Relationship Status: It was always about you - Mark/Eduardo - NC17
Title: Relationship Status: It was always about you
Author: jeyhawk
Rating: NC17
Pairing: Mark/Eduardo
Beta: sbb23! <333
Word Count: 17,617
Disclaimer: Not true. Not even a little bit. Not even at all.
Summary: College AU. The one where Eduardo works at the campus coffee shop and Mark doesn't understand the concept of love at first sight. Coffee, code, Facebook and love (not necessarily in that order).
Notes: Thanks to inbetweencabs, cabayuki, and elizaria for alpha reading and encouragement, and as always to sbb23 for being amazing. What would I do without you guys? <333
There's a twenty-four hour coffee shop on campus. It's not the sort of place Mark would normally frequent because normal, for him, means Kirkland and unless he can avoid it, class, but apparently Mark on a coding tear makes hooking up awkward and he has been banned. Mark doubts that Dustin will manage to hook up with anyone, Mark or no Mark, but Chris might and it's not like Mark wants to listen to their grunting anyway.
The coffee shop is the kind of place that attracts philosophy students, and art students, and other people that can't shut up, but that is, in Mark's opinion, why god invented headphones and blessed him with the ability to completely shut out the outside world.
He finds a table at the very back, sinking down into a comfortable armchair and setting his laptop down before him. He slides his headphones on, opens up the screen, and lets himself fall face first into the code, fingers dancing across the keyboard like Flight of the Bumblebee played at breakneck speed. (There was a video, Dustin made him watch it, the image has been stuck in his mind ever since.)
--
He doesn't know how long he's been out of it, but the coffee shop is considerably less crowded when someone taps his shoulder, forcing him to look up from the screen. A guy is standing next to the table, tall and whipcord lean with a black apron tied around his slim waist. His mouth is moving, but Mark can't make out his words over the music and he reluctantly pushes the headphones down to hug his neck.
"I said," the guys says, as if he's already on his seventh repeat. "It's considered common courtesy to order something if you're going to take up a table for hours at a time."
"Oh." Mark looks down on the screen again, fingers already poised to type; after a moment, he puts the headphones back on.
The guy sighs and throws his hands up. Mark doesn't look after him as he leaves.
--
A cup lands on Mark's table, put down with enough force to make something that looks like coffee slosh over the edges. It's the guy again, bringing Mark a drink he didn't order. Mark looks at the cup and then up at the guy. He has ridiculous hair, Mark notices, and brown eyes under bushy eyebrows. He seems to be waiting for something.
Mark takes a hesitant sip from the cup; it's coffee, dark and bitter. He puts the cup down again.
"Not enough sugar," he says.
--
The sugar package hits him square in the forehead. He only looks up for long enough to dump it into his coffee. He writes another few lines, barely noticing when a spoon lands in his cup, making drops of coffee stain the front of his shirt. He stirs and takes a sip; much better.
The next time he looks up the coffee is long gone and the guy is sitting at his table, an economics textbook open in front of him. Mark squints at the giant clock on the wall behind the guy's head, 5 AM, which means he could probably head back to Kirkland. His eyes fall to the guy again, noticing the nametag pinned to his shirt. It reads Eduardo in messy black script and it's just a piece of paper, not even stuck into one of those plastic holders.
He rolls the name over in his mind; Eduardo - Italian, maybe Spanish - the sort of name that comes with golden skin and brown eyes. He thinks about looking it up, looking him up, but a line of code catches his eye and he falls right back into it.
--
The next time Mark looks up Eduardo is staring at him. When he realizes that he has Mark's attention his eyes flicker down to his impromptu nametag and then back up at Mark, pointed stare directed at Mark's chest as if he expects Mark to have a nametag too. Mark doesn't have a nametag because he doesn't work here. He wouldn't work here even if they paid him which he supposes that they would, if he worked here.
He wonders how much Eduardo makes and if it's really enough to pay for a shirt as impeccably cut as the one he's wearing. Mark doesn't know much about clothes, close to nothing actually, but he knows class and Eduardo's shirt has that in spades.
After a moment he reaches for his bag, finds a black marker and a piece of paper that supposedly holds some sort of assignment he should be working on. He folds the paper into a triangle and writes Mark in big block letters. The ink bleeds through the paper and onto the table; he pretends not to notice as he assembles his sign and turns it over to face Eduardo.
Eduardo smiles at him, mouth forming words that might be a greeting but that could as well be the opening lines of a dissertation in Greek. Mark watches his lips move. Eduardo's upper lip is unusually curved, tilting upwards at the corners as if he's always caught halfway to smiling. Mark stares at it for another moment before his eyes drop back to the screen.
--
An hour later a sandwich magically appears on the table. He eats it, casting a furtive glance towards the counter. Eduardo is busy with a group of customers; eyes alight as he laughs at something one of the girls in the group said. Mark can't know for sure that it was her, of course, but one of them has long dark hair and a plush pink mouth. She looks like the kind of girl someone like Eduardo would laugh with: pretty, petite, and possibly clever (Mark doubts it).
There's something written on the girl's cup when Eduardo slides it across the counter. It could be the order, but it could also be a phone number. Mark reaches out and crumples up his name sign, dropping it on the floor next to his bag. He turns the volume up until his eardrums are thrumming with it, the deep throbbing beat rattling his brain, and goes back to coding.
--
"Music that loud really isn't good for you, okay?"
Eduardo is standing by the table again, Mark's headphones dangling from his hand. Mark feels oddly disconnected, fuzzy somehow, maybe that's why he doesn't immediately yank the headphones back and tell Eduardo to mind his own fucking business. Instead he reaches out and lowers the volume, until the tinny music spilling out of the headphones is barely perceptible.
Eduardo smiles, it makes his eyes sparkle, but it's not quite as impressive as the way he laughed for that girl.
"So what are you doing, anyway?" He nods towards the computer.
"Coding," Mark answers, snatching his headphones back even if it's too late to be upset about it now.
"What kind of coding?"
Mark explains, in excruciating detail, the kind of detail that makes even Dustin's eyes glaze over, but Eduardo just keeps smiling at him. He waits until Mark's tumble of words slows to a stop before he speaks.
"But why?" he asks, as if that's in any way a valid question.
Mark stares at him for a moment. "Because I can," he says simply and slides the headphones back on.
--
Eduardo's shift ends at 8 AM Mark knows this, because Eduardo comes over to say goodbye, dark suit jacket tugged over his shirt and a leather bag slung over his shoulder. He looks like an economics major, a rich economics major, and Mark wonders what he's doing working in the campus coffee shop.
"You should get some sleep," he says, smiling a little when Mark acknowledges him.
Mark's music is still turned down, he realizes, the coding a sufficient distraction from the increased level of noise now that the campus is waking up. He blinks up at Eduardo, who's still standing there, looking as if he just fell out of one of those fashion magazines Chris jerks off to and not as if he just finished a god-knows-how-many-hours shift.
"Yes," he admits.
As soon as he looks away from the screen the weariness settles in his bones, shoulders hunched and aching, eyes stinging, which is why he doesn't look away from the screen unless something, or in this case someone, makes him.
"Come on," Eduardo says, still smiling. "I'll walk you to your dorm."
It is the most ludicrous thing anyone has ever said to Mark, including Dustin, so there's really no explanation as to why he closes his laptop and grabs his bag, following Eduardo out of the coffee shop.
Eduardo talks the entire way across campus. Mark isn't really listening, the code still running through his mind, but he likes the cadence of Eduardo's voice. It's good to think to, better than music even, and he absently wonders if it would be creepy to record it and play it on a loop when music just doesn’t cut it.
"So anyway," Eduardo says, stopping below the stairs to Kirkland House. "That's my story."
"Oh," Mark responds, trying to rewind the conversation in his head. Maybe there was something in there to explain why Eduardo just walked him, Mark Zuckerberg, home, as if they are stuck in an old-fashioned movie.
Eduardo smiles at him, as if he knows full well that Mark wasn't paying attention and says, "My next shift's on Tuesday."
"I pity you," Mark says, because that's what he thinks and his thoughts have a disturbing tendency to go verbal.
Eduardo laughs, a full belly laugh, throwing his head back to reveal his really long neck. Mark isn't comparing or anything, but he's pretty sure it’s a fuller laugh than the girl got.
"See you around, Mark," he says and then he's walking away.
--
Mark doesn't actually plan on going back to the coffee shop, not on Tuesday, not ever, but amazingly enough Dustin actually did hook up with a girl and they're going out on Tuesday night, which means both Mark and Chris are asked, in not-so-polite words, to vacate the premises.
Chris heads over to Billy's room, ostensibly to watch a movie, but when he asks Mark if he wants to tag along Mark mutters something about having work to do and some nonsense about the coffee shop being a good place to get things done. It's not really a conscious choice, the words slip out of his mouth unchecked, but once they're out there he's not going to take them back.
"The coffee shop?" Chris frowns.
"Yeah," Mark says flippantly, as if he's the kind of guy that doesn't want to stab himself in the eye when surrounded by too many people. "It's kind of dead at night."
"Quiet," he adds after a moment, as if that will make Chris stop staring at him.
"Oookay," Chris says, drawing the word out in a highly annoying way. "You know where to find me if you change your mind."
--
Mark changes his mind about ten times on the way over, but he's so not going to slink back to Kirkland with his metaphorical tail between his legs. He changes his mind yet again when he walks in and is met by mayhem. Almost all the tables are occupied, by loud people, probably stupid people, people Mark would very much prefer to never see again, or now, come to think of it.
He turns on his heel and steps back outside. The air is getting cooler, chilly through his threadbare hoodie and on his feet, bare in his flip flops; cold enough that his breath almost turns to mist where it puffs out of his mouth. He goes for a walk.
The place is no less crowded when he comes back, but before he can escape Eduardo comes out from behind the counter and thrusts a coffee cup into his hands.
"Your table's free," he says, nodding towards the back.
Mark wants to point out that the fact that he sat there once before doesn't make it his table, it barely sets a precedent, but Eduardo's smiling at him and his hair is ridiculous and somehow Mark finds himself following him further into the chaos.
--
The place clears out after 1am, group after group dropping off until Mark and Eduardo are the only ones left. Mark wonders why they insist on having it open twenty-four hours when there are hardly any customers after midnight, but when Eduardo settles down at his table and pulls out a laptop of his own, he decides to not question it.
Mark always checks other people's computers, it's a thing; kind of like he imagines librarians check people's bookshelves, or fashion designers look in people's closets. He stares for a while at the thing on the table before Eduardo.
"I really hope you're working here to save money for a new computer," he says.
Eduardo looks up. "There's nothing wrong with this one."
"It's embarrassing."
Eduardo's lips curl, as if he's barely holding back a smile.
