you’re making a mistake. He’s got your back.” He shifted his gaze to Mike, but didn’t look at him directly. “Not many people have that. It’s good.”
“Luka…”
“I’ll see you around campus,” he told Gia, a frown pulling his mouth down. Then, he stared at Coach, blinking a few times before he straightened his shoulders and lifted his chin, looking the man directly in the eyes. “Coach, I honestly didn’t mean any disrespect at all. I’m sorry.”
And without a backward glance, without stopping when Gia called after him, when Mike did, Luka got in his new Mustang and drove away.
8.
LUKA
Luka hated hiding out in his mother’s house. There was no real peace there. No comfort the woman offered. Nothing that settled him. But he couldn’t face the team house and risk the chance of seeing his coach. Worse yet, he couldn’t risk seeing Gia waiting for him downstairs because he’d refused to answer her calls or meet her in their usual places. She’d spotted him only once since the day he’d driven away from her and Mike. That had been near the coffee shop by the bookstore. Luka forgot how much she loved the place. It had been habit—one of their accidents that he found not remotely happy anymore.
“You’re avoiding me,” she’d told him, catching him as he left the coffee shop just before it closed.
“It’s not like that.”
“Then tell me what it’s like.” She’d taken two steps, bringing her smell, her beauty, the temptation of her, too close to him. He’d almost given in. He’d almost forgotten the look on his coach’s face, how disappointed the man had been when he’d found them together.
Almost.
“This thing between us…G…it’s not...” Then Gia moved her head, a small tilt, a withering frown that tore at his insides. One small head tilt and he couldn’t look at her. It was the smallest gesture, something he’d seen her do a dozen times. Something that Luka hadn’t realized until that moment he loved seeing. She watched him like she expected logic and reason. Like whatever he said would take the frustration from her features and relax the tension bunching the muscles around her mouth.
“Lu?”
He shut his eyes, taking two steps back before he walked away from her. “I gotta go,” he called over his shoulder and jogged toward his car.
“Coward,” he said to himself, laying on the bed in his childhood room, hating that everything in this place made him feel like he didn’t belong.
The living room held pictures of he and Kona when they were kids or his mother and her father when they were all younger. Younger versions of Luka were in some frames, but over the years, as they grew older and it became clear Kona was the stronger athlete, that he had something Luka never would, their mother’s favoritism showed itself in the shrine she’d begun to erect to his brother in this house.
Kona has more trophies, his mother had explained as reason for his twin getting the bigger room when they moved into this place. Luka didn’t argue. It wasn’t a lie. But other things bothered him. Things that he knew had nothing to do with Kona and everything to do with how his mother looked at them. They stopped being a packaged duo somewhere around their tenth birthday when Kona got leaner, taller, and looked more like their kuku, and Luka stayed chunky and round and looked like…whoever the hell the bastard was that left them all twenty years ago.
Maybe, he thought, that’s why he was a chicken shit. It was that turn-tail-and-run DNA that came from the man he’d never known. Whoever the asshole was that got his mother pregnant and then left her with two babies growing inside her, clearly had something weak in him. Had to be what he’d left to Luka. Had to be why he couldn’t find it in himself to face Gia or her uncle. Had to be why he couldn’t fight for her.
“He’s not here.”
“Like hell he’s not!”
The two rising voices were both female. Both very familiar and they pulled Luka out of the bullshit thoughts that had his head twisted up with the asshole who didn’t deserve a second of his attention.
“I have no idea who you think you are…”
“Luka! Are you here? Come out here and talk to me right the hell now, you cooch!”
He bolted from his bed, heart hammering as Gia’s voice rose, lifting over his mother’s own threatening tone.