So there I was, on a walking tour of western Ireland — alone. I had started out travelling with my boyfriend Pete. We had flown in from Toronto to Dublin together, but the bars and clubs of Dublin were more of an attraction to Pete than walking the Kerry Ring, so we had a terrific row and parted company.

I had bused it to Cork, and started my trek from there. Sometimes it was pretty lonely on the road, but I was determined to walk the west coast, where my ancestors had originally come from. And walking western Ireland is not such a big deal as it may sound. The whole country is less than 200 miles by 200 miles, and I was only planning on Cork to Galway.

I had been on the road now for three days, covering about twenty miles a day. I was in no hurry. The countryside was green and lush, the coastal views were breathtaking, and there were well-kept walking paths skirting most of the roads. Plenty of tourists and locals used the walking paths, and all of them were very friendly.

And it was on this walking path that I met up with Father Murphy. To call him Father Murphy makes him sound like an aging cleric from a Bing Crosby movie; to call him by his first name, Father Brian, doesn't make him sound much younger, either; but he was in fact probably no more than 35.

He was striding along nicely when he came up from behind on that country path, really outpacing me, but he must have felt like some company, because he lessened his pace and fell in beside me. His flowing black cassock and white clerical collar immediately identified him as a priest. A simple wooden crucifix swinging from a light chain round his neck completed the picture.

"And it's a lovely day, to be sure, is it not?" he commented.

"It sure is," I agreed.

"Ah, you're American, are you?" he asked

"No, Father. I'm Canadian," I corrected him.

"Ohh! Pardon me for my stupid mistake," he apologized.

"No need to apologize," I informed him. "No offense taken."

"As I've not been to either America or Canada, I cannot hear the difference," he explained. So what brings you to my part of the world? There must be more exciting places a young feller like you would rather be."

"My dad's family came from these parts," I explained, as we strode along. "They emigrated to canada in the 1850s."

"Ah yes, the times of the Great Famine," he commented. "I believe about a quarter of the population fled Ireland at that time. And what's your family name, then?"

"I'm a Murphy. Patrick Murphy."

"And I think there's lots of Murphy's in these parts. I'm one myself - Brian Murphy. Maybe we're related. Most Murphys are in one manner or another."

"Yes, it's quite likely," I chuckled.

We tramped along together, and occasionally he would point out something of interest - a hawk hovering, searching for prey; a fox scampering across a field; a rabbit hiding from both in the grass.

The morning was warming up, and I offered the priest a swig from my water-bottle, which he accepted gladly.

"And what are you doing walking the paths?" I asked. "Getting some exercise?"

"Exactly," he agreed. "My parish includes the village we just left, and the next one along the road, about eight miles along. I live in the village behind us, but I conduct services in both, and see to the needs of the flock in both. On Sundays I drive between the two villages. The church provides me with a motor-car, but on weekdays when the weather is as nice as this, I prefer to walk."

"Are you the only priest for the area?" I asked.

"No," he told me, "There is also Father Andrew. He is in his eighties, and we share the vicarage together, but I'm afraid the poor man is quite senile. Mrs. Donovan from the village does for us. She cooks our main meals and does our washing and cleaning. She also keeps an eye out for Father Andrew when I am away."

We paused at an old milestone which Father Brian used to prop his foot on while he re-laced one of his boots. It gave me a chance to get a better look at him. He was, in fact, remarkably good-looking. He had golden blonde hair, and the clean, rosy complexion of a choir boy. In any other situation, I would probably have tried to hit on him.

We started up again, and I noted his confident stride, his firm body. Yes, he was a sexy man!

I made some more small talk to get my mind off sex, for I must admit I was unusually horny this morning. He eventually brought the subject back to me.

"And why are you travelling alone, Patrick?" he asked. "Are you not married?"

"I was travelling with my boyfriend," I told him truthfully, 'but we had a fight in Dublin and parted company. I guess I should call him my ex-boyfriend. We were together nearly two years," I added, regretfully.

