As Erin enjoyed what was left of her wine, she smiled slightly. “I hope you don’t mind, but I have a question I just have to ask. How did you manage to perfect your speech to such a degree that most people can’t even tell you’re deaf?”

Wyatt topped off his glass and hers with what little was left in the wine bottle. He felt nicely relaxed, but not even a little tipsy. He guessed they had been at the table for so long that enough time had passed to offset their consumption rate. “I learned how to speak properly by using programs that teach people how to speak a foreign language. For me, that language was English. And the only feature in all the programs I purchased that I could actually use was the repeat-after-me feature. I could see the word, and as I tried to say it, the program would kick it back at me if I didn’t pronounce it right.”

“That must have been grueling. And the time you had to invest must have been huge.”

He shrugged. “I spent hours in front of a computer every night. And when you’re deaf, saying a word correctly once doesn’t mean you have it down. You forget how you said it, and you have to say it again and again.” He pressed a fingertip to the rim of his glass and circled, thinking of how Kennedy loved to make crystal sing. “It took me forever and hundreds of dollars to find an application that truly worked for me, one that focused mainly on pronunciation and wouldn’t let me move forward to another word until I said it right.”

“How old were you when you started practicing?”

“A teenager. Up until then, there weren’t many programs that could help me, and in the end, the one that helped me the most was the cheapest, wasn’t touted to be the best available, and probably wouldn’t have pleased hearing learners at all, because it mainly focused on correct pronunciation. That was key for me. I needed a program that wouldn’t let me skate by, saying a word slightly wrong. It was exacting. It frustrated me. Sometimes I wanted to throw the computer out the window. It didn’t tell me how I was saying the word wrong. It just repeated the word with proper pronunciation, but I couldn’t hear the example given. I just had to keep saying it until I got it right.”

“And you ended up speaking almost perfectly.”

“I’m not sure how perfect my diction is. What matters to me is that nobody has laughed at me for the way I talk for a long time.”

A suspicious glimmer of moisture shone in her eyes, and she caught her bottom lip between her teeth. He had a feeling she was battling tears. “Oh, Wyatt. I’m so sorry that ever happened to you. People can be such idiots.”

Wyatt almost told her that truer words had never been spoken, because he was working his way toward idiocy himself. All he could think about was how lovely she was and how badly he wanted to kiss her. Big problem. He wouldn’t want to stop with only a kiss, and anything more would be as risky for her as it would be for him. He needed to drive her home, walk her to her door, and then put as much distance as possible between them before he did something he might regret.