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That very last time in the Palo Alto rental house, they had a stilted conversation about how having sex under the same roof as three of their employees would be stupid and inappropriate, a conversation they ended by jerking each other off in Mark’s bed.
“You should be here,” Mark told him in a rush while Eduardo fought against the cramp in his hand trying to make him come. Mark always ran his mouth when he got close. He talked with his nose dug into Eduardo’s cheek, eyes screwed shut, hushed but frantic, his hips working furiously. “I don’t know what you’re doing out there and it’s starting to - oh fuck, oh, fuck,” he sucked in a breath and Eduardo took the opportunity to kiss him before he started talking again, “I think, I think we should really talk about you moving out here, not just appearing every few weeks and disappearing again - things are moving, they’re really moving, and you’re missing it and I, I -” He threw his head back and came across the back of Eduardo’s knuckles, his body wound as tight as it could go, one long clenching muscle. “Yeah,” he huffed, his face turning soft, “yeah, yeah.”
Afterwards, he was briefly pliable and low-energy and into extended periods of kissing. Eduardo came groaning into his mouth with Mark’s hand around his cock. He touched Eduardo with a kind of delicacy during sex, and that made it hard for Eduardo not to feel like he was in love with him, and that was a feeling he never knew what the hell to do with when it arose.
He caught his breath with his face tucked into the curve of Mark’s neck, then he pulled his T-shirt off and wiped their come off of Mark’s stomach with it.
Mark said, quietly, somewhat ridiculously, “Thanks.”
It always took Eduardo longer to shift headspace after sex, to make himself stop wanting to linger in the intimacy of it. He touched a freckle on Mark’s pale ribs with his fingertips.
Mark’s breath jumped in his chest. He stared up at the ceiling.
“You should get back to the couch before the guys wake up,” he said.
-
The first time was at Kirkland in Mark’s cramped little single bed while his roommates were gone over break. Afterwards, they lay side-by-side, sweat and come turning cool on their skin, Mark’s arms folded self-consciously over his chest.
He broke the silence by saying, “Sex is like being a body without a brain for a while.”
He sounded agitated, jumpy, like there was someone else in the room he felt he had to defend their behavior to - their behavior being grinding on each other for the better part of seven minutes.
His face was still flushed. “It’s just - it’s animal impulses and sensory overload and inevitable embarrassment.”
“You have nothing to be embarrassed about,” Eduardo told him, gently.
This was pre-Facebook, pre-Erica. Before Eduardo understood that he could feel for a guy the way he ended up feeling about Mark. He really thought it was coming from a platonic place, saying that with Mark’s spit still wet on the corner of his mouth.
Mark turned, looking at Eduardo’s shoulder instead of his face. There was something sweet about him then, about how meaningful it seemed to be for him to hear that.
His voice was almost inaudible. “That’s a nice thing to say.”
Their arms brushed. Eduardo swallowed.
“That can’t happen again,” Mark said.
Eduardo nodded. “I know.”
“It’s out of my system.” Mark lifted his head off the pillow to look down at him. “Is it out of yours?”
Eduardo gave him a split-second glance.
“Yeah,” he lied.
From then he would look at Mark in class, in conversation, from across library desks, and see someone he’d once heard say please like he meant it, someone who’d clutched his wrist as he came. It was an instant, on-sight thought process he couldn’t help: look at Mark, remember sex with Mark, feel the urge to have more sex with Mark. Animal impulse. He kept meticulously shutting those thoughts down, and then four days later they ducked out of an AEPi party early to lick the taste of beer out of each other's mouths in the privacy of Eduardo’s locked dorm, where Mark asked him with hazy, dilated eyes, “Would you -“ and finished the question by dipping the tip of his thumb into the parting of Eduardo’s lips.
That night Eduardo became someone who went down on other guys. Mark became someone who whimpered. These were difficult realities to confront when Eduardo’s alarm clock rang out at 7:30AM the morning after.
Mark was closest to it. He reached out, grunting, and smacked it quiet. Then they lay next to each other, awake and hungover, and said nothing for a while.
Eduardo shifted to face the back of Mark’s head.
“Should we talk about this?”
“There’s nothing to talk about,” Mark muttered.
“Sure. Right. Yeah. But, I mean - should we?”
Mark pushed himself onto his elbows. His face was scrunched up and half-asleep and his hair had gone flat in some places and stayed curly in others, and Eduardo was still attracted to him. He was starting to wonder when this would go away. What the fuck would make it go away?
Mark kept his eyes fixed on the door straight ahead. His voice was scratchy.
“We’re friends,” he said.
“Exactly. I don’t want this to mess with that.”
Mark’s eyes darted sidelong. “Are you gay?”
“No.” Eduardo was relieved at how sure he felt saying it. This thing with Mark was just an outlier - you were allowed that in college.
“Okay. Me neither.” Mark rubbed his face tiredly. “So it’s not a problem. It’s fine.”
“Well, okay, but -”
“I am not talking about this anymore,” Mark snapped.
Eduardo frowned up at him. A muscle in Mark’s jaw clenched tight then eased.
He looked down at his hands on Eduardo’s bedsheets and said, his voice soft now, “Why don’t you just say whatever it is you want to say, Wardo.”
