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Roy has to wonder, just briefly, if he should be worried about the pleasure he takes in watching Ed eat an ice cream sundae. There’s nothing strictly suggestive about it, not the way Ed inhales—there’s barely enough time for the ice cream to soften, let alone drip and require licking of some vaguely lascivious nature. And Ed’s still short enough to pass for a child if you don’t look too closely, but Roy in fact looks very closely, and anyway Ed is legal, so it’s not like buying ice creams from a cart in the park and sitting at a picnic table to eat them should feel just the wrong side of pedophilic. It’s just that Ed takes such delight in his ice cream, scraping the bottom of the cup with his spoon, sucking the last dregs off, cheeks flushed with summer heat and hair blindingly golden, even in the dappled shade of the trees.
Soon all that’s left of his treat is the cherry stem, which he worries in his teeth absently as he eyes some sprinkles left at the bottom of Roy’s more modest cup. Roy watches him, fixated on the motion of his mouth and his jaw as he chews. Then Ed’s eyes cut up to his; he grins, and sucks the stem into his mouth.
“You’re not supposed to eat that bit, you know.”
Ed raises an eyebrow, mouth working, then sticks his tongue out. Sitting there on the tip of it is the cherry stem, tied in a neat, tight knot.
Well. “Impressive,” Roy purrs, and is gratified by the way Ed’s pupils dilate. “Where did you pick up that little trick?”
“Um,” Ed says.
“’Um?’” Roy repeats, raising his eyebrow, and Ed…flushes. Just a little, at the tips of his ears.
“Um, from Ling,” Ed says.
“Ling. Now Emperor Ling. Taught you to tie knots in cherry stems with your tongue.”
“Well, we did camp a whole winter together, I mean he wasn’t Greed all the time, and Greed did sleep once in a while, and I had nightmares and the automail was fucking cold, so I didn’t sleep much, and, well, I said about the cold already—”
Roy tunes out for a moment to properly process that mental image. Sixteen-year-olds—one of them Ed and the other…well, honestly, not bad looking at all—sleepless and seeking warmth in the quiet of a winter night…learning to tie knots in…where would they even get cherry stems in the dead of winter?
“—I mean, I guess I extrapolated the stem part, it wasn’t exactly cherry season—”
Roy has flaws. He can be, on occasion, a jealous man. But he’s a hedonist first and foremost, and loathes the idea of letting a twinge of petty, groundless possessive instinct deprive him of a perfectly lovely bit of mental eye candy. And he knows Ed was essentially virginal when he pulled Roy into that supply closet at the hospital, but there are still plenty of things two attractive teenagers can do to keep warm—
“—and um…Roy? You gonna eat those last couple of sprinkles?”
Roy stands abruptly, tossing his cup in the trash.
“Hey—”
He takes Ed’s hand, tugs. It’s only a block and a half to the house, he can make it that far before his ill-chosen linen shorts give too much away.
“Roy, what the hell—!”
“What other…tricks did you learn?” Roy asks conversationally, tugging Ed along toward home. Ed lengthens his stride to catch up, peering at Roy for a beat or two as they walk. “Anything you’d like to share?” Roy asks him, lower.
Ed shivers.
“You perv,” he says fondly, with a slow, heating grin. “You know, I did learn some other kinds of knots. Apparently they’re really into that over there.”
And Roy’s beginning to wonder if they couldn’t just take a side trip into that little alley right there—
“But I’m not gonna call you ‘Emperor.’”