fic: Little by Little
title: Little by Little
pairing: Mark/Eduardo
rating: R
word count/warning: ~10,000
disclaimer: This is a work of fiction.
summary: Written for this prompt at the tsn_kinkmeme: Mark has an unrequited crush on Eduardo which Eduardo decides to exploit when Mark tells him that's he is going to get left behind.
Eduardo isn't sure when it began. Maybe he should have realized it earlier. There was this moment, he remembers, the one where he was on the couch in Mark's dorm room, reading, and suddenly he feels Mark's eyes on him, unblinking, unmoving. He had turned around from his computer, mid-code, to stare at him silently. He had waited for Mark to say something and when he didn't, he let out a little too aggressive "what?" in response. Mark turned back around, and mumbled a "nothing."
He's sure he would have forgotten about it in time. Mark's weird in general, stressed over TheFacebook specifically, and who knows what freaky sub-routines his genius brain does for maintenance. But Mark doesn't stop staring at him for what feels uncomfortably long periods of time.
There's that Z-movie marathon Dustin arranges, painfully bad and painful to sit through and Mark's staring more at him than he does at the splatter and gore but then Mark might be just more squeamish about fake blood than he wants to admit. If Eduardo wasn't too drunk to turn his head around, he might have stared back and turned it into a staring contest.
It's really nothing too weird until he leans over Mark's shoulder one day to hand him a beer and Mark tenses up all over, hunches his shoulders up, balls his hands into fists instead of grabbing that bottle, and then… sniffs him with an audible, sharp, drawn-in breath.
Eduardo stops wearing that cologne pretty much immediately. Who would have thought that Mark would be too polite to mention that he stinks?
Unfortunately that doesn't stop Mark's fits of tensing up and drawing deep breaths around him. It's weird - even for Mark - and Eduardo just wants things to go back normal. He starts showering so much that he's about to turn into a prune permanently and yet Mark just doesn't stop.
He gives up and prays that Mark will get a cold and will just stop smelling things permanently. He feels bad just thinking that though and brings Mark a six-pack pretty much immediately as some sort of penance.
Mark's an idiosyncratic genius, really, and with the way TheFacebook is reducing his sleep into little power naps and his nutritional intake into something that seems more like malnourishment (Eduardo has taken to spiking his beer with vitamin tablets, which is perfectly normal for their dynamic, okay?) him getting weirder by the hour is really nothing to worry about, right?
It's only on the morning when Eduardo wakes up on that couch to find Mark leaning over him; Mark's right hand hovering over Eduardo's hair while his eyes look ever so hungry - as if Eduardo was Mountain Dew, Twizzlers, and Thai food all wrapped up in one (as if that wasn't gross at all) - that he realizes that he's probably exactly as dumb as the box of rocks his father used to describe him as.
He decides that he must be wrong immediately. He asks the still-hovering Mark: "Is something wrong?" like he never even heard of the word "epiphany", let alone "gay panic."
Mark's stops hovering and mumbles about TheFacebook and Eduardo tunes him out pretty much immediately because there's a statistically-proven 98 percent chance that he'll have no idea what Mark's talking about anyway. Instead he focuses on the more pressing matter at hand, the factuality of Mark's heterosexuality.
Mark had gotten exactly one girlfriend since he's known him, despite his truly appalling social skills. (Eduardo still isn't sure how Mark landed Erica in the first place. Maybe he's good in bed. Not that Eduardo would know. Or want to know. Or even want to think about knowing.)
And while Mark has never done the thing every self-respecting computer science major has done and stalked Queen Amidala across the campus, he always figured that Mark was just playing the long game and is waiting to woe her when he's a gazillionaire. That was Eduardo's plan, actually, but it goes a long way of accounting for Mark's obvious and rather bizarre lack of interest in the Queen.
And really? Mark gay? With that appalling dress sense and just terrible taste in music? Eduardo's straight as an arrow and he's got more Madonna on his ipod than Mark. Who used to tease him about that…
Mark's still talking about users, PHP, and servers and Eduardo's getting a headache and there's the stale taste of beer in the back of his throat and there's really no telling what went down on the couch he's lying on and now he's thinking about Mark going down...
He gets up immediately and talks about that thing that they wanted to do. Chances are Mark's got as little of an idea as he has about what he's actually talking about but he'll take his chances and drag him into the first best afterschool campus special Harvard has to offer.
*
It turns out that the first best afterschool special is Bill Gates and he's boring as fuck. Mark looks only vaguely interested but he hasn't stared at Eduardo for twenty minutes now which means that he's probably completely enraptured. Eduardo's not vain to think that but he's used to Mark staring at him so often that he kind of notices when he doesn't.
But there are two cute Asian girls in the row behind them and they look more than just vaguely interested. One of them, the less mouthy one, even resembles Queen Amidala a little. It's perfect, really. Except when they get back to the dorm, he finds a Cease and Desist letter, courtesy of the WASP Crew Twins, that Mark never even bothered to tell him about and things are a lot less perfect. Eduardo would understand if Mark was reluctant to come out with... uhm... more personal feelings, entirely hypothetical personal feelings, but this is business and not only Mark's - it's his too.
He feels vaguely angry and then he looks down at Mark, who's perhaps just too used to carrying the weight of that damn site all by himself and he's his best friend and deserves someone who doesn't freak out just because someone touched their hair.
"I'm here for you," he says and he means it.
As if to make up for all the headache is cost, Mark's doubtful (actually, it was never in doubt. Never.) heterosexuality makes itself known and Eduardo decides then and there that Mark's got the dibs on the Amidala clone.
The evening progresses in unexpected ways, some better (when Christy drags him into an empty bathroom stall, undoes his pants and goes to town), some worse (when Alice drags Mark into the neighboring stall and does the same, judging by the sex noises that Mark makes.)
If there's one thing Eduardo never ever wanted to hear, it was Mark's sex noises and they're fucking distracting him from Christy's skilled mouth and the fantasy of finally being cool enough to have groupies. This quickly goes from the most arousing thing that ever happened to him to the least arousing thing that ever happened to him while he got a blowjob. Not that he got that many to compare them to.
When he starts wondering if Mark's thinking of him in the neighboring stall, he tries to stop thinking so hard that he probably burst a blood vessel or two in his brain, lest he offends Christy by failing her completely. He doesn't know if he could survive the embarrassment.
But Christy's good enough to distract him from Mark long enough to come and that's a fucking amazing feat. He decides she's a keeper.
*
The first time Mark smiles at Christy, Eduardo wonders if he should be jealous of Sean Parker. He has no reason to. Even if Mark's face lights up not unlike it sometimes does when it looks at him, Parker isn't really that special. He didn't even invent Napster on his own. Ask anyone who invented Napster and they're going to say Shawn Fanning.
Sean Parker was merely the co-founder.
Not that co-founders cannot be great all on their own. Eduardo isn't really a hypocrite even if he thinks that Mark's idol worship is really misplaced. Maybe Parker did contribute something special to Napster. Maybe he was the one who turned into something better, something more just like Eduardo hopes he can do with Mark's site. Be something else but Mark's ATM machine.
*
Sean Parker's worse in person. So is Mark, actually. But Mark being smitten can be easily explained away. But taking Sean's advice on anything? Pearls of wisdom from a guy whose entire claim to fame is streamlining the process of stealing other people's work?
Fuck him and his corporatebabble and his billions and his fucking fishing metaphors.
Fuck Mark and his idol worship and his talk of California and going where Sean wants to lead him.
Even though he briefly thought about pawning Mark off to Sean - one problem less, he had thought - but he would physically throw himself between those two before he will let that happen. Mark's his friend. TheFacebook is their business, is their site, is their project and no stupid paranoid snake oil salesman is going to come between that.
*
Of course, he lets Mark go to California with 18,000 dollar and the vain hope that Sean Parker doesn't find them there. Meanwhile he's looking for advertising money in New York, trying to prove that he's more than an investor. That he can contribute to the site as well. More than Sean fucking Parker. He fails.
He stands in the hallway in Palo Alto, soaked through and through and Sean is in the living room and Mark doesn't even listen to him. Mark asks him about the internship he quit weeks ago, tells him that it's nice to have a girlfriend who frightens you.
Mark doesn't talk to him, he realizes, he talks to him as he imagines him. An Eduardo Saverin-shaped cut-out in his place, the one with the Lehman Brothers internship and Christy, the harmless, easy girlfriend. Mark doesn't even see the real him anymore.
When Mark is finished with what he imagines polite small talk to be, he begins what sounds like a somewhat rehearsed speech. "It's moving faster than any of us ever imagined," Mark says and there's this light in his eyes and Eduardo doesn't know who put it there. It used to be him. Now it could be Facebook or even Sean fucking Parker.
He swallows hard when Mark delivers to the coup de grace of his little speech: "You're going to get left behind."
It should have been an ultimatum, he thinks dumbstruck, a threat, but it comes across as a fact, a blast from the past. He already has been left behind. Mark is just stating the obvious.
Mark closes his eyes and it's obvious that he says next he says despite himself, so reluctantly it comes out of his mouth in stutter: "I want you... I need you out here. Please don't tell him I said that," he says, talking to floor.
There it is, the way out. It's the thing that will allow him to catch up. He thinks of Sean Parker in the living room, like a spider weaving his net, waiting for the big payday when Facebook will have its billion dollar evaluation. He must have think it possible, to be here instead of somewhere else. To be here means that he has more trust in Facebook than Eduardo, more than Dustin, probably even more than Mark himself. Sean will not leave and Mark won't let him.
Maybe there was a moment where he could have kept Sean out of the company, if he had just found some investors, if he had just found a way to make money and keep the site cool.
But that window of opportunity has closed. What matters now is not Sean's position in the company but his own.
And there is Mark who is still staring at floor, waving the Twizzler nervously around. Eduardo slides down the wall to sit on the floor and just bury his head in his hands for minute. He's cold, he's wet and when he looks up Mark looks at him as if he were a person again, not an Eduardo Saverin shaped ATM machine.
He looks like him like he used to, like he always has. For the first time since before Sean Parker, he sees his best friend again, the one that used to stare at him too long and he cannot remember why he ever thought this was a bad thing. He has been so long without that focused attention that he has quite forgotten how good it feels.
This is it, he realizes, this is the moment where he can still have it all Mark, Mark's undivided attention, Facebook, everything. He just needs to do the right thing, say the right thing.
He gets up, slowly, thinking it through. Mark's his best friend. He's low maintenance. He's not frightening, not insane, not insanely, obsessively jealous, not like Christy. He's a good guy and in the right light people would probably think he's cute. He's a genius. And he loves Eduardo.
This will be easy, Eduardo tells himself, laying his hands on Mark's shoulder.
"You want me?" he asks because this one he cannot afford to get wrong.
Mark nods but there's no shyness in his eyes, no reluctance. His response is a demand. And Eduardo's lips curl up; his eyes are alight with humor because suddenly he understands why Mark's so fucking terrible with girls.
And that's when Mark kisses him.
For a millisecond Eduardo doesn't react before he remembers that this is what he wanted. This is the reaction he wanted.
Mark's lips are soft and sweet like the candy that he just dropped to the floor. It's not that hard to enjoy the kiss. To kiss him back. Eduardo briefly wonders what his lips and tongue taste like to Mark. What this lie tastes like.
The first time Eduardo feels Mark's tongue against his own, he has a minor freak-out and it takes all of his self-control to respond as he feels he should.
He can take this, he tells himself. It's Mark for fuck's sake. It's just the surprise. It's pleasant, normal even. He's not a fucking homophobe, he can deal with his.