Eduardo moved to sit up straight, his back to the wall.
“Is…” He cleared his throat. “Is it going to happen again?”
It was impossible to ask this and keep looking at Mark. Instead he directed the question to the textbooks across the room on his cluttered desk - he was going to miss class if he didn’t start getting ready right now, he realized, and stayed exactly where he was.
“I don’t know,” Mark said. Then: “Is it?”
Eduardo scrubbed a hand through his bedhead and blew out a breath. “Maybe. Yeah.”
Mark paused.
“If it did happen again, obviously it would be a separate thing from you and me normally,” he said. “We can’t let it change, um.”
He gestured between them.
Eduardo smiled a little. “Of course not.”
“Okay.” Mark dipped his head in a nod. “Good.”
He met eyes with Eduardo, the first time he’d looked at him properly all morning, and Eduardo remembered the night before with an abrupt clarity and heat in the pit of his stomach - Mark’s hands gripping his hair, the low sounds he buried into Eduardo’s pillow. Mark’s cock in his mouth. Eduardo had come first, his hips pushing as deep into the mattress as they could go, listening to Mark pant out, “Wardo - Jesus fucking Christ.”
Eduardo looked away and folded his hands loosely, surreptitiously, over where his dick was threatening to get hard.
Mark kept looking intently at the side of his face. It was unnerving. For some reason it was turning Eduardo on more.
“Last night,” Mark said, “I could tell that you’d never thought about - doing that before.”
Eduardo winced, more from the awkwardness than embarrassment. “That bad?”
“No.” Mark shook his head. “No, that’s not what I...”
He pushed up so they were both sitting up next to each other, pulling some sheets over his chest, and the strange domesticity of the situation hit Eduardo hard - him and Mark half-naked in bed together, talking about the sex they’d had the night before.
Mark took his bottom lip into his mouth. “It made it better, that you’d never done it before. Like - you’d never wanted to. But I made you want to.”
“Well,” Eduardo swallowed, “yeah.”
Mark said nothing. There was something about having all of his attention that made the back of Eduardo’s neck hot. That had been true ever since they first met.
Slowly, Mark reached out a hand. He placed it over Eduardo’s stomach, his fingers spread, then trailed it down his body, under the sheets, to palm Eduardo’s half-hard dick through his underwear. Eduardo bit down a sound that would have cracked in his throat.
Mark looked up from where his hand was working, his face uncertain. “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” Eduardo huffed.
He rocked into Mark’s hand, his teeth catching in his lip.
“You have an objectively nice face,” Mark said.
This was not the most arousing thing he could have said at that moment, but for some reason Eduardo’s body reacted like it was. He shot forward and kissed him, curling a hand into his hair and cupping the other to his cheek. Mark tasted like morning breath and last night’s beer and he kissed back immediately, with urgency, and Eduardo was going to come so fast it would be objectively fucking pathetic.
“Did you like doing it?” Mark asked, mouth to Eduardo’s cheek.
It took a second for Eduardo to understand what he meant.
“Yeah. I - yeah.” Mostly he’d liked how much Mark liked having it done to him.
Mark pulled away. “I want - can I -”
“Yeah,” Eduardo told him, “yes.”
Mark’s face was flushed. “I wasn’t finished asking.”
He was still stroking Eduardo’s dick. Eduardo let his head thump back against the wall and said in an unsteady voice, “You can't expect full brain function from me while you’re doing - what you’re doing.”
Mark nodded like he hadn’t considered this. “Right, yeah. Can I - um.”
Eduardo rolled his head to the side to look at him. Mark was looking back at him, mouth pressed to one side.
“I feel like I owe you one,” he said.
Eduardo let out a strangled laugh. “Please don’t do anything out of obligation here. I don’t love that as a reason for someone to have sex with me.” While he was talking Mark thumbed teasingly over the head of his cock through his underwear and made his voice go tight around the word sex. He looked like he thought it was funny; Eduardo huffed a laugh and said, with no bite to it, “Asshole.”
Mark dipped his thumb under the waistband of Eduardo’s Calvin Klein’s. He watched intently as the muscles of Eduardo’s stomach clenched in response.
Eduardo’s voice was shaky. “You don’t have to, you know.”
“Wardo, I know that,” Mark said. He frowned down at Eduardo’s erection and stopped stroking it to give it what felt like a more clinical kind of inspection. “I’m not going to be good at this.”
This is sort of ridiculous, Eduardo thought, and a moment later Mark was tugging down the waistband of his boxers and putting his mouth on him and it was not ridiculous at all.
-
It went on like that for a semester. Between class and studying and maintaining a slight social life, there was this thing with Mark.
On the nights he stayed over, Eduardo would sometimes wake up at 3AM to the cold light of a laptop screen next to him and Mark’s blank expression as he typed endlessly - physically there, mentally in some unreal space beyond his blinking cursor. Sometimes Eduardo would say in a gravelly voice, “Mark, that can wait,” and Mark would blink down at him in surprise, face tired and sallow, then he’d reach a hand down to close Eduardo’s eyelids over like he was putting a body to rest. Sometimes he’d say it and Mark would stop whatever he was doing, rub his face, close the laptop over and put it on the floor. Under the sheets he’d shuffle closer to Eduardo’s side of the bed until their bodies pressed close together. The pitch black allowed for a different kind of intimacy that was unsexual, unspoken of.
