Chapter Twelve Kami
Chapter Twelve
Kami
The girls’ basketball skills were inversely proportional to their cheerleading ability. Me included. Our school had a reputation for putting out good basketball players, and the guys pretty much all knew what they were doing, but we girls weren’t only flubbing it, we were getting in the way.
“Move,” someone named Richie shouted at me—I don’t think I’d ever seen him in my life—and he elbowed past me before setting up his jump shot.
Taylor was on his team, but he still defended me. “That was a foul!”
“Taylor,” Thiago shouted, “are you honestly going to snitch on your own teammates?” I could tell he was relishing his new position of authority.
“Didn’t you see how he nearly knocked her over?”
He was so protective of me, I was touched, and I ran over to kiss him on the cheek and tell him I was fine. Thiago yelled, “Hamilton, this is a game, not date night.”
I stepped away from my boyfriend and got back into position.
Soon enough, our team lost, and we had to go sit on the bench.
Taylor’s team had yet to lose a game, and we all took turns trying to beat them.
Meanwhile, Danny, on the sidelines, looked like he was about to explode.
He kept yelling, “Not that way, dumbass! Over there!” and harassing this poor girl from our art class.
She was a skinny, short thing with thick glasses, and she froze every time someone passed her the ball.
“Walker! Drop and give me twenty!” Thiago demanded every time Danny opened his mouth.
That was his line—he’d even made me do some, first for jumping on Taylor’s back when he was supposed to be blocking me but instead reached back and tickled me, and second for flipping the bird at Julian, who kept dribbling around me in a circle to piss me off because he knew there was nothing I could do to stop him.
I couldn’t help but laugh as I saw Danny sweating and grunting. He deserved it—he deserved that and worse. During a water break, I walked over to Taylor and smiled.
“Are you sure you want to be an engineer?” I asked him. He grabbed me around the waist and picked me up. “Because you look sexy as hell out there on the court,” I added.
“Give me a kiss right now, and I’ll be whatever you want me to be,” he said, and leaned in. I couldn’t help but open my eyes as Taylor put his tongue in my mouth, and I was not surprised to see Thiago watching us. And he didn’t seem too happy about it.
“Back on the court!” he shouted, without taking his eyes off me.
Taylor let me go with one last peck on the cheek, and jogged out on the court. I sat next to Ellie on the bleachers. She still hadn’t told me what was going on with her and Danny.
“Hey,” I said, trying to figure out how I could confront the issue without sounding jealous. “What happened with you and Danny at the Halloween party?”
Blushing slightly, she said curtly, “Why do you ask?”
Should I tell her I saw her, I wondered, or just keep asking questions to see if she’d admit it herself?
“I mean, I saw you guys,” I said, deciding to cut to the point.
“Saw us…?” She was playing dumb.
“I saw you kissing him, Ellie.”
She looked over at Danny, who was back in the game, dribbling the ball down the court. “Can’t we just pretend it didn’t happen?” she asked, turning back to me. Her cheeks were flushed from the cold, and her black lashes made the dark circles under her eyes look more dramatic.
“But why did you do it? Do you like him?”
She hesitated. “You know, Kami, you can’t always control who you fall in love with.”
“You’re in love with him?!” I shouted, unable to help myself.
“Hamilton, that’s ten more push-ups,” Thiago called from the sidelines, turning to face me.
Goddammit! “I didn’t do anything!” I stood and shouted.
“You’re supposed to be paying attention, not gossiping.”
“What am I supposed to pay attention to?”
“The game. Just because your team isn’t playing right now doesn’t mean you can goof off,” he said, completely ignoring the fact that everyone else was talking too.
“I can talk and pay attention at the same time!” I wasn’t in the mood for more push-ups.
“Sorry,” Thiago responded. “Let’s make that twenty.”
I stomped over to him. “You’re pushing it way too far, Thiago,” I whispered, so only he could hear me.
“You can call me Coach or Mr. Di Bianco, not Thiago.” He turned back to the court. “Walker, pass the ball!”
“You’ve been testing me ever since class started,” I said. I was annoyed by his attitude and refused to do any more push-ups.
“You’ve been getting on my nerves today more than normal,” he said. “Now give me those push-ups, and not the half-assed, knees-on-the-ground kind—count ’em out.”
“I hate you,” I said.
“Good. That solves a serious problem then,” he said, looking me straight in the eye.
“What problem?”
“Me pulling you off into an empty classroom and fucking you against the chalkboard, for example.”