He still pushes at Mark's shoulders, pushes him away, on his lips a guilty fake laugh. "I'm getting you all wet-".
"Don't care," Marks says and recaptures Eduardo's mouth greedily. All hail the conquering hero, fanfares and all that. Of course, Mr. 'I walk through the snow in fucking flip-flops' wouldn't care.
And then it's Mark who pulls away and for a moment Eduardo wonders if Mark has figured him out. Mark is good at figuring people out. He should see through this in a hot minute. Should have already the second Eduardo kissed him back.
"So you're staying?" Mark asks and he sounds happy, excited at the prospect. He doesn't sound like he's disappointed at all. He grabs Eduardo's left hand that has fallen off his shoulder when he pulled away and grasps it in his hands.
"Ye... yes," Eduardo stutters.
Mark smiles. Disconcertingly, there are dimples in his cheeks. And he pulls Eduardo's hand up to briefly kiss his knuckles - unselfconsciously, still smiling. It's the first thing about the whole mess that turns Eduardo on - a little. He immediately feels ashamed.
"Come on," Mark says and pulls him down the hallway. "Let's tell the others."
"Tell them what?" Internally Eduardo freezes at the idea of coming out to a drunken frat house, featuring Sean Parker, two stoned girls, and most of his friends but Mark's pull is insistent and he's past the point of cold feet anyway.
"That you're staying." The 'duh' swings in Mark's voice. "Stanford's business program is pretty great, you know..."
That stops Eduardo dead in his tracks: "Wait, Mark, we... you're not going back to Harvard?"
"I'm taking the next semester off," Mark says happily. "And if everything goes like it should... No, I'm not going back."
"Oh."
"Don't tell me you want to go back to Caribbean Nights at AEPi?" Mark asks. His mocking tone leaves little doubt this isn't even a question.
Except Harvard isn't AEPi. It's a source of pride, for him, for his family. And he's just a year shy of graduating. He closes his eyes, briefly. Stanford isn't that bad and Mark's here.
"No," he says. "This is just..." Surprising, confounding, stunning, startling, a SAT test set of answers, he wants to use. Instead his voice trails off.
Mark smiles at him, reassuring. It doesn't work on his face. Or maybe it just doesn't work here.
"It's so much better, isn't it?" he completes the sentence for him. "To be where it's all happening."
Mark opens the door to the living room and basically shouts into the room: "Eduardo's staying."
The reaction is like a series of flashbacks with no context, memories in the making: Dustin whoops. Sean downs his drink in one go. The girls on the couch holler. One of the interns is taking off his headphones. Mark is still smiling, it's bordering on manic now.
He feels hollowed out, exhausted, and is thankful for it because if he felt something more the vague sense of loss would probably hurt. He sits down next to one of the girls on the couch, his coat; all of his clothes are drenched. Part of him hopes he gets pneumonia and dies before he has to tell his father that he's dropping out of Harvard.
Dustin hands him a beer. It's warm against his palm or maybe he's just really cold. The bottle is not even opened, so he just sits there on the couch while the girls disappear to somewhere where their voices don't carry. He falls asleep.
He's woken up by a hand shaking his shoulder and Mark's voice.
"Hey Wardo, wake up."
He stares at Mark for uncomprehending second before he allows himself to be dragged off the couch and off to one of the bedrooms. Mark's bedroom, he figures, judging by the familiar clothes strewn all over the floor. There's an expectant glint in Mark's eyes as he closes the door behind the two of them and everything comes flooding back to Eduardo.
Just in time as Mark's pressing him against the closed door and kisses him like he's trying to make up for lost time. Mark kisses like he writes code - with focus, intent and, surprisingly enough in this case, skill. It actually feels kind of competitive to Eduardo, so he tries to kiss Mark with as much focus and skills, using one hand to twist it around the back of Mark's neck, the other to bury his fingers in his curls, the source of Mark's genius and brilliance only a few millimeters away.
Meanwhile Mark pushes his wet coat off his shoulders, then his blazer before he starts working on the buttons of his still damp shirt without ever letting Eduardo up for air.
It's dizzying to be the focus of Mark's attention but not dizzying enough to not be startled by Mark's fingertips on his naked chest. He tries to think of a way to slow Mark down, to make him take his hands off his body.
He starts to pull at Mark's hoodie roughly as he was trying to get it off. Mark has to let go off him and it's a relief, except after the hoodie has joined the mess of Eduardo's clothes that's pooling around their feet, Mark's hands now seem to move toward his belt. So Mark's t-shirt is the next thing that Eduardo strips Mark off with so little tenderness that it could be mistaken for impatient enthusiasm.
Once the shirt is gone Mark goes back to pushing back Eduardo against the door and kissing him, his naked chest pressing against his own. He hears the thumps of two sandals being thrown off Mark's feet and then Mark's right hand wanders from his shoulder down his back, settling on his ass.
He toes off his own shoes, trying to dislodge Mark's hand with the movement. It works for a short moment but not for long. He breaks the kiss.
"Mark," he says breathlessly. "Slow down."
"No," he breathes into Eduardo's open mouth. "I can't wait anymore."
But he relinquishes his hold on his behind to pull him by the belt towards the bed, blindly navigating until he sits on the edge and Eduardo stands between his legs. Once they are there his fingers nimbly open the belt and Eduardo knows that he can't hide the panic any longer.
"I...," he says as he hold Mark's hands still on the top button of his pants. Mark looks up to him, confused and vulnerable; a breath away from anticipating rejection.
"I've never done this before."
There's a pleading note in his voice and he wonders if this will be the moment where Mark will finally see that he's fucking liar, a coward, and the worst friend he's ever had.
But instead Mark smiles at him radiantly, like he's the billion dollar evaluation, and it's fucking beautiful.
He wants to lean down and kiss him for that look in his eyes, for thinking him a much better person than he could ever be. And so he does. And for the first time it's not weird, not a lie, but rather something joyous, something happy, something so good it hurts.
"Don't worry," Mark promises into his mouth. "I've got this."
It's so Mark that promise, all vague swagger - about taking the entire social experience of college and putting it online, about California, about billions of dollars when they haven't even got one single investor yet - it makes Eduardo laugh into Mark's mouth, and then laugh again with his lips on the column of Mark's throat.
"You're...," he says he's kissing Mark's pale shoulder, down his collarbone and he hopes that Mark can feel every bit of his affection for him as he says this: "you."
And as he softly bites into the fleshy part where Mark's shoulder meets his neck while Mark is moaning softly, he knows that he should have told him he loves him right there.
Because it is true. Even though he knows it's not enough. He just has to find a way to make it enough for Mark.
This is just the beginning.
It's when Eduardo's euphoria dies down, and he feels Mark's hands on his ass again - 'Really, Mark?' he thinks - that he tries to stop it one last time.
"Mark," he says, so close to Mark that he can still smell the Twizzlers on his breath.
"Won't this be weird... We're friends... I don't want to lose you over..."
Mark doesn't even let him finish.
"Wardo, this is a win-win scenario," he says with conviction, his eyes alight. What's cooler than a million dollars? A billion dollars. What's cooler than having a best friend? Fucking your best friend.
Clearly this shit makes sense in Mark's head, which doesn't really say much about Mark, but this has gone past the point of no return no, past words even. Mark's hands, his lips, his tongue are like an oncoming storm - an inevitable force of nature.
Mark pulls the magic trick where he get them both out of their pants before Eduardo has even a chance to realize what he's doing. It's a surprisingly smooth move, like Mark planned it, thought it through, and practiced it. Eduardo doesn't like the thought of Mark doing the latter.
He wishes he could make his brain shut up, too, and just enjoy this, but it's all so foreign, and it's Mark. It's impossible to not think about the way Mark's hands on his skin are just too strong, that his legs aren't smooth, that he's got too many angles, that he's too heavy.
And with every second it gets harder to remember why he's doing it and how much he loves Mark because this isn't it what he wants to do and he feels like he's getting aroused against his will. Him getting hard seems more like a credit to him being horny as a default, like every guy his age.
He bites the knuckles of his left hand hard when Mark's moves downwards past his navel; the pain is a reminder not push Mark away, not to reject him.
'Just let it happen,' he tells himself, 'don't think about what will happen afterwards. Just let it happen.'
He bites his knuckles harder because, as Mark takes the head of his cock into his mouth, it stops being merely weird and not arousing, it also becomes embarrassing.
He should have drunken that beer, hit the girls' bong and downed every drop of alcohol in the house, so this would feel more like a drunken mistake, like doing the moonwalk in front of all of AEPi and less like dancing like an idiot stone-cold sober.
The worst part is that Mark's mouth feels good, that he knows what he's doing, that this is... If this was any girl, maybe even any other guy, this would be okay, it would be great. But it's Mark and it's not okay, and it's not great and he shouldn't enjoy the way Mark's tongue is tracing the underside of his dick.
"Fuck. Mark," falls from his lips, past the knuckles he's bitten raw.
Mark takes it as an encouragement. And maybe that's finally the bottom of the barrel of what is worst about it - that Eduardo's no longer sure if it wasn't when he comes down Mark's throat.
It's that moment when Eduardo can breathe again and Mark looks at him expectantly, he realizes he needs to stop keeping track of about what's worst about it. Just thinking it is like promising himself that there's a light at the end of the tunnel when it's just the light of the oncoming train.
'Train wreck,' he thinks to himself because no one else is listening.
He kisses Mark because that's a safe bet to begin with what Mark expects of him. He roams his hands down Mark's skinny back and cups his ass.
He could jerk him off. It would be the most familiar thing to do. But he would have to look into Mark's eyes doing it, at least once. That wouldn't be familiar at all, that would be horrible.
So he uses the leverage he has on Mark's hips to turn him on his back.
Mark's hard but that much Eduardo already knew, felt.
He breathes kisses down Mark's neck and sternum, small ones, more breath than lips - Eduardo guess they count as open-mouthed and Mark seems to enjoy them.
So far, so easy. He moves farther south while he prays for the house to burn down that very minute.
'Fuck the deposit. Fuck the computers. Fuck Facebook.'
He accidentally nips Mark's stomach right then getting a "Fuck, Wardo, don't do that," from Mark.
Eduardo doesn't believe that Mark's talking really about keeping the skin of his abdomen intact. He's probably giving him advice about what not to do when he reaches his destination.
'I know,' he nearly says. 'I'm not a girl, I know how this works.'
But he can't find his voice, he can't find the courage to talk about back because this - taking Mark's dick between his lips, slowly sucking it in - is taking all of his courage and he doesn't have more to give.
He doesn't have more to give than remembering every blowjob he has ever received and project it into experience he doesn't have and never wanted to.
Mark softly moans, and then unexpectedly buries his fingers in Eduardo's hair. He tucks at the strands while Eduardo sucks harder and deeper, willing for this to end sooner than later.
Mark's obliging in that regard, at least. He comes in Eduardo's mouth quickly, salty, before Eduardo can even figure out the etiquette of spitting or swallowing. He swallows because Mark did it, too, and Eduardo guesses it's the polite thing to do.
Mark drags him back up, just as Eduardo begins to yearn for his toothbrush, and before Eduardo can even say something, anything, Mark's tongue down his throat. A chaser of sorts.
Then Mark takes a breather for a second, Eduardo assumes for only about as long, because the breather turns into Mark practically falling asleep on the spot with Eduardo still draped all over him.
Eduardo disentangles himself quickly, puts back on all of his wet clothes minus the coat and silently walks the walk of shame across the hallway to the next bathroom. Thankfully no one's either in there or in the hallway. There's loud music blaring from the living room, so he figures whatever noises they might have made, no one should have heard.
