“I could not be more impressed. I’m at the edge of bliss. Paradise itself couldn’t be more appealing.”
This excited her and her nipples were happy and aching and she wiggled her breasts in his face, teasing and tickling his chin as they swung. He took ruby nipples in his nimble teeth, treating them like the precious jewels they were. She cried out, loud enough that she was convinced that if there was anybody in the room next door, they would’ve heard.
Now more than ever she wanted to experience all the earthly pleasures a man could give her. She felt as though she was now no longer tethered to the planet and might fly free to Heaven.
Cedric laced his fingers through her shining hair, pushing her down, down, down. They rolled over and over and she wound up on top, smiling like she’d just won the wrestling championship of the world.
Now it was his turn to cry out. She took him into her mouth and he thought he might climax right then and there. Noticing this, she eased back a little bit, slowly and with great care not to nibble at him, although she wanted to.
He held her shoulders and the back of her neck, feeling the fine and downy hairs there and even they trembled at his touch. So close to finishing too early, he thought about unappealing things to control his volatile erection. Eugene McCarthy. Joe DiMaggio’s buck teeth. Hockey fights.
But it didn’t work. His heartbeat got faster and his face more flushed; he wondered how there could be any blood left anywhere in his body but that fueling his hardness.
He massaged the firm yet delicate area between her shoulder blades as her mouthed moved all over him. She kissed his thighs and his belly and then moved back to his penis again. His hips swiveled a bit (a move soon to be made both famous and scandalous by a young singer from Tupelo, Mississippi) and he pressed against her.
“Could I feel this way about a normal man with a normal job?” she questioned herself. Julianna didn’t think so. She felt as though there was something outside the realm of everyday Catholic experience for her.
“No man has touched me like this, aroused me like this, inflamed me like this.” She felt hot enough to melt the snow outside in moments, a process that would, in actuality, last well into July. Far, far to the north, a storm of ungodly proportions was building.
But that was in the future. Now was the time for making love.
He placed his hands on her chest, softly but with authority, and every fiber of her being became his. He activated pleasure zones she didn’t know she had; Julianna’s neck and her abs and the dimples above her bum and the backs of her knees all felt little jolts of electric power, like a current running straight between her legs. It amazed her that the human body was so complicated and so chemical.
“My Jewels, my gorgeous girl, my chatty starling, I have been singing songs to you since day one.” Father Briar’s hands explored the geography of her body, mapping its secret hidden places, its mounds and curves and exotic dead end places, those special places where love blossomed.
Although inexperienced, Cedric was trying not to be a selfish or inconsiderate lover. He studied her like the scholar he was, giving attention and affection to her, timing the movements of his body to hers, trying to make her needs his own, even trying to sync the very beating of their hearts.
They kissed, their tongues coiling together like ropes on the deck of a fishing boat. Soon their clothes were entwined with the bed sheets and their bodies were coupled, everything in the universe seemed to have paired off.
“Kiss me other places, places deeper down,” pleaded Julianna. He rose up from the bed for a moment to better take in the spectacular view of her. From this angle and all the others, she looked wonderful.
Father Briar took this moment to be bold. His lips traced a line down the center of her, between her breasts, across her stomach, past her navel, and down to her folds; lust and love made her shiver, quiver, and then gasp. She could hear the cheap box spring mattress squeaking and straining to beneath them as she bucked and robe and grabbed his lush chestnut hair.
“Oh, my, I can’t believe I have waited so long to experience this,” she cried. While he was kissing her sweet folds, Julianna thought she might climax right then and there, so new and overpowering and delirious was the sensation. He tickled parts of her that changed her life, tickled them with the tip of his tongue and she cried out again, then again, with such animal rawness that he pulled back.
“Have I hurt you, my dear?”
“Far from it,” she responded, not embarrassed by her volume, but liberated.
Father Briar’s head dipped back between her legs and she put them around him like a scissors, squeezing him tight. She didn’t want him to ever move, never to stop.
