Father Briar and The Angel Read online

  It was all so incredible intense. Their lovemaking was heightened by the passion of the rescue. That they had to clutch each other for warmth, to make sure he didn’t get hypothermia, to keep his leg from getting frostbitten, was even more arousing to her; they couldn’t stop, even if they wanted to.

  But, oh! They did not want to.

  She tangled her fingers in his hair and guided him around her body before settling him between her legs. He kissed her for a while, then she felt his finger replace his tongue and she cried out in delight.

  “Cedric!” her eyes flew open after being pressed shut from the intensity of the passion. “Cedric!” she cried again.

  Father Briar gave no indication that he’d heard his lover (and his rescuer) scream his name. He continued with the same gentle insistence that he’d started with, making her passion rise and rise.

  He tickled her with his tongue in the places only he knew, that she’d allowed only him. As she liked, he lifted her from the bed drawing her even closer to him, sliding his tongue deeper into her.

  She wanted to scream, so she did.

  “Why not? Nobody can hear me,” she though.

  So Julianna screamed and let her body lose control, blessed and God-given control, and let her orgasms ripple through her body, one after another. She shuddered and didn’t try to control it.

  “What bullshit shame is!” she thought as more orgasms shook her body, shook her like the walls of the icehouse, shook her to her soul, as she screamed for him not to quit and keep that unbelievable pleasure going.

  She let her body follow its own instincts, its own rhythms, and its own private dances. Julianna felt like a marionette finally shaking off its strings.

  Julianna bucked and rode, reversed positions and let him take the top, rolled him back, kissed his mouth, his neck, and his nipples. As he rammed into her, she responded with a ferocious rocking of her own, like he’d never seen her do before.

  Because he remembered how much he liked it, he took her butt in his hands and lifted her up, making her scream from the length and strength of him.

  All the pain in his leg was gone (although soon to return) and she could see the color returning to his skin. He was a deep and lush red and he was absolutely gorgeous.

  Their passion couldn’t continue much longer, both were peaking on adrenaline and ready to release. He, too, had lost the inhibitions of his voice, and intensity of his shouting raised hers as well, shaking the walls. The noises carried on the wind for miles and miles.

  Julianna wrapped her legs around him and locked down as hard as she could. She could feel the beginning of his twitching; his testicles tucked up into his body and she could feel them spraying into her.

  Her legs vice gripped him even more aggressively and she gave herself an explosive orgasm around his semen as it flooded her. Finally she unlocked her legs and he exhaled, breathed deeply, and exhaled again, utterly spent.

  Julianna did the only thing she could think of in such a miraculous occasion; she said a prayer of thanks to God.

  “I know that when they have…intercourse…he does it with his collar on,” Gosha told Dale. “And nothing else. Can you imagine that?”

  “I sure can,” the Bishop Dale said, with probably a spoonful too much enthusiasm. “What do you think Julianna wears while they are doing it?”

  “Her big, corn-fed American breasts, with their pink bubblegum nipples, swing free as she rides him, I am sure.”

  “She could be on top of him?” Dale was astonished. Like a proper Christian, he only knew the missionary position.

  “Not only could she be on top of him, he could be behind her.”

  Dale liked the sound of that. This scary Polish mystic was giving him feelings he’d not had since he was a teenager. But golly, Gosha, he was still a priest, so there was a pressing issue to be addressed.

  “Do you think they use birth control?”

  That unique cackle came again, filling the cab of the truck with its mischief and melody. “Would a deer in the woods? Would a salmon in the stream? Would a dog in the streets?”

  “So…no?

  “They fornicate without care or control. Like beasts. No. Not like beasts. He does not fuck her like a beast or a priest. He fucks her like a real man.”

  To emphasize her point, she grabbed his dick. Astonished to find it as hard as the stick shift controlling the truck’s transmission, she gave it a couple of tugs, and then he moaned and passed out.

  The wolf decided it was time. He needed to eat.

