Make a Decision

The lunch dispensed with, the two stretched out beside each other and Sean, a bit hazy and fascinated with Chet’s tattoos, began tracing them on the young man’s body with his fingers. On impulse, Sean reached around Chet’s neck and released his hair, which cascaded down to his shoulders. He was rewarded with a “fuck me” expression from Chet, who was bold enough then to whisper, “You’re going to fuck me, aren’t you?”

“It appears so,” Sean answered, and his fingers went back to tracing tattoos but then went to running his fingers along the lines from either side that ran down below Chet’s belly and above his thighs into this groin. Chet panted and reached down to trace Sean’s cock through the material of his shorts. Sean was hard.

“Shit, you’re huge,” Chet exclaimed.

“Does that scare you?”

“Not a bit. I want it.”

“Does being restrained scare you?”

Chet groaned, but he whispered, “I want that too. It excites me. I knew when you bought the books you did . . .” He put an arm around Sean’s neck and pulled the older man’s face down for a kiss. During the kiss, he ran his hand over Sean’s chest. “You’re chiseled,” he said when they came out of the kiss. “A great six pack and your muscles have muscles.”

“I have a muscle for you,” Sean murmured.

“You sure do. I want you to punish me,” Chet said, and as they kissed again, he unzipped Sean and reached inside and grasped his cock. “Fuckin’ shit,” he said when they came out of the kiss. “Fuck me. Put it in me and fuck me hard. Make me feel it.”

“Maybe not here. There are guys on the beach. Let’s go up to the condo.”

The tour of the condo was brief—it didn’t take more than a minute and a half to see everything on the lower level. Chet saw the ladder, though, and that there was a loft with shutter window inserts above the powder room-foyer-kitchen area. He put a hand on the ladder. “What’s up there?”

“Go on up and find out. That’s where you could get tied up.”

“I don’t know if I—”

“Go up the fuckin’ ladder, Chet. Now!”

For the first fuck Chet was spread-eagled on the bed, facing the ceiling, wrists and ankles restrained to the four corners, but with some give in the leads. Sean was under him, also facing the ceiling, his cock buried up Chet’s passage, and his hands gripping the slim young man’s waist, lifting and lowering him on the cock. Chet was a good deal shorter than Sean was, and his shoulder-length black hair was fanned out on Sean’s chest.

They were into the second fuck, with Chet strapped at the four corners of a wooden X frame nailed to the wall beside the foot of the bed, his rump projecting out into the loft space, and Sean behind him, gripping and spreading his buttocks and fucking up into his passage when Pete entered the apartment.

They’d left the door to the condo open. They’d also left the blanket and hamper on the beach.

“I saw that you left this—and the door was open. Sean?” Pete said, as he entered the foyer. He, of course, heard them up in the loft. He put the hamper and blanket down on the living room floor and, out of instinct, climbed the ladder far enough to see who was up there and to assure himself they were OK.

Chet didn’t look OK, but what he was mouthing off about was encouragement and pain-pleasure, not anything he wanted to be saved from. He was begging for more, egging Sean on.

Pete came back down the ladder, but not until he’d watched for a few minutes. He folded the blanket up and left the condo, closing the door behind him.

If Chet or Sean realized that anyone had been there, they didn’t permit it to interfere with their march to climaxes.

And the garage guy at the gay bar had been right. Chet was kinky. He was kinkier than Sean naturally was. He’d initiated much of the rough BDSM-hinted action, goading Sean into going over the edge there. He was kinkier than Luigi Capiletto was, with his need for punishment and insisting Sean give it to him during sex. None of this made Sean any more self-assured about the possibility of retreating to Rome—and under the control of Capiletto.

* * * *

The next couple of weeks went smoothly and Sean began to settle into life at Crescent Beach, with four hours of work on three days a week. The workload was light at the bookstore, and the other three workers Sean worked with in varied schedules were congenial. He and Chet hadn’t had sex again and Sean hadn’t been back to Paddie’s Bar. They didn’t discuss it, but the intense experience had rattled them both a bit. They’d both enjoyed it, but it scared them—or at least it had scared Sean. Chet had asked for more than Sean had ever given before and had been able to goad Sean into giving it. He had never gone that far into bondage and mild BDSM. Sean again felt it had been because he was more than half drunk, like had happened earlier with Pete. With Pete, though, it hadn’t been as kinky.

