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“Come on, Brother,” Al says, having moved from stern to wheedling now. “We don’t need the money.”
Ed gives him a look. Al’s excessively color-coded spreadsheet, packed to bursting with formulas and some mystical thing called a ‘pivot table’, was the first fallen domino that eventually necessitated this conversation. “Yeah, we do.”
“We need some money,” Al says, setting his jaw, “but we could both just get normal part-time jobs at a normal place—like food service. Then we could get tips. The cupcake shop—”
“I will kill a customer,” Ed says. “It is an inevitable fact. In no universe is two shares of part-time minimum wage gonna pay that bail, Al. Besides, you shouldn’t be working like that. You need to study.”
Al scowls at him. “Well—well, I’ll get another scholarship. I’m willing to bet that there’s one out there for hardships involving one’s brother being an absolute idiot.”
“Hang on,” Winry says, tapping on her phone screen and then taking a half-step forward. “Hold that expression, Ed. You look like you know something.”
Ouch. Ed tries not to move his face. She may be diabolical, but she’s his only guide through this perilous wilderness, and he doesn’t want to go it alone.
Inexplicably, she hasn’t turned off the camera shutter sound on her phone. “Perfect,” she says, and she drops onto the couch next to Ed where he was sprawled in what she promised was a seductive-looking way, draped across their prettiest blanket and wearing nothing but his tightest and lowest-cut pair of black jeans. Which chafe. A lot. “Hey, lighten up, Al. We’re just exhausting all of our available options here so that you don’t have to survive on unseasoned ramen noodles.”
“They don’t come unseasoned,” Al says, sniffily. “The little packets—”
Winry shoves her phone in Ed’s face and starts thumbing through a series of tiny images of… someone who certainly looks like him, at least in an abstract way. Someone with his hair, and more or less with his face, and apparently with his shoulders; someone propped up on his left elbow, with his head tilted at an angle that could either be interpreted as intrigued or somewhat coy, with his automail arm mostly bent behind him, silver fingers resting casually on his hip. The hip in question is very exposed. Maybe they should Photoshop some body jewelry on; the person in this picture looks like he’d have his bellybutton pierced. He looks like a tease. He looks like he knows what he’s doing. He looks like it affords him a degree of power, and he knows precisely how to use it.
No one’s ever honest online anyway.
“This one’s my favorite,” Winry says, pausing the bizarre slideshow of Ed’s new persona on one where he has his chin raised just slightly, which changes the gleam of their kitchen light on his eyes into something kind of… challenging. “Who’s gonna say no to that?”
“Someone who doesn’t like prosthetics,” Ed says.
“Someone with a conscience,” Al says, loudly, “who isn’t on a sugar daddy website.”
With a few mercilessly efficient taps of the thumb, Winry AirDrops it right onto Ed’s waiting laptop. “Stop living in the 1950s, Al. It’s not like we’re selling him on Grindr or something.”
Al raises one still-too-spindly hand to his forehead, and Ed’s heart clenches. “So you admit that you’re selling my brother. For sex. Online.”
“With his consent,” Winry says, and Ed bites down on the side of his tongue so that his stomach won’t twist up any worse than it already has. “Besides, there’s lots of sugar daddies who don’t even ask for anything weird. Like, they just want someone to canoodle with sometimes, and then they buy you all sorts of shit.”
No matter how sick he’s been, one year to the next, Al’s eyes have always managed to be merciless when he wants them to. “Hey, Winry? Why are you such an expert on sugar daddies all of a sudden, anyway?”
“YouTube spiral,” Winry says, hiking Ed’s laptop up onto her thighs. “I was about to have a panic attack about my quals. Seemed like a better solution than crying in the bathroom all night. And now it’s coming in handy, right?”
Al turns the laser eyes on Ed, who cringes away from them a little bit. “Brother—”
“Relax, Al,” Ed says, maybe slightly helplessly. “This site she found—like, it’s not even that bad. You can check boxes for all the stuff you’re comfortable with, so my profile can just have, like, the bare minimum. Probably I won’t even have to do anything except send nudes, and we can just rake in the cash for a while until we find some other way to get some of those bills paid off. It’s gotta be a hell of a lot easier than maintaining an OnlyFans.”
