fic: we were fated to pretend (2/2)
we were fated to pretend
Part Two
-----------------------------------
Eduardo jumps when something lands, heavy and full upon his desk -- he blinks, looks up at the critical expression on his assistant’s face, and then back down to the offending object: a salad. Take out, from Ananda Bhavan, which is kind of a hike, but it’s one of Rhoda’s favorites. Over time, he’s come to recognize: it’s always a bad sign when his assistant buys him her own favorite food.
Because she only goes so far to get her favorite food when she’s gearing up to give him news she’d rather not have to deliver.
“Afternoon,” he says, skeptical, eyeing Rhoda and the salad by turns with an arched brow.
“You haven’t eaten anything since you got here,” she tells him, by way of explanation, gesturing toward the container perched atop a few contracts, a quarterly statement or two.
“It’s only one-thirty,” Eduardo protests; there are plenty of days where he takes his lunch past three, sometimes where he skips it altogether.
“On Thursday,” she shoots back, eyes sharp, unamused; “You never went home last night.”
Eduardo blinks. “Oh.” He hadn’t realized that, but it kind of makes sense. He thought he’d been inordinately tired that morning.
“You’re impossible,” Rhoda sighs, shakes her head. She’s never approved of him, exactly, but she certainly seems to care, nonetheless. You know, if the plastic fork she tosses at him is any indication.
“From you?” Eduardo smiles softly up at her as he unwraps his food: she got him extra dressing, just as he likes. He knew he’d hired her for a reason. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”
He’s opened up the salad, has a forkful hovering right in front of his open mouth when she drops the bomb: “You’re going to Boston next week.”
The lettuce falls off the spoon from where it dangles in midair; Eduardo’s mouth, though, stays open.
“Excuse me?”
“Boston,” Rhoda rolls her eyes, but she repeats it fast, knows that while time has passed and lives have changed, there’s no love lost between Eduardo at that city, that place, the things it still holds in the soil, the shade. “You have a meeting with some grad students who think they have the next generation-defining idea,” and her voice is cynical, her tone mocking, trying to make light of the way that something heavy settles in Eduardo’s gut when he thinks about the East Coast, whether he likes it or not.
“Boston,” he says again, lets the name roll around his tongue until it can’t taste sour, until it lilts the right way and feels like a place that was once his home, versus a place that was once his hell.
“Beantown, Ye Olde Town, the City on a Hill,” Rhoda speaks deliberately, as if to a child, and leans into his desk with hands on either corner, braced for a reaction: whatever kind comes. “Yes. Boston.”
Eduardo pokes his fork into the salad again and chews through his words; he takes a perverse kind of pleasure in the look of disgust that he gets from Rhoda as a result. “Grad students, hmm?”
Rhoda grins a little, humorlessly. “Three guesses where from.”
“Goddamnit.” Eduardo suspected, but wasn’t sure; he really should have known.
It’s only Harvard students who believe that creating a job is better than finding one, after all.
“You leave on the 23rd,” Rhoda tells him, tapping on her tablet, mapping out the calendar in real time. “You’ll pop there, you’ll pop back here, then you’re off to Hong Kong before you swing by San Fran,” she puts the screen to sleep and tucks it under her arm as Eduardo preemptively laments his sleep schedule, not to mention his general sense of time. “I accept frequent flyer miles as part of my yearly bonus, as you know,” she tacks on; “but I feel the need to emphasize that it only counts as part of the bonus.”
Eduardo snorts at her and spins in his chair, facing his desktop now instead of the doorway she’s standing in. He’s thinking of Harvard Square and Nocch’s and Holyoke Center, and they all have a certain common denominator, a particular shared phenomenon. “Fantastic.”
He looks; doesn’t have any unread messages in his inbox.
“Don’t sound so enthused,” Rhoda shoots over her shoulder as she walks away, leaving Eduardo to his salad and his murky thoughts.
Which is why he blames her, absently, half-heartedly, some three hours later. It’s why he blames her for the fact that he’s looking for transcontinental flights on the 24th, or red-eyes on the 23rd, BOS to SFO, just because.
Just... because.
Fuck. Fuck.
Goddamn Rhoda.
_______________________________
Eduardo’s sitting, he’s just sitting there in the Yard, stretched out between two of the colored chairs scattered in between the trees, watching the students and the tourists wind around instead of reading the textbook propped open between his knees.
He’s just sitting, when a force of nature comes up next to him and nearly startles him out of his seat.
“You,” the intruder tells him, and he looks harmless enough -- harmless, at least, if you disregard the fact that he might be absolutely insane. “Party. Tonight.”
Eduardo blinks, takes him in: reddish hair. Crazy eyes. Exuberance, like, a lot of it, so much that he’s kind of vibrating right where he stands.
“Excuse me?” Eduardo finally asks, though he suspects it might have been smarter to simply ignore the guy. He looks kind of familiar, sure, but so do a lot of people.
And, well, given the givens, Eduardo tends to avoid those sorts of people. He can never quite remember which ones he recognizes from class, and which he vaguely recalls because he came once, all over their sheets.
“You,” the redhead points at him with both hands; “party,” and now, the redhead dances, or else, Eduardo thinks that’s what he’s getting at: mostly, he’s swinging around at random, gesturing wildly with his arms and thrusting with his hips; “tonight,” and there, he stops, like he can’t figure out how to represent the concept visually off the top of his head, but he finally settles on resting his head on the pillow of his hands, eyes closing briefly as he lets out an exaggerated snore.
Weird as it is, the performance clears things up for Eduardo: he didn’t sleep with that. He’d have remembered that kind of hip action, for sure.
“And you are?”
“Dustin,” the guy, whose name is apparently Dustin, tells him, a little exasperated, entirely good-natured. “Mark’s roommate,” he adds helpfully when Eduard says nothing, might be staring in a potentially-rude kind of way. “You’re Mark’s friend, right?”
“Friend?” Eduardo asks, because, well, he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know why he asks, he doesn’t know that friend is an accurate descriptor, he doesn’t know how he feels about the jolt the word sends through him, he... doesn’t know.
“Dude,” Dustin raises an eyebrow unnaturally high at him, crosses his arms over his chest in mild disbelief. “I’ve witnessed you talking to Mark for more than three minutes, and he didn’t a) provoke you via insults to throw your drink in his face, or b) otherwise offend or bore you into leaving of your own volition. I count that as a check in the ‘friend’ category, my man,” and of course, the guy makes a check-mark with his finger in midair to illustrate his meaning.
Eduardo, yeah, okay: the staring’s probably rude, by this point, but he can’t really help it. This Dustin character is... something else. Seriously.
Also, yes, Eduardo’s mind might be kind of occupied, because ‘friend’ is a loaded word for him. ‘Friend’ can mean a lot of things. ‘Friend’ can lead to things, but more often, ‘friend’ can fuck things up. ‘Friend’ makes things complicated. ‘Friend’ keeps Eduardo’s dick tucked securely in his pants.
Eduardo generally has trouble with the whole ‘friend’ thing. He more-than-generally has trouble with it when he thinks about Mark Zuckerberg.
What does it even mean to be ‘friends’, anyway?
“You in?” Dustin asks, hopeful in a way he has no right to be, because what investment does he have in Eduardo, in Eduardo’s presence at this get-together? Why does he care? Why would Mark care? Does Mark even care?
And most importantly: why does Eduardo find himself wanting to say yes?
“Do you have Halo?” is the question that comes out, that overrides the rest of the buzzing in his brain. Dustin shoots him a affronted kind of glare.
“Do I have...” he starts, sputters a little; “Seriously?” He shakes his head and hikes his backpack up on his shoulder a little higher. “BYOB, Mr. Saverin. We’re playing Oddball tonight, and I’m gonna own your Prada-wearing ass.”
“This is Hugo Boss,” Eduardo quips dryly, tugging at his lapel; he gets an eye-roll in reply.
“We start at nine,” Dustin tells him, like a decision was made, an answer was given, and maybe it was, sort of. “Be there,” and he spins a little, and Eduardo watches him closely as he points in the vague direction of the dorm Eduardo remembers from the winter, in the cold, “or be square,” and yeah, Dustin draws a fucking square in the air before he walks off with a half-wave over his shoulder.
Mostly, Eduardo wonders what the hell he’s getting himself into. He doesn’t process a single word of his reading assignment, either, even though he stays in the Yard trying to finish it up until the sun sets, until the bells toll eight, until it’s useless.
Useless.
With regard to more than just the reading.
_______________________________
So that’s how it starts, basically. Eduardo goes to the ‘party’. He gets there at quarter-after. There’s enough beer to sink the goddamn Titanic between the fridge and the cases lining the wall. Dustin -- who he starts bitching at as “fuck you, Moskovitz” after a few drinks and about an hour in front of the Xbox -- does kick his ass on just about ever game-play mode they tackle. Repeatedly.
It’s Mark, though. Mark’s what makes the evening both a blessing and a curse.
