Author's note: This is a continuation of my previous story, Gabe-o.
//
The guys started arriving a little after six. It was the second weekend of the semester, when every year I hosted an annual "welcome back" barbecue for my wrestlers. This year, instead of at the usual local park, I held the barbecue in my back yard. Well, more accurately, the back yard of the athletic director's house. She was away on a year-long sabbatical and she had offered me the house-sitting gig. On the phone with her, glancing around my spartan apartment, I had quickly agreed, it was a no-brainer. Her house was a beautiful, restored Victorian on the edge of the town, in the neighborhood where all the university muckety-mucks lived.
It was early September and still hot and sticky, the dregs of a brutal Midwestern summer. I was at the grill, sweaty and slinging burgers and sausages, pushing meat on the guys who needed to bulk up, and cajoling my big guys, shooing them away from the chips and soda over to the "healthy" table where my ACs and I had laid out a large spread of fruit and green salad.
The volleyball net was getting put to good use and the scene before me, in the setting sun, was, for the most part, a joyful one. My eyes flicked over the young, muscular bodies of the guys playing volleyball, arcing and flexing in the golden light, but didn't linger, of course. Here, as ever, I was the consummate professional. I tried to notice only the mechanical and the mundane - Josh with his tight hamstring limping after a stray ball. Nick, putting on some serious muscle, yikes. It would really throw things off if he had to move up a weight class. And Danny. Oh, poor Danny. He tried so hard, even now, in a casual game of back yard volleyball - desperate to be good enough, to match his peers' athletic abilities, but there was just something
off
about the kid. Too small? No, I definitely had wrestlers smaller than him. Maybe his proportions, his coordination? I just couldn't quite put my finger on...
"Hey coach."
The deep, familiar voice knocked me out of my thoughts. I turned and saw Gabe standing about five feet from me. He must have just come from the gym. He was wearing a light gray tank and black shorts, and his face, arms, and torso were flushed red. There was fresh sweat on his exposed skin. He pulled the bottom of his tank up to wipe his face. Involuntarily, my eyes tracked down to the fuzz on his exposed belly. After coming back heavy from the summer break, he had dropped the excess weight quickly, as I knew he would. In these pre-season weeks he was hovering around 290, still a little high, but rapidly replacing fat with muscle.
"Hey Gabe," I said, turning back to the grill. Even in the late afternoon heat, I felt a chill descend on me, an extension of the dark cloud that had been gathering the last few weeks.
We stood there together, somewhat awkwardly, at the edge of the grill, our eyes fixed on the meat sizzling there. Unspoken between us, ever since the Expo last weekend, was a reality that neither of us were quite prepared to acknowledge.
"So, uh..." Gabe said, rubbing the back of his neck after a long beat. "I guess I'll grab some fruit."
"Yeah," I said, and started flipping burgers that didn't need flipping. I didn't meet his eye but I turned to watch him lope over to the healthy table and leap onto the back of Dylan, one of the other heavyweight wrestlers. Dylan's plate of fruit went flying and in spite of myself, I felt a tightness in my groin as they went down and started to wrestle in the grass. I swallowed past the lump in my throat and turned back to the grill.
"Fuck," I breathed to myself. Even goofy, the way Gabe's body moved was any coach's dream, a fluid line that defied sinew, muscle, and bone. Hard and soft, the bulk of him flexing on top of me, his erection lodged firmly against my...
"Coach!"
I snapped back to reality and smelled burning meat. Danny was standing across the grill from me, gesturing at the grill with an empty bun.
"Oh, man," I said, and I quickly began to shuffle the burgers and sausages off the heat and into a foil tray. I looked up at Danny who was watching me with a raised eyebrow. He held out his bun and I tonged a blackened sausage into it.
"Thanks..." he said, eyeing the sausage suspiciously.
"No sweat," I said, ignoring the awkwardness of the moment. I handed him the full tray of sausages and hamburgers. "Hey Danny, take the rest of these over to the meat table, will you?"
~
By any measure except the churn in my guts any time I caught sight of Gabe, the picnic was a success. The guys were in great spirits - it was that magic series of weeks before the reality of the season started in earnest, before classes started started to get difficult earnest, while everything was still fresh and new. The Expo, which we had hosted the previous weekend, had gone well for us across the board.
These days the Expo didn't mean as much as it used to. Really, it was a throwback to a bygone era of collegiate athletics, to a time before everything had gotten so, well, professional. Wrestling, at least here in the Midwest, had been king, bigger than football, in its day, and it remained a cornerstone of high school sport across the region.
Originally, the Expo had been a mechanism to bring talented high school wrestlers to a Division I campus to meet coaches get a chance to compete against other regional talent. Over the years, though, beyond a recruiting tool, it had evolved into something of a pageant - an opportunity for each program to take the temperature of each other's rosters, see what we'd be up against during the regular season. I had been thrilled to see that my guys, most of whom I'd developed since they were in high school, had dominated in just about every weight class. The other coaches had been uniformly congratulatory to me and expressed a lot of admiration about my program. I'd done a lot of work to diversify my program, developing talent from outside the normal demographics that feed wrestling programs, and it felt great to finally be getting recognition for that hard work. I'd even been courted by a few athletic directors from other schools, dropping heavy hints that they'd be open to discussing bringing me to their campuses. And I'd had a veritable line out my door of the best of the high school talent, wanting in.
I should have been over the moon. But I wasn't. Because of Gabe.
Gabe had mopped the floor with the first of his expo opponents. A true beast of a guy from Minnesota, almost a head taller than Gabe, and somehow thicker. It was someone we'd met a time or two before, and someone who'd always given Gabe a run for his money, but this time, it was over almost before they started. Gabe had him down and splayed out in less than a second, and after that, the guy was spooked, and made a series of stupid mistakes. After each period, I could see Gabe relaxing into his body and his confidence, and I had the familiar feeling with Gabe, like watching a big cat stalk its prey. Flashing in Gabe's eyes, and growing panic in his opponent's.
It was like that for the next two as well. Almost all the guys in his weight class across the division had seen Gabe wrestle in previous years. They saw that he was in the zone, and they were nervous.
