Lay POV

I walked into the dorm and threw my stuff down. “Duizhang!” I yelled. I knew he was here somewhere.

“In here!” He yelled back. I trudged through to the living room where he was sitting on the floor, writing on the coffee table. He looked up at me as I entered, “What’s up?” he asked. I stood there awkwardly for a moment, unsure of how to say what I wanted to say. I looked around quickly,

“It’s just us right? Everyone’s out?” He nodded and I sighed. I looked down, embarassed. “Ge, can you… can you teach me English?” I finally asked. I looked up at him hopefully. He looked up at me in surprise,

“Why do you want to learn that all of a sudden?” I looked away. “Oh. I see.” I looked back at him and he was smirking, “Because of her. Right?” We stared at each other for a moment untill I finally looked away and nodded in defeat. “Well,” he said, streaching, “I don’t know how much I can do… but I’ll try. ...And I promise I’ll be nice about it.” He gave me a genuine smile. I sighed, relieved. He patted the space beside him, indicating that I sit. “Okay,” He flipped his notebook to a new page, “Let’s see what you know.”

~~~

Since my beginning knowledge of English wasn’t very extensive, Kris had his work cut out for him. We worked on a lot of basic, and conversationsal things such as asking people about themselves and their hobbies. The hardet thing was the pronunciation. UGH! It was so hard sometimes! But I wanted to do this, so I kept working hard. By the time we knew everyone should be getting home and we packed up, we had filled a coulple of pages in a new notebook for me to review on my own untill Kris could teach me again.

~~~

We continued our lessons the next week, once we had some free time. We were about to pack up when we were surprised by a voice. HER voice, “Hey! Is anyone here?! I’m back!” Nina called. Kris and I looked at each other.

“Uhh…” We both started scrambling to put stuff away. We had come to a mutual agreement about these lessons: NO ONE should know about them.

1. Because I didn’t want people questioning my motives. Especially since they would be right. -.-
2. Because Kris didn’t want to have to teach five guys English, which is exactly what would end up happening if the others found out.

This was just sort of our thing. Nina entered the room, “Oh, hey guys. There you are.” She began walking closer towards us, “Whatcha doing?” I looked down at the table. My English notebook was still open, displaying all of my English lessons for the whole world to see. I quickly snapped it shut,

“Nothing!” I said, a bit too quickly. She eyed the two of us suspiciously.

“Uhh, okay…” We just blinked at her innocently. “Hmm,” She eyes us as she walked away again. Once she was gone, I sighed and leaned back,

“That was close.”

“You know,” Kris began, “I don’t get why you don’t just ask her to teach you. I mean, you’d get to spend plenty of quality time with her. Plus, she’s probably a much better teacher than I am.” I shook my head,

“That may be so, but I would be too freaked out and pressured and nervous and… and… It just wouldn’t work. I wouldn’t be able to learn anything. And then I would feel bad because she would probabaly feel like it was her fault, which its not, well it kinda is, bit not really. At least not how she would think it was. I’d just be too freaked out.  Yeah, so no. That can’t happen. It wold end up being disastrous.” He just stared at me for a moment, trying to decide what to think of me and my confession.

“Ah… I see… Well, I guess we’re done for now. You’d better go and hide that,” he pointed to my notebook, “She’s seen it now and know what it looks like. We don’t know how curious she’ll be…” Right. I can’t have her know what I’m doing. Yet.