Because it’s Mark who opens the door and sees him, and doesn’t seem to expect to see him. It’s Mark who blinks, whose fingers tighten around a bottle of Beck’s as he glares in Dustin’s direction before belatedly decideding to let Eduardo in. It’s Mark who, in a completely contradictory way, goes and laughs at a really lame joke Eduardo makes about Master Chief and Cortana, which Eduardo knows is kind of out-of-character, until everyone else stares at Mark with their jaws half-open, and then Eduardo knows it’s basically unheard of. He might blush as a result.
It’s Mark who doesn’t say more than ten full sentences to him in the first two hours he’s there, and then brings him another beer and talks his ear off about ANSI escape sequences. It’s Mark who makes a point to sit next to him, or stand next to him, or hover in his general vicinity, closer than anyone else gets to be, from the moment Eduardo walks in to the moment he passes out on the futon, sometime close to 4 AM.
In fact, it’s sweat and stale air, nacho cheese and tuna and high-fructose corn syrup, alcohol and fabric softener: that’s what he smells, right before whatever happens next, whatever’s happening right this moment, trails off and fades to black.
_______________________________
Eduardo wakes up, and his neck’s a little kinked, and he thinks it might be late, like, later than he usually wakes up. His head’s still a little fuzzy, he might still be a little drunk, but, see: he wakes up, and there’s this sound. It’s a weird sound. Moving, wet -- sluicing, almost, lazy, in a way, and warm; Eduardo’s not sure how a sound can be warm, but it is, and it’s warm in a way that’s not like the heat that’s nice, comfortable against Eduardo’s side, against his head: a different warm, and full, too. Quickish, not objectively, but like Eduardo knows it should be slower, can be slower but this version of it -- the weird, warm sound -- it’s brisk and staccato and it’s, it’s-
It’s a heartbeat. That’s not his.
It’s under his ear. There’s a heartbeat under his ear.
That probably means there’s a person under his ear. Probably, yeah.
He’s, he’s... he’s fallen asleep.
He never lets himself fall asleep.
Never.
He leaps up, stumbles and hits his knee on a table and he swears, grabs at his leg like it’ll do anything to counter the sharp jolt of pain, and that’s when he hears it, small, soft, a little groan. That’s when he looks.
Mark. Mark, sleeping. Sleeping Mark, who’s curled into the corner of the futon, up against the wall, with his face all scrunched and a space hollowed next to him in the way he’s positioned. A space a person could fit.
An Eduardo-shaped space.
Son of a bitch, he’d been sleeping on Mark.
He turns on his heel and does what he’s good at. He runs.
It doesn’t take long, really, before he’s in his room, and his heart’s still racing, and all he can think about is how the sheets aren’t warm, his mattress isn’t soft, the sound of his pulse just isn’t like Mark’s.
And there’s a tightness in his chest, and his head’s spinning, and he’s scared and nervous and light, lighter than normal, and it all feels strange and awesome, and he might be dying, or he might pass out, and he’s never felt like this, and he’s never --
Jesus, god, fucking... motherfuck.
There’s something, deliberately, that he never does. Never feels. Something that, if the urban legends are to be believed, sounds a hell of a lot like this.
He’s, Mark, he’s in, he’s fall-
He’s fucked. That’s, it’s...
He’s fucked.
_______________________________
Eduardo kind-of partly hates flying First Class. Yes, the leg room and the free drinks are legitimate perks, but what he hates the most is the way that people watch him, stare at him on the smaller jets, the connections where the First Class cabin isn’t to the fore of Coach. They all file in to their seats, and they all judge, with their eyes. He’s always felt that way: when he was a teenager, a college kid -- from those days to these. He doesn’t like it.
He busies himself with his phone to avoid the stares, the glances: he stops himself from texting Mark, tries to calm the nerves in his gut when he sees the timestamp on their conversation -- weeks, now, since they exchanged any words, and Eduardo’s not so much of a masochist that he’ll let himself scroll up and read what’s above, their texts from the night of the NTC. He doesn’t hate himself that much.
Except that he totally does.
So he reads, and his stomach clenches, and then it’s his chest, and then he breaks down, then he does the one thing that he said he wouldn’t. The one thing that’s worse than bombarding Mark with more texts, more e-mails, more unanswered attempts at a response that he can’t comprehend, that he doesn’t understand the reason for.
He takes it to a whole new level:
about to hit your continent; free for dinner? how are things? how is everyone?
He selects the recipient from his contacts -- Chris Hughes -- and hits send as they declare his electronics verboten and close the cabin door.
_______________________________
Eduardo isn’t entirely sure how to navigate Mark, after.
It’s not that Mark changes at all; Eduardo’s not even sure Mark knows what happened, or remembers. Eduardo’s not even sure that what happened deserves noting. The real problem is that Eduardo wakes up in the morning, every morning with the ghost of heat and weight and a rhythm under his ear, and his own hand down his boxers, a hand that his mind imagines belongs to someone else.
That’s the real problem.
So Eduardo buries himself in final projects and term papers until Reading Period. He buries himself in textbooks, studying for finals until his exams. He declines invitations to get drunk, to party, to play video games, to do anything outside of his dorm room. He walks too fast around campus, and takes strange routes to get to classes-he makes himself scarce like a goddamned fugitive, and he knows it’s excessive, knows it’s a step too far, but he can’t help it. He’s coming apart at the seams, every rule he’d made for himself, every line he’d drawn: they’re shattering, it’s all shattering, and he can’t catch the pieces. So, yeah: he takes the first flight to Miami he can get on as soon as he turns his last assignment in.
He gets a text from Mark, right before he flies, and it’s irrational, it’s totally irrational: he’s fucking insane, and this is just proof of it, but he thumbs to the message and deletes it before so much as looking at the first few lines, and then turns his phone off.
The summer’s a long blur of forgetting, after that. Of pining, and fucking, and feeling empty afterward in a way he never had before. Faceless hookups on the beach, alcohol-fueled one-night-stands that don’t even last a night: they don’t work anymore. They make him feel hollow, fill him with regret. It’s not the act, not in itself; it’s the thoughts the act sparks, the feel of a body next to his when he wakes up, the proof of life under his cheek as he stirs from sleep, the warmth and the steady thump of blood.
_______________________________
After Eduardo meets with the Harvard kids (it’s a decent idea, he’ll actually think about it), he rearranges a few things to meet Chris in New York-halfway for the both of them. This city, oddly enough, doesn’t feel hostile to Eduardo, like it used to. He wishes that bit of progress extended to other aspects of his life, but hell, he should probably just shut up and take what he can get.
Chris hugs him in greeting, and they chat amicably over their salads, through the entrée course. It feels nice, to be honest,
And it feels like bullshit, to be frank.
“It’s been how many years, now?” Chris interjects as Eduardo’s telling him about an investment he made in some strange, but promising new iteration of PayPal.
Eduardo doesn’t need to think about how many years; he knows the weeks, the days, Possibly the hours.
He plays dumb anyway.
“Since I backed them? It’s been less than three months, man.”
“You still tense up when we so much as skirt a subject that has the slightest connection to,” he pauses, seems to ponder, “well, anything even remotely related to him.”
Eduardo’s face freezes, he can feel it; he stills, steels himself and starts to smile, starts to cover his ass because Chris has called him out, yes, and fuck him for it.
“Hell, Eduardo,” Chris tells him, tilts his head after the man who took their orders for coffee as he makes his retreat to fill their requests; “our waiter’s name is Mark, and you stare at him like he’s the goddamned sunshine and the devil all at once.”
Eduardo keeps his face stony, stoic, but his heart’s getting a little out of hand, getting frantic in his chest.
“Got a call from Dustin,” Christ starts in a new vein, but Eduardo tenses anew; he can feel this is going somewhere uncomfortable, can tell that it’s going to hit even closer to the places where Eduardo’s most vulnerable-where he’s the least and most guarded all at once-the longer Chris talks, the more that he says. “Couple of days ago.” Chris looks down, folds his napkin up on the table in front of him as their dishes are cleared away. “Turns out Mark’s been a bit, off lately. Distracted.”
The fact that he’d looked away makes it all the more powerful, all the more chilling and piercing when he looks back up; the bastard, he planned that shit, he plotted out moves like that, master manipulator that he is.
“You wouldn’t know anything about that, now,” Eduardo swallows, forces a smirk as Chris’ eyes narrow just a bit; knowing, not judging, just-too knowing. “Would you?”
Their drinks come, and Chris starts to sip his carefully, gracefully. The fucker.
Eduardo hates himself, a little, but he can’t even make himself move, just then.
“Just about every airline you can think of runs nonstop from JFK to the West Coast now, you know,” Chris says, offhandedly, and all the white noise in Eduardo’s head at that moment zeroes in on the fact that there’s really only a few hundred dollars and a handful of hours standing between him and the one man who has owned his goddamned world for far too long.
And Chris, Chris, just-fuck him. Seriously. Just.
Fuck.
