Archive of Our Own ^beta

I. KIRKLAND

Back when they were still getting to know each other, after too much beer one night, he told Eduardo about a vacation his parents took him on when he was a kid.

There was never anything judgmental or mean about Eduardo’s face, just a disarmingly genuine interest that made talking to him easy, absurdly easy. When they were up late together and tipsy enough things Mark had never attempted to verbalize before could slip out on their own.

“They talked about going on that trip for the first thirteen years of my life,” Mark told him. They were sitting in the hallway outside of his dorm, backs to the wall, what was left of a six-pack between them. By then Mark’s roommates were starting to become Eduardo’s friends, too - they couldn’t be alone like this in there anymore. “And until they die, I’m going to be hearing about how good this spaghetti was that my mom ate next to some cathedral we didn’t even go into.”

Eduardo’s mouth twitched up. He would always wait a beat before replying in case Mark had more to say, which Mark appreciated, because he normally did.

He twisted the ring pull on his can of beer. “I think even back then I could see how small their lives were.” And because he was three beers deep, because Eduardo was looking at him with understanding, he lowered his head and added, “It was - I think it scared me.”

“I know what you mean,” Eduardo said. When Mark responded by staring at him doubtfully, blank-faced, he just laughed. “I do. The way your parents talk about Lake Como is the way mine talk about my dad buying stock in IBM in the eighties. Isn’t that worse?”

“No. Your parents own six houses in four different countries. Their lives are not small.”

“That’s not what I…” Eduardo took a drink, shrugging. “I don’t know. Getting into this place felt huge. It felt like everything. But now I'm here, and it feels small.” He knocked his knee against Mark’s. “In a good way.”

Their knees stayed touching. Mark stared at the point of contact then shifted his leg away.

“What about what you did in the summer?” he asked. “Three hundred thousand dollars. That’s not small.”

Eduardo ducked his head. He would get politely sheepish whenever Mark backed him into a conversation about how much money he and his family had. “I did it to impress my dad, and he didn’t care. It’s not like I needed it, so.” He glanced at Mark. “What was it for? You know?”

His eyebrows arched towards each other, and Mark realized too late that it was a bad idea to get into a conversation about their parents. After talking about his father Eduardo always seemed to need comforting somehow.

He hooked a finger through one of the plastic rings he’d pulled a beer out of earlier and lifted it, dangling the last can in the pack between them.

“It got us this six-pack,” he said.

He looked at Eduardo’s obscured face through the plastic rings. They swayed a little, shifting focus across his features. Right eye, left eye. The barely-there freckle on his left cheek. He was giving Mark a smile he only offered in private. Mark thought about kissing him, just once, just to know what it would feel like so he could move on from wondering.

He lowered his hand. The last can thunked to the floor. They looked at each other in silence.

“Do you want to come back to Eliot with me?” Eduardo asked.

“Do I want to -” Mark said, eyes darting away from him.

Eduardo had a room all to himself in Eliot with an ensuite and everything. Mark had never been. Once or twice he’d indulged in a fantasy that involved going there, to the hypothetical layout of the place he’d built in his mind, the bed Eduardo slept on.

“It’s nice,” Eduardo went on. “Quiet. We won’t have to sit in the hallway.”

The openness of his face made Mark’s palms sweat.

“I think that’s a bad idea,” he said.

Eduardo ducked his head, nodding. “Yeah. I thought you might think that.” He met Mark’s eyes, his mouth curling self-deprecatingly. “Sorry.”

Until then Mark had been certain that any acknowledgement of the thing that may or may not have been lurking between them, any indication that he was attracted to Eduardo at all, would be the dreaded gesture that would make Eduardo look at him unkindly - or worse, with pity.

Eduardo had just laid it out and asked. Anxiety was still twisting around in Mark’s stomach. His hands were tight with it.

“Are we okay?” Eduardo asked.

Mark jerked his head in a nod. “We’re fine.”

Eduardo pushed up to standing, dusting off the back of his expensive slacks. Mark held the last can from his six-pack out towards him awkwardly.

“I had three,” he explained.

Eduardo looked like he found the situation a little funny, a little painful. “Have my third, too.”

Mark let his hand fall back to his lap.

“I’ll see you tomorrow, Wardo.”

“Yeah.” Eduardo started backwards down the hallway. “Night, Mark.”

For a while Mark stayed put on the floor next to their empty cans, leaning his head back against the wall, listening to the muffled sound of the neighboring dorm’s TV. He drank the last beer just for something to do.

He felt listless, strange. Like he should have told Eduardo, sure, okay. Let’s go. It was the alcohol making him think that way, he knew. It was the kind of attraction-addled thinking that he understood was not to be trusted - that he was, annoyingly, just as susceptible to as the next college student. That wasn’t a person he was willing to be.

-

The morning after, he was in the living room when a guy who was not Chris slipped out of Chris’s bedroom in underwear and a too-small T-shirt, nodded at him, and went into the bathroom.

He was still sitting in the same spot later when Chris walked the stranger out into the hallway for a private goodbye. He stared at his laptop and thought about how any chance Chris ever had of getting into the Owl, the final club his father had been a member of, was now totally fucked.

Chris came back in with his hands shoved into his jean pockets. He looked at Mark steadily, waiting for him to speak first.

“I didn’t expect that,” Mark admitted. “I - when we talk about girls, you talk about girls.”

Chris pushed both hands through his hair. “I thought it would be easier. But it’s not.”

They’d lived together for five months at this point and Mark realized only then that he barely knew anything about Chris, really, outside of him being a handy teammate for first-person shooters and that the prescription shampoo in the bathroom belonged to him.

“Dustin and Wardo know already. ” He looked at Mark, eyebrows drawn. “I guess I didn’t know how you’d take it.”

There was an odd satisfaction in hearing that.

“I don’t really give a shit,” Mark said.

Chris snorted. “Right.” He nodded. “Should have figured.”

He went back to his room. It was the most personal conversation they ended up having.

-

For Eduardo’s birthday they went to a bar - Mark, Chris, Dustin, a few guys from AePi and some of Eduardo’s econ friends, who organized it. It was a gathering of people who Mark either lived with and saw enough of already, people he actively hated talking to, and, of course, Eduardo himself, who would be busy trying to keep everyone else happy on a night ostensibly arranged to celebrate him.

He sent Mark a message half an hour before they were supposed to meet. I get the feeling this is going to suck.

Mark looked away from his laptop long enough to reply, Yeah. HBD.

They hadn’t acknowledged the conversation they’d had alone in Mark’s hallway a few weeks ago since it happened. He was hoping it would stay that way.

He showed up twenty minutes late to a bar he’d never been to before, a place that played alt-rock, sold bullshitty IPA’s, and didn’t card. As he stood waiting to order he eyed a table of uniformly pretty BU girls and felt a vague sense that sex would somehow fix most of his problems.

Someone touched his shoulder. He turned to find Eduardo behind him, smiling, the striped orange tie Dustin had bought him for five dollars out of Wal-Mart hanging loosely around the collar of his shirt.

“Hey." The volume of the music drowned him out. He leaned back to speak into Eduardo’s ear. “What do you want? It’s on me.”

Eduardo clapped his shoulders from behind. “Mark.” His voice was a little too loud - he must have already had the right amount of alcohol to strip away a layer of self-consciousness, which sometimes with him only took the one. “I’ve decided I’m going to have a good time.”

Out of consideration for the fact it was his birthday Mark didn’t roll his eyes. “Okay.”

“I’ve decided you’re going to have a good time too.” Eduardo’s hands tightened on his shoulders, jostling him. “Let’s do some shots.”

“Some. As in multiple.”

“Yes. Two each.” A bartender was finally looking Mark’s way. Eduardo raised a hand to him. “Four tequilas, please.”

“No,” Mark said, and when the bartender set up four shot glasses right in front of him, louder, “No.”

“You want the salt and lime?” the bartender asked. He was at least a foot taller than Mark was and he had janky tattoo sleeves on each arm. Mark didn’t like him.

“Yeah,” Eduardo said. “Thanks.”

The bartender slid over a salt shaker and four shot glasses with haphazardly cut limes on their rims, all spilling out tequila. Mark handed him fourteen fucking dollars.

“Wardo, you know I hate this shit.”

“I know - but listen.” Eduardo licked his thumb and swiped it across the back of his hand. He sprinkled salt on the skin there. “Hear me out, okay?” Then he held the shaker out towards Mark and said, “It’s my birthday, man.”

“Fuck you,” Mark said, taking it from him.

He knocked both drinks back as quickly as he could, one after the other, which seemed like the most painless way to get through it. He scowled each time, first at the tequila, then at the lime.

When he was done he said, voice a rasp, “Fuck.”

He watched as Eduardo put his second empty glass down on the counter. His face was crumpled and ridiculous.

“Jesus.”

“You owe me a drink now.”

“Yeah,” Eduardo huffed a laugh, “okay.” He nudged Mark’s side. “Hey.”

Mark made no effort to look any less pissy than he felt. They were crowded into each other at the small section of the bar they’d taken for themselves, arms pressed together, close enough that he could smell Eduardo’s overpriced cologne and the alcohol on his breath.

Eduardo grinned. “Say ‘happy birthday.’”

Mark’s mouth twitched despite himself. “Happy birthday, Wardo.”

Eduardo got him a palate-cleansing beer, and that on top of the tequila seemed to slow everything down, Mark’s head, his hands, the bar around him. He ended up explaining the structure of an HTML page to one of Eduardo’s technophile English major friends by scribbling a tree diagram on the back of a paper towel.

Afterwards the guy frowned at the drawing uncomprehendingly. “You should make a website or something.”

“I should try that,” Mark said, staring.

He turned away, officially done with socializing for the night. Across the table Dustin coughed a laugh into his beer.

At the bar Eduardo was talking to one of the BU girls Mark had seen earlier, suit jacket off, shirt sleeves rolled up his arms, some of his hair drooping down towards his forehead. He was overly smiley that way he got around girls he wanted to like him; she was smiling back at him. Mark couldn't tell which direction his jealousy was going in.

The rest of the night passed in a haze of more beer and more aborted conversations with strangers. On the walk back to campus Eduardo was in a good mood, chatty with it. He came back to Kirkland, where he took a few inhales of a joint Chris rolled then promptly fell asleep on their couch.

Mark woke up feeling slightly less shitty than he’d anticipated. In the living room he found Eduardo sitting on the couch, face in hands, in his unbuttoned shirt and boxers, shittier looking than Mark had ever seen him before.

“You good?” he asked.

“No,” Eduardo said, muffled.

It was sort of funny how miserable he looked compared to the stoned smile he’d had on last night right before passing out.

“Want coffee?”

Eduardo leaned back, tipping his head over the back of the couch to look at him. Mark’s eyes followed the long tendon in his neck to the start of his chest, the vague indication of hair at the center of it, then he looked straight down and headed towards the kitchenette.

“Please.” Eduardo’s voice was scratchy. “Thanks, man. Do you guys have aspirin?”

There was nothing he could do about the fact he wanted to fuck Eduardo. Sometimes it brought something punitive out in him. He didn’t check the drawer Chris and Dustin kept stocked with painkillers and Bengay, just said, “No,” and went about the process of making coffee with more cabinet banging than was necessary.

He gave Eduardo one of the floral mugs Dustin’s mom had passed onto them. Eduardo took it and continued staring at the black TV, half-awake, until his phone buzzed on the coffee table. He flipped it open and frowned.

“‘Happy birthday.’ No punctuation. Only - nine hours late.”