He locks the bathroom door behind him, undresses while turning away from the bathroom mirror, and stands in the shower until the water runs cold.
Then he returns to Mark's room in clean shorts and a t-shirt. Where else would he go?
*
Eduardo wakes up in the middle of the night, sweating because Mark has wrapped his naked body possessively around Eduardo, one arm is snaked around his chest, and the other has slipped under his t-shirt, holding him around the waist. His right leg is hooked across Eduardo's hip.
Mark is a good alternative source for heat in cold Massachusetts winter, but in California in the summer, up this close, even with the AC running, he's unbearable.
Eduardo tries to shake him off but Mark's a deep sleeper and his hold onto Eduardo feels like a death grip. So Eduardo sweats and sweats, willing the time to go faster, until he falls asleep again.
*
Mark is already up and gone when Eduardo wakes up again, sparing Eduardo the awkward moment of having the morning after conversation. What is he supposed to say, really?
He dresses and goes downstairs. Mark's not wired-in, he talks about Facebook with Dustin and Sean, and Eduardo wonders if anything has really changed, or if he's still left behind. But then Mark spots him, and smiles.
"Wardo," he says, the words coming out so fast out of his mouth, they seem to swallow each other, as he brings Eduardo up to speed. "The servers running to full capacity again and Dustin has this great idea on how to waste less bandwidth to lessen the load and avoid potential downtime. We just need to group the users differently, which means we have to reconfigure some of the internal settings and probably overhaul the sign-up process. But that shouldn't take all that much work, except this week we have this meeting with Thiel and someone has to handle all the day to day stuff, so we are thinking about getting someone to do this full-time."
Eduardo nods, he understands the basics - server overload, coding overhaul and not enough personnel; it's not that hard to understand - and really, hiring more people to help is the sensible things to do. He can handle this, he understands this and if they get Thiel then maybe they won't need advertising for some time. Maybe they can keep the party running.
*
He ends up preparing with Sean for the Thiel meeting because Mark's so useless that even Sean can't keep from rolling his eyes and sends Mark back to his computer. He then makes a spreadsheet of their current costs and how long they'll last without additional money. Somewhere between writing off the deposit and the beer money, things look less than promising. But he feels useful, like he's doing something right for once, like he belongs.
*
The hours everyone keeps are ridiculous but Eduardo stays awake because he is in this with everyone here. That's why at 2am he finds himself alone, sitting by the pool, a beer in his hands (his third, but who's counting?) feeling buzzed, and kind of content. The light of the pool reflects ever-changing the patterns onto their fence. It's relaxing just to look at and not to think about anything.
It's a great way to pass the time until he feels a hand on his shoulder and he can guess without looking that it's Mark.
"Is everything alright?" Eduardo asks.
"Come to bed, Wardo" Mark says. His voice sounds a little hoarse.
"But it isn't even five yet," he deadpans.
Mark doesn't respond, so Eduardo looks up to him and there's Mark with a smile on his face and he holds out his hand as if to help him up. It's a lovely smile, he thinks distantly, as he takes Mark's hand and stands up.
The rest of the night is not unlike the one before, except Eduardo doesn't protest, not even when Mark's fingers bury themselves in his ass. He tries not to think about what that will mean once they graduate to something beyond blowjobs, even though Mark's warm body enveloping him so tightly it feels less like spooning and more like slow-motion suffocation and he can't fall asleep.
*
Mark doesn't fuck him for real until after the Thiel meeting; after they've been promised half a million dollars.
The shares will have to be redistributed because Thiel gets a piece of the pie now, and so does Sean, who has already the eyes on their next investor because "Half a million is just the beginning, Eduardo", and so they owe him.
They redistribute the shares mostly from Mark's percentage but there's also some from his own. It's not even a question - 23 percent of a half a million company is more than 30 percent of a company that has barely enough money for cereal left. (Eduardo has checked. They can keep the servers, the interns, the house, and the beer for another month but only if they all start to live off ramen. He guesses there's a culinary reason why Thiel is an angel investor.)
It's business and it's good, and it feels great to be in the middle of it because Mark's "You're going to get left behind," is haunting his memory like a particularly nasty ghost.
They all go out for drinks in the evening, except for Dustin who gets stuck with server watch because Mark's paranoid about the possibility that the servers could go down, ruining Facebook forever and ever.
Eduardo has barely the time to down his second shot when Mark pulls at his sleeve, impatiently. His pupils are large, and for a moment he suspects that he has done coke with Sean in the bathroom but the thought is just fucking ridiculous.
He allows himself to be pulled outside and into a cab, briefly wondering who's going to pick up the tab.
Back at the house - they'll have to get a real office now - Dustin's wired in and probably high by the smell of the living room. He wouldn't even realize if the roof fell on him, let alone Mark and Eduardo coming home early.
Mark shrugs off his hoodie the second he's inside the bedroom and then starts pulling at Eduardo's clothes. This is still weird but Eduardo has gotten used to the whole routine of it. It's just sex after all.
Except this time, the routine takes an unexpected detour when Mark pulls out condoms and lube and Eduardo's brain starts to short out in panic for a second.
It stutters back into action just in time to see that Mark looks at him hungrily and Eduardo asks the first thing that comes to mind.
"Have you eaten?"
There's an acute feeling of embarrassment that's trickling down his spine before he's even finished. He buries his face in his palms and his voice comes out muffled under the sound of Mark's laughter.
"Sorry, you looked... Oh God, kill me now."
Mark's laughter quiets but Eduardo still can't look up from his hands until he feels Mark's hand under his chin, lifting his eyes to meet his own.
"Don't worry," he whispers against Eduardo's lips. "I'm only hungry for you."
Mark looks really happy, he registers dimly, because Mark's already kissing him again, pressing him down the mattress. The gesture removes every last doubt on who will do what now and Eduardo tells himself that the whole thing is too far gone to deny Mark now. It doesn't make him feel any less queasy. He tries hard to focus on the good feelings that Mark's touch evokes on his skin.
But there's a party somewhere in one of the neighboring gardens, and he can hear the dim murmur of people talking in the distance and the soft lull of music. The chords of the acoustic guitar sound familiar, but it takes him a while to distinguish the voice and the guajira guantanamera he sings about.
Spanish isn't his strong suit but he makes an effort to understand the lyrics for once. The singer sounds mournful, and he remembers that this is a song about dying.
The first verse he tries to translate is fairly easy, Disney-esque something about a forest animal, but the next verse is harder, something about a cruel man who is tearing out the singer's heart, but he doesn't give him thorns and nettles in return, he gives him a white rose. A peace offering of sorts. Turn the other cheek.
"Wardo," Mark asks. "Is everything alright?"
And it's like a light is turned on. Mark's still there and Eduardo is actually trying to decipher some Cuban poet's last verses about the world, peace, and things that make no sense at.
"Sorry, it's that song..." Eduardo apologizes.
"What song?"
"The one the neighbors are playing?"
He gets a blank stare from Mark who apparently heard nothing.
"Guantanamera?"
Mark's stare goes possibly even blanker.
"It's a Cuban song, it's kind of weird for me... never mind," Eduardo says and grabs Mark by the back of his neck and pulls him into a kiss.
The neighbors play something else afterwards, more acoustic guitars and more songs about changing the world (Hippies, he realizes dimly.) but the song is stuck in his ear, the lyrics stuck in his mind.
As Mark takes him apart, puts him together again, and takes and takes, Eduardo keeps thinking about arranca el corazón con que vivo. He wants to draw the parallels but he isn't the truthful man of the song and Mark isn't stealing any hearts.
Mark can't take what is already his.
With that truth he comes apart and stops thinking for a while.
When he regains his senses he wonders if he isn't a lot gayer than he ever thought he could be.
It's a comforting thought.
*
The next morning Mark sends him off to Stanford to sort out his transfer. Turns out there's a lot of paperwork involved.
When Eduardo calls his father to tell him about giving up Harvard for Stanford and Facebook his father hangs up on him.
Eduardo knew it would happen. He knew it when he said to Mark that he would stay. Knew that the people in this house would have be his family now - even though some have interesting ideas about personal hygiene, and he still doesn't like Sean.
Maybe things have to get worse before they get better. He just wishes sometimes he could speed up the process.
*
They move into the new offices, the day he finalizes the transfer. He doesn't get the opportunity to tell Mark because Mark's busy. But Mark's always busy. He usually finds the time to give Eduardo a brief smile somewhere between one Facebook thing and another. It's not unlike their Harvard days when Mark was too busy to even notice that Eduardo was in the room. Before Facebook. Before things got strange.
It hasn't even been a year and now they're talking about million dollar investments and shares and going global. And Mark's sleeping in his bed, sleeping with him, and no one even cares.
He thought that someone would bring it up, would ask him about it.
It takes him a while to realize the silence doesn't mean they haven't noticed. It's just that no one thinks this is a new development.
Only Dustin talks to him about it, in his strange, circumventional Dustin way during that last evening in the house before they all move out to the tiny, yet overpriced apartments they all can afford now.
He lays his arm around Eduardo's shoulder and drunkenly slurs: "'ardo, 'ardo, so glad you're with us on this..."
Dustin waves his arm around, looking for a metaphor grand enough.
"Adventure," he finally says. "Like explorers of unknown waters, like pirates of the stormy seas, we couldn't be here without our first mate."
Eduardo nods, humoring Dustin.
"So if I'm first mate, what are you?"
There's no question what position in that marine metaphor Mark has.
Dustin thinks about this seriously for a while.
"Hmm, probably ridiculously good looking swashbuckling defender of hapless virgins."
"Is that an official position?" Eduardo deadpans.
Dustin laughs and boxes him in the shoulder.
"I'm glad you're back here with Mark," he says. "It hasn't been quite the same without you. Mark without you is like Batman without Robin, Lois without Clark, M without the other M. That's, like 2 and 2 without the four, an open italics tag..." here Dustin fake-sniffles. "...standing there all alone with no one to close it, turning everything into sad little bowed letters."
"Chris," Eduardo calls out because he heard the saddest littlest italics tag monologue before. "Dustin's crying about code again."
*
He tells Mark about the completed transfer to Stanford the morning after they move into their new apartment.
Mark wanted a rather frugal interior design for the apartment but even Eduardo drew the line at a mattress on the floor. He fought for a real bed and a decent AC. He doesn't tell Mark but turning the AC down into near-Arctic colds make Mark's warm presence in his bed so much easier to deal with.
He feels well-rested that first morning and Mark looks open, like he would actually listen if Eduardo told him something.
So on their way to the offices he tells him about the transfer. Mark doesn't say anything but his smile would probably be blinding if it was on the face of another person. On Mark, it's much more subtle but Eduardo can read him and his dimples well enough.
Mark asks about the hours he's going to be on campus. He doesn't ask about Eduardo's father, the Phoenix, or the friends he will leave behind. And Eduardo doesn't mention any of it. What would be the point? There's no going back.
*
Eduardo makes a color-coded schedule to time his time between attending classes and Facebook perfectly. But it still takes him only three days to drop all of his non-essential classes.
His class attendance remains spotty, there is always something more important happening at Facebook that he's needed for. And when he attends, he's usually working on something for Facebook anyway.
Eduardo knows he's failing his classes; that he's behind his reading, that he missed way too many lectures; that academically he's a goner.
But he refuses to give up until one day in November his phone rings. He reaches for his cellphone and sees Mark's name on the display when his professor calls him out.
"If you want take that call, Mr. Saverin, you better leave the class."
Eduardo looks up. The professor, whose name he can't even recall, has a sneer on his face.
"But if you do, you won't need to come back."
