fic: tsn; sweet on you (NC-17) (3d/3)

[mooging]

(continued from here)

//


Mark is running later than usual one morning near the end of January, and he can hear the hum of the morning rush in the bakery under his feet as he hops about putting socks on and trying not to fall over couch arms while he simultaneously tries to yank on a tee and zip up his jeans, crotchety with morning.

He pauses just before he rounds the corner from the stairwell into the bakery proper, putting his backpack on the ground while he wrestles with his fleece, both the arms inside-out where Eduardo had hauled it off him the night before. It smells good in the bakery, coffee and freshly baked cake, and even in a rush, Mark has to stop to breathe it in. As much as he hates to admit it, it sort of calms him down, now, like breathing against Eduardo's neck when they'd not seen other over Hanukkah. Code doesn't smell of anything, which is one point in Eduardo's favour. Not that he's in competition with code, or anything ridiculous like that that certain factions of the Facebook staff might be intimating around the water cooler, just. Mark's just saying. Eduardo smells good.

When Eduardo gets to the end of a line of customers, he comes over to the foot of the stairs where Mark is still trying to navigate his arm into his fleece, and passes him a coffee.

"Obrigado," Mark says, without really thinking, mind still on the vocab list he'd assigned himself to go over in the shower, wrestling with the sleeve of his fleece, and Eduardo makes this choked, pleased little noise, pushes him against the wall of the stairwell and kisses him hard, sliding his hands up under Mark's tee without any hesitation. Mark almost loses his balance trying not to drop his coffee and stay on the stairs at the same time, but he gets a hand on Eduardo's waist, steadies himself, and kisses back. Eduardo's hands bracket Mark's ribs, code-easy to understand, like Mark is the only variable and Eduardo is keeping him the same. Mark tugs at Eduardo's hips, fitting his fingers into the belt loops on his stupid formal pants. The banister is digging into the small of Mark's back, but Eduardo is biting Mark's lower lip a little, dragging his tongue over the light indent of teeth, and Mark could basically be standing on hot coals right now and probably not really care.

Not that he'd especially like to test that theory.

California is hanging on to winter like it's never had one before and it's fucking freezing outside -- all the bedroom windows were condensed when Mark woke up, and file that under things Dustin never needs to know -- and so they can tell when the bakery door opens, an eddy of chill air finding its way to the stairwell, nipping at their skin.

Eduardo rests his head against Mark's shoulder, panting a little.

Mark bats at him. "Go serve people," he says. "You have a job to do."

"Shan't," Eduardo says, tightening his fists in the front of Mark's fleece, still hanging half off his arm.

"You're supposed to be the sensible one," Mark reminds him.

Eduardo leans his head into the crook of Mark's neck. "You're supposed to be at a shareholders' meeting in half an hour," he says. "But I don't see you going anywhere."

"Yeah, well," says Mark, clutching at Eduardo's back in a way he will definitely deny later. "You're not moving either."

Eduardo kisses him, says, against Mark's mouth, "Yes, I am," and Mark groans, and says, "That is cheating, Wardo, you know that isn't - " and then shuts up, because Eduardo starts pressing hot, open-mouthed kisses down the line of Mark's neck, and Mark has learned that if he tries to keep talking during that, his voice does something stupid he'd rather it didn't.

The bakery door opens again.

Eduardo keeps ignoring it.

Mark wriggles away enough that his voice is steady when he says, "You have to go."

Eduardo doesn't look fit to go anywhere except to bed, right now, with Mark.

"I do," Eduardo agrees, reluctantly, and Mark reaches up and straightens Eduardo's collar. Now Eduardo has a straight collar but he still looks like he's been making out in a stairwell. Mark has a sudden, irrational urge to stop him from going anywhere until he looks less like that, so other people can't see him the way Mark gets to see him, on the edge of debauched.

Mark reaches out for him again, and he doesn't know what he was going to do, but it doesn't really matter, as Chris's voice suddenly breaks through into the stairwell.

Of course it's Chris.

"Get your delinquent ass out here, Mark," he shouts. "I know you're there. I can hear you breathing."

"I'm busy," Mark yells back, immediately descending into ridiculousness because apparently his life is just like that now, and Eduardo rolls his eyes, and rights Mark's sleeve. Mark works his arm into it, sullenly.

"I thought you said I had to go," Eduardo says, grinning at Mark, and Mark says, "Shut up."

Chris shouts, "Mark, if I do not see you out here in the next thirty seconds I am sending Dustin back there to drag you out."

"Hi, Mark!" shouts Dustin.

Oh, excellent.

Eduardo laughs, and shoves Mark out into the bakery.

"Your commitment to your job is terrifying," Mark grumbles in Chris's direction, as Eduardo runs a hand through his hair and looks slightly sheepish under Chris's I am not his keeper but by god he is not missing this meeting gaze, and Chris just shrugs, and grabs Mark unnecessarily hard by the elbow, and leads him to the door.

Mark pauses in the doorway despite Chris's groan of frustration, and says, over his shoulder, to Eduardo, "Até mais tarde," and even from his distance away, he can see Eduardo go a fast, promising red.

It's even worth listening to Dustin flail endlessly on at him all the way to work about bilingual romance, just to remember that look on Eduardo's face.

//

Mark picks up the phrase book again one night, when Eduardo is sleeping, and lets it fall open where it likes.

eu te amo, the book insists.

