“Your mom made feijoada,” she replied, sniffling into his shoulder. “And she showed me how to make rice.”

“You asked my mom to teach you to make rice?” She was already planning the wedding, he thought wryly.

“Well, I’ve only ever used a rice maker, and I wanted to do it right.”

“That’s very sweet,” he said softly. “I’m sorry I messed that up.”

“We can still eat it,” she said grudgingly, and he laughed.

She pulled back to frown up at him. “Are you laughing at me?”

“No, fofa.” He kissed her, soft and sweet. “Did I ever tell you the story behind that nickname, by the way?”

She knuckled a tear away. “No.”

“It’s a pretty good story,” he told her, lifting a hand to brush her hair away from her face. “Kind of a family legend. Would you like to hear it?”

He could see confusion in her hazel eyes, but she tilted her face into his hand and nodded.

“You know my mom is Brazilian, right?” He waited for her nod. “Well, she came to the States as an exchange student when she was eighteen. That’s when she met my dad. His younger sister was one of her classmates, and they got to be friends.”

He paused to tug a strand of hair away from her lips. “Anyway, she and Aunt Amy hung out a lot. Dad was away at college, but he came home for Christmas that year, and that’s when they met.”

“Was it love at first sight?” she asked, and he chuckled.

“More like hate at first sight. Or at least, deep dislike at first sight. He thought she was stuck up, and she thought he was arrogant. They didn’t fight, exactly. My grandparents wouldn’t have stood for that. But they got in their little digs. Mom used to cuss him out in Portuguese, until my grandmother caught wind of what she was doing. Gran told her she couldn’t use any words they couldn’t look up in a Portuguese-English dictionary, so she started calling him ‘fofo’.”

He paused for a moment. “Portuguese is a romance language, so some words are gendered. Fofa for girls, fofo for boys.”

“I took French in high school,” she told him, and he nodded.

“Anyway, ‘fofo’ just means cute or fluffy, so when they looked it up in the dictionary, it didn’t seem derogatory. But dictionaries don’t generally include cultural nuance, and in Brazil, it’s an endearment for little kids, or something fluffy and cute. So using on it an adult man was…let’s just say, not complimentary.”

“She was mocking the shit out of him,” she guessed.

“Oh, yeah.” He laughed. “He always suspected something was up, because she was never sweet to him. But he said when she called him ‘fofo’, she might as well have been spitting sugar.”