Kulti by Mariana Zapata
“You think he’ll take a picture with me before he leaves so I can send it to your tios?”
“Yes.”
Dad nodded in pleasure. “I can rub it in their faces later, with their pinches fotos of their grandkids. Why do I want grandkids when you bring The King home with you?”
I rolled my eyes and patted his leg. “I want you to tell Mom those exact words the next time she asks me when I’m finally going to get married and give her a couple of babies.”
He gave me another side hug. “You know I’ll love you if you play or not.”
I did. “I know.”
“I just want you to be happy.”
“I know.”
“I mean it,” he insisted.
And I smiled. “I know, Dad. I promise I know.”
With one more side hug, he let me go. “Tell your friend I said thank you for doing the yard.”
“You could just tell him yourself,” I said, getting up.
He shook his head. “No. You tell him for me.”
Stubborn mule. “Okay. Goodnight.”
“Buenas noches, amor.”
I backed out of his room with another smile and closed the door behind me. My little sister’s door was closed and that time I didn’t hold back my sigh of annoyance with her. She’d gotten home with my dad after school, said ‘hi’ and then walked into her room and stayed in there for most of the day, only coming out to grab a plate of food and go back in with it. For a second, I debated whether to knock on her door and tell her goodnight just to be a troll but decided against it. We were going out to dinner for our dad’s birthday the next day, and I needed her to chill out as much as possible so it wouldn’t turn into a nightmare.
She was still a turd though.
By the time I made it back to the guest room, Kulti was already lying in bed with the sheets pulled up halfway to his stomach, his legs propped up and his tablet reclining against them. I grabbed my nightclothes and stuff from my bag and went back into the bathroom to shower, put on another long T-shirt and socks that went up almost to my knees.
“Are we going for a run in the morning?” Kulti asked from his spot on the bed once I was back in the room, pulling out a new set of running clothes for the next day.
“As long as you can keep up again,” I teased him, setting the clothing on top of my bag and turning around to see him scowling at me. Not saying a word, I winked and climbed up to the top bunk, settling in before I remembered what my dad had said. I got up to my knees and leaned over the edge so I could see him, sitting there on the too-small-for-him bed. “Thanks for helping me today with the yard. My dad asked me to say thank you too.”
Squeaky clean and so relaxed-looking on the bed I’d grown up in, Kulti looked refreshed. He tipped his chin down. “It was my pleasure.”
I flashed him a smile and sat back up, crawling under the covers one more time. I’d barely pulled them up to my chest when Kulti spoke again.
“That was my first time using a lawn mower.”
I fucking knew it! I didn’t say that of course, instead, I stuck with a very grown-up, “Oh really?”
There was a pause before he kept going. “I enjoyed it. I can see why you went to school for it. It’s fitting.”
Wait a second, wait a second. I knew for a fact that I’d never once told Kulti that I got my degree in landscaping. He’d never asked, not once. Sure, I had told him out of anger that I did landscaping work, if he hadn’t already known, but that was the extent of it. There wasn’t a single doubt in my mind that I had never mentioned what university I went to school at, much less what I majored in.
“How do you know what I went to school for?” I asked him casually. I’m sure I was making some kind of stupid face.
“I looked you up. You have it on your profile,” he said without skipping a beat.
What? I sat up again and looked over the edge of the bunk bed. “You did?”
Even upside down, I recognized that he nodded. “Yes.”
“You… have an account?”
He might have frowned, but I wasn’t positive with all the blood rushing to my head. “Get down before you fall over the side of the bed and give yourself more brain damage than you already have.”
Rolling my eyes, I did as he said but only because it wouldn’t be the first time I’d fallen off a bunk bed. I climbed down way too quickly and went and sat on the edge of his mattress, way too interested. “You use social media?”
Kulti stared at me. “Yes.” Then he added, “I have a fake account.”
“No!” I laughed.
“Yes,” he confirmed.
“Can I see it?”
The German looked like he wanted to deny my request but he finally nodded, and a minute later, handed me his tablet. The blue and white page had “Michel Reiner” at the top and some bogus, generic picture of a sunset as the profile picture. His number of friends? 25.
Twenty-freaking-five.
I looked at him over the top of the tablet and felt my little heart break just a bit. “Do you know how many people like your fan page?”
He shrugged.
I looked it up.
The Reiner Kulti Official Fan Page had one hundred and twenty-five million likes.
And ‘Michel Reiner’ had twenty-five.
Something watery pooled in my throat as I handed him back his tablet. “I don’t get on there much but you could add me as a friend if you wanted to,” I offered in a wobbly voice.
“What an honor,” the bratwurst said, but he said it with a small smile so I knew he didn’t mean it like an asshole.
I still reached under the cover and pulled his leg hair. At least I hoped it was his leg hair.
Whatever it was, he let out a grunt-squeak noise of surprise as he jerked away, a big smile on his face that seemed to fit into skin that wasn’t accustomed to forming those types of facial expressions. “Do it again Sal, and you’ll get it right back.”
I made sure he was watching when I crossed my eyes at his threat. “I don’t have hair on my legs, so good luck with that.” I eyed the small screen again. “Who else are you friends with on there?”
