Fic: we were fated to pretend (1/2)
Title: we were fated to pretend
Rating: R
Pairing: Mark/Eduardo
Word Count: 13,687
Summary: Eduardo lives by simple rules: he only fucks the people he probably won’t see, definitely won’t know. If he owes them nothing, has no connection, it can’t get complicated, it can’t become too much. And Mark, well: Mark was already complicated, Mark was his best friend. Mark, for all that it killed him, was off limits.
Except they're not really friends, anymore, are they?
Spoilers for The Social Network (2010).
Disclaimer: I own nothing but the plot. The characters and situations mentioned herein are inspired by the fictional actor portrayals set forth in the 2010 film The Social Network; thus, they are in no way connected to, nor do they reflect upon, any actual persons or situations of the same or similar name. tl;dr: This is NOT RPF. Credit to MGMT for the title.
Author’s Notes: Overdue anon-fill from the kinkmeme. Heads-up for rampant chronological shifts.
we were fated to pretend
Part one
-----------------------------------
In the moment, Eduardo doesn’t think twice about it. He’s not in a panic, nor is he uneasy -- if anything, this is the one thing that he knows, the one thing he can apply across circumstances and be fairly fucking certain of the outcome. In the moment, Eduardo is quiet, careful as he stands, dresses, gathers his things in the dark. In the moment, he considers leaving a note on the hotel stationary, asking if they can catch lunch sometime, but he thinks better of it: that’s what texting, what e-mail -- for fuck’s sake, what Facebook is for.
He zips his fly and eases the door closed behind him, turns in his keycard for the room, leaves the spare on the nightstand, and calls a cab. He has a flight to catch.
To be honest, aside from a little nagging ache that’s mostly nostalgia and a little bit of misplaced hope for something unnameable, Eduardo doesn’t think twice about leaving Mark to wake up by himself the next morning, with just cologne-scented sheets and a tied-off rubber in the trash to greet him. He doesn’t question it.
Which isn’t an issue, really -- doesn’t raise any red flags -- because this isn’t really new. This is what Eduardo does with people who he wants to sleep with, who aren’t his friends.
And Mark, well, Eduardo isn’t sure what Mark is, these days, but Mark is not his friend.
He tips the cabbie particularly well when they arrive at Departures, and frankly, he’s kind of looking forward to going home.
He sleeps the whole ten hours until they land for his connection; and it’s nice, the way that his jacket smells like college, like a night spent with Mark sitting next to him.
In the moment, it’s really nice.
_______________________________
In the beginning, Eduardo never meant for it to be anything, for them to be anything. He never even actually meant to meet Mark Zuckerberg in the first place.
Maybe it’s fitting, the way they do meet. It’s past midnight and he’s leaving Eliot House -- there’s snow on the ground, just a dusting, but it’s fucking freezing and Eduardo couldn’t find his left shoe, or either of his goddamned socks in the chick’s dorm room before he bailed, and he has an exam in the morning. He needs to get some sleep.
And that’s basically how he ends up shuffling across the frost-slick pavement in the lamplight, barefoot. That’s basically how he even ends up speaking to Mark, really, that first time.
They cross paths, though not so close at hand that they’re obligated to acknowledge one another. As a matter of fact, Eduardo hadn’t planned on even looking up from where he’d trained his gaze on the ground before him, making sure not to step on anything hazardous. It’s the guy whose route he’s intersecting where the walkways come together that makes a point of anything, that pauses and stares and opens his fucking mouth.
So really, if any of it is anyone’s fault: in the beginning, it’s probably Mark’s.
“And people give me shit for wearing sandals in the winter,” the guy looks at him, kind of snorts, but his tone is bland, dry. Eduardo doesn’t know what to think of it.
Eduardo knows exactly what to think of the way the guy’s lips bow, full and red in the cold; the way his hair shines with condensation, with little flecks of white as they fall. Eduardo knows exactly what he thinks of that.
“Yeah, well,” Eduardo shrugs, clears his throat, tries not to get distracted by imagining this guy naked -- tries not to think too much on how he’s already more aroused by that idle thought than he’d been with the chick from Eliot. And it’s even not intentional that the two of them walk in the same direction, fall into step but don’t really speak.
It’s not intentional -- not any of it. It honestly just happens.
“Mark!” Eduardo hears it suddenly, a muted echo from an open window at the top of god-know-which-dorm-because be real, there are too many goddamn freshmen buildings with too many weird-ass names-and the guy next to him glances up automatically-it’s strike one, really, learning his name. Mark.
“Where the fuck have you been? We’ve been waiting on the beer for a fucking hour, man,” and the guy slams the window shut as Mark adjusts the shoulder strap of his backpack and bounds up the stairs, flip-flops smacking the steps, and just before he swipes into the building, he turns, and he smirks.
“Try not to get frostbit, yeah?” And then, he’s gone.
And the thing is: there were rules then, as there are rules now, and Eduardo would have snapped in two if he didn’t stick by them, if he tried to bend them. And from that first encounter, he’d never had any intention of getting to know this Mark, of making nice with him or hanging out on his couch with a bottle of Beck’s. In the beginning, Eduardo really just wanted to bed the pale bastard with the big blue eyes. Hell: if he’s honest, Eduardo failed a reading quiz in his modern literature class that very next afternoon, mostly because he was daydreaming about sucking Mark’s dick.
So yeah. The initial plan -- if it could even be called a plan -- was just to fuck pretty-Mark-from-the-Yard and move on.
Eduardo wonders sometimes, in the now, if that would have been better, really, in the long run.
Not that he’ll ever know.
_______________________________
After the first time, Eduardo finds that pretty-Mark-from-the-Yard’s actually kind of an enigma, and really fucking hard to track down. Eduardo tries not to think too much on it.
He goes into the city and hooks up with a guy from Tufts -- Eduardo knows this because he’s wearing a shirt that says so. It’s a good enough night, and Eduardo’s pleasantly buzzed from the drinks and the sex when he stumbles back to College Avenue to catch the bus; drunk enough that he giggles to himself in his seat at the thought that he probably, definitely might have cleaned himself off against the guy’s tee, right where it read Pax et Lux. Fucking people from Tufts.
He nearly misses his goddamned stop.
But yeah, so: after the first time, Eduardo basically gives pretty-Mark up as a lost cause -- great material for jacking off in his bed, but nothing Eduardo’s going to get to tap any time soon. It’s fine.
It’ll be fine.
_______________________________
It’s always been kind of futile, really, trying to ignore the way he used to feel -- might still feel, might learn how to feel again -- about Mark. He had rules, he knew Mark was off limits, but it never stopped him from being jealous, from coveting what he couldn’t have.
But now, the rules were shot to hell. Now, Eduardo knows what Mark looks like breathless, flushed, hard against Eduardo’s thigh, his hip, trapped between them and straining, leaking at the tip -- Eduardo knows the kind of sounds Mark makes, knows what it’s like to see Mark spread open and unhinged.
Eduardo has what he’s always wanted, and fuck, but it’s not enough.
He probably should have known it wouldn’t be, really. But admittedly, Eduardo’s perspective is a little bit shot to hell these days, after everything.
He lays-over in Tokyo. He can’t stop himself from tapping out the text to Mark’s number as soon as the cabin door opens.
i’ll be in sf next month. dinner?
The fact is that he has no idea what the fuck he’s doing. This isn’t how he functions, this isn’t what he knows. Christy was the closest he ever got to a functioning relationship in which he knew things about his partner, in which he gave anything meaningful of himself, left anything of himself behind when he walked away. And that ended so fucking well.