Mark frowns down at the page, and then, suddenly, thinks about Eduardo bending the pages wide open as he tests Mark, the spine bending with them, about Eduardo always leaving the book face down when he's done, about the way Eduardo looks at him, kisses the back of his neck when they're starting to fall asleep, curled up together in the duvet.

He thinks about the way he thumbs to this page himself, sometimes, when no-one's looking.

He puts the book down, and if he's shaking, well, fuck it, there's no-one there to see.

He wires in, and thinks about nothing except Perl for a good three hours, and then resurfaces disorientated and tired. When he clambers into bed next to Eduardo, Eduardo reaches out a hand in his sleep to pull him closer, and Mark nestles down easily, lining himself up in front of Eduardo, draping Eduardo's arm over his waist.

Okay.

He can think about everything else later.

//

One night, when Mark is half-asleep with Eduardo curled around him, knees to the backs of Mark's own, Eduardo tells him about it.

Eduardo tells him about his father wanting him to go into business -- Mark thinks, well, you run a bakery, that's a business, but he stays quiet -- and how he got into Harvard but couldn't make himself go.

"I wanted to do what I loved," he says, against the back of Mark's neck, and his breath catches, and Mark is flushing hot, not knowing what he should be doing, and understands.

"Yeah," he says, uselessly, and he fumbles behind him for Eduardo's hand, holding on tight.

When Eduardo swallows, Mark feels it against the tops of his shoulders.

"What did you do instead?" he asks, quietly. He can do this. If Eduardo wants to do this, Mark can make himself okay at this.

"Culinary school," he says, and he sounds quietly proud. Mark squeezes his fingers, because he doesn't know what to say.

Eduardo tells him that his father still paid -- "He said the money was there for me to go to school, so I might as well use it." -- but never approved. Mark thinks about all the times he's talked to Eduardo about Harvard, off-hand, and wonders if Eduardo has been thinking about this every time. Mark doesn't normally feel like a dick for things he's said in the past, but he really, really does now.

But he still doesn't know what to say back.

"It's," says Eduardo, in this odd, full voice, and Mark is terrified, suddenly, and angry, because Eduardo should never have to sound like that, "it's not that he doesn't love me, I know he does, it's just -- "

Mark stays very still, in case Eduardo is only talking about this because it is dark and he can't see Mark's face.

"It's just," says Eduardo, swallowing again, "I want him to be proud, you know? And I don't know if he is."

That, right there, is what Mark has been waiting for. He's -- he's sort of been waiting for this moment, for Eduardo to tell him whatever he has been hanging onto, and he's -- oh, god, this could go incredibly badly, and is probably the most stupid, trivializing thing Mark could do at this point, but he's going to do it anyway.

"Hang on," he says, scrambling abruptly out of the bed, flicking on the light, and Eduardo props himself up on his elbows. Mark can't look him in the eye right now, because Eduardo looks a little raw around the edges, and Mark is trying to - he's trying -

"Hang on," he repeats, stumbling to the door, to his backpack on the couch. It's in there, it's been in there since Hanukkah, tucked in the pocket at the back that Eduardo doesn't touch, the one with the back-up laptop power lead in it. It's crumpled when Mark's fingers brush it, but it's in one piece.

Mark goes back to the bedroom clutching the photo tight in his hand. Eduardo looks a little less wounded, and Mark sits next to him on the bed, looks down for a second at the picture he's holding. This is ridiculous, and possibly the sappiest gesture Mark has ever made, and entirely unnecessary and overblown and stupid, but it's the best idea he's got.

In the picture, Mark is six years old and pale and scrawny, wearing cargo pants that cut off at the knee, a ratty striped tee, an wide-eyed smile and a fireman's helmet, much too big for him, falling down over one eye. He looks absolutely ecstatic. Mark has been trying to get hold of and destroy this picture for years. Instead, he hands it to Eduardo.

Eduardo looks from it to Mark and back again a couple of times. His expression keeps flickering, and Mark can't tell what that means. He folds his arm across his chest, and waits.

Eduardo says, in a funny, high-pitched voice. "Is this a picture of you as a six-year old?"

Mark nods.

"I said," says Eduardo, disbelieving, "when you said you got stuck in the bathroom, I said - and then you said I could talk about it if I liked - and this is -"

Mark nods again. Oh, god, this is stupid. He scowls down at the duvet like this whole situation is its fault.

"I picked it up from home at Hanukkah," he says. "I thought -- I don't know, I thought you might like to see it. Or something. I don't know."

How do other people do relationships? How has the human race survived? Mark wishes there was a button he could press to make this okay, to move on from this moment, but the universe stubbornly does not provide him with one. He can't code his way out of this one.

He looks up again, when Eduardo hasn't said anything after a couple of minutes.

Eduardo is still staring down at the photo. "You're wearing a fireman's helmet," he points out, like this fact isn't both perfectly obvious and burned into Mark's mind forever.

"Yes," he says.

"Why?"

Mark shrugs, and tucks his hands further up under his arms, defensive. "I liked fire-engines."

"I thought you liked computers," Eduardo says. His voice is easier to understand now, a tilt into gentle ribbing, out of level ambiguity. Mark relaxes a fraction; it's working.

"I liked fire-engines too," Mark says. "I'm a complex person, Wardo, I contain multitudes."

Eduardo cannot keep his mouth in a straight line, and Mark watches it twitch in and out of a futilely repressed smile. "Multitudes of fire-engines?"