_______________________________
When he gets back to Cambridge, it’s almost easy to imagine that time will have dulled things, just a little. That the shift in him was all just him, and that Mark was only, you know, a catalyst. He wasn’t the sole thing, the central thing, the most important thing.
Dreams, and thoughts, and feelings be damned.
Eduardo’s always been good at lying to himself, when things are still theoretical, when there’s room for plausible deniability.
That room, though? It ends when he sees Mark moving back, lugging furniture into Kirkland a week before classes start back up.
He tries to duck away, but Mark catches his eye, even across the distance. And Eduardo freezes, and catches fire, and there’s a magnetism and an entropy and there’s so much and so little and Mark smiles, which Mark never does, that little quirk of his lips, and raises a hand in greeting.
Eduardo can’t help himself. He raises his hand right back, and smiles, wanly, anemic.
And then-because old habits always die hard-he turns tail and walks fast until he’s out of sight.
And then, one more time: he runs.
_______________________________
In retrospect, Eduardo hadn’t really thought the whole thing through. At all. Which is kind of a pattern, really, when it comes to things involving Mark.
He enters the offices, because he’s a shareholder, and he has clearance. He knows where Mark’s office used to be, and he figures there’s a good chance that it hasn’t changed, because with certain things, Mark’s about innovation. Other things, Mark’s all about routine.
He isn’t wrong, about Mark. About routine. About where his office is.
He walks, doesn’t really see if anyone pays attention, if anyone recognizes him; he walks to Mark’s office, to his door, and knocks, and Mark says, “It’s open,” and Eduardo wonders if his heart’s actually stopped pounding for a single goddamn minute since he left the restaurant with Chris and grabbed a cab to the airport to do something stupid, to do this, which was stupid, is stupid-he wonders if it’s taken a single breather from that point to this, because the muscles’s getting tired, he can feel it; he can almost tell that it wants to, has at least entertained the prospect of giving out entirely, just fucking off in the center of his chest.
Being close to Mark, though, makes him feel that sensation all the more acutely. He shouldn’t surprised.
And to be honest, he thinks for a second that it does just give up, give out, right there, when Mark looks up, when Eduardo doesn’t enter, doesn’t say anything, just stares.
Mark blinks at him, rolls his eyes, turns away, puts his headphones on and says-says, when he probably can’t even hear his own words over the music in his ears-”Get the fuck out.”
Eduardo just stands there, stares, mouth try, vocal cords all shriveled suddenly, and he watches, waits, wonders what the hell he’s doing and when he decided that being anything less than unavailable, inaccessible, unassailable was worth his goddamned time.
“Wardo,” there’s a hand on his shoulder, he starts at the contact. “Come on,” Dustin guides him back and eases Mark’s door shut as he spins Eduardo around and leads him away, and Eduardo lets him, because he’s dazed and confused and fucked, completed fucked and that’s not new but it is, like this. Like this, it is. “I think we need to have a chat.”
_______________________________
Never let it be said that Mark can’t read people correctly, once he’s reached every wrong conclusion possible. He’s a rational sort-process of elimination never fails.
He shows up at Eduardo’s room, a few days after move-in, the Sunday afternoon before classes pick back up; he looks as harried as Mark gets, which isn’t very harried, but it’s enough to catch Eduardo’s attention, to cause a lurch in Eduardo’s chest at the bags under his eyes and the wild edge to his gaze, the nearly-imperceptible tremble at his wrist when he’s still, from too much caffeine-a lurch that catches Eduardo’s attention.
“Look, I don’t know what you’re upset about, or even if you’re upset,” Mark says, gestures, states it clear and blunt. “But Dustin’s an idiot and Chris is frustrating and they’re beating me at Slayer which is fucking unacceptable,” he shifts his weight and crosses his arms over his chest. “So, yeah.”
Mark’s the most fucked up, perfect thing Eduardo’s ever fucking seen. And yeah, he’s head over heels. He might as well own it in his own head, at the least.
“I’m making dinner,” which is new for Eduardo, this whole thing is new, he is new and his world has shifted, has a slightly-different hue. “There’s enough for two.”
He turns, but hears the door close and sandals shuffle across the floor, and he smiles to himself as he checks the Hot Pockets he’d popped into the microwave; he’d been hungry enough for two, before, but now, not so much.
Now, just one’s good.
_______________________________
“You know, it’s kinda strange,: Dustin says as he shuts the door to the conference room behind Eduardo, sliding onto the table and swinging his legs underneath him. “He eats, he sleeps,” Dustin glances through the glass walls toward Mark’s office, where the blinds have been pulled, where Eduardo can’t see the man inside.
“He hasn’t coded something straight through, start to finish, in weeks,” Dustin continues. “He smiles at people, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. He’s quiet, reserved almost, even. He compliments the developers. He comes to meetings, and there are notes on his legal pads, instead of doodles.”
“He’s perfectly fucking normal,” Dustin concludes, expression tight. “For anyone but Mark.”
Eduardo doesn’t know what to say to that. He’s not sure he’s supposed to say anything; not sure he’s supposed to know, either way.
“Now, I’m not a moron,” Dustin starts, and Eduardo interjects immediately, knows exactly what to say to that.
“I never thought you were.”
Dustin’s face relaxes a bit, and he smiles just a little, nostalgic, fond: he looks a little more like he used to, before. “You didn’t, did you,” he muses, then shakes it off, picks back up where he left off.
“But I’m also good with details. Storylines, Timing. Cause and effect. I played enough D&D to be able to follow the action as it went along, or in your case, as it crashes and burns repeatedly because you’re a goddamn idiot, and so’s he,” he tilts his head toward the office with the blinds. “But yeah. I’m good with details, and I’m not a moron. This started after that conference. The one you happened to be at.”
“That doesn’t mean anything,” Eduardo protests, but it’s weak, on it’s own, and once again he can’t think of what else he’s meant to say.
“But the look on your face sure as hell does,” and Dustin, prick that he is, disciple of Chris Hughes’ brand of reading people on top of his own strange kind of perceptiveness, and fuck them, fuck them both, Eduardo can’t argue. They’ve got him by the balls.
“I don’t give a shit about your personal affairs, to be honest. Or else, you know. No more than a friend should,” and Dustin looks at him, square in the eye. “If we are still friends, Eduardo. And on my end, at least, I like to think so, for all the water that’s stagnating under the bridge.”
Eduardo nods. Dustin’s still his friend. Some things just are, no matter how much they maybe shouldn’t be.
Eduardo knows that better than anyone.
“And maybe you’re stupid, or maybe you’re scared,” Dustin tells him, not viciously, not cruelly, just straight. “Maybe you’re oblivious, or maybe you really are as self-centered as he is, at all the wrong times. Maybe you’re selfish when he’s an open-fucking book who’d hand you his goddamned soul on a platter to carve up and leave bloody, just because it’d be your hands making all the cuts, and then you both just trade off without ever seeing the signs. I don’t know.”
Eduardo, he kinda feels like he’s forgotten how to swallow.
“You’ve made this so much more complicated than it ever needed to be,” Dustin tells him, “so I’m going to spell it out for you, alright? I’m going to do you this one favor, and then the ball’s in your court.”
Now he’s kind of thinking he might be forgetting how to breathe.
“He’s in love with you,” Dustin says it, and there’s some kind of static, the sound of a drum that echoes in Eduardo’s ears from that moment on. “He was then, the whole time. That might make what happened worse, to be fair, but I don’t think he understood. He’s different, always has been, you know that as well as I do,” and yes, Eduardo does, he really does. “And I can honestly say that he didn’t see the threads coming together like they did, like they do; he saw it all like different tapestries altogether, and that was naive, but them’s the facts, man. He doesn’t want to see you because you hurt him, because you were being selfish without meaning to, because this time it was you who didn’t understand, because there was past and present and then and now and for him, it’s all the same, because he saw that the threads came together and in tugging one, the whole thing unraveled. He learned that the hard way. He saw that when you left.”
And it’s true, isn’t it. It was obvious, and he didn’t see it. He didn’t think it. Didn’t realize any of it and it’s all so fucking clear that Eduardo kind of wants to smash it, break it, kind of wants to sob and laugh and scream.
“It’s Romeo and Juliet without the suicide,” Dustin says, sounds sad and exasperated all at once, the drama drawn out too long, and ain’t that the fucking truth? “Just one big, tragic, fucked-up miscommunication.”
“So yeah,” Dustin tells him, sums it up, and Eduardo’s grateful, he thinks he might need it, the direction; he feels a little bit adrift, caught up in it all, revelation and responsibility and all the fucking rest, even as he’s trying not to think about what might have been, had he seen the signs sooner, had he not, had he been-“He’s not talking to you, not looking at you, doesn’t want to fucking see you, because what you did-whatever it was; how would you feel if the person you’d be in love with for years did that to you?”
Damnit. Damnit
“How did you feel, Wardo?”
Jesus, Jesus... fuck.
He looks, immediately, turns toward Mark’s office where the blinds are up again and the lights are off. Mark’s gone home for the night, apparently. It’s only 5:30. He had to have left right at 5.