And then, Jesus; maybe there hadn’t been sex involved before, but look at how he and Mark had ended, that first time.
But Eduardo knows what it feels like inside Mark, now -- what it feels like when it’s Mark’s breath that cools the sweat between his collarbones. He knows the shape that Mark’s teeth leave in his bottom lip, the feel of his nails gripping tight against his shoulder blades.
And it’s always been kind of futile, ignoring how Mark gets to him, what Mark does to him. More than that, though -- ignoring Mark isn’t something Eduardo thinks he wants, anymore.
He knows how Mark fucking tastes.
So Eduardo presses ‘send’ and tries not to worry. It’s not like things can get more fucked up this time than the last.
_______________________________
Five weeks later -- not that he’s counting -- Eduardo hooks up with some jock who rows mediocre crew. It’s a quick fumble in between buildings, the rush of maybe being seen, maybe getting caught, and it makes Eduardo come down the guy’s mouth harder than he has in a long fucking time. He watches, sweaty and spent in the cool early-evening air, as the crew-boy struggles to swallow it all, lets a little spill out on his lips.
It’s hot.
But then crew-boy kind of ruins it, tells Eduardo that he’s on his way to a party for his fraternity. He kind of ruins it, when he asks Eduardo if he wants to come with.
And Eduardo -- that’s not how this works. That’s not what he does. That’s attachment and commitment -- that’s friendship or something close enough to resemble, close enough to count.
Eduardo doesn’t do that.
So he pulls some bullshit about having his own Greek commitments -- which he does, actually, but he wasn’t planning on going -- and smiles, says see you around like he might mean it, he’s learned how to make it convincing, while keeping it from sounding like a promise, and he walks quickly away to where he knows his Eta Psi chapter’s holding... something. Eduardo doesn’t even know what.
So he walks in, and he’s a little bit blinded by flashing strobes and a fucking glitter ball spinning from the celling, scattering the light, and he almost walks back out, almost says screw it, but then. But then.
Five weeks later -- and yes, okay, yes, he was counting, he’s been counting, Eduardo notices shit like that, so fucking sue him -- Eduardo catches the mop of curly hair and the condescending smirk that he’s been damn-near fantasizing about, right across the room at AEPi’s Disco Night.
He knew he’d joined the frat for a reason.
_______________________________
Within the larger metropolitan Boston area, there are fifty-four institutions of higher learning. Some of Eduardo’s roommates from freshman year made a bet over too much vodka that together, over their four years of undergrad, they could fuck their way through at least one student from each of those schools.
At the time, Eduardo had thought it juvenile and objectifying. He’d taken one last shot and gone to sleep.
In the now, however, as he stares up at the ceiling in some ratty fucking apartment in Quincy, long past the last run on the Red Line, he thinks maybe he’s already managed what those wasted guys in his suite had been laughing about -- the ENC seal on the girl’s binder is hard to miss. Maybe he’s already managed it without even trying.
Eduardo doesn’t remember any of their names.
He doesn’t know how he feels about that.
_______________________________
He’s got a meeting to run to, shortly after he touches down at Changi -- there’s a driver waiting to take him to The InterContinental for a face-to-face with a couple of guys he’s been in contact with over the phone -- they’ve got a pretty solid idea about how to capitalize on the rise of real-time video chatting using social media outlets. It has potential. Eduardo should be excited about this.
And he was. He was. Except that now, he can’t even focus in on the meeting, on what they’ll be discussing, on what they have to address and what he has to learn about these potential clients, because all he can do is run his thumb across the scroll-pad on his Blackberry, waking the screen, checking for a message notification in the right mailbox -- the right message.
It’s pathetic.
Then again, he probably shouldn’t have expected any less; but Eduardo -- he’s not always the type of person who learns everything he should from the past, who picks up all the nuances and puts them together in a way that makes sense.
Either way, though: he keeps it up, glances too often at his phone, through the whole fucking meeting. If his soon-to-be clients notice, nothing is said.
And that’s who Eduardo is, now. Eduardo is the man who can look at his goddamned phone the whole time someone is speaking, and no one will say a fucking word.
Apparently, though, Eduardo is also the man whose stomach feels wrong, who declines refreshments and struggles to keep his airplane meal down as he wonders, wonders and waits for the light on his phone to blink the right color, in the right sequence -- the right person trying to get ahold of him.
And that was never the man Eduardo wanted to be. Never.
Considering his track record, though, where Mark is concerned: maybe he never had a choice, never really had a chance in hell.
_______________________________
Eduardo thinks too much.
He thought too much as a kid, when he was afraid of the beach because he accidentally caught a story on the news about hypodermic needles in the sand, and thought he was going to step on one and die. He thought too much as a teenager, when it took forever to get him behind the wheel of a car because he was scared to fucking death of hitting a pedestrian. Eduardo thought too much about college, deliberating and making pro-and-con lists for every school that sent him an acceptance letter, made himself sick with it until his father decided on Harvard for him, until the decision was taken out of his hands.
Eduardo thought too much the first time he had sex, heart pounding and mouth dry and the girl under him looking too small, too innocent, and he didn’t even know her, only met her at orientation the day before -- he didn’t mean to leave, to hurt anyone, and he felt guilty, he feels so fucking guilty because that’s not him, that’s not the person he is, but he runs as soon as she’s asleep.
He doesn’t see her afterward, and it’s both a blessing and a lesson, wrapped up into one.
Because it’s hard to feel guilty about things in the abstract. The adage wasn’t lying: out of sight, out of mind.
That’s how it starts, really. That’s how it starts.
The rules were for his own good, to keep him from having to think. He put them there to keep himself sane. He only fucks the people he probably won’t see, definitely won’t know. If he owes them nothing, has no connection, it can’t get complicated, it can’t become too much. If there’s nothing there to consider in the first place, he can’t think about it too much, can’t invest in it, can’t hold on and make it hard.
It’s not until later that it strikes him, that he even ponders what it means: because he only fucks strangers on a sliding scale -- somewhere between I vaguely recognize you but I don’t know your name to I’ve never seen you in my life, and after tonight, I probably never will again -- and there are a lot of them. There are so many strangers, so many people he sleeps with and leaves cold in the night, that it almost makes him wonder how many friends he has, how few people are off limits, how few the rules apply to at all.
By then, though, he’s taught himself how not to think about it, how to just let it go.
And so he does. He lets it go.
_______________________________
“I don’t think those really fit the theme of the evening,” Eduardo says, smooth and awkward at the very same time, he can feel it all warring in the way he smirks, walks up behind Mark and leans in, not too close but close enough to be heard over the music, but far enough that when Mark turns -- curious and distrustful and caught off-guard as Eduardo keeps his half-grin and nods down at Mark’s very un-disco flip-flops -- they don’t run into each other, they don’t touch.
It takes a moment, but recognition dawns, and something changes in Mark’s expression as he sizes Eduardo up, sweeps him bottom to top with his eyes -- something changes, and it makes Eduardo’s blood feel hot, thick in his veins. “Well, at least you’re wearing shoes,” Mark shoots back, biting and brilliant and fuck, this kid’s hot. “That’s a step up.”
Five weeks feels like forever when he hears that voice, hears it and lets it settle in his gut -- Eduardo doesn’t want to take another five weeks before he sees Mark again.