Eduardo started buying cereal Mark liked - Froot Loops, like a kid would eat. He kept a spare toothbrush at his en-suite sink. He stopped caring so much about dating.
In the world outside of his locked dorm room in Eliot, the two of them looked like they were functioning as usual. To his roommates, Mark’s night-long disappearances were a source of sordid discussion that Eduardo found sort of funny and that Mark did not enjoy.
“It’s annoying.” He was working in the empty computer lab for the night to escape Dustin and Chris’ relentless comments about his sex life; Eduardo was there under the assumption Mark would give them more ammunition by coming home with him again that night. “They’re annoying. They think I have an easy girlfriend with easy friends for them.”
“I do have easy friends,” Eduardo said. “They’re called Dustin and Chris.”
He tucked the tag of Mark’s hoodie in for him unthinkingly and Mark shot around to face him, frowning, a drawstring hanging out the side of his mouth.
“I think your neighbors are starting to notice me coming over at night and leaving in the morning,” he said.
Eduardo doubted it. “You don’t want to come over?”
“There’s no real privacy here.” Mark turned back to the computer, tapping a key without pressing it, a rapid, agitated movement. “It’s risky and it’s stupid for us to keep doing what we’re doing and thinking nobody else will catch on, and I don’t want people to -”
Eduardo realized, stomach lurching, that he didn’t want to hear this. “Okay.”
“Let me finish.” Mark shook his head. Neither of them were properly looking at each other. “I don’t want to stop. I just don’t want other people to know what we’re doing. The second thing might have to cancel out the first thing.”
“Yeah.” Eduardo nodded. “I get it.”
He looked out the window at the campus outside, the small figures dotting the green. Privately, he wasn’t sure that his housemates knowing what was going on with him and Mark would be enough to make him want to stop doing it, even if any kind of suspicion would be enough for Mark to call it quits.
He scratched at the corner of his mouth.
“My parents are in the Maldives for Thanksgiving,” he said.
Mark’s eyes slid from the screen to meet his.
“How nice for them,” he said, unblinkingly.
Mark told his family he too was busy with school to make it home for Thanksgiving break, then he came to New York to spend three days alone with Eduardo in the townhouse he grew up in.
Things blurred there. Mark wore his old oversized highschool T-shirts for pajamas and went around in worn boxers, in Eduardo’s father’s bathrobe and slippers. He slept in Eduardo’s bed with him. On Thanksgiving he answered a call from his mom on Eduardo’s couch while they watched old Star Trek, stoned, and said, “Yeah, I’m pretty swamped. It’s not much of a break.” His slippered feet were on Eduardo’s lap. He lifted one and tapped Eduardo on the chin and Eduardo turned to him, smiling, feeling stupid and happy to see Mark’s equally stupid and contented face looking back at him. “No, I’m good.” Mark’s smile slanted to one side. His eyes were pink, half-lidded. “I’m looking after myself. Really.”
That was the same night Mark asked if Eduardo would let him fuck him, the same night Eduardo squirmed on his old sheets and let Mark push inside of his body with painstaking slowness - it seemed to go on forever, more and more of him stretching Eduardo open, filling him up.
Every so often Mark would pause, eyes scanning Eduardo’s face, a crease between his eyebrows. He’d ask, breathlessly, “Okay?”
“Keep going,” Eduardo told him. He tried to soften his grip on Mark’s shoulders. “It’s just - it’s intense.”
Mark let out a breathy, nervous laugh. “Yeah, no shit.”
It hurt in a way Eduardo found he could adjust to, and then in a way he found he could enjoy, and then it felt good in a way he had no idea his body was capable of. Near the end, every time Mark fucked into him it tore a moan out of his throat, like that was the mechanical process their bodies were working for.
“Wardo,” Mark said, muffling it into the side of his neck, driving into him. “God, it’s - you feel -”
Eduardo grabbed the sides of his face and kissed him hard. Mark made a cut-off gasping sound and started to come, scrambling to put a hand between them. It barely took anything for Eduardo to come too, into the welcoming arch of Mark’s palm with his head thrown back on the pillow.
Afterwards they looked up at the ornate ceiling moldings for a while in silence. Eduardo glanced at the torn condom wrapper on the bedside cabinet and thought, faintly, Jesus.
“That’s the best I’ve ever felt.”
He turned to Mark. In the half-light coming in from the window Mark’s face was pink, shiny. Looking at his profile, at the distinctive line of his nose, made something in Eduardo ache.
“During sex?” he asked.
“No. In general.” And when Eduardo burst out laughing Mark turned to him with huge eyes and said, “Wardo. I’m not kidding,” and started laughing too.
Eduardo stayed a few days longer to see his parents after they got back from their vacation. The day Mark was scheduled to fly back to Massachusetts, he spent the morning sleeping face down on the couch in Eduardo’s old math club T-shirt and a pair of boxer shorts that didn’t fit him while Eduardo cleaned up all signs of drugs, beer and sex from the house, then he woke up disoriented and hastily showered, packed, and downed some coffee.