He shut his phone over but held it in his hand, keeping it standing upright on the arm of the couch.

“Did you get her number?” Mark asked.

“Who?”

“The girl at the bar.”

Eduardo grabbed his pants from where they were hanging over the back of the couch next to his jacket and belt. From one of his pockets he pulled out a napkin with a number scrawled across it, holding it up between two fingers.

“She was cute,” Mark tried.

Eduardo’s hand flopped back down to the couch. “Yeah.”

The gold ring his dad had given him for his bar mitzvah was sitting on the coffee table. He only ever took it off to sleep and shower, like Mark's mom with her wedding ring. He was staring at it blankly.

Mark didn’t have the patience for this. Eduardo’s dad was a prick - that was not going to change, ever, and it was only becoming more frustrating to watch Eduardo be struck continually by this same realization without accepting it as the immutable reality that it was.

“Why waste more time thinking about him than he thinks about you?” he asked, voice flat.

Eduardo scrubbed a hand through his bedhead and muttered, “It’s not that easy.”

“Fine. Then I guess you should just sit here and feel shitty about it some more.”

“God.” Eduardo looked at him, twenty years and a day old and as pissed off as Mark thought he’d ever see him, which was not very. “If I got hit by a car and crawled up the stairwell to this place you wouldn’t have an ounce of sympathy to give me.”

“If you got hit by a car then for some reason crawled up the stairwell to this place, no, I definitely wouldn’t have any sympathy for you,” Mark said, “what the fuck are you talking about?”

Eduardo let out a long breath and leaned over, elbows on his knees, head in his hands.

“Nothing,” he said. “I don’t know. I feel like shit.”

“You’re hungover. Drink some coffee and have something to eat. It’s fine.”

Eduardo dragged his hands down his face to cover his mouth. Mark said, “Wardo,” and, when that didn’t work, grabbed him by the shoulder; Eduardo turned, startled.

“It’s fine,” Mark said. “You’re fine. Fuck him.”

One corner of Eduardo’s mouth lifted slightly. “You must really be hating this.”

“Yeah. You know better.”

Eduardo pressed his lips together and nodded. Mark let him go.

They ate breakfast on the couch, half-watching the TV. Eduardo had a bowl of Mark’s Cheerios and Mark toasted a few slices of Chris’s bread against Chris’s express desire for him to stop doing exactly that.

“Sorry,” Eduardo said, “for getting all -” He shrugged instead of finishing the thought. “It’s a waste of time. You’re right.”

“I am.”

“And thanks.”

“For what?”

“For being smart about something I can’t be smart about.” Eduardo focused on stirring his cereal around. “Looking out for me.”

Mark didn’t know what to say to that. “Okay.”

He glanced sidelong at Eduardo.

“Are you going to call her?”

Eduardo glanced at him.

“She was nice. From what I remember, anyway.”

The news was on at a barely audible volume. The bottom left of the screen said it was almost ten.

“Have Dustin and Chris been up yet?”

“I heard them leaving like half an hour ago,” Eduardo said. He spoke through a mouthful of cereal, the kind of thing he wouldn’t have done in the others' company.

Mark moved to sit sideways on the couch, lifting his feet up onto Eduardo’s lap. Eduardo blinked, moved his bowl to make room, and said nothing about it. They both looked at the too-quiet TV.

“Do you have class?” Mark asked.

Eduardo let an arm rest tentatively across his knees. “Not for a couple of hours.”

That afternoon, after he'd gone, Mark found the napkin with the BU girl’s number on it halfway down the side of the couch. He trashed it along with the contents of the ashtray from the night before.

-

For a few OS classes that semester he had a guest professor - of actual note, for once - who set them a week-long project in his first class. Immediately after it ended, Mark headed back to Kirkland, turned on his computer, and got to work.

There was a knock on his room door right in the middle of things.

He kept typing. Said absently, “Yeah?”

The door creaked open. Eduardo peered around it. Mark glanced at him, frowned, and turned his attention back to the computer.

“What are you doing here?”

Eduardo came in and surveyed the room warily. “Dustin told me you haven’t come out of here for two days.”

“Dustin’s so concerned that he’s messaging you about it?”

“No. I'm concerned because you haven’t answered my texts in forty-eight hours and I messaged Dustin to ask whether you were, you know. Alive.”

“That’s dramatic.”

“You’re dramatic. This,” Eduardo nudged one of the five empty Red Bull cans next to Mark’s desk with the toe of his shoe, “this is dramatic.”

Mark kept typing. “I don't need anyone to take care of me.”

He darted a look at Eduardo and saw him pressing his lips together.

“A walk,” Eduardo said, “and dinner. Anywhere you want, on me.”

Dinner? Mark checked the time: 6PM, almost exactly twelve hours since he’d last checked. It was alarming enough that he briefly stopped being able to think about what he was supposed to be doing. He stared at the blinking cursor on his screen and noticed, vaguely, that he was hungry, like Eduardo had just spoken the feeling into existence.

“And - maybe a shower, first,” Eduardo went on.

“Can you get out?” Mark rubbed his eyes. “You’re fucking with my ability to think straight.”

Eduardo leaned over the back of his chair and turned his monitor off. The rough fabric of his coat sleeve grazed Mark’s ear on the way - Mark almost jerked at it, the sudden realness of it, but managed to stop himself.

Eduardo sat on his desk, right next to the keyboard, and looked down at him seriously.

“You look like you’ve been on a bender,” he said. “Come on. You’ll feel better.”

The presumptuousness of what he was doing there in the first place pissed Mark off. If he hadn’t been interrupted and forced to think about it he probably wouldn’t have even realized how shit he felt.

“What are you, my keeper?” he snapped.

Eduardo just gave him a look. “I’m your best friend.”

Mark blinked, couldn’t think of anything to say.

“I'm just going to stay here and keep bothering you, so you may as well come and get it over with. The sooner you do it the sooner you can get back to work.”

Mark wanted to keep working and he wanted to be anywhere but his cramped dorm. Wanted to drag himself over to his bed and fall asleep, wanted to yank Eduardo down by his lapels. More than anything he wanted something to eat.

“Fine,” he muttered, rolling his chair back.

Showering and pulling on fresh clothes did make him feel better, annoyingly. As he toweled his hair dry he noticed that Eduardo had gotten rid of the cans of Red Bull, the jerky wrappers, the half-empty glasses of water in his room, and was irritated and appreciative in equal measure.

He found Eduardo in the living room, pulling up the side of a couch cushion to inspect underneath it.

“Are we going?” Mark said.

Eduardo jerked up, blinking. “Yeah.”

They walked to a burger joint fifteen minutes from campus that normally functioned as a go-to hangover fix. Mark spent the entire journey moving on autopilot, thinking about the unfinished line of code he’d left behind and continuing to work from that point in his head. He was quiet in a way that kept Eduardo quiet, too, although every so often he could tell he was on the receiving end of another concerned, big-eyed look.

A few bites of proper food made him more talkative. He told Eduardo about his project for class and Eduardo nodded along. He could follow programming discussion more than most people, knew the vernacular of it from enough time around Mark. He could have learned to code if he wanted to. He once said that he’d considered trying it after they first met, but he’d never mentioned it again - Mark must have put him off of it, personally. It was work that demanded a kind of antisocialism and an insomniac working pattern. Eduardo was too sociable for it, or at least too interested in the idea of being a sociable person for it.

When Mark told him the guest professor he had for the semester Eduardo asked, chewing a fry, “Who’s that?”

“Lahiri,” Mark repeated. Eduardo just looked at him. “He wrote The Dragon Book.”

“Uh - The Hobbit?”

Mark paused with his burger an inch from his mouth. Eduardo looked like he wanted to laugh. “No. Not The Hobbit. The Dragon Book.”

“I don’t know what that is, Mark.”

“Well, it’s important.”

Eduardo raised his eyebrows, mouth twitching. “Obviously. You know I don’t know computer stuff outside of what you tell me. I wasn’t allowed one until I was seventeen.”

“Your Boca Raton upbringing was tragic, really,” Mark muttered, then he caught the way Eduardo’s face fell and thought, shit.

Eduardo let the fry he was holding drop onto the wrapper and wiped his hands on a napkin. “That’s not what I was saying.”

“I know.” Mark looked at the sheen of grease on his $20 burger. He could only ever justify eating at this place if Eduardo was covering it. “That was shitty.”

Eduardo looked out the window. He couldn’t hide when he was stung - his big eyes always gave him away. The vulnerability of his face could be uncomfortable to look at. Mark suspected it was the reason his father couldn’t seem to respect him.

He lowered his head and tugged at the zip on his hoodie. “That book was a big deal to me. This is a big deal.”

“I got that.” Then, because Eduardo was soft and he always let Mark off the hook for being his worst self, he nodded his head at Mark’s burger and said, “How is it?”

“Good.” Mark swiped ketchup from the side of his mouth. “Needed.”

Under the table his knee bumped up against Eduardo’s. Eduardo didn’t move away. Neither did he.

It was the first full meal he’d had in days, all carbs, all salt, all sugar. On the walk back to campus he was disoriented by how tired it made him. Eduardo must have clocked it but he said nothing about it, not even when Mark stumbled into his side, low-energy and uncoordinated.

As they approached Kirkland they passed two first-year girls coming hand-in-hand down the pathway. Mark turned his head to watch them go, his head thick feeling. Eduardo was looking at them too.

Sleep deprivation could work his brain like a drug. Things floated closer to the surface than he would have let them get in his right mind. Eduardo only looked half-real beside him, like he might suddenly slip out of existence without warning. It would have been easy to reach out and touch him - Mark was struck by just how easy it would be.

“Thanks,” he mumbled.

Eduardo nodded, hands stuffed in his pockets. “Get some rest, Mark.”

Mark went upstairs and slept for fourteen hours solid. He woke up at an unexpectedly human time of morning and sent Eduardo a text that said, Briefly comatose.

Eduardo replied a few minutes later. Thousand calorie sedative.

He put his phone down on the floor and lay there debating with himself for a while, hands fisted in his hair, dick half hard in his boxers. After a few minutes he caved and gave himself another pass - thought about Eduardo’s tan hands, his long fingers, and reached under the sheets.

Lahiri didn’t even teach the next OS class, didn’t come back to Harvard that semester at all. He had some family emergency that needed him back in India. The code Mark wrote just sat on his hard drive and gathered dust. All that work for nothing.

-

For his birthday his parents sent a care package that arrived a week early. His dad wrote the card in his neat cursive. Call when you can. Love you.

Mark didn't call. He didn’t open the package. Dustin had been the one to take it from the delivery guy. When he handed it over it was like he somehow knew its origin, and it made Mark feel pathetic in a way he couldn’t put words to.

He spent the day itself holed up in the computer lab. On the walk back to Kirkland that night he was knocked into by a pair of identical 6’5” students who looked WASPish to the point of parody.

They bumped Mark one after the other, left shoulder then right. Only one of them noticed. He caught Mark by the arm, swaying him like he weighed nothing, and told him with an affable smile, “Sorry about that.”

He walked away again before Mark could say anything back, like ‘sure, fuck you.’ He just held it in his mouth all the way back to the dorm.

Eduardo came over a little while later. He stood behind the couch while Mark sat watching the TV, feet kicked up on the coffee table next to the tupperware container of Chris’s leftover ragu he’d picked at.

“What are you doing?” Eduardo asked.

Mark looked around. “What does it look like?”

“Where are the guys?”

“Gone for the weekend.”