Father Brian was silent while he digested this information. In fact, he was silent for quite a while. I began to think I had offended him by admitting that I was gay. But at last he spoke again:

"Your boyfriend, eh? So you're one of these homosexuals, are you?" he asked, but there was no hint of accusation or condemnation in his question.

"Yes," I admitted bluntly. "Are you going to tell me I'm going to burn in hell?"

"Not al all, my boy," he assured me. "The Book tells us, 'Love one another.' It doesn't say who to love."

"But the Catholic Church condemns homosexuality," I said.

"Yes, it does," he agreed, "but times change. The Church will change. It just takes a long time for the Catholic Church to change." He was silent again for a few minutes, then, out of the blue, he began again:

"And I am no saint myself," he started. "I had a boyfriend myself when was in the seminary in Rome. " He paused, and I thought he was not going to say more, but having gone that far, he decided to continue. "The powers that be suspected so, and they made sure my friend and I were well-separated. They shipped him off to South Africa, and me back here to Ireland.'

I had never heard of a priest confessing to homosexual inclinations, but I had certainly heard plenty of accusations of pederasty and abuse of young choirboys.

"You remind me of him so very much," he added.

"Do you hear from him?" I asked.

"Not from him, only of him, through official channels," the priest reply sadly. I let him dwell in his reveries for a while before I asked a question I had always wanted to ask of a priest.

"So what do you do for sex?" I asked, forthrightly. I think I expected to hear a confession of guilty masturbations, or women or boys from the village, or clandestine trips to brothels, but he put that idea to rest.

"I don't," he stated. "Like all priests, I have taken a vow of celibacy. There is no sex for us."

"I must be hard," I commented.

"It is like a famine,' he admitted. "Like a potato famine, but all around me I see tasty spuds, forbidden fruits I cannot have."

"Do you regret the life you chose?" I asked.

"At times," he sighed. "At times. When I remember my friend from the seminary. And especially times like this morning, when I talk to a young man who is free to do as he wants, to love whomever he wants, to have sex with his beloved." The Father fell into silence again as we marched the path.

To change the topic, which was obviously hard for the young priest, I commented on an old farmhouse I spied across a field overlooking the coastline on our left..

"There's so many of those old stone houses just crumbling away," I said, nodding in its direction.

"Ah, yes," he said sadly. "The small farms are disappearing. A farmer dies, and his son does not want to work the land. He wants the city life. He sells the farm to a large company. They put one manager with modern equipment in charge of several farms, and the old farmhouses crumble away."

"So sad, and so beautiful," I said.

"Would you like to have a closer look at one?" Father Brian suggested. "I'm sure no-one will mind if we cross the field."

"Yes, that would be nice," I agreed, so we crossed the road, clambered over the low stone fence and picked our way across the recently-turned field toward the ruined house.

The remains of a wooden front door still swung crazily from its rusting hinges, and we pried it open. If there had even been glass in the widows, it was long gone, as were any wooden window frames. The floor had been packed dirt when it was inhabited, and it was packed dirt now. There was the remains of what had probably been a heavy table, also, but it was hard to tell. The house had once had attic bedrooms, and the floor to those still existed as a roof to the room we were in, probably a living area, kitchen combined.

Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Father Brian remove his crucifix. I thought he has going to perform some rite of blessing or something, but he slipped it into the deep pocket of his cassock.

"It is so quiet here," he commented.

"Yes," I agreed, " it's very pleasant." Indeed it was. The morning outside had been heating up as we trudged along, but in here it was pleasantly cool. I slipped off my backpack and bedroll and dumped them in a corner.

"It's not often I get to spend some time alone with a handsome young man," he commented. "And you are handsome."

"Thank you," I replied. "And you are pretty hot yourself!"

"Hot?" he queried. He didn't seem to know the term.

"Handsome ... exciting ... sexy!" I explained.

He seemed truly amazed. "You think I am sexy?" he asked.