So he chuckles, nods, and they both pull on beers they’re too young to drink and make small talk, say nothing, just speak for the sake of it. Mark sneers at a few girls trying to do the Robot, or the Hustle, or something else that Eduardo doesn’t know much about, except that these girls are definitely doing it wrong, so he adds in for good measure:
“That’s one thing about Asian chicks. Can’t dance to save their lives.”
Mark chuckles, and it sounds like he hates it, like he can’t stand the fact that he’s laughing, but he is anyway, doesn’t stop it -- maybe can’t. Eduardo feels like the king of the fucking world, in that moment.
The party itself sucks, as most of them do, and it’s not like Eduardo can expect anyone to want to spend more time there than they have to, but it ends too quick, it’s over too soon, and sure -- all Eduardo’s done over the course of the slightly-more-than-twenty minutes that he’s been standing near Mark at all is just to simply soak up the monotone buzz of his voice, but still.
Still.
“I’m leaving,” Mark announces between songs, in the segue from the Bee Gees into Sister Sledge; “the lights give me migraines,” and that’s that, basically.
“Yeah,” Eduardo says, drains the dregs from his bottle and swallows; “catch you around, then?” He tries not to sound hopeful
“More likely than not,” and Mark doesn’t sound like he cares much one way or the other, but Mark also seems like the kind of person where maybe it says something, means something, that he said anything at all.
And Eduardo doesn’t follow him as he walks away, doesn’t ask if Mark wants to come back to his -- Eduardo doesn’t do what he normally does, doesn’t do what he always does when he’s with someone he really wants, and that was probably the first real clue, the first mistake.
It was the first step toward the inevitable, and Eduardo should have known better. Eduardo should have seen.
But he didn’t, he doesn’t: all he knows is that when Mark walks away, he grins, just a little -- not enough to notice on its own, only enough that Eduardo can tell in comparison, that he can see because it’s brighter than the expression that preceded it.
Eduardo jacks off that night, thinking about smiles that aren’t really smiles, and he doesn’t even suspect what’s to come, what’s in store.
He just slips off into the kind of dreams no one remembers, the sort you just know were kind of nice.
_______________________________
Eduardo should be exhausted. First Class or not, sleeping in a plane doesn’t amount to actual rest. Plus he’s been out all day, driving and meeting and arranging.
And looking at his stupid fucking phone.
So he should be exhausted, he should be tired and it shouldn’t even take any effort at all to fall asleep as he settles into his bed. It shouldn’t.
So of course, it does.
Because there’s so much in his head -- there’s always so much in his head, but he’s gotten better at compartmentalizing, and putting the pressing things in the front and leaving everything else to clutter up the back; and it’s all he can do just then, he can’t even stop it: pulse loud in his ears, skin tight around his joints, eyes trained on the ceiling above him, Eduardo can’t help but remember -- can’t help but think about mornings when he fell asleep on the couch at Kirkland, when someone would leave him a cup of coffee on the counter and the only way he knew for sure when it was Mark was the fact that Mark was the only one who knew how he liked his coffee, who made it taste close to right; can’t help thinking about ice below his bare feet and a curious gaze on the Yard, or the first time someone called him Wardo, or nights in his dorm room, hand on his dick, curly hair and sharp blue eyes on his mind. He can’t help but think about the way his chest ached, viscerally, every day of the lawsuits, every day he thought about a world where Mark wasn’t around, wasn’t near him, feared the worst before he knew he could survive, could adapt, could move on.
Eduardo can’t help but think.
So yeah -- Eduardo thinks too fucking much, still; whatever. It’s a character flaw. He deals with it.
He doesn’t turn his phone on silent as he drifts between waking and sleeping for the rest of the night, keeps the ringer on.
Just in case.
_______________________________
When he gets back to campus late, Eduardo likes to sit up on the little pillars, the edge-points outside of Widener: perched on high, legs sprawled out, cool concrete at his back -- he has to dry clean the fuck out of the whole damn suit when he’s done, but whatever.
It’s good, you know? It’s good to unwind after a quick fuck, after running up to Waltham or banging a grad student at Suffolk Law. It’s good to just breathe in the night air and watch the sky and think about everything and nothing until his lungs hurt, because the breeze is cool and damp and he can hear the traffic and the rustling leaves and the beat of his own goddamned heart like it’s a part of this place, like he fits here, finally, like he makes sense in this city, this space.
It’s the only time he ever feels that way. He soaks it in as best he can.
“What are you doing?” He hears the question from below him, adds up the pieces of it before he sits up: he picks apart the sound of rubberized sandal-soles hitting against stone, the sharp tone, the slick intake of breath, and his heartbeat’s not a part of this place, this campus, this city anymore, it reasserts itself as something outside of all that, fierce beneath his collarbone as he breathes out, heavy and shaky and slow. He breathes out, but he doesn’t sit up.
“Watching,” he answers, and his voice is thin, low, wisps around on the wind and he doesn’t think Mark even hears him, standing where he is below, all those steps, those feet down to the ground -- Mark doesn’t pay that close attention.
“What?” Mark asks, and yeah: Mark doesn’t pay attention to most things.
“Hmm?”
“What are you watching?” And now the feet, the footsteps: they’re scraping on the stairs, they’re climbing, coming close, and now Eduardo’s pulse beats into that, catches up, slows in time with the footfalls, the shuffle on the stone: even the changes in breathing that come with the exertion of all those goddamned stairs.
The pulse finds a place, there. In the sounds that Mark makes.
Jesus fucking Christ.
“I’m watching paint dry,” Eduardo quips, more aloof than he is, than he has been from the start, but that’s the game he has to play, that’s the game he knows. “What the fuck do you think I’m watching?”
He doesn’t, he can’t look over when Mark sits, settles, stretches out next to him, too close and too far all at once.
“It’s overcast,” Mark comments, flat, and Eduardo doesn’t know what to make of this, of any of this. Of Mark. Of the hour. Of the place, and the time. The fact that Mark stopped. That Mark came up. With him.
Mark doesn’t strike him as the type who comes anywhere, really. For anyone.
“Clouds move, moron,” Eduardo tells him, fondly; they do then, as if to prove his point, and the stars are visible for a moment, just above the streetlights. Eduardo looks, then, because he’s seen the sky enough times. There’s something better, here, next to him.
And it is, it’s better: Mark’s staring up, and his eyelashes are longer than Eduardo would have guessed: maybe it’s the angle, or the shadows in the night, but he sees them here, and he’s mesmerized. He’s mesmerized by the curve of Mark’s pale cheek, the way there are freckles there, just a few; by the spill of his curls around the bulk of the hood on his sweatshirt. Mark’s staring up, and Eduardo’s staring over, and if his eyes look down, he can watch Mark’s chest rise and fall, buried under the hoodie, but Eduardo can imagine the chest beneath, the light muscling, just like he’s envisioned, and it’s still fucking winter, because it’s winter for a really long time in New England, but Eduardo feels warm, suddenly, underneath the chill.
And the guy he slept with tonight, just hours before: the guy was all strong hands and firm abs, lean limbs, and Eduardo can feel the burn in his thighs from the third, the fourth time they went at it before Eduardo took his leave; it was great. It was quick and frantic and full and Eduardo felt sated afterward, felt loose and boneless and fucking awesome in the aftermath. It was really good sex, plain and simple, and Eduardo? He would know.
It was really good sex, and yet, it doesn’t have anything on this, right here.
_______________________________
He jerks, sits up straight, and his heart’s fit to pound out of his chest, or maybe just burst between the ribs, and he’s sweating at the palms, clutching at the sheets and finding the handheld that’s still sitting on his mattress, runs it beneath shaking fingers as he gets a grip on himself, as he realizes: a dream. Just a dream.
