mooging | fic: tsn; sweet on you (NC-17) (3e/3)

(continued from here)

//

Afterwards, when Mark is sticky and trying to catch his breath and vaguely aware that he is going to be sore all over in the morning, Eduardo makes him go shower while he orders take-out. Mark says, "What happened to the healthy option, Wardo?" in as deadpan a voice as he can find when he's still reeling, and Eduardo hits him with a pillow and tells him sometimes a person just really fucking needs some noodles.

Mark showers, and thinks about saying I love you, and doesn't feel stupid about it. Mostly he just feels stupid for not saying it earlier. He can feel Chris being proud of him, which is a little weird, but whatever. He's sort of proud of himself, a bit, for getting the fuck out of his own way.

They balance the take-out on their knees on the couch and watch a terrible movie because the synopsis sounds so god-awful they can't resist it -- when ice-dancing sensation Mariella starts receiving threatening letters at the ice-rink, can she solve her own murder before it's too late? (Mark picks holes in the grammar; Eduardo wants to know if Mark will be able to solve the murder before Mariella does; Mark says, "The butler did it," and Eduardo laughs, and steals a piece of his chicken) -- and Eduardo sits closer to Mark than is really necessary for the size of the couch, and Mark leans in against him as they both maneuver chopsticks around sleep-heavy fingers. The movie ends --

("How did you know there would be a butler?" Eduardo asks, incredulous. "You are the luckiest man on the planet."

Mark is fucked out and boneless and still turning over potential update problems, and he can't quite stop himself from thinking, sleep-drunk, yeah, maybe I am.

Instead, he shrugs, and says, "I'm just that good," and Eduardo squawks and pokes him in the side with a chopstick, leaving a little round szechuan stain on Mark's hoodie.)

-- and Mark is still picking at noodles he hasn't quite finished yet, still tapping at his laptop, because despite any grand gestures he may have made earlier in the day, he's never going to be able to switch that part of himself off completely.

Eduardo reaches over and puts a hand on Mark's, arched pianist-graceful over the keyboard. Mark looks up, blinking.

"So," says Eduardo, a little pink-cheeked, "I didn't get a chance to say it earlier - "

"Yeah," Mark interrupts, "because you jumped me."

Eduardo swats at him. "Shut up," he says. "I just, I didn't say that - "

Mark shoves more noodles in his face in case they can cure feelings-related embarrassment. They can't, it turns out, but they do taste really good.

Eduardo kisses Mark's neck, and Mark almost drops his plate, almost kicks his laptop off the coffee table, reflexes sleep-slow.

"I could have choked on my noodles, Wardo," he says, trying for admonishment and not even getting anywhere close.

Eduardo does it again, not even a little repentant.

"I love you," he says, against the curve of Mark's neck, and Mark actually does fumble his chopsticks. Eduardo laughs, softly. "Or, you know," he says, while Mark is going red and hot and flustered and grinning, "if you're going to get all emotionally stunted about it, I can say it in Portuguese and you can pretend not to understand me."

"Yeah," says Mark, shoving his plate onto the coffee table as Eduardo laughs and presses his forehead against Mark's shoulder. "Yeah, let's go with that plan."

Eduardo shifts round so he's straddling Mark, and Mark's hands go to his waist, instinctive. Less instinctive and more deliberate is the way he pushes Eduardo's shirt up so he can get his palms on Eduardo's skin, so that Eduardo rocks against him, and smiles so hugely it makes Mark go dizzy. This whole conversation is making him a little dizzy.

"Eu te amo," Eduardo tells him, cupping Mark's face in his hands, and Mark swallows hard, and turns his face to kiss Eduardo's palm.

"Eu te amo," he says, in case it means more in Portuguese, because he wants to say it every way he can. "I - you - Wardo - "

Eduardo's bright, genuine smile looks a little watery, and Mark rolls his eyes at him, at himself, because Eduardo is ridiculous and Mark is in love with him, so that probably says something about Mark that he should spend some time thinking about, but right now Eduardo is leaning down to lick his way into Mark's mouth as Mark falls against the back of the couch and tugs Eduardo down against him, so introspection can probably wait till later.

Later, Eduardo is shirtless and sweaty and grinning, and Mark is sacked out over his chest, and distantly aware that this couch has seen a number of things it probably shouldn't have, and Eduardo makes this little sleepy, satisfied noise, and Mark throws an arm over his waist, pressing closer. He isn't worried anymore, about code, or potential crashes, or - or - anything else.