They sat on the couch and waited for his ride to show. They kept a natural distance between them, like some nebulous boundary had been put back in place overnight.
“Thanks, for -” Mark said. “This was -”
He looked down at where his hands were curled awkwardly around his knees. Eduardo wanted something from him that he knew he couldn’t have. He reached out and squeezed Mark’s arm.
At the door, after the cab pulled up outside, Mark paused and turned to face Eduardo with his bottom lip tucked into his mouth. He took his hand and kissed him, and there was no heat behind it, none of the urgency that came with sex. It was lingering and soft and familiar - and then he was out the door, gone.
Eduardo got back to Harvard a few days later. By then, Erica had entered the picture.
-
Mark introduced her to Eduardo a few weeks later at a bar close to BU campus. When she excused herself to the bathroom a few drinks in, Mark watched her go, frowning, and said, “I don’t think she likes me.”
Eduardo did not want to be there but didn’t know how it would look if he tried to leave. He was Mark’s best friend - he had to be interested in meeting the girl he was seeing. Objectively, Erica seemed like a good fit for him. Different enough to soften his edges. She carried herself with ease, had all the social graces Mark was chronically deficient in, and had no interest in taking his shit.
Over a round of beers earlier she’d done an impression of how she’d found Mark next to her in bed once, hunched over his laptop in the dead of night, an impression so accurate Eduardo had surprised himself by how hard he laughed at it. She laughed, too. Mark took a drink. The instant it stopped being funny it all just seemed unbearably fucking weird instead.
“She wouldn’t be here if she didn’t like you,” Eduardo told him.
Mark tapped a finger on the label of his bottle. “Her ex-boyfriend looks like a Jewish Abercrombie model.”
Jesus. Eduardo dug his thumb into his eye. “What am I supposed to say to that?”
“Something affirming but manly. Like, ‘fuck that guy.’”
Eduardo said solemnly, “Fuck that guy.”
“I don’t think she’s wearing makeup. I think - she just looks like that.”
“Mark. She's here.”
Mark looked at him. He nodded slightly. Eduardo was maybe the only person who could say something to the effect of ‘shut up’ to him and have him actually do it.
“Have you been seeing anyone?” Mark asked.
Eduardo took a long drink. He was further into his beer than any of them, he noticed, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. “I'm getting coffee with a girl from statistics class tomorrow.”
Mark stared. “What about Counter-Strike?”
“What?”
“Tomorrow. Me, You, Chris, Dustin. Counter-Strike.”
Eduardo blinked. He wasn’t usually a sought after player in their friend group, and had in fact been told multiple times by every individual member of it that having him as a teammate was worse than having nobody.
“That’s the first I’m hearing about this,” he said.
“No, it’s not, because I told you about it.”
“I have zero memory of that. And I think we all know you guys are better off without me.”
Mark drank. In an undertone, he said, skeptically, “A girl.”
Eduardo’s hand went tight around his beer. “Yeah, a girl. Of course a girl.”
Mark raised his eyebrows. He glanced around briefly as if double-checking that nobody in the packed bar was listening to their conversation, like anyone would have given a shit.
“You seemed to really like the kind of sex guys don’t typically have with girls,” he said.
“You seemed to really like the kind of sex guys don’t typically have with girls,” Eduardo snapped. “What, it’s automatically gayer for me?”
Mark blinked at him. “Well. Yeah. Position-wise. How is that even debatable?”
In truth, Eduardo got the feeling Mark was probably more into guys generally than he was, and he got the feeling that on some level Mark was aware of this and resented it. He’d mentioned watching gay porn before, in a tone of voice like he thought he could pass it off as some kind of scientific inquiry on his part.
Eduardo’s thing for Mark was more singular. He looked at other guys and wondered about this sometimes - why the desire was there for Mark but not for any of them. Attraction seemed to come hand-in-hand with their friendship the closer they got, like wanting to fuck each other was the only natural progression left at a certain point.
“I only wanted it because you wanted it,” Eduardo said.
Mark scowled and opened his mouth.
“That doesn’t mean it wasn’t good,” Eduardo added hastily. His ears burned. “It was. Obviously, it was. It just means that was why I agreed to do it.”
Mark closed his mouth. He stared at Eduardo, his eyebrows twitching, thinking hard.
“You agreed to it because I wanted it,” he repeated.
“It feels good when -“ Eduardo closed his eyes and tried again. “It felt good, when I knew you felt good.”
Mark said nothing but Eduardo could feel the weight of his stare; when he turned to face him Mark’s eyes darted away from his. Why the fuck had he said that?
He put a hand on the table to push his chair out. “I’m gonna go.”
Mark grabbed his wrist.
“Wait. No.” His eyebrows were arching towards each other slightly. Eduardo could not look at him without thinking of how they’d kissed goodbye at the front door of his parents’ place, couldn’t look at him without wondering what exactly Mark saw in return. “Not because of - we always said the other thing wouldn’t mess with this thing. Stay. Dustin and Chris are coming. Erica’s friends are coming.”
“This feels weird, Mark,” Eduardo admitted.