That’s so fucking wrong, it’s scary.
“And the lightbulb goes off, ladies and gentlemen,” Dustin announces, sounds a little relieved and claps Eduardo on the shoulder as Eduardo starts to stand, starts to move, starts to leave. “The man can, indeed, be taught.”
_______________________________
It’s not so much a decision, really, when it happens. It’s an imperative, it’s a necessity. He feels like he’s going to explode, and that seems unpleasant, so he takes the only other option he has. He releases the pressure.
He’d planned to do it soon, but when he’d gotten the e-mail notification of a blog update from Zuckonit, and then another, and then another, in quick succession; when he’d read what had happened, when he’d seen it on the screen in black and white, he was out the door before he could think twice, his legs taking the initiative, his body desperate where the rest of him was terrified.
The walk to Kirkland had never seemed so long, so quick, all at the same time.
He almost trips going up the stairs. Twice.
“Hey,” he says, breathless, when he opens the familiar door. “What’s goin’ on?”
Mark looks up, and Eduardo lets the physical take over, lets something instinctive propel him forward, move his lips and his tongue and vibrate on his vocal cords, to say it.
“Hey Mark.”
“Wardo.” Eduardo never used to care for his nicknames, used to cringe to hear them, but not with Mark, not when Mark says that. It sends chills through him, tightens in his groin, makes him feel... god, just makes him feel.
“You and Erica split up.” He kicks himself, he bites his tongue, he wants to bang his head against the wall but what he does instead is lean forward, stupid, stupid.
“How did you know that?” Mark looks confused, or as confused as he gets, and Eduardo, he almost balks, he’s losing his nerve, his head’s overruling his body, and his heart’s speeding off a mile a minute, it doesn’t get a goddamned vote right now, it’s too unstable, to erratic, too consumed.
“It’s on your blog.” Mark shrugs, looks... almost sad, but not really, and it’s all Eduardo can do to breathe even as he watches, little hints of things that he can’t grasp but that he wants, he wants and he’s never wanted before, he’s always taken off, always was the one to run before this could happen, before he could even see, and he should run now, he shouldn’t try to make this different, shouldn’t turn over a new leaf because it’s dangerous, it’s fucking lethal, but it’s Mark, it’s Mark, it’s pretty-Mark-from-the-Yard, his best friend Mark, Mark the only person who Eduardo can’t help but break rules for, who Eduardo can’t get out from under his skin, who Eduardo would have to tear everything he is to shreds, would have to destroy himself to eradicate, and maybe he has, maybe he is, maybe he will.
“Yeah,” Mark says, and Eduardo thinks that if Mark noticed things, he’d see the jump of Eduardo’s pulse at his neck, the one he can feel teasing at the collar of his shirt when he shifts his weight.
“Are you alright?” Eduardo thinks that question might be better asked of him, rather than Mark, given the givens, given that Mark’s fucking gorgeous and Eduardo feels a little bit dizzy with the person he’s trying to be, or turning into, or both.
“I need you,” Mark says, and it feels like a dream and a nightmare and all the good and bad things come together in an explosion that leaves Eduardo temporarily deaf and blind, and his body takes over, he moves closer again, and he speaks before he can think, something hopeful in him wrenching control.
“I’m here for you.”
“No,” and then comes the fucking algorithm, and something in Eduardo stops, gets whiplash, grinds to a halt before the bottom falls out, and his heart calms down and retreats and this is what happens when you try to change the inevitable; this is what happens when you’re the only one who changes, and the world stays the same, and yeah. Fine. He loses his nerve and writes the fucking formula.
If he’d known it was only going to head downhill from there, he might have grown some balls.
Honestly, though: he’d never been in love before, never let himself tumble down this rabbit-hole, and he’s kind of a fucking coward when it comes to matters of the heart. So yeah, he might have. But probably not.
_______________________________
It’s not a decision this time, either. It’s not a fucking choice. He doesn’t plan it, but the suddenness, the impulsiveness of it is familiar, somehow. He’s walked this road, and he’s seen the worst places it can lead. There’s nothing to lose, this time. There’s no where darker he can go.
That’s oddly comforting.
The look on Mark’s face when he answers the knock at his door, when he sees Eduardo: it’s surprise and then betrayal, the kind of hurt that twists in Eduardo’s gut by proxy and then finally, something almost like disgust as Mark moves to close the door again, to slam it shut on Eduardo where he stands, loose-limbed and exhausted and desperate on Mark’s doorstep, absolutely unsure what he’s going to say but thinking that maybe, maybe, that’s the best he could have hoped for in this. Maybe it’s the best case scenario, here and now.
“I used to lose sleep,” Eduardo blurts out, his palm darting out to catch the door, to wedge it open; Mark turns, mouth open, and Eduardo knows he has to be quick, has to finish; “thinking about the things I wanted to say to you, but couldn’t.”
Mark’s jaw works, soundlessly, but he doesn’t try to close the door again. The words are on Eduardo’s tongue, honest and unpolished: sloppy. He’s a fucking mess.
He remembers this feeling all too well.
“I failed my international business final the second semester of my sophomore year, because of you, because I could only think of you,” and that’s true, that’s true: he’s been hiding from Mark like it would make a difference and it had, it’s taken him and turned him stupid with want. “I was lucky enough that my prof bought my excuse of having the flu, and he let me retake it before my father caught wind of anything.”
Mark’s expression doesn’t change, exactly, but he swallows differently. Eduardo can tell what that means; Mark wants to smirk, is trying to fight it off. That’s a good sign.
“I’d sit in my bed,” Eduardo ventures a step forward, dares to put the toe of his shoe on the threshold, not close enough to Mark to touch, to feel, just a step.
But a step, in this, is everything.
“I’d sit there in the dark, alone, and I’d run my hand over my chest,” his voice dips, and he doesn’t know why he’s saying this, how he’s saying this, spouting this maudlin fucking shit, these secrets he’s buried and promised never to revisit in the corners of his own mind, let alone say aloud, not to mention saying it to Mark, Jesus. He’s fucked in the head, he really is.
“And I’d let my pulse run ragged, ‘til you could feel it if your palm was hovering, not making contact with the skin, and I’d breathe and I’d close my eyes and I’d just picture you,” Eduardo has enough presence of mind to see that Mark still looks pissed, still looks confused and angry and hurt, but his pupils are wide, really wide, and it’s not just the fact that it’s dark out, Eduardo’s pretty sure of that.
“I’d hear the sound of your heartbeat in my ear, when I looked at you,” Eduardo confesses, puts his own hand to his chest unconsciously, feels the way his heart’s pumping now; “that one night that was everything for the longest time, innocent, an accident.” He swallows, and he watches Mark swallow, and he thinks that maybe, maybe there’s a chance. Maybe there’s something here to save. Something to start. To build from. “At the depositions, I’d still hear that sound in my head.”
Eduardo takes a chance, grows the balls he should have years ago and takes one more step; Mark steps back, hesitant, but Eduardo goes with him, and Mark stills, lets him come closer. “That night,” Eduardo whispers, pauses, stays just a breath from touching, from breathing the air right out of Mark’s lungs, and they both know what he’s talking about, they’ve both lived half inside that night ever since, Eduardo can see that, and it breaks his heart and makes him soar all at once.
“I wouldn’t have done that to you,” he says, rough and low and laden with all the feelings he’s known but never said, never really thought he could, doesn’t know if he can, but for the first time, wants to more than anything. “I know how it feels to,” he sucks in air and it’s not just him; Mark does, too, and they’ve both stepped wrong, fucked things beyond repair, but they’re both the broken sort anyway, maybe. Perhaps they don’t need fixing.
“I didn’t,” he hesitates, trembles, stumbles; “I’m sorry.”
Mark blinks, and Eduardo presses on, because it needs to be said, it needs to be known, and for Mark, for this, for the promise of a possibility that may never come but could, Eduardo can form the words.
“After everything, after all that happened,” he confesses, a sinner and a saint between them in the whispers; “the day we signed the papers, even,” his chest is sore and his throat is raw and it’s not just lust widening up Mark’s blue eyes, now, it’s something bigger, maybe better.
“I would have done that, if I’d known,” Eduardo tells him, honest, because he wouldn’t have. “Not ever.” He’d have stayed that night, despite everything.
“I’m sorry.” And that’s all he’s got, really; that’s all he can do for now, and he watches Mark, watches Mark being still and stoic, and watches when Mark’s chest expands beneath his tee shirt and watches when Mark looks away before he speaks.
“I’m making dinner,” Mark finally says, and Eduardo blinks, taken aback for a second, remembering the world as it used to be before slamming back into this moment, here and now.
Mark looks at him, his eyes narrowing, his eyebrows moving, indicating something unsaid before he goes ahead and spells it out, before he says it. “There’s enough for two.”
And frankly, that in itself really is enough. For now.
Eduardo follows Mark inside, picking up on the scent of pepper and basil and olive oil (and not, absolutely not Hot Pockets)-he follows Mark inside and shuts the front door behind him.
