Thrice Fooled

Reality started to creep into my dreaming as I was floating up into consciousness. I started reliving the night before, the hour drive to Albuquerque and the Sidewinders Bar, which was rougher than my norm, but I had been in particular need and drinks were half price during their annual April Fools’ Eve event, which this year started after midnight on April 1st, as April Fools’ Day this year was on a Monday and the bars didn’t open on Sunday. As I was seeking, was being picked up there, cut out of the herd, crowded, rushed, cowed, and manhandled. He’d had an arm around me, pressing me into the bar stool, his knee between my legs, pushing into my basket, kissing me, while the party swirled around us. Whispering in my ear what he was going to do to me—whether I liked it or not. I liked it; it was what I’d come for.

And the forcible sex in the backseat of his double-cab truck. Him on top of me, overpowering me, muscular and demanding, leather clad and tattooed, with a metal ring in his thick, long cock. I had gone to the party to get just this—hard, forced sex. The sensation of him inside me, stretching, pounding, deep. The humiliation of wanting that, going soft and vulnerable for him then, clinging to him, crying out for more as, gripping one of my knees with one hand and my throat with the other, he lay between my spread and bent legs and pounded, pounded, pounded.

The backseat of the truck being confining and the position awkward—even my head bouncing against the curve of the panel on the door under the window—all of it was arousing, connected to the atmosphere of being taken hard without permission—a fantasy I’d been nursing all week before. It was the illusion I was seeking. That it was rough wasn’t an illusion though.

Satisfied, yet not satisfied. Being pushed out of the truck cab when he was done. When he’d gotten what he wanted. On the surface it was what I wanted too, what I’d driven from Santa Fe to Albuquerque to get—a casual hookup—what I’d spent three hours on a Sunday night and Monday morning, two hours of that on the road, to get. But below the surface, I wanted so much more, more than twenty minutes of hot, sweaty sexual calisthenics in the backseat of a double truck cab, release, and separation. Being quick fucked in the back of a truck at 1:00 a.m. on a Monday morning. April Fools’ Day.

I’d never even learned his name. It wasn’t a name I wanted from him. I didn’t want to date him. One and done was fine with me. I’m betting it was more than fine with him.

Monday, April 1st. I came more fully awake, hearing Mary move in the kitchen below. I’d thought she’d be off to Tucson to visit her friends for the week before now, but I should have known she would stay around to fix my breakfast before she went. I came awake with my hand grasping my cock under the covers. I’d been masturbating as my dreams had drifted into the reality of the night before, and I was in erection.

I laid back on the bed, rocking my pelvis into my sheathed hand, resurfacing the sensations of the backseat of the truck—his muscular, strong body, the thickness of his cock, being able to take the cock in, the high of having a muscular biker man inside me. The glorious helplessness of being controlled and dominated by a mean man. The unique, first-time sensation of a thick Prince Albert ring punishing my passage walls, churning inside me as I lay under his dominating weight, helpless and vulnerable to him taking his pleasure of me with no thought to whether I was being pleasured too. But of course I was pleasured. I was pleasured by how much different it was from the life I projected in public here in Santa Fe.

I tensed, jerked, and came into the underside of the sheet. I’d have to remember to wash the sheet myself while Mary was gone. Maybe later in the week, though. This wouldn’t be the only time I masturbated myself awake this week. I was always freer to pleasure myself when Mary was off visiting.

“I won’t do that again,” I whispered aloud. I didn’t mean I wouldn’t masturbate again, of course. That was how I managed to keep my need for visits to Albuquerque to a minimum. I meant I wouldn’t go to a leather bar like Sidewinders when I went to Albuquerque on one of my outside-of-my world journeys of need. I usually went to someplace tamer like the Effex Club, where the crowd was more mixed and the hookups, if they occurred, more subtle.

But who was I fooling on this April Fools’ Day? The Sidewinders experience had made my arousal soar. Isn’t that what I drove an hour out of my world to achieve? Of course, when a certain need arose, I’d go back to the Sidewinders bar—and into the backseat of some mean stud’s truck again. I’d lie there, pinned to the seat by some bruiser’s bulk, and take him and take him and take him, and love it while pretending to hate it. Wanting him to be rough with me, reminding me that it was a sin.

I groaned. I didn’t want to think about this now. I rolled out of the bed and struggled into the bathroom off my bedroom. I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror, but I finally had to get shaved. I shaved quickly, though, as I knew Mary wouldn’t take off for Tucson until she was satisfied I was up and had eaten, and I had to be over by the cathedral to check in on breakfast being served at the Mission House.