“Some old teammates, my mother, my manager and publicist.” He tapped my name into the search and hit the ‘add’ button once my page came up. “You.”
My phone beeped a second later, and I saw the alert of a pending friend request. I accepted it and set my phone back down on the dresser before taking the seat I’d left next to the German.
The German who was already busy browsing my profile.
“Nosey much?” I asked.
He grunted, clicking on my main album and scrolling down. They were mainly all pictures that friends or family members had posted and linked me to. Birthdays, games, get-togethers, more games… it was a timeline of the last eight years of my life through other people’s eyes. Kulti didn’t say anything as he looked through them, until he suddenly stopped scrolling.
“Who is this?” he asked.
He didn’t need to point at the picture for me to know who he was referring to, and honestly, I was a little surprised Adam still had pictures of us up. We hadn’t been together in five years, and he’d dated more than a few girls since then.
But there we were on the screen.
I was in my early twenties, him in his late twenties and me on his lap, with his arm around my waist. My ex-boyfriend of four years was blond, built like an Abercrombie model, really cute and just as nice as he’d been attractive.
“That’s really old. It’s my ex-boyfriend,” I explained to the German.
The man who rarely used words didn’t change his tactic, but he slowly started looking through more pictures with dozens more of Adam and I popping up along the timeline. It made me feel a little sad that I hadn’t tried harder to work things out with him. We’d always gotten along really well, and he’d been the exact person I needed and wanted back then.
“How long were you together?” he asked once we’d scrolled three years furthe
“Four years. We met my second year in college.”
“He looks like an idiot.”
It took me a moment to comprehend what came out of his mouth, but it made me laugh once it finally took hold. I nudged him with my elbow. “You’re rude. He wasn’t an idiot. He was really nice.”
Those green-brown eyes slid over to me. He didn’t look amused. In fact his jaw was tight, and he looked a little pissed off. “You’re defending him?” He sounded like he couldn’t believe it.
“Yeah. He was really nice. He’s the only man I’ve ever really dated, Rey. We’d probably still be together if I would have wanted to have kids right after college.”
Kulti’s head jerked to look at me directly.
“What?” I asked, surprised by his expression.
“Have you kept in contact with him?”
I shrugged. “He calls me between girlfriends, but that’s it.”
“To get back together?” Why his voice was so low I couldn’t understand, and I gave him a weird look.
“Yeah, but it wouldn’t happen. He’s slept around a lot since we split. I’m not one of these girls that think men who have slept with hundreds of women are sexy. That’s gross. I don’t loan my body out to just anyone, and I don’t like the idea of a bunch of girls knowing what someone I love’s penis looks like, you know?”
A muscle in Kulti’s jaw ticked and I swear his eye twitched. Then I realized what had just come out of my mouth.
“No offense to you. It’s your business whatever you decide to do with yourself. I’m not going to judge. I’m just old-fashioned and picky. That’s probably why I haven’t been in a relationship since him, huh?”
His eye definitely twitched that time, and I felt bad for pretty much calling him an unattractive man-whore.
“Look, I’m sorry. Just because I can’t imagine being intimate with someone I don’t love doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with it. It’s not for me. Different strokes for different folks.”
Kulti’s eye twitched again. I didn’t miss the way he was biting down hard and making his cheek flex either.
“What?” I asked when he didn’t say anything.
Nothing.
The German tipped his head back and closed his eyes, his fingers going for the bridge of his nose. One inhale, one exhale. Another inhale, one more exhale. What the hell was wrong with him?
“Rey, are you okay?”
One eye opened as his chest puffed. “Stop talking about sex.”
Jeez. “Okay. Sorry. I didn’t take you to be a prude.”
He choked, his other eye opening. But did he say a word? No, he didn’t.
I sat there waiting for him to make another comment, but nothing came out of his mouth. I really hadn’t taken him as a person who would get offended so easily. The ‘s’ word hadn’t even come out of my mouth, much less anything raunchier. So I didn’t completely understand why he was getting so bent out of shape.
When he continued to say nothing and he kept looking at the support for the bottom of the top bunk bed, I fidgeted. “Can I see your tattoo now?” He’d been a little too secretive about it, and I’d been wondering what the hell he was hiding all day.
Mr. Secret’s chin moved just a tiny bit to the side before he nodded almost belligerently. Setting his tablet flat on the bed, he arranged his body to the side and carefully pulled the sleeve of his undershirt up. Where less than forty-eight hours ago there had been a tattoo nearly as old as me, a cross, it had been covered as if by magic with the outline of a bird. It was a beautiful, regal-looking bird.
“A Phoenix,” Kulti explained like he could read my mind.
“I can’t even see your old one at all,” I told him, still inspecting the great, beautiful wings and the eccentric-looking crest on its head. “This is amazing, Rey.” I wanted to touch it but the skin was still a little irritated, and I didn’t want to be the one to accidentally scratch it and mess it up before it was healed. “Seriously, way better than that cross you had before. What made you decide to get that?”
