"Time to start earning your keep" I heard Miguel say in the pre-dawn darkness.

I tried to roll away from him, but an arm that was a brown steel girder of muscle curled around my body and I was lifted effortlessly out of his bed.

Miguel had proposed it all the night before. In exchange for helping him repair the ranch over the summer, he would work out with me, coaching me for football tryouts this fall. And I would find out how he had gotten as strong as he had. "Room and board" he smiled, adding that of course I could stay with him.

Naked, he walked into the small kitchen of his mobile home, and pulled a small jar out of the freezer. "Come over here".

I walked over, curiously. Miguel grinned, and opened the jar to show me what was inside: it was a baby food jar with what looked like pasty grey overcooked Chinese food inside. Could he be joking? Could this stuff be what gave him the strength to wrestle steers? It probably smelled worse, and --

His hand reached to my head, and I winced as his broad fingers clamped around my skull over my brush cut. With one hand holding my head, he dug into the jar and smeared some of the stuff two of his fingers. My head in a vise of his hand, he brought the stuff to my lips.

"Eat" he snarled. "You have to show me you deserve this" he said. "You're gonna do what I want your body to do now, because I'm your coach, your jefe, the boss. This is a gift, man, from hundreds of years ago! My feet were off the ground by then, and his dark eyes glittered. His cock was a hot steel pole that was rubbing against my six pack, leaking precum between my abs and dripping down into my basket.

I opened my mouth and he gently slid his fingers in. I locked my eyes with his and I sucked the what-the-hell-it-was into my mouth and swallowed. It tasted as good as it looked.

"Good" My feet were back on the ground. "Let's get dressed."

"Getting dressed" consisted of jeans and work boots, period.

Miguel told me that he was hired to do repair work on the ranch, until the bank which had foreclosed on it could find a new owner. The buildings and land was in disrepair, and he had to clean it up and get the ranch in shape before the new owners could build. He had been doing this kind of work since high school, and he liked it. It kept him in shape, he explained.

I'm sure it did. A guy who could lift a Winnebago with enough power to dent the fender wouldn't find much in a gym to challenge him. And taming steers barehanded kept him in better shape anyway.

We both walked around to the back of the barn where a junk heap of old wrecked cars and scrap metal lay in a tangled mess. "We gotta get this junk onto the truck" Miguel said, pointing to the flatbed truck parked alongside. "Wedge this stuff loose, and I'll get it up there."

Miguel walked the truck, and came back a second later, casually carrying what looked like an eight-foot length of railroad track with one hand. Shoving one end into the mess, he began to rip up the pile of metal scrap with the track. In the dawn I watched his shoulders swell around under his neck like two football helmets, and the veins of his biceps and triceps darkened. His basket swelled out against his levis and his back spread wide, pushing his shoulders even further away from his neck.

"What do I use?" I asked. How was I gonna keep up with this guy all summer?

That brought him up short for a second. He left the track stuck in the scrap heap, and rooted around for a moment.

He pulled out what used to be a six-foot long, inch-thick crowbar, before it got bent into a U-shape. With both hands, he took one sharp breath and his forearms grew thick veins wrapped around pencil-sized tendons. The bar gave a sharp screech as Miguel straightened the it, the steel of his arms greater than the steel of the bar. I could smell a light sweat out of his armpits as he twisted the bar back straight. More or less straightened out, he casually handed one end to me.

"Use this."

And that was how the summer took off. Every morning, Miguel would wake me the same way: carrying me to the kitchen for the whatever-he-called-it, which he fed me himself. I never saw where he kept it or even how he made it. Then a full day of backbreaking work fixing up the ranch with Miguel, always wearing nothing but the jeans and boots. But even though it never tasted better, after a week I knew something was going on.

Even though I had worked out in the hot Texan sun for a full week, my skin didn't burn. In fact, my skin tanned golden brown all over my body, not only my torso but my legs and ass as well. I stopped shaving after three days when my beard dulled the razor blade; I grew a light beard which stopped growing after the week, even without me trying to trim it.

My appetite had doubled; Miguel and I had breakfast and four meals a day, he cooking basic Mexican meals and me eating them as fast as I ever have in my life. When I finished I always wanted to go out back to work outside because of the pump the food gave me. Miguel gave me his old work jeans for me to wear, as well as old steel-toed boots.

It was after a full month, in July that my body took off, and I knew it in two ways. One way was when by accident I tried to put on my old jeans that I wore the first day I met Miguel, and felt the denim tear under my fingers as I couldn't even fit them over my thighs.

The second way I knew that I was growing came at night. After the day of brutal physical work, Miguel and I would shower (together, of course, "To save water, man" he told me, playfully). I would get in the shower first with Miguel getting in behind me. His massive bulk gliding into the stall, he would bend his knees, shove his cock between my legs, and gently lift me with his cock into his arms under the hot water.