Al’s face crumples. “A what?”
“Oh, Al,” Winry says warmly as she adds a series of progressively more suggestive winking and tongue-out emojis to Ed’s defenseless profile. “I love you. Never change.”
“Seconded,” Ed says.
“You,” Al says, “should change. Not much. Just enough that you stop whoring my brother out on the internet for the purposes of—”
“Too late,” Winry says cheerfully, stabbing her index finger down on the bottom of the trackpad. “His profile’s live. Now we wait and see who bites.”
Ed’s stomach goes very twisty indeed at that particular phraseology, but she’s right. It’s too late now.
He looks at the screen.
And then his twisty guts more or less drop right out of him.
“Winry,” he says. “Why the fuck did you say that I’m ‘fun-loving and outgoing’?”
“I didn’t,” she says, putting a new fingerprint on his screen as she points. “I said ‘fun-lovin’’. Looks more casual, like you don’t really care. These kinds of guys want a little bit of a chase, and they want to feel like they won something, so you need to act like you’re not that interested, and you’ve got lots of other offers.”
What Ed has got is a bad feeling and the inklings of a stomachache. “That’s… not my point. You think somebody’s not gonna notice immediately that I’ve never been either of those things in my entire life?”
Winry picks up her phone again, opens one of the photos, and zooms in on Ed’s abs until they’re unrecognizably pixelated and fill the entire screen. She positions the screen two inches from his eyes. “You think,” she says, “that some horny rich dude is going to give a single fuck about your personality after he sees this?”
“Cool,” Ed says, faintly. “Real reassuring.”
Al has his head in both hands now, which is a notable despair upgrade from just the one. “Is this my fault somehow? I’m reevaluating all of my life choices. I can’t pinpoint the place where this went wrong.”
“Stop passing value judgments,” Winry says. “It’s not ‘wrong’; it’s just… different. The world is changing, Al. This is what modern courtship looks like. This is the future.”
“The future,” Al says, “is fucking creepy.”
Ed hears himself gasp out loud. Al just pouts at him.
Winry, utterly undeterred, just wags a finger. “‘Creepy’ is a value judgment, too, Al. C’mon. Let go. Ed’s smart enough not to get himself in too deep to anything that he can’t handle. How bad can it be?”
Ed looks at Al. Al looks back.
“Well,” Ed says, weakly, “I guess we’re gonna find o—”
“Holy shit,” Winry says, leaning over the laptop again. “You already have someone trying to match with you. See? I told you this was gonna work.”
Ed blinks and then sits up, trying to lean in around her arm. “Where? Who is it?”
“It’s been forty seconds,” Al says, grimacing. “I think it would be very unwise to respond to someone who’s obviously just lurking on the website nonstop, waiting for photo uploads from attractive blon—”
“OhmyGod,” Winry coos. “Look at the puppy.”
Ed’s eyes more or less registered a beautiful, extremely fluffy husky in the photograph, sure, but they didn’t linger on it. Next to the husky, with one cheek pressed against its fur, is one of the most show-stoppingly gorgeous human beings that Ed has ever fucking seen, which takes precedence over even the cutest specimen of dog.
“Site must be broken,” Ed croaks out. “No way this guy’s offering instead of propositioning.”
Al puts his head down on the kitchen table. “Dear diary: Today I had to hear my own brother use the word ‘propositioning’ to describe his weekend plans.”
“Well, what else were you gonna do?” Winry says, eyes flicking back and forth across the screen as she scrolls too fast for Ed to keep up. “Sit around and watch old seasons of Kids’ Baking Championship and try to make macarons again?”
“Excuse you,” Al says. “I’m so close. And at least Ed doesn’t have to sell himself when we do that. What’s wrong with you?”
“Again with the value judgments,” Winry says. “Site’s fine, Ed—look, it says Daddy since May 20th right here under his name. This is perfect; he’s practically brand-new. You can get in on the bottom floor.”
Al makes a noise a little bit like a sob. “So to speak.”