"Shut up," says Mark, champion of banter, feeling himself going red, but it's working, it's really working. Eduardo doesn't look closed up, or sad, or like he's waiting for someone's stupid approval; he's looking at Mark, just Mark, like he doesn't know what to say, but in a good way. Like he's happy, Mark thinks, which was the point of the stupid photo in the first place.

Eduardo runs his thumbs along the bottom edge of the photo, staring at it like it's something precious. "Fire engines," he says, in this quiet little voice, and Mark is just not at all capable of doing these moments properly.

"Okay," he says, abruptly. "Enough feelings. Let's have sex."

Eduardo looks up at him and laughs, but he lets Mark shove him back against the mattress and push his tee up so Mark can get his mouth against Eduardo's stomach, making his breath hitch. Eduardo tangles a hand in Mark's hair as Mark dips lower, which Mark is entirely on board with, but instead of pushing him down he pulls him up, and when Eduardo kisses him, it's not hungry, not a precursor, it's gentle. Mark's breath hitches too.

"Thank you," Eduardo says, in the space between their mouths, and Mark is embarrassed by everything and especially the way Eduardo's hands are tender along Mark's sides, a brush of skin on skin, so he just says, "Shut up," again, in this weirdly thick voice, and Eduardo kisses him properly, hard, and the next time he gets his hand in Mark's hair, he is pressing him down, and Mark wants to go where he's bid.

//

Eduardo starts toying around with Valentine's Day recipes in late January, and so he's spending more evenings in the bakery kitchen than he is on the couch with Mark, or combing through his accounting books while Mark pretends not to watch. Mark can just as easily code at the big bakery kitchen table, so he sits on one of the kitchen chairs and frowns down at the profile update that won't fall into shape while Eduardo patters about mixing things, dipping the knuckle of his pinky finger into batter to taste test it.

It's getting Eduardo distracted, Valentine's Day, like when holiday season was just around the corner, and Eduardo's living room floor was strewn with pages from his scrapbook: scribbled recipe ideas, messy sketches of cookie designs, icing patterns. Eduardo keeps a small notebook in his pocket too and sometimes breaks off in the middle of conversations to write something down, his hand smudging the ink in his haste. Mark gets it, because sometimes he stops talking to code, doesn't finish sentences because he's thinking about dropped brackets and has to immediately read back through an afternoon's work. He gets the thrill of making something, of creation, but he's never really tried to bake, not since he was little and making latkes with his mother.

Eduardo clearly loves it. Mark wants to understand what it is that he loves.

"Show me," Mark blurts, and Eduardo turns round from where he's frowning absently down at two small bottles of food colouring, one red, one purple.

"What?"

It is quite possible Mark hasn't thought this all the way through. "Show me how to make something," he says, fidgeting. "I want you to."

Eduardo is giving him this little half-smile, not uncertainly, just like he's trying not to. Mark watches his mouth fight itself, and wants to kiss him. He wants to kiss him so much of the time that it is actively interfering with his having other thoughts, which is inconvenient but also inconveniently unpreventable. He folds his arms, because this cannot be difficult, it is baking, and glares. Eduardo's smile breaks free properly and makes Mark's voice wobble when it shouldn't, inopportune, when he says, "Show me."

"Okay," says Eduardo, still at full wattage. "What do you want to make?"

"I don't know," says Mark. "You're the baker, you decide."

"What do you like?"

"You," says Mark, bluntly. "Or I wouldn't be baking."

This should not be news, Mark feels, but Eduardo smiles so widely it's like he's hearing it for the first time. Maybe Mark hasn't said anything like that before, but he thinks it should have been obvious. Then he thinks, maybe Eduardo just liked hearing it too.

Eduardo decides that Mark should make a cake, and he sets out the ingredients on the table, making sure to move Mark's laptop out of potential spillage distance.

Eduardo stands behind Mark with his arms around Mark's waist as Mark measures out cupfuls of flour and sugar and butter, and when he's done, Mark surveys the amassed ingredients with some incredulity.

"How are you so skinny?" Mark asks, turning to face him. "You make things like this all day, and you cook with, like, metric tons of butter, and you still wake me up by poking me with your hips."

Eduardo raises an eyebrow.

Mark says, "Don't you dare say 'that's not all I could poke you with'."

Eduardo laughs, happy, throwing his head back. Mark watches the line of his throat, the set of his shoulders, the curve of his mouth. Fuck, he is in so fucking deep.

"I don't know," Eduardo says, still smiling, tipping things into the mixing bowl. "High metabolism, work on my feet, stir endless amounts of cake batter."

Mark says, "That's not exercise," all skeptically, and Eduardo shoves the mixing bowl at him. Mark looks down at the butter and the sugar inside, falling all over each other and just not coalescing or whatever the fuck the baking term is, pure binary, no end result.

Eduardo says, challenging, "Go on, then. Mix it."

Mark learns two things in the next couple of minutes: one, the correct term for combining butter and sugar is not coalescing but creaming, which Mark doesn't hesitate to point out is unnecessarily pornographic, and Eduardo goes a happy, fond red, and Mark thinks about coming in his jeans on Eduardo's kitchen floor; and, two, creaming stuff together is actually genuinely pretty fucking hard.

"This is like torture," Mark insists, dramatically, still stubbornly working the wooden spoon around the bowl even though his upper arm muscles (Mark cannot in good conscience call them biceps or triceps, because he has seen himself in the mirror, and he does not look the same as he did when he had fencing practice keeping him in shape) are letting their displeasure with this activity loudly and anaerobically known. "How do you do this all day? Did someone force you? Do you secretly yearn to be a sedentary accountant but participated in an unfortunate set of naked photography sessions to put yourself through school and someone is blackmailing you into baking instead?"