Our lovemaking started out awkward for two reasons: First, Miguel was twice my weight and he could have crushed me by accident. Not to mention his cock, whose head I couldn't even fit into my mouth. And Miguel himself was coated with his thick dark golden armor of muscle so that when I groped and massaged his pecs it was like rubbing warm unyielding, velvety granite. Only when I took my beard and ran it back and forth over his thick hairless nipples could I get any control over our lovemaking. I would start fast, feeling the pencil nubs of his nipples across my jaw and chin as I slowed, drawing it out as long as I dared, because if made Miguel lose control he could hurt me -- badly. I felt really safe only when I felt his orange-sized balls let go, spraying me from my head down across my thighs. Then he would hold me in a bear hub, his come and sweat welding us together for the night.

But the same day I found I couldn't even fit into my old jeans anymore was the night that on impulse I in one stroke took his cock into my mouth full for the first time, my hands almost reaching around his cock, squeezing its marble veins. He answered with his fingers massaging my asshole, easing in one and then two and then three fingers to find my prostate. When I dared to reach towards his hole with my own fingers he took my cock into his mouth down to the balls, wolfed both my balls into the oven of his mouth and took me over in one relentless stroke. I surrendered his cock in favor of his balls, feeling them under my lips as they pumped his load over my head and across my shoulders down to the small of my back.

In the morning I decided not to wear anything that day except boots -- there were no neighbors for miles around, and I wanted Miguel to see how my body had grown.

"Man, I could go back to the football team today, Miguel!" I said as we walked towards a stack of two-by-fours. "I'm ready!"

Miguel just nodded and pointed towards a broad ax leaning against an oak stump. "Hand me that, man." I picked it up, but even I needed both hands to hold it. He took it out of my hands with one of his paws, fixed me for a second with his dark eyes and took a breath. In a brown blur, his hands brought the ax around and down into the stump with an impact I felt in my boots and a loud crack that startled the steers in their pens. When Miguel stood back, I saw the ax buried in the stump over a foot deep, only the handle and a small sliver of steel showing above the wood.

"You give me back that ax, mi hombre, you're ready."

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It was later in August, the afternoon of a promised thunderstorm. The cattle were nervous, smelling the storm in the air, edging back and forth. We were finishing loading all the scrap into the dumpster, me breaking odd lengths of two by four over my knee before fitting them into the nearly full dumpster as Miguel carried over an old car engine in his arms to toss on top. From the skies there was a sharp crack of thunder, and a second later, a crack from the corral. One of the steer broke loose!

When I heard the sharp crack of wood breaking, I turned to see the steer break around me towards Miguel. Miguel had nowhere to go and the steer lunged towards him ready to gore him with his horns! I tore across the yard towards the steer and out of instinct tackled it like it was a linebacker. I knocked him off his feet out of Miguel's way and we both fell into the dust, me jumping up a split-second ahead of the bull. Forgetting Miguel, he swung his thick head towards me in a rage. I heard Miguel call my name distantly but I felt blood roaring in my ears as I jumped forward to grab the bull by his horns. I braced my legs as the bull's roaring doubled in volume, he trying to shake my hands off of his horns, and then, as my arms steadied and then pushed the steer down, his roaring giving way to exhausted gasps. The strength of its legs sapped, the bull collapsed into the dirt, its head and horns still held in my arms. With one heave, I flipped the bull around and down into the dust, where it lay spent.

Miguel and I smiled at each other for a long second. Then, I walked over to the stump and grabbed the ax handle. Bracing myself, I gave one long supreme heave and the oak around the ax began to crack and splinter. With one last rip, I pulled the ax out of its stump and offered Miguel the handle.

He took the ax and put it down, then we gave each other a bear hug, my hands reaching for the first time around his torso, my blond short beard scraping over his dark thick beard.

"Get dressed. I'll drive." Miguel said.

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The next morning, I walked into my coach's office to say hello. Even though I was on the junior varsity team, I wanted to pay my respects. I asked him how his summer had gone.

He looked at my body under its t-shirt and jeans, then up at my head where my brush cut was threatening to graze the ceiling.

"Can you start next Saturday? he asked politely.

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It was my first play on the varsity team. Two 300-pounders on the other team had tried to block me, and I had wrapped one arm around each of them, lifting them off their feet before dropping them to keep towards the quarterback, whose eyes watched me approach like a deer tracking the headlights of an approaching semitrailer. Remembering what Miguel said about temper, I reined myself in when I tackled him. Since a spooked quarterback is contagious, as I dropped him I reached with one hand and crushed the football in his hands, leaving him on the grass holding a broken balloon.

Trotting back towards the sidelines, tens of thousands of spectators roaring, I looked up and saw only one man.

Miguel, smiling. •