CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER NINE
I spent the afternoon of my fourth day of acknowledged queerness feeling slightly strange. I was with Frank and Rafe. I still had my clothes on and wasn't into something sexual with them. It felt strange to be looking in windows at Georgetown Mall instead of having a cock in my mouth or up my ass. If anything, it was stranger still I wasn't even looking at the guys who passed by us.
Maybe there was something to be said for a variety of experiences. I wasn't ready to agree that non-stop sex was getting old yet, but I was enjoying being with my friends in public and doing things we weren't likely to do naked and getting it on.
"What's with this shit these twins of yours are pushing?" Rafe Ciencias asked.
"Shit if I know." I looked at him. "What makes you think I'd know anything about it?"
"They're staying at your house, Mark. You seem to have got deeper into things with them than Frank has."
"They can get pretty deep, can't they?" I answered, grinning over at his brother.
He blushed as I suspected he would. "Staying on the sexual level for a minute," I continued, "some Monsignor seems to have found a way for the Catholic church to accept us gay boys - without doing so."
"That sounds just like the church," Rafe growled, "always straddling the fence. You ought to see how it's screwed Spain up -" He shook his head slowly at some memory known only to him. "They're finally coming out of it - like the French."
"Yeah?" I glanced from one brother to the other. "Well, I don't think this is official church doctrine yet. The gist of it is it's all right for you to suck a guy off or let him pork you - as long as you don't enjoy it."
Rafe stopped in the middle of the top floor of the mall and stared at me. "You're shitting me." He glanced at his younger brother then. "Why the fuck do it if you don't get off on it?"
"I shit you not," I answered. "It sort of goes along with church teaching on sex as I understand it - you're supposed to have sex only when you're trying to make a kid. You're supposed to be spiritual and not physical other times," I added, my lips twisting into a grin.
"Why the fuck do it if you don't enjoy it?" Frank groused and ran his fingertips down Rafe's arm. The older Ciencias smiled back at him.
"Whoever said religion made sense?" I shrugged and tried not to think about how close this set of brothers had already got.
"Is this why those two have been spanking each other since they got in?" Rafe asked.
"I think so. It seems Jimmy was pretty well out of the closet even back at camp - Henry walloping his ass and every one of the 500 guys out there being fed the same shit - that sort of kept Jimmy's love of cock in line. But Henry wasn't enough-" I smiled. "Not when Jimmy found other guys who didn't think anything about getting off on sex. Henry's coming around-"
"I hope so." Frank leered. "That boy was really into getting laid all the way around last night."
"I noticed that - as well as not being treated to any more of them beating on each other afterwards."
Rafe frowned. "Why were they doing that, any way?" He colored slightly. "I can see it, if a guy's going to get off on it, like you and Frank - but I get the impression they were paddling each other to get rid of hard-ons, not get off."
"They were." I lowered my voice instinctively. "They'd pray for deliverance in between licks - like those guys in Iran who beat on themselves with nasty looking whips and pray at the same time."
"Jesus, that's got to be crazy."
"That's what happens to your brain when you listen to preachers," I told them. "Any way, that idea - the one that says you can help a buddy out but you can't get off on doing it - connects in with the rest of how they were acting."
"Like Henry saying they couldn't suck me off or let me fuck them that first night because I'm not circumcised?" Frank asked and I nodded.
Rafe frowned and I suspected he hadn't heard how his younger brother had found his true sexual calling.
"There are supposed to be people who're more Christian than others - more capable of being Christian, I guess. Mormons have the same idea - about blacks and Indians being inferior, I mean. Good European stock are the guys who're going to get ahead if those crazies ever take control of the country-"
"That'll never happen," Rafe growled.
"I sure as hell hope not - but the US of A has a lot of crazies floating around these days. That's their plan, though - to bring America back to a Europeanized Christ. I even got the idea these Christian Soldiers are linked up with the skinheads from a couple of things Henry said early on."
He shuddered at the thought. "That'd be like that nut Congressman from California saying gays should be quarantined."
"They'd do that. You see, if you like your sex with another guy - that's an abomination. Being gay, to them, means taking pride in your abomination. I think Jesse Helms' and Robert Dornan's concentration camps on Pacific islands would be a real possibility if these guys ever got control of the country."
"Sort of like the pink triangle Hitler had homosexuals wearing back then?" Rafe asked and I nodded. "And you've been fucking around with these guys?" he demanded.
"I don't think the church has been as efficient as the Nazis were in indoctrinating this latest version of the Hitlerjungen." I told him grinning. "Those boys have grown into first-class queers these past couple of days - there's hope for them yet."