  The growling began in earnest at 11pm on the second night of the storm. Cedric and Julianna were nude under a hand-stitched quilt, a double stuffed thing so thick it had gravity. Their bodies had been intertwined for hours and she had no intention of letting him go.

  They were in the endorphin-enhanced state of post-coital bliss when wolf began his threatening. Just low, gnarly noises from the back of his famished but formidable throat. The wind was so loud and the snow had such a muffling effect that they didn’t hear him at first, and when they did, they weren’t sure what it was they were hearing.

  “I think it is just the wind, whipping and whistling through the cracks,” he reassured her. His foot was wrapped in blankets and he kept it near the stove at all times. Otherwise their bodies were still locked together, as if they intended to stay that way forever.

  And they might’ve, if not forever, at least for the foreseeable future, except for the wolf had decided it was now or never: his belly needed filling.

  He circled the icehouse once, then again. The door was obviously the weakest of spots and the obviously entry way. He pawed at it, his icy claws leaving deep, visible marks in the frozen wood.

  “That was clawing,” Julianna said, panic rising in her voice.

  “Clawing?” Cedric asked, confused.

  “Yes, clawing.”

  Then he heard the sound again.

  “Yes,” he agreed, astonished, “that is clawing.”

  Cedric tried to stand up but fell. There were pins and needles stabbing at his legs as the blood returned to them. The tumble would’ve been comical under any other circumstances. and even Julianna had to suppress a laugh.

  But she was still in control. She’d been in control throughout the rescue and the subsequent amazing sex, and she wasn’t yet ready to let him have it back.

  “Cedric,” she said, calm and cool (literally cool, shit, it was cold), “seeing as you can’t walk, I need you to roll over to the door.”

  She stood, still naked, and loaded the flare gun.

  “When you open the door, I’m going to blast whatever is out there. So stay low.”

  Cedric was surprised, but did what he was told. With the last of his remaining strength, he pulled the door open by the bottom plank.

  Nothing had surprised the wolf in his weeks of running. Not the fury of the storm, not the length of his journey, not coming upon poor Robbie Roggenbucker in his truck. He didn’t have much experience with human beings, but they didn’t usually appear in front of him, white in the darkness, breasts swinging free, with a gun in their hands.

  Hunger is a powerful motivator, but self-preservation is even stronger. The wolf was turning to flee even before the shot sizzled over his back, singing his fur before briefly illuminating the night before disappearing into the awful, gloaming snow.

  God takes care of all creatures great and small, so concerned souls, I’m sure the wolf way okay.

  Chapter Twenty Eight: Dum Spero, Spiro is Latin for “As I breathe, I Hope.”

  Beauty and the Beast (although Gosha had already herself shortened its name to just the more appropriate “Beast,” pushed the snow aside with ease, clearing a path across the lake.

  “That cow catcher works wonders,” Bishop Mueller said, watching the steel wedge welded to the front of the truck do its plowing work.

  “I never understand when is on a train they call it “cow catcher.” Looks more like “cow vaporizer” to me.” The old Pole l
oved black humor, useful stuff for her massive truck, and trains. Cows she was indifferent to. But the sold steel grill, bought at auction for a bargain price, had fit quite nicely, after some blowtorching, on the front of her ride. Now, instead of clearing debris (most of it, despite the name, not of a bovine nature) off the train tracks, it was serving as a snowplow.

  “I know where icehouse is,” she declared. “teenagers like to have sex there. I must clear it out of “humpers” regularly.”

  Besides the winch, the cow catcher and goodness knows what else, Gosha had mounted a 10,000 candlepower spotlight (bought at a military auction for, get this: a bargain price!) and she hit the switch to turn it on.

  The Army light cut through the wildly flying snow and ice and inky black night like a not-quite-invented-yet laser beam. After a few seconds of fiddling with her in-cab controls, which consisted of chains and pulleys and spinning plates on well greased ball bearings.

