Freaking pumpernickel.
“Again?”
Hands on my hips, I took a few deep breaths in through my nose and nodded at the man standing in front of me, breathing just as hard. There weren’t very many people at the park we’d gone to about twenty minutes from Kulti’s house, but there were more than there’d been when we first arrived.
Against my better judgment, I said, “One more.”
We went for it.
We both might have been more tired than we’d been when we started, but it didn’t matter. Kulti was on me from the second I got the ball, constantly less than a foot away. He was definitely slowing down, and I used it to my advantage. I was just as tired as he was, our game the day before had drained me, but he was thirteen years older than me and didn’t train as hard. And I was almost as fast as he was.
“Slowing down?” I panted as I tried to fake him out and make a run to the left.
He grunted, raw and rough. “Quit talking and play.”
Yeah, he was definitely pooped.
Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a few people sitting along the edge of the small field we were on, watching. But it was right then that Kulti snuck his foot into my path to try and trip me.
“You ass,” I hissed, just barely missing him.
He used me being distracted and pissed, to steal the ball.
In the end I took it back when I summoned the last bit of energy I was willing to spend, and really put in the effort to power toward the goal, scoring. I threw my hands up in the air and stuck my tongue out at The King. “I win.” Yeah, I totally wasn’t being professional or mature about it.
Just to rub it in even more, our audience on the edge of the field began clapping.
Someone wasn’t amused. I’d actually say he looked a little pissed.
I liked it.
“Oye! Muchacha! Es el Aleman?”someone from the field yelled.
“Callate tonto!”someone else replied, telling the guy asking to shut up.
I eyed the sore loser in front of me, not knowing what to do. Now that I got a better look at the people on the sidelines, they were all Latinos, in their late twenties and older. The German didn’t say anything with his eyes or his body language.
“Amiga! Es Kulti?”
There were only about six of them…
I looked at Kulti again but the only thing he did was shrug, damn it.
“Si es,”I admitted. “Pero no le digan a nadie.”
The group erupted. “No chinges!”No shit was right.
The next thing I knew they were on their feet, hands on their heads, losing their minds. The guys went up to the German, speaking quick Spanish and watching him like they had never seen anything like him before.
It wasn’t until I heard the first one who had spoken, say, “No me digas!” that I heard Kulti reply in perfect Spanish, explaining that he was real and not a ghost, “No soy fantasma.”
The guys lost it again. “You speak Spanish!” one of them exclaimed in the same language.
The German shrugged and gave them an easy smile.
For the next couple of minutes, I watched as the strange men blasted off several questions, and they were answered in an accent that rivaled mine.
I’m not going to lie, not even a little bit. Besides a big butt, I had a thing for guys that spoke different languages. While Reiner Kulti was every bit as impressive of a male specimen as you could get physically, the way he spoke Spanish multiplied his attractiveness by about thirty percent.