Frank went over to the rail and glanced down through the levels of the mall. "You want Japanese or standard American?"
"Japanese what?" Rafe asked suspiciously.
"Food," he grunted, standing back up and looking at me. "I'm getting hungry and it's lunch time."
Rafe dropped us off at my house because he had a job interview in McLean. "You going to be home tonight, Francisco?" he asked as his brother shut the car door and stepped onto my drive.
Frank grinned and nodded.
"We'll do dinner then - just the two of us."
Frank nodded again and watched the car pull away. He looked pretty wistful to me.
"Rafe accepts you like cock?" I asked.
He turned back to me and I watched him shut the door to one compartment of his brain and open another. "Yeah," he allowed slowly.
"And he's fucking you regularly?"
Frank nodded, watching me.
"What do you need with me and the twins then?"
"We're friends - you and me."
I frowned. "I mean our sex, Ciencias."
His face reddened. "You guys put out. And I like at least a hot mouth once in a while."
"How does Rafe feel about that?"
He shrugged. "He doesn't like it. He wants me to be all his-"
"How about you?"
He started twisting his hands together in front of his pants and got real interested in watching them. "I - Shit! The Rafe that came home Sunday, the one who fucked me half the night - I could really go for him, you know? Only, I want more than a huge dick in my ass all the time."
"Have you told him this?"
He nodded.
"What does he say to that?"
Frank snorted. "He says he's only just found out he likes ass. He's telling me I need to give him time to get used to that before he thinks about anything else. That's why he's not bent out of shape when I come over to see you and the twins."
He smiled suddenly. "Last night, when he was fucking me just before we went to sleep, he jacked me off. He did it again this morning when he woke me up with that monster going into me - he's coming around."
I nodded. "Sounds like he is. It also sounds as if you two are getting something more than just sex going."
"I hope so," he mumbled.
We stepped into the house. "It's awfully quiet in here," Frank observed as I shut the front door behind us.
"They might still be asleep," I offered, slipping past him in the foyer and starting for the family room. I grinned over my shoulder. "Maybe we ought to wake them and get into something?"
Frank chuckled. "Have you noticed how completely you and I both have just accepted ourselves - you in four days and me in three?"
"What's that supposed to mean?" I asked, stopping and turning back to face him.
"I mean, four days ago when you sucked me off in those trees at the reservoir, I'd have died if somebody told me I was going to get off on getting fucked or any of the other shit we've done. I'll bet the day before when you were hemming and hawing about feeling something for me, you were scared to death what that might mean in reality."
I thought about it for a moment. I had been scared. Sure, I was fantasizing about us having sex and stuff - but it had still scared me. The idea of having queer sex was scary enough; but somebody knowing I was queer had me thinking I was having a heartattack.
I grinned and nodded. "I was so scared it had to be written across my face in big letters. I died when José picked up on it-"
"José?"
"At the Mexican restaurant."
I could tell the moment Frank remembered the manager of my favorite Mexican restaurant; his eyes flashed with memory - and suspicion.
"He's nice," he admitted, studying me. "He picked up on your being gay?'
"Yeah." I decided to come clean. "I was freaked at giving you a blow job and knowing you planned a lot more than that when you came over Friday night. I couldn't get sex out of my head - I was hard the whole drive back home. Anyway, I decided to eat there - and he just invited himself along for whatever I had planned for the afternoon. We got back here-"
"You invited him here?"
"We were going to go out to Tyson's and I needed my checkbook, Frank. But we never went shopping. He had me figured from the get go."
"What did you guys do?"
I colored slightly. "He fucked me."
His face darkened with a shot of anger. "You told me you were a virgin that night, Mark!"
I felt myself blush down to my toes. "Don't get possessive with me," I growled. "You're the one who's going to try to get things going with Rafe."
"Jesus," he growled. "You really are spreading it around."
I stared back at him, angry I was having to defend myself. "One more than you, bastard."
"What's he like?" he asked, slowly working his way out of the trap of judging me.
"Nice body and big cock," I answered and managed to keep from smiling at the memory of his equipment. "Not as big as Rafe, though. We've got a date Wednesday."
"You're going to let him fuck you-"
"Look, Frank, I sort of wanted to check your big brother out-" I smiled as I remembered what Rafe had felt like in me. "You're getting all of him from what you were just saying. We have the twins here the rest of the week and I haven't seen you being particularly reticent about any kind of sex with them. I want to spend some time with José. He's probably going to be just one more cock in my ass, but I like it. And, maybe, he'll be more than that - like you're hoping Rafe is."
