STORY EXCERPT

So I shouted at Con, “Call 911!”

Con was more than glad to wander back toward the house and make the call. Meanwhile, Wacker thrashed about and tore at the snake head.

“Get it off me! Get it off me!”

“Stop moving!” I yelled. “The more you move the faster the venom gets into your bloodstream.”

“How’m I supposed to stop moving with this motherfucking snake head buried in my neck?”

Arlo squeezed my shoulder and crouched down beside the victim. “It’s just a dead head,” he said, as though convincing himself.

To show my support, I squatted next to the priest. “Squeeze the hinges of its jaws.”

He did, and the head came away. He tossed it over by the rest of the snake. It didn’t escape me that this was the second time this week that someone or thing had been cut in half on this property.

The improvement was mostly psychological. I implored Wacker not to move and borrowed Arlo’s army knife to cut away his T-shirt from his neck and chest. Yes, it was a Grateful Dead T-shirt. I had to give Con kudos for that. The bitten area had already swollen until Wacker had no jawline at all, and I started fearing for his demise. Without treatment within the hour, his systems would break down, and he’d die within a day or two.

We scooted a few feet away on our butts, regarding the victim with emotionless eyes.

Arlo said, “Are you thinking the same thing? This would be the perfect time to question him?”

I had been thinking that. “I can’t allow that, Arlo. That’d go against my creed.”

He nodded, understanding. Then he flashed a crooked grin at me, sort of the way I looked smiling ever since my dad had beaten the shit out of me, damaging the nerves in my mouth. “That doesn’t stop us from going through his stuff, finding the bottle and the oil.”

“Hey!” yelled Wacker, ten feet away. “Stay out of my house!”

“Shut your dafty trap!” yelled Arlo.

“Fine talk coming from a priest,” I said good-naturedly.

Arlo shrugged. He looked manly as hell, the cuffs of his button-down shirt rolled to his elbows, revealing bulging, sinewy forearms. He wore some sort of religious ring and that was it. I could easily find out if he was married by asking around. Why was I always attracted to these older silver foxes? Besides being an EMT, Troy had taught boxing at the local gym. It didn’t get much manlier than that.

I clearly had a type. And my type seemed to be the unavailable type.

“I get the job done,” Arlo said.

“Whatever it takes, right?” I agreed.

He tilted his head in an appealing way, now serious. “I don’t find the end justifies the means. But in today’s rough trade world, you’ve sometimes got to be a bit coarse and raw to get what you want.”

“Oh yeah?” My heart thudded with excitement. It suddenly hit me that we weren’t talking about empty booze bottles anymore. “And what do you want?”

Now he was flirtatious, appealing again. “I want it vulgar and savage. As long as I’m in control, it can’t get nasty and coarse enough for me.”

My lower jaw dropped.

We were clearly not discussing bottles or oil anymore.

It was like my brain had suddenly been bruised. I couldn’t wrap my mind around his meaning, his intention.

But he looked directly at me, not shying away from any implication. His sparkling cornflower eyes told me he wasn’t ashamed that he liked it rough. His obscenely curled lips said he wasn’t repentant for who he was. His cock throbbing half-erect against his thigh let me know he was aroused right now.

Problem was, I had no idea who he wanted. Me, or a woman?

Suddenly, Wacker bawled, “Oh, get a fucking room!”

Arlo barked, “Shut yer dobber mouth!”

“Hey!” Con was yelling from across the street. He waved some things around in his hands and bounded over to us like a fawn. I didn’t have a single second to relish the lewd meaning behind Father Fleming’s words. That would have to wait for later, because Con was waving some plants in one hand, and crockpot in the other.

“Look!” he cried. “I found the rice cooker they were using. It’s got residue in it you can analyze. And look at these cannabis stems and leaves! We can probably figure out exactly which pot plantation they came from.”

“Aye!” said Arlo. “Good work, lad! Stick that stuff in the truck.”

“You can’t take my shit!” yelled Wacker.

“Stay calm and stop moving!” I shouted back at the victim.

It took the ambulance forty-five minutes to get there that day. Too much tissue had been destroyed and his blood wasn’t clotting. He died the next day.

I had to get to work on the plants and rice cooker in my lab, where I had plenty of time to mull over the good father’s salacious words.

ADULT EXCERPT

I loved cock. I loved the feel of the hard, taut cockhead against my tonsils, the ridged sensation of the bulging veins as I wrapped my tongue around its heft, the pisshole, slimy with precum. I even loved the various flavors of jizz as it spurted down my throat. Depending what they’d eaten—champagne was my favorite—we had salty, bitter, tart, fruity. I loved cock and that wasn’t going to change any time soon.

