Winry threw her head back and laughed uproariously. His hair is tickling the crook of her neck and she fleetingly wondered whether she'd have to wear a scarf to cover the love bites tomorrow. He struggled with her coat for a few brief seconds before he pushed it off her shoulders and took his time to crease up the front of her blue cotton mini dress. Everyone is sleeping and all she can hear is the sound of their intermingled heavy breathing.
He wasn't supposed to take her back to her hotel room but she supposes it's all right because they aren't exactly in the room yet. She can't promise she won't go the whole way if he hasn't stopped doing that delicious thing with his tongue when they finally stumble far enough down the corridor to reach her door. It was only a bit of fun to go out with him and all she knows or cares about this situation is that his hand rubbing her arse feels bloody good. The morality of the situation can wait until the morning.
They must have been making a bit too much noise because a door opened and someone yelled out "oy!"
The boy started turning to respond, but Winry, heady in the moment and annoyed at the interruption, deliberately grabbed the back of his head to place a finale lingering provocative kiss, angling it so the intruder could clearly see exactly what she was up to and that she really couldn't care less about his prudishness. To finish off the display Winry gave her date a squeeze on the bum, a saucy wink and finally looked over, eyebrows raised, to face down … Edward Elric.
In a moment of clarity Winry, busy going through the multiple exclamatory combinations of "shit", "fuck" and "buggery" in her mind, became conspicuously aware of exactly how intimate Damien's hand on her breast was.
A bug-eyed Edward seemed to be coming to exactly the same conclusion. He inhales sharply. Ed stumbles backwards and quickly closes the door.
"Coffee?" Ed mumbled. It's the only thing he'd said to her all morning.
"Oh. Yeah. No milk, one sugar."
The hotel dining room is bustling with couples on mini breaks and Winry self-consciously tugged at her high collar, looking everywhere over her shoulder except at him. The mug of coffee warmed her shaking hands. Ed nearly choked on the large quantities of toast he kept hurriedly shovelling into his mouth. Winry moved to pat his back but his face turned to nearly matching the red of his jacket so she jerked away and focused her attention to the cooling baked beans she couldn't bring herself to eat. Five minutes of fidgeting later she had enough.
"For goodness sakes Ed! You can't do this forever!"
"Do what?" He faced away from her to stare at a waiter taking an elderly couples order.
"That!" Winry banged down the mug of coffee on the table. The waiter turned and made a shushing noise at her. "I didn't…look, it didn't mean anything, okay? It just kinda of happened and so what if it did?"
Ed snorted into his orange juice.
"Please believe me! I didn't know you where there."
"That's kind of obvious."
This was not going as planned - not that she had been able to plan anything during the excruciating night. Edward seemed determined to make this really, really difficult and that was making her feel angry.
"Why does this even bother you? I'm sure it's not like you've never done the same thing…" He glared at her. "Oh," she amended, "You haven't."
"I've been busy."
Winry frowned. Of course. The Fullmetal Alchemist has much better and important things to do than making out. He didn't have time for girlfriends and he'd never gone out of his way to show any interest in having one. That, however, did not give him the right to make her feel guilty for having a good time with a good-looking guy.
"It's not my fault this has upset you! I haven't done anything wrong and don't you dare act like I have!"
"Right…" Ed finally turned to look in her direction although his gaze remained fixed above her left shoulder and his voice wavered like he was recalling a memorised speech. "You can do what you want. I was just not expecting to see you there. We are friends. Just friends. So as long as you are happy I don't care."
"I'm sorry, what?"
"The only thing is…" Ed started to gather his things and stack his knife and fork neatly on the now empty plate, "You're like a sister to me. So tell me if you need someone to watch your back."
He stood up and turned to leave; waving backwards- "I've got work to do in the library."
Winry watched the waiter bustle to clear up the abandoned china dishes.
Her throat clogged and she could feel the tears building up. Why the hell did this, more so than any shouting or awkwardness, feel like the worst possible scenario?
Complete bollocks. Ed reached for a library book, flipped through the pages, didn't see the right diagram and tosses it aside. Utter shit. Honestly he can't believe he managed to say those lines without completely loosing it and using alchemy to explode the table.
The worst bit was that despite it being all complete shit it was true. There was no logical caveat saying Winry couldn't let anyone she wanted attach themselves to her face like a parasitic growth; that she couldn't enjoy affairs with tall dark strangers who groped her in places he'd spend hours denying she'd developed; that she shouldn't be forming relationships (shallow or not) in which he had absolutely no place to be.
Ed groaned and clenched his fists, accidentally breaking a fountain pen in his metal grip. Cursing, he immediately starting cleaning up the spreading ink.
He hadn't been able to go back to sleep afterwards and he'd spent hours debating with himself how to best deal with the situation. If he were to be honest with himself his embarrassment partly stemmed from the fact he had never imagined Winry in that light and therefore never conceived anyone else might. She was – had been - a constant and whilst he had embraced the roles and responsibilities of adulthood he'd never imagined his childhood friend would stop being a child. It was, of course, a stupid oversight.
In the end, applying a causal reaction systematic approach he'd rooted out the best solution as to be the one he'd only just previously employed. Deal with it upfront to dismiss the situation and hope the mental images would fade. It was already starting to work. He couldn't remember much about what the idiot guy looked like anyway. His facial features had already started to melt in his mind. The only problem was that Winry wasn't disappearing from his memory and he could still clearly hear her throaty moans.
Had Winry had many boyfriends? Had one of them broken her heart or had she smashed some sod's dreams herself? And then what else had she gotten down to with those boys? It's at times like these that he appreciated theorems and alchemic tables to distract his mind. There was no way Edward would let something like that distracts him from important work.
Edward Elric scribbled out some figures so hard the paper tore.
It's imperative he acts like a good friend would and thinks brotherly thoughts.
It's the only viable scenario.
All constructive criticism is greatly appreciated.