Kulti (36 page)

Carefully, Dad set the shoe back into the box and took a deep breath before meeting my eyes and in a very low voice said, “Tell him I said thank you.”

I put a fist over my mouth but I wasn’t sure whether it was to keep from laughing or sighing in exasperation. “Dad, tell him yourself.”

He shook his head, and I knew that was as good as I was getting.

Biting my lip I turned back to Kulti, who I was sure had heard what my dad had said and repeated what I’d been told.

Very seriously, the German nodded. “Tell him he’s welcome.”

Jesus Christ.

“And tell him there’s something else in the box.”

Something else? “Pa, there’s something else in the box.” Also, like they hadn’t heard each other from four feet away.

Dad blinked, and then rifled through the nameless white box and pulled out a greeting card sized envelope. He removed something that looked like an index card. He read it and then read it a second and then a third time. He put the card back inside the envelope and then the box. His dark face was somber as he took a few breaths. He finally raised his green eyes to meet Kulti’s hazel ones.

“Sal,” he said, looking at the German, “ask him if he wants his hug now or later.”

“
W
hat’s wrong
?”

I gave Kulti a look as I sat on the edge of the bigger bunk bed, ready to take my shoes off. “Nothing. Why?”

The German blinked at me. “You haven’t said a single word.”

I hadn’t. He was right.

How could I talk when something huge had lodged itself into my chest? Something monstrous and uncomfortable had picked up and moved in, stealing the space where my breath and word usually lived.

Kulti had stolen that piece of me when he hugged my dad back…

He’d given him two front row seats to a FC Berlin game, along with a voucher for flights and a hotel.

What do you freaking say after that?

“Are you upset?” he asked.

I made a face. “About what?”

“Berlin.”

Oh my God, he looked so earnest… “Rey.” I shook my head. “How could I ever be upset over that? That was the greatest thing anyone has ever done for my dad. I can’t even…” I stared up at him as he stepped right in front of me, looking down. “I can never pay you back. Okay, maybe I can if I pay you installments over the next five years, but I don’t know what to say.”

He shrugged those brawny shoulders. “Nothing.”

I rolled my eyes. “It’s a big deal.”

“It isn’t.”

I stood up and held my arms open. “It is, so quit arguing and give me a hug.”

He quit talking but he didn’t hug me. I should have taken it as a compliment that he didn’t shrink away from me or simply say ‘no.’ Kulti just looked at the arms I held a little away from my body, like it was some foreign thing he’d never seen before.

When he stood there for another ten seconds, I decided I had enough. This guy had given out thousands of hugs over the course of his life. Then I looked at his face and how serious he always was, and decided maybe he hadn’t. But he had given my dad one at the restaurant, so screw it. He had to have another one in him.

I took a step forward and wrapped my arms around his waist, over his own arms like they were hostage. He rested his chin on the top of my head. “Thank you,” I told him.

I held him for another ten seconds, feeling him stay stiff as a board the entire time, and then decided I could put him out of his misery. I dropped my arms and took a step back, the backs of my knees bumping into the frame of the bed.

Maybe it would have been awkward if I really cared about him hugging me back, or in this case, not hugging me back, but I didn’t. Not at all. He’d given my dad something wonderful; I could live with it.

What
was
awkward was the way he was looking at the freckles on my chest and bare shoulders beneath the thin straps of my sundress.

“I should probably go change now,” I muttered, taking a step to the side. “But I want you to know how grateful I am for what you did for my dad, all right?”

He nodded absently, still looking at the skin right above my boobs. Not directly at my boobs, just above them. Weird.

Well I guess this was payback time for looking at his boner the day before, and I was going to take it. “Hey, eyes up here, pretzel face.”

“
H
ow was your break
?”

I looked up from my spot on the ground pulling my socks up high to see Gardner standing over me. “Good. I got to spend some time with my family, and you?”

He shrugged, crouching down. “I slept a lot.”

