A/N: More fluff. More sex. Thanks, y'all.

III.

The first insistent ring of the phone had Winry blinking up at the motes in the air above her. The sun was pouring decidedly through the window in sheets over her bed. The second ring and Winry was rubbing her eyes, disoriented. She wasn't supposed to be seeing sun slanting through her window, was she? She only saw those powdery, yellow beams on weekends, when she allowed herself a few extra hours in bed.

"Oh no!" Winry squeaked. She looked at her alarm clock, sitting peacefully on her bedside table. It was 8:15. "Oh no!"

The phone rang again, and Winry threw back the blankets, snatched up a shirt-shaped article from the floor—wait, naked?—and scrambled for the phone by the fridge. She had one of her arms in a sleeve by the time she snatched the receiver off the wall and all but cried, "This is Winry."

It was her supervisor, wondering where the hell she was. Winry didn't bother with an excuse, only somewhat noncommittal apologies—she had become quite distracted by this very odd shirt she was putting on. It was awfully big. Like a man's. She held the receiver between her shoulder and ear as she struggled to fit buttons into buttonholes. As her supervisor continued his rant, Winry pinched the collar of the shirt and held it to her nose. That was definitely not her laundry detergent.

The receiver slipped away from Winry's face and clapped against the wall as her shoulders dropped. She whipped her head toward her bedroom, toward the privacy screen demurely hiding the man who had slept in her bed last night.

The tinny sound of her name through a phone line snatched back her attention. With a start and a squawk, Winry picked up the phone where it dangled by the cord. She stammered out one last apology and a promise to be there as soon as she could, and she hung up the phone without saying goodbye.

The apartment abruptly seemed so quiet. Her ears strained for the sounds of another person, but she couldn't hear him breathing or stirring. In the silence, Winry assessed: oh, my, were her hips ever sore. The cuffs of her shirt hung past her fingertips, and she smelled that faintly sweet, musky smell of a man's deodorant, the sharp nip of aftershave, the stale, cottony hint of cigarettes. Winry lifted the shirt up to her nose once more. Yes, that was the smell of man.

She looked around her apartment, saw all the dishes scattered around the kitchen table and the coffee table, saw the chairs untucked and the lamp left on, the general disarray left in the wake of the sincere hurry she had been in the evening before.

Winry pressed the pads of her fingers to her mouth.

She had had sex! This was quite exciting. Sex after a year of semi-voluntary celibacy seemed far more important than any other intimate benchmark she'd encountered—well, the only other intimate benchmark she'd encountered.

All virginities aside—sometimes she wondered if a girl would get her virginity back if she let her registration expire—Winry still reeled just a little bit. She wondered if that's what it was always like. If so, then... oh, my. She'd had no idea.

Still, she kept her fingers against her lips as she tiptoed back toward her bed, hoping the phone and her croaking hadn't roused her guest. Winry crept up to the screen and leaned around, careful not to put any weight on the screen itself in case it might creak. She scanned the scene from bottom to top. There were bundled clothes on the floor, her bedspread rumbled up at the foot of the bed, her sheets like a topographical map.

And if that wasn't the back of a blonde head, Winry was hallucinating. If those weren't two arms and a set of shoulders—those were naked and masculine, weren't they?—hugging one of her pillows, the sexual frustration must have been really getting to her.

There was the bubble in her chest, pushing up behind her sternum, and this time, she couldn't stop it, couldn't force it down. So instead, she pressed her balled fists to her mouth, squeezed her eyes shut, and muffled the squealed peel of girlish glee that she simply wasn't strong enough the quash. And then she was bouncing on the balls of her feet, feeling the ache of her hips with each spring. And then she was doing restrained triumphant punches into the air as she shuffled in a little circle over the floorboards.

Jean was there. He was there. In her bed! There was a man in her bed, and she'd brought him there, and soon, he was going to wake up, and then they'd be two people, awake and talking.

And...