But, oh! he didn’t want to go anywhere but he also didn’t want her to think she was in control. That would give her too much power, too early in their illicit love. So he pinched her buttock hard enough for her to cry out and let him go, then he wiggled away.
Cedric didn’t wiggle far away, though, just back on top of her She pressed her breasts up against his muscular body, and wondered for a another moment how a priest kept his body so tight, then just thanked his Navy training and his Jesuit rigor and went back to enjoying her pleasure.
“He has this sudden and terrible power over me,” she thought, “how I love it!”
He started moving like a wave, up and down across her body, his energy peaking and cresting as he moved from breasts to pussy and back again, as powerful as the tide.
Julianna bobbed up and down in the wake of this for a while before she couldn’t stand the pressure building up for another single second. She had to take control of this, she had to wrest the power back from him, she had to have him and take him, she had to have her orgasm or she might drown in lust.
She took hold of the root of him and slid down upon it. This was both an increase in desire and a release of long-held sexual tension. She loved the feel of him inside her; he was certainly the most endowed man she’d ever known. Their hips came together and he slid in and out, over and over again.
Cedric felt hot and hard inside her. She knew she was being loud and she tried to quell her sounds, what of them she could hear over his ragged breathing and own cries of passion.
He lifted her bum off the bed with an athlete’s strength; he hadn’t lost much of his high-school ability. He then penetrated her deeper and harder, an unbelievable feeling that she never wanted to stop.
“Please,” she begged. “Please keep your hands on my ass.”
Father Briar loved this new power, this sexual discipline, and even her lust. Lust had always been a sin in his mind, but now it felt liberating. Julianna’s eyes widened like illuminated moons and her mouth pursed into an equally rounded smile.
“What a glorious woman my Julianna is,” he marveled, close to climaxing.
She, too, was near, near enough to feel as though consciousness was only fleeting, and then in the face of that sex induced glory, she came and came and came. This spurred him on and he soon followed.
Finally finished and wet with everything sex entails, she lay on his chest, her mind both drifting and racing. She felt alive and asleep, satiated but somehow still hungry, and very close to God.
Chapter Eleven: By Golly, Gosha.
Gosha, the nosy next door neighbor, came to the door the next morning, about fifteen minutes after Julianna had pulled up in her car, still un-showered, tired after the drive home and smelly from sex with Cedric.
Her neighbor was both snooping and asking for a cup of sugar. She also had a basketful of bunnies. Jewels always gave it her, but was slightly annoyed.
“She always takes all the sugar and never brings the cup back. Gosha doesn’t know better, though, she’s from Poland.”
In 1954’s Minnesota, a Polish émigré was an exotic creature.
In their happy ignorance, the Brannaska locals often mistook her for a Gypsy (that wasn’t an offensive term back in ’54, these days, those folks are called Roma) and there was always comical spe
culation as to what she was doing with those rabbits.
She always had baby bunnies. Her primary occupation seemed to be driving around town in her pickup truck, asking people if they needed rabbits.
Rabbit demand had been down in Brannaska lately.
Then finally she gets around to what she came over for; she is there to ask about the priest and what the relationship between the two of them might be. She’s an Old World Polish Catholic and she doesn’t like the new world priest.
“Could I ask you how you properly say your full name?”
This made the Polish woman bristle. “These thick, simple, American tongues cannot pronounce the multisyllabic majesty of my full name, Malgorjata, so I make them call me Gosha.”
But she liked Julianna, as much as she liked anybody. So she would try to explain now. Once, and only once.
“Mal-Gor-Jah-Tah. But you must say if fast.”
Julianna tried.
“Close,” the Pole lied. “But just to say Gosha is better.”
She was once a woman of considerable and substantial beauty, but age, liver failure, and the Soviets had managed to strip her of some of it. Some, but not all.
