Chapter 12 #2
Why he’d decided to share it with me, I still wasn’t positive, but I’d take what I could get.
A slow, steady exhale made its way out of him. “Do you know why I retired?”
He’d torn his ACL for the third time. There’d been rumors from the prior tear that he wouldn’t come back 100 percent, or even 90 or 80 or 70 percent.
He was too old, people had said. When it finally happened, stacked on top of arthritis in his toe, and other small injuries that managed to add up over the years, everyone thought it was inevitable.
Reiner “The King” Kulti had announced his retirement shortly afterward, ending his legacy.
Was I going to say that? Definitely not. I settled for a nod and a “yeah.”
“It took a long time for me to heal,” he said. Then he didn’t say anything afterward.
I found myself slowly turning my head to give him an incredulous look I realized I had no right to give him. “Okay. Then what?”
He shrugged.
Reiner Kulti shrugged like “oh, my ACL took a long time to heal” was reason enough to explain why he hadn’t played his beloved sport in two years.
He wasn’t fooling me. He still loved it.
You didn’t give up a great love so easily.
I could tell by the look in his arrogant eyes when he watched the team.
He looked at some players like they were complete pieces of crap he wished he could shake until they got things right.
You didn’t look like that unless you still cared.
He wasn’t fooling me.
“That took what? Six months? Eight months?” I asked, blinking at him slowly.
When he said, “It hasn’t completely healed,” it was proof enough for me he was full of shit. He didn’t strike me as the type to want to make a big deal about his injuries.
So I said something I would have said to any other player I had a decent relationship with—he didn’t exactly count. “Bullshit.”
“Excuse me?”
I laughed. “That’s bullshit. Your knee still hurts?
Come on. Do I look like I was born yesterday?
I’ve been in some sort of pain since I was sixteen, and I’m sure you have been too.
” I shook my head and laughed again before focusing back on the road.
“Jeez. Next time tell me to mind my own business instead of telling me something so ridiculous.”
What the hell else had I been expecting? He’d said more than I would have bet my life on to begin with.
“You don’t know anything,” he snapped back.
Once again, another thing I shouldn’t have been surprised at. “I know enough.” Because I did, his bullshit was evident from a mile away.
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” Kulti’s voice was laced with just a bit of anger.
He’d finally dropped a “fuck.” How about that.
I was almost in awe—almost, and I definitely couldn’t find it in me to get all bent out of shape at his ugly tone and words. “You know what I mean. Look, you don’t need to get an attitude. All I was asking was why you haven’t played in so long. It’s none of my business, fine. Sorry I asked.”
There was a pause. “Explain what you meant.”
He wanted to understand, but I knew in my heart he didn’t really want me to tell him. I kept my attention forward and shook my head, the laughter and amusement dying off my face. “It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters,” he insisted. I kept my mouth shut. “Say it.”
Yeah, I wasn’t saying anything. Nobody was handing me the shovel to dig my own grave.
“You think I’m lying?” Kulti asked in a cold voice.
I swallowed. Well, he asked, right? I picked my words carefully and answered.
“I’m not saying you’re lying. I’m sure your knee hurts, but there is no way that’s why you haven’t played.
Even if you’re only back at 60 percent, 50 percent, it doesn’t matter; you still would have played with friends at least, or something.
Kicked the ball on your own. You have the money to build your own field, I’m sure, if you don’t want everyone in your business.
It seems like you’re selling yourself out.
You already told me you miss playing. I just don’t believe something like a little pain would stop you from at least…
you know what? It doesn’t matter. I’m glad you finally started kicking some balls around. Good for you.”
Hours later, I’d realize how differently I could have handled the situation.
How horribly I’d actually gone about it.
I knew better. I knew better. I understood people who held their pride and arrogance like a shield and how they handled someone attacking them.
Or worse, someone feeling sorry for them.
I knew because I was well aware how much I hated anyone feeling sorry for me.
Pitying a man with the ability to make my life a living hell on the field, a man who had once upon a time held a passion for soccer that seemed to light him up from the inside out, it was like I turned a force of nature against me.
Forget that I’d tried to be nice to him, that I’d driven him home and never insisted on knowing why he had me take him instead of his driver or a taxi or Gardner or Grace, or just about anyone else who had more of a relationship with him than I did.