Chris was out of town with his boyfriend, the same guy Mark saw ducking out of his room a few months ago - Saad, who Mark would come across from time to time around the apartment reading on the couch or actually using the kitchen to cook. He could see, objectively, what Chris liked about him. For a while it had felt obvious how capable he was of seeing it - like Saad knew, and Chris knew, like everyone on some level knew - but thankfully it turned out Saad thought Mark hated him.

Dustin was back in Illinois for a high school friend’s birthday. He’d stayed close with a group of guys there. Mark heard him screwing around on RuneScape with them almost every night.

Eduardo climbed over the back of the couch to sit next to him. He had his satchel slung around his shoulder and that tired look he got on his face after lectures. He kicked his feet up next to Mark’s.

“I assumed we’d all be hanging out tonight,” he said.

“Why?”

“Because it’s your birthday.”

“I never said I wanted to do anything for it.”

“I know you didn’t.” Eduardo nudged Mark’s knee with his. “What are we doing?”

Mark looked at him, the agreeable tilt of his smile.

“Nothing,” he said.

Eduardo shrugged. “Okay. Here, I got you something.”

He opened his satchel and pulled out a small styrofoam box. Mark took it, frowning, and lifted the lid: it was a donut from Rosie’s, a bakery just off campus. He recognised it from the window display because he was there all the time. He still had the palate of a kid; since finding this out Eduardo had always liked catering to it.

“It’s the birthday cake one,” Eduardo said. “I think that just means it has vanilla frosting and sprinkles.”

“Thanks, Wardo.”

“Happy birthday, man.”

Mark pulled the donut into two halves and handed Eduardo one. They ate in the odd quiet of the Kirkland dorm sans Chris and Dustin. It was different being alone without anyone else around, without the threat of anyone else around. It was just him and Eduardo and the thing between them they didn’t talk about.

“I saw you running a few weeks ago,” Mark said. He wasn’t sure exactly why.

Eduardo tilted his head towards him. “You did?”

“Yeah. On Memorial Drive.”

Mark had been on his way to pick up antihistamines, half-alive, congested beyond what seemed physically possible. He’d been trailing behind a group of obnoxious freshman on the footpath when he glimpsed Eduardo through them, heading straight towards him. He’d run past without noticing Mark at all.

“It was weird,” Mark said.

“Do I run weird?”

“No, I mean -”

He felt suddenly inarticulate, alarmed by it.

That moment in the middle of the street, seeing Eduardo in his running shirt and shorts, in bulky headphones and Nike shoes, with that serious, set look on his face - nothing like himself, really - was the first time Mark had ever felt alone around him. He’d passed Mark like they were strangers.

“You didn’t see me,” Mark said, stiltedly.

Jesus. He closed his eyes, jaw gritted. He sounded fucking stupid.

“Sorry,” Eduardo said.

Mark scoffed, turning. “For what?”

Eduardo didn’t even look like he knew, but he looked like he meant it.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. He turned to Mark. “Just - I normally see you.”

His face was perfectly earnest. Sweet. Mark leaned all the way towards him.

One startled second and then Eduardo was kissing him back, his mouth soft and lush, his hand coming up to tentatively cup the side of Mark’s face. Mark’s mind was radio-silent, for a moment something built to feel and not to think.

When Eduardo drew back he followed after him on instinct, their noses grazing. His cheek felt cold where Eduardo’s hand had been.

They looked at each other uncertainly from a few inches away. Mark eyed the freckle on Eduardo’s cheek. This close it was clear, distinct on his skin.

“They’re gone until Monday.” He swallowed. “You could - you could just stay.”

Eduardo’s eyebrows twitched up. His mouth opened like he had an answer ready, then he paused. His eyes on Mark’s bottom lip felt like a physical pressure. “What happens when they get back?”

They were speaking to each other in low tones, different than they ever had before. Mark could feel the texture of Eduardo’s voice in his gut, the heat of it. He reached out and touched the skin just under Eduardo’s clavicle.

“You button your shirts too low,” he muttered.

Eduardo breathed out unsteadily. Mark felt it under his fingers.

“What happens when they get back?” Eduardo asked. “With us.”

Mark’s fingers curled into themselves, knuckles to Eduardo’s sternum. “Nothing. We spent the weekend getting high and playing video games.”

“Right.” Eduardo’s eyes darted to the side. “It’s felt like this for a while between us. You know? And I think come Monday it’ll probably still - be there.”

If Mark didn’t let himself have this now, once, he knew he never would. “At least we’ll have done something about it.”

Eduardo said nothing, just sat there biting his lip, looking away. Mark waited. His hand sat loosely curled on Eduardo’s chest until too much time passed, then he pulled back, humiliation spiking in his gut.

Eduardo fumbled to grab his hand.

“Okay.” He pressed his lips together, nodding. “Yeah. Okay.”

He’d caught Mark in something awkwardly close to a handshake. Mark used it to pull him forward into another kiss.

II. FACEBOOK / EDUARDO

He found Eduardo in the kitchen staring into the bright light of the fridge. He’d changed out of his wet clothes and into a pair of pajamas that Mark was intimately familiar with - even with Eduardo’s back to him, it made looking at him uncomfortable.

Eduardo glanced at him over his shoulder and turned back to the empty fridge. “There’s nothing to eat in this house.”

“There's cereal,” Mark said. “And chips, maybe.”

Eduardo closed the fridge door, tight-lipped. “Right.”

“Order something.”

“It's fine.” He combed a hand through his lank hair, now damp from showering and not the downpour he’d gotten caught in earlier, then he leaned against the fridge and asked out of nowhere, “Did you leave me at the airport intentionally?”

“Why would I do that intentionally?” Mark said, frowning.

Eduardo looked tired. “To let me know I'm not a thing that’s registering on your radar right now.”

Mark rolled his eyes up to the ceiling. In the last two days he’d coded for thirty-six hours, added a new feature to the site in the process to immediate success, and slept for an accumulative four and a half hours. “A lot’s been going on. I know you’re aware of that. It’s not all so goddamn personal, Wardo.”

“This was. I asked you for a ride as a friend, not as a business partner. And you said you’d be there.”

Mark was overtired, agitated. Even a minute-long argument felt like an inexcusable waste of his time. “Well, somehow you survived the cab ride from LAX and found your way here.”

It didn’t land like it would have a few months ago. Eduardo didn’t look hurt; he just looked resigned, unsurprised. He looked at Mark and Mark looked away.

The muffled sound of music and high laughter was coming from the backyard. Mark had been out there with the others for a while. On last look Dustin and the other programmers had been sitting on the edge of the pool with their pants rolled up, feet in the water, passing a bong around. The girls Sean had brought over were on the sun loungers, Sean crouching on the fake grass between them with a hand on the armrest of each chair. He’d caught Mark’s eye and given him this look, like they were in on something together, nodding his head for Mark to come over. Mark had come here instead.

Eduardo rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. “You know, I don’t think I’ve ever heard you say ‘I’m sorry.’”

“I forgot, okay?”

“We started this thing together.” The way Eduardo’s arms were crossed made it look more like he was holding himself. “You said - you said you were worried I’d get left behind.”

“So don’t let yourself get left behind,” Mark said quickly.

“Don’t make me wait two hours for you outside the airport and then not show,” Eduardo said.

They looked at each other from across the small kitchen. Mark gripped the counter. He'd slept in the T-shirt Eduardo was wearing before. He’d woken up in Eduardo’s bed at Eliot wearing it, had pulled the collar to his nose and thought about how their detergents smelled different from one another while Eduardo was curled up beside him, breathing deeply.

Sean appeared in the doorway. Seeing him shot common sense back into Mark’s brain. He straightened. Eduardo cast his eyes down, mouth thinning into a line.

Sean looked between them. “Everything okay?”

“Fine,” Mark said.

Sean nodded, eyebrows raised. “Wardo, how’s Christy doing?”

“Great.” Eduardo brushed past him, out of the door. “I’m gonna go to bed.”

Sean blinked at him as he went. He grabbed a bag of cheap potato chips out of an otherwise bare cabinet and hopped up to sit on the counter next to where Mark was leaning.

After a moment Mark said, “You heard that.”

Sean chewed slowly as if considering how to answer.

“You didn’t come to Silicon Valley to be some rich kid’s driver,” he said.

“We wouldn’t be here at all if Eduardo wasn’t paying for it.”

This was only easy to admit when Eduardo wasn’t around to hear it. Otherwise it chafed at him, the money that sat tucked away in Eduardo’s wallet that he had to keep asking to be permitted access to, over and over again, just to keep the site alive. The fact Eduardo had gone to New York instead of coming here in the first place to be with what they’d made.

“He’s the CFO. If he’s agreeing to foot the bill he should understand what it’s for.” Sean shrugged. “I get it, man. You’re friends. But that shouldn’t get to fuck with all this.”

He offered the bag of chips out. Mark took one just for something to do, ate it despite having no appetite.

/

After their first meeting in New York, Sean had kept in touch when he went back to Harvard.

It was impossible to care about college anymore by then. The site was everything - and Sean understood that in a way nobody else did. Eduardo, Dustin, Chris, they all kept one foot out the door. They were still killing themselves for classes that didn’t mean anything, they still cared more about school than Facebook. It was like they doubted its potential.

Eduardo stopped by Kirkland most days then, more to check on Mark than on the site, which was irking on its own. Mark hid the Sean thing because he knew Eduardo wouldn’t like it, that he didn’t like Sean at all, but eventually his cell buzzed on his desk during one of Eduardo’s visits and gave him away.

“Parker’s calling you,” Eduardo observed.

Mark reluctantly declined the call. “Yeah.”

“You guys talk a lot?”

“A few times a week, I guess.”

Eduardo raised his eyebrows and said nothing.

“I know,” Mark started, grimacing, “that you think I want to -“

“I don't think you want to sleep with him,” Eduardo cut in. He looked just as unhappy about saying it as Mark had been. “I think you want to be him, which is a lot more concerning.”

“You’re computer literate enough to understand the cultural importance of Napster, Eduardo. You had it.”

“This isn’t about what he made, it’s about what he is.”

“A self-made millionaire.”

“A salesman.”

“Selling free advice?”

“Selling Sean fucking Parker!” Eduardo looked at him like he couldn’t comprehend why Mark wanted the input of the only industry icon he had anything in common with. “Whatever millions of dollars he ever might have had got tied up in NDAs and lawsuits.” Then, as if this meant anything, “He’s an asshole.”

“Do you really think I care about that?”

“He’s devoid, Mark,” Eduardo tried, frowning.

“He gets it.”

“And I don't.”

“No,” Mark said. He didn’t miss a beat.

Eduardo gave him a look. “That wasn’t a question.”

Before the site went up there had been a good stretch of time where he and Eduardo were on the same page about everything. After it went up, they argued over the Winklevoss twins and their ridiculous cease and desist letter, argued over the mind-numbing meetings Eduardo kept setting up with advertisers that Mark would rather have died than let anywhere near his site. Now, there was Sean. It was like Eduardo was acting purposefully obtuse about any decision he wanted to make for the good of the site just to be exhausting.

“You can think he’s bullshit,” Mark said, “but I'm CEO, and I don’t.”

“Jesus,” Eduardo muttered under his breath. He raised his hands. “Fine.”

Mark shut his computer monitor off to make it stop staring at him, turning his seat towards Eduardo. He could only ever realize in retrospect when he’d said something objectively shitty.

“Are we okay?” he asked.

Eduardo wiped his hands down his face. “We’re okay. Have you eaten?”

“Dustin brought pizzas earlier.”

Eduardo nodded. He added, quieter, “You look like you’ve lost a little weight.”

Mark shrugged.

