Absolution

He was a Jesuit priest wannabe. Appropriately named Joseph. As catholic as they come. And so intense, serious, bookish, and with all the pent up sexual tension of a 21 year old who had always believed he would be celibate for life. I don't like to think I was either his downfall or his salvation, but perhaps I was at least his epiphany. We had been friends for a while, but I wanted more. I wasn't really that much more experienced than him, I'd only had a couple of boyfriends and a few fumbling exploratory sexual forays myself, but to him I think I must almost have seemed like a scarlet woman. Perhaps that was my attraction to him. Perhaps he wanted to reform me, though of course the odds were always in my favor.

He was immersed in his studies that year, but I knew that he noticed me in class. Sidelong glances and nervous shuffling of his feet whenever I was in his line of sight. And he blushed like a girl if ever I was close to him, and I made sure that I was as often as possible. I loved that flush on his cheeks, the way his eyes would dart around, looking everywhere but at my breasts, and definitely avoiding the shy longing that must have blazed at him from my own eyes. I'm not really sure why I wanted him so much, I just did. He was tall, almost lanky, but with a strong frame, muscles wiry and hard from playing football, but not the average jock by any means, He was much too shy, and it was no secret that he would soon be a priest and wanted nothing to do with women. His spiritual single-mindedness seemed to be a barrier to everyone but me. Even then I knew a challenge when I saw one, and I wanted him. I wouldn't have called myself predatory at the time, but looking back I did lay some traps that would have been hard for him to avoid, and fall into them he did... with enthusiasm and eagerness and oh my, such energy.

He was living in an apartment and seemingly totally absorbed with work, possibly to take his mind off the distractions of college life, but our friendship developed innocently enough over our Psychology books in the library, over cups of coffee at the local student cafe, and eventually over simple meals we concocted at his apartment. I would go there after school and we would make dinner together, then clean up and sit down to study. It didn't take too long before studying was the last thing on our minds, and I helped his fumbling hands to relieve us of our clothes. Such slender gentle fingers that remembering their inexperienced yet eager touch on my skin, their frantic struggling with unfamiliar hooks and buttons and fastenings, even now makes me tremble.

His apartment had a brass bed that folded up into a special closet behind double doors. We would pull down the bed and I would sit on it, by now partially or totally naked and wait for him. He always made me wait. Even though he knew by now that the power and unstoppability of the acts we would commit, he still held back for a while. This was a 'sin of the flesh' and his anxiety over commuting such a sin tore him apart until he was finally able to reach some kind of personal detente with such conflicts of body and soul. His solution was ritual, and as I sat, naked and waiting, my arms crossed, bare feet tapping on the cool wood floor, he would kneel at the foot of the bed and say the rosary. Somehow he rationalized that what we were doing was communication, the highest form of communication there was, in fact so high that it was close to God. Almost praying. And so every time before we made love he would kneel and say the rosary. I have never been Catholic, but even so I knew that the pace at which he was able to reel off this prayer was impressive. Usually I would simply sit and wait. Once, with a smile I said quietly, "Joe, I am not upset with what you are doing. If that's what you want to do, it is ok with me, but I just want to make sure you realize one thing. That you are making a big ass out of yourself?"

He looked up at me and simply replied, "Please, just a moment more. I am praying." He seemed to pray a little faster that day, and then, like every time he hung his rosary over the end of the bed, and throughout the acts that followed we would hear the beads clacking against the brass with every movement, a metronome to mark the pace of our now sanctified lust.

That simple ritual never failed to ease his soul and allowed him to throw himself with guiltless abandon into the delicious communion of our bodies. Even with his youth and inexperience he was the perfect lover, with just the right combination of enthusiasm and restraint, a true disciple of the female body. And for those hours in which I was the sole object of his adoration I repaid his devotions with prayer after prayer, beggings and entreatings, submitting with near religious fervor to each worshipful touch. And often, as he cried out his acknowledgment of his maker's absolution of this act, the strangled 'oh god, oh god, oh god', offered from his lips to heaven as he climaxed, his shuddering body collapsing onto mine, I would utter my own litany of thanks to the deity who had absolved him.