He hasn’t dreamt of then, of before and the rush of it, the feel of any of it: he’s tried and failed at not thinking about it at all for so goddamned long -- it’s strange.
Really strange.
Eduardo wakes up in steps from there: blinks the sleep from his eyes, and orients himself to the waking word for all of a few spare moments before he reaches again for the phone, watches as it cycles through the rainbow, vivid in the dark and blinking all sorts of colors, all the colors except for the one he wants it to blink, the color that’s tied to his personal account, the bright sapphire shade that means...
There’s no blue, among the notification lights. No blue at all.
He can’t pretend he doesn’t feel himself deflate, and that he doesn’t feel bile rise in his throat at the realization, at the thought of what it means. And the shower, once he drags himself into the bathroom to wash up and face the day, seems too cold, like needles; like he’s a little too raw to stand beneath the spray, and it doesn’t make sense, exactly, but that’s not the worst part.
The worst part of it is not knowing what’s causing it. The worse part is not being able to see -- not being able to face the why behind all of it, behind everything.
The why that had been there for too goddamned long.
_______________________________
There’s this girl, from BU, that he meets in the Square, and he’s really just wandering, kind of: he wants a drink like nothing else, needs to eat, and he’s thinking he’s just going to go to The Queen’s Head and say fuck it, get the beef burrito he always gets and call it a night, but he asks her to come. Her eyes light up, and he smiles, because that’s what he does, and walks her through campus toward Mem Hall.
He knows one of the bartenders, and so he gets a 1636 for himself and his guest without so much as a raised eyebrow. She talks a lot, mostly about her classes, about how different Boston is -- Eduardo doesn’t even catch where she’s from, originally, but he doesn’t have to catch things like that, if he doesn’t want to; he’s figured that out. All he has to do is grin, which he does, and she keeps talking, and drinking, and his burrito comes and he takes a bite and the sound he makes when he finally eats something must sound encouraging, or like agreement, because she talks even more, after that.
Eduardo’s noticed that, the more that girls like this talk? The more likely they are to invite him back to their dorm.
“Hey.” The girl stops talking, and Eduardo’s got a mouthful of food when he turns, swallows painfully when he sees Mark standing there next to where they’re sitting. Mark stands with his hands in the kangaroo pocket of his hoodie. Eduardo notices that.
“Mark,” Eduardo coughs out as he clears his throat, licks his lips, tries not to stare at Mark’s ghost-white calves, poking out of his cargo shorts, and fuck it, but Mark’s from Dobbs Ferry: it gets cold there. Eduardo doesn’t understand how the bastard never got the whole dressing-for-the-weather memo. It’d be different if he was from farther south, but Eduardo grew up in Miami. And even he understands what it means to put a fucking coat on.
He thinks he needs to buy Mark a North Face. Or something.
“What’s up?”
Mark shrugs, regards Eduardo with a bored kind of stare, but it doesn’t escape Eduardo’s notice that Mark doesn’t regard his lady-friend at all. It doesn’t escape Eduardo’s notice that he’s not really paying attention to the girl he brought here, either. Now that Mark’s here.
“We just came out for something to eat,” Mark cocks his head toward the corner, where Eduardo sees a table of guys, some of whom look vaguely familiar, maybe from AEPi, and one of them waves animatedly in their direction when Eduardo glances over. Charming. “My roommates think I need to eat sometimes.”
Eduardo frowns and leans in a bit. “You do need to eat.”
Mark just shrugs again. “I’ll leave you two to it,” he says before turning back to his friends; “See you ‘round, Wardo.”
And Eduardo doesn’t understand why he came over, what the point was, why his own eyes follow Mark all the way back to his seat and only leave when the girl sitting across from him reaches for his hand. She looks curious, maybe a little bit pissed, but then Eduardo grins, and she settles, and he finishes his burrito while she nurses her second beer.
The big surprise, though; the real kicker, is that Eduardo doesn’t follow the girl onto the T, lets her take the escalator down alone with some half-assed excuse about homework, even though it’s a Friday. She probably sees right through it. Eduardo doesn’t even know what’s wrong with him.
What the fuck is wrong with him?
It’s only later that he realizes that Mark said his name, but not his name; it’s only later that he processes what Mark called him when he left.
Wardo.
_______________________________
Eduardo spends a lot of time in front of a computer screen, in the course of any given day. This, it turns out, is a dangerous thing.
Because first, there’s e-mail. Well, okay, mostly, there’s e-mail. Which means there are all of the e-mails he and Mark have sent back and forth over the past few months, slowly, tentatively reopening the lines of communication. Quick hellos, vague questions about business, a random mention of what they’re eating for lunch, minor complaints about coworkers, Dustin’s antics, Eduardo’s affectionately-prying PA. And then, briefly, just the beginning of asking after one another, of removing certain words -- words like chicken and Caribbean and appletini, words like that -- from the list of taboos that had risen like a brick wall between them. There are so many e-mails, and Eduardo never erased a single one. Not even the ones that just said:
dustin’s an asshole.
or
chris tells me leaving an e-mail unanswered for too long is rude. so, hello. i answered.
Not even those ones.
So yeah, there’s e-mail. But then, there’s also Facebook.
They’re not friends, they haven’t made that leap yet: there’s something about it, something in the principle of the thing. But right before they’d met up, before they’d seen each other at the NTC, he’d sent a request. It felt like a step.
The request, though; it’s still pending.
Eduardo doesn’t know what that means.
_______________________________
Eduardo eats out too often. He’s a college student, he’s entitled.
He’s on his way to grab a slice at Otto’s when he sees a curly-haired head bowed, all eyes-to-the-ground, and Eduardo’s smiling, stopping before he can think about it twice.
“Mark,” he calls out, and it’s comical, the way that Mark stops, like a brake’s been pushed, like there should be sole-tracks from his shoes against the ground: Eduardo feels warm all of a sudden, even though there’s coolness still clawing at the spring afternoon.
“Oh, Wardo,” and Mark looks lost, squinting in sun that’s not-so-bright, and there’s something that clenches in Eduardo’s chest, not-so-soft, when he tacks on; “hey.”
“Hey,” and Eduardo takes a step toward him, points his thumb behind him; “you hungry?”
Mark: he still looks lost, but Eduardo thinks maybe that’s not quite it, it’s not quite lost -- and maybe it’s not quite something to be worried about, where Mark’s concerned.
“Want to grab some pizza?”
Mark kind of shrugs, indifferent, but follows when Eduardo starts to move, mutters his order to the cashier with something like decisiveness, like he’s sure he wanted something, and this would certainly do.
And Eduardo thinks that Mark was on his way to the T when they crossed paths, now that he considers Mark’s route, his trajectory, the way his CharlieCard is tucked into his back pocket -- not that Eduardo’s looking, because he’s not looking at Mark’s back pocket, at the way Mark’s jeans hang from his hips, the way the shape of his ass underneath is a mystery-
“This is good,” Mark says, mouth full, words muffled as they walk down Church Street, aimless, and Eduardo hasn’t even taken a bite of his pizza yet.
He’s totally staring at Mark’s denim-obscured ass.
“Yeah,” Eduardo says, grins around the the edge of his slice, and there’s something more to this: the feeling that sweeps over him is more than just lust, than just his dick tightening, going hard in his pants; “it’s good.”
This, just this; it’s so good.