Chris and Dustin were both out for the evening - Chris was with Saad and Dustin was making the most of his connection to Facebook to go out with any girl now willing to have drinks with him.

He put a hand on Eduardo’s hip, drawing his thumb down the dip of the bone there, and looked up at him.

Eduardo didn’t meet his eyes. “You can be an asshole to me about the site, but not about this.”

He might as well have slapped Mark’s hand away. Mark let him go, ducking his head.

“I haven’t been sleeping much,” he offered.

“I know.” Eduardo still wasn’t looking at him. He was seeing Christy semi-seriously by that point. Mark had encouraged him to. “You should lie down for a while.”

Mark said he would. The minute Eduardo was out the door, he called Sean back.

They talked less in concrete ideas and more about the potential of the site. What social media would look like if it was done the right way, what it could mean to people.

Mark looked at the Facebook homepage as they spoke. He spent more time than he was willing to admit staring at it - it made him giddy how real it felt, how many other people were looking at the same thing at any given time. It was like watching an organism in a petri dish growing microscopically by the second. His brainchild, his thing. Back then it seemed alive somehow.

“You’re handing them tools to construct a whole new identity,” Sean said. There tended to be music thumping in the background of his calls that fed the adrenaline Mark felt talking to him. “People can make themselves into whoever they want, and it's fuckin’ easy.”

Mark nodded vigorously as if Sean could see him. “Exactly, yes.”

That was how their calls would go: Sean talking, Mark taking in his every word like a hit of something.

After hanging up Mark stayed put in the dark of his dorm room, face lit by the computer screen. Nothing left in him to put into the site except a 3AM feeling of desperation.

/

At the house in Silicon Valley Eduardo looked out of place, a presence Mark had spent the summer mentally detaching himself from that was suddenly, unignorably there - on a sun lounger by the pool, in a shirt and suit pants in the hundred degree California heat. Untouchable and as unwilling to look at Mark as Mark was to look at him.

He only stayed for one more day and left the next morning before Mark got up. Mark went from room to room in the crowded house expecting to see him, dreading it. The realization that he was gone was as bad as being faced with him.

/

In theory, dating Erica had seemed like a good distraction. Mark had liked her enough. It turned out that could coexist with what he felt about Eduardo.

There was something similar about them Mark had never been able to put his finger on, but he'd known it was there - a kind of through line resemblance, an embarrassing pattern that revealed something about him he wasn’t interested in knowing. Whatever it was, it wasn’t enough to make being with her feel the same as being with him. The last time he slept with Eduardo he’d technically been dating her.

“That was a shitty thing to do,” Eduardo said afterwards.

He had a hand on the side of Mark’s face. The handful of times they’d had sex there had been a short window of time that followed where they could lie together and touch each other carefully, where Mark could map the freckles on Eduardo’s chest out with his thumb with consideration, like together they formed a puzzle he could solve.

He never felt calm like this with Erica. He had never felt like this with anyone.

He rubbed Eduardo’s side, a smooth slide of warm skin that tapered under his palm. “I know.”

Eduardo’s face was twisted up with guilt and something gentler, an aching look he only had on after sex. Mark knew he personally didn’t feel bad enough about what they’d done. Eduardo would probably feel a disproportionate amount of guilt about it forever, helping him cheat on his girlfriend of six and a half weeks.

He shuffled closer across Eduardo’s mattress. Eduardo murmured, “Mark” - like a warning, like a refusal - then he kissed Mark back immediately, hands curling tightly in his hair.

Before that Eduardo had gotten along with Erica in a way Mark resented, despite himself. Afterwards, Eduardo removed himself from any situation he might encounter her in. Mark resented that, too.

/

Mark slipped back into the house and sidestepped the ongoing celebration in the living room to go check the site on his computer. Still fine, unaffected by the freeze on the account the servers survived on.

Anticipating the site going down had made him feel sick since the Thiel meeting, since Sean tried and failed to buy a bottle of champagne on the company card on the way back to the house. Mark had sat in the back of the cab, ill, stunned, while next to him Sean rattled off an indignant tirade about what the consequences of something like this ought to have been. He was pitching firing Eduardo - Mark knew that, even in the disassociated state he’d been in.

There was a knock at the door, then Sean let himself in. Mark spoke before he could.

“I called,” he said. “I spoke to him. He knows how badly he fucked up.”

On the phone Eduardo had sounded frantic, desperate. Mark knew his apology was genuine.

“You spoke to him about it,” Sean repeated doubtfully, leaning an elbow on the desktop. “And, what? That’s it?”

When the site first went live Mark had been delirious from the excitement, from barely eating or sleeping the entire week prior. He’d gotten up out of his old busted desk chair in Kirkland and crossed the room unthinkingly to grab Eduardo by the back of the neck and kiss him hard.

Thiel’s investment was the first company milestone Eduardo hadn’t been with him for. Mark stared at the computer screen.

“That’s it,” he said.

Sean took a slow swig from his beer. He put a hand on Mark's shoulder. “I’m telling you this as someone who knows what this thing you’re trying to make needs in order to function, and I’m telling you it as a friend,” he said. “What he did warrants more than a slap on the wrist. You can't just let shit like this slide.”

“Sean,” Mark said, jerking Sean’s hand off of him, “drop it.”

/

After the weekend they'd spent in Kirkland together, they'd gone a few days exchanging awkward messages like nothing had happened, then Mark had texted to let Eduardo know he was inviting himself over.

Almost immediately Eduardo replied, Right now?

Do you have class? Mark sent.

There was a pause, then: I can miss one class.

It was Mark’s first time visiting Eliot. He lay on Eduardo’s bed and squeezed his eyes shut tightly as Eduardo kissed the side of his neck and pressed inside of him slowly, carefully. He was too overwhelmed by the reality of what was happening to tell Eduardo to stop being so cloyingly sweet about it - stroking his sides, asking is this good, are you okay, are you sure. Like this was highschool, like Mark was a girl.

“You’re always so fucking nice about everything,” Mark muttered, voice catching. It was the first thing he'd said that wasn’t ‘yes’ or ‘I said yes, didn’t I?' since Eduardo pushed inside of him.

Above him Eduardo’s face looked shiny and golden. He thumbed a damp curl away from Mark’s forehead. He was panting, frowning. “You - you don’t want me to be nice?”

Mark tightened his thighs around Eduardo’s small waist. “That wasn’t a complaint.”

“Oh. Okay. Good.”

Mark knew he would never be able to admit to wanting this from anyone else. It felt good. Even something about the way it hurt felt good.

“Mark,” Eduardo breathed, hips rocking. “Mark.”

Mark dug his nails into the hair at the nape of Eduardo’s neck. “I know.” His voice shook; he scowled.

“I think - I think you were better at this than me.”

It was such a ridiculous thing to say in that moment that Mark huffed out a kind of hysterical laugh. Managing to fuck Eduardo for longer than two minutes the weekend before was the most strenuous challenge he’d ever put his body through.

Eduardo laughed too. His eyes fluttered. “I’m not going to last long, I mean. I’m close.”

So was Mark. “It’s okay,” he said, quietly.

Eduardo dropped his forehead to his cheek. “I don’t want to be.”

“Then just - stop for a minute.”

Eduardo stopped moving, tense all over, as deep inside Mark as it felt like he could get. Mark kept his arms and legs locked in place around him and his head buried into the curve of his neck, eyes squeezed shut. Eduardo rubbed his arms and kissed the curve of his jaw. Even like that, Mark felt like he wasn’t getting enough of him, bereft of something he didn’t even know how to have.

Afterwards, he sat on the edge of the bed Eduardo was still sprawled across and redressed, shoulders hunched, sore in a way that now just seemed humiliating.

Eduardo pushed up to sitting and pressed his forehead to Mark’s shoulder. Mark stopped in the middle of tying his beat-up Adidas trainers.

“What if we made this work?” Eduardo said.

Mark was back to feeling how he had the Monday morning prior, after Eduardo left Kirkland and he was alone with himself again for the first time in days - like he’d resurfaced, clear-headed, from some obscuring depth. The way he felt about Eduardo was something he was becoming more and more certain he couldn’t forgive him for.

“Made what work?” he muttered.

Eduardo didn’t move for a moment, head to Mark’s shoulder, still, silent. Then he got up and went into the en-suite, the lock turning after him with a click.

/

Eduardo called the morning of his flight back to San Francisco. Mark sat on a sun lounger by the pool, twisting the ring of keys for the new office space around his finger, and couldn’t listen to another apology from him.

“Stop,” he said, voice tight. “It’s done, and thankfully it didn’t impact things as badly as it could have, so we don’t need to keep talking about it.”

Thinking about how close all the work he’d put into the site had come to being negated by an abrupt, unstoppable system crash still made his stomach twist. All the sleep he hadn’t gotten, the days he’d spent coding, planning, barely alive. Everything he'd built had almost dissolved into nothing.

He shook his head. “I can’t fucking believe you did that.”

“I know,” Eduardo said softly, then, for the third time, “Mark, I’m sorry.”

“Yeah.”

Eduardo waited a beat. Mark had nothing else to say.

“What’s the new office like?” Eduardo asked.

“Bigger than the current one we’re operating out of in the living room.” Mark squeezed the keys in his hand. Sean had already gotten in touch with some LA artists to commission wall art from, guys who were cool in a way nobody at Harvard had been, who thumped Mark on the back and listened to him intently when he told them exactly what he wanted for the space. “Huge, actually.”

“I can’t wait to see it.”

Then you shouldn’t have gone to fucking New York again, Mark thought.

“Is Christy coming with you?”

“No. Jesus, no. I broke up with her last night.”

Mark tried to stay neutral where Christy was involved, but he found himself saying reflexively, “You can't break up with her.”

There was a pause. Mark thought maybe the line had died, then Eduardo said, “Mark. She tried to light my bed on fire.”

Mark looked at the house. He lowered his voice. “One of us should have a girlfriend.”

Eduardo made a sound that fuzzed the line so badly he had to hold the phone away from his ear, scowling. “Oh my - Mark, nobody thinks anything is going on between us. You’re being paranoid.” Then, “Is this about Sean?”

“What does that mean?”

“Are you worried that he thinks you’re -“

“Of course I am. If he finds out - if anyone found out -“

“What? What would happen?”

“It would change things. It’s a liability, it’s a character assassinator.” Mark’s voice pulled out of his control in a way he couldn’t stand the sound of. “It could kill everything before it even has a chance to really start.”

“Jesus Christ,” Eduardo muttered. “You really think that? What about Chris?”

“Don’t give me that. It’s different - you know it’s different. Chris isn’t the face of the thing, and I’m not - what if your dad found out? What then?”

“I would have told him about you, if there had been anything to say.”

Mark froze, stomach twisting.

“That’s bullshit,” he said.

“Right. Okay. I'm gonna go. I can't have this conversation. You definitely can’t have this conversation.”

“You would never have -“

“Mark,” Eduardo said sharply. “Let’s just - let’s not. None of this matters.”

That feeling Mark had been trying to will away was still there, would always be there. Under every conversation, lying in wait. It wrenched in his chest.

“You’re right.” He put a hand over his eyes. “It doesn’t matter. Break up with her.”

The line scratched. Eduardo sounded even further away somehow. “I’m at the airport. I’ll be there soon.”

“Yeah. See you.”

Mark hung up.

He stared out at the pool, at the dirt and insects and dead leaves floating across the surface of the water, then he called his new lawyers. They agreed to dilute Eduardo’s shares all the way down to nothing for him.