“Nice.”

Gardner made a pleasant face but didn’t reply. He stayed next to me as I pulled my cleat on and tied it. “Sal.” His voice was so low my gut immediately knew something was wrong. “More pictures popped up this weekend. I want you to be smart, okay?”

I didn’t even tilt my head to take a look at him, only slanting my eyes over in his direction as my guts crawled up into my throat. “We’re friends, G. That’s all.”

The grave expression on his face wasn’t exactly reassuring. “Look, I believe you. I’d believe you if you told me pigs flew, but I know Cordero’s going to be pissed, and there’s only so much Sheena and I can do.”

Time seemed to slow down. “What are you trying to say?”

“I want you to think about what you’re doing and what you want from the future.” Gardner put his hand on my shoulder. “I want the best for you, Sal. That’s the only reason why I’m saying anything. I don’t want you to get blindsided.”

Blindsided by what?

Before I could even start to get my thoughts together and ask him for clarification on whether I was over-exaggerating what he was implying, Gardner straightened up and walked off.

There’s only so much Sheena and I can do for you.

Think about what you’re doing and what you want to do in the future.

I don’t want you to get blindsided
.

All I did was take my friend home with me. That was it.
It
.

I hadn’t done drugs, flashed a crowd, stolen anything or killed anyone.

If my guesses were on track, Gardner had just warned me that my career was in jeopardy.

Maybe I should have panicked. Cried. I would have sworn that I would stop being friends with someone who so obviously needed a friend.

But I didn’t do any of those things. Not even close.

While Gardner had just been trying to be a good friend and warn me, I was suddenly pissed. Really pissed.

I hadn’t done anything wrong, and I knew that in my heart. Sure, there was a stipulation in my contract about fraternization, but I hadn’t been freaking
fraternizing
with anybody. Not even close, and I was being punished? Or at least sort of being punished?

This was horse shit. Absolute horse shit.

And I really wanted to punch Cordero in the face. Repeatedly.

Tension screamed through my shoulders and down my arms. I had to ball up my fists to contain my frustration with this entire situation. Honestly, I liked Rey. It wasn’t easy, and he got on my nerves at times, but I felt a closeness to him that I didn’t feel with anyone else I played with.

The fact that only a few of the girls on the team spoke to me during practice didn’t make things any better. The rest cast me side-glances that I wasn’t a fan of. But they didn’t say anything to egg me on, so I managed to keep my mouth closed. I knew better than to be the one to start anything. You’re only young and dumb once.

When they weren’t giving me snide glances, they were looking at Kulti like they were expecting to find him with my bra around his neck. The thing was, while I could keep my mouth shut, the German didn’t have to.

And he didn’t.

He had met my eyes early on during practice and frowned. His frown had continued to deepen the longer practice went on. Kulti didn’t try to ask me what happening, but somehow I knew that he was aware something was bugging me, and it had to do with the girls looking him up and down.

My favorite thing that came out of his mouth was, ”I don’t know what the hell you’re looking at, but you need to be looking at the field and not braiding each other’s hair!”

It was so sexist and untrue; I couldn’t help but snicker and then try to hide it.

In the long run though, it didn’t help me be any less pissed off.

They were still talking about me, and giving me looks. Murmuring. There was nothing I could do.

S
omeone was seated
at the bottom of the stairs leading up to my apartment by the time I got home from work that evening. It took all of a split second once I got out of the car, to recognize the brown hair and the long body that stood up, brushing off the back of his loose workout shorts.

He didn’t say anything to me as I parked my car a couple feet away from him, and he didn’t say a word as he took my duffel bag, even as he eyed the baggy pants and the long-sleeved shirt I had on. He hadn’t seen me in my work clothes before, and I couldn’t find it in me to care that I had dirt and grass stains all over my knees and that my hair had doubled in volume since that morning.

“Hey you,” I said with a smile as we climbed up the steps to get to the front door.