And now this horny priest. All over me like a bunch of killer bees. He wants me. A man who wore a cassock and passed out communion wafers and spoke Latin wanted to slide his dick down my throat. I was definitely not prepared for such holy meat, but just being in the same room as Arlo Fleming had my penis extending inside my boxer briefs, obvious to anyone who cared to look.

Then. With a shock to my heart, I realized my dead, daydreaming eyes had been gazing glassily into one of the rectory’s windows.

The curtain was pulled wide open, and the buff, manly figure of Father Fleming strode back and forth, naked.

His full, meaty cock swayed between his thighs. He strode easily, hands dangling loosely, supremely confident, maybe even arrogant. He didn’t even have the decency to wrap a towel around that trim waist. If he knew I was looking, he was certainly putting on a show. I must have watched his brawny ass jiggle four or five circuits across the bedroom as he paraded, shaving or whatever he was doing with a little towel around his strong, sexy neck.

What was he doing? To show him he didn’t scare me, I got out of the county car and slammed the door loudly. His beautiful sloping back was to me, and I saw some of the bunched muscles flinch. He’d heard me, but he only paused for a second. He turned to face the window with a faraway, unfocused look. He slowly lifted one of his hands and almost absentmindedly scratched his stomach.

I knew he was only drawing attention to what youths would call his “sick abs.” Being a Scotty, of course he was pale, but he had that exquisite line of hair starting between his beefy pecs and arrowing down to his navel and beyond. It was like he was posing for one of those silver fox calendars, his beautiful face all sharp angles, more colorful ink displayed on his ribs, his lower back.

Were the inked characters in Latin? I’d have to get closer to see.

As I stepped so close I could see his luxuriant salt and pepper bush, the root of his cock jutting proudly, he turned and stalked to a mirror on the wall. As befitted the sparse priestly decor of the place, it looked like there was a sink in his bedroom, and my mouth watered as he bent forward to put his face close to the mirror.

I was pretty much obsessing on his shapely ass and might not have even noticed what he was doing, but for how odd it was. He was sticking his finger into his eye.

When it struck me that he was putting in contact lenses, I knew he probably hadn’t seen me out there at all.

That infuriated me.

He wasn’t parading before me at all! He’d been just blindly, musingly, staring at a rectangle of light!

He stood straight, shaking his head and blinking his eyes to get them accustomed to the lenses.

I didn’t want him to see me leering there like some kind of perverted voyeur, so I stomped around to the front door and pounded angrily on it.

Arlo didn’t come fast enough for me, so I rang the bell, too.

Well, what did I want him to do? He was naked, and I could’ve been any old parishioner. He had to get dressed first.

Still, I kept pounding. He had pissed me off. There I was, fantasizing he was stalking around arrogantly for my benefit, when he’d seen me maybe as an amorphous blob—if at all! I was one of those cartoony amoebas from science class and his dick was at half-mast because he was thinking about George Clooney or whoever! I almost felt like screaming!

But then he’d know I’d been ogling him.

When he opened the door innocently, I practically stepped on his bare toes getting inside the foyer. Bare toes? For he hadn’t tossed on a single stick of clothing at all other than to wrap a towel, sauna-style, around his hips. The towel was so low I could see that jaunty line of hair pointing down to where his cock bulged out the towel lewdly.

That made me even angrier. How did he know I wasn’t some fiancée coming for marriage advice? A Brazilian missionary coming with a plan? A bum coming for a handout? The bishop coming for a year-end meeting?

“What the fuck, Arlo?” I demanded. “Did you forget our meeting? You often run around like a towel boy at a Turkish bath?”

Arlo was speechless. He stood with the doorknob in his hand, the towel inching down his lean stomach far enough to exhibit some pubes. “I—”

“What if I was someone else, Arlo? A half-naked priest answering the door? No wonder they kicked you out of Oakland!”

He shut his mouth and the door. “What do you know about that?”

What? “Nothing. I’m just saying you parade around half-nude like that, you’re going to start to get—followers. You’re going to get people—women—with crushes on you. Is that what you want?”

“Indubitably not.” He was mindlessly scratching his stomach again, drawing attention to the half-mast penis so clear under the flimsy towel I could see the ridge of his taut corona. “But I knew it was you at the door.”

“How’d you know that?” I pointed at the ground. “How’d you know?”

He shrugged. “I saw your car out front. I saw you watching...me.”

“What?” I was appalled. So he had been able to see me! Drooling, ogling, leering like a voyeuristic perv! “I wasn’t sure if I was really seeing what I thought I was...seeing.”

He was matter-of-fact. “You saw me naked.”

I had to nod.

“And you liked what you saw?”

Again, I had to nod. So minutely you could’ve heard my neck creak.

He stepped toward me. “So you ogled my arse for a while. You thought that was nicer than coming to the front door. You like to watch. You admire my big horse cock?”

It was like I was under his spell! I had to nod again!