Eduardo laughs, and snags the mixing bowl from Mark's hands. Mark would protest this, but he's too busy poking his arm to see if it still registers feeling beyond the burning ache of short-term overuse following a long stretch of being under-utilized.

Mark watches with a frown as Eduardo creams the stuff together in an embarrassingly short amount of time.

"What's next?"

Mixing in eggs goes well, until Eduardo says, "Careful it doesn't curdle," and Mark slams the bowl down on the side.

"What the hell?" he asks. "Curdle?" Baking is apparently full of pitfalls.

Eduardo peers over the rim, pokes the mixture with the tip of the spoon. "Yeah," he says, and Mark can't tell if he's faking. "Like that."

Mark grabs the spoon back. "How do I fix it?"

"Flour," Eduardo tells him, and gives him a sieve.

Mark mixes that in too, and, okay, his arms do actually hurt. This is ridiculous. He tells Eduardo this, grumpily working the wooden spoon around the bowl.

"You sit and code all day," Eduardo says. "I mean, you probably burn all your calories with the amount of caffeine you drink, but that's not exactly a work-out."

"I have strong fingers," Mark says, and he didn't even mean it like that, thinking about hours of unbroken code, fingers unceasing on the keyboard, but Eduardo goes a slow, shy red, and curls out this little grin, and Mark has to look away from him immediately so he doesn't just up-end the mixing bowl on him right there and then and have a lot of sticky, sugary sex and then maybe a second round in the shower, cleaning off.

As it turns out, baking a cake leaves enough time to get Eduardo off against the fridge, which Mark considers a much better use of his hands than holding a wooden spoon, and he tells Eduardo this, pulling back and looking up from his knees.

Eduardo looks down at him with slightly unfocused eyes, and says, a little breathless, "Fine, okay, you don't have to bake again, just - fuck - " as Mark gets his mouth back around him, curling a fist at the base so he can go fast and not worry about choking, and Eduardo makes a sound like he might be choking when he comes.

The oven timer goes off just as Eduardo has got his hand into Mark's sweats, and Mark swears, and thumps his head back against the fridge.

He has to be the only person in the world who gets cockblocked by cake.

Eduardo washes his hands and puts on a pair of oven-gloves, which Mark is careful to mock, and then slides the baking tray out of the oven as Mark comes over to peer over his shoulder, and --

"Oh my god, Mark," Eduardo says, straightening up to put the cake on the counter. "That looks good, that looks really good." He pauses. "Surprisingly."

Mark shrugs and feigns modesty, and Eduardo swats him with the oven-gloves.

Apparently cake needs to cool down before it can be frosted, so there is another space of time for Eduardo to shove Mark into one of the kitchen chairs and drag his sweats down around his ankles, smiling up at him from between his thighs. Mark is getting so much more on board with this whole baking idea.

He makes Eduardo frost the cake when it's cool enough, watches the quick flick of his wrist, the way he still pokes his tongue out a little when he's concentrating like Mark remembers from summer, and pretending not to stare over the top of his laptop screen. Finally, Eduardo puts his hands on his hips and steps back, and says, "Done," and loops an arm around Mark's waist, pulling him in to his side. Eduardo's arm has a little frosting on it too, from where he's brushed against the cake, and he gets it on Mark's hoodie, but Mark doesn't care at all.

He eyes the cake, and thinks about it starting from nothing, from separate components, like the potential of creation in unpressed keys, about Eduardo brushing his elbow and bringing him a biscotti and setting him up a tab. Eduardo is the sort of person who looks like he's thinking these things all the time, reminiscence and metaphors, and Mark does not look it, or feel like he should be, but he is now, apparently. Eduardo has made him like that.

This would probably be a good time to say it, right here, but Mark stays quiet and just lets Eduardo cut them both a slice of their cake.

//

Mark doesn't get to sleep for a while that night.

Eduardo is all tangled up in the duvet, lying on his stomach with his arms and legs flung out, starfish-style, across the bed. Mark is sort of confined to the edge, perilously close to moving the wrong minute muscle and tipping himself ass-first onto the floor, but he's awake, and not generally in the habit of letting himself fall off things, so he doesn't really mind. It's sort of like a movie, post-coital, when the characters seem to have one of those magic bed sheets that covers the woman to her neck but the guy only to his waist, and, okay, Eduardo is definitely attractive enough most of the time to be in a movie, but he is the least dignified sleeper Mark has ever seen, and he lived with Chris and Dustin through finals, so he's seen his fair share of unattractively zonked out guys. Eduardo has the duvet in this sort of full body Klingon grip, twisted up under one armpit and knotted somehow around his waist, one arm flung haphazardly half over the pillow and his face, one leg hanging over the side of the bed. He snores most nights, but not offensively. Mark is actually surprised by how little this bothers him, when he remembers ganging up with Chris to actually shove, like, wads of cotton wool up Dustin's nostrils just to try to make the noise stop.

It really hits him here, listening to Eduardo snuffle into the pillows, that this is it. Eduardo is it. He has no back-up plan.