Holy hell, Winry thought as she stopped her victory dance abruptly. Soon, he was going to wake up, and then they'd be two people, awake and talking.

What was she going to do? Winry didn't really know how two people carried on after the fact when they didn't have a backlog of years of mutual wrong-doing to burn off. She didn't have any history with Jean before a week ago. She didn't have any hatchets to bury in his back. She didn't even have any minor confrontations to work through with him. What was there to say other than something along the lines of So, we totally had sex last night. Any thoughts?

Her first impulse was to flee, to leave a note and then hide in the cabinet under her sink and sneak little peeks at Jean as he moved dejectedly around her kitchen.

No. That wouldn't do. What kind of asshole was she?

Winry closed her eyes and braced herself. She'd totally had sex; she could handle this. With all her mettle drummed up to the surface, Winry marched herself around the screen and up to her bed.

She hovered over him for a moment before it started to feel creepy. And for that moment, she let herself drink it in—the musty, earth-smell of hours-old sweat, the deep grooves in Jean's shoulders and arms where everything fit together so well but still left the most alluring seams, the milky morning light over her bed, casting broken blocks of sun across the sheets.

With Jean's shirt still on, Winry gingerly lowered herself back into the bed and drew the sheet over her. She was prepared to settle on to her side of the bed, to keep a good few inches between her skin and his, and to wait for further inspiration. Jean, it seemed, had different plans.

He made a sort of throaty, snore-groan, flopped over onto his other side so that he was facing her, and dropped his arm heavily across her chest.

Winry barely had time to squeak.

He was like a tentacled intimacy monster on a notably demonstrative day, and he dragged her closer with his right arm hooked around her ribs while shoving his left arm under her head.

Winry went entirely rigid for a moment. Then, slowly, she began to see that, well, um, actually, this was kind of nice. She felt his nose buried in her hair, his front—still naked, still masculine—flush with her back, the unyielding swell of his bicep against her ear. Yeah, this was really nice.

And she'd totally had sex with him.

Winry pressed her fist to her mouth once more and mewled into her fingers.

"You sound like a pack of long-tailed mice at marching band practice," Jean muttered into her hair.

Winry jumped and eeped. She went entirely stiff.

"Yeah, that right there," he said.

All right, so how would a normal woman reply? Something coquettish about all those other noises she had made? Something about the catalog of noises she made only for him? Perhaps a purr of some kind?

Instead, Winry gulped. Audibly.

Jean began to chuckle. She felt it in her hair, the sensation traveling all the way down her back. "What?" Winry bit out. In her mind, it was firm and demanding. Out loud, it was small and mad. Like a hornet.

"You weren't expecting to see me this morning, were you?"

God, was she so predictable? "I didn't really know what to expect." He was quiet, and Winry wasn't brave enough to look over her shoulder at him. "Don't take it personally," she said tartly. Because getting defensive was exactly what the situation called for. Good job.

They lay still for a moment, but Winry was beginning to twitch. She was so aware of every inch of skin, every motion, so self-conscious of the messages each touch sent. It was overwhelming. When she remembered the angry phone call from her supervisor, all of those factors had her tossing the sheet back brusquely and swinging her feet to the floor.

"Are you wearing my shirt?" Jean asked as he rolled onto his back and put his hands behind his head, the sheet bunched at his waist.

Thaaat's a naked guy.

"Yes?" Winry managed. She kept her eyes averted and could feel the mingled sensation of cold mortification and very hot flush.

And then Jean was laughing at her again. Frustration was a welcomed reprieve, and Winry latched onto it. She swung her face around to glare at him and punched the mattress next to her left hip.

"What?" she snapped, and Jean had the compassion to temper his laughter.

"You're getting shy, aren't you?" he teased, narrowing his eyes at her suspiciously.

Winry dropped her bright red face. "Shut up, already," she muttered.

With a chorus of sleepy sighs and groans, Jean elbowed himself backwards until he was propped up against Winry's headboard. He reached behind himself and repositioned his pillow. "If it makes you feel any better," he offered, "I haven't seen anyone since I sobered up."