/

They hadn’t set foot outside the dorm once that weekend they’d spent in Kirkland together. They’d shared Mark’s toothbrush, his clothes, his cramped single bed, the weed Chris and Dustin had left as a low-effort birthday gift.

On the Sunday morning he'd even let Eduardo rub Bengay on his RSI-fucked wrist. Eduardo was stoned and incapable of hiding how obvious it was he wanted to laugh about a handjob related injury.

Mark told him, deadpan, “It’s not funny.”

“No, it’s serious,” Eduardo agreed, nodding. They were both trying and failing to look sober. “And it’s appreciated.”

He cracked a smile and kept rubbing firm circles into Mark’s wrist. He was unselfconscious about how much he liked doing things like this for Mark. It made it easier for Mark to accept that he liked it, too - the attention it took, the sincerity of it.

He had his legs stretched out over Eduardo’s thighs, his free hand cupped to Eduardo’s knee, his wrist between Eduardo’s hands. For those few days his body was completely at ease around Eduardo’s, always interested in being close to it, like even on a physical level he knew to make the time count.

/

Mark sat at his desk with someone else’s laptop in front of him, his fingers braced on the keys, doing nothing.

Someone tapped his shoulder. He pulled his headphones down reluctantly and turned to look up at Sean.

“I think you should come out. I really do.” Sean put a hand on the back of his seat and leaned close, closer than Mark wanted him to come. “The Eduardo thing was tough, but it's not what tonight’s about. Tonight’s about that.”

He pointed at the screen at the head of the office. The number on it grew with every refresh: one million, two hundred and thirty-four members. Around them, the office was emptying, their new employees petering out to celebrate.

Sean clapped him on the arm. “You should get to feel good.”

There hadn’t been any relief in solving the problem Mark hadn’t known what the fuck to do about for the last year - since he’d sat in the Kirkland hallway and finished off a six-pack by himself. The contempt on Eduardo’s face was all he could think about. He felt untethered. Nauseated.

He shrugged his shoulders mechanically. “Maybe later.”

“I’m gonna call if you don’t show,” Sean said, backing off, drifting in the direction of Mark’s intern’s desk.

Mark put his headphones back on. He looked at Sean over his screen as he spoke to Ashley, leaning in even closer than he’d gotten to Mark. He smiled constantly. Eduardo had pointed it out once, months ago, on the cab ride home from their first meeting with Sean in New York.

“I don’t like him,” he'd said, staring miserably out the window. “I don’t like that he’s always smiling.”

Mark and Christy had shared a bemused look.

“He has a great smile,” she'd said, to which Eduardo had mumbled, “Jesus.”

Back then Sean seemed to move through the world effortlessly, on a first name basis with every tech somebody and pretty hostess he encountered. It had looked like something worth wanting.

Mark lowered his eyes back to the screen.

/

That first night together, Mark had knelt over Eduardo in a position he’d imagined them in before on that exact couch, Eduardo’s knees bracketing his hips as they pulled ineffectively at each other's clothes and grinded against each other. He maintained conversation even with his tongue in Eduardo’s mouth. He could not stop talking.

“I threw out that girl from BU’s number,” he said into the corner of Eduardo’s lips.

Eduardo blinked up at him. His hands were on Mark’s bare skin, up the back of his shirt, fingers digging into the muscles under his shoulder blades.

His voice was breathy, low. “You did?”

“Did you leave it here on purpose to see if I would?”

“I thought I lost it. But it doesn’t bother me that you -“ He made a soft sound when Mark mouthed at the side of his neck. “I - I like that you did it.”

Mark pulled back to look at him. “Have you done this before?”

“You mean with -” Eduardo shook his head, nose glancing off of Mark’s. “No.”

Mark had, at computer camp when he was seventeen. A kid called Taio who’d wanted to stay in touch with him after they went back home. Mark had written a fake email address down on his notebook and regretted it later, even knowing full well it was the smart thing to do. He’d assumed that Eduardo had some kind of similar experience. It was disappointing to find out otherwise, embarrassing somehow.

Eduardo’s hands slid down his back to curl into the hem of his rucked up T-shirt.

“Can I take this off?” he asked.

Mark paused, nodded. Eduardo tugged his shirt up and over his head and dropped it on the coffee table. He looked down at Mark’s chest, the unimpressive, pale expanse Mark generally avoided looking at himself, and put his hands on Mark’s waist. One of his thumbs reached to the sparse trail of hair under Mark’s belly button and dragged down the line of it.

Mark exhaled softly. Eduardo’s eyes flicked up to his, the corners of his mouth lifting.

Mark frowned. “What?”

Eduardo’s face was turning flushed. He shrugged.

“You’re different like this,” he said.

He started undoing the buttons of his own shirt with one hand and tugged Mark back down with the other, which saved Mark from trying to figure out what that meant.

III. SCOTCH

His lawyer told him repeatedly not to interact with Eduardo outside of the legal proceedings.

“Nothing of value comes out of talking to the other person at this stage of the process,” Sy said again on the first day of the depositions, walking Mark to the conference room. “Only more damage gets done.”

They were already in the middle of the depositions with the Winklevosses and Narendra, so at this point Sy knew Mark had a habit of speaking even when advised not to, and Mark knew Sy looked at him in some part as less of a client and more of a disobedient kid he was being paid by the hour to wrangle in.

“Isn’t this whole thing about putting a value on damage?” Mark said, just to nettle.

Sy gave him a tight smile and held the door open for him.

Inside Eduardo was already sitting at the table with his lawyer, listening to her talk quietly. He didn’t look up when Mark came in or when he sat down across from him. His face was placid, blank. The last time they’d been in the same room as each other was three years ago in the Facebook offices, after Eduardo stormed up to his desk and looked down at him with a woundedness that shifted, gradually, into loathing.

Mark looked down at his lap.

Next to him Sy sat down and clicked open his briefcase. “Shall we get started?”

-

During that first excruciating eight hour meeting Eduardo sat with his hands folded on top of each other and barely moved, barely looked in Mark’s direction. He looked grim-faced, dulled. Like he didn’t want to be in the room he’d paid extravagant legal fees to force them both into for the next god knew how long.

He was still wearing the gold ring his father had given him. Mark clenched his jaw when he noticed it and thought, come the fuck on, already.

On the second day he found Eduardo in the building lobby waiting on an elevator. They stood a few feet apart and waited in silence. Mark looked at Eduardo sidelong and Eduardo stared fixedly ahead - and he couldn’t help himself.

He watched the elevator dial as it ticked down towards the ground floor. “All this for more money you don’t need.”

Eduardo turned to him.

“Because that’s who I am,” he said.

“Right.” It had always driven him crazy that Eduardo acted like his wealth was a side note to his character, like he wasn’t raised as a second son to his father’s bank account. “You’re suing me for six hundred million dollars, but it’s not about money.”

“I think I deserve something from you and I think money’s all you have," Eduardo said.

Mark’s stomach dropped.

It must have shown on his face because Eduardo’s hard-edged look faltered. He looked down and away, then went into the elevator and disappeared between its closing doors. Mark stood, unmoving, and waited for the next one.

-

For weeks he split his time between work and his two ongoing lawsuits, only one of which he could take seriously. The thing with the Winkelvosses and Narendra was a farce, and they knew he thought as much because most of his statements were worded specifically to let them know it. He was the only person at those meetings who understood in technical terms just how little claim they had to anything from him until Eduardo was called in as a witness.

“Were you aware that while Mr. Zuckerberg was building The Facebook, he was also communicating with the plaintiffs?” their lawyer asked him.

Eduardo blinked. He seemed more nervous in this deposition room, in these proceedings, less sure of the whole thing. “Not at the time, I wasn’t, but -”

He met Mark's eyes from across the table. An old understanding passed between them: Eduardo knew just as well as he did that all of this was bullshit.

“It really didn’t have anything to do with the Winklevosses’ dating site,” he finished, waving a hand.

Further down the line of suits on the other side of the table, Tyler erupted.

“How would you know?” he asked, voice raised.

His lawyer lifted a hand to quieten him down. Eduardo raised his eyebrows, his lips pressed together in what Mark recognised as the face he made when politely stifling laughter.

They didn’t catch eyes again the rest of the meeting. Mark kept thinking they might.

-

On his way out that night he saw Eduardo in the courtyard outside the building entrance and walked past him awkwardly.

“Mark,” Eduardo called.

Mark stopped dead. Eduardo came over to him.

“At the last meeting,” he started, “what I said to you -”

“Are you about to apologize for being rude while you’re in the middle of suing me?” Mark cut in.

Eduardo’s eyebrows drew together. “No. I’m not apologizing. I just shouldn’t have said it.”

He had his hands deep in his pockets, shoulders raised. Mark knew he was about to leave.

“Why does it matter?”

Eduardo looked over Mark’s shoulder instead of at him. “It was the kind of thing you’d say.”

“I never told you you were nothing but your money.”

“Sure.” He nodded, mouth twisting to one side. “Not just money. Sex, too.”

Mark’s chest seized up. Around them the courtyard was silent, deserted.

“That’s not fair.”

“Fair,” Eduardo scoffed. “Jesus.”

“You really think that,” Mark said, frowning, anger rising. “The cartoon bad guy your lawyer and the Winklevosses' team have concocted. You believe that.”

“Mark.”

“What?”

“You don’t care what I think,” Eduardo said.

They looked at each other. Eduardo looked realer this close, in the outside light instead of some lifeless conference room. Mark could see the softness that had left his face over the last few years. Now he was made up of more angular lines, harder curves.

“We shouldn’t be talking,” Mark said, staring.

“No,” Eduardo agreed.

Neither of them moved. Eduardo gave him a frowning appraisal that made it seem briefly like he might hit him, or feint for him the way he had for Sean back when everything first blew up. Even with nothing but resentment on his face he didn't want Eduardo to look away from him then.

“Do you want to come back to my apartment with me?” Eduardo asked.

Mark blinked.

“Is that a joke?”

“No.”

“That’s -” he started - on his way to, that’s a terrible idea - then he stopped himself.

His attraction to Eduardo inspired less spite than it used to. There was an urgency to it now he knew that having women interested in him wasn't the cure-all salve he’d always assumed it would be. He leaned in one direction more than the other - he understood that. It had made itself impossible to keep ignoring.

“Yeah." His voice was quiet, unintentionally, embarrassingly quiet. He cleared his throat. “Okay.”

Eduardo nodded. He started walking. Mark followed after him, looking over his shoulder.

-

The place Eduardo was renting was smaller than Mark expected. He had to be paying for it with the money he made personally instead of money he inherited. He worked as a pricey investment consultant in New York - a job that didn’t require an economics degree from Harvard, that Mark was pretty sure he’d only taken to prove to his father he was financially competent after what happened at Facebook.

Standing in evidence of the flipped wealth disparity between them was jarring. Mark had spent most of his college experience letting Eduardo cover drinks, meals, movies, out of a kind of vindictiveness that felt earned at the time. Now the generations of wealth that made up the Saverin family estate was dwarfed in its entirety by what Mark had earned in four years of being Facebook’s CEO.

“I’ve never seen you wear a shirt and tie before,” Eduardo said, slipping off his shoes.

Mark did the same thing. “It was on the advice of legal counsel.”

“I don’t think it has the desired effect when you act the way you do during depositions.”

“I’m not going to treat the Three Stooges with respect just because their father’s lawyer finally managed to get them in a room with me.”

Eduardo leaned back against the wall, arms crossed. “What about when you’re in the room with me?”

Mark wandered past the foyer into a small living room. “I’m respectful, then.”

“Do you really think that?”