  The light spilled in through every crack in the little fishing shack.

  I haven’t seen a light like that since the war,” Cedric said.

  Julianna peaked through the cracks in the walls of the shack, then shocked and needing further information, she opened the door just enough to get a clear view.

  “It is Gosha and Bishop Muller in a tank,” she said, in surely the strangest sentence she’d ever uttered.

  “I know what to do,” Julianna said. “Don’t worry. Go out, stall them for a moment, and then let them in.”

  “Where are your clothes?” he panicked, pulling his flannel long johns on and his snow suit over them.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “Where I’m going, I won’t need them.”

  He was befuddled, but didn’t press further. As dressed as possible, he slipped out the doorway and back into the blizzard.

  Julianna slipped down the fishing hole she’d kept chipping the ice from all storm. It felt as warm and soothing as bathwater.

  “Oh, Father Briar, thank God you are safe and okay,” Bishop Muller gushed. He’d never really taken Gosha’s complaints about Father Briar seriously, especially after his breakfast and fancy dinner with the man. and after his unexpected (and decades in the waiting) sexual release, he wasn’t much in the mood for anything but a joyful reunion with his best priest.

  “And your girlfriend?” Gosha asked. Even she was surprised by the fury of the storm and wanted to get back into the Beast and away from the cold. She also wanted another shot at the manliness of the bishop. Gosha assumed he’d be looking for more, too; and maybe to be able to enjoy it this time for longer than fifteen seconds.

  “What girlfriend?” Father Briar asked, the hostility frozen in his voice. “I’m here alone.”

  He couldn’t believe he was saying this. Julianna most certainly was inside the icehouse, with nowhere to go. The only things in there were their love nest of blankets and a stove.

  But he knew to follow his instructions. He’d heard her still, small voice, heard it from somewhere inside his soul, and he knew that now was the time to follow her.

  “Would you and Bishop Muller like to come in and see for yourselves?” he said with a straight face.

  “Of course we would, especially if you have a cup of coffee in there,” the Bishop said.

  “I might have a nip of something a bit stronger,” Cedric offered, and opened the door to an empty icehouse.

  Julianna knew she should be dead by now but she wasn’t; quite to the contrary, she was clear-headed and analytical and most surprising, warm. Kicking her legs with power and grace, she flipped herself upside down.

  Julianna felt elemental, essential, and utterly real. She felt close to God and His power enveloped her.

  “Air,” she remembered, “don’t humans need air?” It sure didn’t feel like it. She put her hands to her breast to check her heart: its beat was still strong and steady.

  There were currents flowing around her, but she did not move. These warmer and cooler parts of the lake rose and fell and traveled around, moved by unseen forces.

  There was no pain. “Remarkable,” she thought, “it’s like a bath.” She smiled and then wondered how that was possible. “Shouldn’t my cheeks be numb? Shouldn’t my muscles be stiff and useless? But they were not. Julianna felt like an otter or a beaver. “A polar bear, even!” she said to herself, in a clear and strong voice.

  Another voice spoke, spoke so close to her she’d know hearing it was real and not a tricky hallucination caused by anoxia. The voice was still and small and as real as the water around her.

  “This storm is not God’s work,” the voice said, “for I have seen no wrath except on man's side, and He forgives that in us, for wrath is nothing else but a perversity and an opposition to peace and to love. Do not worry about what you perceive as sin, your sin of love for the Father. Human souls mature so that evil and sin will no longer hinder us.”

  “Well, this place is most certainly empty,” Bishop Muller said.

  Gosha was dumbfounded. She’d been so certain that she’d caught them, she been so certain that she was right and so certain of the rightness of her cause, that proven wrong, she wanted to explode like an atom bomb. She’d wanted to leave immediately but Bishop Muller had insisted they stay for a coffee and a nip of brandy.