I tried not looking at myself in the mirror in the bedroom either, as I dressed in the black that clearly marked my vocation. I couldn’t help looking into the mirror as I adjusted my white clerical collar marking me as a priest, in my case an Episcopalian priest. I stood there, then, for extra precious moments, taking in both the collar and my eyes. Wondering if my eyes betrayed my weakness. But I decided it didn’t matter. I did what I did regardless.

A melodic voice floating out “Breakfast, Timothy” drifted up the stairs and, with a sigh, I went downstairs to join Mary for breakfast.

She’d already eaten and was dressed for travel. She didn’t ask where I’d been the previous evening. My beat was the homeless of Santa Fe, so I was out at all hours of the day and night. She never asked.

“When do you plan to be home again?” I asked as I tucked into a full breakfast of fried eggs and bacon. “For Easter morning, I hope. We need your voice in the choir.”

“Yes, I should be home by Friday,” she answered. “Try not to work too hard while I’m gone.”

“I’ll do my best. Early spring’s like this can be a rough time for people out on the streets, though. People here aren’t used to cold snaps.”

“It is cold out there. I got a chill just going out to pick up the paper. It might even snow in the mountains. An April Fools’ Day surprise for us all. But it will clear the air,” Mary, ever optimistic, said. “Pick them up and take them into the Mission House. Don’t spend a lot of time ministering to them on the street. You all need to be inside in this weather.”

“Thanks, Mary, I’ll do that,” I answered.

She helped me load the clothing and shoes I’d gathered through the area churches in the weeks since Christmas into the back of my Forester and then I waved her off in her Corolla for her annual Eastertime visit to her friends in Tucson to the south.

Home alone for four days.

* * * *

The Mission House was a homeless shelter on Cienega Street, not far from the Catholic Cathedral Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi, a landmark of Santa Fe’s old city center. The shelter provided meals for the homeless; someplace they could congregate during the day, although most of them wanted to spend their days outside; and shelter for the night for those who would follow the rules to respect the privacy and safety of the others. As Easter was upon us, we tried to lay on extra services and greater care for a couple of weeks. The Catholic diocese owned the building, so the shelter was generally considered a Catholic charity, but the program was more ecumenical than that, governed and financed by a consortium of churches.

I was the vice rector of the nearby St. John Episcopal church, this being my first posting following seminary, and work with the shelter was in my spectrum of duties. I helped with breakfast and lunch three days a week and the counselling and contact time for the hours between. In this Easter season, our consortium of churches was running a clothing and shoe drive to provide for the homeless, and I was in charge of collecting these and dispersing them this year.

On my way into the center of the town, I made my usual circuit, picking up homeless men and women wishing to go to the Mission House for breakfast, continuing on when I’d taken four of them on board. When I pulled up in front the Mission House that morning and was starting to unload the clothes and shoes from the back of my Forester, one of the homeless men came down the steps to help me. He was a solidly built man appearing to be in his early forties. I judged him to be newly homeless as, although his clothes were in tatters, he was cleaner and a bit better groomed than I was accustomed to seeing and in more robust shape generally. He had a beard, with attractive streaks of gray in it, but it couldn’t have been started in building for more than two weeks.

He also seemed familiar to me, although I couldn’t remember having seen him at the Mission House or out on the street. He introduced himself to me as Noah when he offered to help. He was well-spoken enough to confirm my impression that he hadn’t been out on the street long. I marked him as someone who had just been overwhelmed by debt for some reason, which had pushed him out into the street. I didn’t read him as an alcoholic or a drug addict. I regret to say that, after my rough, man-on-man adventure of the previous evening, I was prone to look at him as more than just another homeless man, as I did prefer men who were solidly built as he was, with rugged, but handsome features, and older than I was. When I saw a man like this, I immediately clicked into thinking of them naked, on top of me, and driving hard.

I must have given off some aura of interest because he was giving me an eye I was familiar with that was seeking a return of interest that went beyond the friendly. After he’d helped me get the clothes and shoes in and arranged on table in the hallway outside the fellowship room, he’d melted away and I got lost in my supervisory duties and, eventually, at helping serve the breakfast.

He was there, in conversation, at a table of other homeless men about his age when I came around with the dessert cakes to hand out. He touched me on the forearm and smiled up into my face when I set his down, and I melted to him. I found him sexy, even though homeless, and very alluring. He seemed to be coming on to me too despite the clerical collar I was wearing. That served as a barrier for most men. But it wasn’t out of the ordinary to encounter homeless men who were gay. Most homeless men had more than one reason to be living out of the norm to prefer the streets to a more settled existence.

