“Do you do this often?” he asked after I’d covered his chin.
“A couple times a week.” I smiled, noticing his eyes on mine. “Do you?”
“I’ve had a few scrubs before photo shoots,” he admitted.
I nodded, impressed. What a metrosexual. I ran my fingers over the strip of flesh below his nose. “We spend so much time in the sun, you really have to try and take care of your skin. I don’t want to look like an old lady before my time comes.”
He nodded his agreement and let me finish putting the mask on him with watchful eyes. Once we were done, I told him we needed to wait at least twenty minutes before washing it off. “Don’t touch anything either. The turmeric stains everything,” I warned him, but I didn’t really care if I got a stain on my furniture or not.
Grabbing an ice pack from the freezer, I sat on one end of the couch and watched him sit on the other. Propping my leg on the coffee table, I slapped the ice-pack down on it for a good fifteen minutes. My notebook was on the cushion between us, with a whiteboard on the table for my sticky notes, right where I’d left it before I decided to do my first beauty treatment of the week. The reporter’s question earlier about the summer camps reminded me that I needed to plan the lessons for them. I hadn’t finalized a single thing yet.
The German didn’t even hesitate to pick up the notebook, reading over the notes I’d written about the different things that I thought would be beneficial to the kids at their ages.
“What is this?” he asked.
I fought the urge to snatch the notebook away from him. “Plans. I have a few summer camps coming up.”
His eyes flicked up from over the edge of the notebook. “Training camps?”
“For kids,” I explained. “They only last a few hours.”
He glanced back down at the sheet. “For free?”
“Yes. I do it in low-income neighborhoods for kids whose parents don’t have the funds to enroll them in clubs and leagues.”
He hummed.
I scratched my cheek, feeling oddly vulnerable at him reading over the skills I planned on teaching the kids. He kept reading and it got worse. It wasn’t like he was a fantastic coach, he wasn’t. I had no doubt he could have been a great coach if he wanted to, but he didn’t.
I scrunched my toes up in my socks and watched his face.
“Did your parents have money?” I found myself asking.
Kulti “uh-huh”ed.
I pulled my knee up to my chest and put my chin on it, careful not to rub the yogurt all over it. “There was no scholarship for you at the academy?”
He glanced up. “FC Berlin covered the costs.”
No shit. They’d recruited him at eleven? It happened, but I guess it still amazed me.
“And you, Taco?”
I smiled at him from behind my knee, surprised he was asking. “You’ve been to my house, Germany. We weren’t poor-poor, but I didn’t have a pair of name brand shoes until I was probably fifteen, and my brother bought them for me with his first advance from the MPL. I have no idea how my parents managed to swing paying for everything for so long but they did.” Actually, I did know. They cut a whole bunch of things out of the budget. A lot. “I just got lucky they cared, otherwise things would have gone a lot differently.”
“I’m sure you haven’t made them regret anything they did.”
“Eh. I’m sure I’ve made them wonder what the hell they were doing a time or two.” Or three. Or four. “I used to have a terrible temper—“
The German snorted. Straight-up snorted, lips fluttering, too.
Ass.
I nudged at his hip with my toes. “What? I don’t have a terrible temper anymore.”
Those awesome almost-hazel eyes looked up again from over the notebook. “No, you don’t and neither do I.”
“Ha!” I nudged at him again and he grabbed my foot with his free hand. I tried to yank it back, but he didn’t let go. “Oh please, my temper isn’t anywhere near as bad as yours.”
“It is.” He pulled my foot back toward him, getting a better grip around the instep.
“Trust me. It isn’t.”
“You’re a menace when you’re mad, schnecke. Maybe the refs haven’t caught you pinching girls, but I have,” he said casually.
I sat up straight. “Unless you have any physical proof, it never happened.”
Kulti stared at me for a beat before shaking his head, his thumb pressing a hard line down the arch of my foot. “You’re an animal.”
My shoulders shook but I managed to keep myself from laughing. “It takes one to know one.”