I nodded. “I did okay, didn’t I?”
He bit back a smile. “You butchered the pronunciation.”
I gasped. “That sounds xenophobic.”
Luka snorted. “No, that sounds accurate.” I threw a pillow at him, and he caught it easily, still laughing. He tilted his head. “Do you really want to learn some more?”
There was enough skepticism in the question to make me laugh.
“Yeah.”
Luka looked at me for a second, as though checking whether I’d change my mind, then shifted closer across the bed. The mattress dipped beneath his weight until our knees bumped.
“All right,” he said. “Simple phrase first.”
I sat up straighter. “I was born ready.”
His lips twitched. “To use a word you are fond of, you were absolutely not.”
“Wow.”
He chuckled, then said something slow and melodic that I had no hope whatsoever of repeating correctly.
I stared at him. “That sounded fake.”
“It is not fake.”
“You added extra vowels to confuse me.”
Luka laughed again. “Try.”
I attempted it. Badly.
Luka folded forward against my shoulder, laughing while I protested loudly about sabotage and impossible consonants.
“You sound drunk,” Luka informed me.
“Help,” I called out. “I’m being linguistically oppressed.”
“You just told me, very confidently, that my grandmother is a bicycle.”
I froze. “What?”
Luka nodded solemnly. “An elderly bicycle.”
“Oh my God.”
He laughed so hard he nearly fell against me again.
I narrowed my gaze. “This is your fault.”
He blinked. “How? You were the one speaking.” He settled against my side while I wrapped an arm around him.
“Okay. Teach me something real this time.”
For a moment he didn’t answer.
I touched his hand. “Hey. You don’t have to if it feels weird.”
