Ever since I had jumped in the T-Bird and started racing down through Washington and Oregon and along the California coastal highway to put my final fight with Clem out of my mind, I'd been searching for some way to calm my combined anger and grief at the loss of that angelic, young free spirit. He had made me forget these last two years that I now was on the wrong side of thirty-five no matter how much I pumped iron and groomed my body. I was grabbing at the last vestiges of my youth and the privilege of a vigorous, hard body, and I thought I had found that fountain of youth in Clem. I had gloried in his vibrancy and supple, lithe body, and he had seemed mesmerized by my blond good looks and hunky muscles and the mastery of my thick nine-inch sword. Our lovemaking helped me maintain the edge I needed to continue to compete at the pro level. I took Clem's desertion of me for a younger man as a sign of what was to come with my professional football career, and, although I couldn't admit it to myself, I was so afraid of the future that my hands trembled on the steering wheel. I kept on the move as if standing still would drag me down and accelerate the aging process.
I had always had my pick of young men to fuck. Clem had been my first attempt to settle down with one of them, and he had betrayed me and justified all my latent fears by walking out on me with that new football recruit straight off the university gridiron—the same recruit who seemed so greedily to be eyeing my position on the squad. The recruit had let me bring him home and fuck him and then, when he had exhausted me, he'd pumped Clem in my bed and stolen him right from underneath me.
Out of fear of going limp, I remained in perpetual motion for three days in my journey down the coast in the mid August sunshine, during which I stopped at every winery along the way to try to drown out the ringing in my ears. It was at the San Luis Vineyard on the Monterey coast that I encountered an angel. At first I'd thought he was a mere teenager, as small and lithe as he looked, but as he poured wine in the tasting room for a group of silver-haired senior citizens who had pulled up in a tourist van as I was tasting the first, light Chardonnay, I heard him tell them that he was a university student working on his off hours for his grandfather.
Our eyes met when he passed by me with the next bottle, and he saw and didn't misinterpret the sudden interest I had taken in him. He was a beautiful youth, with dark Italian features, and he moved with the grace of a dancer. The tourists sipped and bought and left, and I remained at the tasting bar. The young man had slowed my servings so that I still had the desert wines to go when we were alone. He admitted that he recognized me as a professional football player and seemed star struck by my visit to his winery.
He asked me if I'd taken a tour of the wine-making process before, and I said that I had but that I might benefit from a refresher on how the grapes were actually grown and harvested if he knew of a good spot in the vineyard where that would be appropriate and if someone here were free to do a demonstration.
He gave me a searching look, called for someone to take over the pouring duties at the tasting bar, and, after pulling some bottles and food from a refrigerator and grabbing a blanket, invited me to follow him outside. As he glided out the door, he told me his name was Gabriel Caboronne and that he was the grandson of the San Luis Vineyard owner, Paulo Caboronne. I would have known that he was Gabriel—the angel Gabriel—even if he hadn't told me his name.
I followed Gabriel away from the tasting room building and into the tall rows of wooden stakes supporting luscious green leaves and vines interspersed with moist clumps of purple and green grapes nearly bursting with rich juices. He stopped on the edge of a rock-walled terrace where we could look down across the Monterey coast to the pounding surf of the Pacific Ocean. My pulse was pounding as well, and even while standing here, Gabriel was in perpetual motion, expressing himself and his love of this coast with broad sweeps of his finely muscled arms.
It was a perfect morning, and I had the perfect guide beside me to show me the fundamentals of a grape harvest. If he had been around in Michelangelo's day, he would have been the model for the statue of David. For all I knew, one of the youth's ancestors had been the model. Despite his youthful appearance, his body was perfectly shaped and his features achingly handsome. His hair was dark and curly, and his fingers and the toes I could see clinging to his sandals were long and sensuous, a promise of length in other features as well. He wore only loose cotton trousers, having stripped off his T-shirt, with its winery logo, and tied it around his waist as soon as we had emerged into the sunlight. The skin of his body, tightly stretched on his musculature, was an olive brown, evidencing the many hours he spent in the sun on these hilly slopes and belying the long hours he had said he was forced to study in the university library when he only wanted to be up here working in the vineyard.
Gabriel turned to me and grinned, all pearly white teeth and sensuous lips, showing me in that one gesture just how much he loved these California coastal hills and their bounty of rich grapes. He gestured for me to follow him, and I watched the motion of his lithe body as I followed him into the vineyard terraces. It hit me once again that Gabriel had been in perpetual motion since the first time I had seen him. Even when he was standing still, his torso was languidly moving. His motion made my juices flow. I wanted to capture and harness that perpetual motion. I could feel myself getting hard, and the sign of vigor gave me a thrill.
I loved watching him move. I felt myself melting into him and, and I ached to feed on his youth, to absorb it, to fuck him hard and deep until we were one fine-tooled motion machine—to ram my nine thick inches far up his young and tender ass repeatedly and to hear him groan and moan for me. I wanted him as I had wanted Clem, if not more.
When Gabriel halted, deep down the corridors of the grapevine support fences, I stripped off the gauzy white shirt that had loosely covered my torso, and we worked hard, side by side, for nearly an hour. Gabriel showing me which grapes were begging to be plucked and how to harvest them without bruising their tender skins. And all the time his torso was in perpetual motion, moving like a master dancer.
The sun hadn't reached its zenith when Gabriel called for a respite. He fanned out a blanket on the ground under a tree, where a section of the vineyard made way for an olive orchard, and began unpacking the basket he had filled before we had come out into the sunlight. There were several bottles of wine, uncorked, ready for tasting. With a merry laugh, Gabriel took one of these and handed me the other one. He leaned against a tree and saluted me with the bottle before drinking directly from it in a long gulp. He looked entirely too young to be taking deep swigs from a wine bottle, I thought. Even leaning against the tree, his body was in languid motion.