--
At some point Mark pushes his headphones down to rest around his neck and he never gets around to pulling them back up. Eduardo keeps talking at him, not to him because that requires some kind of input besides inarticulate grunts, but at him, a constant stream of idle chatter - the kind of nonsensical small talk that Mark usually hates, but somehow finds himself listening to anyway.
Eduardo's clever, Mark deduces that right away, probably not as smart as Mark, but clever enough to be interesting. Mark doesn't listen all the time, code has a tendency to steal his attention, but he resurfaces often enough to keep up with the monologue. Eduardo talks about his schoolwork, his textbooks, his professors and classmates, all things that are of little interest to Mark, but every now and then a nugget of real information slips out.
"Brazil, huh?" Mark lifts his eyes from the screen, letting them linger for a moment on Eduardo's hands before looking at his face.
Eduardo blinks. "I didn't think you were listening," he says.
Mark shrugs and goes back to coding. Eduardo was born in Brazil, he's Jewish, his family lives in Miami, his last name is Saverin and he is, indeed, an economics major. Mark likes being right.
--
Around 2 AM a rowdy group spills in through the doors and Eduardo gets up to serve them. The sandwich fairy (who is most likely 6 feet tall and Brazilian) dropped off a sandwich while Mark was immersed in coding and he eats it while watching Eduardo work.
Mark is in no way an expert on baristas, or coffee shops in general, but it seems to him that Eduardo is not that good at his job; maybe there's a reason they stick him on the night shift. He fumbles and forgets things and makes hundreds of unnecessary trips back and forth between the counters. His lack of a system is really grating and after a moment Mark looks back at the screen, because code makes sense where Eduardo certainly doesn't.
--
Around 4 AM Eduardo starts nodding off, waking up with a start every time his head falls forward. It's hilarious to watch him, even if there's no logical reason for Mark to be looking away from the screen, or even noticing. It's all very confusing.
"You can sleep," Mark says magnanimously, nodding towards the cushioned bench stretching along the wall. He figures that Eduardo will be less of a distraction that way even if he's not quite willing to admit that he is a distraction. Mark doesn't get distracted from coding, especially not by people with ridiculous hair.
"You sure?"
Mark shrugs; he offered didn't he? Eduardo looks at him for another moment before giving in and moving to stretch out on the bench. He pillows his head on his hands, smiling a little when he catches Mark watching him.
"Wake me if there are customers," he says.
Mark nods and looks away.
--
Eduardo is a quiet sleeper. He doesn't snore, or snuffle, or make any kind of noise really. It's disconcerting and Mark finds himself glancing over every fifteen minutes, just to make sure he's still breathing.
There's only one customer between 4 AM and 6 AM and Mark deals with her on his own. She only wants a cup of regular coffee anyway and while he has to hack the cash register mainframe to be able to ring it up, she doesn't seem to mind the 30-second wait. She has long nails, painted a shiny silver that reminds Mark of his laptop. He watches her wrap her slim hands around the coffee cup and kind of idly wonders what they would look like wrapped around his cock.
For some reason his gaze strays to Eduardo, who's got one hand tucked in under his head and the other resting on his stomach; when he looks up again the girl is gone, the door falling shut behind her. He returns to the computer and settles down, bringing up a new window and idly designing a new security system for the cash register, and also, a stray line of code that would turn the items on the receipt into rude words.
He looks up at Eduardo for a moment and discards the window. It's probably one of those situations where no one would appreciate the fact that he was just trying to help.
--
Eduardo wakes up with a start just after 6 AM, eyes huge and hair tousled.
"Whu?" he says, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth and pushing himself up. "Huh?"
Mark blinks at him, trying to make sense of the nonsensical thoughts running through his mind like disjointed lines of code. He notices that the third button of Eduardo's shirt has come undone, showing a glimpse of smooth skin, that his bottom lip is wet, that his hair is flat on one side, that his hands look fragile. He shakes his head, looks away, shrugs. He doesn't look back until Eduardo's sliding down into the other chair, stretching his arms above his head and yawning so wide that Mark can see his molars. He looks away again.
--
Eduardo's replacements come in just before 8 AM, two girls in black shirts that awww over him and ruffle his hair obnoxiously as if manning an empty coffee shop all night is some sort of accomplishment. One of them gives Mark an odd look and bends forward to whisper something into Eduardo's ear that makes him flush pink and give her a light shove. In Mark's mind she topples over and cracks her head open on the floor. Sometimes Mark's mind isn't a very nice place to hang out.
He packs up the computer and slings his bag across his back. He's just about to leave when Eduardo comes back and somehow he ends up waiting for Eduardo to grab his stuff as well.
"My next shift's Thursday," Eduardo says when they stop outside Kirkland.
"Okay," Mark responds.
He takes the stairs two at a time.
--
Okay isn't a promise, it's not even close. Okay doesn't mean 'Yeah, sure I'd love to see you again,' and it doesn't even imply 'Of course I'll be there'. Mark knows this because he has forgotten about enough promises in his life to be an expert on navigating the grey areas that don’t really promise anything. The areas that don’t have him falling out of a 36-hour coding tear to find someone looking at him with big hurt eyes and but you promised tumbling from their lips.
Okay doesn't mean anything so there's no reason for the way his stomach clenches with something remarkably close to guilt when he looks up from his computer to find that it's 2 AM.
Chris and Dustin are on the couch watching a Baywatch rerun, if the flashes of red and bouncing tits are anything to judge by. Empty Red Bull cans litter Mark's desk, crumpled wrappers are scattered on the floor, and a forgotten can of tuna stands open on the nightstand, absently left behind when a kitchen break turned into a bathroom break turned into code.
He scrubs at his eyes and cracks his neck, fingers poised to start typing again. He looks at the clock, 2:10.
Eduardo has really big eyes.
He didn't promise.
--
3 AM.
"Fuck this shit," he mutters, slamming his laptop shut and yanking the power cord out of the wall.
"What?" Dustin asks, blinking sleepily. He has all but collapsed sideways, body bent awkwardly at the waist.
"I'm heading down to the coffee shop," Mark says, which is more of an explanation than he usually gives and it should be more than enough, but Dustin pushes himself up to gape at him.
"What?"
"It's a good place to get work done," Chris fills in. "Quiet."
"No, seriously," Dustin says. "What the fuck?"
Mark ignores them both, not even bothering to grab his bag on the way out.
--
The coffee shop is almost empty when Mark arrives and Eduardo's slumped across the table, Mark's table, fast asleep with his face wedged into one of his textbooks. He doesn't wake up when the door falls shut behind Mark; he really is a horrible employee.
There's a girl sitting at table by the window, curled up in her chair with a book open on her lap.
"Don't wake him up," she says sharply when Mark's flip-flops scuff against the floor.
Mark stops and stares at her. It's Laugh Girl from the other night; he almost didn't recognize her without the heavy makeup and fuck-me heels.
"He works here," he points out.
"He's exhausted," she counters.
"Obviously," Mark says dryly. People don't fall asleep with their nose in a book unless they're really short on sleep. He should know.
"It's all your fault anyway," she says bitterly, pushing herself up from the chair and slamming the book shut. "Everything was perfect before you came along."
Mark stares after her as she throws the shiny black curtain of her hair back over her shoulder and leaves.
"I'm a little scared of her," Eduardo says, coming up behind Mark and putting a hand between his shoulder blades.
Mark shrugs the hand off. "She's weird," he says. "And ugly," he adds, even though she really isn't.
Eduardo snorts, as if he maybe he doesn't agree and Mark pushes past him to take his usual seat.
"I didn't promise anything," he says curtly.
Eduardo's face scrunches up. "Huh?"
Mark ignores him, diving straight into the one thing in his life that always made sense.
--
Eduardo is curious and he asks too many questions, about Mark's life and his friends and his schoolwork and Mark that Mark, for the most part, doesn't answer. He's not stupid (far from it), he knows that people tend to like him a lot less once they've had a conversation with him, and he kind of wants Eduardo to like him, or at least not hate him, which also happens once people have had a conversation with him.
"You really are the strong and silent type, aren't you?" Eduardo says after Mark has once again blatantly ignored one of his asinine questions. Why would anyone care what Mark was like in high school? Mark doesn't want to know what he was like in high school.
There are only so many things to say about weekends spent holed up in his room, toilet water dripping from his bangs, his mother's quiet worry, and the one time he almost got expelled for erasing every trace of the bullies' online records. They were never able to pin it on him, he was way too smart for that, but everyone knew and it didn't exactly make his life better.
Mark holds one of his arms up. "Chicken arms," he points out and Eduardo laughs so hard he almost falls off his chair. It wasn't even that funny, but whatever, Eduardo is weird.
--
"When's your next shift?" Mark asks when Eduardo starts gathering his textbooks, stuffing them into his bag with slow, almost sluggish movements.
Eduardo looks up. "I… uh…," He drops his bag on the floor. "Just a second."
He disappears into the kitchen, or what Mark presumes is the kitchen; he never bothered to explore.
"Saturday," Eduardo says when he comes back, out of breath. "My next shift's Saturday."
"I might not be here," Mark says, because that's better than 'okay' It's definitely not a promise.
"Oh." Eduardo looks… disappointed? Mark isn't very good at reading emotions; he never cared to look long enough at anyone's face to master it.
"I don't promise anything," he clarifies and for some reason that makes Eduardo smile, as if Mark did promise something.
Eduardo puts his hand on Mark's back as they walk out. Mark doesn't shrug it off.
--
"Who is she?" It's a non sequitur, even for Dustin, and Mark frowns at him, pulling his can of Red Bull closer when it looks as if Dustin might make a grab for it.
"Who is who, what?"
"At the coffee shop? Who is she?"
"There's no girl at the coffee shop." Mark scoffs, flinging his textbook to the side; he was only looking for an excuse anyway.
"Boy then," Dustin says, inching closer so that he's almost sitting on Mark's feet.
Mark pulls his feet away. "Eduardo?"
He realizes it's a mistake the moment the name drops from his lips, even before Dustin starts hyperventilating and squealing ohmygod, in this really high-pitched and annoying way.
"Chris, Chris, ohmygod, Chris you gotta hear this."
Chris shuffles in from the living room, rubbing sleep out of his eyes. "What?"
"Mark…" Dustin pauses for dramatic effect, or maybe because he's choking up, sometimes it's hard to tell with Dustin. "Is gay."
"Are you insane?" Mark asks, kicking Dustin's thigh. "I'm not gay."
Sexuality, in Mark's opinion, is something that happens to other people, just like the bubonic plague and herpes. Mark's in a committed relationship with his right hand and he likes it that way.
"You sure?" Chris asks, leaning against the doorpost.
"Of course I'm sure." Mark huffs, reaching for his textbook again, because, seriously, schoolwork beats the hell out of this conversation.