_______________________________
Part Two --->
Rating: R
Pairing: Mark/Eduardo
Word Count: 13,687
Summary: Eduardo lives by simple rules: he only fucks the people he probably won’t see, definitely won’t know. If he owes them nothing, has no connection, it can’t get complicated, it can’t become too much. And Mark, well: Mark was already complicated, Mark was his best friend. Mark, for all that it killed him, was off limits.
Except they're not really friends, anymore, are they?
Spoilers for The Social Network (2010).
Disclaimer: I own nothing but the plot. The characters and situations mentioned herein are inspired by the fictional actor portrayals set forth in the 2010 film The Social Network; thus, they are in no way connected to, nor do they reflect upon, any actual persons or situations of the same or similar name. tl;dr: This is NOT RPF. Credit to MGMT for the title.
Author’s Notes: Overdue anon-fill from the kinkmeme. Heads-up for rampant chronological shifts.
we were fated to pretend
Part one
-----------------------------------
In the moment, Eduardo doesn’t think twice about it. He’s not in a panic, nor is he uneasy -- if anything, this is the one thing that he knows, the one thing he can apply across circumstances and be fairly fucking certain of the outcome. In the moment, Eduardo is quiet, careful as he stands, dresses, gathers his things in the dark. In the moment, he considers leaving a note on the hotel stationary, asking if they can catch lunch sometime, but he thinks better of it: that’s what texting, what e-mail -- for fuck’s sake, what Facebook is for.
He zips his fly and eases the door closed behind him, turns in his keycard for the room, leaves the spare on the nightstand, and calls a cab. He has a flight to catch.
To be honest, aside from a little nagging ache that’s mostly nostalgia and a little bit of misplaced hope for something unnameable, Eduardo doesn’t think twice about leaving Mark to wake up by himself the next morning, with just cologne-scented sheets and a tied-off rubber in the trash to greet him. He doesn’t question it.
Which isn’t an issue, really -- doesn’t raise any red flags -- because this isn’t really new. This is what Eduardo does with people who he wants to sleep with, who aren’t his friends.
And Mark, well, Eduardo isn’t sure what Mark is, these days, but Mark is not his friend.
He tips the cabbie particularly well when they arrive at Departures, and frankly, he’s kind of looking forward to going home.
He sleeps the whole ten hours until they land for his connection; and it’s nice, the way that his jacket smells like college, like a night spent with Mark sitting next to him.
In the moment, it’s really nice.
_______________________________
In the beginning, Eduardo never meant for it to be anything, for them to be anything. He never even actually meant to meet Mark Zuckerberg in the first place.
Maybe it’s fitting, the way they do meet. It’s past midnight and he’s leaving Eliot House -- there’s snow on the ground, just a dusting, but it’s fucking freezing and Eduardo couldn’t find his left shoe, or either of his goddamned socks in the chick’s dorm room before he bailed, and he has an exam in the morning. He needs to get some sleep.
And that’s basically how he ends up shuffling across the frost-slick pavement in the lamplight, barefoot. That’s basically how he even ends up speaking to Mark, really, that first time.
They cross paths, though not so close at hand that they’re obligated to acknowledge one another. As a matter of fact, Eduardo hadn’t planned on even looking up from where he’d trained his gaze on the ground before him, making sure not to step on anything hazardous. It’s the guy whose route he’s intersecting where the walkways come together that makes a point of anything, that pauses and stares and opens his fucking mouth.
So really, if any of it is anyone’s fault: in the beginning, it’s probably Mark’s.
“And people give me shit for wearing sandals in the winter,” the guy looks at him, kind of snorts, but his tone is bland, dry. Eduardo doesn’t know what to think of it.
Eduardo knows exactly what to think of the way the guy’s lips bow, full and red in the cold; the way his hair shines with condensation, with little flecks of white as they fall. Eduardo knows exactly what he thinks of that.
“Yeah, well,” Eduardo shrugs, clears his throat, tries not to get distracted by imagining this guy naked -- tries not to think too much on how he’s already more aroused by that idle thought than he’d been with the chick from Eliot. And it’s even not intentional that the two of them walk in the same direction, fall into step but don’t really speak.
It’s not intentional -- not any of it. It honestly just happens.
“Mark!” Eduardo hears it suddenly, a muted echo from an open window at the top of god-know-which-dorm-because be real, there are too many goddamn freshmen buildings with too many weird-ass names-and the guy next to him glances up automatically-it’s strike one, really, learning his name. Mark.
“Where the fuck have you been? We’ve been waiting on the beer for a fucking hour, man,” and the guy slams the window shut as Mark adjusts the shoulder strap of his backpack and bounds up the stairs, flip-flops smacking the steps, and just before he swipes into the building, he turns, and he smirks.
“Try not to get frostbit, yeah?” And then, he’s gone.
And the thing is: there were rules then, as there are rules now, and Eduardo would have snapped in two if he didn’t stick by them, if he tried to bend them. And from that first encounter, he’d never had any intention of getting to know this Mark, of making nice with him or hanging out on his couch with a bottle of Beck’s. In the beginning, Eduardo really just wanted to bed the pale bastard with the big blue eyes. Hell: if he’s honest, Eduardo failed a reading quiz in his modern literature class that very next afternoon, mostly because he was daydreaming about sucking Mark’s dick.
So yeah. The initial plan -- if it could even be called a plan -- was just to fuck pretty-Mark-from-the-Yard and move on.
Eduardo wonders sometimes, in the now, if that would have been better, really, in the long run.
Not that he’ll ever know.
_______________________________
After the first time, Eduardo finds that pretty-Mark-from-the-Yard’s actually kind of an enigma, and really fucking hard to track down. Eduardo tries not to think too much on it.
He goes into the city and hooks up with a guy from Tufts -- Eduardo knows this because he’s wearing a shirt that says so. It’s a good enough night, and Eduardo’s pleasantly buzzed from the drinks and the sex when he stumbles back to College Avenue to catch the bus; drunk enough that he giggles to himself in his seat at the thought that he probably, definitely might have cleaned himself off against the guy’s tee, right where it read Pax et Lux. Fucking people from Tufts.
He nearly misses his goddamned stop.
But yeah, so: after the first time, Eduardo basically gives pretty-Mark up as a lost cause -- great material for jacking off in his bed, but nothing Eduardo’s going to get to tap any time soon. It’s fine.
It’ll be fine.
_______________________________
It’s always been kind of futile, really, trying to ignore the way he used to feel -- might still feel, might learn how to feel again -- about Mark. He had rules, he knew Mark was off limits, but it never stopped him from being jealous, from coveting what he couldn’t have.
But now, the rules were shot to hell. Now, Eduardo knows what Mark looks like breathless, flushed, hard against Eduardo’s thigh, his hip, trapped between them and straining, leaking at the tip -- Eduardo knows the kind of sounds Mark makes, knows what it’s like to see Mark spread open and unhinged.
Eduardo has what he’s always wanted, and fuck, but it’s not enough.
He probably should have known it wouldn’t be, really. But admittedly, Eduardo’s perspective is a little bit shot to hell these days, after everything.
He lays-over in Tokyo. He can’t stop himself from tapping out the text to Mark’s number as soon as the cabin door opens.
i’ll be in sf next month. dinner?
The fact is that he has no idea what the fuck he’s doing. This isn’t how he functions, this isn’t what he knows. Christy was the closest he ever got to a functioning relationship in which he knew things about his partner, in which he gave anything meaningful of himself, left anything of himself behind when he walked away. And that ended so fucking well.