"I mean it, you know," he says, quietly, in case Eduardo is asleep already. "I really mean it."

"Shh," says Eduardo, calm and sleep-slurred. "I know. Me too."

Eduardo makes it sound easy, and Mark thinks, drifting off himself, that maybe it always was.

//

Mark stops by Dustin's desk on his way into his office the next morning.

"Dustin," he says, standing behind Dustin's chair, and Dustin, who was there in the bar when Erica Albright said the internet isn't written in pencil, Mark, it's written in ink, Dustin, who linked his arm through Mark's while Mark was angry and hurt and humiliated and walked Mark home even though they were out with a group and listened to him talk about expanding to Yale and Columbia, Dustin, who said it was time they saw theFacebook in California, Dustin, who made Eduardo give Mark his number-- he spins round in his silly swivel chair and takes one look at Mark's face and knows. Mark doesn't even have to say anything, and Dustin knows.

"Oh my god," he says, in a voice entirely different to his ordinary exuberance, and then he throws his arms around Mark, and holds on tight.

Mark lets him.

"Well done," Dustin says, quietly, into the side of Mark's neck. Mark could maybe be insulted by that, he thinks, but he's not. He clears his throat and pats Dustin on the back like men do when they hug in movies, but Dustin doesn't let go of him.

"Hold your fucking horses," he tells Mark, as Mark starts to go red, because Dustin's desk is out on the main floor and people are staring. "I'm not done being proud yet, give me a second."

"I'm not a child," Mark grumbles. "You don't need to be proud of me."

"Shut the fuck up," says Dustin. "We're having a moment."

When he does let Mark go, he sits back down in his chair and grins up at him.

"Back to work, peons!" he commands. "Don't be jealous, there's more than enough of the Dustinator to go around."

Mark groans, and starts walking away, but something bounces off his back, and he turns around again, eyebrow raised.

Dustin gives him the thumbs up, and a much more Dustin-like wink, and Mark can't help grinning back at him.

//

from: mark.zuckerberg@facebook.com
to: chris.hughes@facebook.com
subj: and then we never speak of it

I told him.

He said it back.

THIS EMAIL NEVER HAPPENED.

from: chris.hughes@facebook.com
to: mark.zuckerberg@facebook.com
subj: I am not speaking about it

but if I were, I would say, OF COURSE HE DID.

and well done.

and I should quit right now and start my own advice column.

from: mark.zuckerberg@facebook.com
to: chris.hughes@facebook.com
subj: no-one's stopping you

but.

thank you.

from: chris.hughes@facebook.com
to: mark.zuckerberg@facebook.com
subj: don't hurt yourself on the feelings wheel

but.

you're welcome.

//

Valentine's Day is coming up, and if Mark had thought Thanksgiving was bad, it had nothing on this. Eduardo spends practically every waking second with his nose in his scrapbook, scribbling in pink pen on every page, endless sugar cookie refinements, ideas for novelty cupcakes, rough sketches of figurines annotated with incomprehensible shorthand scrawls, marzip? fdt? ed ppr? Mark peers over his shoulder and Eduardo nibbles the end of his pen and furrows his eyebrows at the pages and reaches up with his free hand to pat Mark's arm absently, and Mark has a sudden sympathy for anyone who's around him while he's wired in. Not a lasting sympathy, obviously, because his job is much more important than anything trivial like cleaning the kitchen or whatever it was Chris used to try and get his attention for while he was first building theFacebook, but still. At least Eduardo pats his hand once in a while, or looks up to give him sheepish, tired smiles with his mouth all covered in pink ink where he's bitten through the end of the pen without noticing. Mark does not look up when he's wired in, apart from when Eduardo falls asleep on his shoulder on the couch, and lets his scrapbook slip from sleep-loose fingers onto the floor. Mark picks up all the newspaper cuttings and picture printouts that fall out onto the floor, and prods Eduardo awake to get him into bed.

Eduardo is so tired some nights at the moment that he crawls into bed and collapses against Mark's shoulder, pressing exhausted, open-mouthed kisses against the curve of bone and falling bonelessly asleep in minutes. Mark had always thought that falling asleep before your head hits the pillows was just an expression, but Eduardo seems to be managing it, conked out almost as soon as he hits the mattress. On the one hand, Mark is wondering whether he should maybe be a little bit worried at the same time as being aware that this is exceptionally black pot et cetera, and on the other, he's missing the sex. On a third hand, which Mark needs to grow to make this work and which would also make eating while coding a lot more efficient, he sort of likes Eduardo making his arm go numb, the weight of him against his side. Eduardo loves him. Mark loves Eduardo. As far as Mark is concerned, Eduardo could make his entire body go numb.