"When was that?"

Maybe he didn't expect her to ask because he cleared his throat and looked at his feet. "Two years ago," he muttered.

It rather did make her feel better. Winry watched his face, the impression of the wrinkled pillowcase still lingering on his scruffy cheek, watched him hook his index finger around the chain of his dog tags and peel them off his skin. Winry did not realize that the impulse had struck her until she was draping herself over him, putting her palms on his ribs, and resting her cheek against his breastbone. He hesitated, his hands hovering away from her, before they settled on her shoulders. And Winry smiled against his skin. She wasn't trying to keep up with an expert or a professional or anything. She was trying to keep up with Jean the Normal Guy. How encouraging.

While Jean made coffee and an omelet for them to split, Winry took a quick shower, brushed her teeth, and dressed in a hurry. Jean had his shirt draped over his arm and really needed a shave when they left for him to drop her off. He told her that he could roll up at work whenever he wanted to, so he could get back to his apartment to do something about the post-coital look he had about him.

When they pulled up to the curb outside the COG, it was about nine. Jean must have mistook Winry's fixing her hair in the mirror for her waiting for him to get the door, so he put his car in park and came around to the passenger side.

While it certainly had been tempered, the shyness was still thick around her. It slowed down her brain and dulled her senses, and Winry couldn't for the life of her think of anything casual or confident to say to Jean when they were standing face to face. So, she said, "Thanks for the ride." Whether she meant the ride last night or the ride that morning, she wasn't entirely sure, and she certainly wasn't going to explore it too hard right then.

"Anytime," he said and kissed her. She could taste his coffee during that lazy, under water sort of kiss, the kind of kiss that really shouldn't happen where anyone could see, the sort of kiss that made her knees puddle in her shoes and her head swim a little, the sort of kiss that she kind of started to compare to all the other kisses she could remember because she had a sneaking suspicion that it might be the best kiss she'd ever received. That's how Jean kissed Winry on the sidewalk outside her office that morning. An honest kiss. A temporary-goodbye kiss. An affirmation kiss.

"So, uh," Jean began, "Don't take too long to let me know if you want to do that again." She half-expected him to get flustered and explain that he meant the dinner-part, not the sex-part, not that he didn't like the sex-part or anything, although—he would explain—if she wanted to do the sex-part again, he was totally down.

But he didn't say any of that.

That would have been the perfect place to say something coquettish and charming, but Winry opened her mouth and all that came out was, "Okay."

x

x

x

If there were anything Winry remembered from the Economics class she took when she was a kid, it was that supply and demand were always in flux and, on the surface, were very simple concepts. Now Winry kept catching herself trying to remember more about how they behaved. Specifically, she tried to recall what her teacher had said would happen when demand is through the roof and supply is a bottomless well and the trajectories of both didn't look like they were going to change any time soon. No market can survive like that, right?

The subsequent week was a whirlwind for Winry as her life became one long episode of the Jean Havoc Radio Hour. And in her daily journal entries, Winry documented the greatest hits:

Jean took her to service Farmer Splitz's tractor and taught her how to hoist up a bale of hay, kick one end hard, and flip it over her head to carry it on her back. After her failed first attempt, which left her sprawled on her back with the hay crushing her chest, Jean almost took away her bale. But Winry was determined that if he could do it, so could she—despite the foot of height difference and the fact that Jean could comfortably bench press about a Winry and a half. It took a few more tries, but once she had it, Winry marched in proud circles around Jean, who stood and watched her in the cool shade of the barn.