"Very!" I assured him. Mostly because you are very attractive to look at, and also maybe because you are forbidden fruit, too. That makes you even more exciting."

"You think I am forbidden fruit?" he asked. "You have taken no vow barring you from me."

"No," I agreed, "but you have."

"Vows can be broken," he murmured, then was silent.

For the first time, I noticed that his cassock was bulging out at crotch height. There was something there aching to be free.

"Yes, they can," I whispered. I looked him straight in the eye. He stared straight back at me. Then he came to a moment of decision, from which there could be no turning back..

Father Brian fumbled with some buttons, then parted the lower half of his cassock. He was naked beneath, and my eyes went straight to his thick, hard circumcised cock!

I reached out and touched the swollen knob. I grasped the shaft, and he closed his eyes and sighed in ecstasy.

"Do you want me to stop?" I asked.

"No, no! Please continue!" he demanded. I gently stoked his swollen rod with one hand, while I used the other to undo my shirt. I stopped stoking his cock for long enough to slip my shirt, my boots, and my pants off. I was not wearing underwear. My cock leapt free, hard and ready. I let my clothes drop to the hard dirt floor.

Father Brian, too, slipped off his cassock, and remained standing there in just his socks and boots. Stripped of his vestments like that, he was no longer a priest, just a man, just like me.

"Father Bri…" I began.

"Just Brian," he interrupted. "Call me just Brian. I am not your father. For now, I am just another man," he added, exactly echoing my own thoughts.

And so I did what I would do to any other man standing before me with a beautiful, inviting penis. I dropped to my knees to better see that beauty, and to take it into my mouth.

As I have said, it was a thick penis, and I had to open my mouth and jaws wide to accommodate it. Brian made gratified moans and sighs as I sucked on his dick-head, forcing it as far into my gullet as I could before withdrawing and starting over. In fact, a couple of the words he muttered were almost blasphemous.

I am sure I heard him murmur "Oh, my God," at least once!

After some minutes of my sucking on his cock, he put his hands on my head and pulled my from his dick.

"If I don't stop you, I will shoot my spunk in your mouth," he warned.

"That would be fine by me," I told him.

"But not fine by me," he objected. " I don't want to come in your mouth. I want …" He paused for a moment. "I don't know how to ask you this …" He paused again.

"You want to fuck me?" I suggested.

"Crudely put, but yes, I want to fuck you. May I?"

I don't think anyone had ever asked me so politely whether they could fuck me. Nor has anyone since then.

"Of course," I said. I looked round for a clear space on the floor where I might spread my bed-roll, but Brian stopped me.

"I think we can manage standing up, don't you?"

"I'm sure we can," I agreed. So I leaned forward slightly, propping myself on two hands against one of the cold stone walls, exposing my buttocks and hole to him.

"It has been ten years since I last did this," Brian informed me. "Not since the seminary."

It might have been ten years, but Brian had not forgotten how. He bent and spat in the crack of my ass, then I felt his fingers rubbing the spit into my crack. One of his fingers found my eager hole and worked some spit into it, lingering to search for my prostate and massage it, making me harder than ever. I was ready for his entry immediately. I wanted his fat dick inside me.

I felt his hot knob searching for the entry way, and when it was in the right position I pushed back onto it. His large knob forced open my sphincter muscle, but I felt little pain. My ex-boyfriend had fucked me often, and he, too, had a large knob, so Brian's went in easily.

"Ah, yes!" he sighed as his shaft slipped up into me. "It felt just like this with my friend, all those years ago. You are so much like him. His name was Patrick, also," he added, as he settled into a slow rhythm of fucking my arse.

But ten years of abstinence was too much for him. After only a few minutes he speeded us slightly and then gasped, "I'm going to shoot my spunk into you."

"Go ahead," I told him. "I love a load of cum in me."

Brian took me at my word, and gasped and shuddered as he shot stream after stream of his cum deep into my innards. I'm sure it must have been one of the biggest loads I have ever taken.