“Just stay,” Mark insisted. “Okay? Please.” Then he looked over Eduardo’s head, drew his hand back, and said, “Erica. Hi.”
-
They dated for just long enough for it to start feeling normal that they were together in the first place, and then Mark took the break up so badly he decided to destroy Harvard’s servers for a night.
Eduardo stayed late in Kirkland with him after the lights in Chris and Dustin’s rooms had gone out and the sound of light snoring was coming from one of them. They sat at the computer staring at a blank screen in disbelief.
Mark was riding an adrenaline high. Every time he hit refresh his mouth would twist up to one side with an awed kind of satisfaction. It was a stark transformation from how miserable he’d been earlier that night.
“I don’t think I’ll sleep.” His eyes were bright and he was fidgety in a way he only ever seemed to get after 1AM. “I feel like I’m on drugs.”
“You kind of look like you are.”
Mark gave him a twitchy smile.
“You’re really in for it tomorrow, you know,” Eduardo said.
“Look.” Mark gestured to his computer. “They can’t deny that it’s impressive. Wardo, aren’t you impressed?”
“Not by the content.” Eduardo shook his head bemusedly. “But the fact you pulled it off is…”
Mark smiled at him again, this time with warmth.
There was no human shaped buffer for Eduardo’s mind to bump up against now Erica was gone. The same want he felt for Mark back when they were spending their free time messing around last semester was buried deeper, but it was there.
“Okay,” he said, clapping his thighs. “I’m calling it a night.”
He got up and placed his empty beer bottle near the small collection that had amassed next to Mark’s desk over the course of the night. As he pulled his coat on Mark swiveled in his chair to watch him. He wasn’t restless now. He was still.
He told Eduardo, “I think it’s normal to still think about it sometimes.”
Eduardo focused on buttoning up his coat, trying not to fumble with his awkward feeling hands. “Yeah. Me too.”
He glanced up. Mark looked back at him levelly for a moment, then nodded. It seemed to give him some peace of mind. He turned back to the computer and refreshed it again.
“Hey - at least lie down for a while, okay?” Eduardo said.
Mark tapped refresh again. “Night, Wardo.”
-
He gave Mark a thousand dollars for their site, and then a few weeks went by where the only way he could find out if Mark was still alive was to go to the computer lab, which was open 24/7 for finals, and which he never seemed to leave.
One night after studying Eduardo brought him a sandwich from a deli he knew Mark liked and a bottle of water to counteract all the energy drinks he’d no doubt been subsisting off of. He put them down on the tiny bit of space left on Mark’s desk between the computer monitor, keyboard, his laptop, his hard-drive, and three empty cans of Red Bull.
Without looking away from the screen, Mark muttered, absently, “Thank you.”
He looked pale, bordering on unwell. His eyes were unfocused and exhausted. He wasn’t even typing anything. He just sat with his hands in his lap and frowned at the computer monitor. Both screens in front of him were displaying the exact same segments of code.
Eduardo rubbed his eyes. “You really can’t do this when the sun’s up?”
“It’s missing something but I don’t know what it is. I just know it’s not there.”
“It’s two in the morning, man. When did you last sleep?”
Mark continued frowning at the screen.
“I really think you should get some rest,” Eduardo said. “Mark. Mark. Listen to me.”
Mark closed his eyes. He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Do you know how close I am to -”
“No, I don’t!” Eduardo said, loud enough that Mark actually turned to look at him, along with the few other students scattered throughout the room. “And I don’t care. You look like shit, you need to go to sleep. Your brain needs to shut off for a couple of hours. This isn’t good for you.”
“I’ve tried,” Mark said. It was even more concerning that he didn’t seem to have the energy to get annoyed. “I go to bed and I see this screen. There’s no difference between me lying awake in Kirkland or being sat exactly where I am right now.”
Eduardo dropped into the seat at the desk next to Mark’s and scrubbed his hands through his hair. Mark had deflated in his seat. He was still looking at the code.
“I appreciate you coming,” he said. “But you should just go.”
Eduardo looked at him for a moment in silence.
He rolled his chair closer to Mark’s until the armrests butted against each other, then he lifted his head to check the other students in the lab weren’t paying them any attention and saw them both typing furiously. Mark gave him a wary look.
“You could come back to Eliot with me,” Eduardo told him in a whisper. “I could - I could take your mind off of work for a while.”
Mark blinked. He whispered over the sounds of keys clicking, too. “I didn’t think we were still…”
“If you want.”
Mark’s mouth quirked up slightly. There was no meanness to it when he said, “Right. And if I want, you want.”
Eduardo felt his face warming. He shrugged.
Mark’s smile faded. “This comes pretty close to mixing business with the other thing.”
“The other thing is kind of an extension of me caring about you so - maybe I can't help that.”
Mark’s eyebrows twitched towards each other. His hand hovered over the trackpad of his laptop.
He said nothing for so long Eduardo became physically pained by it. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have -”
“Let’s go.” Mark closed his laptop over. “Let’s get out of here.”
Eduardo watched him quickly turn the computer off and start packing his things up, stunned.
“To Eliot?” he asked.