x

"They told me," Jean said as he unlocked his front door, "To get a houseplant. If it's alive after a year, get a pet. If the pet is alive after a year, then it might be time to bring a girl home." He didn't tell Winry who they were, and she didn't ask. His apartment was in a renovated factory, and all his walls were naked brick. She felt some relief when she saw that his apartment was a larger, more bachelor-ish version of hers. The wall opposite the door had tall, wrought-iron framed windows that stretched up to the ceiling and overlooked the street. The floor was grey concrete with big, threadbare area rugs under the mismatched furniture. One corner of the flat was raised on a platform and closed off by windowed walls, and Winry could see a bed and dresser within. Next to the bedroom was the kitchen and dining area, separated by a bar. "When I moved in," Jean explained as tossed his keys and wallet onto a table by the door, "this was just a big, empty room, but I got the Super to front the money if I did all the labor. I think it's pretty livable now." He introduced Winry to Phil, his split-leaf ficus, and Cooper, his golden retriever.

x

They took Cooper to the park, and Jean showed Winy the most impressive trick in Cooper's repertoire. Jean called it playing lost, and he instructed Winry to sit on the grass and "just pretend to be a girl." She watched him and Cooper walk a distance away, and then he crouched down next to the dog, said something quietly to him, and pointed at Winry. Jean then got up and moved farther away. Once he was out of sight, Cooper bounded toward Winry and flopped down in front of her in that unconditional love display that only dogs can pull off.

"Hi, Cooper," she said and scratched his snout.

Jean then came jogging up to her, gasping. "Thank God," he panted. "You found my dog. We were on the other side of the pond, and he just took off." He knelt in front of her and pet Cooper, who was licking Winry's hand. "He seems to have taken a liking to you."

She smiled. "You have such a sweet dog, sir," she chirped in her best high-pitched, nondescript female voice. "You must be a wonderful man with a good job who's great in the sack!"

Jean grinned. "As a matter of fact, I am. Have we met?"

x

Jean told her that possibly the hardest part of sobering up was the guilt. "I did a lot of, you know, asshole things, and they say you're supposed to call all the people you wronged and apologize." This they came up whenever Jean talked about drinking, Winry noticed.

"Like who?" she pressed.

He looked at his feet sticking up from under the flat sheet at the end of the bed—he preferred to sleep with his feet uncovered.

"One really unlucky innkeeper. A bunch of girls who never thought they'd hear from me again. A couple of old friends. My mom."

x

Winry showed him her latest project—an automail right forearm for a man who lost his at the cannery. Jean was awed by her pinprick soldering iron and tiny screwdrivers.

"It just takes practice. You get used to it," she said, looking up at him through her big, magnifying goggles. "I bet you could figure out automail with time."

He snorted. "It's like you take an entire car and cram it into a space the size of a mailbox, Pidg. I think it would take more than time."

x

"Shrink tells me I've got PTSD. You know what that is?" he asked as they smoked his cigarettes on his fire escape. It was two in the morning, and Jean's thrashing had woken Winry up.

"Yeah," she said. "I see it all the time at work."

Jean took a long pull off his cigarette and flicked the ash through the wrought iron grating under them. "Getting Cooper helped a lot. He doesn't let people walk up behind me. Still can't turn my back to a crowd, though."

"Do you think that's what made you drink?"

He chuckled. "Saying I'm an alcoholic is like saying I'm tall, Pidg. It just is."

Winry wondered if that was what they told him.

x

Jean's downstairs neighbor called Saturday afternoon, complaining about the noise.

x

"Okay, we'll start slow," Jean said. He took her left hand and rested it on his arm, just below his right shoulder. He then held her right hand and settled a palm on her waist. "You feel this," he said, giving her arm a shake. "You've gotta keep your frame. Keep your arm steady."

Winry swallowed and nodded.

"And don't look so scared."

She nodded again.

They stood in a grocery store parking lot—what? Yeah, Winry wasn't entirely certain either. What had began as a Sunday evening walk down to the park had metamorphosed into this. Perhaps it was the gramophone playing out of a window above them. Perhaps it was the start of Jean's physical therapy that emboldened him. Perhaps one of them had mentioned Jean's long history of adolescent barn dances or Winry's complete deficit of dancing experience. Whatever the case, Winry found herself putting on her game face as strangers passed the parking lot with puzzled looks.