And then, Jesus; maybe there hadn’t been sex involved before, but look at how he and Mark had ended, that first time.
But Eduardo knows what it feels like inside Mark, now -- what it feels like when it’s Mark’s breath that cools the sweat between his collarbones. He knows the shape that Mark’s teeth leave in his bottom lip, the feel of his nails gripping tight against his shoulder blades.
And it’s always been kind of futile, ignoring how Mark gets to him, what Mark does to him. More than that, though -- ignoring Mark isn’t something Eduardo thinks he wants, anymore.
He knows how Mark fucking tastes.
So Eduardo presses ‘send’ and tries not to worry. It’s not like things can get more fucked up this time than the last.
_______________________________
Five weeks later -- not that he’s counting -- Eduardo hooks up with some jock who rows mediocre crew. It’s a quick fumble in between buildings, the rush of maybe being seen, maybe getting caught, and it makes Eduardo come down the guy’s mouth harder than he has in a long fucking time. He watches, sweaty and spent in the cool early-evening air, as the crew-boy struggles to swallow it all, lets a little spill out on his lips.
It’s hot.
But then crew-boy kind of ruins it, tells Eduardo that he’s on his way to a party for his fraternity. He kind of ruins it, when he asks Eduardo if he wants to come with.
And Eduardo -- that’s not how this works. That’s not what he does. That’s attachment and commitment -- that’s friendship or something close enough to resemble, close enough to count.
Eduardo doesn’t do that.
So he pulls some bullshit about having his own Greek commitments -- which he does, actually, but he wasn’t planning on going -- and smiles, says see you around like he might mean it, he’s learned how to make it convincing, while keeping it from sounding like a promise, and he walks quickly away to where he knows his Eta Psi chapter’s holding... something. Eduardo doesn’t even know what.
So he walks in, and he’s a little bit blinded by flashing strobes and a fucking glitter ball spinning from the celling, scattering the light, and he almost walks back out, almost says screw it, but then. But then.
Five weeks later -- and yes, okay, yes, he was counting, he’s been counting, Eduardo notices shit like that, so fucking sue him -- Eduardo catches the mop of curly hair and the condescending smirk that he’s been damn-near fantasizing about, right across the room at AEPi’s Disco Night.
He knew he’d joined the frat for a reason.
_______________________________
Within the larger metropolitan Boston area, there are fifty-four institutions of higher learning. Some of Eduardo’s roommates from freshman year made a bet over too much vodka that together, over their four years of undergrad, they could fuck their way through at least one student from each of those schools.
At the time, Eduardo had thought it juvenile and objectifying. He’d taken one last shot and gone to sleep.
In the now, however, as he stares up at the ceiling in some ratty fucking apartment in Quincy, long past the last run on the Red Line, he thinks maybe he’s already managed what those wasted guys in his suite had been laughing about -- the ENC seal on the girl’s binder is hard to miss. Maybe he’s already managed it without even trying.
Eduardo doesn’t remember any of their names.
He doesn’t know how he feels about that.
_______________________________
He’s got a meeting to run to, shortly after he touches down at Changi -- there’s a driver waiting to take him to The InterContinental for a face-to-face with a couple of guys he’s been in contact with over the phone -- they’ve got a pretty solid idea about how to capitalize on the rise of real-time video chatting using social media outlets. It has potential. Eduardo should be excited about this.
And he was. He was. Except that now, he can’t even focus in on the meeting, on what they’ll be discussing, on what they have to address and what he has to learn about these potential clients, because all he can do is run his thumb across the scroll-pad on his Blackberry, waking the screen, checking for a message notification in the right mailbox -- the right message.
It’s pathetic.
Then again, he probably shouldn’t have expected any less; but Eduardo -- he’s not always the type of person who learns everything he should from the past, who picks up all the nuances and puts them together in a way that makes sense.
Either way, though: he keeps it up, glances too often at his phone, through the whole fucking meeting. If his soon-to-be clients notice, nothing is said.
And that’s who Eduardo is, now. Eduardo is the man who can look at his goddamned phone the whole time someone is speaking, and no one will say a fucking word.
Apparently, though, Eduardo is also the man whose stomach feels wrong, who declines refreshments and struggles to keep his airplane meal down as he wonders, wonders and waits for the light on his phone to blink the right color, in the right sequence -- the right person trying to get ahold of him.
And that was never the man Eduardo wanted to be. Never.
Considering his track record, though, where Mark is concerned: maybe he never had a choice, never really had a chance in hell.
_______________________________
Eduardo thinks too much.
He thought too much as a kid, when he was afraid of the beach because he accidentally caught a story on the news about hypodermic needles in the sand, and thought he was going to step on one and die. He thought too much as a teenager, when it took forever to get him behind the wheel of a car because he was scared to fucking death of hitting a pedestrian. Eduardo thought too much about college, deliberating and making pro-and-con lists for every school that sent him an acceptance letter, made himself sick with it until his father decided on Harvard for him, until the decision was taken out of his hands.
Eduardo thought too much the first time he had sex, heart pounding and mouth dry and the girl under him looking too small, too innocent, and he didn’t even know her, only met her at orientation the day before -- he didn’t mean to leave, to hurt anyone, and he felt guilty, he feels so fucking guilty because that’s not him, that’s not the person he is, but he runs as soon as she’s asleep.
He doesn’t see her afterward, and it’s both a blessing and a lesson, wrapped up into one.
Because it’s hard to feel guilty about things in the abstract. The adage wasn’t lying: out of sight, out of mind.
That’s how it starts, really. That’s how it starts.
The rules were for his own good, to keep him from having to think. He put them there to keep himself sane. He only fucks the people he probably won’t see, definitely won’t know. If he owes them nothing, has no connection, it can’t get complicated, it can’t become too much. If there’s nothing there to consider in the first place, he can’t think about it too much, can’t invest in it, can’t hold on and make it hard.
It’s not until later that it strikes him, that he even ponders what it means: because he only fucks strangers on a sliding scale -- somewhere between I vaguely recognize you but I don’t know your name to I’ve never seen you in my life, and after tonight, I probably never will again -- and there are a lot of them. There are so many strangers, so many people he sleeps with and leaves cold in the night, that it almost makes him wonder how many friends he has, how few people are off limits, how few the rules apply to at all.
By then, though, he’s taught himself how not to think about it, how to just let it go.
And so he does. He lets it go.
_______________________________
“I don’t think those really fit the theme of the evening,” Eduardo says, smooth and awkward at the very same time, he can feel it all warring in the way he smirks, walks up behind Mark and leans in, not too close but close enough to be heard over the music, but far enough that when Mark turns -- curious and distrustful and caught off-guard as Eduardo keeps his half-grin and nods down at Mark’s very un-disco flip-flops -- they don’t run into each other, they don’t touch.
It takes a moment, but recognition dawns, and something changes in Mark’s expression as he sizes Eduardo up, sweeps him bottom to top with his eyes -- something changes, and it makes Eduardo’s blood feel hot, thick in his veins. “Well, at least you’re wearing shoes,” Mark shoots back, biting and brilliant and fuck, this kid’s hot. “That’s a step up.”
Five weeks feels like forever when he hears that voice, hears it and lets it settle in his gut -- Eduardo doesn’t want to take another five weeks before he sees Mark again.