Eduardo doesn't like threats, doesn't like being blackmailed, doesn't ultimatums. He doesn't like being a college drop-out either but he grabs his bag and leaves. By the time he's outside, Mark has given up on reaching him.
It doesn't matter, staying in that class would have been merely delayed the inevitable. He was never going to get through this semester, let alone the whole year.
He walks back to the Facebook headquarters, familiarizing himself with the new him: Eduardo Saverin, college drop-out, CFO of an unprofitable but popular internet start-up company, professional liar.
Mark doesn't look surprised when he turns up even though he should be in class. The problem he called him for is minor, and when Eduardo tells Mark that he's dropping out Mark doesn't even pretend to look unhappy about it.
He drags him into the supply closet, tells him to be quiet and gives him a consolation blowjob. The orgasm is nice but not much of a consolation with the supply closet setting and all.
He feels better about the day after when it hits him that he doesn't owe anyone but Facebook and Mark his time anymore. On the way to work, he deletes his father's number from his cell.
*
It turns out he's good for Facebook. The site has its ups and downs but it grows and grows, and when Eduardo isn't tending the numbers, he ends up being the one to publicly smooth the waves over privacy concerns.
He makes a startling number of appearances for the company on his own. And he is wherever Mark has to appear to do most of the talking for him - before Mark is provoked into spitting out that privacy is only for people who have something to hide.
Eduardo is good at being the public face of the company. He's likeable. People believe the things that come out of his mouth, even though he knows that some of the promises he makes to the public, Facebook has no intention of keeping.
The Wall Street Journal calls him the yin to Mark's yang. Together they weather lawsuits, and Sean's rather scandalous exit. Eduardo isn't particularly sad to see him go. But he still finds himself missing the way he would take on the challenge of making Facebook "the greatest thing on Earth."
Now Mark's the only one left with a vision. Eduardo just follows.
*
The day they get their billion dollar evaluation, Mark's wired in because they are in the middle of site-wide update. Sean doesn't call. Dustin's too busy to harass the programmers to pay attention to the business side of things, and all he gets from Chris are talking points for his next interview.
Eduardo always thought that this would be the moment that would matter more than any other, that this would be the moment they all had been waiting for all along.
Instead he sits at his desk in the middle of the coders, surrounded by the multiplied clack-clack of keyboard typing, the middle of his, their, billion-dollar company and feels not the slightest bit cooler, not the slightest bit more accomplished than he did before.
Three desks away is Mark, lost in code, working towards that ten billion, that fifty billion dollar evaluation. Eduardo lives with him, sleeps with him, wakes up next to him, works with him, eats with him, is with him every day of his life, and yet he hasn't the slightest idea when and if a number will ever be high enough to represent the something Mark really wants. Or what that something really is.
All Eduardo knows that Sean was wrong. A billion dollars isn't the cool thing he had been looking for, the number that would set them all free.
*
A few weeks later, his mother calls him and halfway through the call hands the phone to his father. His father doesn't apologize, he doesn't say he forgives him, doesn't say that he's proud of him. But he asks him about Facebook, about the plans they have for the company, about that Time magazine profile. And his father listens.
They don't talk about Mark. Not for some time. But once his father does, there's never an angry word, just silent acceptance of Mark, the visionary, Mark, the billionaire.
"You've done well, son," his father says one day, saying the words Eduardo has been waiting for his entire life. They feel strangely hollow like he's praised for something he has swindled his way into getting, like he's praised for someone else's work.
This is not how this was supposed to feel.
*
In 2008, Chris gets infected with the idea of hope and changing the world as if he managed to preserve some idealism in the middle of his corporate double-speak.
So one day he drags Mark and Eduardo into one of the conference rooms and asks them to publicly speak out against Proposition 8.
Mark doesn't show any reaction except that he musters Eduardo, waiting for an answer, waiting to go along with whatever Eduardo chooses.
Eduardo doesn't care about gay rights, because he isn't actually gay. He doesn't need gay marriage because there's no man on the planet he would want to marry.
So what if he has been in a relationship with Mark longer than some people have been married? That doesn't mean he would even want to promise Mark a lifetime commitment, or that he wants to support gay marriage.
But he can't tell Chris that, so he settles for a bitter half-truth.
"I don't want to be a spokesperson for gay rights. You know, Chris, unlike you, I gave up on my political ambitions the day I quit Harvard."
At this Chris face twists in self-righteous anger because he has known Eduardo long enough to hear the part that was true.
"Or maybe you don't want to do it because you're a self-hating queen who can't even bring himself to hold Mark's hand in public?"
Eduardo gets up and walks out of the room, walks out of the office, walks out of the building, walks and walks until he finds himself in front of the house he and Mark share.
Mark isn't home yet, and Eduardo left his keys back at the office, so he waits on the front steps until Mark comes home. Mark doesn't talk about what happened for a while. He's kind of silent, actually.
"Chris quit," he says suddenly in the middle of dinner.
Eduardo drops his fork.
"Is it because-?" he starts asking.
"No," Mark interrupts him. "He wanted to go into politics for a while now."
The next time he sees Chris everything between them is as it was before. As if neither of them can remember. As if Chris didn't hit the nail on the head when he called Eduardo someone who hates himself.
*
One day in late 2008 he falls in love.
She's a junior programmer and they meet in the cafeteria when they are both waiting in line. She's cute: tiny, dark hair, full mouth, upturned nose, and as he quickly learns, really smart. She's the kind of girl he would have brought home to meet his family, the kind of girl he would have liked to start a family with.
He makes a lame joke and she laughs at it. Her eyes sparkle, and her lips reveal her teeth, they are as perfect as the rest of her.
He runs across her a few times afterwards, makes it a point to do so. She's charming, charmingly open and trusting, telling him about her family, and her terrible ex-boyfriend.
It's inappropriate but no one seems to notice or care.
Mark and him are an institution, the rock the company rests on, or as Sean once put it - long after he was gone, long after they all were supposed to be cool - the image of the two of them slaving away at Facebook, for Facebook, together, rejecting one billion dollar takeover offer after another, is a large part of what makes the company so valuable.
No one can imagine one cute girl to be a threat to that.
The random meetings never go anywhere. He can never bring himself to take it a step further, to invite her to a coffee, to give her even a hint that he's in love with her smile, her eyes, and her hands that never stop moving.
He wants to believe it's because she never thinks of him as anything but her potential gay best friend. But that's not the reason.
It's because whatever Eduardo feels for her... he loves Mark more.
It's Mark who has never let him down, who has never disappointed him, who has never betrayed him. It's Mark who sometimes looks up from his computer, his eyes searching until they find Eduardo's, and a little smile softens the habitually neutral expression on his face.
It's Mark whose hands are not very talkative unless they move across a keyboard, unless they move across Eduardo's skin; it's Mark whose eyes are usually unreadable but that are capable of warmth and humor when there's no one else but Eduardo around.
So he stops seeking her out, goes actually out of his way to avoid her.
As luck will have it, one day she runs across him when he's with Mark.
"Hey," she says with a small wave of her hand.
"Hey...," he responds, pretending he can't remember her name. "... Janice?"
"Jamie," she says and the smile falls from her face.
Mark's expression is still, unreadable.
When Dustin leaves a few weeks later, he takes Jamie with him to join his new company.
*
It's their anniversary. They don't celebrate it, they never have. Eduardo isn't actually sure if Mark remembers that this is the day he did everything to make Mark listen to him again.
It's late and they're both still at work while nearly all of their employees are gone. Every time Eduardo looks up, Mark's focus is on the screen of his computer.
On a desk near him, a programmer has left his music on, the music blaring tinny and distant through the headphones. But otherwise the room is silent and empty. Mark's typing is the only counterpoint to the music. The bright overhead lighting reflects in computer screens, in empty plastic bottles, soda cans, picture frames on abandoned desks.
In the middle of that vast emptiness of their empire is Mark, coding, fixing, and forever improving the site. The people they left behind - their Harvard friends, Sean, Chris, Dustin - have not even left their ghosts here to keep them company.
"Mark," he asks into the silence after one song ends and before a new one can begin. "Is there something you still want?"
Mark looks up from his computer and fixes Eduardo with a long stare, his eyes narrowing for a moment, lost in thought.
"No," he says firmly, with conviction. "I have everything I want."
His eyes look off to the side for a moment before returning to Eduardo.
"What about you?" he asks.
Eduardo looks at his hands, taking stock of his life. He has nearly everything that was so important when he was just a dumb kid at Harvard: money, success, being indispensible to his company, his best friend by his side all the time, someone who truly loves him, his father's approval.
But he isn't that dumb kid anymore. He's given up a lot to be here, one little thing after another.
Some things seemed to matter at the time, like Harvard, like graduating. Sometimes he sees the applications Facebook gets from Harvard Business School graduates, when they make it past the screening processes. They are three years younger than him these days. He doesn't envy them.
He used to care about his father's opinion but somewhere down the line that stopped being worth something, the hunger for his approval ceased to matter. Perhaps that happened on the day when he finally got it.
He wanted to have a family one day, a white picket fence - a normal life. Instead he has Mark.
He used to worry about this, he remembers. He still doesn't feel particularly gay, whatever that is supposed to feel like. He knows he'll never stop staring at a particular nice and badly concealed pair of tits. But having sex with Mark is something that stopped giving him panic attacks a long time ago and instead is something he enjoys, looks forward to on good days, on bad days, and usually takes the lead on.
And it is so easy to love Mark; it always had been easy, long before California, long before Facebook.
No one ever understood why he was friends with him back at Harvard, why of all the people there he was drawn to that abrasive, socially awkward computer nerd. But it always had been Mark, and he has begun to suspect that this one thing will never change.
He looks at Mark at his desk in the middle of their home away from home and realizes that this is where he belongs. Here, alongside Mark.
"I want you to forgive me," he says into the emptiness between them.
Mark looks confused.
"What the fuck for?"
"For not coming to California," Eduardo says, trying to say the thing he's afraid to voice. He wants forgiveness but he wants Mark more. "For not wanting to quit Harvard. For wanting to stay away."
Mark looks at him, and maybe there is an understanding somewhere where Eduardo can't see. Mark's impossible to read. Maybe he doesn't understand what Eduardo apologizes for. A large part of him hopes this is true.
"There's nothing to forgive," Mark finally says. "You came here, you stayed."
He gets up and sits beside Eduardo; he reaches for the other man's hand then reconsiders.
"I wondered what I did to make you stay for a long time," Mark whispers it like the dirty secret it is. "But the answer really never mattered to me."
He shrugs.
"Maybe it should have. Maybe I should have cared. Maybe I have the wrong programming for this sort of thing. I don't know."
He looks away for moment as if he's embarrassed for this shortcoming of his.
"You're still here," Mark states, his eyes fixing Eduardo unblinkingly. "Do you want to leave?"
"No," Eduardo says.
"Okay."
Mark gets up and goes back to his computer.
Later they'll go home together. They will talk business, their broken microwave, and what to eat at two in morning.
Later that night they'll share a post-coital Lo Mein.
Much later Eduardo will get over his fear of public displays of affection enough to actually ask Mark to marry him, much to Chris' never ending amusement.
Jamie will come to the wedding as someone's date, and Eduardo honestly won't remember her name this time, only the vague sense of shameful wrongdoing her presence inspires.
Dustin will hold a speech, still calling Eduardo Mark's closing italics tag. He'll cry for real this time.
Sean will talk about business to Eduardo for thirty minutes without a single interruption. He'll have a new project, something revolutionary, something unbelievable. Eduardo will actually invest in it; after all he's got a decent track record with this sort of thing.
It will still feel like it's just the beginning.
It won't be perfect.