He apparently actually does make Mark's brain go numb, because that is a ridiculous thing to think.

Admittedly it is sort of amusing to see someone else work like Mark does, but the main thing about this is -- they haven't had sex in, like, weeks.

Okay, maybe it's only been ten days, but that is practically weeks, especially when Eduardo keeps stretching out tired muscles on the couch and his stupid expensive shirt rides up over his stupid tan stomach, or when Eduardo is asleep all over Mark and smells really good, part cologne, part cake, or when Eduardo is just generally in Mark's vicinity and not having sex with him. Mark doesn't want to be, whatever, a needy loser or anything, but he said I love you and then the sex stopped. He's pretty sure that's not the right way round.

But he lets Eduardo work himself into the ground, because as tired as he is at night, it seems to make him happy to trundle up the stairs to the apartment covered in flour and the odd fleck of frosting, or to look up from his third new recipe of the night to see Mark sitting on the bakery kitchen table with his legs dangling off the edge and coding, keeping him company, and Mark is not going to be the person who gets in the way of Eduardo being happy.

He's just saying. There could be more sex.

Enough is sort of enough after about three more days of this, and Mark follows Eduardo into the shower one morning, shucking off boxers and t-shirt and leaving them in a heap on the kitchen floor on the way. Eduardo is standing under the spray, half-dazed because it genuinely does take him a twenty-minute shower to become a human in the morning. Eduardo also owns, like, hair product and body moisturizer, but Mark's time ratio of waking up to being a functioning human is not at all favourable to his not snapping and committing mass homicide before his second cup of coffee, some days his third, so he's not going to begrudge a guy his morning coping mechanism.

All this means is that Eduardo is still heavy-eyed and slow when Mark steps into the shower behind him, pressing himself along the long, wet line of Eduardo's back and running his hands flat, deliberate, down Eduardo's chest.

"What," says Eduardo, sleepily, rough, half turning his head to look back at Mark, and Mark kisses him gently on his jaw line, just behind his ear, the corner of his mouth he can reach, and says, muffled, "It's been two weeks, Wardo, okay," and reaches around and down for Eduardo's dick. He's hard already, and Mark doesn't know whether it's for him or just because Eduardo is like that in the mornings, but either way, it makes Eduardo groan and lean his head further back against Mark's shoulder, his throat already working round a swallow.

"Mark," Eduardo says, still in his sleep-rough voice, and Mark kisses him again, starting to move his hand, slow, careful, and says, "Just, shut up, Wardo," and Eduardo makes this content, turned-on sound, and brings an arm back to stroke Mark's cheek. Mark presses further into Eduardo's back, and lets the water run down over them both, and brings Eduardo off as slowly as he can until Eduardo is making these choked, needy little noises right by Mark's ear, and Mark is so turned on and the shower is so steam-filled that he thinks he might legitimately pass out.

Eduardo's knees actually buckles when he comes, and Mark will take the opportunity later to mock him endlessly for it, but right now he just groans and comes too, holding on hard to Eduardo's hips to keep them both upright, leaning heavily against the tiled wall.

"Mark," says Eduardo, sort of breathlessly chiding, when Mark presses kisses to the back of Eduardo's neck, breathing in water droplets and morning sweat, unwilling to let him go yet, "Mark, I'm going to be late."

"Mmph," Mark contradicts, muffled by Eduardo's skin against his mouth, running a palm over the top of Eduardo's thigh, trying to touch all of him at once. "Not important."

"It's - fuck - sort of important," Eduardo insists, but then he leans back a little further, and Mark curls round him to wash Eduardo's stomach clean, his inner thighs. Eduardo bites his lip and shifts against him, and it's almost worth going without sex for a while, for this.

Not that Mark is a huge advocate of going without sex in general, obviously. Just - this is almost definitely worth it.

The bakery only opens ten minutes late that day, which Mark considers a great testament to his powers of self-restraint. Eduardo laughs when he says this, later, and tells him he doesn't have a self-restraining bone in his body, and Mark makes some horrendously easy and crude remark about all the boners in his body, and Eduardo bites at his earlobe, which should not be as sexy as it is, and then they don't say much of anything comprehensible for a while.

