The Priest's Tale - Prologue. Prologue

In the business class lounge on the Qantas flight over the Pacific, Bill Martin was nodding enthusiastically.

“Damn! Quite a story, Harold. Your Lord Henry Sandringham sure has his shit together. And that Winnie character! I’d fucking love to meet him in Madame Coy’s club some night!”

“Right! It had a right proper mix of sex and suspense, and Bijan Tohjani sounded like a hot young man with an insatiable appetite for cock.” Charles Rolfe chimed in.

Harold Smith-Tawes gratefully accepted their praise. “Well, thank you, gentlemen. It was fun in the telling. I’ll not reveal how much of it is factual and how much comes from my imagination.”

He took a long sip of his G&T. “Now who’ll go next?” He smiled hopefully at his two fellow travelers.

The dull roar of the mighty jet’s engines was the only sound as the three sat in silence for a minute or two. Martin and Rolfe were still savoring Harold’s sexy story about Lord Henry Sandringham and Bijan Tohjani, and both were thinking it would be damned hard to tell a better one.

The three had found themselves seated near each other in the A380’s upper deck Business Class on the nearly 24-hour flight from Melbourne, Australia, to New York City, with a lay-over and U.S. Customs in Los Angeles.

Charles Rolfe was an Australian businessman from Perth, on the west coast of the continent, traveling to the Big Apple as part of a reorganization of the international corporation he worked for.

Bill Martin was a marketing and advertising executive from New York who had been in Australia seeking to win a major contract, and Harold Smith-Tawes was an Englishman returning from a visit to relatives in the pricey Melbourne suburb of Canterbury. Harold had been cagey when the others had inquired about his business.

As the night wore on, they new friends had retired to an empty bar lounge at the front of the section, where they had shared drinks and began to tell stories to pass the time. The fact of all three being gay guaranteed that their tales would be profane and filled with sexual escapades.

“I suppose I could take the plunge,” Bill finally nodded with a chuckle. “This is totally different from your story, Harold, but there’s always hope for a happy ending, eventually.”