And, okay, Mark is not actually used to having a back-up plan. It's just not something he thinks about. He tends to jump straight into whatever it is he's doing, because he's doing it, so it's probably going to work out. Like, with Facebook, people kept asking him if he was going put ads on it, monetize it early to string out the maxed out credit cards he and Chris and Dustin were already straining, and he refused. That wasn't what Facebook was about: it was something bigger than commercials and billboards, something that was Mark's. He could make something good enough that it only needed to advertize itself. There was no back-up plan because it was always going to work out, to catch on, so he didn't need a fallback. This doesn't mean that he doesn't know that it's, whatever, the prudent thing to do, it just means he's secure enough, or arrogant enough, that he just doesn't do it.

It's the middle of the night, and Eduardo is snoring next to him, and the light of the laptop on Mark's knee is starting to make Mark squint, tired, and he glances over at Eduardo, and doesn't want a back-up plan. He just wants this.

He looks at Eduardo lying there, face mashed into the gap between the pillows, half-hidden by his forearm, and loves him, and thinks, gut-deep, terrified and exhilarated all at once like reading the Facebook masthead on the live site for the first time, shivering from snow-wet socks, oh, fuck: enough.

He's going to need some help.

//

As soon as Mark sits down in the chair opposite Chris's desk, his phone buzzes. It's from Dustin. He ignores it.

Chris is looking at him like he's gone mad, which is not a new experience.

Mark takes a deep breath and hopes that this will be over as soon as it possibly can be.

"I am going to ask you something," he says, staring hard at the edge of Chris' desk, "and then you can help and then we can never speak of this again. Okay?"

This is becoming a pattern.

"What," says Chris, "the Masons have approached you? You belong to the Knights Templar? You're Dan Brown's illegitimate son? Give me something to work with here, Mark."

Mark's phone goes off again. It's Dustin again. He keeps ignoring it.

"No," he scowls, mostly out of anticipatory humiliation. "Chris, this is - I'm - you - "

Well, this is off to a flying start.

His phone buzzes again. Mark doesn't even check it this time.

Chris's expression of tolerant exasperation shifts into something more serious. He leans forwards across his desk. Mark would mock him for being a cliché of every understanding friend in the universe were it not for the fact that he really fucking needs an understanding friend at this point, which is not something he really wants to admit to, but whatever. He's not going to get in his own way for this one. Eduardo is worth a little loss of pride.

"Mark, what is it?"

Mark thinks you're CEO, bitch, you can fucking ask this question, man the fuck up, and stares more at Chris's desk and says, "How - "

Mark's phone goes off again at the exact same time that the door flies open. Mark doesn't even need to turn around.

"Don't you check your phone anymore?" Dustin asks, hanging in the doorway. "What if it there had been an emergency?"

"Is there an emergency?" Chris asks, warily.

"No," says Dustin. "Not apart from the fact that you're apparently having secret meetings without me now. Which is pretty emergent. If you're me."

Mark slumps down in his chair.

Chris says, "Emergent doesn't mean that."

Mark checks his phone while Dustin argues the case for language evolution and Chris starts up about evolution being a slow process and not something to be abused in nanoseconds by crazy people.

Dustin's four messages read like this:

why are you in Chris' office and should I be?

seriously Mark

I could just come in you know, I am only refraining because your face looked all wobbly when you walked past

FINE don't answer me SURPRISE DUSTIN AWAYYYY.

Sometimes it's really, really difficult for Mark to remember that Dustin is actually really intelligent.

"Fine," he blurts, because Dustin shows no sign of going away soon and also because he really needs to stop this going round in his head before he explodes or just writes it out in code when he's deep in something important and ruins his website and also his life. "Look, um.

Chris and Dustin have both turned to him, expectantly. Mark avoids their gaze with the skill born from years of practice.

"If I, um," he says, "wanted to tell someone something important. How - how would I do that?"

Chris says, "Mark, I mean this in the nicest possible way because you are technically my boss, but you really, really don't have a problem telling people things."

Mark sighs. "No," he says, "it's - I - he."

Dustin's ears all but prick up. "He?" he says. "Like, Eduardo he?"

Mark nods, with a kind of dread-based reluctance.

Dustin makes some sort of strangled, incoherently delighted noise and clasps his hands together. "Oh my god," he says, obviously immediately seeing where this is going, because Mark's life is just cruel like that, apparently. "Oh my god, Mark, are you - "

"I want to tell Eduardo I love him," Mark says, loudly, over the top of Dustin, who falls abruptly, unnaturally quiet. "How do I do that?"

Chris stares at him like he thinks he might just have hallucinated. This is not new either, but the soft, pleased smile threatening to unfold along with it definitely is.

Mark goes spectacularly pink.

"I didn't want Dustin to say it before I did," he mutters, which makes him feel even more like Reese Witherspoon than ever, and he kicks mulishly at the chair legs until he can look up again.

"Well?" he demands, when neither Chris nor Dustin have responded in any way. "Come on, I have other things to be doing that don't make me want to die."

"I think you've killed Dustin," Chris says, slightly high-pitched, and Mark turns round and Dustin's face has actually become an emoticon.

"Oh," says Dustin, slowly, in the tones of someone gearing up to explode verbal confetti all over the wreckage of Mark's dignity, "my GOD." He pauses. "Mark! The robot's fallen in love! They look and feel like us! There are twelve Mark models and they're all in love with bakers!"

"Dustin," says Mark, somewhere between warning and just pure horror, but Dustin ploughs on.

"It's so perfect! Because he looks like that and he makes you go all soft and gentle and wobbly - "

"Dustin," says Mark, with a touch more outrage than before.

" - and normally you look all cylon but when you talk about him you don't, apart from right now when I am technically talking about Eduardo but you look like you might be gathering storm clouds to lightning me into shutting up, but you are foiled, Marky Mark, because lightning never strikes the same place twice!"