Winry snickers, and Ed can feel himself going scarlet, which is especially stupid when he’s slouching on his own couch shirtless, and he extremely literally signed up for all of this.
Ed tries to skim the text on Gorgeous McNiceFace’s profile before Winry’s speed-scrolling strikes again.
Roy, 42. The supermodel in the photo is Sonja, the love of my life. Unfortunately, my so-called “best friend” is jealous of the fact that I love her more than I love him, and is harassing me to make “human connections” so that I don’t “turn into one of those weird old guys”. In the interests of getting him off of my back and having more time with Sonja, I’m looking for someone who’s willing to send explicit text messages and occasionally pose for photos with me in my home and elsewhere. You will be competitively compensated as soon as I figure out what that means.
“He’s a winner,” Winry says. “Look how nice he looks.”
“That doesn’t mean anything,” Al says before Ed can say it. “Horrible people can look nice, too.”
“He has a dog,” Winry says.
“Horrible people can also have dogs,” Al says. “Which is bad news for us, and for dogs.”
Winry rolls her eyes and then digs her elbow into Ed’s side. His side is still a lot more naked than it probably ought to be on an otherwise average Saturday morning. “So match back,” she says, “but don’t message him right away. Let him message you first and see if you get a bad vibe.”
Ed looks at the photo again. You can add as many as you want to the website, but this Roy guy only uploaded the one. The shiny sunglasses that he pushed up into his hair hold it back off of his forehead, and his grin makes his cheekbones stand out and crinkles up the corners of his eyes. He has eerily perfect teeth. The photo cuts off just underneath where some open buttons on a white shirt show a sliver of his collarbones.
Ed is…
Hungry.
And kind of terrified.
But he usually handles terrified by holding his nose and flinging himself directly into the deep end, no matter how cold the water is, whether or not he can see the bottom.
“All right,” he says. “Match back and then log me out. I have some data analysis I gotta do today anyway.”
Winry follows his instructions without arguing—which is probably a first in the history of their lives, but if he points that out, there’s no chance whatsoever that she’ll ever let it happen again—and then closes his laptop. “You should download the app. It’ll make it easier to send him pictures.”
“He already has a picture,” Ed says. “Which leaves, like, thirty percent of my cumulative surface area to the imagination. Why would—”
Winry makes a beckoning motion for his phone. “Trust me.”
He hands it over, although not without a sigh. “If it tracks my calls, I’m gonna be pissed.”
“This is incredible,” Al says as Winry calmly types in Ed’s passcode, which he has never told her, and then his app store password, which he has never told her either. “I feel like I’m watching passengers board the Titanic.”
At least it’s Ed’s turn to nudge Winry with his elbow. “Did you hear that? Al thinks I’m a huge ship.”
“A doomed ship,” Al says, loudly.
“That’s me,” Ed says. “Titanic. Titanium. Nailing it. Thanks, Al.”
“The worst thing,” Al says, laying his head back down on the table, “is that I’m too old to get emancipated. I missed my chance. I’m stuck with you forever.”
“Poor baby,” Ed says. “Would you like some cheese with that whine?”
“I would,” Winry says, tossing his phone into the air so that he has to scramble to try to catch it more with the left hand than the right. “You definitely owe me lunch for hooking you up. And since you’re about to make bank, you can afford to take me someplace nice.”
Ed thinks of all of the guilty red squares on Al’s spreadsheet. “Uh… not just yet.”
“You at least owe me a Starbucks,” Winry says.
“Okay,” Ed says. “Fine.”
He’s not entirely sure what it says about him that he completely forgets about his own theoretical sugar daddy until he climbs into bed and picks his phone up from the bedside table, with the intention of setting his alarm and doing one last email-and-okay-maybe-Twitter check. Winry put the new app on the first page of his home screen, like a heathen. At least the icon is a relatively subtle little illustrated sugar packet.
Ed hesitates for a second. He’s always felt that “playing hard to get” or whatever is immature and pointless, but Winry is the expert here, and he’s not about to discount her advice. Is most of a day long enough to make someone wait to demonstrate that you’re not desperate?