--
On Friday Mark eats lunch in the cafeteria with Chris and Dustin, and ends up arguing with Dustin, who should know better than to challenge Mark when it comes to code. He's just about to end the argument with one last acerbic remark when Eduardo shows up.
"Hey." Eduardo smiles and Mark completely forgets what he was about to say.
Logically, he knows that Eduardo is a student, which means that Mark could run into him anywhere, but in his mind Eduardo is tied to the coffee shop and seeing him at the cafeteria just seems wrong somehow.
"You actually talk?"
Mark blinks. "Yes," he says. He has in fact talked to Eduardo plenty of times but he refrains from pointing that out, he's getting better at this social clues thing.
"So it's just me you don't talk to."
"Yes."
"Oh." Eduardo's face falls and Mark always thought that was an expression invented by writers of fiction with a little too much time on their hands, but Eduardo's face actually falls, even his hair seems to droop and his mouth curls downwards. He nods a little, as if he made up his mind about something, and forces a smile, or maybe he doesn't force it but it looks forced and his eyes don’t light up.
"Okay," he says. "See you around, yeah?"
His gaze flickers to Chris and Dustin and then he's walking away. Mark is really not sure what just happened.
Chris cuffs him hard over the back of the back of the head and Dustin says, very seriously: "This is where you go after him."
Mark frowns, looking after Eduardo's retreating form. "Why?"
Chris throws his hands up. "Seriously, if you don't. I will."
--
Mark catches up with Eduardo in the main hall.
"Wardo," he says, the name tripping on his tongue and coming out wrong.
Eduardo stops and slowly turns around to face him, eyebrows drawn. "Mark."
Mark rock back on his heels and shoves his hands into his pocket. "I uh…."
He trails off, catching sight of their reflection in a nearby window, staring at the contrast. Eduardo's in black slacks and a grey shirt, unbuttoned at the neck, and a black suit jacket. He's slim but not skinny with golden skin and a narrow waist. Mark's hair is flat against his head, his hoodie too big and his skinny legs stick out of a pair of seasonally inappropriate cargo shorts. He's almost painfully pale.
Eduardo cranes his neck to see what he's looking at, smiling when he catches Mark's gaze in the reflection. Mark looks away.
"Okay, so here's the thing." Mark stuffs his hands deeper into his pockets. "You're weird."
Eduardo's eyebrows shoot up, but he looks more amused than surprised, maybe. It might just be his stupid mouth.
"People don't usually want me to talk to them, okay? It's... I'm not very good... at that."
"At talking?"
"At saying the right thing." Mark presses his lips together; he really doesn't like talking about himself. No one likes feeling inadequate and Mark even less so than most people.
"You've been doing pretty well so far," Eduardo says and yeah, he's definitely amused.
"Are you laughing at me?" Mark asks. He kind of wants to punch Eduardo in the arm, but he always hits too hard when he does that and he doesn't want to bruise Eduardo.
"With you," Eduardo corrects, and solves Mark's dilemma by bumping his shoulder.
Mark's mouth twitches and his stomach feels weird. "Don't say I didn't warn you," he says.
"About what?" Eduardo asks.
"Talking to me. If I hurt your feelings, it's all your fault."
Eduardo laughs, as if he thinks Mark is joking. Somehow Mark kind of wants to be.
--
Mark ends up going to a party on Friday night; well, he makes a brief appearance at one because he forgot his keycard and has to borrow Dustin's. It's your typical college party, loud and obnoxious, and it smells vaguely like week-old gym socks and spilled beer.
Mark has to push his way past a game of beer pong, something that looks like a clothed orgy (probably the dance floor even if it doesn't look like dancing to Mark) and a guy who passed out on the floor with a bucket over his head. Mark spares five seconds to see that his chest is in fact moving; he would (hopefully) feel horrible if the guy ended up being dead and he just stepped over him.
Dustin's tucked into a corner with Chris and Billy, quite obviously sulking into his beer. Mark almost changes his mind, he just knows he's going to get an earful of whatever woes Dustin is having and it's going to be painful and awkward and he won't know what to say. But if he's honest with himself it's not like he has anything better to do, no pressing schoolwork, no urgent coding needs. It probably won't hurt him to listen to Dustin's blabber for a few minutes; after all Dustin sometimes listens to him.
He changes his mind two minutes into Dustin's woes, but then it's too late to back out and Chris is giving him these looks, as if he's a proud parent or whatever. Mark inexpertly pats Dustin's back, almost making him choke on his beer, and makes some noises that are supposed to be consoling.
"I love you, Marky," Dustin says, wrapping an arm around Mark's neck and giving him a very uncomfortable hug. "You're a good friend."
Mark blinks uncertainly and pulls his lips into something he hopes at least resembles a smile. No one ever accused him of being a good friend before. He pats Dustin's back again, it seems like the right thing to do, and Dustin beams at him in a particularly watery way. Mark wonders if he's going to cry.
--
Eventually Mark does get the key card and magically enough he doesn't end up pissing anyone off; not even the girl that plants herself on his lap and tells him she loves his curls, shamelessly grabbing a handful of them. She does look a bit surprised when she ends up on the floor, but Dustin consoles her, so Mark thinks that maybe it'll be a happy ending for everyone.
He's just about to leave, one hand on the door knob and the other stuffed in his pocket, when he spots Eduardo. He's talking to Laugh Girl; one of her hands is curled around his arm, and as Mark watches she leans in to whisper something into Eduardo's ear. It looks intimate, familiar, and Mark's stomach twists. He really doesn't like Laugh Girl.
Eduardo shifts, as if he's about to turn in Mark's direction, and Mark yanks the door open, almost jumping out into the hallway with his heart lodged in his throat. Life, he thinks, would be so much easier if you could handle your personal relationships online.
--
On Saturday morning Mark wakes up with an idea. He finds a sketchbook buried underneath his textbooks for art history and scrawls out a quick sketch. The bare bones of a profile page, a few unrelated ideas, and something he decides to call The Wall.
He puts the sketchbook down and pulls up the Kirkland facebook on his computer, staring at the way the people he sometimes runs into in the halls decide to represent themselves. TheFacebook, he thinks, the entire social experience of college, but put online. His skin feels too tight and for a moment he can't even breathe. He's onto something.
--
The next time he looks up from the computer screen it's after midnight and he's dizzy with a combination of raging hunger and too long spent staring at characters climbing across the screen. TheFacebook is nothing but bones, pages upon pages of notes and code, ideas for how to tie it all together, how to make it work.
He staggers to his feet, every muscle in his body protesting, and his shoulders popping when he rolls them back. He shuffles into the living room where Chris and Dustin are piled up on the couch.
"Coffee," he grunts, as if they asked for an explanation, and grabs his hoodie from the hook beside the door.
His feet know the way to the coffee shop by now, carefully picking their way around snow drifts and spots of ice. He wraps his arms tight around his torso and tries not to think too much about what he's doing or why.
--
Eduardo's behind the counter when Mark walks in, serving a rowdy group of students who look as if they're headed for a party. Mark stares for a moment at the number of tanned bare legs displayed among the girls and decides that they're either crazy or from California. Probably both.
He nods at Eduardo and walks over to the usual table, sinking down into the comfy blue armchair he's beginning to think of as his. The coffee machine churns and hisses; Mark's head hurts.
He startles awake when Eduardo shakes his shoulder, big brown eyes blinking down at Mark with something that might be concern.
"Hey," Eduardo says. "Are you okay?"
"Are you dating the crazy girl?" Mark asks.
Relationship status, he thinks, reaching up to grab a pen from Eduardo's breast pocket and scribbling it down on the back of his hand.
"Christy?" Eduardo asks, frowning. "She's just a friend." He catches Mark's hand and turns it over to study the scribble. "Relationship status?" he asks.
Mark stares at Eduardo’s long golden fingers against his skin. Eduardo's hands are warm and soft, nails short and well kept. He wonders if Eduardo gets manicures.
He tells Eduardo about TheFacebook, words coming out in a rushed, excited tumble. He doesn't think he makes the idea justice, but Eduardo smiles at him, as if he's brilliant, and Mark trails off into a confused mumble, staring up at Eduardo's pretty face.
"Did you eat today?" Eduardo asks. He's still holding Mark's cold hand between both of his.
Mark shakes his head.
"I'll make you something."
--
Eduardo returns to his spot behind the counter and another group swarms in. Mark grabs a discarded napkin; he still has the pen.
Relationship status:, he writes. Then, Single. Underneath he scribbles, Interested in:. He taps the back of the pen against the table and cranes his neck to look at Eduardo, taking in the long line of his throat, the swoop of his hair, the intricate curve of his mouth and the way his eyes light up when he smiles.
Mark swallows, mouth suddenly dry. Men, he writes.
--
Eduardo brings back a huge plate of pasta and big cup of coffee, sinking down into the chair opposite Mark, as if Mark might not eat if Eduardo isn't there to watch him. Mark's mouth waters and he shoves his mouth full of too-hot food, flushing when Eduardo laughs at his sputter.
"Shut up," he mutters, taking a little more care with the second bite.
He eats mostly in silence, trying to not dwell on the fact that he just had some kind of sexual epiphany about four years too late. (Mark's not certain but he thinks that most people realize that they're gay around the time they're fifteen and popping boners looking at ice cream. He could ask Chris, but he's pretty sure he'd rather drown himself in a bucket of piss.)
"Good?" Eduardo asks when Mark pushes the empty plate away and leans back with a groan.
"Amazing," Mark answers, even though he has no idea what he just ate.
"Want some pie?"
Mark pats the swell of his stomach. "Yes, please," he says.
--
It's cherry pie, served warm with a mountain of ice cream and whipped cream. It might be the best thing Mark's ever eaten and he mumbles as much with his lips wrapped around the spoon. Eduardo flushes, and looks away, the tips of his ears turning pink. He really is stupidly attractive.
--
"So… uh… when's your next shift?" Mark asks, when dawn starts creeping across the floor.
Eduardo scrubs a hand over the back of his neck and ducks his chin. "I… uh… I don't have a next shift." His ears turn pink.
"They fired you?" Mark asks. He's not surprised; while Eduardo is clever, he's not a very good barista, and he keeps stealing food to feed Mark.
"Uh… no… I… I don't actually work here."
Mark raises his eyebrows. If Eduardo doesn't work here he's the best imposter ever, right down to the apron and the awesome customer service.
"I mean, obviously I work here right now, but I was just helping a friend out of a tight spot. She… uh… she needs this job and they wouldn't give her time off if she couldn't find someone to take her shifts so…," Eduardo shrugs and blushes some more.
"Great," Mark mutters, stabbing a finger at his napkin. "So you're a saint too."
Someone-who-looks-like-Eduardo dating someone-who-looks-like-Mark vaguely falls within the realm of possibility. Mark might be deathly pale and completely lacking anything that resembles style, but he has pretty good features and his body isn't repulsive. He's not a golden god, obviously, but it's possible. Hot guys have ugly girlfriends all the time.