<--- Part One
Part Two
-----------------------------------
Eduardo jumps when something lands, heavy and full upon his desk -- he blinks, looks up at the critical expression on his assistant’s face, and then back down to the offending object: a salad. Take out, from Ananda Bhavan, which is kind of a hike, but it’s one of Rhoda’s favorites. Over time, he’s come to recognize: it’s always a bad sign when his assistant buys him her own favorite food.
Because she only goes so far to get her favorite food when she’s gearing up to give him news she’d rather not have to deliver.
“Afternoon,” he says, skeptical, eyeing Rhoda and the salad by turns with an arched brow.
“You haven’t eaten anything since you got here,” she tells him, by way of explanation, gesturing toward the container perched atop a few contracts, a quarterly statement or two.
“It’s only one-thirty,” Eduardo protests; there are plenty of days where he takes his lunch past three, sometimes where he skips it altogether.
“On Thursday,” she shoots back, eyes sharp, unamused; “You never went home last night.”
Eduardo blinks. “Oh.” He hadn’t realized that, but it kind of makes sense. He thought he’d been inordinately tired that morning.
“You’re impossible,” Rhoda sighs, shakes her head. She’s never approved of him, exactly, but she certainly seems to care, nonetheless. You know, if the plastic fork she tosses at him is any indication.
“From you?” Eduardo smiles softly up at her as he unwraps his food: she got him extra dressing, just as he likes. He knew he’d hired her for a reason. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”
He’s opened up the salad, has a forkful hovering right in front of his open mouth when she drops the bomb: “You’re going to Boston next week.”
The lettuce falls off the spoon from where it dangles in midair; Eduardo’s mouth, though, stays open.
“Excuse me?”
“Boston,” Rhoda rolls her eyes, but she repeats it fast, knows that while time has passed and lives have changed, there’s no love lost between Eduardo at that city, that place, the things it still holds in the soil, the shade. “You have a meeting with some grad students who think they have the next generation-defining idea,” and her voice is cynical, her tone mocking, trying to make light of the way that something heavy settles in Eduardo’s gut when he thinks about the East Coast, whether he likes it or not.
“Boston,” he says again, lets the name roll around his tongue until it can’t taste sour, until it lilts the right way and feels like a place that was once his home, versus a place that was once his hell.
“Beantown, Ye Olde Town, the City on a Hill,” Rhoda speaks deliberately, as if to a child, and leans into his desk with hands on either corner, braced for a reaction: whatever kind comes. “Yes. Boston.”
Eduardo pokes his fork into the salad again and chews through his words; he takes a perverse kind of pleasure in the look of disgust that he gets from Rhoda as a result. “Grad students, hmm?”
Rhoda grins a little, humorlessly. “Three guesses where from.”
“Goddamnit.” Eduardo suspected, but wasn’t sure; he really should have known.
It’s only Harvard students who believe that creating a job is better than finding one, after all.
“You leave on the 23rd,” Rhoda tells him, tapping on her tablet, mapping out the calendar in real time. “You’ll pop there, you’ll pop back here, then you’re off to Hong Kong before you swing by San Fran,” she puts the screen to sleep and tucks it under her arm as Eduardo preemptively laments his sleep schedule, not to mention his general sense of time. “I accept frequent flyer miles as part of my yearly bonus, as you know,” she tacks on; “but I feel the need to emphasize that it only counts as part of the bonus.”
Eduardo snorts at her and spins in his chair, facing his desktop now instead of the doorway she’s standing in. He’s thinking of Harvard Square and Nocch’s and Holyoke Center, and they all have a certain common denominator, a particular shared phenomenon. “Fantastic.”
He looks; doesn’t have any unread messages in his inbox.
“Don’t sound so enthused,” Rhoda shoots over her shoulder as she walks away, leaving Eduardo to his salad and his murky thoughts.
Which is why he blames her, absently, half-heartedly, some three hours later. It’s why he blames her for the fact that he’s looking for transcontinental flights on the 24th, or red-eyes on the 23rd, BOS to SFO, just because.
Just... because.
Fuck. Fuck.
Goddamn Rhoda.
_______________________________
Eduardo’s sitting, he’s just sitting there in the Yard, stretched out between two of the colored chairs scattered in between the trees, watching the students and the tourists wind around instead of reading the textbook propped open between his knees.
He’s just sitting, when a force of nature comes up next to him and nearly startles him out of his seat.
“You,” the intruder tells him, and he looks harmless enough -- harmless, at least, if you disregard the fact that he might be absolutely insane. “Party. Tonight.”
Eduardo blinks, takes him in: reddish hair. Crazy eyes. Exuberance, like, a lot of it, so much that he’s kind of vibrating right where he stands.
“Excuse me?” Eduardo finally asks, though he suspects it might have been smarter to simply ignore the guy. He looks kind of familiar, sure, but so do a lot of people.
And, well, given the givens, Eduardo tends to avoid those sorts of people. He can never quite remember which ones he recognizes from class, and which he vaguely recalls because he came once, all over their sheets.
“You,” the redhead points at him with both hands; “party,” and now, the redhead dances, or else, Eduardo thinks that’s what he’s getting at: mostly, he’s swinging around at random, gesturing wildly with his arms and thrusting with his hips; “tonight,” and there, he stops, like he can’t figure out how to represent the concept visually off the top of his head, but he finally settles on resting his head on the pillow of his hands, eyes closing briefly as he lets out an exaggerated snore.
Weird as it is, the performance clears things up for Eduardo: he didn’t sleep with that. He’d have remembered that kind of hip action, for sure.
“And you are?”
“Dustin,” the guy, whose name is apparently Dustin, tells him, a little exasperated, entirely good-natured. “Mark’s roommate,” he adds helpfully when Eduard says nothing, might be staring in a potentially-rude kind of way. “You’re Mark’s friend, right?”
“Friend?” Eduardo asks, because, well, he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know why he asks, he doesn’t know that friend is an accurate descriptor, he doesn’t know how he feels about the jolt the word sends through him, he... doesn’t know.
“Dude,” Dustin raises an eyebrow unnaturally high at him, crosses his arms over his chest in mild disbelief. “I’ve witnessed you talking to Mark for more than three minutes, and he didn’t a) provoke you via insults to throw your drink in his face, or b) otherwise offend or bore you into leaving of your own volition. I count that as a check in the ‘friend’ category, my man,” and of course, the guy makes a check-mark with his finger in midair to illustrate his meaning.
Eduardo, yeah, okay: the staring’s probably rude, by this point, but he can’t really help it. This Dustin character is... something else. Seriously.
Also, yes, Eduardo’s mind might be kind of occupied, because ‘friend’ is a loaded word for him. ‘Friend’ can mean a lot of things. ‘Friend’ can lead to things, but more often, ‘friend’ can fuck things up. ‘Friend’ makes things complicated. ‘Friend’ keeps Eduardo’s dick tucked securely in his pants.
Eduardo generally has trouble with the whole ‘friend’ thing. He more-than-generally has trouble with it when he thinks about Mark Zuckerberg.
What does it even mean to be ‘friends’, anyway?
“You in?” Dustin asks, hopeful in a way he has no right to be, because what investment does he have in Eduardo, in Eduardo’s presence at this get-together? Why does he care? Why would Mark care? Does Mark even care?
And most importantly: why does Eduardo find himself wanting to say yes?
“Do you have Halo?” is the question that comes out, that overrides the rest of the buzzing in his brain. Dustin shoots him a affronted kind of glare.
“Do I have...” he starts, sputters a little; “Seriously?” He shakes his head and hikes his backpack up on his shoulder a little higher. “BYOB, Mr. Saverin. We’re playing Oddball tonight, and I’m gonna own your Prada-wearing ass.”
“This is Hugo Boss,” Eduardo quips dryly, tugging at his lapel; he gets an eye-roll in reply.
“We start at nine,” Dustin tells him, like a decision was made, an answer was given, and maybe it was, sort of. “Be there,” and he spins a little, and Eduardo watches him closely as he points in the vague direction of the dorm Eduardo remembers from the winter, in the cold, “or be square,” and yeah, Dustin draws a fucking square in the air before he walks off with a half-wave over his shoulder.
Mostly, Eduardo wonders what the hell he’s getting himself into. He doesn’t process a single word of his reading assignment, either, even though he stays in the Yard trying to finish it up until the sun sets, until the bells toll eight, until it’s useless.
Useless.
With regard to more than just the reading.
_______________________________
So that’s how it starts, basically. Eduardo goes to the ‘party’. He gets there at quarter-after. There’s enough beer to sink the goddamn Titanic between the fridge and the cases lining the wall. Dustin -- who he starts bitching at as “fuck you, Moskovitz” after a few drinks and about an hour in front of the Xbox -- does kick his ass on just about ever game-play mode they tackle. Repeatedly.
It’s Mark, though. Mark’s what makes the evening both a blessing and a curse.
