Half an hour.
It had taken him twenty-eight minutes and thirty-nine seconds to chew through the skin on his bottom lip and draw blood.
I had been watching him with a fascination I'd never really felt before. It was so graceful: His teeth would gnaw at the chapped skin, and his tongue would move across it once, as if lulling the pain.
The intriguing thing was that he seemed unaware that he did it. He had been reading for hours, and I had been quietly sitting across the room from him, toying (or attempting to toy) with a new automail leg for the dog. As I was driving a screw into the joint connecting the paw and the leg, I happened to glance up.
And he was chewing his lip.
He'd had that habit since he was five years old. It had become so familiar to me that I barely noticed he did it anymore.
Except today.
I had realized years ago that I was in love with Edward. He had come home to have his arm fixed after Scar had destroyed it, and I had realized the depth of my affection for him.
And now, he was chewing on his lip, something I hadn't seen him do in years, because he was away so often. It had so much more meaning to me now, a link to a childhood we'd left far behind.
He looked up at me, to see me looking at him.
And thirty-one minutes and fourteen seconds after he had started chewing on his lip, he smiled.