Eduardo, the saint, dating Mark, the social leper, is a lot less likely. Eduardo is so effortlessly nice, and attentive, and nice. Mark isn't any of those things and while he might be willing to try it out, it's not like he's going to learn how to not be offensive within the next twenty-four hours, even if he asks Chris to give him a crash course.
"I'm not a saint," Eduardo says, laughing. "My thoughts are way too dirty for that."
Mark flushes, and fidgets, and wonders if Eduardo will be able to see his boner through the table. Eduardo probably doesn't have dirty thoughts about him anyway; Mark knows he's not exactly wet dream material.
"I… uh… I should head back to the dorm," Mark says.
"Oh, of course," Eduardo says. "I… uh… yeah."
Mark scribbles down his dorm number on a napkin before he can talk himself out of it.
"You should come by," he says, pushing the napkin across the table. "Sometime."
Eduardo flushes and worries at his lower lip in a way that is certifiably adorable. "Okay," he says, folding the napkin up and stuffing it into his pocket. "I will. Uh… tomorrow?"
"Sure," Mark says.
Eduardo laughs and produces a slip of paper, writing something down on it with his spare pen. "Here," he says.
It's his phone number and Mark feels kind of dumb for not thinking of that.
"Thanks," he says, slipping the note into his pocket. "So… uh… tomorrow?"
"Okay."
Mark wonders if all social interactions are this awkward or if he's just special.
--
It's not until Mark's halfway back to the dorm that he realizes what else was written in the napkin he gave Eduardo. He trips over his feet and nearly brains himself on the sidewalk, scrambling to his feet with a hectic flush rising in his cheeks. What's he supposed to do now?
Chris and Dustin are, of course, entirely unhelpful. Dustin runs around singing I told you so and Chris laughs so hard he turns blue. Mark locks himself in his room and codes.
--
Mark surfaces eight hours later, bleary-eyed and annoyed, because someone's banging on the door. The room's empty - he vaguely recalls Chris saying shouting something about going out - and as he shuffles across the floor he designs a quick plan for how to kill the intruder and put the blame on Dustin.
He yanks the door open, his best glare firmly in place, and ends up eye to throat with Eduardo. Mark blinks, and flushes, and sways a little on his feet. Eduardo's holding a greasy paper bag and a six-pack of beer, shifting his weight from foot to foot.
"Hey," he says. "I… uh… wasn't sure if tomorrow was tomorrow or later today so I… uh…"
Eduardo trails off, looking uncertain and Mark steps aside to let him in.
"Uhm… welcome," Mark says.
His stomach grumbles at the sight of food and he realizes he hasn't eaten since the cherry pie. He also hasn't slept in close to thirty-six hours, but that's usually less of a problem. He doesn't remember about the note until he's pushed Eduardo down on the couch and ventured into the kitchenette to look for clean plates.
"Fuck," he mutters, banging his forehead against the cupboards.
"You okay?" Eduardo calls from the living room.
Mark doesn't bother to answer. There's barely enough room to stand in the kitchen, the likelihood of him sustaining serious injury while looking for plates is less than zero. Of course Eduardo doesn't understand, because he turns up to hover in the doorway, cutting off the light falling in from the living room.
"Let me help," he says.
There's a huge pile of dirty dishes in the sink, take-out containers all over the counter, and something blue and possibly scaly lives in the fridge. Somehow Eduardo ends up cleaning, with his shirt sleeves pushed up above his elbows and soap studs on his skin, while Mark naps on the couch. Mark doesn't know how that happened either.
--
Mark wakes up to the sound of laughter, mingled laughter, Eduardo's and Dustin's. He sits up straight, blinking rapidly. Eduardo and Dustin are cleaning out the fridge, sleeves rolled up and piles of trash bags around them on the floor. Mark scrubs a hand over his eyes, but they're still there when looks up again.
"What the fuck?" he says faintly, letting himself drop back against the cushions.
"Mark, seriously," Chris hisses, reaching over from the armchair to clutch at Mark's arm. "If you don't marry him, I will."
Mark shrugs his arm off and glares. "We're not dating," he mutters.
"He's cleaning your kitchen," Chris hisses, doing weird things with his eyes, as if he actually expects Mark to pick up on non-verbal communication.
"Maybe he's a stickler for cleanliness," Mark hisses back.
"Then what on earth is he doing with you?" Chris asks.
It's a valid question without a satisfactory answer.
--
It turns out to be a good night, if weird, all four of them eating reheated Chinese food on sparkly clean plates. Eduardo sits next to Mark on the couch, sleeves still pushed up, and every now and then Mark finds himself staring at the dusting of hair covering his muscled forearms. They talk about school, and people, and books, and TV and a million other things that Mark doesn't normally talk about, but that are somehow made interesting by Eduardo's input.
"So why business?" Chris asks, leaning back in the armchair and eyeing Eduardo in a way that Mark really isn't comfortable with.
Eduardo shrugs. "Because I'm good at it."
Mark doesn't think that's the full story and surprisingly he finds that he wants to know the rest. It's like Eduardo is a program and Mark wants to break him up into chunks of code to understand how it all fits together.
--
Mark walks Eduardo downstairs when it's time for him to leave, hands stuffed deep into his pockets and shoulders hunched.
"Thanks for the food," he says. "And uhm… the cleaning."
"No problem," Eduardo answers, smiling. He's pulled a jacket over his shirt and Mark misses the sight of his forearms.
"So… uh… about that note I gave you," Mark says, focusing very intently on the floor. "It wasn't… I mean… I wasn't hitting on you. It was just an idea. For TheFacebook."
"Oh," Eduardo says, and Mark can't tell if he's relieved or disappointed.
Eduardo rocks back on his heels and Mark smiles stupidly and the silence stretches out.
"So," Mark starts, biting down on his lower lip. (How do people do this? How do they make friends with people who are not forced to spend time in their company?) "You're welcome to stop by anytime," he finishes lamely.
"Okay," Eduardo says and he smiles a whole lot wider than the situation calls for. Mark hopes that means he'll be coming back.
"I mean the bathroom's pretty nasty…"
Eduardo laughs and squeezes Mark's shoulder and Mark feels warm inside for hours afterwards.
--
Mark throws himself head first into building TheFacebook, only pulling himself away from the computer for class, food and occasionally sleep. He enrolls Dustin to help him code and appoints Chris his PR man, but in reality there probably wouldn't even be a site without Eduardo.
Eduardo is the cog that makes the machinery work; he makes sure Mark sleeps, eats, and drinks something that isn't beer, Red Bull, or coffee. He's the only one that can pull Mark out of a coding tear, hands gentle as he drags Mark from the computer to bed, or put something to eat into his hands. His smile is fond but exasperated as he makes Mark drink water and orange juice, and occasionally take a vitamin supplement, or a piece of fruit.
When Mark worries about financing, Eduardo puts up the funds. When Mark runs into a problem, Eduardo listens, for hours if he has to, until Mark runs out of words and the solution presents itself. Eduardo doesn't know shit about code, but he understands people in a way that Mark never did, and between the two of them TheFacebook grows from a simple idea to a blue and white reality.
--
Mark can easily do forty-eight hours with nothing but bathroom breaks, Eduardo draws the line at twenty-four.
"Okay," he says now, sitting cross-legged at the edge of Mark's bed. "It's break time."
Mark ignores him, because sometimes it works.
"Come on." Eduardo sounds immensely cheerful. "Let's go outside."
That gets Mark's attention; he pulls his eyes away from the screen and blinks blearily at the window. "It's night," he points out.
"Doesn't mean some fresh air won't do you good."
Mark considers this, staring at the lines of code running down his screen. "You know I'm not going to get scurvy, right?"
"Not on my watch, that's true," Eduardo answers, and somehow Mark lets himself be pulled away from the blinking cursor.
--
"See, this is nice," Eduardo says. He's holding a cup of steaming coffee between his hands, smiling at Mark over the rim.
Mark grunts in response, sipping from his own cup. The night is chilly, but the coffee is warm and Eduardo is pressed up all along his side, some of his overzealous body heat seeping into Mark's cold skin.
"It's almost done," Mark says, mostly to stop himself from saying something that will give too much away. He's getting really good at having conversations around the things he doesn't want to admit.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
"That's awesome."
Eduardo slings an arm around Mark's shoulders in an awkward half hug. Mark doesn't protest when he leaves it there.
"So how much longer?" Eduardo asks.
Mark shrugs. "A week maybe," he says. "Two at most."
"Awesome," Eduardo says again.
Mark leans his head against Eduardo's shoulder, just a little bit.
--
Mark finds a typo in Dustin's code when the site is almost done and he just blows up. He doesn't normally show a lot of emotion and he doesn't ever shout, but he just loses it, pouring all of his frustration and anger and stress into one continuous string of curse words and accusations that actually makes Dustin duck for cover.
"That's enough," Eduardo's voice cuts through the rage and Mark spins around to face him.
"He… he…"
"I said, that's enough," Eduardo repeats.
Mark swallows. Eduardo looks serious, calm but deadly serious, and it feels as if he just stabbed Mark in the back. He's supposed to be Mark's friend, he's supposed to take Mark's side, he's not supposed to show up dressed in his evening finest and defend Dustin when Mark needs him so very much. When Mark… Mark…
Mark doesn't even bother to grab a shirt before he runs.
--
Eduardo catches up with him halfway across campus. Mark's stopped running by then, walking with his head ducked low and his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his jeans.
"You're being ridiculous," Eduardo says.
He's out of breath and his hair is a disorderly mess. Mark looks away and keeps on walking.
"Come on." Eduardo holds out Mark's jacket. "At least put this on."
Mark ignores him. He kind of wants to hit Eduardo in the face, or grab his ears and kiss him, and he's not going to do either of those. He's just going to keep on walking until his skin feels as if it fits him right again.
Mark had a best friend in middle school, Ben. They were next door neighbors and from kindergarten through middle school they did everything together. Then high school happened and on the second day Joe Miller grabbed Mark by the scruff of his neck and dunked his head into a toilet. When Mark stumbled out of the bathroom, soaking wet and bleeding from a cut above his eye, Ben was the first one to point and laugh.
Mark kind of feels like that now.
Except not at all.
--
"You're not going to get rid of me, you know," Eduardo says after five minutes spent walking in silence.
Mark's teeth are clattering and he's pretty sure there's actual frost forming in his hair. He keeps on walking.
--
"Why do you have to be so goddamned difficult?" Eduardo snarls, and before Mark's had a chance to move away, Eduardo has grabbed his arm and is dragging him towards the doors to Eduardo’s dorm complex. Mark hadn't even noticed they were in the vicinity and now he's halfway up the stairs.
He's too cold and too miserable to protest, not even trying to wrench his arm out of Eduardo's punishing grip even though he's fairly sure he could.
