Kulti

by Mariana Zapata

I mentally stepped into my big girl socks—the equivalent I’d been given as a kid instead of big girl panties because my dad thought that was a creepy expression.

Cute

It was the most highly televised sporting event in the world. Why wouldn’t it be? Soccer, also known as the “real” football or futbol, was the most widely played sport across the inhabited continents. It didn’t discriminate. You could be tall, short, skinny, poor, or rich. All you needed was a ball that was at least sort of inflated and something to make a goal, which could be anything. Coffee cans. Coke cans. Trash cans. Anything. You could be a girl or a boy. Have a uniform, not have a uniform. And as my dad said, you didn’t even need shoes if you really wanted to get technical.

That’s kinda beautiful

He ran and ran and ran and, by some miracle, avoided every opposing player who went after him. He scored the most beautiful, ruthless goal in the top right corner of the net. The ball seemed to sail through the air with a one-way ticket to the record books. My dad screamed. Eric yelled. The freaking stadium and the announcers lost it. This guy who had never played on such a platform had done what no one expected of him. It was one of those moments that lifted a person’s spirit. Sure, it wasn’t you that did anything special, but it made you feel like you had. It gave you the impression that you could do anything because this other person did. It reminded you that anything was possible.

Me when i watch WC

No one ever said fear was logical, because it wasn’t. It was stupid and irrational, and on a scale of one to ten, it sucked about a fifty.

Me 24/7

Kulti was just a man. I closed my eyes and thought of the first thing that could get me out of my holy-shit-it’s-Kulti-standing-right-there trance. Poop. He poops. He poops. Right. That was all I needed to snap out of it. I pictured an image of him sitting on the porcelain throne to remind me he was just a normal man with needs like everyone. I knew this—I’d known this for the longest. He was just a man with parents that pooped and peed and slept like the rest of us. Poop, poop, poop, poop, poop. Right. I was good. I was really fine.

This is funny

While I looked at Kulti as the type of badass I wanted to aspire to be one day, Eric had been the one to assure me I could be better. When Kulti had broken my brother’s leg, I made my choice. I would choose my brother every single time.

Awh love this

Except every time I looked in my dad’s direction, he was busy staring at Kulti like a total creeper. I loved him even if he had horrible taste in men.

LOL

Just that quickly, this version of me who understood that people changed over the years was reborn from the ashes of teenage Sal. The grown-up version of me didn’t give a single fuck about Reiner Kulti. He hadn’t been the one who sat through my practices, my games. He wasn’t the one who stressed about my injuries and teased me through my recuperation periods. I had a list of people that I loved and respected, people that had earned their way into my heart and deserved my loyalty. Reiner Kulti wasn’t anyone special in the ways that really mattered. He’d been my inspiration a very long time ago, but he hadn’t been the one to help me make it happen.

Omg beautiful

I couldn’t find it in me to regret what I had done. If I couldn’t stand up for what I believed in, then I wasn’t the person I strived to be.

Go girl

I held my head up high and didn’t put in any extra effort to pretend not to look at Kulti. If I glanced in his direction, I kept on looking. The one time our gazes met, I let my eyes linger for a second before looking elsewhere. They say not to make eye contact with dangerous animals so that they don’t perceive you as a threat, but I said screw it; I was no one’s bitch, especially not Kulti’s.

I mean, he was a foot taller and at least fifty pounds heavier, yet he was playing as rough as my brother and his friends did. I’d been playing with the boys since I was a kid, and they’d missed the memo that said I was a girl seven years younger than them. Apparently, Kulti had too.

With a large hand, he pointed at the bench right off the curb. “Sit there.”

I'm sat

With his arms crossed over his chest as he prepared himself to rip us new assholes, he asked in a voice so low only I could hear, “Your foot?” I crouched down and retied my shoes. “It’s bruised.” Kulti looked unimpressed when I glanced up, like I was a total baby for succumbing to something like bruising. “I have oil that will make it go away faster,” he mumbled his reply. “Find me after practice.” I almost choked on my saliva. No joke. Somehow by the grace of God, I managed to get out, “Okay.” But of course nothing with him was easy. If playing softball outside of practice hours was our dirty little secret, then we were going to keep it that way. “Deal with it until then.” Ding, ding, ding. There was the man I knew and… respected? Meh. Something like that. “I will.” He nodded. “I know.”

Bit much but love the intent

“You,” the voice from behind me said, “run along before I call Mike Walton and repeat what you said to him.” Who Mike Walton was, I had no idea. But the person behind me? I definitely knew him. The bratwurst. From the look on Amber’s face, as the footsteps behind me got louder with Kulti’s approach, she knew exactly who both Kulti and Mike Walton were. Her face might have paled, but it was too dark to know for sure. What I did know was that she was pissed. Real pissed. “Today,” Kulti snapped. The rate at which she moved said exactly what words didn’t. Amber was one of the stars of the national team and had been for years. A few months ago, I’d seen a lotion commercial with her in it. She wasn’t used to having someone tell her what to do. He didn’t even wait until she was out of earshot before he asked, “What’s her name?” “Amber Kramer,” I replied, looking over my shoulder.

I was picking him up. Poop.

The 'poop' hits every time

My stomach burned, and my lower ribs ached as I tried to push up to my hands and knees. Holy shit. I sucked in a breath and hissed it right back out, one hand going under my shirt to palm the skin that I knew was scraped to hell. Before I could even successfully sit up on my knees, the culprit had been shoved to the ground. I mean he was shoved hard. It wasn’t Marc, and it wasn’t Simon. It was Kulti standing with his back to me. Kulti had pushed the full-grown man to the ground. Reiner “The King” Kulti stood over the fucking weasel, straddling his body in a squat. “You coward,” he spat. Literally, I saw saliva coming out of the German’s mouth as he said words in his native language, which I didn’t understand but got the gist of. They weren’t friendly, not at all. “You’re pathetic.”

