Kulti (37 page)

“Don’t mind me,” I explained, walking back to the kitchen where I’d left my face mask.

“You have something on your face,” Kulti stated, standing on the other side of the counter with a curious expression.

I had only managed to cover one cheek before he’d knocked so I’m sure I looked like an orange creamsicle. Picking up the spoon, I applied more of the cool mixture to my cheeks and forehead, watching the German as I did it. “It’s a face mask made with Greek yogurt, turmeric, ground oatmeal and lemon.” I raised my eyebrows as I dabbed some over my upper lip. “You want some?”

He eyed me dubiously. Then, he nodded.

All right, then. “Rinse off your face with hot water, and then you can put it on.”

I blindly finished putting the mixture on my target skin as he went to the kitchen sink and splashed water over his face, dabbing it dry with a paper towel. It wasn’t until Kulti took a seat on the edge of the kitchen counter and tipped his chin down, that I realized he wanted me to put the mask on him.

“Are you serious?”

The German nodded.

“You are really something else, you know that?” I asked, even as I stepped forward and began smoothing the gunk over his nose and across each cheekbone, gentle and slow. The facial hair that had grown in over the day prickled my fingers with each pass over his features.

“Do you do this often?” he asked after I’d covered his chin.

“A couple times a week.” I smiled, noticing his eyes on mine. “Do you?”

“I’ve had a few scrubs before photo shoots,” he admitted.

I nodded, impressed. What a metrosexual. I ran my fingers over the strip of flesh below his nose. “We spend so much time in the sun, you really have to try and take care of your skin. I don’t want to look like an old lady before my time comes.”

He nodded his agreement and let me finish putting the mask on him with watchful eyes. Once we were done, I told him we needed to wait at least twenty minutes before washing it off. “Don’t touch anything either. The turmeric stains everything,” I warned him, but I didn’t really care if I got a stain on my furniture or not.

Grabbing an ice pack from the freezer, I sat on one end of the couch and watched him sit on the other. Propping my leg on the coffee table, I slapped the ice-pack down on it for a good fifteen minutes. My notebook was on the cushion between us, with a whiteboard on the table for my sticky notes, right where I’d left it before I decided to do my first beauty treatment of the week. The reporter’s question earlier about the summer camps reminded me that I needed to plan the lessons for them. I hadn’t finalized a single thing yet.

The German didn’t even hesitate to pick up the notebook, reading over the notes I’d written about the different things that I thought would be beneficial to the kids at their ages.

“What is this?” he asked.

I fought the urge to snatch the notebook away from him. “Plans. I have a few summer camps coming up.”

His eyes flicked up from over the edge of the notebook. “Training camps?”

“For kids,” I explained. “They only last a few hours.”

He glanced back down at the sheet. “For free?”

“Yes. I do it in low-income neighborhoods for kids whose parents don’t have the funds to enroll them in clubs and leagues.”

He hummed.

I scratched my cheek, feeling oddly vulnerable at him reading over the skills I planned on teaching the kids. He kept reading and it got worse. It wasn’t like he was a fantastic coach, he wasn’t. I had no doubt he could have been a great coach if he wanted to, but he didn’t.

I scrunched my toes up in my socks and watched his face.

“Did your parents have money?” I found myself asking.

Kulti “uh-huh”ed.

I pulled my knee up to my chest and put my chin on it, careful not to rub the yogurt all over it. “There was no scholarship for you at the academy?”

He glanced up. “FC Berlin covered the costs.”

No shit. They’d recruited him at eleven? It happened, but I guess it still amazed me.

“And you, Taco?”

I smiled at him from behind my knee, surprised he was asking. “You’ve been to my house, Germany. We weren’t poor-poor, but I didn’t have a pair of name brand shoes until I was probably fifteen, and my brother bought them for me with his first advance from the MPL. I have no idea how my parents managed to swing paying for everything for so long but they did.” Actually, I did know. They cut a whole bunch of things out of the budget. A lot. “I just got lucky they cared, otherwise things would have gone a lot differently.”

“I’m sure you haven’t made them regret anything they did.”