Mark latched his three-year old threadbare backpack shut. He spoke in an undertone. “I have somewhere else in mind. Off campus.” He lifted his head in Eduardo’s direction without looking at him and said, “If you want.”
It was nearly 2:30AM. Eduardo had been up from six and he had a presentation in eight hours and neither of those things seemed very important then.
“I do,” he said.
Outside, off the main campus, Mark ate his sandwich while they waited for a cab.
After the first bite he closed his eyes and said quietly, “Jesus Christ. I needed this.”
Eduardo laughed. Alone together on an empty street, in the early morning darkness, he felt okay thumbing away a crumb from the corner of Mark’s mouth. Mark leaned into the touch. He chewed his next bite in silence and stared ahead, deep in thought.
-
Mark gave the cab driver the address of the hotel that his parents had stayed at when they visited him during his first year at Harvard. He spoke to the middle-aged, uninterested woman at the reception desk, and then he led Eduardo upstairs to a room with a double bed and a view of the parking lot.
He stood in the middle of it looking nervous, his hands curling and flexing at his side.
“I thought this would be -” He pressed his lips flat together. “I don’t know what I thought it would be.”
“It's nice,” Eduardo assured him. “Mark. Hey. It’s nice.”
Mark stared at the patterned wallpaper. “I just wanted to be somewhere else for a while.”
Mark would get them the hotel room and pay the cab fare but he wouldn’t move from the spot he was standing in now they were here. Eduardo knew that. He went over to him obligingly.
When he got close Mark gave him that tight-lipped look like he was sure he was being judged. Eduardo leaned in and kissed the side of his clenched jaw, lingering there. It was barely anything, like a kiss on the cheek. Enough to make Mark reach up to grip the backs of his arms with a shallow inhale.
“We can’t do this again,” he said.
Eduardo’s stomach dipped. He kissed the curve of Mark’s jaw, nosed into it. “Okay.”
“Okay,” Mark said, clutching at him. He turned his head to catch Eduardo’s mouth with his.
-
The site launch made things easier. The world opened up beyond the claustrophobic spaces they’d been stuck in since starting college - mostly for Mark, who seemed to both relish and resent his newfound popularity on campus in equal measure.
Christy made things easier. Exciting, unlike-anyone-else-in-his-life Christy. Christy who Eduardo did not feel depressed after having sex with.
She liked coming with Eduardo everywhere, and because Eduardo had never figured out how to tell a girl no in a way that guaranteed no hurt feelings, whenever he told her he was going to see the guys he could never scrape up a reason to stop her from tagging along. Sometimes Mark didn’t seem to mind her presence at all. Sometimes he made it explicitly known that he did.
“That’s my hoodie,” Mark pointed out.
Eduardo was in his room with him, at the computer Mark was semi-permanently positioned at. In the living room the others were eating pizza and talking over a CD of indie music that Dustin had definitely burned in an attempt to impress Christy.
“She found it under my bed,” Eduardo explained, quietly. “I told her it was mine.”
“Why? It’s not innately sexual for me to leave a hoodie in your room. Or even that you wore it a few times.” Mark’s face twisted. “I liked that thing.”
“I panicked, okay?”
“I bet it smells like her perfume now.” He added, muttering, “I smell it on you sometimes.”
Eduardo didn’t know what to say. He looked at Mark and Mark looked at the computer. In the living room Christy and Dustin burst into sudden, jarring laughter.
“I like her, Mark,” Eduardo said.
“Sure. I like her too.” Mark shrugged. “The way she smells just gives me a headache.”
A few weeks later, during their trip to New York, Christy agreed to set up a dinner with Sean Parker on the condition that they would go out for drinks with some of her friends from highschool who lived in the city. Proximity to TheFacebook founders was a kind of social capital Mark seemed to have no issue with her exploiting if it meant he got to meet Parker. He agreed easily.
After that, he had no issues with her. Eduardo, on the other hand, had many issues with her by then, and had come to understand that they were not a good match for each other. Her being involved in the business, her wanting him to meet her oldest friends, all this only made it harder for him to try disentangling himself from her, which made it harder for him to pretend he wanted to stay with her.
Before they went out with her friends, she got pissed and accused him of cheating for the third time that week, then she threw a high-heel at his face from across the room with dead-eyed precision. He managed to duck just in time. The heel left a dent in the wall.
Later, in the safety of a bar’s empty mens’ room, Eduardo told Mark about it in a panic. “She knows something’s up.”
He spoke in a whisper, like she might potentially burst out of one of the stalls at any moment. Mark rolled his eyes. He was physically present but mentally working. When he got like that you could grab the sides of his head and shake it around like a Magic 8 Ball and he would still be looking at a perfectly clear computer screen in his head. None of Christy’s friends' attempts to flirt with him had even knocked him out of it.
“So stop acting like something’s up,” Mark snipped. “This does not constitute cheating, we haven’t - it’s been months since anything happened on that front, and now she’s stuck to you like flypaper, so for all intents and purposes, nothing is going on to act so suspicious about. You’re in the clear. Jesus, can we stop talking about this? I don’t know if you’ve failed to notice, but there are more important things happening, Wardo.”