--
NEXT
--
Author: jeyhawk
Rating: NC17
Pairing: Mark/Eduardo
Beta: sbb23! <333
Word Count: 17,617
Disclaimer: Not true. Not even a little bit. Not even at all.
Summary: College AU. The one where Eduardo works at the campus coffee shop and Mark doesn't understand the concept of love at first sight. Coffee, code, Facebook and love (not necessarily in that order).
Notes: Thanks to inbetweencabs, cabayuki, and elizaria for alpha reading and encouragement, and as always to sbb23 for being amazing. What would I do without you guys? <333
There's a twenty-four hour coffee shop on campus. It's not the sort of place Mark would normally frequent because normal, for him, means Kirkland and unless he can avoid it, class, but apparently Mark on a coding tear makes hooking up awkward and he has been banned. Mark doubts that Dustin will manage to hook up with anyone, Mark or no Mark, but Chris might and it's not like Mark wants to listen to their grunting anyway.
The coffee shop is the kind of place that attracts philosophy students, and art students, and other people that can't shut up, but that is, in Mark's opinion, why god invented headphones and blessed him with the ability to completely shut out the outside world.
He finds a table at the very back, sinking down into a comfortable armchair and setting his laptop down before him. He slides his headphones on, opens up the screen, and lets himself fall face first into the code, fingers dancing across the keyboard like Flight of the Bumblebee played at breakneck speed. (There was a video, Dustin made him watch it, the image has been stuck in his mind ever since.)
--
He doesn't know how long he's been out of it, but the coffee shop is considerably less crowded when someone taps his shoulder, forcing him to look up from the screen. A guy is standing next to the table, tall and whipcord lean with a black apron tied around his slim waist. His mouth is moving, but Mark can't make out his words over the music and he reluctantly pushes the headphones down to hug his neck.
"I said," the guys says, as if he's already on his seventh repeat. "It's considered common courtesy to order something if you're going to take up a table for hours at a time."
"Oh." Mark looks down on the screen again, fingers already poised to type; after a moment, he puts the headphones back on.
The guy sighs and throws his hands up. Mark doesn't look after him as he leaves.
--
A cup lands on Mark's table, put down with enough force to make something that looks like coffee slosh over the edges. It's the guy again, bringing Mark a drink he didn't order. Mark looks at the cup and then up at the guy. He has ridiculous hair, Mark notices, and brown eyes under bushy eyebrows. He seems to be waiting for something.
Mark takes a hesitant sip from the cup; it's coffee, dark and bitter. He puts the cup down again.
"Not enough sugar," he says.
--
The sugar package hits him square in the forehead. He only looks up for long enough to dump it into his coffee. He writes another few lines, barely noticing when a spoon lands in his cup, making drops of coffee stain the front of his shirt. He stirs and takes a sip; much better.
The next time he looks up the coffee is long gone and the guy is sitting at his table, an economics textbook open in front of him. Mark squints at the giant clock on the wall behind the guy's head, 5 AM, which means he could probably head back to Kirkland. His eyes fall to the guy again, noticing the nametag pinned to his shirt. It reads Eduardo in messy black script and it's just a piece of paper, not even stuck into one of those plastic holders.
He rolls the name over in his mind; Eduardo - Italian, maybe Spanish - the sort of name that comes with golden skin and brown eyes. He thinks about looking it up, looking him up, but a line of code catches his eye and he falls right back into it.
--
The next time Mark looks up Eduardo is staring at him. When he realizes that he has Mark's attention his eyes flicker down to his impromptu nametag and then back up at Mark, pointed stare directed at Mark's chest as if he expects Mark to have a nametag too. Mark doesn't have a nametag because he doesn't work here. He wouldn't work here even if they paid him which he supposes that they would, if he worked here.
He wonders how much Eduardo makes and if it's really enough to pay for a shirt as impeccably cut as the one he's wearing. Mark doesn't know much about clothes, close to nothing actually, but he knows class and Eduardo's shirt has that in spades.
After a moment he reaches for his bag, finds a black marker and a piece of paper that supposedly holds some sort of assignment he should be working on. He folds the paper into a triangle and writes Mark in big block letters. The ink bleeds through the paper and onto the table; he pretends not to notice as he assembles his sign and turns it over to face Eduardo.
Eduardo smiles at him, mouth forming words that might be a greeting but that could as well be the opening lines of a dissertation in Greek. Mark watches his lips move. Eduardo's upper lip is unusually curved, tilting upwards at the corners as if he's always caught halfway to smiling. Mark stares at it for another moment before his eyes drop back to the screen.
--
An hour later a sandwich magically appears on the table. He eats it, casting a furtive glance towards the counter. Eduardo is busy with a group of customers; eyes alight as he laughs at something one of the girls in the group said. Mark can't know for sure that it was her, of course, but one of them has long dark hair and a plush pink mouth. She looks like the kind of girl someone like Eduardo would laugh with: pretty, petite, and possibly clever (Mark doubts it).
There's something written on the girl's cup when Eduardo slides it across the counter. It could be the order, but it could also be a phone number. Mark reaches out and crumples up his name sign, dropping it on the floor next to his bag. He turns the volume up until his eardrums are thrumming with it, the deep throbbing beat rattling his brain, and goes back to coding.
--
"Music that loud really isn't good for you, okay?"
Eduardo is standing by the table again, Mark's headphones dangling from his hand. Mark feels oddly disconnected, fuzzy somehow, maybe that's why he doesn't immediately yank the headphones back and tell Eduardo to mind his own fucking business. Instead he reaches out and lowers the volume, until the tinny music spilling out of the headphones is barely perceptible.
Eduardo smiles, it makes his eyes sparkle, but it's not quite as impressive as the way he laughed for that girl.
"So what are you doing, anyway?" He nods towards the computer.
"Coding," Mark answers, snatching his headphones back even if it's too late to be upset about it now.
"What kind of coding?"
Mark explains, in excruciating detail, the kind of detail that makes even Dustin's eyes glaze over, but Eduardo just keeps smiling at him. He waits until Mark's tumble of words slows to a stop before he speaks.
"But why?" he asks, as if that's in any way a valid question.
Mark stares at him for a moment. "Because I can," he says simply and slides the headphones back on.
--
Eduardo's shift ends at 8 AM Mark knows this, because Eduardo comes over to say goodbye, dark suit jacket tugged over his shirt and a leather bag slung over his shoulder. He looks like an economics major, a rich economics major, and Mark wonders what he's doing working in the campus coffee shop.
"You should get some sleep," he says, smiling a little when Mark acknowledges him.
Mark's music is still turned down, he realizes, the coding a sufficient distraction from the increased level of noise now that the campus is waking up. He blinks up at Eduardo, who's still standing there, looking as if he just fell out of one of those fashion magazines Chris jerks off to and not as if he just finished a god-knows-how-many-hours shift.
"Yes," he admits.
As soon as he looks away from the screen the weariness settles in his bones, shoulders hunched and aching, eyes stinging, which is why he doesn't look away from the screen unless something, or in this case someone, makes him.
"Come on," Eduardo says, still smiling. "I'll walk you to your dorm."
It is the most ludicrous thing anyone has ever said to Mark, including Dustin, so there's really no explanation as to why he closes his laptop and grabs his bag, following Eduardo out of the coffee shop.
Eduardo talks the entire way across campus. Mark isn't really listening, the code still running through his mind, but he likes the cadence of Eduardo's voice. It's good to think to, better than music even, and he absently wonders if it would be creepy to record it and play it on a loop when music just doesn’t cut it.
"So anyway," Eduardo says, stopping below the stairs to Kirkland House. "That's my story."
"Oh," Mark responds, trying to rewind the conversation in his head. Maybe there was something in there to explain why Eduardo just walked him, Mark Zuckerberg, home, as if they are stuck in an old-fashioned movie.
Eduardo smiles at him, as if he knows full well that Mark wasn't paying attention and says, "My next shift's on Tuesday."
"I pity you," Mark says, because that's what he thinks and his thoughts have a disturbing tendency to go verbal.
Eduardo laughs, a full belly laugh, throwing his head back to reveal his really long neck. Mark isn't comparing or anything, but he's pretty sure it’s a fuller laugh than the girl got.
"See you around, Mark," he says and then he's walking away.
--
Mark doesn't actually plan on going back to the coffee shop, not on Tuesday, not ever, but amazingly enough Dustin actually did hook up with a girl and they're going out on Tuesday night, which means both Mark and Chris are asked, in not-so-polite words, to vacate the premises.
Chris heads over to Billy's room, ostensibly to watch a movie, but when he asks Mark if he wants to tag along Mark mutters something about having work to do and some nonsense about the coffee shop being a good place to get things done. It's not really a conscious choice, the words slip out of his mouth unchecked, but once they're out there he's not going to take them back.
"The coffee shop?" Chris frowns.
"Yeah," Mark says flippantly, as if he's the kind of guy that doesn't want to stab himself in the eye when surrounded by too many people. "It's kind of dead at night."
"Quiet," he adds after a moment, as if that will make Chris stop staring at him.
"Oookay," Chris says, drawing the word out in a highly annoying way. "You know where to find me if you change your mind."
--
Mark changes his mind about ten times on the way over, but he's so not going to slink back to Kirkland with his metaphorical tail between his legs. He changes his mind yet again when he walks in and is met by mayhem. Almost all the tables are occupied, by loud people, probably stupid people, people Mark would very much prefer to never see again, or now, come to think of it.
He turns on his heel and steps back outside. The air is getting cooler, chilly through his threadbare hoodie and on his feet, bare in his flip flops; cold enough that his breath almost turns to mist where it puffs out of his mouth. He goes for a walk.
The place is no less crowded when he comes back, but before he can escape Eduardo comes out from behind the counter and thrusts a coffee cup into his hands.
"Your table's free," he says, nodding towards the back.
Mark wants to point out that the fact that he sat there once before doesn't make it his table, it barely sets a precedent, but Eduardo's smiling at him and his hair is ridiculous and somehow Mark finds himself following him further into the chaos.
--
The place clears out after 1am, group after group dropping off until Mark and Eduardo are the only ones left. Mark wonders why they insist on having it open twenty-four hours when there are hardly any customers after midnight, but when Eduardo settles down at his table and pulls out a laptop of his own, he decides to not question it.
Mark always checks other people's computers, it's a thing; kind of like he imagines librarians check people's bookshelves, or fashion designers look in people's closets. He stares for a while at the thing on the table before Eduardo.
"I really hope you're working here to save money for a new computer," he says.
Eduardo looks up. "There's nothing wrong with this one."
"It's embarrassing."
Eduardo's lips curl, as if he's barely holding back a smile.