“Next time, I’ll break your hand.” With that, he turned around.

👀👀

Kulti was ahead of me. He’d already reached down and grabbed my glove, his own tucked under his armpit, one arm extended out in my direction in a gesture for me to come toward him. I did. My abs and sides ached with every step, but I managed to keep it together as we walked nearly side by side, the German ending up just slightly behind me. He veered off for a second to grab both of our bags, snatching them up off the floor. The anger coming off him was suffocating, but I took it all in, okay with it. He’d been about to beat the crap out of that guy in my honor. I’d seen Kulti lose his shit for much less, but for someone else? Never. Marc was going to scream over the phone later, I just knew it.

“I don’t think you all understand. This doesn’t look good,” Sheena said quickly, before anyone cut her off. “Do you think you could… I don’t know, Mr. Kulti, I’m just throwing out ideas for you to talk to your publicist about, but… do something publicly to pull rumors away from… this… friendship? Possibly go on a date?” Kulti didn’t even hesitate. “No.” “But—” “No,” he repeated. Sheena’s desperate eyes met mine. “Sal, what about you? Could you go on a date? Post some pictures⁠—” “No.” That was definitely not me who answered her. It was Kulti who answered almost angrily. I let him. “Sal—” “No.” That was Kulti again. “Absolutely not.” “But—” “Stop asking,” the German snapped. “I’m not doing it, and neither is she.”

Let her speak

I grabbed a sweatshirt off the pile of clothes on my bed with every intention of putting it on when the knocking became even more persistent. Impatient ass. I carried it to the door with a sigh, not even bothering to check the peephole. “Bratwurst?” I asked as I undid the deadbolt again. “Ja.”

The way he just answered that lol

“I’m serious, Dad. It’s just weird. I had to think about him pooping for the first two months so I wouldn’t stutter every time I was around him.”

Coming up from behind, I squeezed my dad’s shoulders and whispered in his ear about how he needed to imagine him pooping, before taking a seat next to the German and sneaking a piece of watermelon off his plate.

Don’t glance at his crotch. Don’t glance at his crotch. I glanced. Just real quick. “Eyes up here, Taco.” I wanted to die. “What?” I slowly looked up to see a smug look on his swollen mouth.

It was the German walking across the middle school field, which would have been a “holy shit” moment to begin with if I wasn’t already used to seeing him all the time. But there were the two men walking alongside him. One was another German who I’d seen play plenty of times growing up, and the other a Spaniard who I’d met before and happened to have a cologne commercial running on television. They pooped. They all pooped. Every single one of them.

Lol, getting a bit much this ‘poop’ thing

“Since when do you run away from your problems?” He caught me with a hand to my wrist as I started to turn around. I stopped and looked him dead-on, aggravation simmering in my veins. “I don’t run away from my problems. I just know when I’m not going to win an argument. Right now I’m not going to win against your freaking bipolar ass.” Kulti dropped his chin. “I am not bipolar.” “Okay, you’re not bipolar,” I lied.

He is

Kulti had always told me that there was only one person in the world I needed to watch out for, and that was me. Yet here he was telling me otherwise. He was making me feel bad for even thinking about going to Europe without mentioning it to him first.

He's a jerk

“How many houses do you have?” “Only three,” he answered nonchalantly. Only three. I’d grown up the kid of paycheck-to-paycheck parents. While I knew that someone who had as much money as he did could realistically afford way more than three houses, it still amazed me. At the same time, it made me like Kulti a little more. I could respect someone who didn’t blow his money on stupid crap.

He has 3 fucking houses girl wdym???!!

“I’ve always wanted to go to Germany,” I told him. “It’s on my list of places to go on my bucket list.” He slanted a look at me. “What’s a bucket list?” He didn’t know what a bucket list was? I shouldn’t have found that as cute as I did.

It's not cute, it's dumb wth??!

Then he went for it, and I just sat there and took it. “You scared the hell out of me!” An image of a lion with a thorn in his paw flicked through my head, and by some miracle I didn’t smile. “You’re yelling,” I stated very calmly, eating up his reaction.

This man is yelling at someone who has a concussion

I had a man I respected that respected me, and he didn’t care if the world knew we meant something to each other. Our friendship hadn’t been given to either one of us; we had worked at it. On top of that, I felt something for him, even if he was an egotistical, arrogant, stubborn pain in the ass. He was my egotistical, arrogant, stubborn pain in the ass.

I don't know how to feel

“You know, Sal. It’s why we fight and makeup. Why we’ll always fight and makeup. You were the one who said to me that you fight with the people you love the most, remember? You and I fight all the time, see?”

Toxic??!

“I was nineteen when that showed up to the club’s offices. It was my third fan letter ever, and the other two were topless pictures,” he said in his low, steady voice. “That letter stayed in every locker I used for the next ten years. It was the first thing I looked at before my games and the first thing I saw after I played. I framed it and put it in my house in Meissen once it started to wear out. It’s still there on the wall of my bedroom.”

Nope this is fucking weird

“I take so much pride in knowing you’ve become the player you are because you looked up to me, Sal. It’s the greatest compliment I’ve ever been paid.”

Narcissist much?

out of starting fights all the time.” “Oh please.” I laughed. “You’re a troublemaker, schnecke.”

She literally didn't have one fight in this whole book because she never speaks her mind