Page 11 of Hell and Its Pleasures

I hesitated. He did not. The bishop’s cane whacked across my chest, sending the skin aflame. My nipples throbbed but pushed up hard and obvious with want, and the bishop struck me again so hard I screamed. The sound of my voice echoed back, returned by the wall of fog that boxed us in, and the bishop shoved his cane beneath my chin, pressing the end into my jugular so firmly it became difficult to breathe.

“Do what I tell you, you pathetic excuse for a man.”

Which made me move. I pushed up onto my knees and unlaced the black breeches, slipping them over my hips quickly and gracelessly. When I went to stand to push them over my ankles, the bishop laughed and struck me—across the ass.

I cried out and fell face first into the dirt, cock out and pressing against the warm dust, and pants tangled around my legs. The skin stung, but my whimper only seemed to embolden him, and he struck me again and again until I was writhing, pushing away uselessly towards nothing, and non-committal as I went. It hurt—it hurt, but I didn’t want it to end. My mind spun somewhere happy and half-blank, and every strike against my flesh sent my soul stirring. It felt like he was beating against the shackles of my shame, like every strike weakened a link and pushed me ever closer to unabashed freedom.

As I lay there, precum weeping out of me and skin stinging, the bishop came and wrenched me up by my head.

“We aren’t done, whore,” he grunted. His cock twitched in my line of sight, and I pushed myself up greedily, mouth searching; pathetic, I knew I was, I knew how I must have looked with the dust around me stained and wet and congealing with my saliva. I felt desperate.

Then—perhaps Iwantedto do this.

He pushed into my throat again and I groaned, licked, sucked. I went to touch myself, to rut against the palm of my hand, but he brough his booted foot down and crushed against my aching cock. Shamefully, I bucked up against the pressure, excited and eager for any kind of release. The edges of his black cassock ghosted across the skin of my forearms, and incense had long ago settled into the fabric, which was now forever scented by the old, stale sandalwood and frankincense. It sent me back to church and holy ceremonies, so that somehow now I felt close to divinity when I had never been further away. My eyes rolled to the back of my head as he thrust inside, his foot crushing down harder on my groin.

Abruptly, he pulled away. Stringy saliva and precum connected us. His cock rested on my face, the warm tip kissing my cheek, and with it the bishop lightly slapped my face, tried to call me back to the moment, and said, “Confess to me, little priest.”

I swallowed hard, still trying to regulate my breathing, and looked up at him. On my knees like that, dog-like and eager, I felt so wonderfully apart of myself. There was none of that side of praying, where your soul began to feel distant, or where you yearned to be outside of your body and far beyond it, floating up above with God. I felt, right now, so particularly human that it made me joyous. I yearned not for heaven, but for this moment dragged out and extended and relived, wheremy body could offer pleasure, and where it could be degraded; where I could be depraved and love it.

I opened my mouth and whispered, “I have sinned.”

“You have,” came the reply, and three taps to my cheek had my mouth open and searching for him again. I chased after his cock with my lips, but he pulled away. “Stupid little slut that you are. You have betrayed God, haven’t you?”

“Yes,” I whispered. “Yes, I have. Willingly. Happily.”

“Tell me.”

“I opened the gate to Hell. I murdered a man. I did it. . .for Asmodeus.”

The bishop tilted at his hips and slapped me hard across the face. He caught my ear, made it ring, and dull pain echoed through my skull. “You did it for cock.”

“For cock,” I repeated, nodding my head. My voice came out tinny and strangled. I breathed through the pain and nodded. Tears streaked my face. “For cock. I did it because I want cock.”

“That’s it,” the bishop said. He had a fistful of my hair and, tugging it firmly, he made me nod. Up and down, as pliable as a doll, I nodded to him over and over. “You love this,” he said, still making me nod. But the physical affirmation wasn’t enough. “Say it!”

“I love it!” I gasped. “I love it! I love being used like this!”

“Used like what?”

“Like an animal!” I cried out. My cock throbbed as I said it. My cheeks were aflame, shame and pleasure mixing. “Like I was made only for this. To pleasure others.”

He let go of me and stepped back, expression appraising, edging away from mindless disgust to something thoughtful. He cocked his head. I saw the visage slip momentarily, and he was Bishop Jonah ten years younger, the expression identical to how I remembered.

The memory that came to me then was odd, perverse in itsown way, and haunting in another. I was twenty-five, and I hadn’t seen Bishop Jonah in years. I had not yet returned to the abbey of my village, and was worshipping elsewhere, a few towns over. The bishop came and saw me; saw right through me like he didn’t remember me. He hadn’t greeted me. He hadn’t said a thing. My stomach had fallen far as his eyes passed over me. I recall thinking:what?

I couldn’t reconcile it then, but I felt abandoned. I wanted him to remember me and know me; I wanted him to scold me for the creases in my cassock, I wanted to be seen. It didn’t matter if he hated me.

I sought him out that night after mass, under the pretence of thanking him, when in reality I wanted to be remembered. I didn’t find him that night. I didn’t find him until he took confession for us, a great honour, and I had to confess that I felt jealous of the attention he was awarding other priests. That I felt upset he wasn’t focusing on me.

“We are servants of God, before we are His children,” the bishop had told me. And then, with a pained sigh, “Alessandro, you are one of many young men I have mentored in my time. Surely you knew that before now?”

I remember breathing heavily, not understanding the twist in my gut. He disliked me, and he had made my life a living hell, and here I was all desperate and wanting. Why? Why did I care? Why did I care so much that I felt hot in my cheeks, and fire in my gut? Looking back, I wonder if it was the knowledge he had of me, that deep down he knew what I was in truth, and perhaps with the right words or the right prayers, I thought he might be able to make me pure.

I was not attracted to him. Not physically. But the authority. . .the power he wielded. God’s man on earth.

He might as well have been God tome.

Then, in Hell, blinking up at him through my eyelashes, with saliva dripping from my mouth, I shivered with expectationand understanding. His authority had followed me even here, and I was a slave to it once more. His eyes slid over me as I quivered before him on my knees. A smile pricked his sour expression apart.

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