//

There's a pre-Valentine's Day mixer or something in the office that Thursday, although Mark is pretty sure that the heart-shaped banners slung hastily over doorways in the afternoon are just to give this whole thing unfounded legitimacy as a front for people getting drunk and making poor decisions in the name of socializing or team-building or something else unnecessary. Mark can socialize if he wants to, and he's already built a team by hiring people in the first place, so he definitely doesn't need to trust fall into their arms or anything. He’s pretty sure not everyone would catch him, at that. He thinks, out of nowhere, that Eduardo would catch him.

Anyway.

There had actually been a conversation about whether or not it was politic to call it a Valentine's Day party, with Chris, as ever, erring on the side of caution with the temper of a man who sees what bullshit his job can occasionally be, and Dustin throwing himself dramatically over desks and bewailing that if greeting card companies got to make shit loads of money making single people feel bad, why couldn't they spent a small amount of money on making sure the single people on the Facebook staff felt excellent because they had access to a large amount of spiked punch and office party gossip? Chris had given in mostly to make Dustin shut up, Mark is pretty sure, and also because Chris gives in to Dustin more than he would like to admit.

Mark was mostly just deeply chagrined that that conversation needed to be a part of his life at all, and coded some more in case that would make it stop.

Eduardo even promised to surface from his haze of delicately colour-coordinating frosting to come to the thing. Mark didn't so much ask as mention it was happening, and Eduardo had said, "Sounds great, I'd love to come," in a way that wasn't so much presumptuous as it was understanding Mark's way of asking him, which was handy, because Mark had no desire to sound like he's asking Eduardo to prom or anything.

Dustin comes in and drapes a paper chain of hearts around Mark's neck like a lei around four Thursday afternoon, and when Mark looks snappishly up at him, he sees everyone else already abandoning their desks. Dustin grins down at him.

"Come celebrate love and happiness, Mark," he says. "I am single and need reassurance around this time of year, or I start thinking about Alsatians chewing on my decomposing shins and then I accidently drink all the vodka."

"You always drink all the vodka," Mark tells him, but he gets up from his desk anyway.

He goes out into the main office, and just as someone turns on some music, something popular that Mark doesn't know or like, the door from the stairwell opens, and Eduardo walks in. He looks around for a minute like he's taking it all in, like Chris and Dustin had when they first had a real office, the first big office after the angel investment, like they couldn't believe what they'd been part of. Eduardo looks like that, but a little different. He doesn't look disbelieving, and he's been here before so it's not, like, the holy shit this is Facebook thing that some people get when they walk in, relatives of some of the programmers or whatever - this is - Mark thinks - it's -

Well, whatever it is, it is tempered by the unbelievably ridiculous dance Eduardo does in his direction, his arms wide, one of the stupid things he does to horrible music in the kitchen while he bakes.

Mark is grinning at him despite himself before he can do anything about it.

"I am so proud of you," Eduardo tells him, drawing closer, with his customary earnestness, and Mark goes pink to his ears, and Dustin makes a sound like he wants to kiss Eduardo on the mouth.

Mark actually does kiss Eduardo on the mouth, because he is his to kiss.

"Why?" he says, pulling back after a second, when he's gotten both his point across and Eduardo's mouth red.

"Why what?" says Eduardo. In the background, Dustin squeaks, "Oh my god, Mark, you kissed his pride away, you are a kissing magician," but Mark is spared having to fire him or stand on his foot because Chris blessedly materializes and drags him away to the unnecessarily pink bowl of punch. Dustin doesn't need any help in finding his way to the punch, Mark thinks, mostly because he's pretty sure Dustin's already sampled some of that particular alcoholic ware, but it does at least get him to go away, so Mark's going to give that one a pass.

"Oh, right," says Eduardo, rubbing a sheepish hand over the back of his neck. "The being proud thing."

"Yes," says Mark. "I mean, apart from the obvious."

"The obvious?"

Mark waves a hand to indicate all the computers, their Wall, the big screen display. "Facebook," he says, and Eduardo laughs.

"Oh yeah," he says. "That."

"You disparage my life's work," Mark says.

Eduardo says, "You constantly mock my profession."

"But I'm CEO," says Mark, deadpan. "You're a baker."

"I could bake you," says Eduardo, which doesn't make any sense, but he's smiling, and Mark is smiling, and there are pink paper hearts all over the walls, and it doesn't really matter.

"Getting back to my original point," Mark says, because he doesn't let things go easily, "although I wouldn't mind a detour into an explanation for the dancing, but you sounded like you were about to give me a compliment, so let's go back to that."

Eduardo smiles, because he apparently likes it when Mark says things like that. Mark likes that.

