Determined Faith

"Give it to me hard. Harder; deeper," she gasped as she grasped the edge of a sofa cushion with her hands and began to bang him back hard with her rump, meeting his thrusts with counterthrusts of her own. He grabbed her hips with his hands and began to piston her hard. She took it like a champ, and later that night, when he was stretched on his back and she was riding his cock like a bull rider with a steel rod up the back, there was no hint of delicacy or weakness about her either.

* * * *

Three weeks later, a visibly irritated and disappointed military officer came to the cell to free Paolo. His family had finally brought their clout to bear, and in the absence of anything but innuendo from one witness, the shifty-eyed Faro Jamba, there was insufficient proof to hold him. There had, however, been additional charges of spying that were being lodged against David Proctor.

Another week later, Thomas appeared again.

"The wheels are spinning in Luanda," he assured David. He didn't however, tell David that he hadn't gone to Luanda himself. "There's some bad news I must tell you, however."

"Hope?" David asked. He'd yet to have received so much as a message from her. It's not that she hadn't sent any, but that she'd sent them through Thomas and they weren't being delivered.

"Yes, Hope. It's the original charge thing, I'm afraid. She can't stop thinking about it. And, as you know, this isn't really the place for a woman as delicate as she is. And it's not getting any safer. The rebels have expanding their areas of operation. I'm afraid she's going home—and she's starting proceedings."

"A divorce?"

"Yes, I'm sorry to say. But the embassy should have you out of here soon. And you can then come back to the States, and I'm sure she'll come around when you're there."

"You said 'come back to the States,'" David said.

"Yes. I'm being reassigned back to the States too. I'll probably be going back on the same plane as Hope is—so you need not worry about her traveling alone. But the embassy in Luanda is on it. This spying charge, of course, is ludicrous. It won't stand."

"That Baptist minister in Cunjamba? He's been freed?" David asked, his voice showing some sign of hopefulness.

"Well, no. He's still in prison. But we're not the Baptists. The Assembly of God is in better stead with the Angolans than the Baptists are."

When Thomas left, David, now alone in his cell, sank back down into the near-fetal position against the wall that had become his habitual retreat from reality.

The trials of Job, he was thinking, his mind dredging up and repeating some of the passages from the Bible on that. Faith. He knew he had to keep faith. Determined faith.

* * * *

"We need to leave now, in a hurry. And keep your voice down."

David had been surprised to look up when the door to his cell opened and there, instead of the jailer, one of the few people he'd seen in the last seven months, stood Paolo Flores, dressed in dark colors. The young man had motioned him and said, "Come on out. You're free. But keep it quiet."

Almost like he was swimming underwater, David dumbly responded to Paolo's call, not asking any questions, but standing up from his crouch at the end of his bed and shuffling toward the door. When he got to the door, though, he said, in a hoarse, rarely used voice, "Free? Charges dropped?"

Paolo didn't answer that. Just, while looking up and down the corridor outside the cell door, he gently took David by the arm and guided him out of the cell and down the corridor.

Outside, in the Jeep—in the Calai Assembly of God orphanage and school Jeep—Paolo had handed over a pair of trousers and a shirt and instructed David, still whispering, to put them on.

"These look like mine."

"They are," Paolo said. "I took them from your bungalow at the orphanage. There's a suitcase in back with more of your clothes and belongings in it."

"Is that where we're going? To the church compound?" David asked as he started to change while sitting in the passenger seat.

"No, we're not going back there. It's the first place they'll go to look for you."

"I haven't really been released, have I?" David asked, interrupting the buttoning of his shirt.

"I released you. I got tired of the red tape. I have friends who helped make the guards look the other way tonight. I went directly to Luanda when they let me out, only to find that neither the church office there nor the American embassy had any idea you were in jail and didn't seem to want to take my word for it. They called, but Pastor Thomas told them nothing was wrong."

"The compound. Thomas . . . and my wife."

"They've gone back to the States . . . together. I'm sorry, David. There's nothing at the compound for you anymore."

"I . . . I guess I knew all along," David said. "So, where are we . . .?"

"We're going across the border into South-West Africa. The church compound at Kongola there. You can call the office in Luanda and the embassy yourself from there. But you'll be safer across the border. And Kongola is so remote and the South Africans so disinterested in their mandate over South-West Africa and no one will bother us there."

"Us?"

"I'm going with you. It will be safer for me across the border too now . . . with you."

They drove across the desolate land, under the stars, in silence, arriving in the early morning hours at the Kongola compound guesthouse. Paolo immediately went back into one of the bedrooms, but David sat in the living room and reached for a Bible. He hadn't had a Bible in his hand for seven months and he needed to settle his jangled nerves. After seven months of isolation and inactivity, he suddenly had been hit with a flurry of activity and a charge of adrenaline.

An hour later, David rose, calm, from the chair in the living room and walked back to the bedrooms. Opening one of the doors, he stood framed in the moonlight streaming in through the window. Paolo was lying on his back on the bed, naked, his legs spread and bent, his hand encasing his cock, his eyes turned toward the doorway, a little smile on his face.

David sucked in his breath. The light chocolate of the young man's well-defined, muscular body gleamed in the available light. David's eyes went to the jet-black cock and balls of the beautiful mixed Portuguese and Bantu young man, whose body had taken on the best features of each of his heritages. The skin tone for most of his body was Mediterranean, but the eyes were drawn to the blackness of the Bantu cock and balls. The hair on his head and pubes was jet black, but curly.

He was slowly masturbating his cock, which was erect. David felt himself going erect as well, as he slipped the suspenders off his shoulders, unbuttoned his fly, and let his trousers and underdrawers cascade to the floor. As he was unbuttoning and shucking off his shirt, Paolo was sitting up on the end of the bed so that when David, naked now himself, reached the bed, Paolo need only move his hands around to grasp David's buttocks and pull the older man into him, open his mouth, and let David's cock slide to the back of his throat.

Paolo was moaning and sighing, grasping David's head between his hands, and resting his legs on David's shoulders, when David was knelt on the floor below the foot of the bed and giving Paolo head. Then David was standing, grasping Paolo's hips, and pulling him to and onto David's cock, while Paolo cried out in pleasure-pain at the penetration and possession of his channel by the older, larger man's cock. He raised his arms and grasped the rungs of the brass headboard, as David, putting all of the frustration and fury of going seven months without sex with Paulo into his thrusts, fucked Paolo hard and deep.

Afterward, the two of them lay in a close embrace. David was still inside Paolo, not hard but not soft either, just resting, an interlude before they would be fucking again. Paolo whispered, "I've missed you so. I've missed this." He was fingering Paolo's ass entrance. Paulo moved his buttocks so that the finger entered him. His muscles there drew the finger inside him. The mutual sigh was in harmony—David's baritone to Paulo's tenor.

"Seven months. Seven months without this. The last time we made love was on the night they arrested us," David murmured.

"Yes, I thought I'd go mad," Paolo murmured. "Wanting so much to be doing exactly what the jailers wanted us to be doing in the cell, but knowing we had to stay away from each other, pretending that the truth wasn't true."

"It's faith," David whispered. "I kept telling you that determined faith would pull us through. It even solved the problem of Hope. I could not bring myself to abandon her, and fate intervened to make her leave me willingly. All it took was determined faith."

"Yes, and I have faith that you . . . and just like that you're getting hard again," Paolo whispered with a sigh.

"Yes, I am," David answered as his hips began to move again, his cock engorging and beginning to stroke again—Paolo sighing and groaning for him as his pelvis started to respond as well, the two of them sinking into the rewards of having been capable of sustained, determined faith that their love would win through.