Roy was sure he had misheard. This was why he asked, "Excuse me?"
"I said, do you want to go out to dinner with me?"
Interesting. That was certainly what he thought he had heard the first time. So he just had to be misinterpreting it.
"You mean, go with you to the mess hall?" he asked innocently.
His assigned study partner, the one who was issuing this complicated invitation, sighed in good-natured frustration. "I mean: do you, Roy Mustang, want to go out to dinner with me?"
Roy pondered this. "Are you asking me out on a date?"
Maes was tempted to say "no" and drop the subject, but he decided against it because he really, really wanted to go out to dinner with this guy from his advanced math course. He collected himself before coming at it from a different angle. "Is this a hard concept for you to understand, or are you just straight or something?"
Roy stared blankly across the cluttered table. "No, of course not."
The other boy breathed an exaggerated sigh of relief. "That's great. For a moment there I was really worried. I mean, wouldn't that be embarrassing!" He grinned a manic grin back over the table.
"Um." Roy said. He'd been told stories about the academy, stories about the horrors of freshman life...but this guy was in his class...so he was probably being serious...right?
"Um," he reiterated. "You're being serious, right?"
Maes stood and threw his textbook at the floor. "You. You're coming with me. We are going to dinner. Now." Without ceremony, he reached down and grabbed Roy's hand--not wrist, Roy commented to himself, but hand--and hauled him to his feet.
They stood there for a moment, hand in hand. It was Maes who first shrugged and looked away and gave a sideways grin. "That is, if you, you know, wanted to go." He coughed. "If you wanted to go to dinner with me."
Roy wasn't sure about this at all. That was why he asked, "Are you going to pay for me?"