Chet didn’t seem to mind that they didn’t do it again, and he was no less friendly with Sean than the others working at the bookstore. One issue with Chet was that he’d recalled where he’d seen Sean’s name before and had tracked down a copy of Todd Littlepage’s tell-all book. He knew Sean was a Catholic priest and Chet was a Catholic. It all clicked the Sunday after they’d fucked, as they’d attended mass at the same church.

They’d met for coffee afterward.

“I didn’t know—the other day—that you were a priest,” Chet said.

“And that makes a difference with you?”

“Yeah, I’m afraid it does. We were sinning big time. I’d feel like I’d have to confess my sins to you all the time you were . . . you know . . . doing me—and like that.”

“Well, I’m not sure I’m a priest anymore, Chet. That’s the reason why I’m here. I have to decide whether I’ll go with my pleasures or with my calling. I’m told I can’t have both. And I’ve been weak. I’m not sure I even believe anymore, so I don’t think I’m really a priest.”

“You were at mass today,” Chet said.

“Yes, so?”

“If you’re still going to mass, you’re still believing—or trying to. And until and unless you’re defrocked, you’re still a priest. You can do a lot of good. You just have to get your demons under control.”

“So, no more sex?”

“I’d work on the alcohol first,” Chet said. “I don’t think we’d have done what we did the other day if you hadn’t had too much to drink. I wanted you bad, so I would have done it. But I don’t think you were all there. Maybe you need to work on being all there.”

Sean saw the wisdom in that. There had been no more booze. But there had been no more sex either. Sean had seriously considered doing as the Monsignor suggested—remaining a priest and going to Rome to work with Archbishop Capiletto, although he wasn’t sure that that wasn’t being offered with a rough sex angle. He’d searched the shelves in the bookstore for books on Italy and the Vatican and had devoured those. He couldn’t build up an enthusiasm for that form of exile, though.

Weeks had gone by, as well, with Todd Littlepage’s book for sale, and it hadn’t produced the groundswell of attention the church had anticipated and Sean had feared. The longer Sean went here in Crescent Beach with the ocean and his part-time job and the start of forming a circle of friends, some in the bookstore, a few from the local Catholic church, the less media pressure there was on Sean. The father at the church knew of Sean’s priest status and was working Sean into the visitation program there, but no one else, other than Chet, knew he was a priest. Happily, there hadn’t been any gorgeous young man there to tempt him, either.

One problem, though, was that there still was a gorgeous young man, Pete, out on the beach every day, surfing, flying his kite, or playing volleyball with his friends. Pete was the one person who worked at Sean’s arousal, and Sean spent considerable time on his balcony, with binoculars, watching the young man cavort on the beach. Not being with Pete had sharpened Sean’s feelings for the young man. And whenever he started weaving a new life in Rome in his mind, visions of Pete and of Pete in his bed intruded. And the visions were of Pete in his bed, not in the kinky sex chamber in the loft that went through Sean’s head.

Sean sat on his balcony, watching, assuming Pete didn’t know he was there or didn’t care, the two of them having had a casual coupling a long time ago now. There was the danger of this being Todd all over again—Sean forming deep feelings but Pete’s interest having been casual and fleeting.

In this assumption, Sean was wrong, though, Pete was very much aware that Sean spent hours on his balcony, watching him. The beach was endless. Pete could have moved his activities beyond the sight of the balcony. But he didn’t. What he did do, though, was constantly check to see if Sean was alone. So far, following having found him with that dark-haired tattooed guy in very serious acts, Pete hadn’t seen Sean with another guy.

The two were circling each other—from afar. That changed in mid-July, with the developing hurricane season on Florida’s Atlantic coast.