While they were eating their desserts, I went out to the hall and picked out a nice shirt his size, still in its new wrappings, and a pair of brown jeans I knew would go with it and be big enough for him. I picked out something as well for two of the other homeless men at his table who I knew, but that was just for camouflage. I didn’t want anyone to see that I was focusing on one of the men, but I couldn’t bear to see Noah in the tatters he was wearing.

“I picked out some clothes for some of you who I could figure the sizes of,” I said when I returned to the table. “I encourage the rest of you to go out and look for something that appeals to you. They are gifts of the coming Easter season, making all things new again, and many of them are still in their new wrappings, obviously never worn before. Like this shirt,” I said, as I handed the one I’d selected for Noah to him. “I think this is your size, Noah.”

“I think so too,” he said, looking at the label. “I think you’ve sized me up well.” His smile told me that that two of us were interpreting that a bit differently from the how the other men at the table were.

Later, after lunch, I went out to survey what was left on the table. The men and women hadn’t been greedy, and although I’d held back some at home for another day, there was still several arm fulls of clothes there to lug back out to the Forester.

“Can I help you with those—to get them to car?” Noah asked, as he saw me in the hallway and stopped.

“That would be helpful,” I said, with a smile.

When we got them to the car, he said, “Maybe I should come with you and help you get them out of the car at the other end.”

“I’m not sure we’re going in the same direction,” I said.

“I don’t have a special direction to go in,” Noah answered.

I melted to him, and when we drove up to my house on the Paseo de Peralta curve and we’ve come around to the back of the Forester, he said, “This doesn’t look like the Cathedral rectory.”

“It isn’t,” I answered. “This is one of the houses the St. John’s Episcopal church has for its priests. I’m an Episcopal priest, not a Catholic one. The Mission House is an ecumenical ministry.”

“Oh,” he said. “I thought you were a Catholic priest.”

“No, I’m not.” I didn’t really know why that made a difference to him or whether it had anything to do with what he said next. But then maybe I did know. There had been several outings of gay priests in the area in recent months. Noah could have been hopeful that I was one of those. It was clear that he was showing sexual interest in me—or, at least, it was clear to a submissive like me who understood and was susceptible to that sort of signaling.

“I’ll help you take this stuff into the house.”

“That’s OK. If you’ll stay out here to make sure nobody walks off with it, it’ll just be a couple of trips for me.”

Holding out the shirt and pair of pants I’d given him, he said, “I thought maybe you’d invite me in so that I could change into these.”

“Of course,” I said. “What was I thinking. Grab a bunch of these clothes too and come on in. Maybe you’d like something to drink.”

“That would be nice,” he said. We each took an armload of clothes. He had an arm left over, though. As we walked side-by-side to the house, I felt a hand on my waist and then when I did nothing to move away from it, it dropped to one of my butt cheeks. I left it there too.

“Nice house,” he said as we stood in the foyer, looking awkwardly at each other, hip to hip, him still cupping my butt cheek, me not taking the arm full of clothes from him and telling him to go. “Are there bedrooms upstairs?”

“Yes,” I answered.

“Am I being too forward?” he asked.

“No, you’re not,” I answered.

“Do you want me to go upstairs with you?” He pulled me in for a deep kiss, and I went with it.

“Yes, but first down here. Come into the dining room.” I couldn’t resist an assertive man.

* * * *

I lay on the bed, on my back, legs spread and bent, panting, as I listened for the shower to stop in the adjoining bathroom. I wanted him to fuck me in the missionary position, hovering over and on top of me, facing me, our eyes locked for him to be able to see the passion in me—to understand that this was more than just a casual fuck. It was unfolding that way, but I wanted him to know that I’d felt something since I’d first seen him on the steps of Mission House when I rolled up to it in the Forester. I wasn’t just an easy lay. Well, I had been of late, but I didn’t want to be that with him—with Noah. I wanted there to be something different, something more. Something much more.

It certainly had been combustive and hurried that first time, me bent over the dining room table, on top of bundles of clothing, just my black trousers and briefs off as Noah took me from behind, dressed in his tatters, with his fly unzipped. He’d cupped my chin with one hand, pulling my head back into his chest, and his other hand was on my belly. He’d prepared me, but not much, kneeling behind me and working his tongue into me while a hand milked my cock. But he soon was up and crouched over me, working his thick shaft inside and then thrusting, thrusting, thrusting.