“Eh. I’m sure I’ve made them wonder what the hell they were doing a time or two.” Or three. Or four. “I used to have a terrible temper—“

The German snorted. Straight-up snorted, lips fluttering, too.

Ass.

I nudged at his hip with my toes. “What? I don’t have a terrible temper anymore.”

Those awesome almost-hazel eyes looked up again from over the notebook. “No, you don’t and neither do I.”

“Ha!” I nudged at him again and he grabbed my foot with his free hand. I tried to yank it back, but he didn’t let go. “Oh please, my temper isn’t anywhere near as bad as yours.”

“It is.” He pulled my foot back toward him, getting a better grip around the instep.

“Trust me. It isn’t.”

“You’re a menace when you’re mad,
schnecke
. Maybe the refs haven’t caught you pinching girls, but I have,” he said casually.

I sat up straight. “Unless you have any physical proof, it never happened.”

Kulti stared at me for a beat before shaking his head, his thumb pressing a hard line down the arch of my foot. “You’re an animal.”

My shoulders shook but I managed to keep myself from laughing. “It takes one to know one.”

The corners of the German’s mouth tipped up. “Unlike others, I have never pretended to be nice.”

“Oh, I know.” I smiled at him. “There was that time you bit a guy—“

“He bit me three times before I had enough,” he argued.

I raised an eyebrow but kept going. “Don’t get me started on the thousand times you elbowed someone in the face.” Once the words were out of my mouth, I reeled back. “How the hell didn’t you get banned?”

The fact he shrugged at that claim said just how much of a crap he still didn’t give about the staggering number of noses he’d broken and eyebrows he’d busted.

“All the fights you were in—“

“I usually didn’t start them.”

“Debatable.” He blinked at me. “And don’t forget about the tibias you’ve broken.”

With that comment he just kept an even glare on me that had me smiling pretty smugly, even if it was at my brother’s expense.

“You win,” I stated. “All I give are bruises,” and then I added, “and an occasional bloody lip or two and a concussion once.”

The German leaned over, putting my notebook down and scooting closer to me, yanked my foot once more before setting it back on the couch next to him. His hand was wrapped around my ankle. “I’m positive you’ve thought about doing worse and in the end, that’s what matters.”

He had a point, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to admit it.

Instead I just sat on my end of the couch and gave him a flat look of irritation, until he smiled just the slightest bit wider and finally looked back down at the notebook. I went back to the sticky notes on the poster board and reviewed what I had jotted down already.

In the middle of making a few new notes, Kulti tapped the top of the foot I still had right by him. “Tell me how I can help with this.”

If anyone thought for one second that I would ever say no to help from him, they would have been insane. It wasn’t just the endless endorsements he had access to. If he wanted to do any actual work with the kids, it would be like having Mozart give a kid a lesson in musical composition.

I swallowed and felt my entire body brighten. “Any way you can.”

“All you have to do is ask.” Then as if he thought about what he said, his eyelids hooded low. “You aren’t going to ask, I don’t even know why I bother. Let me see what I can do.”

“All right.” I smiled at him. “Thanks, Rey.”

He nodded very solemnly and I found myself just studying him.

“Can I ask you something?”

“No,” he said in a pain-in-the-ass tone.

I ignored him. “Why did you take the Pipers position when you hate coaching?”

The notebook he’d been holding was slowly lowered to his lap. The muscle in his jaw flexed, and his expression became very even. “You think I don’t like coaching?”

“I’m ninety-nine percent sure that you freaking hate it.”

Kulti relaxed a whole millimeter. He just kept looking at me for so long I thought for sure he was trying to intimidate me into changing the subject or hoping I’d forget. Maybe.

The hell I was.

I blinked at him. “So?”

The German’s lips peeled back into something that was a mix between an incredulous smile and an amazed one. “Is it that obvious?”

“To me.” I shrugged my shoulders at him. “You look ready to strangle someone at least five times each practice, and that’s when you don’t even say anything. When things actually come out of your mouth, I’m pretty sure you would light us all on fire if you could get away with it.”

When he didn’t agree or deny anything, I blinked.

“Am I right or am I right?”

