,” he told me.
It wasn’t easy.
I didn’t tell my parents the gay thing. My mother would never understand that. Leaving the seminary was enough.
But I was honest with Uncle Rubin.
I told him the truth.
“I wish you would have talked to me before you did all of this,” he said to me over lunch at some extremely expensive restaurant where I was very aware my clothes didn’t fit in. “It took guts to take the risk you did—and you were right not to tell your mother about the”—he hesitated, wouldn’t look me in the eyes—“gay thing. Where are you going to live in San Felice?”
“I applied for the dorms. I’m waiting to hear back. But the student loans will cover—”
“You’re paying those back. My nephew isn’t getting out of college owing those vultures his soul.” He waved his hand. “You can join my fraternity. I’m the alumni president. I’ll talk to the chapter president, get you a room there.”
I wasn’t so sure I wanted to join a fraternity, but Uncle Rubin was being so reasonable, so understanding, I didn’t want to tell him that. I didn’t want to disappoint him any further.
His words were understanding and kind, but I could actually see it in his eyes, the way he wouldn’t look me in the eyes as we talked.
The shame. The disappointment.
I can only imagine how my parents will react.
He called me to let me know it was all arranged, my rent for the summer and fall was paid, and I could move into the house this weekend.
Which is why we are in the car driving north on the 1, boxes of my stuff in the trunk of Lupe’s battered old car. She can afford a new one, but she is saving every penny she makes to pay for her wedding next summer. Uncle Rubin won’t pay for her wedding. I know that bothers her. It’s always bothered her and Sergio that rich Uncle Rubin always seems to favor me over them. They don’t blame me for it, but I know it bothers him. He doesn’t take her seriously, refuses to invest in her shop.