Chris says, "I do feel the need to interject here that lightning hasn't struck you once yet."

Dustin says, "I am too awesome for lightning to bother me."

"But," says Chris, diligently, "you just said that lighting never strikes in the same place twice. If it hasn't stuck you yet, then - "

"Silence," Dustin demands. "I am also too awesome for logic."

Mark reminds himself that this is definitely a conversation he needs to have, and so he definitely cannot get up and leave and also barricade himself somehow in his office so no-one can come in and say horrifying things to him for a while.

"Am I just supposed to say it?" he interrupts. "Is that how it works?"

Chris stops side-eying Dustin and brings his attention back to Mark. "It doesn't work any particular way," he says, which, great, how helpful. "If you love him," - Dustin squeaks again, in the background - "just tell him."

"When?" Mark demands. "Is there a, a moment? Do I need to sky-write it or something? Is there a wrong way to say it?"

Dustin actually sounds like he might pass out. Mark really vehemently wishes he would.

On the other end of the humiliation spectrum, Chris looks so understanding that Mark kind of wants to hit him. No-one hits the understanding friend in the movies. Mark hates films, and real life, and the vast, guideless gulf between the two.

"I can't tell you when to say it," Chris says, gently. "You have to do that part."

If there is a way for this conversation to get more horrendous, Mark cannot think of it. Happily, Chris immediately provides him with the answer.

"But, Mark," he says, out of nowhere. "You can't just say it. You have to really mean it. This is - it's not - you have to really, really mean it. And I think you do, but - "

Mark fixes him with a stare that hopefully encompasses his utter disdain for Chris's implications to the contrary. "Of course I fucking mean it," he says, letting his embarrassment translate into irritation. "Why the fuck else would I be having this excruciating conversation with you?"

"Point taken," Chris says.

Mark's head feels like it did when he first put his fingers to his keyboard to type out the first lines of code for theFacebook, questions he needs to answer and not able to do everything at once. "I," he says, which is not a sentence, so he clears his throat, irritated at himself, and tries again. "I'm learning Portuguese," he says, to his hands. "I let him teach me how to bake," - Dustin makes some alarmingly rapturous noises behind him - "and, and, I still don't know how to say it."

He also doesn't know how to make his voice stop sounding like that, so he just scowls some more, and folds his arms across his chest.

Dustin puts a hand on his shoulder. Mark tenses up immediately.

"Hey," Dustin says, in a very un-Dustin tone of voice. "Mark. It's fine. It's really fine. You've got this."

"I have Facebook," Mark mutters, calming down.

"That too," Dustin says. "But I am telling you, even you genuinely cannot fuck this one up. It's basically impossible." He hesitates.

"What?" Mark says, twisting round in the chair to face him. "By all means, drag this out more, that will help you keep your job."

Dustin glances at Chris, and Mark says, "What?"

Dustin says, "We've seen the way he looks at you, okay? I am beyond sure you don't need me to tell you this, but he - "

"I know," Mark says, fast, before Dustin can finish. He looks down at his hands again. He can't help smiling. It makes him feel gentle, when he thinks about it, when he thinks that Eduardo -- okay, so, if normal people feel like this all the time, if this is what has inspired a vast array of horrible, insipid, radio-abusing songs, he doesn't know how modern civilization functions. It essentially makes him want to narrow his world down to a dark room, a bright screen and an unlit keyboard, so he pushes his chair back and stands up because he is in danger of growing ovaries if this goes on any longer. We've seen the way he looks at you. Mark has seen the way Eduardo looks at him, and it has driven him to have this insipid conversation. He wants his keyboard back, and also his sanity.

"Right," he says, not looking at either of them, "great, okay, good talk, see you in the next millennium when I can think about this without wanting to throw myself out of a window."

"That's my boy," says Chris, and Mark slams the door on his way out.

//

from: dustinohyeahitsdustin@facebook.com
to: mark.zuckerberg@facebook.com
subj: have you said it yet?

TELL HIM TELL HIM TELL HIM TELL HIM TELL HIM TELL HIM

T
E
L
L

H
I
M

(TELL HIM)

//

It's a Tuesday morning in early February, and the profile update is going live as soon as Mark gets to work, and he pauses in the bakery doorway, clutching his take-out cup of coffee.

"The update's happening today," Mark says, as Eduardo wipes down the counter ready for the morning rush, "so I might be late home."

Eduardo freezes.

It takes Mark a second to realise what he's said, and then he goes red, as hot as the coffee in his hands.

"Home?" says Eduardo, in this funny tone of voice, and Mark grits his teeth, and refuses to take it back.

He has a key. He has a drawer. He has a side of the bed, a pillow that smells like his own shampoo, and Eduardo moves to throw an arm over him in his sleep, and, yes, fucking right it's home.

It comes out angrily, because Mark is worse than useless at this, but it still comes out. "Yes," he says, and he feels uncomfortable because he can't fold his arms without spilling scalding hot coffee all over himself, but he keeps going, monosyllabically emphatic. "Home."

Eduardo smiles. It takes a second to happen, like he can't let it all out at once, and he looks a little blown away. Mark fidgets, and hopes. "Okay," Eduardo says, in this wavering, delighted way. "Good."

Mark nods, sharp and brusque, but he's smiling too, irrepressible. "Good," he says, back, and his voice sounds ridiculous, and this is ridiculous, and he turns on his heel and goes to work because his chest is warm and he can't stop grinning, and if he goes back to kiss Eduardo he will just never leave the shop again, and then his site will be running with sub-par profile features forever.