He mumbled something that could have been “you’re right” but it was said so low I couldn’t be sure. The fact he was avoiding my eyes said enough. It had me grinning.

“So why are you doing it? I’m sure they’re not paying you a quarter of as much as any of the European men’s teams would. I’m definitely sure the MPL would have paid you a lot more, too. But you’re here instead. What’s up with that?”

Nothing.

It felt like a few hours had passed without him saying anything.

Honestly it was really kind of insulting. The longer he took to not answer, the more it hurt my feelings. I wasn’t asking him for his bank account number or for a freaking kidney. I had taken him home with me, brought him into my house, told him about my grandfather and he couldn’t even answer one single personal question? I’d understood from the beginning he had trust issues, and I couldn’t say that I blamed him. My brother got all cagey around people he didn’t know. At some point, you never knew who was your friend for the right reasons and who wasn’t.

But… I guess I had thought we were past that.

I swallowed back my disappointment and looked away, scooting forward on the couch so I could get up. “I’m going to make some popcorn, do you want some?”

“No.”

Averting my eyes, I got up and headed into the kitchen. I pulled a pot out and set it on the stove, lighting it. Collecting my extra-large tub of coconut oil and bag of kernels, I tried to suppress the feeling in my chest that I was suddenly not so fond of.

He didn’t trust me. Then again, what the hell did I expect? It wasn’t like anything I found out about him wasn’t given out in drips. Tiny, tiny drips.

I’d barely scooped some oil into the heated pot when I felt Kulti standing behind me. I didn’t turn around even when he got so close that I couldn’t take a step back without touching him. His silence was incredibly typical, and I didn’t feel like saying anything either. I scooped a few of tablespoons of popcorn kernels into the pot and set the lid on, giving it a shake which was angrier than it needed to be.

“Sal,” he said my name in that smooth tone that hinted at a trace of an accent.

Keeping my eyes on the pot as I opened the lid to let the steam out, I asked, “Did you want some after all?”

The touch on my bare shoulder was all fingertips.

But I still didn’t turn around. I gave the pot another forceful shake but his fingers didn’t fall off, they just moved further up my shoulder until he was closer to my neck. “You can take the first batch if you want.”

“Turn around,” he requested.

I tried to shrug off his fingers. “I need to keep an eye on this so it doesn’t burn, Kulti.”

He dropped his hand immediately.

“Turn around, Sal,” he said forcefully.

“Wait a minute, would you?” One more hard shake to the pot and I opened the lid.

The German reached around me and turned off the knob on the stove. “No. Talk to me.”

Carefully, I wrapped my fingers around the long oven handle and took a breath to bottle my frustration up.

“You said a few minutes ago you didn’t have a temper,” he reminded me which only made the moment that much more aggravating.

“I’m not mad,” I snapped back a little too quickly.

“No?”

“No.”

He let out a sound that could have been a scoff if I thought German people were capable of making noises like that. “You called me Kulti.”

My fingers flexed around the oven handle. “That’s your name.”

“Turn around,” he ordered.

I tipped my chin up to face the ceiling and asked for patience. A lot of it. Hell, all of it. Unfortunately, no one seemed to answer my prayer. “I’m not mad at you, all right? I just thought…” I sighed. “Look it doesn’t matter. I swear I’m not mad. You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to. I’m sorry I asked.”

No response.

Of-freaking-course not.

Right.
Right
.

Patience. Patience
.

“I took the position because I had to,” that deep voice I’d heard a hundred times on television said. “I didn’t do anything for almost a year except almost ruin my life, and my manager said I needed to come out of retirement. I had to do something, especially something positive after my DUI.” Two warm hands that could only have belonged to him covered my shoulders. “There weren’t many things to choose from—“

“Is that because you didn’t want to be in the spotlight anymore?” I asked, remembering an earlier conversation we’d had.

He made a positive grunt. “Coaching was the only thing we could agree on. Short and temporary, it seemed the best fit.” Kulti paused as the pads of his thumbs brushed over my trapezius muscles. That made me snicker, and it made the German dig his thumbs into my muscles. “A friend of mine suggested women’s soccer. I did some research—“