Even at seventy four years old, her eyes possessed a mischievous twinkle and a keen intellect. There was something impish and elfin about her.
“They are good for pets or for stews,” she’d say about her rabbits. She had always had a way of making innocent statements seem somewhat morbid, but in a humorous and exciting Eastern European way.
Gosha dressed in a manner that the locals called “different.” She made almost all her clothes by hand, and was fond of using bright threads to accent and accessorize her woolen garments. She’d been known to string Christmas tinsel through her scarves. Although she stood out by a mile with her attire was a mish mash of ill co-coordinated colors, which was how the locals of Brannaska had arrived on the nickname By Golly Gosha, she was never cold, under-dressed, or under-prepared for the terrifying Minnesota winters.
She had a house on the edge of town, right next to Julianna’s. It had been added on to with parts of various other dwellings: an icehouse, an engine-less school bus, part of a permanently beached tugboat. She could often be heard singing old Polish folk songs when the windows were open during the brief Minnesotan summers, ribald and raunchy things, although she never whistled in the house for this caused one’s money to fly out the window.
She had furnished her house simply, for her first love was the outdoors. The walls had few photographs spare a couple of pictures of the countryside in West Pomerania. The sofa bed was well worn and the nightstand was fully stocked cupboard of knitwear and other knickknacks that she had lovingly hand crafted.
Gosha found knitting pleasing for it took her mind off the long hard winters and the true and existential boredom that they posed. The one thing she did miss was Polish food; she often had to improvise and bemoaned the fact that she missed her native dishes to the locals of Brannaska.
“Why oh why does the grocery store not stock Kielbasa? I miss my Polish sausage,” She would often be heard as she wandered the meat section much to the bemusement of the butchers.
The butchers, of course, stocked all manner of bratwurst and other German sausages. However, she’d have soon starved than eaten the meat of the enemy nation.
All of these quirks were forgivable. A bit harder to deal with was her busybody temperament and meddlesome nature. Her pastimes peering through Julianna’s bay windows and listening in on the local phone lines, for Brannaska was still such a small town that the whole place functioned on one group line. Her gossip was innocent and mild-mannered, but it was also irritating enough for some of the locals to pretend they hadn’t seen her as she went about her day.
“There goes Gosha. By Golly, you had better avoid that woman if you want your reputation intact,” and similar such words were often exchanged amongst the locals while they ate breakfast at Bjorn’s and bought earthworms, leeches, minnows, and other fish bait at Ed’s Bait Emporium and Lure Menagerie.
Julianna liked the woman; she seemed to live a purpose driven life. Gosha shoveled her own walk and driveway, she chopped her own firewood, she was a master of tools both modern and improvised, and Julianna often saw flashes of torchlight coming from her garage workshop and wondered what she was welding in there.
But she never had the courage to ask.
Chapter Twelve: Bless this Feast and Let us Eat Like Beasts.
Every little town has a cultural institution that it could not live without.
There was a quiet small café in the flatland community of Brannaska called Bjorn’s that was just such an institution. It came alive each and every morning at 5:15am.
That is, it is alive that early if all of the farm work is temporarily done, or if the wife has no pressing jobs for the man of the house to do. Brannaska was surrounded by farms of various sizes, some prosperous and others not so much; these farmers needed to break away from the solitude of the work and the winters, so they gathered around the long, white, and coffee-stained counter of the café.
“A person can do no better than five cent cup of Joe and arguing about differences between fertilizer brands, politics, government regulations for farmers, and the ridiculous conservation plans that the President has just proposed,” Bjorn would tell newcomers (not that they got many), “whatever regulations that might be and whichever president might be in office!”
He’d put a big, hand-painted sign behind the cash register that read “No Gambeling” and he was stout and steadfast in his refusal to change the misspelling.