He turned. “Did you ask me here to argue about the suit?”

Eduardo looked at him for a moment then pushed off of the wall.

“Do you want a drink?

Mark never drank anymore. He flexed his fingers at his sides. “Yeah.”

In the adjoining kitchen Eduardo took out two glasses and a bottle of something alarmingly deep brown. Mark sat at one of the stools tucked under the counter between them. He lifted the glass Eduardo passed him warily.

“You drink scotch.”

“Yes.”

You could not be twenty-four years old and genuinely like scotch. It was like the suits in college, just the next progression point for Eduardo in his effort to become his father.

Eduardo took a long mouthful from his glass and placed it back down expressionlessly.

“You want me to run out and grab you some Bud Light?” he asked.

“Fuck you,” Mark muttered.

He gripped his drink by the rim of the glass, jaw tight, then threw it back in one to get it over with.

It scorched its way down his throat. He had to stifle a cough into his hand after setting the glass down.

Eduardo’s mouth twitched. He followed Mark’s lead and drained the rest of his drink, too, and Mark watched him tip his head back, watched his throat work, felt the heat from the scotch spreading through him. On his thigh his hand curled into the fabric of his pants.

Eduardo wiped his mouth on the back of his knuckles, eyes on Mark’s.

“The last time was at Eliot.” He leaned forward on his elbows. “You had an argument with Erica then you came to Eliot to fuck me.”

Mark frowned. “That’s not how it happened.”

“Yeah, it is.” Eduardo looked down. “I liked that you didn’t get along with her.”

Mark used to feel the same about Eduardo and Christy. It had been easy to want Eduardo to stay with her knowing how unhappy he was. In college, Eduardo seemed too sweet to think that way.

“You did,” Mark said, uncertainly.

Eduardo shrugged. “Of course I did.”

It was surreal, sitting across from him like this. His face was so much more closed off and inexpressive than it used to be. Mark grabbed the bottle of scotch and poured himself more, drank it, then belatedly poured some into Eduardo’s glass.

Eduardo took a slow sip. Mark looked at his mouth.

“Have you,” he said, stomach tight, “with other -”

“Yeah.”

Mark had been with one guy since Eduardo. He’d had him sign an NDA after - he had everyone he slept with sign one. Nobody ever took offense because being able to wield that kind of social power was presumably the only thing they found attractive about him in the first place. It made any experience he had less real than other people’s. Less real than Eduardo’s. Mark was jealous of him for it, jealous of everyone who’d been with him.

He leaned over the counter until there were only a few inches between their faces. Eduardo looked at him expectantly, unreadably. The idea of kissing him seemed somehow like a step too far; instead Mark ducked his head and slotted his mouth to the skin under his jaw, sucking a kiss into his pulse point.

Eduardo exhaled a breath - had always been sensitive here. When Mark mouthed his way along the tendon that ran down his neck he arched into it, hands sliding into Mark’s hair.

That last time at Eliot he’d worked his fingers into Eduardo until he was whining and kicking the comforter down the bed. He'd had Eduardo’s sweat sharp on his lips, had his heels dug into the small of his back. He’d known Eduardo’s body intimately enough by then to know how to make it good. It had never strayed very far from his mind, the sex he still measured the rest against.

He tugged the knot of Eduardo’s tie loose to undo the first few buttons of his shirt, splitting the collar open in a deep V, how Eduardo used to dress in college. His mouth dragged along the trail of his throat, teeth skimming the rise and fall of Eduardo’s Adam’s apple all the way down to the pronounced dip of his clavicle.

Eduardo’s voice was breathy. “We should -”

“Yeah,” Mark said, forehead to the side of his neck. His half-hard dick was pushing up uncomfortably against the edge of the counter between them.

In the bedroom there was a fresh suit hanging on the wardrobe door, a book about the economy of Ancient Greece on the nightstand with a glasses case on top of it. Proof of the day-to-day reality of Eduardo’s life that Mark had been making a conscious effort not to think about since the depositions started.

Eduardo sat on the bed and slid his tie off from around his neck.

“This is a bad idea,” he said, dropping it to the floor.

It seemed likely that at any point he might realize he didn’t want this after all - Mark in his rented apartment, bumping up against pieces of his new life.

Mark knelt on the mattress in the space between his legs with one steadying hand on his shoulder.

“When wasn’t it?” he asked.

They were stiflingly close. Eduardo looked up at him, black-eyed, the bridge of his nose lining up with Mark's chin. Mark felt old enough to know with certainty what he’d only suspected in college: that he didn’t have in him to want anyone else like this. It was like an ache.

He tilted his head down until their noses touched then hesitated, throat clicking. Eduardo surged up to kiss him.

Mark gripped the back of his neck and kissed him back deeply, without finesse. He wondered how could they be in a place with each other that was beyond apologies, beyond reconciliation, but not beyond this - the physical truth that couldn’t be reasoned with, the deep-rooted satisfaction of feeling Eduardo’s hands and mouth and body heat on him. The scotch tasted better in his mouth than it had in Mark's.

Eduardo fisted his hands in the back of his shirt and dragged him close. He leaned back on the bed, drawing Mark down with him to lay on the mattress, and on top of him like that Mark could feel his dick pressing against his thigh, hard and hot.

He buried his face in Eduardo's neck and grinded down helplessly, then Eduardo was groaning in his ear, rocking back against him. If he wasn’t careful, this would be over too soon.

He slipped a hand between them to undo the rest of Eduardo’s shirt buttons hastily, forehead to Eduardo’s shoulder, trying to focus on making his fingers work. When he pulled it open there was a long pale pink scar on Eduardo’s stomach.

He frowned at it, thrown. “What’s that?”

Eduardo looked at him uncomprehendingly, mouth parted and shiny, face flushed. He glanced down. “Appendectomy scar.”

He kissed Mark again, tongue sliding into his mouth, hands sliding into the back pockets of Mark’s slacks.

Mark pulled away. “When did that happen?”

“When did - I don't know. Years ago.” Eduardo was out of breath. He pushed a hand through his hair, murmuring, “I forgot you get like this.”

“Can I - “

Mark ran his thumb along it lightly, as though it was a seam that might pull open under any firmer pressure. Eduardo’s stomach tensed in response.

“Get like what?” Mark asked.

“Talkative.”

Mark’s eyes flicked back up to his. “What does that mean?”

“Nothing.” Eduardo reached between them for the buckle of Mark’s belt. He said, quietly, “I used to think it was sweet,” and kissed Mark again.

He stripped Mark of his belt, his shirt and tie, his pants. Getting Eduardo out of his well-fitting slacks was a joint effort. Mark paused after it, stumped by the contraptions around Eduardo’s calves. Sock garters, like they were in the fifties.

Eduardo gave him a look as though daring him to comment on how ridiculous they were. He unfastened one deftly, sliding it down the swell of his calf. Mark watched his long fingers work.

They caught eyes. Mark touched the other garter, trailing his thumb across the leather, then Eduardo bent his leg out of Mark’s touch to press an argyle-socked foot up against his erection.

Mark made a soft involuntary sound. He moved against the kneading pressure for a moment, eyes on the wry quirk of Eduardo’s mouth, then he swallowed and unclipped the garter. He pulled it off along with the sock, letting his nails scratch down the hair on Eduardo’s shin.

Eduardo’s erection was straining against his underwear, dampening the fabric. Mark knelt between his thighs and smoothed his hands along the insides of them, the tips of his fingers sliding under Eduardo’s boxers.

It had been a while. He ran his tongue along his bottom lip. “Do you want -”

“Yeah,” Eduardo breathed.

He propped himself up on his elbows, chest rising and falling unsteadily, like he wanted to see. The back of Mark’s neck went hot. He tugged Eduardo’s boxers down his thighs and pulled them all the way off, then he held Eduardo by the hips and slid his mouth over him.

“Mark,” Eduardo huffed, “God.”

His hands were curled up in the sheets by his thighs. Mark could see his knuckles clenching rhythmically in time with his mouth. It was satisfying to watch happen - to feel his hips uncontrollably twitching up, to listen to his shallow breaths turn into moans. Making him feel good was gratifying in a way it wasn’t with other people. Mark could trust that he was being honest about it.

Eduardo was still loud, still sweet like this. When Mark slid two spit-wet fingers into him he let out a moan that cracked and turned ragged halfway, arching on the mattress, hands covering his face. One of his hands shot down to grip Mark by the shoulder.

“Mark,” he panted, warningly, “Mark, I’m -”

Mark kept going, single-minded. Eduardo came with a cut-off gasp, squirming, squeezing Mark’s shoulder tight. Mark only stopped when his grip went lax.

He wiped his mouth on the back of his wrist and rose onto all fours, crawling up towards Eduardo.

“Wardo,” he said. He could barely think, let alone speak. “You - I need -”

Eduardo yanked him down into a kiss. He reached a hand out, fumbling with a nightstand drawer, and pulled out a bottle of lube. Mark’s dick was pressing into his hip, aching.

“Eduardo,” he breathed.

“It might be cold,” Eduardo said, muffling it into the corner of his mouth. “Sorry.”

He groaned at Eduardo’s hand on him, soft and slick. They’d done this before a dozen times, curled around each other in this position, the same sounds coming out of Mark’s mouth. It was as overwhelmingly good as it was when he was nineteen.

He felt drunk on it. Eduardo stroked him, mouth warm and wet on the curve of his jaw, and Mark hooked a leg around his and rutted into his hand until he came, sucking in a breath, eyes clenched shut, wrung out.

He breathed hard. He opened his eyes again to see the curve of Eduardo’s neck, his shoulder. They were still tangled around each other.

“Mark,” Eduardo said quietly. He’d gone tense.

Mark extricated himself from Eduardo's long limbs. He awkwardly moved to the edge of the bed. Eduardo sat up, Mark's come shiny on his chest and stomach, and scrubbed a hand down his face.

What had happened somehow didn’t seem real. Mark looked away from him. He picked up his rumpled shirt from the floor and pulled it on, struggling with the buttons. It hit him gradually just how immensely stupid what they’d done was.

“Your lawyers,” he said, slinging his tie around his collar. He glanced over his shoulder at Eduardo, who sat unmoving, staring into space. “They don’t know about...”

Eduardo blinked. “Of course not. Jesus, Mark.” For the first time since the depositions started he looked openly stung. “That’s not what the lawsuit’s about.”

Mark stood to pull on his pants and muttered, “Isn’t it?”

Eduardo stared at him for a moment, mouth parted, eyebrows drawn. Then, with a stunned revulsion Mark had been confronted by before, “Are you kidding me?”

“You can’t tell me in all honesty that no part of this lawsuit is about what happened between us outside of the business.”

“I was fired for shit that happened between us outside of the business."

“That’s not true,” Mark lied.

“We’re not in the conference room,” Eduardo gestured an arm out, “they can’t fucking hear you.”

“I didn’t fire you because we stopped - that wasn’t why.”

Eduardo clenched his eyes shut and shook his head, breathing deeply. He got up and pulled up his slacks, his back to Mark.

“You’d gotten what you could out of me,” he said, quietly.

When Eduardo’s and the Winklevoss twins’ legal teams painted Mark’s teenage self as some prescient manipulator he’d feel an impotent anger curl up in him at being made to sit and listen to it. This was different. It crept out of his chest from somewhere deeper.

“I’d gotten what I could,” he repeated. He stood frozen in place, belt dangling from his hand. “That’s what it was, now. Me getting something out of you.”

Eduardo pulled his shirt on. “What it was for you and what it was for me are two completely different things.”