Jean showed her the steps—right, left, rock back—criticized her wobbly arms, and reminded her to let him lead. But after a few false starts, she got it.

Then they were dancing together in a vacant parking lot at dusk on a Sunday, rocking and skipping and turning. Jean spun Winry so fast and so suddenly that she did not have time to fall. And she was laughing at them, at herself when she stepped on him, at this alien sensation of unadulterated, unabashed fun.

Only when Winry felt Jean seize her sides and start to hoist her up did they both falter. Winry dropped her frame and flopped against him.

"Sorry," Jean panted. He was about to do what he called a lift, he explained. "Got a little carried away." He rested a hand on the old scar on his left shoulder, and Winry understood.

x

x

x

The receptionist that afternoon came and knocked on the door of the workshop, and Winry looked up, her vision distorted by the magnifying goggles she had on. The receptionist jabbed a thumb over her shoulder and said that Winry had a call at the front desk. That was odd, Winry thought as she rose and pushed her goggles up. Most patients saved their questions for their appointments.

Leaning an elbow on the counter above the reception desk, Winry held the phone to her ear. "This is Winry," she said.

"Hey, Pidg."

Winry straightened up suddenly and glanced around. "Jean," she hissed into the receiver. "I asked you not to call me on this line. What are you doing?"

"Courtin' you," he replied lazily. She could just hear him slouching back in his office chair and staring at the ceiling. "What are you doing?"

Winry hunkered down where the patients in the waiting room couldn't see her and ignored the looks the secretary was giving her. "I'll give you a hint," she whispered, "It starts with a w and ends with an orking."

"Weird. Me, too." He chuckled into the phone. "When are you done?"

The receptionist had told Winry that she had one patient that afternoon. "I don't know. Three maybe?" She glanced over her shoulder, just knowing her supervisor was going to wander up and overhear.

"I've got a meeting with Facilities Management 'til five, but if you want, you can go over to my place and start dinner," he suggested. Winry heard a shift in his voice and could just tell he was grinning. "You know, it would be real nice to come home to a lasagna waiting for me."

She cupped her hand around the mouthpiece. "What do I look like? Your wifey?" Winry snapped as quietly as she could.

"I'm amenable."

She almost dropped the phone. Perhaps that's what electrocution feels like: having her boyfriend of only a month or so drop a deceptively casual bomb like that on her. Winry felt the sparrow in her chest fluttering cramped circles around her ribcage. When all the other things she could say got too tangled up, she squeaked, "Did you remember your uniform?"

"I did, actually," he went on, with the easy confidence Winry had come to expect from him now. Before the last meeting Jean had had with the Director of Facilities Management, he had left his uniform, clean and pressed, in his closet. He had told her about it that evening, about how refreshingly low everyone's expectations had been of him while he was covered in grease and smelled like acetylene.

Winry heard the baritone of her supervisor coming down the hall toward her, and she hunkered down further. "Listen, Jean, I have to go. Did you need something?"

There was a long pause on the other end of the line. "No?"

Winry rolled her eyes. "Then why did you call?"

"I don't know," he said, some exaggerated hurt in his voice, "Maybe I knew I wasn't going to see you until late, and I wanted to hear your voice before I waded into that shark tank of a conference room for the next four hours."

Despite herself, Winry smiled, and when she tried to sound irritated into the phone, she knew—and she was pretty sure Jean knew—that she was faking. "You'll be okay. I've got to run, but I'll see you tonight?"

They exchanged quick, quiet goodbyes, and Winry hung up the phone. She felt her heart dancing, her face warming, and it felt like something downy was expanding in her chest so fast. She smiled at the phone and was feeling too flustered to really defend herself when the receptionist teased her. All Winry could muster was a dismissive wave as she turned and headed back toward her workshop.