Because it’s Mark who opens the door and sees him, and doesn’t seem to expect to see him. It’s Mark who blinks, whose fingers tighten around a bottle of Beck’s as he glares in Dustin’s direction before belatedly decideding to let Eduardo in. It’s Mark who, in a completely contradictory way, goes and laughs at a really lame joke Eduardo makes about Master Chief and Cortana, which Eduardo knows is kind of out-of-character, until everyone else stares at Mark with their jaws half-open, and then Eduardo knows it’s basically unheard of. He might blush as a result.
It’s Mark who doesn’t say more than ten full sentences to him in the first two hours he’s there, and then brings him another beer and talks his ear off about ANSI escape sequences. It’s Mark who makes a point to sit next to him, or stand next to him, or hover in his general vicinity, closer than anyone else gets to be, from the moment Eduardo walks in to the moment he passes out on the futon, sometime close to 4 AM.
In fact, it’s sweat and stale air, nacho cheese and tuna and high-fructose corn syrup, alcohol and fabric softener: that’s what he smells, right before whatever happens next, whatever’s happening right this moment, trails off and fades to black.
_______________________________
Eduardo wakes up, and his neck’s a little kinked, and he thinks it might be late, like, later than he usually wakes up. His head’s still a little fuzzy, he might still be a little drunk, but, see: he wakes up, and there’s this sound. It’s a weird sound. Moving, wet -- sluicing, almost, lazy, in a way, and warm; Eduardo’s not sure how a sound can be warm, but it is, and it’s warm in a way that’s not like the heat that’s nice, comfortable against Eduardo’s side, against his head: a different warm, and full, too. Quickish, not objectively, but like Eduardo knows it should be slower, can be slower but this version of it -- the weird, warm sound -- it’s brisk and staccato and it’s, it’s-
It’s a heartbeat. That’s not his.
It’s under his ear. There’s a heartbeat under his ear.
That probably means there’s a person under his ear. Probably, yeah.
He’s, he’s... he’s fallen asleep.
He never lets himself fall asleep.
Never.
He leaps up, stumbles and hits his knee on a table and he swears, grabs at his leg like it’ll do anything to counter the sharp jolt of pain, and that’s when he hears it, small, soft, a little groan. That’s when he looks.
Mark. Mark, sleeping. Sleeping Mark, who’s curled into the corner of the futon, up against the wall, with his face all scrunched and a space hollowed next to him in the way he’s positioned. A space a person could fit.
An Eduardo-shaped space.
Son of a bitch, he’d been sleeping on Mark.
He turns on his heel and does what he’s good at. He runs.
It doesn’t take long, really, before he’s in his room, and his heart’s still racing, and all he can think about is how the sheets aren’t warm, his mattress isn’t soft, the sound of his pulse just isn’t like Mark’s.
And there’s a tightness in his chest, and his head’s spinning, and he’s scared and nervous and light, lighter than normal, and it all feels strange and awesome, and he might be dying, or he might pass out, and he’s never felt like this, and he’s never --
Jesus, god, fucking... motherfuck.
There’s something, deliberately, that he never does. Never feels. Something that, if the urban legends are to be believed, sounds a hell of a lot like this.
He’s, Mark, he’s in, he’s fall-
He’s fucked. That’s, it’s...
He’s fucked.
_______________________________
Eduardo kind-of partly hates flying First Class. Yes, the leg room and the free drinks are legitimate perks, but what he hates the most is the way that people watch him, stare at him on the smaller jets, the connections where the First Class cabin isn’t to the fore of Coach. They all file in to their seats, and they all judge, with their eyes. He’s always felt that way: when he was a teenager, a college kid -- from those days to these. He doesn’t like it.
He busies himself with his phone to avoid the stares, the glances: he stops himself from texting Mark, tries to calm the nerves in his gut when he sees the timestamp on their conversation -- weeks, now, since they exchanged any words, and Eduardo’s not so much of a masochist that he’ll let himself scroll up and read what’s above, their texts from the night of the NTC. He doesn’t hate himself that much.
Except that he totally does.
So he reads, and his stomach clenches, and then it’s his chest, and then he breaks down, then he does the one thing that he said he wouldn’t. The one thing that’s worse than bombarding Mark with more texts, more e-mails, more unanswered attempts at a response that he can’t comprehend, that he doesn’t understand the reason for.
He takes it to a whole new level:
about to hit your continent; free for dinner? how are things? how is everyone?
He selects the recipient from his contacts -- Chris Hughes -- and hits send as they declare his electronics verboten and close the cabin door.
_______________________________
Eduardo isn’t entirely sure how to navigate Mark, after.
It’s not that Mark changes at all; Eduardo’s not even sure Mark knows what happened, or remembers. Eduardo’s not even sure that what happened deserves noting. The real problem is that Eduardo wakes up in the morning, every morning with the ghost of heat and weight and a rhythm under his ear, and his own hand down his boxers, a hand that his mind imagines belongs to someone else.
That’s the real problem.
So Eduardo buries himself in final projects and term papers until Reading Period. He buries himself in textbooks, studying for finals until his exams. He declines invitations to get drunk, to party, to play video games, to do anything outside of his dorm room. He walks too fast around campus, and takes strange routes to get to classes-he makes himself scarce like a goddamned fugitive, and he knows it’s excessive, knows it’s a step too far, but he can’t help it. He’s coming apart at the seams, every rule he’d made for himself, every line he’d drawn: they’re shattering, it’s all shattering, and he can’t catch the pieces. So, yeah: he takes the first flight to Miami he can get on as soon as he turns his last assignment in.
He gets a text from Mark, right before he flies, and it’s irrational, it’s totally irrational: he’s fucking insane, and this is just proof of it, but he thumbs to the message and deletes it before so much as looking at the first few lines, and then turns his phone off.
The summer’s a long blur of forgetting, after that. Of pining, and fucking, and feeling empty afterward in a way he never had before. Faceless hookups on the beach, alcohol-fueled one-night-stands that don’t even last a night: they don’t work anymore. They make him feel hollow, fill him with regret. It’s not the act, not in itself; it’s the thoughts the act sparks, the feel of a body next to his when he wakes up, the proof of life under his cheek as he stirs from sleep, the warmth and the steady thump of blood.
_______________________________
After Eduardo meets with the Harvard kids (it’s a decent idea, he’ll actually think about it), he rearranges a few things to meet Chris in New York-halfway for the both of them. This city, oddly enough, doesn’t feel hostile to Eduardo, like it used to. He wishes that bit of progress extended to other aspects of his life, but hell, he should probably just shut up and take what he can get.
Chris hugs him in greeting, and they chat amicably over their salads, through the entrée course. It feels nice, to be honest,
And it feels like bullshit, to be frank.
“It’s been how many years, now?” Chris interjects as Eduardo’s telling him about an investment he made in some strange, but promising new iteration of PayPal.
Eduardo doesn’t need to think about how many years; he knows the weeks, the days, Possibly the hours.
He plays dumb anyway.
“Since I backed them? It’s been less than three months, man.”
“You still tense up when we so much as skirt a subject that has the slightest connection to,” he pauses, seems to ponder, “well, anything even remotely related to him.”
Eduardo’s face freezes, he can feel it; he stills, steels himself and starts to smile, starts to cover his ass because Chris has called him out, yes, and fuck him for it.
“Hell, Eduardo,” Chris tells him, tilts his head after the man who took their orders for coffee as he makes his retreat to fill their requests; “our waiter’s name is Mark, and you stare at him like he’s the goddamned sunshine and the devil all at once.”
Eduardo keeps his face stony, stoic, but his heart’s getting a little out of hand, getting frantic in his chest.
“Got a call from Dustin,” Christ starts in a new vein, but Eduardo tenses anew; he can feel this is going somewhere uncomfortable, can tell that it’s going to hit even closer to the places where Eduardo’s most vulnerable-where he’s the least and most guarded all at once-the longer Chris talks, the more that he says. “Couple of days ago.” Chris looks down, folds his napkin up on the table in front of him as their dishes are cleared away. “Turns out Mark’s been a bit, off lately. Distracted.”
The fact that he’d looked away makes it all the more powerful, all the more chilling and piercing when he looks back up; the bastard, he planned that shit, he plotted out moves like that, master manipulator that he is.
“You wouldn’t know anything about that, now,” Eduardo swallows, forces a smirk as Chris’ eyes narrow just a bit; knowing, not judging, just-too knowing. “Would you?”
Their drinks come, and Chris starts to sip his carefully, gracefully. The fucker.
Eduardo hates himself, a little, but he can’t even make himself move, just then.
“Just about every airline you can think of runs nonstop from JFK to the West Coast now, you know,” Chris says, offhandedly, and all the white noise in Eduardo’s head at that moment zeroes in on the fact that there’s really only a few hundred dollars and a handful of hours standing between him and the one man who has owned his goddamned world for far too long.
And Chris, Chris, just-fuck him. Seriously. Just.
Fuck.
_______________________________
When he gets back to Cambridge, it’s almost easy to imagine that time will have dulled things, just a little. That the shift in him was all just him, and that Mark was only, you know, a catalyst. He wasn’t the sole thing, the central thing, the most important thing.