“Right. You were going to tell your dad. We were going walk hand in hand through Silicon fucking Valley.”

“I loved you, you unfeeling prick,” Eduardo snapped.

He still had his back to Mark. He dropped his face into his hands.

Shame hit Mark physically, a wave of it passing through him with oppressive heat. He kept his gaze fixed on the floor as Eduardo walked past him to the ensuite, the door clicking shut after him.

There was an uneasy feeling of deja-vu to the silence that followed. Mark swallowed the knotted thing in his throat and left.

Outside the apartment building the air was easier to breathe. He turned his work phone on to an immediate three hundred notifications, all of which he ignored. He dropped onto a bench, scraped his fingers across his eyes, and called his driver.

-

On the last day of the depositions Mark was nauseated from caffeine and Eduardo’s testimony by the time Eduardo's lawyer started pressing him for answers.

“What made you decide to dilute Eduardo’s shares?” Gretchen asked.

He could feel Eduardo’s eyes on him. “I thought it was in the company’s best interest.”

“The same night of the dilution, the night of the millionth member party, Sean Parker was arrested for drug possession and supplying alcohol to individuals under the legal drinking age.”

Mark paused for a question that didn’t come. “I’m aware.”

She read from a document. “It was picked up by major publications.” Her eyes flitted back up to his. “You felt keeping him was in the company’s best interest?”

“Sean’s role in the company was significantly reduced afterwards.” A muscle memory answer. “He has nothing to do with Facebook on a day-to-day basis.”

“But he retains his seven percent ownership of the company.”

“Yes.”

“And what part of my client’s conduct did you feel warranted the drop from his twenty-seven percent ownership status to point zero three of a percent?” Gretchen asked, unblinkingly.

Sy had gone over this with him to the point of condescension. Mark was meant to say: Eduardo failed in his fiduciary duties as a CFO when he froze the company account; he didn’t understand the company’s potential beyond ad revenue; he didn’t belong there.

Not the exact truth, but the right answers to give in this room. Reciting them to his own legal team had been easy, tedious. With Eduardo sitting straight across from him he couldn’t get his mouth to open.

In his silence Sy intervened. “I think we’ve already established that there were several factors.”

“I’m asking Mr. Zuckerberg to answer.”

Mark’s eyes darted to Eduardo’s. Across from him Eduardo looked hollowed out, suddenly older. Mark felt older just looking at him.

Four years ago he’d been nineteen - he’d turned that age sitting locked in a pseudo-handshake with Eduardo on the couch in Kirkland, turned that age reeling him forward into a kiss, with Eduardo’s nervous laughter in his mouth. He’d suddenly employed professionals who he’d believed could write up a document that would surgically remove Eduardo from him.

This was probably the last they’d see of each other. He braced his hands on the desk to get to his feet.

“I need a glass of water,” he mumbled.

-

That night their lawyers hashed out a deal over dinner and wine.

Mark didn’t even read the terms of the thing Sy handed him the next morning. He just signed it. Sy mistook the look on his face for having anything to do with the settlement agreement.

“It’s a good thing,” he assured Mark, one hand on his shoulder. “It’s over with.”

Mark was back at Facebook an hour later. He stayed as late as it took for the work to bury everything else in his brain.

IV. FLOWERS

Mark’s thirty-year-old body was a collection of twenty-first century injuries.

RSI and carpal tunnel from coding, general back problems and specific lower back problems from years of hunching over his computer, painfully dry eyes from staring at monitors in the dark, stiff joints and shoulders that cracked and ached from long-term lack of movement, stomach problems from subsisting off of over-sugared snack food, hearing that was shot from listening to music for nights at a time through top-of-the-line, crack-your-fucking-skull-open headphones.

Whatever sense of accomplishment he’d felt when he was younger and he worked hard enough for the physical evidence of it to actually ache through him was gone. Now, all his pain came with the same anxiety about the prematurely waning functionality of his body, about all the damage that couldn’t be undone and the inevitable, unmitigatable damage that loomed closer as forty approached.

He saw a physiotherapist, a physical trainer and a nutritionist. He no longer ate sugar. Every morning he drank a concoction of protein, fruits, and greens that blended into more of a thick paste than a liquid, and every morning it tasted, unfailingly, like shit. He had worse joint health than his parents and prescriptions for Anaprox, Zoloft, and a weed prescription for his insomnia that came with its own issues - he slept deeper than he liked and had stupider dreams than he was comfortable with, but it was preferable to the accumulative effects more nights of not-sleeping would have on his brain. He ran - at first on the advice of the trio of professionals he was paying to troubleshoot his body, and then directly against the advice they gave him to cut down on it. Seven miles on weekdays, ten on weekends, on average. The body’s processes had to be rewritten more inelegantly than he’d have liked. It felt like a sort of duct tape and prayer situation sometimes.

Dustin had commented on it before he’d left the company, around the time Mark was trying to get his resting heart rate down from 68 beats per minute to 65. He would check it regularly by putting two fingers to the pulse in his neck, then he’d check his own measurement against his watch’s built in BPM tracker to see if it was accurate.

“I don’t know if it’s good for someone like you to get so into this kind of thinking,” Dustin told him, frowning a little.

He was sitting on Mark’s desk and nursing a coffee. By then he’d already mentally checked out of his job, and Mark was removed enough from the office day-to-day that he didn’t have to care. He just liked knowing Dustin would be hanging around whenever he decided to come in.

“Someone like me,” Mark said, examining the number on his watch. It climbed, flashing 70. He frowned at it.

“Well, yeah. You get, you know.” Dustin cleared his throat. Over ten years working together and he still sounded uncomfortable raising any kind of disagreement with Mark. “You get tunnel vision.”

“Health is a worthwhile thing to give a shit about.”

“You can care about something to the point that it’s bad for you,” Dustin said, muttering.

72. Mark dropped his arm and looked at Dustin unhappily.

“Is there nothing else you could be doing right now?” he said.

Dustin nodded, mouth a line. He took his coffee and left.

A few months later, he and his wife moved to be closer to her sister in Colorado. He was still on the board, still checked in with the programming team remotely from time to time, but he spent most of his working week making text-based RPGs he’d sell on Steam for a dollar a game to middling reviews.

Before going he’d left a cheap Casio watch like the one Mark wore in freshman year on his desk. There was a slip of company stationery stuck to the box: In case you want one that measures time.

-

In the middle of the Los Altos trail he ran each morning, a pain in his stomach forced him to slow a walk. 

It didn't do anything to help. An aching heat spread through his muscles, contracting and swelling its way through him, sweating out of him, turning his limbs into heavy machinery. It took all his concentration and all his strength to keep moving - then, without warning, his body shut down all at once, and he was pulled to the ground against his will.

He twisted on the dirt and thought he was about to burst open, turn inside-out. His watch, he noted hazily, measured his heartbeat at over 200 beats per minute.

A hand touched his back. A stranger’s deep voice asked him, “Man, are you okay?”

Mark answered, gasping it and gritting it out, “Do I look fucking okay?”

Later, while he was lying in a hospital bed hooked up to an IV and feeling like he’d had the shit kicked out of him, a doctor told him that he’d had an acute case of exertional rhabdomyolysis - rhabdo, she called it. His muscles had started breaking down in his blood and ravaging his kidneys. It was not a thing he knew could happen.

“How serious is that?” Mark croaked. He hadn’t stepped foot in a public hospital since he was a teenager, and even in his private room he felt uncomfortably out of place in a way he couldn’t hide, on display somehow.

The doctor looked at him expressionlessly over the rim of her glasses. “Serious.”

Mark’s palms turned cold with sweat. “As in -”

“As in you’re lucky someone was there to find you when they did,” she said.

The news didn’t get out. His lawyers had the couple who found him writhing on the ground sign a few expensive NDAs. They advised Mark to tell the board members what had happened in the most unspecific, minimizing terms possible. The morning he was discharged from the hospital, two days after he collapsed like he’d been undergoing an internal demolition, he was in his office on a conference call to the board, letting them know he’d been very briefly hospitalized.

In the middle of it Dustin unmuted himself and interrupted with, “Are you okay?”

He sounded sincerely concerned about him in a way Mark knew no other person on the line was.

“I’m in the office,” Mark said, for everyone else's benefit. He was doubled over in his chair, head to his desk, the blinds of the glass wall separating his office from the employee floor each rolled all the way down. It hurt to do anything but keep perfectly still. “I’m fine.”

The call ended soon after that, no other questions or interruptions. Without moving position Mark made a private call.

“Hello?” Chris answered.

He’d kept the same number he had five years ago when he was still working at the company. They hadn’t spoken since he’d left. They’d never had reason to.

“Chris.” Mark’s voice came out revealingly hoarse. He cleared his throat. “It’s Mark.”

“Mark - hi. Jesus.” Chris sounded awkward, uncertain. “This is unexpected.”

“I was wondering if you could help me with something.”

“PR related?”

“No. It’s, I was -“ Mark closed his eyes. “Do you know how to get in touch with Eduardo?”

“Oh. Um - no, I don’t. I haven’t spoken to him in a long time.”

After the lawsuit Mark knew Dustin had avoided Eduardo out of awkwardness and secondhand guilt. He didn’t know anyone else who might have stayed in contact with him. He couldn’t help thinking that it would have been much easier to have this conversation with someone he could just pay to get this information from instead of having to pay in this kind of discomfort for nothing.

He pressed a fist to the middle of his forehead. “I thought maybe you’d stayed in touch.”

“We did, for a while. Last I heard he was getting married.”

“Engaged,” Mark corrected automatically. This, he’d heard about. “They split up before the wedding.”

“Sounds like you’re more in the know than me,” Chris said. “Why don’t you just go through your lawyers?”

Mark used to worry sometimes that Chris knew, that if anyone could have picked up on what was happening with him and Eduardo it was the only other person in their group who could conceive of it as a possibility. Now it was oddly disappointing that nobody else had ever known. Nobody even suspected. There was no lasting proof anything had ever happened between them, no trace of it left.

“It’s not like that,” Mark told him, quietly.

He hesitated, nothing else to say. He didn’t make calls unrelated to work. He didn’t know how to talk to someone who’s life was entirely separate from the company.

He lifted his head from the desk to sit back in his chair, squeezing hard at one armrest at the strain, both physical and social. “Dustin said you have a kid,” he tried.

“I have two.”

The idea of having two kids at his age sounded more daunting than being CEO of a company. “What's that like?”

“It’s chaos. They’re great.” He paused. “How are you?”

I almost died a few days ago from jogging uphill, Mark thought.

“I’m fine.”

“How’s Facebook?”

"The same." Out of him, Dustin and Chris, his life had probably changed the least over the last decade, he realized, and he suddenly felt he’d failed in some very basic respect and needed to get off of the phone as quickly as possible. “Bye, Chris. Congrats on all the kids.”

“Bye, Mark.”

He ended up pulling some strings to get Eduardo’s contact information. The subject of the email he was sent just said Saverin. When Mark was actually faced with it, the impersonal reality of it, he had no idea what the fuck he’d even expected to do with it.

He spent the rest of the day just sitting at his desk, exhausted, looking at his screen or out the window. It seemed preferable to going home.

-

Years ago, on day one of their first Palo Alto office, Mark had looked out at his new wave of employees and felt the operational change happening like an earthquake underfoot.

Sean had steadied him with a hand on his shoulder and said, almost in commiseration, “I know. It's a new era.” If there was one thing the two of them had ever agreed on, it was the value of having your own hands in the guts of the thing you created.