When her last afternoon appointment arrived, the receptionist came and knocked, once more, on Winry's door. The patient had been shown into one of the examination rooms and was waiting for her there. Cracking her neck and popping her knuckles, Winry headed off to see him.

His records were in a plastic file-holder on the wall by the door, and Winry plucked them out and flipped back the cover as she opened the door to the examination room.

Her eyes landed on the name at the top of the page just before the file slipped from her hands and fluttered to the floor. She froze in the doorway. She stared.

"Edward?"

He sat on the examination table, his shoulders rolled, his elbows on his knees, his pale, drawn face smiling a smile that didn't reach his eyes; his hair was so long now, tied back and hanging in a tail down his spine, but his face was like a photograph, one taken from far away, where the impression of him was definitely intact, but he was weary-looking and travel-worn and there—so it couldn't possibly be him, right?—and his clothes seemed too loose for him and perhaps a little shabby but that didn't matter because he was back he was back he was back.

Winry strode over Edward's file, spilled across the floor, and wrapped her arms around his shoulders.

This was, she realized as his arms crept up her sides and settled against her ribs, what she always wanted to do, what she never allowed herself to do when she greeted him. Were it not for the shock—and for the company—Winry would have done this at the Armstrong Gala, and then perhaps Edward would have still haunted her mind that night, but it would have been in a completely different way. He smelled like soap and road dust.

There were stored up rages she knew she had for him, but she couldn't find them.

"Would it kill you to call once in a while?" Winry asked into his neck, her tears rolling down her face to blot into the fabric of his shirt.

"Didn't think you'd want to hear from me," Edward said through a dry, self-deprecating sort of laugh.

"You know, I didn't until just now."

He pulled back and looked at her, and Winry knew that face. That was the face that Edward put on when she was being cruel but when he knew he deserved it. She watched that face, stood between his knees, rested her hands on his thighs. And she was so, so grateful.

Where this new woman had come from, Winry wasn't entirely sure. She hadn't been aware of it until just then, until a younger her wouldn't have known what to do with all this damn love she had for him and would have, instead, hit him or yelled at him. But now, all everything aside, Winry just wanted to touch him, make certain he was there, alive, with her.

The feeling was overwhelming, a tangle of things rapidly expanding in her chest, pressing up into her throat, filling her mouth with angers and hurts and loves and loves and loves.

Winry set her hand on Edward's hollow cheek and kissed the corner of his mouth.

"How you been?" she asked, smiling at him, right at him.

His automail hand was jerky and weak when he set it over hers. He seemed almost uncertain, and Winry could not deny the satisfaction she got from being the resolute one. Finally.

"I've been better," he said, his voice papery.

This is what it felt like to properly welcome him, she thought. She could show him the life she'd had since he'd been gone, a life she enjoyed, one she found almost as fulfilling as the one she had imagined she would have with him. See, she could say, my world turns without you now. And then she could be the generous woman she always wished she was and pause that rotation—not turn it back, mind you, just make it hesitate a little—just long enough to show Edward how amazing it was. How amazing shewas, the steady compass, always pointing north toward the seat of her borderless world of clemency.

Winry smiled. And she understood. She wasn't afraid to be compassionate anymore.

"Maybe if you didn't go a year between tune-ups, Ed," Winry told him, taking his automail hand in both of hers and turning it carefully, slowly.

Ed laughed a little guiltily. "Sorry about that."

Winry met his eyes and wondered how much he was apologizing for with that.

But it didn't matter because she knew how much she was forgiving when she said, "It's okay."

x

x

x

The big clock on the wall in the vestibule of Jean's apartment building read six-thirty when she came in the front door, panting and flustered. Winry barely had time to glance at it as she hurried down the hall, her shoes tap-tap-tapping on the green and white tiles. When she had left her workshop, the other engineers were already gone, and the receptionist had left. At around six or so, Winry thought she heard the phone ringing unanswered outside her workshop, but she had ignored it. She had a feeling it was Jean, and now she felt compelled to generate excuses. Because telling him that she had stayed late to finish up Ed's arm—which was the simple, platonic truth—felt like something he wouldn't want to hear.