Dustin eyes him suspiciously when he gets to work, but Mark isn't talking, keeping it close to his chest, the memory of the smile spreading slow over Eduardo's face, lighting him up.

He checks the code a few times, paranoid, and then it goes up and Mark drinks three cups of coffee one after the other, drumming his fingers against the edge of his desk, just waiting for something to go wrong.

Nothing goes wrong.

Okay, so Mark has had a lot of caffeine in not very many hours, but he feels - odd. Jittery. It takes him a while to place it, but he thinks it's the same thing he was feeling at the last office party, looking over at Eduardo laughing next to the Wall.

The update has gone well.

He thinks about the last profile update, the cold fear it would go wrong, his sleepless weekend in front of the laptop screen. He thinks about the work he's done on this code, about what he's done around this code, about eating feijoada and handjobs on the couch, about pornographic baking terminology, about the broken spine of his Portuguese phrase book, about sharing pizza slices, about eu te amo, about home.

It's not like he's spent the last few years of his life expecting his site to bomb every time they make a change, because he's secure enough -- some (Chris) might say too much -- in his work and himself that he knows when he's done a good job, but for all that time, Facebook has been all he's had. Not in the melodramatic, it was my only friend type way that he knows some people think he might mean, when he's forced to network at various events and people ask him what his hobbies are and he tells them his job is his hobby, but still. He just means, like, if there's been a change, he's wanted to be there, in the office, just in case.

There were no mistakes in the last update. There are no mistakes in this update. And --

-- and Mark has somewhere else to go.

He is also developing a habit of making having major life realizations in the office, but he can't see he didn't see that one coming.

"Mark?" Dustin asks, surprised, as Mark walks out of his office with his backpack slung over his shoulder at seven that evening. "Are you - going out?"

"I'm going home," Mark tells him, and the expression on Dustin's face is painful to watch, so fuck knows what it feels like to make.

"But," he says, and Mark has never seen him at a loss for words before, so this is actually pretty glorious, "but - the - update?"

"It's fine," Mark says, on a grin, remembering. "It's going to stay fine. I've actually been here for the last few years, you know."

Dustin is gaping. Mark should leave early on update nights more often, if this is the result.

"You're tempting fate!" Dustin yells, as Mark makes his way to the stairs. "You are wearing the red Roxanne dress of pride before a fall!"

"Yeah, well," Mark shouts back, over his shoulder. "Fate can blow me."

"Or Eduardo can," Dustin shouts, louder than before, and Mark grins at him from the other end of the main floor, and mimes tipping a hat in his direction, and just yells back, unabashed, "You got it."

//

Eduardo is cleaning down the tables when Mark comes into the bakery, and Mark dumps his backpack by the door and kisses him, bumping him back against the specials board.

"Hello," says Eduardo, grinning, when Mark pulls back for a second, and Mark has his hands on Eduardo's hips and Eduardo's hands in the back-pockets of his jeans, and it's suddenly so obviously easy to do, suddenly effortless. It feels a little bit like everything has been pitching him forward to this, ever since he couldn't get the code out, and took a breath, and looked up at the August sunlight washing watercolour yellow through his windows.

"I love you," Mark tells him, finally, and Eduardo goes wide-eyed. "But don't cry or anything, I just thought you should know - mmph - "

Eduardo hauls him in hard enough that Mark's mouth stings with it, and he gets a leg up around Mark's hip, runs a hand up Mark's back to tangle in his hair, and it's all Mark can do to try to breathe, to go with it, kissing right back.

"You," pants Eduardo, when he lets Mark up for air, "are the most - " - but Mark is apparently never going to find out what he is, because Eduardo kisses him again right in the middle of his sentence, like he can't not do it, and Mark just shoves right back, until he's pretty sure there's not even daylight between them, until his wrist hurts from bracing himself against the wall.

"You're closed now, right?" Mark manages, with the last vestiges of sensible thought he can find, and Eduardo leans way over to flip the open sign round, smacks the shutters closed, and drags Mark upstairs.

//


(continued here)

*
obrigado: thank you
eu te amo: I love you

Comments

[lucdarling.livejournal.com]

Dustin is in spectacular form throughout this but oh my god Maaaaark. ♥__♥

[whitedatura.livejournal.com]

I am sad that I am on 3d and I know 3e is the last bit. Woe. Woe is me.

Mark thinks about all the times he's talked to Eduardo about Harvard, off-hand, and wonders if Eduardo has been thinking about this every time. Mark doesn't normally feel like a dick for things he's said in the past, but he really, really does now.

This fic makes me have so many ~feelings~ I can barely stand it. Oh, Mark. Oh, Eduardo.

Oh my god the picture. Mark carrying it around for weeks. Eduardo finally telling him. The words. They are gone.

Mark says, "Don't you dare say 'that's not all I could poke you with'."

I am so overcome with the delighful sappiness this didn't even make me laugh, I just made this weird happy noise thing. Mmph.

Mark baking. It is too cute. Why do I get the feeling that Eduardo is making Mark use a spoon to mix on purpose instead of like, an electric mixer? XD

Yes, Mark. Your relationship is a cake. Now fuckin eat the cake and tell Eduardo you love him.

Chris says, "Mark, I mean this in the nicest possible way because you are technically my boss, but you really, really don't have a problem telling people things."