The German eyed me as he scooted back into place and tugged his shirtsleeve back down. “Someone told me I can’t take back what I’ve done, but what I do from now on is what matters. It seemed fitting.”
Damn it. I hated when he actually listened to me, but I smiled anyway and dropped the subject when he didn’t meet my eyes. All right. “Are you ready to go to bed?”
“I’m going to stay up and watch a movie on here,” he explained, gesturing to his tablet. With the bed above shadowing half of everything below, I couldn’t see his face well. “Would you want to watch it?”
Was I sleepy? Yes. But…
“Sure, at least until I start to fall asleep,” I agreed.
He slid over all of half an inch and angled his upper body toward me. Well. Scooting in next to him close enough so that our elbows were touching, Kulti propped the tablet back onto his bent knees as I tucked the hem of my shirt between my thighs. It had ridden up but it wasn’t like he could see my underwear, and it wasn’t like he hadn’t seen just as much of my legs practically every other day we’d hung out. I fixed the pillow behind my back and eased onto the bed so that my shoulder touched his bicep.
“What are we watching?” I asked.
Apparently the man wasn’t a cheapskate because we didn’t go with a Netflix movie; instead he bought a digital copy of some newly released suspense thriller.
I’d guess that I probably made it twenty minutes into the movie before I fell asleep. With his body heat on one side, even through the barrier of the sheet he had pulled over himself and the comfortable bed beneath me, I was out.
I woke up to find that my bent knees had fallen over and were resting on Kulti’s hip, my shirt had somehow ridden up past my hips leaving my underwear out for anyone to see. My hands were crossed over my chest and tucked into my armpits, and the entire right side of my body was huddled into the left side of the German.
I sat up and gave him a sleepy yawn. “I’m going to bed.” I squeezed his bent knee before throwing my legs over the side. “Goodnight, Rey.”
“Sweet dreams.”
Sweet dreams? Had that really just come out of his mouth? I think I might have fallen asleep with a smile on my face thinking of him using those words.
* * *
“You’re wearing a dress.”
I turned around and frowned, my hands smoothing down the front of the blue sundress I’d put on five minutes before. “Yes.” It was going to be bad enough when my parents saw my outfit. They acted like they’d never seen me in anything besides sweat pants or shorts.
Now I had to hear it from the German too.
He stood in the doorway in the same jeans he’d had on when we left for Austin. He’d added a black checkered and blue shirt and his tennis shoes.
I smiled.
He didn’t say anything. He only kept looking at me as if he hadn’t seen me in less clothing plenty of times, even thought that made me sound like a nudist. I twitched. “What? I dress up sometimes. Birthdays, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s.” I pulled on the hem of the light dress that almost reached my knees… if I hunched over and yanked.
His gaze slid back up to my face after watching me fiddle with the skirt and he blinked, slow, slow, slow. “You have make-up on.”
“I wear make-up.” Not much but enough.
“No heels?” He glanced at my feet, which were in a pair of black suede ankle boots my parents had bought me for my birthday a couple years ago.
“Trust me, you’d end up spending the night peeling me off the floor or laughing when I walk around like a newborn baby giraffe.” I smiled at him.
His eyes flicked up to mine and a small smile cracked the corners of his mouth. “You’re good at everything.”
I snorted. “I wish. I’ll make you a list later at all the things I’m horrible at.” I grabbed my purse off the corner of the bed and pulled it over my head. “Are you ready to go?”
&nbs
I had freckles on my chest, but it wasn’t like he hadn’t seen those before.
I pushed the acknowledgment of him staring out of my head and drew in a breath to relax. That morning, he’d woken up when I’d been half-naked again, only wearing a sports bra and underwear, and he hadn’t said a word as I pulled the rest of my clothes on. Sure I could have gone into the bathroom to change, but I kept the same thought in my head that I had from the beginning. I had nothing to be embarrassed about. I accepted my body as it was and if I started acting all goofy about it now, well, that just looked stupid.
I wasn’t out to impress anyone.
Plus, it wasn’t like he hadn’t seen better—and hopefully worse—before.
Whatever.
I felt good, and I didn’t care how much crap I was about to get from everyone that enjoyed teasing me just because they could.
Sure enough we found my parents, Ceci and her friend in the living room waiting for us. It was my dad that made the first crack when he saw me.
In a dress shirt, slacks and dress shoes, he must have forgotten he’d been acting like a timid little bear around the German because he immediately nudged my mom with his elbow. “Look, it’s a Christmas miracle. Sal put on real clothes.”
I exaggerated a laugh, making a face at him at the same time. “Funny.”
My mom came forward and squeezed my shoulder. “Look at how pretty you look when you wear a dress. If you dress like this more often, maybe you’d find a boyfriend again. No?”
Once upon a time, her comment would have really hurt my feelings. Actually, she’d said the same thing to me in the past at least a dozen times. If I dressed differently, if I put some effort into my appearance, if I didn’t play soccer, maybe I’d find someone…
Someone who didn’t know me at all could only love me if I was half myself.
I forced a smile onto my face and patted my mom’s arm, ignoring the intense gaze coming from Kulti. “Maybe one day, Ma.”