Unlocking the door, he followed after me, locking it as soon as he was inside and dropping my bag in the same place I always left it. I sat on the floor and yanked off my work boots, too exhausted to even bother trying to do it standing up. They got tossed in the direction of the door harder than they needed to be.

The German held out his hand to me.

I took it and got to my feet, not moving an inch when we stood maybe four inches away from each other.

I’d been telling myself the second half of the day that this was technically his fault. That if I hadn’t been nice to him, we wouldn’t have started spending time together and become friends. If he was anyone else in the world, save for a handful of other people, no one would have given a single shit what we did together. I had spent my entire career trying to get through day by day and improve. I didn’t want fame, and while a fortune would have been nice, it wasn’t what got me going every morning. I’d been careful, always careful, always sacrificing whatever I needed to, to succeed.

Kulti had come in and doomed all that.

I had put time and effort into building a working relationship with the girls I played with. I helped them out, wanting them to do well, and all that hard work was now pretty much in the shitter. No one except Jenny and Harlow had bothered to—

The German squeezed the hand that I hadn’t even noticed he hadn’t let go of. Palm to palm, his thumb rubbed over the back of my hand, once. Just once. “If you would like me to apologize, I won’t.”

I closed my eyes and stood there, letting him hold my hand and not letting myself think about it too much. I was an affectionate person, and even though Kulti hadn’t really been one in the entire time we’d been getting along, you couldn’t be a soccer player and be weird about physical contact. So I would take everything he was willing to give me.

“What do you have to not be sorry about?” I asked him, eyes still closed.

His long fingers squeezed again. “Forcing you to be my friend.”

I felt myself smile. “You didn’t force me to be your friend.”

“I did,” he argued.

“You didn’t. I was nice to you when you were still being an extra-large pain in the ass.”

There was a pause. “Was this before or after you called me a bratwurst?”

I opened an eye. “Both.”

The corners of his mouth tipped up just slightly, but he stayed serious. “I won’t let them bench you.”

I nodded, staring straight at the man who mastered the resting bitch face, and I said, “All right.”

Words hung in the air between us. I felt compressed, squeezed. I was torn between knowing that I wasn’t going to tell him to beat it and knowing that I probably should.

Was this worth it? Was this worth being ostracized by my teammates? Being on my general manager’s hit list? Having my photo plastered on fan pages with the words ‘die bitch’ at the bottom?

I really had no idea.

I hoped so.

“
S
al
! You got a minute?”

My fingers gripped the nylon strap of my bag, and I felt my insides stir. The day before I had managed to avoid the two reporters loitering off the side of the field by hauling ass while they were busy talking to other people, but now… I hadn’t gotten so lucky.

I’d gotten to the field for practice early, but not early enough. Damn it.

“Come on, one minute. Please!”

With no one to hide behind or any other way to pretend like I hadn’t heard the guy calling out to me, I took a deep breath and resigned myself to getting this over with.

The twenty-something guy looked friendly enough in khaki pants and a neatly tucked in, button-down blue shirt. He smiled at me, his little handheld recorder ready and waiting. “Thanks for stopping. I have a few questions for you.”

I nodded. “Sure. Okay.”

He introduced himself and the website he was doing the interview for, and let me know he’d be recording our conversation. “You’re about halfway through the season now, how are the Pipers looking?”

All right. “Good. We’ve only lost one game so far, but we’re trying to stay focused and get through the next few weeks so that we can move into the playoffs again.”

“At what point does the pressure really start to get to you?”

“At least for me, it never lets up. Before the season even starts, I’m already worried about how things are going. Every game is important and that’s what our coaching staff has really drilled into us. It’s easier to stay focused when you’re worried about putting one foot in front of the other rather than trying to take on a huge obstacle at once.”

He smiled and nodded. “Who are you looking forward to watching this Altus Cup?”