But what is?
pairing: Mark/Eduardo
rating: R
word count/warning: ~10,000
disclaimer: This is a work of fiction.
summary: Written for this prompt at the tsn_kinkmeme: Mark has an unrequited crush on Eduardo which Eduardo decides to exploit when Mark tells him that's he is going to get left behind.
Eduardo isn't sure when it began. Maybe he should have realized it earlier. There was this moment, he remembers, the one where he was on the couch in Mark's dorm room, reading, and suddenly he feels Mark's eyes on him, unblinking, unmoving. He had turned around from his computer, mid-code, to stare at him silently. He had waited for Mark to say something and when he didn't, he let out a little too aggressive "what?" in response. Mark turned back around, and mumbled a "nothing."
He's sure he would have forgotten about it in time. Mark's weird in general, stressed over TheFacebook specifically, and who knows what freaky sub-routines his genius brain does for maintenance. But Mark doesn't stop staring at him for what feels uncomfortably long periods of time.
There's that Z-movie marathon Dustin arranges, painfully bad and painful to sit through and Mark's staring more at him than he does at the splatter and gore but then Mark might be just more squeamish about fake blood than he wants to admit. If Eduardo wasn't too drunk to turn his head around, he might have stared back and turned it into a staring contest.
It's really nothing too weird until he leans over Mark's shoulder one day to hand him a beer and Mark tenses up all over, hunches his shoulders up, balls his hands into fists instead of grabbing that bottle, and then… sniffs him with an audible, sharp, drawn-in breath.
Eduardo stops wearing that cologne pretty much immediately. Who would have thought that Mark would be too polite to mention that he stinks?
Unfortunately that doesn't stop Mark's fits of tensing up and drawing deep breaths around him. It's weird - even for Mark - and Eduardo just wants things to go back normal. He starts showering so much that he's about to turn into a prune permanently and yet Mark just doesn't stop.
He gives up and prays that Mark will get a cold and will just stop smelling things permanently. He feels bad just thinking that though and brings Mark a six-pack pretty much immediately as some sort of penance.
Mark's an idiosyncratic genius, really, and with the way TheFacebook is reducing his sleep into little power naps and his nutritional intake into something that seems more like malnourishment (Eduardo has taken to spiking his beer with vitamin tablets, which is perfectly normal for their dynamic, okay?) him getting weirder by the hour is really nothing to worry about, right?
It's only on the morning when Eduardo wakes up on that couch to find Mark leaning over him; Mark's right hand hovering over Eduardo's hair while his eyes look ever so hungry - as if Eduardo was Mountain Dew, Twizzlers, and Thai food all wrapped up in one (as if that wasn't gross at all) - that he realizes that he's probably exactly as dumb as the box of rocks his father used to describe him as.
He decides that he must be wrong immediately. He asks the still-hovering Mark: "Is something wrong?" like he never even heard of the word "epiphany", let alone "gay panic."
Mark's stops hovering and mumbles about TheFacebook and Eduardo tunes him out pretty much immediately because there's a statistically-proven 98 percent chance that he'll have no idea what Mark's talking about anyway. Instead he focuses on the more pressing matter at hand, the factuality of Mark's heterosexuality.
Mark had gotten exactly one girlfriend since he's known him, despite his truly appalling social skills. (Eduardo still isn't sure how Mark landed Erica in the first place. Maybe he's good in bed. Not that Eduardo would know. Or want to know. Or even want to think about knowing.)
And while Mark has never done the thing every self-respecting computer science major has done and stalked Queen Amidala across the campus, he always figured that Mark was just playing the long game and is waiting to woe her when he's a gazillionaire. That was Eduardo's plan, actually, but it goes a long way of accounting for Mark's obvious and rather bizarre lack of interest in the Queen.
And really? Mark gay? With that appalling dress sense and just terrible taste in music? Eduardo's straight as an arrow and he's got more Madonna on his ipod than Mark. Who used to tease him about that…
Mark's still talking about users, PHP, and servers and Eduardo's getting a headache and there's the stale taste of beer in the back of his throat and there's really no telling what went down on the couch he's lying on and now he's thinking about Mark going down...
He gets up immediately and talks about that thing that they wanted to do. Chances are Mark's got as little of an idea as he has about what he's actually talking about but he'll take his chances and drag him into the first best afterschool campus special Harvard has to offer.
*
It turns out that the first best afterschool special is Bill Gates and he's boring as fuck. Mark looks only vaguely interested but he hasn't stared at Eduardo for twenty minutes now which means that he's probably completely enraptured. Eduardo's not vain to think that but he's used to Mark staring at him so often that he kind of notices when he doesn't.
But there are two cute Asian girls in the row behind them and they look more than just vaguely interested. One of them, the less mouthy one, even resembles Queen Amidala a little. It's perfect, really. Except when they get back to the dorm, he finds a Cease and Desist letter, courtesy of the WASP Crew Twins, that Mark never even bothered to tell him about and things are a lot less perfect. Eduardo would understand if Mark was reluctant to come out with... uhm... more personal feelings, entirely hypothetical personal feelings, but this is business and not only Mark's - it's his too.
He feels vaguely angry and then he looks down at Mark, who's perhaps just too used to carrying the weight of that damn site all by himself and he's his best friend and deserves someone who doesn't freak out just because someone touched their hair.
"I'm here for you," he says and he means it.
As if to make up for all the headache is cost, Mark's doubtful (actually, it was never in doubt. Never.) heterosexuality makes itself known and Eduardo decides then and there that Mark's got the dibs on the Amidala clone.
The evening progresses in unexpected ways, some better (when Christy drags him into an empty bathroom stall, undoes his pants and goes to town), some worse (when Alice drags Mark into the neighboring stall and does the same, judging by the sex noises that Mark makes.)
If there's one thing Eduardo never ever wanted to hear, it was Mark's sex noises and they're fucking distracting him from Christy's skilled mouth and the fantasy of finally being cool enough to have groupies. This quickly goes from the most arousing thing that ever happened to him to the least arousing thing that ever happened to him while he got a blowjob. Not that he got that many to compare them to.
When he starts wondering if Mark's thinking of him in the neighboring stall, he tries to stop thinking so hard that he probably burst a blood vessel or two in his brain, lest he offends Christy by failing her completely. He doesn't know if he could survive the embarrassment.
But Christy's good enough to distract him from Mark long enough to come and that's a fucking amazing feat. He decides she's a keeper.
*
The first time Mark smiles at Christy, Eduardo wonders if he should be jealous of Sean Parker. He has no reason to. Even if Mark's face lights up not unlike it sometimes does when it looks at him, Parker isn't really that special. He didn't even invent Napster on his own. Ask anyone who invented Napster and they're going to say Shawn Fanning.
Sean Parker was merely the co-founder.
Not that co-founders cannot be great all on their own. Eduardo isn't really a hypocrite even if he thinks that Mark's idol worship is really misplaced. Maybe Parker did contribute something special to Napster. Maybe he was the one who turned into something better, something more just like Eduardo hopes he can do with Mark's site. Be something else but Mark's ATM machine.
*
Sean Parker's worse in person. So is Mark, actually. But Mark being smitten can be easily explained away. But taking Sean's advice on anything? Pearls of wisdom from a guy whose entire claim to fame is streamlining the process of stealing other people's work?
Fuck him and his corporatebabble and his billions and his fucking fishing metaphors.
Fuck Mark and his idol worship and his talk of California and going where Sean wants to lead him.
Even though he briefly thought about pawning Mark off to Sean - one problem less, he had thought - but he would physically throw himself between those two before he will let that happen. Mark's his friend. TheFacebook is their business, is their site, is their project and no stupid paranoid snake oil salesman is going to come between that.
*
Of course, he lets Mark go to California with 18,000 dollar and the vain hope that Sean Parker doesn't find them there. Meanwhile he's looking for advertising money in New York, trying to prove that he's more than an investor. That he can contribute to the site as well. More than Sean fucking Parker. He fails.
He stands in the hallway in Palo Alto, soaked through and through and Sean is in the living room and Mark doesn't even listen to him. Mark asks him about the internship he quit weeks ago, tells him that it's nice to have a girlfriend who frightens you.
Mark doesn't talk to him, he realizes, he talks to him as he imagines him. An Eduardo Saverin-shaped cut-out in his place, the one with the Lehman Brothers internship and Christy, the harmless, easy girlfriend. Mark doesn't even see the real him anymore.
When Mark is finished with what he imagines polite small talk to be, he begins what sounds like a somewhat rehearsed speech. "It's moving faster than any of us ever imagined," Mark says and there's this light in his eyes and Eduardo doesn't know who put it there. It used to be him. Now it could be Facebook or even Sean fucking Parker.
He swallows hard when Mark delivers to the coup de grace of his little speech: "You're going to get left behind."
It should have been an ultimatum, he thinks dumbstruck, a threat, but it comes across as a fact, a blast from the past. He already has been left behind. Mark is just stating the obvious.
Mark closes his eyes and it's obvious that he says next he says despite himself, so reluctantly it comes out of his mouth in stutter: "I want you... I need you out here. Please don't tell him I said that," he says, talking to floor.
There it is, the way out. It's the thing that will allow him to catch up. He thinks of Sean Parker in the living room, like a spider weaving his net, waiting for the big payday when Facebook will have its billion dollar evaluation. He must have think it possible, to be here instead of somewhere else. To be here means that he has more trust in Facebook than Eduardo, more than Dustin, probably even more than Mark himself. Sean will not leave and Mark won't let him.
Maybe there was a moment where he could have kept Sean out of the company, if he had just found some investors, if he had just found a way to make money and keep the site cool.
But that window of opportunity has closed. What matters now is not Sean's position in the company but his own.
And there is Mark who is still staring at floor, waving the Twizzler nervously around. Eduardo slides down the wall to sit on the floor and just bury his head in his hands for minute. He's cold, he's wet and when he looks up Mark looks at him as if he were a person again, not an Eduardo Saverin shaped ATM machine.
He looks like him like he used to, like he always has. For the first time since before Sean Parker, he sees his best friend again, the one that used to stare at him too long and he cannot remember why he ever thought this was a bad thing. He has been so long without that focused attention that he has quite forgotten how good it feels.
This is it, he realizes, this is the moment where he can still have it all Mark, Mark's undivided attention, Facebook, everything. He just needs to do the right thing, say the right thing.
He gets up, slowly, thinking it through. Mark's his best friend. He's low maintenance. He's not frightening, not insane, not insanely, obsessively jealous, not like Christy. He's a good guy and in the right light people would probably think he's cute. He's a genius. And he loves Eduardo.
This will be easy, Eduardo tells himself, laying his hands on Mark's shoulder.
"You want me?" he asks because this one he cannot afford to get wrong.
Mark nods but there's no shyness in his eyes, no reluctance. His response is a demand. And Eduardo's lips curl up; his eyes are alight with humor because suddenly he understands why Mark's so fucking terrible with girls.
And that's when Mark kisses him.
For a millisecond Eduardo doesn't react before he remembers that this is what he wanted. This is the reaction he wanted.
Mark's lips are soft and sweet like the candy that he just dropped to the floor. It's not that hard to enjoy the kiss. To kiss him back. Eduardo briefly wonders what his lips and tongue taste like to Mark. What this lie tastes like.
The first time Eduardo feels Mark's tongue against his own, he has a minor freak-out and it takes all of his self-control to respond as he feels he should.
He can take this, he tells himself. It's Mark for fuck's sake. It's just the surprise. It's pleasant, normal even. He's not a fucking homophobe, he can deal with his.