He tensed and held. Then he jerked, and with a huff and a groan, jerked and jerked and jerked. It was only then, when I didn’t feel him come inside me that I knew he’d worn a condom. That surprised me. I hadn’t provided one. In the heat of the moment I hadn’t even thought of one. But Noah had brought protection. He was prepared for sex. Had he been prepared to cover me all along? Got his rocks off fucking a priest? In the moment it didn’t matter, but it was something to think about.

He didn’t apologize. He just asked if he could clean himself up and change into the clothes I’d given him. He hadn’t been dirty when he’d come into the house and had embraced and kissed and fondled me before bending me over the dining table. He’d smelled male, but like a man of the forest rather than the dirty streets. I’d been intoxicated by the hint of a musky smell of him. And I’d been lost to his deep, mouth-possessing kiss. It had surprised me that he didn’t smell like a homeless man of the streets. It surprised me more that he wanted to shower after sex. I of course acceded to his request, took his hand, and led him up to my bedroom, with its attached bathroom and queen-sized bed. He didn’t ask me if anyone else slept there with me or in the other bedroom, the door of which was closed.

When he went into the bathroom, I wavered about what I would do. My trousers and briefs were still downstairs, in the living room, where he had stripped them off me and stroked my cock before moving me into the dining room. Then there was the bed, where I had lain and masturbated, being all alone, that morning before going down to breakfast with Mary. What to do? I unsnapped my clerical collar and took it and my black shirt and my undershirt, shoes and shoes, off and crawled up onto my back on the bed. I spread and bent my legs and placed a pillow under my lower back—and waited for Noah to emerge from the bathroom.

I wanted him to fuck me again.

He paused in the doorframe into the bathroom, seeing me lying on the bed, obviously wanting him, open and vulnerable to him. He smiled and started unbuttoning the shirt and unzipping the trousers I’d given to him at the Mission House.

He was on top of me, hovering over me, taking his weight on his knees planted between my spread thighs and a fist pressed into the mattress by my shoulder. His other hand was pressed into my forehead, holding my head to the sheets. His cock head was positioned at my hole, teasing the opening, and I was grasping it by the root with one hand and palming and squeeze one of his butt cheeks with the other. He pressed in an inch and I arched my back.

“Yes, yes, Now. Do it now!” I cried out, moving my other hand to his other butt cheek and digging the fingernails of both hands in. I cried out again as he thrust cruelly up inside me, and he brought his mouth down to mine in a possessing kiss. I struggled against him, but he assumed, correctly, that the resistance was feigned, to enhance the arousal of being forced, and that I wanted to be manhandled. He’d already fucked me on the dining room table, so he knew I wasn’t protecting my honor or rejecting the sex. So, he was a little rough with me, and I loved it. When he had me fully controlled, I clutched his buttocks close into me and started my own pelvis churning, going with him in the deep rhythm of coitus, as he fucked me and fucked me and fucked me.

Afterward we lay, stretched out against each other.

“I’m sorry if I—” he started to apologize.

I brushed that aside. “You don’t have to live in the streets,” I murmured. “You could live here with me.”

He didn’t respond immediately.

“I want you to know that I’m not as promiscuous as it seems from today. I’ve never done this before—brought a man home and let him have his way with me as you have. But I’ve felt something with you.”

“I’ve felt it too,” he now said.

“So—”

“I don’t think so. I haven’t done this to get a place to stay.”

“But this isn’t the last time . . . you’ll come again?”

He gave a low laugh. “I can come again in about twenty minutes, if you want. I’m not as young as I once was, but I haven’t had any trouble getting it up with you.”

We both laughed, me a bit more nervously than he did. “That’s not what I mean. I mean—”

“Yes, I’ll come home with you again, if that’s what you want.”

And he did, over the next three days. On the third day, we were on the bed, in each other’s arms, cooling down, when I heard her enter by the front door—Mary. She was home a day early.

“Timothy. It’s me,” she called up the stairwell. “Are you here? You must be. Your car’s out front. I came home earlier. Laura’s cousin died and they have to drive out to California.”

Noah sat straight up in bed and looked down at me accusingly. “You’re married. You told me you were an Episcopalian priest, not a Catholic one, but you didn’t tell me you were married.”

“Noah,” I said, but he wasn’t listening to me. He was out of the bed like a jack rabbit and pulling his clothes on. Before I could say anything else, as I was pulling on my clothes as well, to go out into the hall to block Mary off from seeing him and letting her know I indeed was home and forming an “I was taking a nap” exclamation, Noah was out the French door unto the deck above the kitchen and shinnying down a trellis to the ground.