“The whole sign is a joke anyway,” he’d say. He’d put it up because some of the guys liked to ‘shake’ to see who has to pay. Ty Olsen, Bjorn’s most enthusiastic and regular customer, always had a pair of dice in the front pocket of his flannel shirt. Low roll paid. While he found it hugely entertaining, the practice wasn’t too profitable for the owner, though, because these guys can drink a lot of coffee and refills are always free.
Some of the other men found that sinful, since it is a form of gambling. They always paid for their own, or if they were feeling especially generous that morning, would pay for their neighbor. Now, these positions could change as quickly as the weather, just for the sake of argument.
While the coffee was strong, it wasn’t caffeine that fuelled the social set at Bjorn’s, no, it was jovial disagreements. Fellows would often change sides of the argument they were continuing from the morning before, just for the sake of novelty.
Bjorn’s was known for its extravagant dishes and huge spreads on the weekends, and this weekend was no different. As bored as everybody else by the stifling winter weather, he was looking to stir up a little entertaining trouble, and had decided to play host to an impromptu, but carefully set up and manipulated by Bjorn himself, eating contest between Dale, “the Bishop of Glutton,” as Bjorn loved to call him, and the Ty the Taxidermist.
Each Saturday evening people from all over the county descended on the cafe for Bjorn’s weekly smorgasbord. Instead of the not-so-clean men in their dirty overalls driving their farm trucks, these people drive up in their Chevy four-door sedans and parked on the dusty main street. Most of the time, there were at least 4 people in each car because friends come together for this Saturday night outing. The men are wearing clean plaid shirts, or maybe even a church-worthy white shirt! The women have jazzed themselves up into dresses, low heels, and always clip-on earrings. Actual holes in your ears were a sign of immodesty and were the same sort of body modifications as tattoos, which were also very much frowned-upon as sinful.
Unfortunately, this restaurant is much too tiny to accommodate all of the wannabe eaters, so a long line formed outside. Ty and the bishop, however, were already inside, having been given the VIP treatment by Bjorn’s wife, who was usually a co-conspirator in his goofy schemes. The line had begun almost an hour before the smorgasbord (“which is never, ever, to be referred to as a “buffet” Bjorn scolded) began.
This line serves two purposes. The first is to make sure that there is an orderly flow into the café, the second is that it provides a time for visiting with each other and maybe even a bit of gossip. No arguing is allowed during these times, and, unlike the “No Gambeling” rule, this one was strictly enforced.
The locals gossiped while they ate.
“That there nuclear-powered submarine is gonna be a game changer. Commies won’t be messing around with us anymore,” Francisco Montana told Paul Livingstone. “It is called the Nautilus, I believe, the USS Nautilus. Funny name, if you ask me.”
Nobody had.
“I don’t think it is powered by nukes, though. Who would want something like a bomb powering your vessel? I’m pretty sure they’re lying to us about it being nuclear powered. I’m sure they got some sort of secret engine in there, something weird and unknown that they discovered underwater or at the top of a mountain somewhere.”
“I think those claims smell a little funny,” Paul said, ever rational and taciturn in the manner of lonely Norwegian farmers.
“Was sure launched by a funny looking woman,” Francisco continued.
“How dare you talk about Mamie that way. The First Lady is a very classy dame, and much better looking than Eleanor Roosevelt,” Bjorn joked as he stopped by their table to pour more coffee.
That was hard to dispute, but Francisco did, just for the sake of argument.
“Now, see here. Mrs. Roosevelt had her fine points…”
The conversation went round and round like this. They talked about the famed journalists Edward Murrow and Fred W. Friendly and their documentary, See It Now: A Report on Senator Joseph McCarthy.
Everybody, of course, hated Communists, but not everybody was ready to believe, as McCarthy was accusing, that the “Reds” had infiltrated the U.S. government at the highest levels and were preparing to destroy the nation from within.
Ty Olsen was as obsessed with baseball as he was hockey and taxidermy (Trig played on the town team in the summers) and was as secretly in love with Marilyn as was Julianna.
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