In the words of my brother, I did it to myself. I brought the attention of a perfectionist down on me, and there was no one else to blame for it.
THE NEXT TWO weeks of my life could be summed up in four keywords: physical and emotional hell.
Any kind of bond I’d formed with Kulti had been shattered the day I pressed him for answers in my car. Proceeding to give him shit for using his injury as an excuse was just the icing on the cake.
Since then I hadn’t given him a single ride home. I wasn’t surprised after that initial first practice, following what I would call Interrogation Day, when he took ripping me a new one to a totally different level.
Seriously.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“Listen to me!”
Blah, blah, blah, fuck, blah, blah, blah, something-something-shit, blah, blah, blah.
But my favorite thing that came out of his mouth was “Is that how girls play soccer?”
Oh man.
I’d heard that one before. It still got me every time.
But if what he wanted was for me and the team to show him just how girls played, he got his wish. We were all out for blood. Most of us had grown up playing with boys, and from experience, we all knew their asses got kicked just as easily as other ladies did.
I couldn’t remember the last time any coach had been on top of me with such a vengeance. There wasn’t anything friendly about the things that came out of Kulti’s mouth. It was all business. All tough love, I’m-going-to-break-you-down-to-get-what-I-want love.
Each day was worse than the one before. Gardner didn’t say anything. He patted me on the back and told me to hang in there.
It got hard to keep my head up and brush off the ugly words.
I tried my best to focus on the things that came out of his mouth that had knowledge beneath them, but it wasn’t easy.
Toward the end of the first week Jenny, the world-class athlete, was the one who panted out, “What did you do to him?” after Kulti yelled at me for passing the ball to another player when he felt like I should have taken a difficult shot instead.
What could I tell her? Nothing. I couldn’t tell her anything without bringing up that I’d driven him home a few times. “I have no idea,” I told her.
“Did something else come up with Eric?”
“No.” I’d been getting fewer and fewer messages about Eric and Kulti over the course of the last few weeks.
I seriously doubted the team photos with us standing by each other had anything to do with it, and Sheena hadn’t brought up anything else about releasing clips from the press conference I’d done with Gardner at the beginning of the season.
Jenny scrunched up her face, wiping at her neck with her shirt collar. “Bring him a cupcake or something then, Sal, because this is getting out of control. I don’t know how you haven’t started crying yet.”
That’s how bad it was. My whole body was tight before practice began, and it stayed that way afterward. Marc went out of his way to tease me more often to get me out of my exhausted funk.
It barely helped.
And then, I finally had enough.
“IF YOU WOULD HAVE—“
If I would have. If I would have done something differently, we could have won by five goals instead of one.
He was being unfair, and everyone knew it. Did anyone say anything though?
Of course not. No one wanted to be the one getting their ass chewed out, and I couldn’t exactly blame them.
Most importantly, did I say anything? Nope. I stood there as Gardner and Kulti went back and forth over what we could have improved upon in our last preseason game. I stayed quiet as Kulti hung the weight of an almost-loss on my shoulders and nodded when I was supposed to.
He was right. I did miss a few opportunities. I wouldn’t deny it.
But so did half the members on our team.
Yet did anyone bring that up? Gardner made some generalizations, but he didn’t name anyone directly, even when it was obvious someone had messed up big-time.
He didn’t get a kick out of embarrassing players and instead would pull a person aside and talk with them.
And this fucking frankfurter….
I swallowed the fucking bratwurst bitch, sauerkraut shit, German-piece-of-shit-chocolate-cake insults, which were all throwing a party in my mouth. They each begged me to let them come out and play.
Inside, oh my God, inside I was raging and trying to talk myself out of doing something that would land me in jail. I wouldn’t cut it. I enjoyed being outside too much.
“Sorry, guys,” I said in a deceptively calm voice once Kulti had finished his rant.
Harlow and Jenny’s faces stood out at me from the semicircle we were standing in. Harlow looked like she was on the verge of laughing, and Jenny looked like she was contemplating how quickly she could grab me in case I decided two to fifteen years behind bars wasn’t that long.
None of the girls said a word.