Dreams, and thoughts, and feelings be damned.
Eduardo’s always been good at lying to himself, when things are still theoretical, when there’s room for plausible deniability.
That room, though? It ends when he sees Mark moving back, lugging furniture into Kirkland a week before classes start back up.
He tries to duck away, but Mark catches his eye, even across the distance. And Eduardo freezes, and catches fire, and there’s a magnetism and an entropy and there’s so much and so little and Mark smiles, which Mark never does, that little quirk of his lips, and raises a hand in greeting.
Eduardo can’t help himself. He raises his hand right back, and smiles, wanly, anemic.
And then-because old habits always die hard-he turns tail and walks fast until he’s out of sight.
And then, one more time: he runs.
_______________________________
In retrospect, Eduardo hadn’t really thought the whole thing through. At all. Which is kind of a pattern, really, when it comes to things involving Mark.
He enters the offices, because he’s a shareholder, and he has clearance. He knows where Mark’s office used to be, and he figures there’s a good chance that it hasn’t changed, because with certain things, Mark’s about innovation. Other things, Mark’s all about routine.
He isn’t wrong, about Mark. About routine. About where his office is.
He walks, doesn’t really see if anyone pays attention, if anyone recognizes him; he walks to Mark’s office, to his door, and knocks, and Mark says, “It’s open,” and Eduardo wonders if his heart’s actually stopped pounding for a single goddamn minute since he left the restaurant with Chris and grabbed a cab to the airport to do something stupid, to do this, which was stupid, is stupid-he wonders if it’s taken a single breather from that point to this, because the muscles’s getting tired, he can feel it; he can almost tell that it wants to, has at least entertained the prospect of giving out entirely, just fucking off in the center of his chest.
Being close to Mark, though, makes him feel that sensation all the more acutely. He shouldn’t surprised.
And to be honest, he thinks for a second that it does just give up, give out, right there, when Mark looks up, when Eduardo doesn’t enter, doesn’t say anything, just stares.
Mark blinks at him, rolls his eyes, turns away, puts his headphones on and says-says, when he probably can’t even hear his own words over the music in his ears-”Get the fuck out.”
Eduardo just stands there, stares, mouth try, vocal cords all shriveled suddenly, and he watches, waits, wonders what the hell he’s doing and when he decided that being anything less than unavailable, inaccessible, unassailable was worth his goddamned time.
“Wardo,” there’s a hand on his shoulder, he starts at the contact. “Come on,” Dustin guides him back and eases Mark’s door shut as he spins Eduardo around and leads him away, and Eduardo lets him, because he’s dazed and confused and fucked, completed fucked and that’s not new but it is, like this. Like this, it is. “I think we need to have a chat.”
_______________________________
Never let it be said that Mark can’t read people correctly, once he’s reached every wrong conclusion possible. He’s a rational sort-process of elimination never fails.
He shows up at Eduardo’s room, a few days after move-in, the Sunday afternoon before classes pick back up; he looks as harried as Mark gets, which isn’t very harried, but it’s enough to catch Eduardo’s attention, to cause a lurch in Eduardo’s chest at the bags under his eyes and the wild edge to his gaze, the nearly-imperceptible tremble at his wrist when he’s still, from too much caffeine-a lurch that catches Eduardo’s attention.
“Look, I don’t know what you’re upset about, or even if you’re upset,” Mark says, gestures, states it clear and blunt. “But Dustin’s an idiot and Chris is frustrating and they’re beating me at Slayer which is fucking unacceptable,” he shifts his weight and crosses his arms over his chest. “So, yeah.”
Mark’s the most fucked up, perfect thing Eduardo’s ever fucking seen. And yeah, he’s head over heels. He might as well own it in his own head, at the least.
“I’m making dinner,” which is new for Eduardo, this whole thing is new, he is new and his world has shifted, has a slightly-different hue. “There’s enough for two.”
He turns, but hears the door close and sandals shuffle across the floor, and he smiles to himself as he checks the Hot Pockets he’d popped into the microwave; he’d been hungry enough for two, before, but now, not so much.
Now, just one’s good.
_______________________________
“You know, it’s kinda strange,: Dustin says as he shuts the door to the conference room behind Eduardo, sliding onto the table and swinging his legs underneath him. “He eats, he sleeps,” Dustin glances through the glass walls toward Mark’s office, where the blinds have been pulled, where Eduardo can’t see the man inside.
“He hasn’t coded something straight through, start to finish, in weeks,” Dustin continues. “He smiles at people, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. He’s quiet, reserved almost, even. He compliments the developers. He comes to meetings, and there are notes on his legal pads, instead of doodles.”
“He’s perfectly fucking normal,” Dustin concludes, expression tight. “For anyone but Mark.”
Eduardo doesn’t know what to say to that. He’s not sure he’s supposed to say anything; not sure he’s supposed to know, either way.
“Now, I’m not a moron,” Dustin starts, and Eduardo interjects immediately, knows exactly what to say to that.
“I never thought you were.”
Dustin’s face relaxes a bit, and he smiles just a little, nostalgic, fond: he looks a little more like he used to, before. “You didn’t, did you,” he muses, then shakes it off, picks back up where he left off.
“But I’m also good with details. Storylines, Timing. Cause and effect. I played enough D&D to be able to follow the action as it went along, or in your case, as it crashes and burns repeatedly because you’re a goddamn idiot, and so’s he,” he tilts his head toward the office with the blinds. “But yeah. I’m good with details, and I’m not a moron. This started after that conference. The one you happened to be at.”
“That doesn’t mean anything,” Eduardo protests, but it’s weak, on it’s own, and once again he can’t think of what else he’s meant to say.
“But the look on your face sure as hell does,” and Dustin, prick that he is, disciple of Chris Hughes’ brand of reading people on top of his own strange kind of perceptiveness, and fuck them, fuck them both, Eduardo can’t argue. They’ve got him by the balls.
“I don’t give a shit about your personal affairs, to be honest. Or else, you know. No more than a friend should,” and Dustin looks at him, square in the eye. “If we are still friends, Eduardo. And on my end, at least, I like to think so, for all the water that’s stagnating under the bridge.”
Eduardo nods. Dustin’s still his friend. Some things just are, no matter how much they maybe shouldn’t be.
Eduardo knows that better than anyone.
“And maybe you’re stupid, or maybe you’re scared,” Dustin tells him, not viciously, not cruelly, just straight. “Maybe you’re oblivious, or maybe you really are as self-centered as he is, at all the wrong times. Maybe you’re selfish when he’s an open-fucking book who’d hand you his goddamned soul on a platter to carve up and leave bloody, just because it’d be your hands making all the cuts, and then you both just trade off without ever seeing the signs. I don’t know.”
Eduardo, he kinda feels like he’s forgotten how to swallow.
“You’ve made this so much more complicated than it ever needed to be,” Dustin tells him, “so I’m going to spell it out for you, alright? I’m going to do you this one favor, and then the ball’s in your court.”
Now he’s kind of thinking he might be forgetting how to breathe.
“He’s in love with you,” Dustin says it, and there’s some kind of static, the sound of a drum that echoes in Eduardo’s ears from that moment on. “He was then, the whole time. That might make what happened worse, to be fair, but I don’t think he understood. He’s different, always has been, you know that as well as I do,” and yes, Eduardo does, he really does. “And I can honestly say that he didn’t see the threads coming together like they did, like they do; he saw it all like different tapestries altogether, and that was naive, but them’s the facts, man. He doesn’t want to see you because you hurt him, because you were being selfish without meaning to, because this time it was you who didn’t understand, because there was past and present and then and now and for him, it’s all the same, because he saw that the threads came together and in tugging one, the whole thing unraveled. He learned that the hard way. He saw that when you left.”
And it’s true, isn’t it. It was obvious, and he didn’t see it. He didn’t think it. Didn’t realize any of it and it’s all so fucking clear that Eduardo kind of wants to smash it, break it, kind of wants to sob and laugh and scream.
“It’s Romeo and Juliet without the suicide,” Dustin says, sounds sad and exasperated all at once, the drama drawn out too long, and ain’t that the fucking truth? “Just one big, tragic, fucked-up miscommunication.”
“So yeah,” Dustin tells him, sums it up, and Eduardo’s grateful, he thinks he might need it, the direction; he feels a little bit adrift, caught up in it all, revelation and responsibility and all the fucking rest, even as he’s trying not to think about what might have been, had he seen the signs sooner, had he not, had he been-“He’s not talking to you, not looking at you, doesn’t want to fucking see you, because what you did-whatever it was; how would you feel if the person you’d be in love with for years did that to you?”
Damnit. Damnit
“How did you feel, Wardo?”
Jesus, Jesus... fuck.
He looks, immediately, turns toward Mark’s office where the blinds are up again and the lights are off. Mark’s gone home for the night, apparently. It’s only 5:30. He had to have left right at 5.
That’s so fucking wrong, it’s scary.