Okay apparently I have recovered from the sap just enough to laugh at that. I love Dustin and Chris and their supportiveness and fondess and exasperation so, so much.

"Home?" says Eduardo, in this funny tone of voice, and Mark grits his teeth, and refuses to take it back.

There went my ability to laugh again. Just happy noises now until forever.

Oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh Mark finally said it, oh my god.

[ymorton.livejournal.com]

Eduardo washes his hands and puts on a pair of oven-gloves, which Mark is careful to mock, and then slides the baking tray out of the oven as Mark comes over to peer over his shoulder, and --

careful to mock CAREFUL TO MOCK

And, okay, Mark is not actually used to having a back-up plan. It's just not something he thinks about. He tends to jump straight into whatever it is he's doing, because he's doing it, so it's probably going to work out.

MAAAAAAAARKRRKKKKKKKK

"Of course I fucking mean it," he says, letting his embarrassment translate into irritation. "Why the fuck else would I be having this excruciating conversation with you?"


bahahahahahahaadfasfdk

yay moree i need to sleep NO FUCK SLEEP FUCK SLEEEP

[muneca-brava.livejournal.com]

Omg, DUSTIIIIIN I love how you write him, he is hilarious

This:
"Oh," says Dustin, slowly, in the tones of someone gearing up to explode verbal confetti all over the wreckage of Mark's dignity, "my GOD." He pauses. "Mark! The robot's fallen in love! They look and feel like us! There are twelve Mark models and they're all in love with bakers!"
and
I am too awesome for lightning to bother me."


And he SAID it and it wasn't a big deal except it was and I really really love this fiiiic.

[ohheykimberly.livejournal.com]

I am sorry, I am unable to say anything anymore as I have actually truly really actually died. That is all.

[cugirl09.livejournal.com]

oh Dustin what are we going to do with you...I am reading this in parts because I know the end is near :(

[kit-kitgoesusa.livejournal.com]

VERY promising start to this chapter, hot-hot-hot make-out sesh in the stairwell ^^ <3
And then THIS!
Chris shouts, "Mark, if I do not see you out here in the next thirty seconds I am sending Dustin back there to drag you out."
"Hi, Mark!" shouts Dustin.
Hahahaha, I could imagine exactly hearing that coming from the bakery XD

And then THIS!
Mark pauses in the doorway despite Chris's groan of frustration, and says, over his shoulder, to Eduardo, "Até mais tarde," and even from his distance away, he can see Eduardo go a fast, promising red.
I. Would. Die. O.O
SO HOT!

I completely loved the inclusion of Eduardo’s troublesome relationship with his father, the way you’ve worked it into this universe so seamlessly. I truly works for the story.
I tip my hat to you, sir!

"I don't know," says Mark. "You're the baker, you decide."
"What do you like?"
"You," says Mark, bluntly. "Or I wouldn't be baking."
Hahaha, amazing ^^

Eduardo is all tangled up in the duvet, lying on his stomach with his arms and legs flung out, starfish-style, across the bed.][ Eduardo is definitely attractive enough most of the time to be in a movie, but he is the least dignified sleeper Mark has ever seen
There’s something so amazing about the fact that Eduardo looks like a moron when sleeping ^^
It’s like the world sees Andrew Eduardo the movie-star hottie but Jesse Mark sees the ‘real’ Eduardo who’s not perfect and more lovable because of it.

FINE don't answer me SURPRISE DUSTIN AWAYYYY.
Sometimes it's really, really difficult for Mark to remember that Dustin is actually really intelligent.
"I'm learning Portuguese," he says, to his hands. "I let him teach me how to bake," - Dustin makes some alarmingly rapturous noises behind him - "and, and, I still don't know how to say it."
*loud laugh* If your Dustin was in my life I would never get anything done XD
Everything you write for him is too hilarious for me to function ^^

..it's suddenly so obviously easy to do, suddenly effortless. It feels a little bit like everything has been pitching him forward to this, ever since he couldn't get the code out, and took a breath, and looked up at the August sunlight washing watercolour yellow through his windows.
"I love you,"
*flails wildly around* Yes.. YES! Oh my Goooood, he finally said it! HE SAID IT! *jumps up and down*

This was so spectacularly wondrous and fantastic! Another chapter, immediately!
*goes for the next part* *ignores that it’s 4 a.m.*

[clatter-in-vain.livejournal.com]

Eu te amo.

<3

[master-kogane.livejournal.com]

"I love you," Mark tells him, finally, and Eduardo goes wide-eyed. "But don't cry or anything, I just thought you should know - mmph - "

I just made this really pathetic, broken aaaaaw sound, and I should have been in bed a while ago, but I couldn't, not before reaching this part, at least. You're an amazing writer, and I can't wait to read the ending tomorrow!

[angelstar2.livejournal.com]

This Dustin is one of my favorite people. I just want to put him in my pocket.
But in love Mark trying to determine the code for the right time is beautiful, this fic is beautiful, remarkable and yes I love this fic enough to have its fic babies!

[badjujuboo.livejournal.com]

CANNOT BREATHE FROM THE LOVE OF THIS FIC

im going to diiiiiiiiiieeeeeee when its over!

[brighterlove.livejournal.com]

awww I just want to put Dustin in my pocket. Oh Mark!

[strongwriter.livejournal.com]

this is my second time reading this fic and IT GOT BETTER like I didn't think it could get any more amazing and then one day I was like "hmm, I think I'll reread sweet on you" and so I did and IT'S EVEN MORE AMAZING THAN I REMEMBERED ouch