Sean had been living in St. Louis, Missouri, for years and, although he was aware of the destructive power of hurricanes, he had no context in how they could affect an ocean coast, especially how quickly they could change course over an ocean. He went to bed one night having heard on the news that Hurricane Bethany had veered away from the Florida coast in a northeast direction and would be felt in the St. Augustine area no worse than high surf, only to wake in the dark, the power out, to go to his bedroom window to see that the pounding surf was crushing over the line of dunes between his condo complex and the ocean. The beach was entirely under water, the wind was whipping at the trees. He’d already shuttered the patio doors, but he’d forgotten the bedroom window. He shut the interior shutters on that and went out to the living room and hunched down in a chair. He had a battery-operated radio for such occasions. The weather channel on this told him the hurricane wouldn’t land near here, but it had changed course enough to batter the St. Augustine coast as it roared past.

He sat and contemplated all sorts of things in his life and current situation, there being little else he could do until the storm passed. He was much too keyed up to try going back to bed. He thought that he’d probably be better being anywhere at the moment other than here. These condos were old, having been built in the late fifties and early sixties. They’d already been extensively damaged in a hurricane that hit land here some twenty years earlier. That had been when Todd had bought this place for Sean—when the condos were reconditioned and sold to the public. They had been a resort before then. But they were better weatherized when they were rebuilt, so Sean felt safe enough, especially since the hurricane wasn’t going to hit land near here.

He then thought about being in Rome rather than here—in better weather. He was enjoying the few hours he worked at the bookstore. The priest at the church he’d started going to had him working at the charity store there too and helping at a soup kitchen once a week and visiting parishioners in the hospital. He remembered that working with people like this—helping people whose experiences were more painful than his had ever been—was what he liked about the priesthood and that it was what helped him keep his sins at bay. But he was learning here that he didn’t have to be a priest to do this work. What would he be doing in Rome? Archbishop Luigi Capiletto would probably keep him to himself and leaning on Sean to exercise his own demons. Capiletto liked his liquor. Luigi also liked sex and to be bound and punished in sex, in more kinky ways than Sean was comfortable with. Sean was feeling safer here in his Crescent Beach condo than he would in Rome.

There was a gust of wind outside, just when it seemed the storm was abating. Something had come off one of the condos and had made a racket blowing to wherever it went. Still, Sean remembered what had been said about how these condos were weatherproofed after the last big hurricane. Some of the houses on the ocean had been built long after that hurricane of the 1990s, though, and people quickly forget what can happen in a hurricane. That house where Pete was pitching his tent, for instance, looked like it was mostly windows—and without any system of protective shuttering.

When that house came to mind, a sudden chill went down Sean’s back. Pete wasn’t even in that house, as vulnerable as it was. Pete had pitched a tent on the house’s terrace, facing the ocean. Is that where Pete was tonight? All alone, outside? Or maybe the house owner was there and he was on top of Pete in an all-glass room, where the glass could shatter and shards be spun in all directions.

Sean was up and digging out storm gear he hadn’t thought about needing since he lived in St. Louis. He paused for a second, wondering how he could get to the all-windows house with the beach inundated but then realized he could pick it out from the road. Should he try hoofing it all the way or risk taking the car. He decided to take the car as far as it could go. It took him all the way, the second line of dunes and stretch of vacation homes cutting down the force of the wind significantly. Also, the storm was lessening. It was passing. That didn’t lessen the danger to Pete, though.

Sean had to pick through shattered and fallen glass as he worked his way from the front of the house to the back. The all-glass house looked like a war zone of shattered walls. He found the tent collapsed, but Pete was under that, bundled up in a sleeping bag, but soaked to the skin.

“Come on Pete, Let’s get you home?”

“Home? I thought you were going to Italy.”

“I don’t think so. I think we’ll stay right here for now.”

Pete’s teeth were chattering too hard to respond to that, but, after they’d gotten back to the condo and had showered and enjoyed a couple of cups of coffee, the power having come back on, Sean said, “It’s getting light but I don’t think either of us got any sleep last night. Let’s try hitting the sack.”

Pete looked over at the ladder to the loft. “I’m not sure I have the energy to climb that just now.”

“I don’t expect you to. We’ll both use the bed in the bedroom.”

“But I thought you said before that you didn’t want to take a man into your bed.”

“Not until I knew for sure it was the man I wanted.”

“And now you think you’re sure? You’ve made that decision you came here to make?”

“Yes, I’m sure—if you’re interested, of course.”

“I thought you’d never ask. But can we still go up into the loft sometimes?”

Sean laughed. “Yes, Pete, we can still visit the loft when we’re in the mood.”