--
At some point Mark pushes his headphones down to rest around his neck and he never gets around to pulling them back up. Eduardo keeps talking at him, not to him because that requires some kind of input besides inarticulate grunts, but at him, a constant stream of idle chatter - the kind of nonsensical small talk that Mark usually hates, but somehow finds himself listening to anyway.
Eduardo's clever, Mark deduces that right away, probably not as smart as Mark, but clever enough to be interesting. Mark doesn't listen all the time, code has a tendency to steal his attention, but he resurfaces often enough to keep up with the monologue. Eduardo talks about his schoolwork, his textbooks, his professors and classmates, all things that are of little interest to Mark, but every now and then a nugget of real information slips out.
"Brazil, huh?" Mark lifts his eyes from the screen, letting them linger for a moment on Eduardo's hands before looking at his face.
Eduardo blinks. "I didn't think you were listening," he says.
Mark shrugs and goes back to coding. Eduardo was born in Brazil, he's Jewish, his family lives in Miami, his last name is Saverin and he is, indeed, an economics major. Mark likes being right.
--
Around 2 AM a rowdy group spills in through the doors and Eduardo gets up to serve them. The sandwich fairy (who is most likely 6 feet tall and Brazilian) dropped off a sandwich while Mark was immersed in coding and he eats it while watching Eduardo work.
Mark is in no way an expert on baristas, or coffee shops in general, but it seems to him that Eduardo is not that good at his job; maybe there's a reason they stick him on the night shift. He fumbles and forgets things and makes hundreds of unnecessary trips back and forth between the counters. His lack of a system is really grating and after a moment Mark looks back at the screen, because code makes sense where Eduardo certainly doesn't.
--
Around 4 AM Eduardo starts nodding off, waking up with a start every time his head falls forward. It's hilarious to watch him, even if there's no logical reason for Mark to be looking away from the screen, or even noticing. It's all very confusing.
"You can sleep," Mark says magnanimously, nodding towards the cushioned bench stretching along the wall. He figures that Eduardo will be less of a distraction that way even if he's not quite willing to admit that he is a distraction. Mark doesn't get distracted from coding, especially not by people with ridiculous hair.
"You sure?"
Mark shrugs; he offered didn't he? Eduardo looks at him for another moment before giving in and moving to stretch out on the bench. He pillows his head on his hands, smiling a little when he catches Mark watching him.
"Wake me if there are customers," he says.
Mark nods and looks away.
--
Eduardo is a quiet sleeper. He doesn't snore, or snuffle, or make any kind of noise really. It's disconcerting and Mark finds himself glancing over every fifteen minutes, just to make sure he's still breathing.
There's only one customer between 4 AM and 6 AM and Mark deals with her on his own. She only wants a cup of regular coffee anyway and while he has to hack the cash register mainframe to be able to ring it up, she doesn't seem to mind the 30-second wait. She has long nails, painted a shiny silver that reminds Mark of his laptop. He watches her wrap her slim hands around the coffee cup and kind of idly wonders what they would look like wrapped around his cock.
For some reason his gaze strays to Eduardo, who's got one hand tucked in under his head and the other resting on his stomach; when he looks up again the girl is gone, the door falling shut behind her. He returns to the computer and settles down, bringing up a new window and idly designing a new security system for the cash register, and also, a stray line of code that would turn the items on the receipt into rude words.
He looks up at Eduardo for a moment and discards the window. It's probably one of those situations where no one would appreciate the fact that he was just trying to help.
--
Eduardo wakes up with a start just after 6 AM, eyes huge and hair tousled.
"Whu?" he says, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth and pushing himself up. "Huh?"
Mark blinks at him, trying to make sense of the nonsensical thoughts running through his mind like disjointed lines of code. He notices that the third button of Eduardo's shirt has come undone, showing a glimpse of smooth skin, that his bottom lip is wet, that his hair is flat on one side, that his hands look fragile. He shakes his head, looks away, shrugs. He doesn't look back until Eduardo's sliding down into the other chair, stretching his arms above his head and yawning so wide that Mark can see his molars. He looks away again.
--
Eduardo's replacements come in just before 8 AM, two girls in black shirts that awww over him and ruffle his hair obnoxiously as if manning an empty coffee shop all night is some sort of accomplishment. One of them gives Mark an odd look and bends forward to whisper something into Eduardo's ear that makes him flush pink and give her a light shove. In Mark's mind she topples over and cracks her head open on the floor. Sometimes Mark's mind isn't a very nice place to hang out.
He packs up the computer and slings his bag across his back. He's just about to leave when Eduardo comes back and somehow he ends up waiting for Eduardo to grab his stuff as well.
"My next shift's Thursday," Eduardo says when they stop outside Kirkland.
"Okay," Mark responds.
He takes the stairs two at a time.
--
Okay isn't a promise, it's not even close. Okay doesn't mean 'Yeah, sure I'd love to see you again,' and it doesn't even imply 'Of course I'll be there'. Mark knows this because he has forgotten about enough promises in his life to be an expert on navigating the grey areas that don’t really promise anything. The areas that don’t have him falling out of a 36-hour coding tear to find someone looking at him with big hurt eyes and but you promised tumbling from their lips.
Okay doesn't mean anything so there's no reason for the way his stomach clenches with something remarkably close to guilt when he looks up from his computer to find that it's 2 AM.
Chris and Dustin are on the couch watching a Baywatch rerun, if the flashes of red and bouncing tits are anything to judge by. Empty Red Bull cans litter Mark's desk, crumpled wrappers are scattered on the floor, and a forgotten can of tuna stands open on the nightstand, absently left behind when a kitchen break turned into a bathroom break turned into code.
He scrubs at his eyes and cracks his neck, fingers poised to start typing again. He looks at the clock, 2:10.
Eduardo has really big eyes.
He didn't promise.
--
3 AM.
"Fuck this shit," he mutters, slamming his laptop shut and yanking the power cord out of the wall.
"What?" Dustin asks, blinking sleepily. He has all but collapsed sideways, body bent awkwardly at the waist.
"I'm heading down to the coffee shop," Mark says, which is more of an explanation than he usually gives and it should be more than enough, but Dustin pushes himself up to gape at him.
"What?"
"It's a good place to get work done," Chris fills in. "Quiet."
"No, seriously," Dustin says. "What the fuck?"
Mark ignores them both, not even bothering to grab his bag on the way out.
--
The coffee shop is almost empty when Mark arrives and Eduardo's slumped across the table, Mark's table, fast asleep with his face wedged into one of his textbooks. He doesn't wake up when the door falls shut behind Mark; he really is a horrible employee.
There's a girl sitting at table by the window, curled up in her chair with a book open on her lap.
"Don't wake him up," she says sharply when Mark's flip-flops scuff against the floor.
Mark stops and stares at her. It's Laugh Girl from the other night; he almost didn't recognize her without the heavy makeup and fuck-me heels.
"He works here," he points out.
"He's exhausted," she counters.
"Obviously," Mark says dryly. People don't fall asleep with their nose in a book unless they're really short on sleep. He should know.
"It's all your fault anyway," she says bitterly, pushing herself up from the chair and slamming the book shut. "Everything was perfect before you came along."
Mark stares after her as she throws the shiny black curtain of her hair back over her shoulder and leaves.
"I'm a little scared of her," Eduardo says, coming up behind Mark and putting a hand between his shoulder blades.
Mark shrugs the hand off. "She's weird," he says. "And ugly," he adds, even though she really isn't.
Eduardo snorts, as if he maybe he doesn't agree and Mark pushes past him to take his usual seat.
"I didn't promise anything," he says curtly.
Eduardo's face scrunches up. "Huh?"
Mark ignores him, diving straight into the one thing in his life that always made sense.
--
Eduardo is curious and he asks too many questions, about Mark's life and his friends and his schoolwork and Mark that Mark, for the most part, doesn't answer. He's not stupid (far from it), he knows that people tend to like him a lot less once they've had a conversation with him, and he kind of wants Eduardo to like him, or at least not hate him, which also happens once people have had a conversation with him.
"You really are the strong and silent type, aren't you?" Eduardo says after Mark has once again blatantly ignored one of his asinine questions. Why would anyone care what Mark was like in high school? Mark doesn't want to know what he was like in high school.
There are only so many things to say about weekends spent holed up in his room, toilet water dripping from his bangs, his mother's quiet worry, and the one time he almost got expelled for erasing every trace of the bullies' online records. They were never able to pin it on him, he was way too smart for that, but everyone knew and it didn't exactly make his life better.
Mark holds one of his arms up. "Chicken arms," he points out and Eduardo laughs so hard he almost falls off his chair. It wasn't even that funny, but whatever, Eduardo is weird.
--
"When's your next shift?" Mark asks when Eduardo starts gathering his textbooks, stuffing them into his bag with slow, almost sluggish movements.
Eduardo looks up. "I… uh…," He drops his bag on the floor. "Just a second."
He disappears into the kitchen, or what Mark presumes is the kitchen; he never bothered to explore.
"Saturday," Eduardo says when he comes back, out of breath. "My next shift's Saturday."
"I might not be here," Mark says, because that's better than 'okay' It's definitely not a promise.
"Oh." Eduardo looks… disappointed? Mark isn't very good at reading emotions; he never cared to look long enough at anyone's face to master it.
"I don't promise anything," he clarifies and for some reason that makes Eduardo smile, as if Mark did promise something.
Eduardo puts his hand on Mark's back as they walk out. Mark doesn't shrug it off.
--
"Who is she?" It's a non sequitur, even for Dustin, and Mark frowns at him, pulling his can of Red Bull closer when it looks as if Dustin might make a grab for it.
"Who is who, what?"
"At the coffee shop? Who is she?"
"There's no girl at the coffee shop." Mark scoffs, flinging his textbook to the side; he was only looking for an excuse anyway.
"Boy then," Dustin says, inching closer so that he's almost sitting on Mark's feet.
Mark pulls his feet away. "Eduardo?"
He realizes it's a mistake the moment the name drops from his lips, even before Dustin starts hyperventilating and squealing ohmygod, in this really high-pitched and annoying way.
"Chris, Chris, ohmygod, Chris you gotta hear this."
Chris shuffles in from the living room, rubbing sleep out of his eyes. "What?"
"Mark…" Dustin pauses for dramatic effect, or maybe because he's choking up, sometimes it's hard to tell with Dustin. "Is gay."
"Are you insane?" Mark asks, kicking Dustin's thigh. "I'm not gay."
Sexuality, in Mark's opinion, is something that happens to other people, just like the bubonic plague and herpes. Mark's in a committed relationship with his right hand and he likes it that way.
"You sure?" Chris asks, leaning against the doorpost.
"Of course I'm sure." Mark huffs, reaching for his textbook again, because, seriously, schoolwork beats the hell out of this conversation.
--
On Friday Mark eats lunch in the cafeteria with Chris and Dustin, and ends up arguing with Dustin, who should know better than to challenge Mark when it comes to code. He's just about to end the argument with one last acerbic remark when Eduardo shows up.
