Falling Fast

Chapter 23 - Hotel California

Being so worried about what to wear for class with Grigory meant I ended up being a little later than usual and I turned up in the most plain and boring jeans and shirt I could have possibly pulled out of my wardrobe. About the oldest too. The jeans were about seven years old and I saved them for when I was ill, the bottoms of the legs were frayed and had holes in, and the red check shirt was fraying at the seems.

It wasn’t that I was dressing down on purpose, I just hadn’t been able to decide on anything nice to wear and in the end had decided that I looked frumpy in everything I owned – apart from the jeans and check shirt. To make it look like I’d purposely gone for the girl-next-door look instead of simply giving up on everything else I owned, I put on my oldest trainers and put my hair in a loose side plait. I walked into the room and got a flat look from Grigory. Talk about tough love.

“You’re late,” he said gruffly, nothing giving away his feelings, and turned back to the board.

“Sorry,” I said and slid in my seat next to Jill.

Quietly I got my pens and note book out and flipped to the next clean page. I took notes from the board and set my phone to record. Grigory kept on teaching not missing a single stride and we quickly got to work practicing a few new phrases with one another. At this point Grigory normally came straight over to me and Jill to ask if we needed help with anything. Today, he went straight over to Harriet.

But he didn’t even like Harriet. And not just because she bullied me. He’d come over one Sunday, bored out of his mind and we’d had a conversation about class, what we were doing. We’d got onto the subject of the study group and I’d mentioned that Harriet wasn’t a part of it and he’d complained about her overt suggestiveness, her malice and her overbearing need to be the centre of attention. I narrowed my eyes at him for a moment.

“Jealous?” Jill teased.

I turned to her and was soothed by the kindness in her hazel eyes. “It’s just odd. He doesn’t even like her.”

She glanced over to him so I did. He was being his usual instructor self. He was polite and courteous but that was it. Even so it annoyed me. He could have come over here and acted the same as normal and no one would have suspected that anything had happened between us. Now everyone was going to think that there was something drastically wrong.

“Argument?” she asked and turned back to face me.

I rolled my eyes nad lied. “About Sergey’s party. Apparently we made too much mess.”

“And Sergey is?”

“Oh. His cousin. The party was supposed to be at his house, but it was moved to Grigory’s and…” I shrugged. “He’s been a bit off since Monday from what I can gather. Sergey’s had most of it. Mostly I’ve been an entity to be avoided.”

That part was mostly true. I hadn’t actually seen Grigory since the party. It was almost as if he’d been making an effort to be out when I was in. I put it down to conflicting schedules most of the time, but occasionally I wondered if he was worried about his job and taking time to think about the kiss. I completely understood that, there was a lot to think about. I just wish he’d sent me word about what was going through his head, or when he was going to be in so that I could go over and see him.

“Let’s get to work before he tells me off again,” I suggested. “You go first.”

We practiced for a while and then we moved onto spellings, endings and grammar. He worked us all a bit harder than normal and I got pretty confused. I didn’t make a fuss about it as I had the recording and could listen again later. Beside me Jill kept looking at her voice recorder too.