He still pushes at Mark's shoulders, pushes him away, on his lips a guilty fake laugh. "I'm getting you all wet-".
"Don't care," Marks says and recaptures Eduardo's mouth greedily. All hail the conquering hero, fanfares and all that. Of course, Mr. 'I walk through the snow in fucking flip-flops' wouldn't care.
And then it's Mark who pulls away and for a moment Eduardo wonders if Mark has figured him out. Mark is good at figuring people out. He should see through this in a hot minute. Should have already the second Eduardo kissed him back.
"So you're staying?" Mark asks and he sounds happy, excited at the prospect. He doesn't sound like he's disappointed at all. He grabs Eduardo's left hand that has fallen off his shoulder when he pulled away and grasps it in his hands.
"Ye... yes," Eduardo stutters.
Mark smiles. Disconcertingly, there are dimples in his cheeks. And he pulls Eduardo's hand up to briefly kiss his knuckles - unselfconsciously, still smiling. It's the first thing about the whole mess that turns Eduardo on - a little. He immediately feels ashamed.
"Come on," Mark says and pulls him down the hallway. "Let's tell the others."
"Tell them what?" Internally Eduardo freezes at the idea of coming out to a drunken frat house, featuring Sean Parker, two stoned girls, and most of his friends but Mark's pull is insistent and he's past the point of cold feet anyway.
"That you're staying." The 'duh' swings in Mark's voice. "Stanford's business program is pretty great, you know..."
That stops Eduardo dead in his tracks: "Wait, Mark, we... you're not going back to Harvard?"
"I'm taking the next semester off," Mark says happily. "And if everything goes like it should... No, I'm not going back."
"Oh."
"Don't tell me you want to go back to Caribbean Nights at AEPi?" Mark asks. His mocking tone leaves little doubt this isn't even a question.
Except Harvard isn't AEPi. It's a source of pride, for him, for his family. And he's just a year shy of graduating. He closes his eyes, briefly. Stanford isn't that bad and Mark's here.
"No," he says. "This is just..." Surprising, confounding, stunning, startling, a SAT test set of answers, he wants to use. Instead his voice trails off.
Mark smiles at him, reassuring. It doesn't work on his face. Or maybe it just doesn't work here.
"It's so much better, isn't it?" he completes the sentence for him. "To be where it's all happening."
Mark opens the door to the living room and basically shouts into the room: "Eduardo's staying."
The reaction is like a series of flashbacks with no context, memories in the making: Dustin whoops. Sean downs his drink in one go. The girls on the couch holler. One of the interns is taking off his headphones. Mark is still smiling, it's bordering on manic now.
He feels hollowed out, exhausted, and is thankful for it because if he felt something more the vague sense of loss would probably hurt. He sits down next to one of the girls on the couch, his coat; all of his clothes are drenched. Part of him hopes he gets pneumonia and dies before he has to tell his father that he's dropping out of Harvard.
Dustin hands him a beer. It's warm against his palm or maybe he's just really cold. The bottle is not even opened, so he just sits there on the couch while the girls disappear to somewhere where their voices don't carry. He falls asleep.
He's woken up by a hand shaking his shoulder and Mark's voice.
"Hey Wardo, wake up."
He stares at Mark for uncomprehending second before he allows himself to be dragged off the couch and off to one of the bedrooms. Mark's bedroom, he figures, judging by the familiar clothes strewn all over the floor. There's an expectant glint in Mark's eyes as he closes the door behind the two of them and everything comes flooding back to Eduardo.
Just in time as Mark's pressing him against the closed door and kisses him like he's trying to make up for lost time. Mark kisses like he writes code - with focus, intent and, surprisingly enough in this case, skill. It actually feels kind of competitive to Eduardo, so he tries to kiss Mark with as much focus and skills, using one hand to twist it around the back of Mark's neck, the other to bury his fingers in his curls, the source of Mark's genius and brilliance only a few millimeters away.
Meanwhile Mark pushes his wet coat off his shoulders, then his blazer before he starts working on the buttons of his still damp shirt without ever letting Eduardo up for air.
It's dizzying to be the focus of Mark's attention but not dizzying enough to not be startled by Mark's fingertips on his naked chest. He tries to think of a way to slow Mark down, to make him take his hands off his body.
He starts to pull at Mark's hoodie roughly as he was trying to get it off. Mark has to let go off him and it's a relief, except after the hoodie has joined the mess of Eduardo's clothes that's pooling around their feet, Mark's hands now seem to move toward his belt. So Mark's t-shirt is the next thing that Eduardo strips Mark off with so little tenderness that it could be mistaken for impatient enthusiasm.
Once the shirt is gone Mark goes back to pushing back Eduardo against the door and kissing him, his naked chest pressing against his own. He hears the thumps of two sandals being thrown off Mark's feet and then Mark's right hand wanders from his shoulder down his back, settling on his ass.
He toes off his own shoes, trying to dislodge Mark's hand with the movement. It works for a short moment but not for long. He breaks the kiss.
"Mark," he says breathlessly. "Slow down."
"No," he breathes into Eduardo's open mouth. "I can't wait anymore."
But he relinquishes his hold on his behind to pull him by the belt towards the bed, blindly navigating until he sits on the edge and Eduardo stands between his legs. Once they are there his fingers nimbly open the belt and Eduardo knows that he can't hide the panic any longer.
"I...," he says as he hold Mark's hands still on the top button of his pants. Mark looks up to him, confused and vulnerable; a breath away from anticipating rejection.
"I've never done this before."
There's a pleading note in his voice and he wonders if this will be the moment where Mark will finally see that he's fucking liar, a coward, and the worst friend he's ever had.
But instead Mark smiles at him radiantly, like he's the billion dollar evaluation, and it's fucking beautiful.
He wants to lean down and kiss him for that look in his eyes, for thinking him a much better person than he could ever be. And so he does. And for the first time it's not weird, not a lie, but rather something joyous, something happy, something so good it hurts.
"Don't worry," Mark promises into his mouth. "I've got this."
It's so Mark that promise, all vague swagger - about taking the entire social experience of college and putting it online, about California, about billions of dollars when they haven't even got one single investor yet - it makes Eduardo laugh into Mark's mouth, and then laugh again with his lips on the column of Mark's throat.
"You're...," he says he's kissing Mark's pale shoulder, down his collarbone and he hopes that Mark can feel every bit of his affection for him as he says this: "you."
And as he softly bites into the fleshy part where Mark's shoulder meets his neck while Mark is moaning softly, he knows that he should have told him he loves him right there.
Because it is true. Even though he knows it's not enough. He just has to find a way to make it enough for Mark.
This is just the beginning.
It's when Eduardo's euphoria dies down, and he feels Mark's hands on his ass again - 'Really, Mark?' he thinks - that he tries to stop it one last time.
"Mark," he says, so close to Mark that he can still smell the Twizzlers on his breath.
"Won't this be weird... We're friends... I don't want to lose you over..."
Mark doesn't even let him finish.
"Wardo, this is a win-win scenario," he says with conviction, his eyes alight. What's cooler than a million dollars? A billion dollars. What's cooler than having a best friend? Fucking your best friend.
Clearly this shit makes sense in Mark's head, which doesn't really say much about Mark, but this has gone past the point of no return no, past words even. Mark's hands, his lips, his tongue are like an oncoming storm - an inevitable force of nature.
Mark pulls the magic trick where he get them both out of their pants before Eduardo has even a chance to realize what he's doing. It's a surprisingly smooth move, like Mark planned it, thought it through, and practiced it. Eduardo doesn't like the thought of Mark doing the latter.
He wishes he could make his brain shut up, too, and just enjoy this, but it's all so foreign, and it's Mark. It's impossible to not think about the way Mark's hands on his skin are just too strong, that his legs aren't smooth, that he's got too many angles, that he's too heavy.
And with every second it gets harder to remember why he's doing it and how much he loves Mark because this isn't it what he wants to do and he feels like he's getting aroused against his will. Him getting hard seems more like a credit to him being horny as a default, like every guy his age.
He bites the knuckles of his left hand hard when Mark's moves downwards past his navel; the pain is a reminder not push Mark away, not to reject him.
'Just let it happen,' he tells himself, 'don't think about what will happen afterwards. Just let it happen.'
He bites his knuckles harder because, as Mark takes the head of his cock into his mouth, it stops being merely weird and not arousing, it also becomes embarrassing.
He should have drunken that beer, hit the girls' bong and downed every drop of alcohol in the house, so this would feel more like a drunken mistake, like doing the moonwalk in front of all of AEPi and less like dancing like an idiot stone-cold sober.
The worst part is that Mark's mouth feels good, that he knows what he's doing, that this is... If this was any girl, maybe even any other guy, this would be okay, it would be great. But it's Mark and it's not okay, and it's not great and he shouldn't enjoy the way Mark's tongue is tracing the underside of his dick.
"Fuck. Mark," falls from his lips, past the knuckles he's bitten raw.
Mark takes it as an encouragement. And maybe that's finally the bottom of the barrel of what is worst about it - that Eduardo's no longer sure if it wasn't when he comes down Mark's throat.
It's that moment when Eduardo can breathe again and Mark looks at him expectantly, he realizes he needs to stop keeping track of about what's worst about it. Just thinking it is like promising himself that there's a light at the end of the tunnel when it's just the light of the oncoming train.
'Train wreck,' he thinks to himself because no one else is listening.
He kisses Mark because that's a safe bet to begin with what Mark expects of him. He roams his hands down Mark's skinny back and cups his ass.
He could jerk him off. It would be the most familiar thing to do. But he would have to look into Mark's eyes doing it, at least once. That wouldn't be familiar at all, that would be horrible.
So he uses the leverage he has on Mark's hips to turn him on his back.
Mark's hard but that much Eduardo already knew, felt.
He breathes kisses down Mark's neck and sternum, small ones, more breath than lips - Eduardo guess they count as open-mouthed and Mark seems to enjoy them.
So far, so easy. He moves farther south while he prays for the house to burn down that very minute.
'Fuck the deposit. Fuck the computers. Fuck Facebook.'
He accidentally nips Mark's stomach right then getting a "Fuck, Wardo, don't do that," from Mark.
Eduardo doesn't believe that Mark's talking really about keeping the skin of his abdomen intact. He's probably giving him advice about what not to do when he reaches his destination.
'I know,' he nearly says. 'I'm not a girl, I know how this works.'
But he can't find his voice, he can't find the courage to talk about back because this - taking Mark's dick between his lips, slowly sucking it in - is taking all of his courage and he doesn't have more to give.
He doesn't have more to give than remembering every blowjob he has ever received and project it into experience he doesn't have and never wanted to.
Mark softly moans, and then unexpectedly buries his fingers in Eduardo's hair. He tucks at the strands while Eduardo sucks harder and deeper, willing for this to end sooner than later.
Mark's obliging in that regard, at least. He comes in Eduardo's mouth quickly, salty, before Eduardo can even figure out the etiquette of spitting or swallowing. He swallows because Mark did it, too, and Eduardo guesses it's the polite thing to do.
Mark drags him back up, just as Eduardo begins to yearn for his toothbrush, and before Eduardo can even say something, anything, Mark's tongue down his throat. A chaser of sorts.
Then Mark takes a breather for a second, Eduardo assumes for only about as long, because the breather turns into Mark practically falling asleep on the spot with Eduardo still draped all over him.
Eduardo disentangles himself quickly, puts back on all of his wet clothes minus the coat and silently walks the walk of shame across the hallway to the next bathroom. Thankfully no one's either in there or in the hallway. There's loud music blaring from the living room, so he figures whatever noises they might have made, no one should have heard.
