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Kulti brushed up against me as he leaned into the sink to rinse out his glass.
I leaned away from the view and him. “Your house is really nice.”
He seemed to absently look around the kitchen, nodding.
“Did you just move in?”
“Two months now, I think,” Kulti answered.
What a freaking talker. I watched as he placed his glass inside the dishwasher. “This is a really nice neighborhood.” I cleared my throat.
He shrugged. “It’s quiet.”
Something about what he said nipped me. “No one knows you live here, huh?”
The German shot me an incredulous look I couldn’t comprehend before answering. “No one.” He kept on giving me that strange look. “I’m ready to go now.”
So he didn’t want anyone to know where he lived. That wasn’t surprising, but I let it drop. “Let’s go.”
Kulti had a bag waiting in his nearly empty living room and followed out after me, setting the alarm and locking the door. The Audi he’d been riding around in was parked in the driveway when I peeked through the wrought-iron fence that sectioned off the back part of his house.
“So none of your neighbors know you live here?” I asked again once we’d gotten inside the car.
“No. I leave the house before they do and get back before.”
“What do you do for groceries?” I was really curious about that. “Order them online?”
“I walk. It’s three blocks away.”
All this walking and riding around in cars he didn’t drive, and all these mentions of a suspended license from people that got paid to investigate things… I gave Kulti a curious look but didn’t dig in too deeply. So what? Maybe the signs were all there, but it wasn’t my business to ask, the same way I didn’t want to talk about Amber and her dumbass husband.
“I guess I don’t understand how no one has recognized you. I mean, your face is on a billboard off the freeway by my house,” I told him, shaking my head. Then again, I’d seen his face hundreds of times on my walls. I could probably do an ink blot test and find him.
“People don’t pay attention. I wear a hat, and the only people that speak to me are the elderly in the motorized scooters who need assistance reaching something.”
Glancing over my shoulder, I shot him a smile. “I don’t know how you do it, honestly. We have fans but it’s different. The only people that wear my jersey are my parents and brother. I don’t like being the center of attention, so it works for me.”
His head moved so that he could look out the window. His voice was so serious, so distant; it made me look at him longer than necessary. “I’ve had enough attention in my life, I don’t miss it.”
That was why he lived in this neighborhood and wore a hat to the grocery store.
I guess you figure that some people have it all. Why wouldn’t they? Looks, money, fame. What else would they need? A friend? Companionship? Something to take the boredom away?
Personally I knew hundreds of people, yet I was only really close to seven. They were all people that I’d known for a long time, but out of those seven I was confident that five would still be in my life even after soccer.
I eyed Kulti again and repressed a sigh. Feeling bad for him hadn’t been part of the plan.
“Close enough?” I grunted.
Kulti pressed into me even more. “No.”
He was backing me into a corner, defender and striker at the same time, to keep me from stealing the ball from him. Somewhat rough and playing like I was just a smaller man, by not avoiding the full body contact that came so naturally in soccer, he crowded me, he held me back. And I fought for every inch I made it forward, having to tap into my short bursts of speed to try and out-trick him.
It didn’t really work.
With him on me, I only managed to get my feet on the ball about four times during our game, and each time he made me lose it out of bounds or stole it away. It was aggravating and exhilarating at the same time, especially when I ran after him and tried guarding against his big-ass body.
Playing with someone bigger, faster and more talented than you are, isn’t exactly an ideal situation, but I tried and in the end, Kulti won, one to zero, nailing a clean shot right between the two goals we’d made out of sticks and empty water bottles we’d found in my backseat.
