S'il vous plaît

      Jeremy heard the door open but didn’t pay attention to it, too absorbed in the textbook in his hands. Flipping through the pages, he noticed only the number of rules and unclear texts.       A few seconds later Jean came into the room. He saw his boyfriend sitting on the bed with a pained expression on his face before he noticed the book.       “Is this a French textbook?” looking at the cover, Jean asked in surprise, stopping at the entrance to the room.       “You think,” — said his boyfriend, finally seeing him. He tried to hide the textbook behind his back pretending that it wasn’t there, but there was a notebook and a pen in front of him, and a phone with a translator open on it, so it was a difficult task.       “You know you can just ask, right? If you want to talk to me in my language, I wouldn’t mind helping you,” Jean stopped next to him, amused by the guy’s behaviour, and a smirk appeared on his lips.       Jeremy’s ears turned red, but he said firmly, “I want to do it myself.”       “Okay. Your face looked like you didn’t understand anything about this thing,” he held out his hand, asking for a book. When Jeremy handed it over, he opened the first page and smiled when he saw the number of illustrations.       “Maybe,” Jeremy replied dejectedly, adjusting his hairstyle to cope with the embarrassment that gripped him at that moment. “Conjugations are so weird. Why is this necessary?”       “Come on. What time are you studying now?” Jean asked curiously, feeling an affectionate smile appear on his lips, which he did not have the strength to remove.       “You don’t think I’ve come this far, do you?.. I just bought this thing an hour ago.”       “Comment pourrais-je penser que tu as pu me cacher la présence de ce truc dans la chambre?”       “What?”       “I say that I should have realized that your progress is terrible,” he looked at the notebook, put down the textbook and continued. “Let’s see what you managed to write here.”       There was a rustle of pages, after which Jean saw the pronouns written in his boyfriend’s clumsy handwriting. He chuckled, noticing the notes and requests for help in the margins.       “There are pronouns here. Did you manage to remember any of this?       “Je?”       “Is there something else?” the guy suggested when he saw how his boyfriend brought his eyebrows to the bridge of his nose, trying to remember.       Jean came up to him and sat down next to him. He remembered how he used to be afraid to stay in the same room with him, and now he ran home just to sit with him.       “Tu,” Jeremy finally remembered, grinning happily.       “Ta prononciation est terrible, soleil.”       “I only understood “terrible”,” Jeremy said with displeasure and put his head on Jean’s shoulder. “Come on, will you use English?”       “Just keep going. Choose any verb.”       “Love.”       “Okey. How will it be “I love?”,” Jean snorted when Jeremy rubbed his nose against him.       “Je aimer?..”       “Non. J’aime . There won’t be an “er” here, and I just can’t listen to your pronunciation, soleil.”       There was a sigh, and then a second attempt, “J’aime? Where does the damn 'e' go?”       “Where? Hm… Are you talking about “Je”?”       “Yes.”       “Well, since the verb starts with a vowel, there’s no point separating it. “Je aime”. Ca sonnera pareil.”       “In English, please,” Jeremy rolled his eyes when Jean spoke in his perfect French again. He always liked listening to him speak in his native language, but he didn’t like not understanding what he was talking about.       “Let’s try to say, “You love”?” Jean smiled at the guy’s words.       “Tu? Hm, Tu aime?”       “Comme c’est mauvais. With “tu”, “es” will be used instead of “er”. Let’s try it again.”       “Tu aimes?” Jeremy tried to say, stopping at each letter.       “Es” and “s” are not pronounced at the end. And not “tu”, but “tyu”.”       “Okey. Tu aimes?”       “Good,” Jean praised him with a satisfied smile on his face. “She loves?”       “Elle aime…” he stopped when he realized that he didn’t know what the ending should be.       “Just like “I”,” Jean prompted him, remembering that it all started with “I want to do it myself”. It was so much like Jeremy.       “Hm, elle aime. Il aime.”       “Oui.”       “I began to understand!” the boy said happily, and then enthusiastically asked, “How do you say “we”?”       “Nous aimons.”       “You said that the “s” is not pronounced,” Jeremy said in surprise. He realized that he had made a mistake with the previous words.       “To make it sound more beautiful, the words are combined into one.”       “Why,” he said without emotion, not trying to make a question out of it.       “Idiot.”       “Do you know that it sounds the same in English?” Jeremy smiled.       “Oui,” Jean repeated his smile.       The boy looked into his boyfriend’s eyes, carefully picked up the textbook and opened the page with the rules of reading.       “Okey. Now can you explain all these rules to me in pronunciation? S’il vous plaît?”       “For your terrible attempt to pronounce it correctly, so be it.”       Perhaps later Jean will kiss him for every attempt to speak French, saying that it helps to consolidate progress, mais ce sera plus tard.