He locks the bathroom door behind him, undresses while turning away from the bathroom mirror, and stands in the shower until the water runs cold.
Then he returns to Mark's room in clean shorts and a t-shirt. Where else would he go?
*
Eduardo wakes up in the middle of the night, sweating because Mark has wrapped his naked body possessively around Eduardo, one arm is snaked around his chest, and the other has slipped under his t-shirt, holding him around the waist. His right leg is hooked across Eduardo's hip.
Mark is a good alternative source for heat in cold Massachusetts winter, but in California in the summer, up this close, even with the AC running, he's unbearable.
Eduardo tries to shake him off but Mark's a deep sleeper and his hold onto Eduardo feels like a death grip. So Eduardo sweats and sweats, willing the time to go faster, until he falls asleep again.
*
Mark is already up and gone when Eduardo wakes up again, sparing Eduardo the awkward moment of having the morning after conversation. What is he supposed to say, really?
He dresses and goes downstairs. Mark's not wired-in, he talks about Facebook with Dustin and Sean, and Eduardo wonders if anything has really changed, or if he's still left behind. But then Mark spots him, and smiles.
"Wardo," he says, the words coming out so fast out of his mouth, they seem to swallow each other, as he brings Eduardo up to speed. "The servers running to full capacity again and Dustin has this great idea on how to waste less bandwidth to lessen the load and avoid potential downtime. We just need to group the users differently, which means we have to reconfigure some of the internal settings and probably overhaul the sign-up process. But that shouldn't take all that much work, except this week we have this meeting with Thiel and someone has to handle all the day to day stuff, so we are thinking about getting someone to do this full-time."
Eduardo nods, he understands the basics - server overload, coding overhaul and not enough personnel; it's not that hard to understand - and really, hiring more people to help is the sensible things to do. He can handle this, he understands this and if they get Thiel then maybe they won't need advertising for some time. Maybe they can keep the party running.
*
He ends up preparing with Sean for the Thiel meeting because Mark's so useless that even Sean can't keep from rolling his eyes and sends Mark back to his computer. He then makes a spreadsheet of their current costs and how long they'll last without additional money. Somewhere between writing off the deposit and the beer money, things look less than promising. But he feels useful, like he's doing something right for once, like he belongs.
*
The hours everyone keeps are ridiculous but Eduardo stays awake because he is in this with everyone here. That's why at 2am he finds himself alone, sitting by the pool, a beer in his hands (his third, but who's counting?) feeling buzzed, and kind of content. The light of the pool reflects ever-changing the patterns onto their fence. It's relaxing just to look at and not to think about anything.
It's a great way to pass the time until he feels a hand on his shoulder and he can guess without looking that it's Mark.
"Is everything alright?" Eduardo asks.
"Come to bed, Wardo" Mark says. His voice sounds a little hoarse.
"But it isn't even five yet," he deadpans.
Mark doesn't respond, so Eduardo looks up to him and there's Mark with a smile on his face and he holds out his hand as if to help him up. It's a lovely smile, he thinks distantly, as he takes Mark's hand and stands up.
The rest of the night is not unlike the one before, except Eduardo doesn't protest, not even when Mark's fingers bury themselves in his ass. He tries not to think about what that will mean once they graduate to something beyond blowjobs, even though Mark's warm body enveloping him so tightly it feels less like spooning and more like slow-motion suffocation and he can't fall asleep.
*
Mark doesn't fuck him for real until after the Thiel meeting; after they've been promised half a million dollars.
The shares will have to be redistributed because Thiel gets a piece of the pie now, and so does Sean, who has already the eyes on their next investor because "Half a million is just the beginning, Eduardo", and so they owe him.
They redistribute the shares mostly from Mark's percentage but there's also some from his own. It's not even a question - 23 percent of a half a million company is more than 30 percent of a company that has barely enough money for cereal left. (Eduardo has checked. They can keep the servers, the interns, the house, and the beer for another month but only if they all start to live off ramen. He guesses there's a culinary reason why Thiel is an angel investor.)
It's business and it's good, and it feels great to be in the middle of it because Mark's "You're going to get left behind," is haunting his memory like a particularly nasty ghost.
They all go out for drinks in the evening, except for Dustin who gets stuck with server watch because Mark's paranoid about the possibility that the servers could go down, ruining Facebook forever and ever.
Eduardo has barely the time to down his second shot when Mark pulls at his sleeve, impatiently. His pupils are large, and for a moment he suspects that he has done coke with Sean in the bathroom but the thought is just fucking ridiculous.
He allows himself to be pulled outside and into a cab, briefly wondering who's going to pick up the tab.
Back at the house - they'll have to get a real office now - Dustin's wired in and probably high by the smell of the living room. He wouldn't even realize if the roof fell on him, let alone Mark and Eduardo coming home early.
Mark shrugs off his hoodie the second he's inside the bedroom and then starts pulling at Eduardo's clothes. This is still weird but Eduardo has gotten used to the whole routine of it. It's just sex after all.
Except this time, the routine takes an unexpected detour when Mark pulls out condoms and lube and Eduardo's brain starts to short out in panic for a second.
It stutters back into action just in time to see that Mark looks at him hungrily and Eduardo asks the first thing that comes to mind.
"Have you eaten?"
There's an acute feeling of embarrassment that's trickling down his spine before he's even finished. He buries his face in his palms and his voice comes out muffled under the sound of Mark's laughter.
"Sorry, you looked... Oh God, kill me now."
Mark's laughter quiets but Eduardo still can't look up from his hands until he feels Mark's hand under his chin, lifting his eyes to meet his own.
"Don't worry," he whispers against Eduardo's lips. "I'm only hungry for you."
Mark looks really happy, he registers dimly, because Mark's already kissing him again, pressing him down the mattress. The gesture removes every last doubt on who will do what now and Eduardo tells himself that the whole thing is too far gone to deny Mark now. It doesn't make him feel any less queasy. He tries hard to focus on the good feelings that Mark's touch evokes on his skin.
But there's a party somewhere in one of the neighboring gardens, and he can hear the dim murmur of people talking in the distance and the soft lull of music. The chords of the acoustic guitar sound familiar, but it takes him a while to distinguish the voice and the guajira guantanamera he sings about.
Spanish isn't his strong suit but he makes an effort to understand the lyrics for once. The singer sounds mournful, and he remembers that this is a song about dying.
The first verse he tries to translate is fairly easy, Disney-esque something about a forest animal, but the next verse is harder, something about a cruel man who is tearing out the singer's heart, but he doesn't give him thorns and nettles in return, he gives him a white rose. A peace offering of sorts. Turn the other cheek.
"Wardo," Mark asks. "Is everything alright?"
And it's like a light is turned on. Mark's still there and Eduardo is actually trying to decipher some Cuban poet's last verses about the world, peace, and things that make no sense at.
"Sorry, it's that song..." Eduardo apologizes.
"What song?"
"The one the neighbors are playing?"
He gets a blank stare from Mark who apparently heard nothing.
"Guantanamera?"
Mark's stare goes possibly even blanker.
"It's a Cuban song, it's kind of weird for me... never mind," Eduardo says and grabs Mark by the back of his neck and pulls him into a kiss.
The neighbors play something else afterwards, more acoustic guitars and more songs about changing the world (Hippies, he realizes dimly.) but the song is stuck in his ear, the lyrics stuck in his mind.
As Mark takes him apart, puts him together again, and takes and takes, Eduardo keeps thinking about arranca el corazón con que vivo. He wants to draw the parallels but he isn't the truthful man of the song and Mark isn't stealing any hearts.
Mark can't take what is already his.
With that truth he comes apart and stops thinking for a while.
When he regains his senses he wonders if he isn't a lot gayer than he ever thought he could be.
It's a comforting thought.
*
The next morning Mark sends him off to Stanford to sort out his transfer. Turns out there's a lot of paperwork involved.
When Eduardo calls his father to tell him about giving up Harvard for Stanford and Facebook his father hangs up on him.
Eduardo knew it would happen. He knew it when he said to Mark that he would stay. Knew that the people in this house would have be his family now - even though some have interesting ideas about personal hygiene, and he still doesn't like Sean.
Maybe things have to get worse before they get better. He just wishes sometimes he could speed up the process.
*
They move into the new offices, the day he finalizes the transfer. He doesn't get the opportunity to tell Mark because Mark's busy. But Mark's always busy. He usually finds the time to give Eduardo a brief smile somewhere between one Facebook thing and another. It's not unlike their Harvard days when Mark was too busy to even notice that Eduardo was in the room. Before Facebook. Before things got strange.
It hasn't even been a year and now they're talking about million dollar investments and shares and going global. And Mark's sleeping in his bed, sleeping with him, and no one even cares.
He thought that someone would bring it up, would ask him about it.
It takes him a while to realize the silence doesn't mean they haven't noticed. It's just that no one thinks this is a new development.
Only Dustin talks to him about it, in his strange, circumventional Dustin way during that last evening in the house before they all move out to the tiny, yet overpriced apartments they all can afford now.
He lays his arm around Eduardo's shoulder and drunkenly slurs: "'ardo, 'ardo, so glad you're with us on this..."
Dustin waves his arm around, looking for a metaphor grand enough.
"Adventure," he finally says. "Like explorers of unknown waters, like pirates of the stormy seas, we couldn't be here without our first mate."
Eduardo nods, humoring Dustin.
"So if I'm first mate, what are you?"
There's no question what position in that marine metaphor Mark has.
Dustin thinks about this seriously for a while.
"Hmm, probably ridiculously good looking swashbuckling defender of hapless virgins."
"Is that an official position?" Eduardo deadpans.
Dustin laughs and boxes him in the shoulder.
"I'm glad you're back here with Mark," he says. "It hasn't been quite the same without you. Mark without you is like Batman without Robin, Lois without Clark, M without the other M. That's, like 2 and 2 without the four, an open italics tag..." here Dustin fake-sniffles. "...standing there all alone with no one to close it, turning everything into sad little bowed letters."
"Chris," Eduardo calls out because he heard the saddest littlest italics tag monologue before. "Dustin's crying about code again."
*
He tells Mark about the completed transfer to Stanford the morning after they move into their new apartment.
Mark wanted a rather frugal interior design for the apartment but even Eduardo drew the line at a mattress on the floor. He fought for a real bed and a decent AC. He doesn't tell Mark but turning the AC down into near-Arctic colds make Mark's warm presence in his bed so much easier to deal with.
He feels well-rested that first morning and Mark looks open, like he would actually listen if Eduardo told him something.
So on their way to the offices he tells him about the transfer. Mark doesn't say anything but his smile would probably be blinding if it was on the face of another person. On Mark, it's much more subtle but Eduardo can read him and his dimples well enough.
Mark asks about the hours he's going to be on campus. He doesn't ask about Eduardo's father, the Phoenix, or the friends he will leave behind. And Eduardo doesn't mention any of it. What would be the point? There's no going back.
*
Eduardo makes a color-coded schedule to time his time between attending classes and Facebook perfectly. But it still takes him only three days to drop all of his non-essential classes.
His class attendance remains spotty, there is always something more important happening at Facebook that he's needed for. And when he attends, he's usually working on something for Facebook anyway.
Eduardo knows he's failing his classes; that he's behind his reading, that he missed way too many lectures; that academically he's a goner.
But he refuses to give up until one day in November his phone rings. He reaches for his cellphone and sees Mark's name on the display when his professor calls him out.
"If you want take that call, Mr. Saverin, you better leave the class."
Eduardo looks up. The professor, whose name he can't even recall, has a sneer on his face.
"But if you do, you won't need to come back."