Well, fuck it. Ed is desperate. His theoretical sugar daddy—if the guy’s even still interested; if he hadn’t found eight other takers for his simple criteria and his cute dog—would find that out sooner or later.
It takes him a second to orient himself with the app layout, but it looks like he already has three other match requests, which… Jesus. He had no idea that sugar daddies were such a renewable resource. Apparently he should have done this years ago.
He also has a new message, though, which probably shouldn’t make him tingle with an anticipation that he knows is stupid. This isn’t a date. This is a business transaction.
He makes a face at his screen, because he can’t make one at himself, and taps into his little inbox.
The message is from Roy, 42, and reads Hey, gorgeous, I like your style. Winry would break no fewer than three ribs laughing at the concept that Ed has ‘style’, but what Roy, 42, doesn’t know won’t hurt him yet.
The message continues with Clearly you also have excellent taste in men, given that you matched back! ;) If you like the sound of what I need, let’s talk.
Ed doesn’t think that this guy needs anything. Ed thinks that he himself needs to have his head examined, but since he also needs a heavy check in the mail, whatever he has to do to earn it, he’s going to shuffle his priorities around if it kills him.
He hopes that it doesn’t kill him. At least that would make for a hell of a headline.
Roy, 42, sent the message just a few minutes after the match thing this morning, so Ed chews on his lip for a second and considers the best way to sound cool and sexily aloof without being a complete dickwad. He’s not entirely sure that there’s a stable middle ground with that one.
Hey, he types. That’s a start. Nice and… neutral. And… meaningless. Sorry to be afk all day, I was busy. That’s sort of redundant, but Winry didn’t write anywhere in his profile that he’s smart, so for once there’s nothing to live up to where that goes. Hope u had a nice day though. Sonja is so pretty, how old is she?
He reads that over before he sends it. He’s not actually directly answering Roy, 42’s question, which will make him come off either shy or ditzy, both of which sound safer than being his actual self. Besides, if he knows anything about dog people, it’s that they will always be delighted to talk about their dogs, so—
She’s three! pops up before he can even finish his thought. We had a lovely day, on weekends we go for a run around the lake and then do two laps biking, which is her favorite. She got to meet a bunch of other dogs, and now she’s finally tired enough not to be singing the song of her people in my ear every five minutes. What are you wearing?
Ed stares at his phone. He is pretty tired. He could be seeing things. He looks up across the room at the little framed photo on the dresser of him and Al and Winry with Granny at that last wonderful-awful birthday party, and he can see it pretty clearly. When he looks back down at the phone, the words haven’t changed.
Well. He did sign up for this.
My pajamas, he writes back. wtf it’s 11 pm what did you think I was going to say??
Roy, 42, sends him back a cry-laughing emoji and the words Oh dear. You’re going to need some coaching.
Ed sends back exactly nine question marks, and then follows that up with Sorry if I don’t believe in LYING in my second message, would it have been better if I said I was wearing a maid outfit?? or a thong with your name on it??? jesus
This time, there are five cry-laughing emojis. It is really very unkind of you to put that thought in my head when I am old and feeble and might have a heart attack just imagining it.
Ed’s face was already well on the way to hot, but now it feels like it’s practically steaming. Shut up, 40 isn’t even old. what are you doing on this website anyway?? A guy like you shouldn’t have any trouble getting like ten boyfriends, even if you WEREN’T rich. what’s the catch
Another cry-laughing emoji. Is that the only one that works on this guy’s phone? Maybe that’s the secret. Maybe—
Me, Roy, 42 types next. I’m a total catch. Except for the minor details that I’m emotionally unavailable and incorrigibly weird and significantly more interested in fawning over my dog than interacting with people and apparently I’m such a train wreck that he’s going to start setting me up on blind dates if I don’t take drastic action. Can I take you out to lunch tomorrow?
Ed feels like he has whiplash.
But in a… good way?
That sounds like a bad sign.
Ok, he writes. As long as it’s a well lit public place and you pay. And u let me pet ur dog.
You are, Roy, 42 writes back, REQUIRED to pet my dog.
That part definitely sounds promising.