They nodded, with only Marc adding, “Are you all right?”
I gave him a thumbs-up.
With a quick wave at the people I did know, the ones who hadn’t tried to hurt me, I walk-slash-limped around the outskirts of the field, following two steps behind a slow-paced Kulti. He didn’t stop or turn around to make sure I was following after him; he just kept heading in the direction of the lot. As we got closer, he jogged toward his car. In the time it took me to walk the rest of the way toward the bathrooms where I’d found him, he had already opened the trunk of the Audi and set a small blue cooler on the lip of the bumper. He pulled two small white things out and closed it again.
With a large hand, he pointed at the bench right off the curb. “Sit there.”
I squinted to see what he was holding, as I sat dutifully.
“Shoe off.” He continued to order me around and I didn’t fight him on it, realizing he had two ice packs stacked together in one hand.
Toeing my tennis shoe off, I pulled my foot up to rest the heel on the edge of the bench. Kulti handed me one of the packs before sitting down next to me. He didn’t have to tell me what to do; I rolled my sock down until it just covered my toes and placed the still very cold cloth material on what was already inflamed pink skin.
Kulti folded his body so that his leg was partially propped up on the corner of the seat and placed the other pack on top of his knee.
We were sitting on a bench nearly side by side, with icepacks.
I burst out laughing.
I laughed so hard my stomach started cramping and my eyes got all watery and overwhelmed, and I couldn’t stop.
The German raised an eyebrow. “What is it?”
“Look at us,” I laughed even harder, unable to catch my breath. “We’re sitting here icing ourselves. Jesus Christ.”
A small smile cracked his normally stern face as he looked at my foot and then at himself.
“And why do you have icepacks in your car anyway?”
His small smile eroded into an even larger one, which eventually cracked into a low chuckle that lightened his face in a way that had me admiring just how handsome something so insignificant could make him. “If I want to walk tomorrow, I need to ice immediately.” There was a brief pause before he added, “If you tell anyone—“
“You’ll ruin me, I know. I got it.” I grinned. “If you tell anyone about this, I’ll kill you, so I guess we’re even, right?”
His expression fell into a flat one. “I won’t say a word.”
I lifted up a shoulder.
He must have thought I didn’t believe him because he kept going. “If you get kicked off the team, I wouldn’t have anyone else to play with.”
My little heart wrapped up that comment in cling wrap to preserve it forever. “What about Gardner?” I offered.
He shot me a look. “Once was enough.”
What? “You played with him?”
“Two days after you.”
“It couldn’t have been that bad.” Gardner had played college soccer.
Kulti sat back against the old wooden bench. “Have you ever played with people that were significantly worse than you?”
That was an incredibly rude way of putting it, but I nodded.
“Picture it, and then imagine that they thought they were a much better player,” he explained.
Ooh. I grimaced and he nodded.
I fought the question that had been living in my brain since that first time he asked me to play and then decided, why not? What if I never got this chance again? “I wondered why you asked me and not anyone else.”