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Something else? “Pa, there’s something else in the box.” Also, like they hadn’t heard each other from four feet away.
Dad blinked, and then rifled through the nameless white box and pulled out a greeting card sized envelope. He removed something that looked like an index card. He read it and then read it a second and then a third time. He put the card back inside the envelope and then the box. His dark face was somber as he took a few breaths. He finally raised his green eyes to meet Kulti’s hazel ones.
“Sal,” he said, looking at the German, “ask him if he wants his hug now or later.”
“What’s wrong?”
I gave Kulti a look as I sat on the edge of the bigger bunk bed, ready to take my shoes off. “Nothing. Why?”
The German blinked at me. “You haven’t said a single word.”
I hadn’t. He was right.
How could I talk when something huge had lodged itself into my chest? Something monstrous and uncomfortable had picked up and moved in, stealing the space where my breath and word usually lived.
Kulti had stolen that piece of me when he hugged my dad back…
He’d given him two front row seats to a FC Berlin game, along with a voucher for flights and a hotel.
What do you freaking say after that?
“Are you upset?” he asked.
I made a face. “About what?”
“Berlin.”
Oh my God, he looked so earnest… “Rey.” I shook my head. “How could I ever be upset over that? That was the greatest thing anyone has ever done for my dad. I can’t even…” I stared up at him as he stepped right in front of me, looking down. “I can never pay you back. Okay, maybe I can if I pay you installments over the next five years, but I don’t know what to say.”
He shrugged those brawny shoulders. “Nothing.”
I rolled my eyes. “It’s a big deal.”
“It isn’t.”
I stood up and held my arms open. “It is, so quit arguing and give me a hug.”
He quit talking but he didn’t hug me. I should have taken it as a compliment that he didn’t shrink away from me or simply say ‘no.’ Kulti just looked at the arms I held a little away from my body, like it was some foreign thing he’d never seen before.
When he stood there for another ten seconds, I decided I had enough. This guy had given out thousands of hugs over the course of his life. Then I looked at his face and how serious he always was, and decided maybe he hadn’t. But he had given my dad one at the restaurant, so screw it. He had to have another one in him.
I took a step forward and wrapped my arms around his waist, over his own arms like they were hostage. He rested his chin on the top of my head. “Thank you,” I told him.
I held him for another ten seconds, feeling him stay stiff as a board the entire time, and then decided I could put him out of his misery. I dropped my arms and took a step back, the backs of my knees bumping into the frame of the bed.
Maybe it would have been awkward if I really cared about him hugging me back, or in this case, not hugging me back, but I didn’t. Not at all. He’d given my dad something wonderful; I could live with it.
Whatwasawkward was the way he was looking at the freckles on my chest and bare shoulders beneath the thin straps of my sundress.
“I should probably go change now,” I muttered, taking a step to the side. “But I want you to know how grateful I am for what you did for my dad, all right?”
He nodded absently, still looking at the skin right above my boobs. Not directly at my boobs, just above them. Weird.
Well I guess this was payback time for looking at his boner the day before, and I was going to take it. “Hey, eyes up here, pretzel face.”
Chapter Twenty
“How was your break?”