But why, Winry asked herself, knowing good and well why. It was nothing. She did a favor for an old, old friend, the oldest she had. She had had to replace all the ball bearing in his shoulder, had to adjust the suspension in his elbow, had to replace the entire nervous impulse converter. It was a big job. But it was nothing.

She was running up the concrete steps in the stairwell, her steps echoing hollowly from floor to roof.

Jean wouldn't think anything of it, she assured herself. He wouldn't mind. He'd have no reason to mind.

Winry didn't knock when she got to the door of his apartment. She made no attempt to slip in unnoticed when she dropped her purse on the table by the door, next to Jean's keys and wallet. A floor lamp was on by the window, and the hanging lamp in the kitchen was on, where Jean was setting dishes in the sink.

"Hey, Pidg," he said, smiling despite the gravity in his voice.

Winry hurried over and stopped him from asking what took her, from telling her he had called the office and no one picked up, from saying he was getting kind of worried. Jean hardily had to time to turn the faucet off before Winry seized the front of his shirt, damp with sweat from the summery heat in his flat, and kissed him fiercely.

She felt him submit, and that, more than the soft, pliancy of his mouth, more than his big, angular hands on her sides, more than his fast breath across her cheek, felt so nice. Winry tugged him closer to her, wrapped her arm around his neck. She pulled them both toward the counter until she felt her lower back bump the edge.

Her intentions must have been clear then because Jean pulled her right knee around his hip and pushed her back and up onto the counter. Still pressed close, still kissing frantically, Winry managed to wriggle out of her shorts before plucking blindly, frenziedly at Jean's belt. He dropped one of his hands from her sides and helped her.

Winry felt his teeth on her neck, his nose pressing into her skin, and she curled her hand severely in Jean's hair when he pressed into her. They made complementary sounds, Jean's low and guttural, and Winry's a whimper.

Winry allowed herself to be inundated then. The smell of Jean's hair and skin, of his apartment. The sound of her name in his voice—he always called her Winry during sex like it was a secret between them. The pinch and stretch of her muscles and skin sighing, and Winry knew abstractly and appreciated viscerally that he was probably the biggest she could handle.

They both had one hand set against the countertop, and Winry came hard when she felt Jean's hand inch across the counter and settle on hers, his fingers curling around her knuckles. She bucked and clawed his back, her eyes squeezed shut, crying over and over Jean Jean Jean.

He usually gave her a moment to catch her breath and soothe her shuddering nerves unless he was quite close to finishing himself, and when he did not pause, when he leaned her back, when he quickened his pace until it almost started to hurt, Winry allowed herself to slip back and sort of float away on the comfort of familiarity. She'd heard women talk of the allure of unpredictability, of new lovers with their new habits, but Winry thought there was nothing more wonderful than this safety, than Jean and his apartment and the sounds he made when he came in her.

Winry sagged backward and propped her elbows against the bar that separated the kitchen from the dining area. She breathed hard, felt Jean breathing hard, and as pleasant as his weight felt against her, his apartment was too damn hot. She rested a hand on his shoulder and gently pushed him back.

"Hi," she said when she met his eyes.

Jean grinned. "Hi," he managed. "It is awfully good to see you."

Winry looked away, a little embarrassed by her own enthusiasm. She heard him laugh and felt him snake an arm around her back and pull her up. They sat then, almost nose to nose. Winry appreciated the quiet in her mind now, the simplicity and the stillness. Jean kissed her quietly, told her that he made her something to eat if she were hungry, handed her her underwear from off the floor.

She heard him laughing at her when she hurried off to the bathroom to get cleaned up. She looked at herself in the mirror over the sink then and listened to Jean heating up her dinner for her in the kitchen. She laughed a self-deprecating sort of laugh. Looked at herself incredulously. How could she ever imagine there was a life more fulfilling than this one?