So he chuckles, nods, and they both pull on beers they’re too young to drink and make small talk, say nothing, just speak for the sake of it. Mark sneers at a few girls trying to do the Robot, or the Hustle, or something else that Eduardo doesn’t know much about, except that these girls are definitely doing it wrong, so he adds in for good measure:
“That’s one thing about Asian chicks. Can’t dance to save their lives.”
Mark chuckles, and it sounds like he hates it, like he can’t stand the fact that he’s laughing, but he is anyway, doesn’t stop it -- maybe can’t. Eduardo feels like the king of the fucking world, in that moment.
The party itself sucks, as most of them do, and it’s not like Eduardo can expect anyone to want to spend more time there than they have to, but it ends too quick, it’s over too soon, and sure -- all Eduardo’s done over the course of the slightly-more-than-twenty minutes that he’s been standing near Mark at all is just to simply soak up the monotone buzz of his voice, but still.
Still.
“I’m leaving,” Mark announces between songs, in the segue from the Bee Gees into Sister Sledge; “the lights give me migraines,” and that’s that, basically.
“Yeah,” Eduardo says, drains the dregs from his bottle and swallows; “catch you around, then?” He tries not to sound hopeful
“More likely than not,” and Mark doesn’t sound like he cares much one way or the other, but Mark also seems like the kind of person where maybe it says something, means something, that he said anything at all.
And Eduardo doesn’t follow him as he walks away, doesn’t ask if Mark wants to come back to his -- Eduardo doesn’t do what he normally does, doesn’t do what he always does when he’s with someone he really wants, and that was probably the first real clue, the first mistake.
It was the first step toward the inevitable, and Eduardo should have known better. Eduardo should have seen.
But he didn’t, he doesn’t: all he knows is that when Mark walks away, he grins, just a little -- not enough to notice on its own, only enough that Eduardo can tell in comparison, that he can see because it’s brighter than the expression that preceded it.
Eduardo jacks off that night, thinking about smiles that aren’t really smiles, and he doesn’t even suspect what’s to come, what’s in store.
He just slips off into the kind of dreams no one remembers, the sort you just know were kind of nice.
_______________________________
Eduardo should be exhausted. First Class or not, sleeping in a plane doesn’t amount to actual rest. Plus he’s been out all day, driving and meeting and arranging.
And looking at his stupid fucking phone.
So he should be exhausted, he should be tired and it shouldn’t even take any effort at all to fall asleep as he settles into his bed. It shouldn’t.
So of course, it does.
Because there’s so much in his head -- there’s always so much in his head, but he’s gotten better at compartmentalizing, and putting the pressing things in the front and leaving everything else to clutter up the back; and it’s all he can do just then, he can’t even stop it: pulse loud in his ears, skin tight around his joints, eyes trained on the ceiling above him, Eduardo can’t help but remember -- can’t help but think about mornings when he fell asleep on the couch at Kirkland, when someone would leave him a cup of coffee on the counter and the only way he knew for sure when it was Mark was the fact that Mark was the only one who knew how he liked his coffee, who made it taste close to right; can’t help thinking about ice below his bare feet and a curious gaze on the Yard, or the first time someone called him Wardo, or nights in his dorm room, hand on his dick, curly hair and sharp blue eyes on his mind. He can’t help but think about the way his chest ached, viscerally, every day of the lawsuits, every day he thought about a world where Mark wasn’t around, wasn’t near him, feared the worst before he knew he could survive, could adapt, could move on.
Eduardo can’t help but think.
So yeah -- Eduardo thinks too fucking much, still; whatever. It’s a character flaw. He deals with it.
He doesn’t turn his phone on silent as he drifts between waking and sleeping for the rest of the night, keeps the ringer on.
Just in case.
_______________________________
When he gets back to campus late, Eduardo likes to sit up on the little pillars, the edge-points outside of Widener: perched on high, legs sprawled out, cool concrete at his back -- he has to dry clean the fuck out of the whole damn suit when he’s done, but whatever.
It’s good, you know? It’s good to unwind after a quick fuck, after running up to Waltham or banging a grad student at Suffolk Law. It’s good to just breathe in the night air and watch the sky and think about everything and nothing until his lungs hurt, because the breeze is cool and damp and he can hear the traffic and the rustling leaves and the beat of his own goddamned heart like it’s a part of this place, like he fits here, finally, like he makes sense in this city, this space.
It’s the only time he ever feels that way. He soaks it in as best he can.
“What are you doing?” He hears the question from below him, adds up the pieces of it before he sits up: he picks apart the sound of rubberized sandal-soles hitting against stone, the sharp tone, the slick intake of breath, and his heartbeat’s not a part of this place, this campus, this city anymore, it reasserts itself as something outside of all that, fierce beneath his collarbone as he breathes out, heavy and shaky and slow. He breathes out, but he doesn’t sit up.
“Watching,” he answers, and his voice is thin, low, wisps around on the wind and he doesn’t think Mark even hears him, standing where he is below, all those steps, those feet down to the ground -- Mark doesn’t pay that close attention.
“What?” Mark asks, and yeah: Mark doesn’t pay attention to most things.
“Hmm?”
“What are you watching?” And now the feet, the footsteps: they’re scraping on the stairs, they’re climbing, coming close, and now Eduardo’s pulse beats into that, catches up, slows in time with the footfalls, the shuffle on the stone: even the changes in breathing that come with the exertion of all those goddamned stairs.
The pulse finds a place, there. In the sounds that Mark makes.
Jesus fucking Christ.
“I’m watching paint dry,” Eduardo quips, more aloof than he is, than he has been from the start, but that’s the game he has to play, that’s the game he knows. “What the fuck do you think I’m watching?”
He doesn’t, he can’t look over when Mark sits, settles, stretches out next to him, too close and too far all at once.
“It’s overcast,” Mark comments, flat, and Eduardo doesn’t know what to make of this, of any of this. Of Mark. Of the hour. Of the place, and the time. The fact that Mark stopped. That Mark came up. With him.
Mark doesn’t strike him as the type who comes anywhere, really. For anyone.
“Clouds move, moron,” Eduardo tells him, fondly; they do then, as if to prove his point, and the stars are visible for a moment, just above the streetlights. Eduardo looks, then, because he’s seen the sky enough times. There’s something better, here, next to him.
And it is, it’s better: Mark’s staring up, and his eyelashes are longer than Eduardo would have guessed: maybe it’s the angle, or the shadows in the night, but he sees them here, and he’s mesmerized. He’s mesmerized by the curve of Mark’s pale cheek, the way there are freckles there, just a few; by the spill of his curls around the bulk of the hood on his sweatshirt. Mark’s staring up, and Eduardo’s staring over, and if his eyes look down, he can watch Mark’s chest rise and fall, buried under the hoodie, but Eduardo can imagine the chest beneath, the light muscling, just like he’s envisioned, and it’s still fucking winter, because it’s winter for a really long time in New England, but Eduardo feels warm, suddenly, underneath the chill.
And the guy he slept with tonight, just hours before: the guy was all strong hands and firm abs, lean limbs, and Eduardo can feel the burn in his thighs from the third, the fourth time they went at it before Eduardo took his leave; it was great. It was quick and frantic and full and Eduardo felt sated afterward, felt loose and boneless and fucking awesome in the aftermath. It was really good sex, plain and simple, and Eduardo? He would know.
It was really good sex, and yet, it doesn’t have anything on this, right here.
_______________________________
He jerks, sits up straight, and his heart’s fit to pound out of his chest, or maybe just burst between the ribs, and he’s sweating at the palms, clutching at the sheets and finding the handheld that’s still sitting on his mattress, runs it beneath shaking fingers as he gets a grip on himself, as he realizes: a dream. Just a dream.