"I talked to Rafe this morning when we were driving over to pick you up," he mumbled, managing to avoid meeting my eyes. "He says, if he gets this job today, I can live with him."
"That ought to be fun."
"Maybe. I don't know."
"Good luck," I offered and meant it. Frank was right. He and I were buddies - fuck buddies - and nearly brothers.
"Let's wake the sleeping beauties up and get something going," I told him and tried to hide the feeling I was getting that I was missing out on having someone special too.
"They're not in their room!" I growled in surprise, staring at the empty, precisely-made bed. Frank stuck his head in, coming in under my arm.
"Their shit's gone too," he announced, pulling my frozen thoughts from the queen-sized bed the twins had shared since Saturday and making me look about the room appraisingly.
"It is," I agreed, seeing nothing that would make me think of either brother.
"It's as if they'd never been here."
"Where would they have gone?" I wondered.
"Back to Montana and their Hitlerjungen camp probably. We were getting to them and screwing up their thinking too much."
I thought about that. Jimmy was definitely too far out of the closet and liking it for him to go back to what he had come from - at least, willingly - unless Henry pushed him into it. After last night, though, I didn't see that one putting blinders back on either.
"I don't think so, Frank. Any time Saturday or even up to Sunday afternoon, that might have happened. But they were too ready to shuck it after last night."
"Maybe they left a note?"
We lifted each lamp and doodad Mom'd populated the bedroom with. We looked under the bed and in the closet. We went through the family room the same way, picking up yesterday's torn condom packets and other trash as we went through the room.
Nothing. Nada. It was as if Henry and Jimmy had never existed in our lives.
"Come on," I told Frank. "Let's ask Father Ralph if he knows anything."
"You're feeling responsible for them, aren't you?"
I shrugged and grinned. "Yeah."
"They're nineteen year olds - a year younger than we are."
"And they're as naive as any yokel just come to town too," I told him. "Come on."
Father Ralph wasn't at the rectory and the housekeeper didn't know where he, the rector, or the curate were. She smiled at me as we were leaving and asked that I remember her to mom. The church secretary had no idea where either of the younger priests were, but the rector had driven up to visit his mother in Connecticut that morning.
Except for three nuns from the elementary school kneeling and twiddling their rosary beads, the church was empty. Frank and I went through both the sacristy and baptistry in addition to the administrative offices.
"Looks like we're batting a thousand," he whispered.
"Maybe one of the priests is over at the school."
Frank nodded to the nuns and said: "Kids are out of school and it looks like all the administration is over here."
I followed the tilt of his head. "They're from the elementary school-"
"You mean old Saint Thomas Henry has a high school now?"
I grinned and started for the large doors and the heat of a June afternoon. "I think your folks left the church too soon, Frank," I told him as we stepped outside. "They put in a high school about eight years ago and staffed it with Dominican monks."
"Sounds like real fun." He grinned. "And you went there, didn't you?"
I nodded glumly. "Only the first year," I offered in apology. "It took me that long to convince the folks the public schools were just as good and they were already paying for those." I snorted and rolled my eyes. "I really learned a whole lot about taxation that year just so I could have my arguments all in a row-"
I peered across the street at the high school and felt a lump grow in my throat when I saw the big, burly man in a cossack standing in front of it. "There's Brother Ignacias," I groaned.
"Who's he?"
"The principal."
"What's so bad about him," Frank asked, eye-ing the big man, "other than his being dumber than shit like any school administrator?"
I reddened. "The last time I got a spanking - before you popped my ass with that ping pong paddle Friday night - he did the honors."
"Was it good?"
"Shit, Frank! There's a real difference between it being part of sex play and it being punishment. That asshole gets something in his head and he doesn't let go of it."
"Nice authoritarian."
"Yeah. Cops and teachers-"
"And Nazis."
"I guess we better go see if he knows where Father Ralph is," I mumbled and started down the steps to the curb.
"Brother Ignacias," I greeted him as we approached him - in some strange way, the years were falling off me fast and I was getting close to being fourteen again and dreading being anywhere near this man.
He nodded an acknowledgment, one short, quick jerk of the head.
"We're looking for Father Ralph," I asked with all the respect a fourteen year old boy can have for a man who can beat him to a pulp. "Have you seen him today?"
"He went into Washington this morning," the monk replied, his voice as gruff and unfeeling as I remembered it. "The Archbishop asked him to do some things over there for him." Brother Ignacias also proved to be as taciturn as I remembered him because he shut up and offered us nothing more.