My mouth went suddenly dry. I couldn’t believe he’d just said that. “What?”
“I said, twenty push-ups!” he screamed. I noticed Taylor was watching us out of the corner of his eye.
I walked off in a state of shock and found a place to do my push-ups.
It wasn’t until Ellie told me I was on number twenty-five that I realized I was in a completely different world.
How could he say that to me? In the middle of class? Just like that?
After class, I hurried first into the locker room, changed quickly, and then sat outside watching the other girls come and go.
Ellie came out soon after and asked me to go with her to lunch, but I said I had a headache and might go to the nurse’s office for some aspirin.
I told her if she saw Taylor, to tell him I’d be there in a few minutes.
I knew Thiago would still be in the gym, putting away the equipment.
The coach was always the last to leave, and he had to check to make sure no one had left anything behind.
I kept sitting there, and eventually he made his rounds and returned.
He didn’t seem remotely surprised to find me there.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“Waiting for you.” My heart beat faster. There was nothing I could do to force it to behave in the presence of my boyfriend’s brother.
“You’re not supposed to be here unsupervised. I could give you detention for this.”
That’s when my mind spun out of control. To a place where a phrase like that was more of a turn-on than a threat. Thiago seemed to read my thoughts, and his voice dropped from a deep, imposing baritone to a whisper as he told me, “Kamila, you need to leave.”
“You can’t treat me that way in front of everyone,” I said. I needed him to know that he had hurt me.
“I can treat you however I want. I’m the teacher and you’re the student, remember?”
“Do you tell other students you want to fuck them?”
“Go to class.”
“No.” I crossed my arms.
“Kamila…”
“Aren’t we going to talk about what happened at your house two days ago?” I said.
“Nope,” he replied, leaning against a wall and crossing his own arms.
I was furious. “What we did meant nothing to you, did it?” I asked.
“You seemed to like it,” he replied.
“Don’t act like I’m the only one who wanted it,” I said.
“What if you were?”
“Oh, right, after all you’ve got your teacher friend, Miss what’s-her-name…” I said sarcastically.
“Maggie.”
“Oh, whatever, I don’t give a shit about her name.” I fell silent for a moment. “I hate this.”
“You hate what?”
“This,” I said, pointing back and forth between us. “Me being with your brother. I shouldn’t feel like this. I shouldn’t…”
“You shouldn’t what?”
“I shouldn’t want to be with both of you!”
It wasn’t until I said it aloud that I realized it was true. Yes: I had feelings for both of them. It wasn’t just a passing infatuation. It wasn’t just a slip-up, or that I was attracted to Thiago. I had feelings for him. And I had feelings for Taylor too.
Thiago’s face was perfectly still. I had no idea what was going on inside him. Was it possible that I was just a plaything for him? Someone to give him a blow job at a fucking costume party?
“I hate seeing you with him,” he finally confessed.
Once more, I froze, taking a deep breath and trying to calm the storm inside me caused by those simple words. “Well, I don’t like seeing you with Maggie.”
“That’s a problem, isn’t it?” He moved closer. He was only a few steps away now. “Thiago…”
“Do you have any idea what it feels like when I hear you say my name?”
“It shouldn’t make you feel anything! Isn’t that what you’ve been trying to tell me, that you feel nothing?” I made sure I was looking him dead in the eye when I said it.
“I’m no good for you, Kamila,” he said, patting my cheek. “And you don’t deserve my brother.”
Those words broke something inside me. Because he was right.
Maybe not about whether he was good for me, but as for whether I deserved Taylor…
of course I didn’t. “I have feelings for him, though…I really do,” I said.
I didn’t know what exactly those feelings were, but there was something about Taylor that…
“To hell with your feelings. You cheated on him. With me. More than once,” he said. “As much as I hate to admit it, I know there’s a part of you that loves him and wants to make him happy, but this isn’t how you go about it, Kamila. What happened the other night…”
“Shouldn’t have happened,” I said, trying to get my thoughts in order.
“But it did happen…and in a way, I think I was trying to push you to see how far you’d go with me. And if my brother hadn’t burst in on us, I know we’d have gone all the way.”
Almost reflexively, I pushed him away.
“You pushed me to see how far I’d go?”
“Did I stutter?”
“You were pretending with me?”
“Kam, you can’t play both of us. You should just stay away. I’m your teacher. God knows what would happen if anything about us came out. And my brother… He deserves someone who won’t go around giving other guys blow jobs behind his back. Especially his own brother.”