But Brian wasn't completely finished yet.

"Now you do me," he pleaded, as he withdrew his cock from my ass and propped himself against the wall alongside me. I was quite happy to oblige. Some of Brian's excess cum was dribbling from my ass. I scooped at it with my hand. I got almost a palmful. It was clean and creamy. I slathered some of it along my stiff cock. The rest I worked into Brian's ass. It was sort of fitting that I use his own cum to fuck him with.

It may have been ten years since Brian had been with another man, but I suspect that he may have made do from time to time with a carrot or some other makeshift dildo, for his ass was far from being the tight hole of a virgin - or of any man who has not been penetrated for ten years.

My cock is far from small but I entered him easily. I slid far up into him as he bent against the wall, and I could feel his sphincter muscles clasping at my rod, trying to draw me further and further in.

"Oh, Patrick," he murmured with pleasure, but I didn't know whether he was addressing me or his friend of years gone by, his friend across the seas in South Africa.

Brian responded to my thrusting hungrily, almost as if he were making up for lost time, but he may well have been recalling his past, or even imagining a future. We can never know what others are thinking. I do know that to me this time was exciting. There was the multiple thrill of having sex in a foreign country, of doing it in a strange location - a deserted farmhouse, and of course, knowing that this man was a Catholic priest.

All of those things quickly brought me to a climax. Just as he had s done with me, I squirted my seed deep into Brian. Then we were done.

"Thank you," he said, before squatting to squirt out my cum.

"It wouldn't do to have it dribbling down the back of my cassock," he explained. As for me, I kept what I still had of his cum inside me. I knew it would mostly be absorbed, and what wasn't I could squirt out later.

We dressed and picked our way back up to the country road.

"Do you feel guilty?" I asked him.

"Not al all," he assured me.

"Have you lost your faith?" I asked him.

"Not in the least," he replied, as we strode along. "I still have faith in God, and his son, and the Bible. Even the Church, though I do dispute some of its laws."

We passed a couple of farms which were not deserted, and met up with the occasional person who greeted Father Brian warmly.

Soon we were in sight of the village of his destination, and he kindly offered to buy me a pint and a pie for lunch at the local pub.

It was obvious that he was well-known and liked in this rustic establishment, and his proffer of payment for our lunch was waved away both by the barmaid and the proprietor.

We found a table in a corner by the windows and ate and drank.

"I have decided I will leave the church," he confided in me.

I was astonished and felt a flood of guilt.

"Because of me?" I asked.

"Not at all," he said. "It is something I have considered for a long time. I can not properly care for my flock if I do not care for myself, if I am not completely happy in my life."

"What will you do?" I asked.

"I think I have some travelling to do," Father Brian replied, and left it at that. "I will write to my superiors to tell them of my decision, and I will announce it to the parishioners next Sunday."

We finished our lunch, not saying much more about his decision. Before we parted outside the small village church, I gave him my father's business card so he could let me know how things were going. I set off down the road on the next leg of my journey. When I looked back, I could see him still standing in the road outside the church, watching me go. He waved, and I waved back, but then a turn in the path took me behind the hedges which skirted the road, and he was gone.

It was nearly a year later, my travels over, and back in Toronto, when my father handed me a postcard.

"This came to my office today, addressed to you in care of me," Dad said.

The front of the postcard was the typical postcard scene of Cape Town, South Africa, with Table Mountain in the background. I turned it over.

All that was written on it was "Thank you" and his signature.

It was signed just "Brian Murphy, not "Father Brian," "Father Murphy," or "Father Brian Murphy," so I can only presume that he has left the church as he had said he would. And the fact that a year later he was saying "thank you" to me leads me to believe that he has something to be thankful for, that he is happy in his decision. Whether he has been rejoined with his lover, Patrick, I guess I will never know, but I like to believe that they are happily together once more, just as Pete and I are happily together once more, following our tearful makeup in Dublin. I hope his famine is over.

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