"You haven't seen two blond young men, have you?" Frank asked, deciding I was still too Catholic to interrogate a man who had intimidated my innocent youth. "They're here on some church business from some sort of camp out in Montana."
"I haven't seen them." Simple as that - no more, no less. Brother Ignacias turned, dismissing us, and started back toward the school.
"If you see Father Ralph, could you have him call me?" I called after him.
"I'll do that, Mark Edwards," he answered without looking back at us.
Frank and I watched him enter the building and check to see if the doors were locked behind him before disappearing into the dimness beyond them.
"He doesn't say much, does he?" Frank said finally.
"Not even when he's blistering your ass." I groaned softly and shook my head. "Six years since I've been in this place and he still remembers my name."
Frank sniggered. "Says something about whatever memory enhancement system he uses-"
"Or that he doesn't have anything else to do but remember those who got away," I rejoined, but I strangely didn't feel like making jokes - not about the man who had just disappeared into the school. "Where do you suppose our Teutonic twins are?"
We started back to the car. "They don't have a car-" Frank held up a finger. "They don't know their way around the District or the suburbs well." He held up a second finger. "They came here for some kind of get-together at this church," he continued ticking off each point as we started back to the car. "That leads logically right back to the church. This church."
"I'll agree with that-" I scratched my head and said: "But where are they, Sherlock?"
"Good point, Watson. What's the most logical answer to your question?"
"Either they left for Montana or they're somewhere around the church here."
"They didn't act pissed last night, did they?"
I shook my head slowly, remembering how both of them had seemed more relaxed and were actually fun to be around.
"So, that leaves us the church. Do you really think Father Ralph, the rector, and the curate are all three gone at the same time?"
"It could happen."
"And no one know where two of them are - especially the secretary?"
"That does seem a little weird, doesn't it?" I agreed.
"Which brings us back to holy mother church here. We've got two reasonably young priests and a whole slew of brothers around here and it's deader than dead - I bet I know where they've got them."
"Where?" I demanded and immediately backed off as we crossed the street. "Hell, Frank, we don't even know the twins are around here."
"Want to bet?" he growled as he stopped at the passenger door a step ahead of me.
"Okay, so where are they?" I unlocked Frank's side of the car and circled the hood to reach the driver's side.
"In the school." He looked back over his shoulder and grinned. "That one right there."
"How do you arrive at that, Sherlock?" I asked pulling my door closed.
"School's out - so, it's the only place no one's likely to be."
I sat behind the wheel and stared straight ahead for long minutes in silence. Frank sat in the passenger seat and smiled as I tried to follow his thinking and work it out for myself. "We don't even know anybody kidnapped them," I complained even as I accepted it completely.
"But there's no other really logical explanation for them just disappearing without a trace, is there?"
I had to admit that much of what he said held water. I was even willing to accept Father Ralph was somehow involved. Henry and Jimmy weren't exactly the best known guys in Falls Church, Virginia, and the priest had been the one shepherding them around just three days ago. He was also the one who tried to bring me in line.
Okay, so the church had them; I had to accept this particular church and this particular school were a relatively safe bet as being the place they were.
I was even willing to accept they weren't there of their own free will; otherwise, there wouldn't be any need for them and the priests to do the disappearing act that was bugging the shit out of me.
I doubted there was a cop around who'd go breaking into a Catholic high school on our say so, though. There wasn't a cop around who'd believe much or any of our story as it was. And, as soon as he found out the twins were as gay as we were, any cop who had believed us up to that point would stop being interested very quickly indeed.
So, the police were out. We were just two young guys up against a curate, a youth minister, and I didn't know how many of the church's contingent of Dominican brothers.
I remembered José then. I was willing to hope he had some smarts to go along with his big cock and really cute looks.
"Why don't we toss this around over an early dinner?" I suggested as I started the car.
"Sure-" He looked at me suspiciously. "You're thinking Mexican, aren"t you?"
Was I that fucking obvious? Jesus!
"Yeah," I told him coloring. "If the twins are here at the church, we're going to need some help, Frank."
"And your boy can give it to us?"
"He's got the waiters at the restaurant," I told him. "They all look pretty healthy to me."
"What you won't do to get laid, Mark," he growled. "I hope he's worth it."
"I wasn't even thinking about that," I lied. José wanted me to be his maricón especial - his special queer. I had moved a long way since Friday afternoon when I found out I liked getting fucked by him but was still more than a little confused about Frank. Shit, yes! I'd be his maricón - special or otherwise. I could bug out on an order of his penga, rare and hard.