Art of the Priest

I heard then what he’d heard. Shuffling outside my door. I had left it unlocked for whoever came to me that night. I had hoped it would be Otto, but I saw the way the young, blond monk looked at him, and I thought that Otto’s efforts might go only in that direction. If Scarlotti had come, I would have received him, glad that he’d finally made the commitment. If no one came, I would get a good night’s sleep. It wasn’t a compulsion of mine—although I would have regretted not being fully fucked by the cruel art thief again. He made me feel alive.

There was enough light coming in from the cell window on the full-moon night to see the door to the cell. We both watched, in suspended fuck, as the footsteps passed back and forth and then stopped. The doorknob turned, but the door didn’t open. Otto had locked it behind him when he’d silently entered the room. I wondered if he’d watched me sleeping before he attacked and overpowered me. It gave me a little thrill that he, a connoisseur of art, might do that. That’s what many of the priests who had fucked me in the Vatican had said about my body—that I was a work of art worthy of Michelangelo. It would be thrilling to think that Otto thought so as well—and then ravished me anyway.

Ah, I thought, that would be true art—a two-panel painting by a master of a virginal young man, naked, lying posed on a chaise, one the painting of the young man’s body before the artist had ravished him. The other afterward.