They had a few more drinks before getting a cab back to the hotel. On the drive Christy fell asleep with her head tucked into Eduardo’s neck. She was nestled in close, her eyelashes twitching against his cheek, both her arms wrapped around his elbow.
He put a hand on her knee, the one furthest from him. When she was nice to him, even in her sleep, he felt like maybe things could work out between them. Maybe it was all fine.
He thumbed over the arch of her kneecap, then he felt it - Mark’s fingers on the back of his, touching the gold ring his father had given him.
Eduardo held his breath. Mark ran two fingertips along the metal, up towards his knuckle.
He glanced at Mark’s face sidelong. Mark was looking down at their hands with a vague kind of interest. A few beers had softened his shoulders, the line of his mouth. He dragged his fingertips along a long tendon in the back of Eduardo’s hand and followed it to the knob in his wrist, dipping his fingers under the shirt sleeve slightly.
Heat spread under Eduardo’s skin. Christy stayed asleep between them, perfectly still.
Mark tapped his wrist with his index finger. When he took his hand back air flooded back into the car - Eduardo breathed in deeply enough to disturb Christy. She woke up and rubbed at her eyes.
Mark glanced at his phone. “Wardo, looks like the meeting tomorrow is back on.”
There had never been a meeting scheduled for then.
“Oh,” Eduardo said, mildly. Christy let her head fall back on his shoulder. “Good.”
-
The day after Eduardo got dressed, kissed Christy goodbye, rode the elevator down one storey, and met Mark in his room. By way of greeting, Mark closed the door behind him and said, “If we do this, it has to be the last time.”
“I know that.”
Mark was businesslike, brusque. “Have you been with anyone since we last -”
“Just Christy.”
“Obviously I don’t mean Christy, Christy doesn’t count.”
“Who counts?”
“I don’t know,” Mark said quickly, and Eduardo realized what question he was really being asked.
“Mark, I don’t have sex with other guys.”
“Who said anything about other guys?” Mark said. “I just think that I’m entitled to know if someone I have sex with has sex with other people. Isn’t that fair?”
“It is,” Eduardo conceded. “And I haven’t. Have you?”
Mark scoffed. “When would I have had the time?”
“When would I have had the time?” Eduardo shot back. “I’m either with Christy or I’m with you. You know that. You’re being an asshole.”
Mark’s mouth pressed into a line. He shook his head and muttered, “This is so - Jesus. We shouldn’t have even let it go on for as long as -”
“Do you want me to go?” Eduardo asked. It was easier than listening to whatever Mark was about to say.
Mark froze. He shook his head minutely.
“I get it. This is it.” Eduardo tucked his chin to his chest. “So - we should make it count. You know?”
He looked up at Mark. This hotel room was a little nicer than the last one they’d been in, and with the curtains drawn the low lighting softened everything - Mark suddenly looked like an insecure undergrad and not some famous tech wunderkind. He had that open look on his face he only ever got when they were totally alone together like this. Eduardo could not push down what he felt for him.
Hesitantly, Mark reached out and cupped his hand to the side of Eduardo’s neck. He trailed his thumb along the line of his jaw and Eduardo tipped his head to the side to follow the touch, exhaling through his nose.
“I’ll shut up,” Mark told him, quietly.
“No, you won’t.”
“I’ll try to shut up,” Mark corrected.
He leaned in and kissed Eduardo lightly, a reacquainting kiss. Eduardo wondered how long they could feasibly stay in this room where they got to be different people, this room where he could slide his fingers into the hair at the nape of Mark’s neck and watch him lean into it, eyes closed.
He kissed Eduardo again, slower, more deliberately. Eduardo pulled him close, one hand in his hair, one on the small of his back, walking backwards towards Mark’s unmade bed until his calves hit the back of it. He crawled back on the bed to lie across it and Mark crawled over him, eyes dark, sharp. He let Mark take his knees in his hands and part them wide because he knew it turned Mark on to move him around like that; because it turned him on now, too.
Mark kneeled over him and said, “Would you, um.”
He swallowed. His hands squeezed at Eduardo’s thighs through his slacks.
Eduardo let his head thump back against the mattress. “Yes?”
“I don’t want you to do anything you don’t want to do,” Mark told him, seriously.
Eduardo blinked. “I wouldn’t. I'm not a pushover, Mark.”
“During sex, yes, you are. And that turns me on, so I push you, and I think you like it most of the time, but sometimes I feel like you’re going along with things just to make me -”
“This doesn't have to be a negotiation,” Eduardo interrupted. “You could just ask me.”
Mark stared at him.
“At your parents’ place, when we -” He glanced at the obvious bulge in Eduardo’s slacks and swallowed, his hands sliding further up Eduardo’s thighs. “Would you want to do that again?”
“Yes,” Eduardo said, easily. “Should we shake hands? Do I have to sign something now?”
“Well, now you’re being an asshole,” Mark muttered.
Eduardo took his face in his hands and pulled him down into a kiss, and then another one - if this was really it he may as well fill up on what he could get.
“I want it. It felt good.” It was easy to say with so little space between them. The closeness and the warmth of Mark’s face, his body, overwhelmed everything. “Please.”