"Hey." Eduardo smiles and Mark completely forgets what he was about to say.
Logically, he knows that Eduardo is a student, which means that Mark could run into him anywhere, but in his mind Eduardo is tied to the coffee shop and seeing him at the cafeteria just seems wrong somehow.
"You actually talk?"
Mark blinks. "Yes," he says. He has in fact talked to Eduardo plenty of times but he refrains from pointing that out, he's getting better at this social clues thing.
"So it's just me you don't talk to."
"Yes."
"Oh." Eduardo's face falls and Mark always thought that was an expression invented by writers of fiction with a little too much time on their hands, but Eduardo's face actually falls, even his hair seems to droop and his mouth curls downwards. He nods a little, as if he made up his mind about something, and forces a smile, or maybe he doesn't force it but it looks forced and his eyes don’t light up.
"Okay," he says. "See you around, yeah?"
His gaze flickers to Chris and Dustin and then he's walking away. Mark is really not sure what just happened.
Chris cuffs him hard over the back of the back of the head and Dustin says, very seriously: "This is where you go after him."
Mark frowns, looking after Eduardo's retreating form. "Why?"
Chris throws his hands up. "Seriously, if you don't. I will."
--
Mark catches up with Eduardo in the main hall.
"Wardo," he says, the name tripping on his tongue and coming out wrong.
Eduardo stops and slowly turns around to face him, eyebrows drawn. "Mark."
Mark rock back on his heels and shoves his hands into his pocket. "I uh…."
He trails off, catching sight of their reflection in a nearby window, staring at the contrast. Eduardo's in black slacks and a grey shirt, unbuttoned at the neck, and a black suit jacket. He's slim but not skinny with golden skin and a narrow waist. Mark's hair is flat against his head, his hoodie too big and his skinny legs stick out of a pair of seasonally inappropriate cargo shorts. He's almost painfully pale.
Eduardo cranes his neck to see what he's looking at, smiling when he catches Mark's gaze in the reflection. Mark looks away.
"Okay, so here's the thing." Mark stuffs his hands deeper into his pockets. "You're weird."
Eduardo's eyebrows shoot up, but he looks more amused than surprised, maybe. It might just be his stupid mouth.
"People don't usually want me to talk to them, okay? It's... I'm not very good... at that."
"At talking?"
"At saying the right thing." Mark presses his lips together; he really doesn't like talking about himself. No one likes feeling inadequate and Mark even less so than most people.
"You've been doing pretty well so far," Eduardo says and yeah, he's definitely amused.
"Are you laughing at me?" Mark asks. He kind of wants to punch Eduardo in the arm, but he always hits too hard when he does that and he doesn't want to bruise Eduardo.
"With you," Eduardo corrects, and solves Mark's dilemma by bumping his shoulder.
Mark's mouth twitches and his stomach feels weird. "Don't say I didn't warn you," he says.
"About what?" Eduardo asks.
"Talking to me. If I hurt your feelings, it's all your fault."
Eduardo laughs, as if he thinks Mark is joking. Somehow Mark kind of wants to be.
--
Mark ends up going to a party on Friday night; well, he makes a brief appearance at one because he forgot his keycard and has to borrow Dustin's. It's your typical college party, loud and obnoxious, and it smells vaguely like week-old gym socks and spilled beer.
Mark has to push his way past a game of beer pong, something that looks like a clothed orgy (probably the dance floor even if it doesn't look like dancing to Mark) and a guy who passed out on the floor with a bucket over his head. Mark spares five seconds to see that his chest is in fact moving; he would (hopefully) feel horrible if the guy ended up being dead and he just stepped over him.
Dustin's tucked into a corner with Chris and Billy, quite obviously sulking into his beer. Mark almost changes his mind, he just knows he's going to get an earful of whatever woes Dustin is having and it's going to be painful and awkward and he won't know what to say. But if he's honest with himself it's not like he has anything better to do, no pressing schoolwork, no urgent coding needs. It probably won't hurt him to listen to Dustin's blabber for a few minutes; after all Dustin sometimes listens to him.
He changes his mind two minutes into Dustin's woes, but then it's too late to back out and Chris is giving him these looks, as if he's a proud parent or whatever. Mark inexpertly pats Dustin's back, almost making him choke on his beer, and makes some noises that are supposed to be consoling.
"I love you, Marky," Dustin says, wrapping an arm around Mark's neck and giving him a very uncomfortable hug. "You're a good friend."
Mark blinks uncertainly and pulls his lips into something he hopes at least resembles a smile. No one ever accused him of being a good friend before. He pats Dustin's back again, it seems like the right thing to do, and Dustin beams at him in a particularly watery way. Mark wonders if he's going to cry.
--
Eventually Mark does get the key card and magically enough he doesn't end up pissing anyone off; not even the girl that plants herself on his lap and tells him she loves his curls, shamelessly grabbing a handful of them. She does look a bit surprised when she ends up on the floor, but Dustin consoles her, so Mark thinks that maybe it'll be a happy ending for everyone.
He's just about to leave, one hand on the door knob and the other stuffed in his pocket, when he spots Eduardo. He's talking to Laugh Girl; one of her hands is curled around his arm, and as Mark watches she leans in to whisper something into Eduardo's ear. It looks intimate, familiar, and Mark's stomach twists. He really doesn't like Laugh Girl.
Eduardo shifts, as if he's about to turn in Mark's direction, and Mark yanks the door open, almost jumping out into the hallway with his heart lodged in his throat. Life, he thinks, would be so much easier if you could handle your personal relationships online.
--
On Saturday morning Mark wakes up with an idea. He finds a sketchbook buried underneath his textbooks for art history and scrawls out a quick sketch. The bare bones of a profile page, a few unrelated ideas, and something he decides to call The Wall.
He puts the sketchbook down and pulls up the Kirkland facebook on his computer, staring at the way the people he sometimes runs into in the halls decide to represent themselves. TheFacebook, he thinks, the entire social experience of college, but put online. His skin feels too tight and for a moment he can't even breathe. He's onto something.
--
The next time he looks up from the computer screen it's after midnight and he's dizzy with a combination of raging hunger and too long spent staring at characters climbing across the screen. TheFacebook is nothing but bones, pages upon pages of notes and code, ideas for how to tie it all together, how to make it work.
He staggers to his feet, every muscle in his body protesting, and his shoulders popping when he rolls them back. He shuffles into the living room where Chris and Dustin are piled up on the couch.
"Coffee," he grunts, as if they asked for an explanation, and grabs his hoodie from the hook beside the door.
His feet know the way to the coffee shop by now, carefully picking their way around snow drifts and spots of ice. He wraps his arms tight around his torso and tries not to think too much about what he's doing or why.
--
Eduardo's behind the counter when Mark walks in, serving a rowdy group of students who look as if they're headed for a party. Mark stares for a moment at the number of tanned bare legs displayed among the girls and decides that they're either crazy or from California. Probably both.
He nods at Eduardo and walks over to the usual table, sinking down into the comfy blue armchair he's beginning to think of as his. The coffee machine churns and hisses; Mark's head hurts.
He startles awake when Eduardo shakes his shoulder, big brown eyes blinking down at Mark with something that might be concern.
"Hey," Eduardo says. "Are you okay?"
"Are you dating the crazy girl?" Mark asks.
Relationship status, he thinks, reaching up to grab a pen from Eduardo's breast pocket and scribbling it down on the back of his hand.
"Christy?" Eduardo asks, frowning. "She's just a friend." He catches Mark's hand and turns it over to study the scribble. "Relationship status?" he asks.
Mark stares at Eduardo’s long golden fingers against his skin. Eduardo's hands are warm and soft, nails short and well kept. He wonders if Eduardo gets manicures.
He tells Eduardo about TheFacebook, words coming out in a rushed, excited tumble. He doesn't think he makes the idea justice, but Eduardo smiles at him, as if he's brilliant, and Mark trails off into a confused mumble, staring up at Eduardo's pretty face.
"Did you eat today?" Eduardo asks. He's still holding Mark's cold hand between both of his.
Mark shakes his head.
"I'll make you something."
--
Eduardo returns to his spot behind the counter and another group swarms in. Mark grabs a discarded napkin; he still has the pen.
Relationship status:, he writes. Then, Single. Underneath he scribbles, Interested in:. He taps the back of the pen against the table and cranes his neck to look at Eduardo, taking in the long line of his throat, the swoop of his hair, the intricate curve of his mouth and the way his eyes light up when he smiles.
Mark swallows, mouth suddenly dry. Men, he writes.
--
Eduardo brings back a huge plate of pasta and big cup of coffee, sinking down into the chair opposite Mark, as if Mark might not eat if Eduardo isn't there to watch him. Mark's mouth waters and he shoves his mouth full of too-hot food, flushing when Eduardo laughs at his sputter.
"Shut up," he mutters, taking a little more care with the second bite.
He eats mostly in silence, trying to not dwell on the fact that he just had some kind of sexual epiphany about four years too late. (Mark's not certain but he thinks that most people realize that they're gay around the time they're fifteen and popping boners looking at ice cream. He could ask Chris, but he's pretty sure he'd rather drown himself in a bucket of piss.)
"Good?" Eduardo asks when Mark pushes the empty plate away and leans back with a groan.
"Amazing," Mark answers, even though he has no idea what he just ate.
"Want some pie?"
Mark pats the swell of his stomach. "Yes, please," he says.
--
It's cherry pie, served warm with a mountain of ice cream and whipped cream. It might be the best thing Mark's ever eaten and he mumbles as much with his lips wrapped around the spoon. Eduardo flushes, and looks away, the tips of his ears turning pink. He really is stupidly attractive.
--
"So… uh… when's your next shift?" Mark asks, when dawn starts creeping across the floor.
Eduardo scrubs a hand over the back of his neck and ducks his chin. "I… uh… I don't have a next shift." His ears turn pink.
"They fired you?" Mark asks. He's not surprised; while Eduardo is clever, he's not a very good barista, and he keeps stealing food to feed Mark.
"Uh… no… I… I don't actually work here."
Mark raises his eyebrows. If Eduardo doesn't work here he's the best imposter ever, right down to the apron and the awesome customer service.
"I mean, obviously I work here right now, but I was just helping a friend out of a tight spot. She… uh… she needs this job and they wouldn't give her time off if she couldn't find someone to take her shifts so…," Eduardo shrugs and blushes some more.
"Great," Mark mutters, stabbing a finger at his napkin. "So you're a saint too."
Someone-who-looks-like-Eduardo dating someone-who-looks-like-Mark vaguely falls within the realm of possibility. Mark might be deathly pale and completely lacking anything that resembles style, but he has pretty good features and his body isn't repulsive. He's not a golden god, obviously, but it's possible. Hot guys have ugly girlfriends all the time.