I didn’t see him again for the two days leading up to Good Friday. He didn’t come into the Mission House and I didn’t see him out on the streets while I was gathering up homeless people to take into the shelter.

The next time I saw him was at the 11:00 p.m. candlelight Easter Eve service at St. John’s church. I was up at the altar, of course, helping to set up and deliver communion, and I saw him enter the sanctuary—or at least I believed it was him. He was shaved and in a suit and looking very prosperous. He sat near the front. I may not have known it was him if he hadn’t made—and maintained—eye contact with me. His expression was one of being wounded and disappointed. I wanted to go to him, to explain, but I had duties to perform.

He didn’t come up for communion. When that started, he stood, turned, and walked back up the aisle and out of the church.

I wanted to cry.

* * * *

My next encounter with Noah, who wasn’t named Noah at all, came as a major shock. A week into May, a board meeting was held of the Mission House program and, for the first time, I attended, representing St. Johns Episcopal church and as one of the staffers at the shelter.

Noah, introduced to us as Noel Sinclair, chairman of Sinclair Manufacturing, the major nonchurch benefactor of the Mission House program, was sitting at the table at the front of the room. His eyes latched onto me from the moment I entered the hall, and I could see there was a change in his expression. He no longer looked hurt. He now looked more beseeching and apologetic. I wasn’t surprised—but was still in shock—when he approached me during a break in the meeting and asked if I would stay beyond the end and go someplace for a cup of coffee with him.

Despite all—including the shock of him not being who I thought he was at all—I would have gone anywhere he asked me to go. My feelings for him had only intensified since the church service the evening before Easter Day.

In a nearby coffee shop, he started off by apologizing.

“I’ve been such a fool. I thought I was being clever and looking out for my company’s interests, but I didn’t take into account who you were—and that you were you.”

“That I was me?” I asked “I don’t understand. Of course, I’m me.”

“You aren’t the ‘me’ I thought you were.”

“It seems you aren’t the ‘you’ you claimed to be,” I said. “You presented yourself as the homeless Noah, but it turns out that you’re rich Noel Sinclair, the major benefactor of the shelter. What? Did you think I’d only have interest in a homeless man? Or were you checking up on what sort of staffers they had at the shelter?”

“For starters I thought you were a Catholic priest and were gay and might be preying on your charges and I was completely fooled,” Noel said, his voice contrite. “Then I found you were an Episcopalian priest, and the religion accepts gay clergy. But then I fooled myself into thinking you were married and messing around with men.”

“Married? I’m not married. Oh, you mean Mary? Mary’s my sister. She lives with me and takes care of me. But she isn’t in my bed. She also knows I’m actively gay.”

“I know—the not married and she’s your sister part. I checked. I cared enough to check.”

“But you were prepared to be fooled in the first place.”

“I should start at the beginning. I knew you were gay and actively went with men.”

“You knew? How did you know?”

“I go to the clubs in Albuquerque too,” Noel answered. “I’ve seen you there. I’ve seen you leave with men—men I knew to be dominant and roughly so. You attracted me even then. But then I saw you at the shelter, in a clerical collar, and the shelter mainly being Catholic, I thought you were a Catholic priest. My company is heavily invested in the shelter, so I thought I needed to check out what was what—not just because of you. I thought I needed to check on how everything was being run, so I went there in the guise of a homeless man. It all checks out. I think I should tell you that.”

“And you did your part in hooking up with me and following me home and bedding me,” I said.

“At first I wanted to know if you were doing that with men at the shelter and if that was doing damage to the shelter’s mission.”

“And, fool that I am, I fell right into that trap. And it was just that—a trap.”

“No, it wasn’t just a trap. In wanted it. I wanted it with you. By the time we were at your house, none of the rest of it mattered to me. I’d fallen for you. It was just when you sister came home and I thought she was your wife. I let myself be fooled. I let myself be fooled by so much. I just wish . . .”

“You just wish what?” I said.

“I wish we could start over. That the air could be cleared and everything I’d let fool myself could just be whisked away.”

“We can’t clear the slate and start from zero,” I said.

The pained expression on his face made me ache, and I had to save him quick. “I don’t want to forget what we’ve already done. I want to do more of it, to build on it. I don’t want to forget our first time—or our second time. Let’s just start from here, you big lug. But I don’t know where—”

“We obviously can’t go back to your place,” he said, with a relieved laugh. “Your sister. But I live alone. There’s no wife or boyfriend or anything like that in my house or life. I’d like to have a boyfriend, though. So, let me pay for the coffees and then let’s go home.”

And that’s what we did.