The office only felt like more and more of a foreign space these days. More faces he didn’t recognise, more jobs he didn’t know were necessary in the company he ran. He didn’t code. The know-how would be buried in his brain forever, but any need for it was gone. Every programmer they hired was better at it than he was. Interns a decade younger than him had more ideas on what direction the site should go in - it was easier to know what was cool when you were twenty years old, and much easier to give a shit about.

He would stand in the room with the people who ran his website for him and feel absent from it, removed from the space he’d carved out himself. All his subversive teenage aspirations and ideas about what a future formed by tech would look like had led him here, to a room filled with people he didn’t know, to a feeling like he was at the edge of some unfathomably vast, unfathomably empty digital canyon.

He still kept tabs on Sean, or, more aptly, on the curated identity Sean had created for himself on social media: a clean living teetotaller who lived on a farm down south, who believed in shit like foot chakras and posted pictures of himself doing cross-legged, closed-eyed meditation on the edge of cliff sides, who spoke out in interviews about growing disillusioned by the tech industry in his thirties. Mark wondered how much of it was based in any kind of truth, how much of it was just a well-crafted new grift for this other new era. In retrospect, those late night conversations they used to have about the world they would create together, the ones Mark had gotten high off of, were just fucking embarrassing.

-

Two weeks after his hospitalization, he found out that Eduardo’s dad was dead from a CNBC article.

He asked the only assistant that he liked which florist they sent flowers from on his behalf around NYC. It had no online presence. He had to call the place up himself. On the phone his voice sounded low and awkward, unpracticed at making calls like this.

“Whatever you recommend for - for grieving people,” he said. “Send that.”

The note he sent alongside it was too personal for anyone but the anonymous person on the other line to know about. It said:

I know what he meant to you and I’m sorry.

Mark

A few days later an assistant passed on a standard thank you card addressed to his office. Inside it said, In SF soon. If you’ve got my address I guess you’ve got my number too. 

It was the closest they’d gotten to a conversation in almost seven years. Mark read it repeatedly, then stared at it without seeing the words anymore, thumbing over the indents Eduardo’s pen had left on the paper. His writing was less cramped than it was in college, less neat.

He’d already saved Eduardo’s number to his phone. He hadn’t been able to stop himself despite how low it felt. He wrote and rewrote the same basic message a dozen times - didn’t know what the fuck to say or how to say it.

Eventually he settled on: It’s Mark. Do you want to get dinner when you’re in town?

He set his phone down after sending it, then he pressed two fingers to the pulse point in his neck and felt it racing, eyes clenched shut.

Eduardo replied a little while later.

Bad idea, he said. I’ll come to the office.

Mark didn’t argue despite how morbid it seemed, despite how uneasy it made him to picture Eduardo in the Facebook building. Any pushback felt too fraught to be worth it. 

-

In the days leading up to their meeting he was distracted, unproductive. His gaze kept drifting to the glass wall of his office, as though Eduardo might appear days in advance - as though he might be standing there at the door in a slate gray suit with the shirt buttoned low, his old messenger bag slung around his shoulder, a brown paper bag in his hand with Mark’s dinner in it.

On the day itself Mark went to a check-up appointment with his doctor first thing in the morning where she told him, again, to take time off.

“You need rest,” she told him unhappily. “Not work. You don’t need the unnecessary stress.”

“The unnecessary stress has nothing to do with work,” he told her.

The rest of the day inched along, bit by bit. He went to the office and did nothing. He looked out the glass wall at the floor of Facebook workers and, for the first time in his life, it seemed to him like a split reality that was operating next door, a world he wasn’t a part of.

That evening, a little earlier than they’d agreed on, he looked out again to see a receptionist on the floor outside assisting Eduardo through the company he’d been assisted out of by security ten years ago.

At this time of night the building was quiet, as low-energy as any other office space. None of the people left at their desks looked up. Nobody out there recognised who Eduardo was.

Mark got up from his desk. He stood in the doorway of his office and watched Eduardo as he looked around, hands in his pockets, and listened to the receptionist recite the spiel any guests with clearance from Mark received - what boiled down to a long, almost unbearably friendly sales pitch.

Eduardo regarded it all neutrally, offering a polite smile whenever she looked his way. Other than some light stubble he looked the same, neatly made up in a shirt and slacks, sleeves rolled up. There was something different in the way he carried himself, more of an ease to him now.

He turned, eyes catching Mark's from over the heads of a few programmers - they kept working, headphones on. The murmur of conversation passing between the other people still left at this time of day went on undisrupted. Eduardo’s face stayed perfectly still. Mark could not look away from him.

Eduardo thanked the receptionist and made his way over.

“She was good at her job,” he said, nodding his head after her. “Effusive about everything you’ve done here.”

“Hagiographic.” Mark gestured to his office. “Do you want to -”

Eduardo nodded and went inside. Mark followed him, closing the door behind them. Through the glass he could see some employees glancing at his office and leaning over their desks to gossip with each other like they did whenever they saw Mark do anything out of the ordinary.

He turned. Eduardo was observing him intently.

“You have a buzz cut," he noted.

Mark ran a hand over his head, the hair there short and rough. He’d done it himself a few weeks ago. Until this moment it hadn’t mattered to him whether it looked good or not. “Yeah.”

"You look...”

“What?” Mark asked, jumpy. He couldn’t read the look on Eduardo’s face. 

Eduardo pressed his lips together. “I heard you were in the hospital for a while.”

“You -" Mark blinked. "How did you hear about that?”

“Chris told me. I think he heard about it from Dustin.”

“You still talk to Chris?”

“I was an usher at his wedding.”

“Of course,” Mark mumbled.

Eduardo kept fixing him with the same tight-lipped look. “What happened?”

“It was a while ago.” About a month. His body was still recovering, still tired. Not quite working right. “It was only a few days.”

“What were you in for?”

His instinct was to brush past it, but he looked up at Eduardo, the seriousness of his face, and wanted him to know. “Rhabdomyolysis.”

Eduardo’s eyebrows twitched. “That doesn’t sound great.”

“Your muscles break down and enter your blood.” He’d read up on it extensively since it happened to the point where it gave him very medically accurate nightmares from time to time. “Which is apparently something that can happen if you physically overexert yourself enough.”

“What the hell were you doing?”

“Running.” Running in the height of the summer heat while already dehydrated, having just left an appointment with his personal trainer. In retrospect he’d pushed himself so hard it was like he’d wanted something to break. “I was doing it a lot for a while. Obviously too much.”

Eduardo frowned at him. “And now you’re - are you okay?”

That was the same big-eyed look of concern Mark used to resent being faced with in college, back when he didn’t understand that being cared for wasn’t the same as being condescended to. He looked so exactly like the version of himself Mark had kept stored in his head for the last ten years it was unreal to be faced with. He swallowed.

“I’m fine.” He put a hand on his desk and curled his fingers into his palm. “How are you?”

Eduardo shrugged. “I’m, you know.”

Mark waited a beat for him to say more, but that was it. “I’m sorry, about your father. He -” He tried to scrounge up a decent thing to say. He'd only seen Eduardo’s father in photos, sharp-eyed and tan and stern-looking, a presence you could feel even in a picture. “He didn’t seem like the kind of person who could get sick.”

“No. But he turned into one.” Eduardo paused. Lower, he added, “He was nice to me at the end, there. I think he was kind of losing it.”

“Maybe he felt bad for being a prick your whole life."

It slipped out. Mark wasn’t sure if it was within the boundaries of what they could still say to each other. Eduardo just huffed a laugh.

“Maybe,” he said. “I doubt it.”

“You’re not wearing his ring.”

Eduardo reached into his pocket and pulled the ring out, holding it up between his thumb and forefinger. His lips flattened into a humorless smile.

“I don’t wear it,” he said, tucking it away again, “but I feel weird without it.”

Mark knew, through means he wasn’t proud of, that Eduardo was only in San Francisco on a cross-country tour of the financial mess his father had left behind, that before dying his father had owed more money than he’d technically had. He wondered how long it had been going on for, how much money he needed exactly. How he could ask Eduardo about any of this in a way that wouldn’t offend him.

Before he could say anything Eduardo asked, “Was it serious? What happened to you?”

“They said I could have -” Mark gestured his head.

Eduardo’s eyes were huge. “Jesus.”

Mark hadn’t spoken about it to anyone in real terms before. “It felt like I was going to, for a minute.”

“You need to take better care of yourself,” Eduardo told him, softly. It went through Mark’s chest.

“That’s what I was trying to do. I’m just not good at it.”

Eduardo shook his head and said, “Mark,” admonishingly, murmuring it to himself.

Mark wanted to touch the stubble on his jaw, the lines by his eyes.

“I heard you almost got married,” he said.

Eduardo turned to face the window, the view of the Valley at night - rows of black-glass buildings glowing in the dark. “Almost.”

“What happened?”

“It didn’t work out, obviously.”

“Why not?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Doesn’t it?”

“Why are you asking?” Eduardo asked, turning to him.

Mark had reached the line he could end the conversation by crossing.

“Because you’re my ex,” he said.

Eduardo’s face softened. He put a hand over his eyes.

“I think I just wanted to be married," he said. "And that wasn’t enough of a reason.”

The news of his engagement had hit Mark less than a year after the depositions, after the very last time they’d slept together. Another year after that, it was called off. Dustin had told him as much in passing over lunch one day and Mark had enjoyed a bitter satisfaction from hearing it.

“I’m sorry.”

Eduardo dropped his hand, blinking hard. “That’s the second time you’ve apologized in one conversation.”

“I owe you a third, I think.”

Eduardo looked at him for another long moment.

“You look different with your hair like that."

Mark touched it again, short hair rasping against his palm, and tried to decipher the look on Eduardo's face. “You don't like it.”

“No. It suits you. It’s just not what you look like when I think of you.”

“What do I look like when you think of me?”

Eduardo’s mouth twitched slightly. “Like a kid.” He glanced at Mark’s desk. “Sitting at your computer in your Harvard hoodie with candy worms hanging out of your mouth.”

He was still that person, in part. Eduardo gave him a look like he knew it, like despite everything there was something there to be fond of. Mark remembered being nineteen years old, half naked and high, lying draped across Eduardo on the Kirkland couch and feeling unselfconscious, okay about it - that had happened. That intimacy had existed between them. No amount of years in between and no amount of settlement money could undo it.

“I’ve been thinking about you a lot,” Mark said. “I didn’t… I never really stopped.”

Eduardo’s eyes went wide. His gaze slid over to the glass, the employees outside who could see them clearly if they just lifted their heads. 

The last time Mark’s heart had beaten this hard he’d thought it was about to give out altogether. “You know why I did it. Don’t you?” He took a step closer. “Because I, I was -“

“Mark,” Eduardo interrupted. He looked stunned.

Mark looked out of the glass at the office outside, at his own office around them. A room with no life except the plants an assistant was charged with maintaining. He didn’t know what this place was anymore, what he ever thought it would be for. If it was anything. All he knew was that it wasn’t enough to live on.

He looked at Eduardo. The way he’d felt about him as a teenager was still lodged stubbornly in his chest, still there.

"All this is so small.” He dug his nails into his palms. “You knew that first.”

Any embarrassment in him was overpowered by a sudden desperation - a bone-deep certainty that when Eduardo left this room, he would disappear altogether.

Eduardo frowned at him. He reached out, sighing, and touched the side of Mark’s face, cupping his cheek in his hand. His thumb skated gently across the shorn hair at Mark’s temple, and there was a sudden stillness to the world, a quiet Mark felt like it passed through their skin, Eduardo’s to his. 

His eyes fell shut. He bowed his head under the touch.