“And the lightbulb goes off, ladies and gentlemen,” Dustin announces, sounds a little relieved and claps Eduardo on the shoulder as Eduardo starts to stand, starts to move, starts to leave. “The man can, indeed, be taught.”
_______________________________
It’s not so much a decision, really, when it happens. It’s an imperative, it’s a necessity. He feels like he’s going to explode, and that seems unpleasant, so he takes the only other option he has. He releases the pressure.
He’d planned to do it soon, but when he’d gotten the e-mail notification of a blog update from Zuckonit, and then another, and then another, in quick succession; when he’d read what had happened, when he’d seen it on the screen in black and white, he was out the door before he could think twice, his legs taking the initiative, his body desperate where the rest of him was terrified.
The walk to Kirkland had never seemed so long, so quick, all at the same time.
He almost trips going up the stairs. Twice.
“Hey,” he says, breathless, when he opens the familiar door. “What’s goin’ on?”
Mark looks up, and Eduardo lets the physical take over, lets something instinctive propel him forward, move his lips and his tongue and vibrate on his vocal cords, to say it.
“Hey Mark.”
“Wardo.” Eduardo never used to care for his nicknames, used to cringe to hear them, but not with Mark, not when Mark says that. It sends chills through him, tightens in his groin, makes him feel... god, just makes him feel.
“You and Erica split up.” He kicks himself, he bites his tongue, he wants to bang his head against the wall but what he does instead is lean forward, stupid, stupid.
“How did you know that?” Mark looks confused, or as confused as he gets, and Eduardo, he almost balks, he’s losing his nerve, his head’s overruling his body, and his heart’s speeding off a mile a minute, it doesn’t get a goddamned vote right now, it’s too unstable, to erratic, too consumed.
“It’s on your blog.” Mark shrugs, looks... almost sad, but not really, and it’s all Eduardo can do to breathe even as he watches, little hints of things that he can’t grasp but that he wants, he wants and he’s never wanted before, he’s always taken off, always was the one to run before this could happen, before he could even see, and he should run now, he shouldn’t try to make this different, shouldn’t turn over a new leaf because it’s dangerous, it’s fucking lethal, but it’s Mark, it’s Mark, it’s pretty-Mark-from-the-Yard, his best friend Mark, Mark the only person who Eduardo can’t help but break rules for, who Eduardo can’t get out from under his skin, who Eduardo would have to tear everything he is to shreds, would have to destroy himself to eradicate, and maybe he has, maybe he is, maybe he will.
“Yeah,” Mark says, and Eduardo thinks that if Mark noticed things, he’d see the jump of Eduardo’s pulse at his neck, the one he can feel teasing at the collar of his shirt when he shifts his weight.
“Are you alright?” Eduardo thinks that question might be better asked of him, rather than Mark, given the givens, given that Mark’s fucking gorgeous and Eduardo feels a little bit dizzy with the person he’s trying to be, or turning into, or both.
“I need you,” Mark says, and it feels like a dream and a nightmare and all the good and bad things come together in an explosion that leaves Eduardo temporarily deaf and blind, and his body takes over, he moves closer again, and he speaks before he can think, something hopeful in him wrenching control.
“I’m here for you.”
“No,” and then comes the fucking algorithm, and something in Eduardo stops, gets whiplash, grinds to a halt before the bottom falls out, and his heart calms down and retreats and this is what happens when you try to change the inevitable; this is what happens when you’re the only one who changes, and the world stays the same, and yeah. Fine. He loses his nerve and writes the fucking formula.
If he’d known it was only going to head downhill from there, he might have grown some balls.
Honestly, though: he’d never been in love before, never let himself tumble down this rabbit-hole, and he’s kind of a fucking coward when it comes to matters of the heart. So yeah, he might have. But probably not.
_______________________________
It’s not a decision this time, either. It’s not a fucking choice. He doesn’t plan it, but the suddenness, the impulsiveness of it is familiar, somehow. He’s walked this road, and he’s seen the worst places it can lead. There’s nothing to lose, this time. There’s no where darker he can go.
That’s oddly comforting.
The look on Mark’s face when he answers the knock at his door, when he sees Eduardo: it’s surprise and then betrayal, the kind of hurt that twists in Eduardo’s gut by proxy and then finally, something almost like disgust as Mark moves to close the door again, to slam it shut on Eduardo where he stands, loose-limbed and exhausted and desperate on Mark’s doorstep, absolutely unsure what he’s going to say but thinking that maybe, maybe, that’s the best he could have hoped for in this. Maybe it’s the best case scenario, here and now.
“I used to lose sleep,” Eduardo blurts out, his palm darting out to catch the door, to wedge it open; Mark turns, mouth open, and Eduardo knows he has to be quick, has to finish; “thinking about the things I wanted to say to you, but couldn’t.”
Mark’s jaw works, soundlessly, but he doesn’t try to close the door again. The words are on Eduardo’s tongue, honest and unpolished: sloppy. He’s a fucking mess.
He remembers this feeling all too well.
“I failed my international business final the second semester of my sophomore year, because of you, because I could only think of you,” and that’s true, that’s true: he’s been hiding from Mark like it would make a difference and it had, it’s taken him and turned him stupid with want. “I was lucky enough that my prof bought my excuse of having the flu, and he let me retake it before my father caught wind of anything.”
Mark’s expression doesn’t change, exactly, but he swallows differently. Eduardo can tell what that means; Mark wants to smirk, is trying to fight it off. That’s a good sign.
“I’d sit in my bed,” Eduardo ventures a step forward, dares to put the toe of his shoe on the threshold, not close enough to Mark to touch, to feel, just a step.
But a step, in this, is everything.
“I’d sit there in the dark, alone, and I’d run my hand over my chest,” his voice dips, and he doesn’t know why he’s saying this, how he’s saying this, spouting this maudlin fucking shit, these secrets he’s buried and promised never to revisit in the corners of his own mind, let alone say aloud, not to mention saying it to Mark, Jesus. He’s fucked in the head, he really is.
“And I’d let my pulse run ragged, ‘til you could feel it if your palm was hovering, not making contact with the skin, and I’d breathe and I’d close my eyes and I’d just picture you,” Eduardo has enough presence of mind to see that Mark still looks pissed, still looks confused and angry and hurt, but his pupils are wide, really wide, and it’s not just the fact that it’s dark out, Eduardo’s pretty sure of that.
“I’d hear the sound of your heartbeat in my ear, when I looked at you,” Eduardo confesses, puts his own hand to his chest unconsciously, feels the way his heart’s pumping now; “that one night that was everything for the longest time, innocent, an accident.” He swallows, and he watches Mark swallow, and he thinks that maybe, maybe there’s a chance. Maybe there’s something here to save. Something to start. To build from. “At the depositions, I’d still hear that sound in my head.”
Eduardo takes a chance, grows the balls he should have years ago and takes one more step; Mark steps back, hesitant, but Eduardo goes with him, and Mark stills, lets him come closer. “That night,” Eduardo whispers, pauses, stays just a breath from touching, from breathing the air right out of Mark’s lungs, and they both know what he’s talking about, they’ve both lived half inside that night ever since, Eduardo can see that, and it breaks his heart and makes him soar all at once.
“I wouldn’t have done that to you,” he says, rough and low and laden with all the feelings he’s known but never said, never really thought he could, doesn’t know if he can, but for the first time, wants to more than anything. “I know how it feels to,” he sucks in air and it’s not just him; Mark does, too, and they’ve both stepped wrong, fucked things beyond repair, but they’re both the broken sort anyway, maybe. Perhaps they don’t need fixing.
“I didn’t,” he hesitates, trembles, stumbles; “I’m sorry.”
Mark blinks, and Eduardo presses on, because it needs to be said, it needs to be known, and for Mark, for this, for the promise of a possibility that may never come but could, Eduardo can form the words.
“After everything, after all that happened,” he confesses, a sinner and a saint between them in the whispers; “the day we signed the papers, even,” his chest is sore and his throat is raw and it’s not just lust widening up Mark’s blue eyes, now, it’s something bigger, maybe better.
“I would have done that, if I’d known,” Eduardo tells him, honest, because he wouldn’t have. “Not ever.” He’d have stayed that night, despite everything.
“I’m sorry.” And that’s all he’s got, really; that’s all he can do for now, and he watches Mark, watches Mark being still and stoic, and watches when Mark’s chest expands beneath his tee shirt and watches when Mark looks away before he speaks.
“I’m making dinner,” Mark finally says, and Eduardo blinks, taken aback for a second, remembering the world as it used to be before slamming back into this moment, here and now.
Mark looks at him, his eyes narrowing, his eyebrows moving, indicating something unsaid before he goes ahead and spells it out, before he says it. “There’s enough for two.”
And frankly, that in itself really is enough. For now.
Eduardo follows Mark inside, picking up on the scent of pepper and basil and olive oil (and not, absolutely not Hot Pockets)-he follows Mark inside and shuts the front door behind him.
<--- Part One