  Cedric couldn’t imagine where Julianna had gone, but he assumed it was outside somewhere. “Could she have turned herself invisible?” he thought, hoping the bishop would sip his drink swiftly. “Could she be like the Shadow?” he thought, remembering the popular radio serial from his youth.

  He stated to worry. There was no other practical explanation but her being outside, but there was no way out, so how? In the absence of logic, the rigorous Jesuit started to panic.

  “This is delightful brandy,” Bishop Muller commented, his breathing relaxed, his pupils dilated, and his blood-pressure mellow after his recent love encounter.

  “Yes, and this little icehouse is lovely,” Gosha added, already thinking of the romantic encounters she could pull off in a secluded place like this.

  Julianna imagined it would be dark and terrifying down under the ice, black and murky and full of grime and grossness. That there would be no light. That there would be dead, fallen trees covered and mossy mud, with fish with beady red eyes and teeth engineered by Satan. That she would need to breathe and open her mouth and take the foul and poisonous water into her lungs and be pulled to the bottom and death.

  None of that were true, at least not from Julianna’s unusual vantage point. She couldn’t see the bottom of the lake, nor anything to the sides. The varied hues of blue were out of a Van Gogh masterpiece, whirling gentle and soft in the distance, hypnotizing and peaceful. Every pint of water seemed to be a different color of blue; aquamarines competed with turquoises and navies competed with periwinkles, denims with oxfords, and iris with teals. A whole universe, multiple universes, even, were contained in a single color.

  She wanted to stay down there forever, and would’ve, until she remembered her lover, dealing with their tormentors above. And then again, that lilting voice spoke to her, the accent ancient but the words so very modern.

  “Jesus said to me, he said, “You shall not be tempested, thou shalt not be travailed, thou shalt not be diseased'; but he Jesus said, 'Thou shalt not be overcome.”

  Now clued in to the incredible importance of listening (something she and so many woman make the calling of their lives) she listened, the sound coming through the water like waves. When Gosha’s truck rolled away, she swam towards the fishing hole in the ice, which now looked like a Heavenly beam, leading her home.

  Cedric was astonished that the ice could hold the Beast as it rumbled off into the night. The machine was so bizarre and so terrifying and so, well, so Gosha, that he wanted to watch it go, but he was terrified about the fate of his Julianna.

  After seeing them off, he barreled his way back into the icehouse to find her standing there next to the fire, as healthy and as pink and as naked as a newborn babe.
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  She had emerged from the lake seconds ago without effort, with the last mystical words that had been spoken to her still ringing in her ears like a bell, like a pure and silver bell.

  “And I saw that truly nothing happens by accident or luck, but everything by God's wise providence. If it seems to be accident or luck from our point of view, our blindness and lack of foreknowledge is the cause; for matters that have been in God's foreseeing wisdom since before time began befall us suddenly, all unawares; and so in our blindness and ignorance we say that this is accident or luck, but to our Lord God it is not so.”

  “Baptize me,” she commanded, “I’ve already been fully immersed.”

  And so he did.

  “Let us ask our Lord Jesus Christ to look lovingly on this child who is to be baptized, on her parents and godparents, and on all the baptized.”

  Nude but warm, she shivered, not from cold, but the Holy Spirit.

  Father Briar continued.

  “By the mystery of your death and resurrection, bathe this child in light, give her the new life of baptism and welcome her into your holy Church.”

  They said in unison, “Lord, hear our prayer.”

  He recited every word in precise, beautiful Latin, and at the end, after he’d traced the outline of the cross on her forehead in ice water, adding a phrase of his own:

  “God forgive us for our small sins,

  and thank you for great miracles.”

  Epilogue:

  Julianna and Cedric’s relationship lasted many decades longer than Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe’s. After New York/Hollywood power and glamour couple returned to the United States after their ill-fated and aborted honeymoon, tension between the combustible personalities continued to build, particularly around DiMaggio’s discomfort with his wife’s sexy image, the very same image that had to attracted him to her in the first place.