It was like Mark had a physical reaction to hearing this. He shuddered, nosing into Eduardo’s cheek, eyes squeezed shut. He kissed the corner of Eduardo’s mouth, his cheek.
“I’ve never felt close like that to someone before,” he said. He said it quietly, almost shyly.
When he pushed inside Eduardo the intimacy of it, of their tangled bodies, their sweat, their hands and mouths endlessly reaching for each other, was almost unbearable.
-
At dinner the night after, Parker ordered a fourth round of drinks for the table right as the third round arrived. He gestured his glass at Mark as he said, in the middle of another breathless spiel, “Whatever it is that's gonna trip you up, you've done already.”
(Eduardo thought about a night back in his room in Eliot, months ago. Mark texted asking Can I come over. and Eduardo said you can but I’m pretty tired. Mark came ten minutes later - someone else must have let him in the front door or buzzed him through. He pulled off his hoodie and shorts in the dark and climbed into Eduardo’s bed wordlessly, and Eduardo lay for a few moments with his eyes open expecting him to say something, to try something, but all Mark did was shimmy close on the mattress and brush Eduardo’s shin with his freezing cold foot.
Eduardo jerked away from him, a full-body response. “Mark, Jesus.”
“It’s not that bad,” Mark mumbled.
“It’s pretty bad.”
Next thing Mark’s icy hands were grabbing his bare stomach.
“You prick,” Eduardo cursed, kicking at him under the sheets, grinning. “You fucking asshole.”
Mark snorted. He didn’t say anything else. Eventually his hands warmed up on Eduardo’s skin. All they did that night was sleep.)
Mark looked at Parker and nodded jerkily. He picked up his drink and finished it in one.
-
Summer alone in New York was miserable. The Facebook house in Palo Alto was even worse.
Eduardo got there late, drenched to the bone. He slept on the couch and kept starting awake only to see the shadow of Sean Parker’s ridiculously big fucking novelty bong in the corner of the room. Then he woke up to Mark’s silhouette above him.
Mark clicked on a lamp just above his head. Eduardo frowned up at him, squinting in the light.
“What time is it?” he mumbled.
Mark looked strange, on edge, the way Eduardo used to find him in the computer lab after he pulled all-nighters trying to solve unsolvable problems.
“It’s five in the morning,” Mark said.
He nodded his head at the sliding doors to the pool, then walked over to them, pulled one open, and walked out.
Eduardo pushed himself up slowly. His body ached from traveling, from trying to sleep on a couch with no give to it. He got to his feet and followed Mark outside, sliding the door closed behind him.
Mark was standing next to the pool with his back to him, hunched into himself. He just stood there, stock-still.
Eduardo waited, waited. A sudden, strong wind made the pool cover creak loudly. Mark did not seem to hear it.
Eduardo walked over to him. He put a hand tentatively on Mark’s shoulder from behind - Mark felt tense, bony. Despite himself, Eduardo wondered if his body was somehow different now, reshaped by the pressure of success.
Mark jerked under his touch, shouldering him off.
“Don’t,” he said quickly. “That would be inappropriate. That would be stupid. ”
At first Eduardo didn’t know what he was talking about. He drew his hand back like he'd been burned.
Mark kept going. “This is basically our head office and all of our employees are a wall away.”
“And Sean,” Eduardo couldn’t help saying.
“It’s not like it was a long-term situation, is it?” Mark kept facing away from him. “We always agreed to keep it separate from everything else, business especially, and I think the only way to ensure that now is to stop doing it altogether. Really stop, I mean.”
They’d done this over and over but it was still nauseating every time.
“Okay,” Eduardo said, placatingly.
Mark kept going like he hadn’t said a thing. He put a hand to his forehead. “There can’t be fuck-ups. Everything, everything has to be about the site. All of it.”
“I get it. I agree. I wasn’t trying to - I know we’re done with that.”
“Oh.” Mark turned to him, head bowed. “I shouldn’t have assumed that was what you were doing, that wasn’t fair.”
Eduardo looked at him helplessly. He wanted to do something that would get that tight, scared look off of Mark’s face.
“You seem really wired, Mark,” he said.
Mark looked up. There were no stars out here, just light pollution and gray-black clouds. “It’s been a lot.”
“I know.”
“And I want, I - I need you out here,” Mark said. He looked like he was only just understanding this as he admitted to it. The frown on his face deepened like he found this disturbing, painful.
Eduardo wanted to reach for him. He curled his hands up at his sides. “I’m here.”
It was silent for a moment. Eduardo thought back to his parents' townhouse - Mark kissing him chastely at the door, Mark’s arm slung around him as they slept in his bed, their bodies pressed together. It seemed unreal in retrospect. That Mark was a separate person to the one standing in front of him now. Someone who was only able to exist in total solitude from the rest of the world.
Mark looked in through the window, into the house.
“It’s quiet,” he said, softly. “I think - I think everyone’s asleep.”
He gave Eduardo a look.
Half his face was in the muted light from the window, the other half indistinct in the dark. If Mark kept asking, Eduardo was doomed to keep following him into empty rooms with locks on the doors. He understood this about himself completely as he said quietly, in answer, “Yeah. I think you’re right.”