Eduardo doesn't like threats, doesn't like being blackmailed, doesn't ultimatums. He doesn't like being a college drop-out either but he grabs his bag and leaves. By the time he's outside, Mark has given up on reaching him.
It doesn't matter, staying in that class would have been merely delayed the inevitable. He was never going to get through this semester, let alone the whole year.
He walks back to the Facebook headquarters, familiarizing himself with the new him: Eduardo Saverin, college drop-out, CFO of an unprofitable but popular internet start-up company, professional liar.
Mark doesn't look surprised when he turns up even though he should be in class. The problem he called him for is minor, and when Eduardo tells Mark that he's dropping out Mark doesn't even pretend to look unhappy about it.
He drags him into the supply closet, tells him to be quiet and gives him a consolation blowjob. The orgasm is nice but not much of a consolation with the supply closet setting and all.
He feels better about the day after when it hits him that he doesn't owe anyone but Facebook and Mark his time anymore. On the way to work, he deletes his father's number from his cell.
*
It turns out he's good for Facebook. The site has its ups and downs but it grows and grows, and when Eduardo isn't tending the numbers, he ends up being the one to publicly smooth the waves over privacy concerns.
He makes a startling number of appearances for the company on his own. And he is wherever Mark has to appear to do most of the talking for him - before Mark is provoked into spitting out that privacy is only for people who have something to hide.
Eduardo is good at being the public face of the company. He's likeable. People believe the things that come out of his mouth, even though he knows that some of the promises he makes to the public, Facebook has no intention of keeping.
The Wall Street Journal calls him the yin to Mark's yang. Together they weather lawsuits, and Sean's rather scandalous exit. Eduardo isn't particularly sad to see him go. But he still finds himself missing the way he would take on the challenge of making Facebook "the greatest thing on Earth."
Now Mark's the only one left with a vision. Eduardo just follows.
*
The day they get their billion dollar evaluation, Mark's wired in because they are in the middle of site-wide update. Sean doesn't call. Dustin's too busy to harass the programmers to pay attention to the business side of things, and all he gets from Chris are talking points for his next interview.
Eduardo always thought that this would be the moment that would matter more than any other, that this would be the moment they all had been waiting for all along.
Instead he sits at his desk in the middle of the coders, surrounded by the multiplied clack-clack of keyboard typing, the middle of his, their, billion-dollar company and feels not the slightest bit cooler, not the slightest bit more accomplished than he did before.
Three desks away is Mark, lost in code, working towards that ten billion, that fifty billion dollar evaluation. Eduardo lives with him, sleeps with him, wakes up next to him, works with him, eats with him, is with him every day of his life, and yet he hasn't the slightest idea when and if a number will ever be high enough to represent the something Mark really wants. Or what that something really is.
All Eduardo knows that Sean was wrong. A billion dollars isn't the cool thing he had been looking for, the number that would set them all free.
*
A few weeks later, his mother calls him and halfway through the call hands the phone to his father. His father doesn't apologize, he doesn't say he forgives him, doesn't say that he's proud of him. But he asks him about Facebook, about the plans they have for the company, about that Time magazine profile. And his father listens.
They don't talk about Mark. Not for some time. But once his father does, there's never an angry word, just silent acceptance of Mark, the visionary, Mark, the billionaire.
"You've done well, son," his father says one day, saying the words Eduardo has been waiting for his entire life. They feel strangely hollow like he's praised for something he has swindled his way into getting, like he's praised for someone else's work.
This is not how this was supposed to feel.
*
In 2008, Chris gets infected with the idea of hope and changing the world as if he managed to preserve some idealism in the middle of his corporate double-speak.
So one day he drags Mark and Eduardo into one of the conference rooms and asks them to publicly speak out against Proposition 8.
Mark doesn't show any reaction except that he musters Eduardo, waiting for an answer, waiting to go along with whatever Eduardo chooses.
Eduardo doesn't care about gay rights, because he isn't actually gay. He doesn't need gay marriage because there's no man on the planet he would want to marry.
So what if he has been in a relationship with Mark longer than some people have been married? That doesn't mean he would even want to promise Mark a lifetime commitment, or that he wants to support gay marriage.
But he can't tell Chris that, so he settles for a bitter half-truth.
"I don't want to be a spokesperson for gay rights. You know, Chris, unlike you, I gave up on my political ambitions the day I quit Harvard."
At this Chris face twists in self-righteous anger because he has known Eduardo long enough to hear the part that was true.
"Or maybe you don't want to do it because you're a self-hating queen who can't even bring himself to hold Mark's hand in public?"
Eduardo gets up and walks out of the room, walks out of the office, walks out of the building, walks and walks until he finds himself in front of the house he and Mark share.
Mark isn't home yet, and Eduardo left his keys back at the office, so he waits on the front steps until Mark comes home. Mark doesn't talk about what happened for a while. He's kind of silent, actually.
"Chris quit," he says suddenly in the middle of dinner.
Eduardo drops his fork.
"Is it because-?" he starts asking.
"No," Mark interrupts him. "He wanted to go into politics for a while now."
The next time he sees Chris everything between them is as it was before. As if neither of them can remember. As if Chris didn't hit the nail on the head when he called Eduardo someone who hates himself.
*
One day in late 2008 he falls in love.
She's a junior programmer and they meet in the cafeteria when they are both waiting in line. She's cute: tiny, dark hair, full mouth, upturned nose, and as he quickly learns, really smart. She's the kind of girl he would have brought home to meet his family, the kind of girl he would have liked to start a family with.
He makes a lame joke and she laughs at it. Her eyes sparkle, and her lips reveal her teeth, they are as perfect as the rest of her.
He runs across her a few times afterwards, makes it a point to do so. She's charming, charmingly open and trusting, telling him about her family, and her terrible ex-boyfriend.
It's inappropriate but no one seems to notice or care.
Mark and him are an institution, the rock the company rests on, or as Sean once put it - long after he was gone, long after they all were supposed to be cool - the image of the two of them slaving away at Facebook, for Facebook, together, rejecting one billion dollar takeover offer after another, is a large part of what makes the company so valuable.
No one can imagine one cute girl to be a threat to that.
The random meetings never go anywhere. He can never bring himself to take it a step further, to invite her to a coffee, to give her even a hint that he's in love with her smile, her eyes, and her hands that never stop moving.
He wants to believe it's because she never thinks of him as anything but her potential gay best friend. But that's not the reason.
It's because whatever Eduardo feels for her... he loves Mark more.
It's Mark who has never let him down, who has never disappointed him, who has never betrayed him. It's Mark who sometimes looks up from his computer, his eyes searching until they find Eduardo's, and a little smile softens the habitually neutral expression on his face.
It's Mark whose hands are not very talkative unless they move across a keyboard, unless they move across Eduardo's skin; it's Mark whose eyes are usually unreadable but that are capable of warmth and humor when there's no one else but Eduardo around.
So he stops seeking her out, goes actually out of his way to avoid her.
As luck will have it, one day she runs across him when he's with Mark.
"Hey," she says with a small wave of her hand.
"Hey...," he responds, pretending he can't remember her name. "... Janice?"
"Jamie," she says and the smile falls from her face.
Mark's expression is still, unreadable.
When Dustin leaves a few weeks later, he takes Jamie with him to join his new company.
*
It's their anniversary. They don't celebrate it, they never have. Eduardo isn't actually sure if Mark remembers that this is the day he did everything to make Mark listen to him again.
It's late and they're both still at work while nearly all of their employees are gone. Every time Eduardo looks up, Mark's focus is on the screen of his computer.
On a desk near him, a programmer has left his music on, the music blaring tinny and distant through the headphones. But otherwise the room is silent and empty. Mark's typing is the only counterpoint to the music. The bright overhead lighting reflects in computer screens, in empty plastic bottles, soda cans, picture frames on abandoned desks.
In the middle of that vast emptiness of their empire is Mark, coding, fixing, and forever improving the site. The people they left behind - their Harvard friends, Sean, Chris, Dustin - have not even left their ghosts here to keep them company.
"Mark," he asks into the silence after one song ends and before a new one can begin. "Is there something you still want?"
Mark looks up from his computer and fixes Eduardo with a long stare, his eyes narrowing for a moment, lost in thought.
"No," he says firmly, with conviction. "I have everything I want."
His eyes look off to the side for a moment before returning to Eduardo.
"What about you?" he asks.
Eduardo looks at his hands, taking stock of his life. He has nearly everything that was so important when he was just a dumb kid at Harvard: money, success, being indispensible to his company, his best friend by his side all the time, someone who truly loves him, his father's approval.
But he isn't that dumb kid anymore. He's given up a lot to be here, one little thing after another.
Some things seemed to matter at the time, like Harvard, like graduating. Sometimes he sees the applications Facebook gets from Harvard Business School graduates, when they make it past the screening processes. They are three years younger than him these days. He doesn't envy them.
He used to care about his father's opinion but somewhere down the line that stopped being worth something, the hunger for his approval ceased to matter. Perhaps that happened on the day when he finally got it.
He wanted to have a family one day, a white picket fence - a normal life. Instead he has Mark.
He used to worry about this, he remembers. He still doesn't feel particularly gay, whatever that is supposed to feel like. He knows he'll never stop staring at a particular nice and badly concealed pair of tits. But having sex with Mark is something that stopped giving him panic attacks a long time ago and instead is something he enjoys, looks forward to on good days, on bad days, and usually takes the lead on.
And it is so easy to love Mark; it always had been easy, long before California, long before Facebook.
No one ever understood why he was friends with him back at Harvard, why of all the people there he was drawn to that abrasive, socially awkward computer nerd. But it always had been Mark, and he has begun to suspect that this one thing will never change.
He looks at Mark at his desk in the middle of their home away from home and realizes that this is where he belongs. Here, alongside Mark.
"I want you to forgive me," he says into the emptiness between them.
Mark looks confused.
"What the fuck for?"
"For not coming to California," Eduardo says, trying to say the thing he's afraid to voice. He wants forgiveness but he wants Mark more. "For not wanting to quit Harvard. For wanting to stay away."
Mark looks at him, and maybe there is an understanding somewhere where Eduardo can't see. Mark's impossible to read. Maybe he doesn't understand what Eduardo apologizes for. A large part of him hopes this is true.
"There's nothing to forgive," Mark finally says. "You came here, you stayed."
He gets up and sits beside Eduardo; he reaches for the other man's hand then reconsiders.
"I wondered what I did to make you stay for a long time," Mark whispers it like the dirty secret it is. "But the answer really never mattered to me."
He shrugs.
"Maybe it should have. Maybe I should have cared. Maybe I have the wrong programming for this sort of thing. I don't know."
He looks away for moment as if he's embarrassed for this shortcoming of his.
"You're still here," Mark states, his eyes fixing Eduardo unblinkingly. "Do you want to leave?"
"No," Eduardo says.
"Okay."
Mark gets up and goes back to his computer.
Later they'll go home together. They will talk business, their broken microwave, and what to eat at two in morning.
Later that night they'll share a post-coital Lo Mein.
Much later Eduardo will get over his fear of public displays of affection enough to actually ask Mark to marry him, much to Chris' never ending amusement.
Jamie will come to the wedding as someone's date, and Eduardo honestly won't remember her name this time, only the vague sense of shameful wrongdoing her presence inspires.
Dustin will hold a speech, still calling Eduardo Mark's closing italics tag. He'll cry for real this time.
Sean will talk about business to Eduardo for thirty minutes without a single interruption. He'll have a new project, something revolutionary, something unbelievable. Eduardo will actually invest in it; after all he's got a decent track record with this sort of thing.
It will still feel like it's just the beginning.
It won't be perfect.
But what is?