Eduardo, the saint, dating Mark, the social leper, is a lot less likely. Eduardo is so effortlessly nice, and attentive, and nice. Mark isn't any of those things and while he might be willing to try it out, it's not like he's going to learn how to not be offensive within the next twenty-four hours, even if he asks Chris to give him a crash course.
"I'm not a saint," Eduardo says, laughing. "My thoughts are way too dirty for that."
Mark flushes, and fidgets, and wonders if Eduardo will be able to see his boner through the table. Eduardo probably doesn't have dirty thoughts about him anyway; Mark knows he's not exactly wet dream material.
"I… uh… I should head back to the dorm," Mark says.
"Oh, of course," Eduardo says. "I… uh… yeah."
Mark scribbles down his dorm number on a napkin before he can talk himself out of it.
"You should come by," he says, pushing the napkin across the table. "Sometime."
Eduardo flushes and worries at his lower lip in a way that is certifiably adorable. "Okay," he says, folding the napkin up and stuffing it into his pocket. "I will. Uh… tomorrow?"
"Sure," Mark says.
Eduardo laughs and produces a slip of paper, writing something down on it with his spare pen. "Here," he says.
It's his phone number and Mark feels kind of dumb for not thinking of that.
"Thanks," he says, slipping the note into his pocket. "So… uh… tomorrow?"
"Okay."
Mark wonders if all social interactions are this awkward or if he's just special.
--
It's not until Mark's halfway back to the dorm that he realizes what else was written in the napkin he gave Eduardo. He trips over his feet and nearly brains himself on the sidewalk, scrambling to his feet with a hectic flush rising in his cheeks. What's he supposed to do now?
Chris and Dustin are, of course, entirely unhelpful. Dustin runs around singing I told you so and Chris laughs so hard he turns blue. Mark locks himself in his room and codes.
--
Mark surfaces eight hours later, bleary-eyed and annoyed, because someone's banging on the door. The room's empty - he vaguely recalls Chris saying shouting something about going out - and as he shuffles across the floor he designs a quick plan for how to kill the intruder and put the blame on Dustin.
He yanks the door open, his best glare firmly in place, and ends up eye to throat with Eduardo. Mark blinks, and flushes, and sways a little on his feet. Eduardo's holding a greasy paper bag and a six-pack of beer, shifting his weight from foot to foot.
"Hey," he says. "I… uh… wasn't sure if tomorrow was tomorrow or later today so I… uh…"
Eduardo trails off, looking uncertain and Mark steps aside to let him in.
"Uhm… welcome," Mark says.
His stomach grumbles at the sight of food and he realizes he hasn't eaten since the cherry pie. He also hasn't slept in close to thirty-six hours, but that's usually less of a problem. He doesn't remember about the note until he's pushed Eduardo down on the couch and ventured into the kitchenette to look for clean plates.
"Fuck," he mutters, banging his forehead against the cupboards.
"You okay?" Eduardo calls from the living room.
Mark doesn't bother to answer. There's barely enough room to stand in the kitchen, the likelihood of him sustaining serious injury while looking for plates is less than zero. Of course Eduardo doesn't understand, because he turns up to hover in the doorway, cutting off the light falling in from the living room.
"Let me help," he says.
There's a huge pile of dirty dishes in the sink, take-out containers all over the counter, and something blue and possibly scaly lives in the fridge. Somehow Eduardo ends up cleaning, with his shirt sleeves pushed up above his elbows and soap studs on his skin, while Mark naps on the couch. Mark doesn't know how that happened either.
--
Mark wakes up to the sound of laughter, mingled laughter, Eduardo's and Dustin's. He sits up straight, blinking rapidly. Eduardo and Dustin are cleaning out the fridge, sleeves rolled up and piles of trash bags around them on the floor. Mark scrubs a hand over his eyes, but they're still there when looks up again.
"What the fuck?" he says faintly, letting himself drop back against the cushions.
"Mark, seriously," Chris hisses, reaching over from the armchair to clutch at Mark's arm. "If you don't marry him, I will."
Mark shrugs his arm off and glares. "We're not dating," he mutters.
"He's cleaning your kitchen," Chris hisses, doing weird things with his eyes, as if he actually expects Mark to pick up on non-verbal communication.
"Maybe he's a stickler for cleanliness," Mark hisses back.
"Then what on earth is he doing with you?" Chris asks.
It's a valid question without a satisfactory answer.
--
It turns out to be a good night, if weird, all four of them eating reheated Chinese food on sparkly clean plates. Eduardo sits next to Mark on the couch, sleeves still pushed up, and every now and then Mark finds himself staring at the dusting of hair covering his muscled forearms. They talk about school, and people, and books, and TV and a million other things that Mark doesn't normally talk about, but that are somehow made interesting by Eduardo's input.
"So why business?" Chris asks, leaning back in the armchair and eyeing Eduardo in a way that Mark really isn't comfortable with.
Eduardo shrugs. "Because I'm good at it."
Mark doesn't think that's the full story and surprisingly he finds that he wants to know the rest. It's like Eduardo is a program and Mark wants to break him up into chunks of code to understand how it all fits together.
--
Mark walks Eduardo downstairs when it's time for him to leave, hands stuffed deep into his pockets and shoulders hunched.
"Thanks for the food," he says. "And uhm… the cleaning."
"No problem," Eduardo answers, smiling. He's pulled a jacket over his shirt and Mark misses the sight of his forearms.
"So… uh… about that note I gave you," Mark says, focusing very intently on the floor. "It wasn't… I mean… I wasn't hitting on you. It was just an idea. For TheFacebook."
"Oh," Eduardo says, and Mark can't tell if he's relieved or disappointed.
Eduardo rocks back on his heels and Mark smiles stupidly and the silence stretches out.
"So," Mark starts, biting down on his lower lip. (How do people do this? How do they make friends with people who are not forced to spend time in their company?) "You're welcome to stop by anytime," he finishes lamely.
"Okay," Eduardo says and he smiles a whole lot wider than the situation calls for. Mark hopes that means he'll be coming back.
"I mean the bathroom's pretty nasty…"
Eduardo laughs and squeezes Mark's shoulder and Mark feels warm inside for hours afterwards.
--
Mark throws himself head first into building TheFacebook, only pulling himself away from the computer for class, food and occasionally sleep. He enrolls Dustin to help him code and appoints Chris his PR man, but in reality there probably wouldn't even be a site without Eduardo.
Eduardo is the cog that makes the machinery work; he makes sure Mark sleeps, eats, and drinks something that isn't beer, Red Bull, or coffee. He's the only one that can pull Mark out of a coding tear, hands gentle as he drags Mark from the computer to bed, or put something to eat into his hands. His smile is fond but exasperated as he makes Mark drink water and orange juice, and occasionally take a vitamin supplement, or a piece of fruit.
When Mark worries about financing, Eduardo puts up the funds. When Mark runs into a problem, Eduardo listens, for hours if he has to, until Mark runs out of words and the solution presents itself. Eduardo doesn't know shit about code, but he understands people in a way that Mark never did, and between the two of them TheFacebook grows from a simple idea to a blue and white reality.
--
Mark can easily do forty-eight hours with nothing but bathroom breaks, Eduardo draws the line at twenty-four.
"Okay," he says now, sitting cross-legged at the edge of Mark's bed. "It's break time."
Mark ignores him, because sometimes it works.
"Come on." Eduardo sounds immensely cheerful. "Let's go outside."
That gets Mark's attention; he pulls his eyes away from the screen and blinks blearily at the window. "It's night," he points out.
"Doesn't mean some fresh air won't do you good."
Mark considers this, staring at the lines of code running down his screen. "You know I'm not going to get scurvy, right?"
"Not on my watch, that's true," Eduardo answers, and somehow Mark lets himself be pulled away from the blinking cursor.
--
"See, this is nice," Eduardo says. He's holding a cup of steaming coffee between his hands, smiling at Mark over the rim.
Mark grunts in response, sipping from his own cup. The night is chilly, but the coffee is warm and Eduardo is pressed up all along his side, some of his overzealous body heat seeping into Mark's cold skin.
"It's almost done," Mark says, mostly to stop himself from saying something that will give too much away. He's getting really good at having conversations around the things he doesn't want to admit.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
"That's awesome."
Eduardo slings an arm around Mark's shoulders in an awkward half hug. Mark doesn't protest when he leaves it there.
"So how much longer?" Eduardo asks.
Mark shrugs. "A week maybe," he says. "Two at most."
"Awesome," Eduardo says again.
Mark leans his head against Eduardo's shoulder, just a little bit.
--
Mark finds a typo in Dustin's code when the site is almost done and he just blows up. He doesn't normally show a lot of emotion and he doesn't ever shout, but he just loses it, pouring all of his frustration and anger and stress into one continuous string of curse words and accusations that actually makes Dustin duck for cover.
"That's enough," Eduardo's voice cuts through the rage and Mark spins around to face him.
"He… he…"
"I said, that's enough," Eduardo repeats.
Mark swallows. Eduardo looks serious, calm but deadly serious, and it feels as if he just stabbed Mark in the back. He's supposed to be Mark's friend, he's supposed to take Mark's side, he's not supposed to show up dressed in his evening finest and defend Dustin when Mark needs him so very much. When Mark… Mark…
Mark doesn't even bother to grab a shirt before he runs.
--
Eduardo catches up with him halfway across campus. Mark's stopped running by then, walking with his head ducked low and his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his jeans.
"You're being ridiculous," Eduardo says.
He's out of breath and his hair is a disorderly mess. Mark looks away and keeps on walking.
"Come on." Eduardo holds out Mark's jacket. "At least put this on."
Mark ignores him. He kind of wants to hit Eduardo in the face, or grab his ears and kiss him, and he's not going to do either of those. He's just going to keep on walking until his skin feels as if it fits him right again.
Mark had a best friend in middle school, Ben. They were next door neighbors and from kindergarten through middle school they did everything together. Then high school happened and on the second day Joe Miller grabbed Mark by the scruff of his neck and dunked his head into a toilet. When Mark stumbled out of the bathroom, soaking wet and bleeding from a cut above his eye, Ben was the first one to point and laugh.
Mark kind of feels like that now.
Except not at all.
--
"You're not going to get rid of me, you know," Eduardo says after five minutes spent walking in silence.
Mark's teeth are clattering and he's pretty sure there's actual frost forming in his hair. He keeps on walking.
--
"Why do you have to be so goddamned difficult?" Eduardo snarls, and before Mark's had a chance to move away, Eduardo has grabbed his arm and is dragging him towards the doors to Eduardo’s dorm complex. Mark hadn't even noticed they were in the vicinity and now he's halfway up the stairs.
He's too cold and too miserable to protest, not even trying to wrench his arm out of Eduardo's punishing grip even though he's fairly sure he could.
--
NEXT
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