I smiled at him, feeling a little easier. The Cup was starting in September, right after our season ended. “Argentina, Spain, Germany.” Almost absently I added, “The U.S.” Well that didn’t sound sincere at all. “I’m pretty excited.”

“Any plans for rejoining the U.S. Women’s National Team?” he asked.

That now-familiar rope of anger laced my wrists, and I had to shake it off. It was easy enough to live with not being on the team before, when things had been great with the Pipers, but now not so much. I was on my last reserve of patience. “No plans,” I said in a steady voice, even smiling. “I’m focusing on the Pipers for now.”

“You’ve talked about your work with youth players in the past; are you continuing your camps this year?”

“Those camps are starting up in a few weeks. It’s mainly low-income middle school kids and early high schoolers I aim for. That’s usually one of the most influential ages for kids to really stick to sports, so I love doing them.”

“Okay, one final question so you can get going: what do you have to say about rumors about a relationship between you and Reiner Kulti?”

Dun, dun, dun. I smiled at him and eased my little heart to slow down. “He’s a great person. He’s my coach and a friend.” I shrugged. “That’s all.”

The look the guy gave me was incomprehensible, but he nodded and smiled and thanked me.

I couldn’t help but feel dirty. Just a little. Like I’d done something wrong—or at least something that I wouldn’t want to own up to. I could handle accepting my faults and mistakes. I didn’t have a boyfriend; I wasn’t married. I could be friends with whoever I wanted to. And it wasn’t like he was still married or anything, either.

But…

I swallowed back the weird feeling in my chest, that strange indecisiveness that wasn’t sure whether I wanted to handle all this unnecessary attention or not.

I wasn’t a superstar. I was just me, a little-known soccer player. The equivalent of a bobsledder in Houston, as my sister had called me one day.

All I had ever wanted was to play and to be the best. That was it.

What was I doing?

I tried to block out all these things that didn’t matter when I was at practice, but it was a lot harder than usual for some reason. I couldn’t stop thinking about Gardner’s warning, stupid Amber and her equally stupid husband, the national team, Kulti and all his famous-person crap. I felt like I had a noose around my neck, slowly, slowly, slowly tightening. I couldn’t breathe.

Right after finishing my passing drills, I felt a hand wrap around my wrist when I wasn’t expecting it.

I hadn’t even realized he was nearby. To be honest, I hadn’t been paying that much attention to anything besides soccer: passing the ball, blocking, sprinting. Things I had done a thousand times and would hopefully do another thousand in the future.

A deep line creased between his eyebrows as he tipped his chin down to ask, “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing” started to come out of my mouth, but I decided against it at the last minute. He’d know. I wasn’t sure how he’d know, but he would know I was lying. “I’m just stressed, that’s all.” Okay, so that was vague and understated, but it was the truth. I was.

Apparently, it wasn’t enough for him. Of course it wouldn’t be. He got that über serious look on his face, the one that smoothed the angled lines of his cheekbones. Kulti met me eye to eye, not caring that we were so close or that whoever wasn’t busy doing drills was more than likely looking at us. He didn’t care. He simply focused on the object of his attention—me.

It tightened something in my chest that I couldn’t really put together.

“Later,” he stated, he didn’t ask.

I shrugged my shoulders.

“Later,” Kulti repeated. “Keep your head in it.”

I nodded and offered him a weak smile.

He didn’t smile back. Instead, he let go of my wrist and put his hand on my forehead before shoving me gently away. It wasn’t exactly a hug or a pat on the back, but I’d take it.

Sure enough when I turned around, at least eight sets of eyes were on us.

Great.

A
knock
at eight o’clock that night had me setting my latest concoction on the kitchen counter, careful not to let the spoon fall out of the bowl. I’m not sure who else I could have been expecting to show up besides the German, so I wasn’t surprised to find him on the other side of the peephole.

“Come in,” I said, already opening the door wide for him to enter.

Right before shutting the door, I noticed that his Audi was parked behind my Honda, the silhouette of someone in the driver’s seat. All right.