He hasn’t dreamt of then, of before and the rush of it, the feel of any of it: he’s tried and failed at not thinking about it at all for so goddamned long -- it’s strange.
Really strange.
Eduardo wakes up in steps from there: blinks the sleep from his eyes, and orients himself to the waking word for all of a few spare moments before he reaches again for the phone, watches as it cycles through the rainbow, vivid in the dark and blinking all sorts of colors, all the colors except for the one he wants it to blink, the color that’s tied to his personal account, the bright sapphire shade that means...
There’s no blue, among the notification lights. No blue at all.
He can’t pretend he doesn’t feel himself deflate, and that he doesn’t feel bile rise in his throat at the realization, at the thought of what it means. And the shower, once he drags himself into the bathroom to wash up and face the day, seems too cold, like needles; like he’s a little too raw to stand beneath the spray, and it doesn’t make sense, exactly, but that’s not the worst part.
The worst part of it is not knowing what’s causing it. The worse part is not being able to see -- not being able to face the why behind all of it, behind everything.
The why that had been there for too goddamned long.
_______________________________
There’s this girl, from BU, that he meets in the Square, and he’s really just wandering, kind of: he wants a drink like nothing else, needs to eat, and he’s thinking he’s just going to go to The Queen’s Head and say fuck it, get the beef burrito he always gets and call it a night, but he asks her to come. Her eyes light up, and he smiles, because that’s what he does, and walks her through campus toward Mem Hall.
He knows one of the bartenders, and so he gets a 1636 for himself and his guest without so much as a raised eyebrow. She talks a lot, mostly about her classes, about how different Boston is -- Eduardo doesn’t even catch where she’s from, originally, but he doesn’t have to catch things like that, if he doesn’t want to; he’s figured that out. All he has to do is grin, which he does, and she keeps talking, and drinking, and his burrito comes and he takes a bite and the sound he makes when he finally eats something must sound encouraging, or like agreement, because she talks even more, after that.
Eduardo’s noticed that, the more that girls like this talk? The more likely they are to invite him back to their dorm.
“Hey.” The girl stops talking, and Eduardo’s got a mouthful of food when he turns, swallows painfully when he sees Mark standing there next to where they’re sitting. Mark stands with his hands in the kangaroo pocket of his hoodie. Eduardo notices that.
“Mark,” Eduardo coughs out as he clears his throat, licks his lips, tries not to stare at Mark’s ghost-white calves, poking out of his cargo shorts, and fuck it, but Mark’s from Dobbs Ferry: it gets cold there. Eduardo doesn’t understand how the bastard never got the whole dressing-for-the-weather memo. It’d be different if he was from farther south, but Eduardo grew up in Miami. And even he understands what it means to put a fucking coat on.
He thinks he needs to buy Mark a North Face. Or something.
“What’s up?”
Mark shrugs, regards Eduardo with a bored kind of stare, but it doesn’t escape Eduardo’s notice that Mark doesn’t regard his lady-friend at all. It doesn’t escape Eduardo’s notice that he’s not really paying attention to the girl he brought here, either. Now that Mark’s here.
“We just came out for something to eat,” Mark cocks his head toward the corner, where Eduardo sees a table of guys, some of whom look vaguely familiar, maybe from AEPi, and one of them waves animatedly in their direction when Eduardo glances over. Charming. “My roommates think I need to eat sometimes.”
Eduardo frowns and leans in a bit. “You do need to eat.”
Mark just shrugs again. “I’ll leave you two to it,” he says before turning back to his friends; “See you ‘round, Wardo.”
And Eduardo doesn’t understand why he came over, what the point was, why his own eyes follow Mark all the way back to his seat and only leave when the girl sitting across from him reaches for his hand. She looks curious, maybe a little bit pissed, but then Eduardo grins, and she settles, and he finishes his burrito while she nurses her second beer.
The big surprise, though; the real kicker, is that Eduardo doesn’t follow the girl onto the T, lets her take the escalator down alone with some half-assed excuse about homework, even though it’s a Friday. She probably sees right through it. Eduardo doesn’t even know what’s wrong with him.
What the fuck is wrong with him?
It’s only later that he realizes that Mark said his name, but not his name; it’s only later that he processes what Mark called him when he left.
Wardo.
_______________________________
Eduardo spends a lot of time in front of a computer screen, in the course of any given day. This, it turns out, is a dangerous thing.
Because first, there’s e-mail. Well, okay, mostly, there’s e-mail. Which means there are all of the e-mails he and Mark have sent back and forth over the past few months, slowly, tentatively reopening the lines of communication. Quick hellos, vague questions about business, a random mention of what they’re eating for lunch, minor complaints about coworkers, Dustin’s antics, Eduardo’s affectionately-prying PA. And then, briefly, just the beginning of asking after one another, of removing certain words -- words like chicken and Caribbean and appletini, words like that -- from the list of taboos that had risen like a brick wall between them. There are so many e-mails, and Eduardo never erased a single one. Not even the ones that just said:
dustin’s an asshole.
or
chris tells me leaving an e-mail unanswered for too long is rude. so, hello. i answered.
Not even those ones.
So yeah, there’s e-mail. But then, there’s also Facebook.
They’re not friends, they haven’t made that leap yet: there’s something about it, something in the principle of the thing. But right before they’d met up, before they’d seen each other at the NTC, he’d sent a request. It felt like a step.
The request, though; it’s still pending.
Eduardo doesn’t know what that means.
_______________________________
Eduardo eats out too often. He’s a college student, he’s entitled.
He’s on his way to grab a slice at Otto’s when he sees a curly-haired head bowed, all eyes-to-the-ground, and Eduardo’s smiling, stopping before he can think about it twice.
“Mark,” he calls out, and it’s comical, the way that Mark stops, like a brake’s been pushed, like there should be sole-tracks from his shoes against the ground: Eduardo feels warm all of a sudden, even though there’s coolness still clawing at the spring afternoon.
“Oh, Wardo,” and Mark looks lost, squinting in sun that’s not-so-bright, and there’s something that clenches in Eduardo’s chest, not-so-soft, when he tacks on; “hey.”
“Hey,” and Eduardo takes a step toward him, points his thumb behind him; “you hungry?”
Mark: he still looks lost, but Eduardo thinks maybe that’s not quite it, it’s not quite lost -- and maybe it’s not quite something to be worried about, where Mark’s concerned.
“Want to grab some pizza?”
Mark kind of shrugs, indifferent, but follows when Eduardo starts to move, mutters his order to the cashier with something like decisiveness, like he’s sure he wanted something, and this would certainly do.
And Eduardo thinks that Mark was on his way to the T when they crossed paths, now that he considers Mark’s route, his trajectory, the way his CharlieCard is tucked into his back pocket -- not that Eduardo’s looking, because he’s not looking at Mark’s back pocket, at the way Mark’s jeans hang from his hips, the way the shape of his ass underneath is a mystery-
“This is good,” Mark says, mouth full, words muffled as they walk down Church Street, aimless, and Eduardo hasn’t even taken a bite of his pizza yet.
He’s totally staring at Mark’s denim-obscured ass.
“Yeah,” Eduardo says, grins around the the edge of his slice, and there’s something more to this: the feeling that sweeps over him is more than just lust, than just his dick tightening, going hard in his pants; “it’s good.”
This, just this; it’s so good.
_______________________________
Part Two --->