"Because," he says, and he reaches out and takes Mark's hand, "I wasn't there to be proud when you started Facebook. Consider it making up for lost time."

The hearts on the walls have nothing on the colour of Mark's face right now. "Oh," he says, which is a reasonable reaction in anyone's book. Mark's book is Facebook and short reactions are definitely okay in that one. "Okay, I guess."

He thinks about Eduardo saying I want him to be proud of me, and I don't know if he is., it suddenly means more, what Eduardo is saying. It means a lot anyway, because Mark has been ruined by feelings, but that still makes a difference.

"You too," Mark says, in a hot, flustered rush. "I mean, I am. Of you. You should probably know that."

Eduardo laughs, but squeezes his fingers. "You are a ridiculous human being," he says.

"Dustin is chasing people with mistletoe in February," Mark tells him, changing the subject as quickly as he can, spotting Dustin doing just that over Eduardo's shoulder. "I should get points for not doing that, at least."

"I'll bear that in mind," says Eduardo, and kisses him again.

At some point Mark is going to have to remember that when he's at work he should be professional or something, but he is unprofessional enough to turn up to work unshowered and in yesterday's clothes when there's a big enough problem or when he's just not gone home overnight, so he thinks his employees should be able to deal with him kissing Eduardo in the middle of the office. No-one's really looking, anyway. Mark thinks the lure of the punch bowl is stronger than the thought of watching their boss get macked on by a skinny, beaming, mop-haired idiot, and then he thinks he maybe needs to hire better employees, because anyone who would choose punch, or anything, over Eduardo is clearly not in full possession of their intellectual faculties.

Then he reconsiders that again, because his employees have enough sense not to gawk at their boss while he's forgetting himself and letting his hands wander all over Eduardo in the middle of the office party, and that counts a whole lot in their favour.

"Mark," says Eduardo, grinning against his jaw, "not that I'm complaining, but do you think you should maybe get your hands off me while we're in public?"

"Shan't," says Mark, churlishly, but he lets his hands drop to his sides anyway.

Over Eduardo's shoulder, he can see Dustin bearing down on an unsuspecting Chris with a piece of mistletoe almost bigger than his head. Where did he get mistletoe in February anyway?

Not that Mark really cares.

"So," he says, and Eduardo must hear the new tone in his voice just in that one word, because he's going anticipatorily pink, which just makes Mark want to molest him in front of his entire staff with callous abandon. "We're in public, then."

Eduardo laces his fingers in with Mark's; Mark is shivering, just slightly, keyed up. He can't stop grinning. Eduardo says, leaning down close to Mark's ear, "Do you want to talk to me alone for a minute?"

"Sure," says Mark, like it's no big deal, and they make their way to the bathroom.

If they're followed out into the corridor by a Chris-flavoured squawk of indignation, well, then, Chris should have taken better anti-Dustin precautions.

//

Valentine's Day is a Saturday, and Mark wakes up alone in Eduardo's bed at about midday. Even from the opposite end of the apartment to the stairs he can smell brownies. He's pulling on a t-shirt when he bumps against the end of the bed, and something falls out from the duvet. It's a scrap of paper, and it says, in Eduardo's scrawling handwriting, DO NOT COME DOWNSTAIRS BEFORE SIX, I AM WARNING YOU. love, ?

Mark snorts, and rummages through the heap of his clothes on the floor to find his phone, and types out, my secret admirer is so demanding.

Eduardo replies, and also a total mystery, I am sure.

Five minutes later, when Mark is standing in front of the door to the stairs, he gets, I AM SERIOUS MARK DO NOT COME DOWN THESE STAIRS GET BACK TO YOUR LAPTOP.

you are not the boss of me, he sends back, but he obligingly goes and codes, listening to the coffee machine downstairs make rocket launching noises on and off throughout the afternoon.

He showers, at five, because it seems like a good idea, and then definitely does not jump when his phone goes again, half an hour later.

HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY MARKY MARK, Dustin has sent. I HOPE YOU VALEN WARDO'S TINE.

And then, before Mark can even hit reply: VALEN HIM GOOD. TINE HIM HARD. TINE HIM ALL OVER HIS GIRAFFE NECK.

what is your deal with zoo animals? Mark sends, and Dustin replies, whatever dude you are a panda, play nice.

Mark turns his phone off.

//

At six, he goes down into the bakery kitchen to find Eduardo looking rumpled and a little harried, but his face breaks into a smile when Mark walks through the door.

Mark blurts, out of nowhere, "Do I still have a tab?"

"Sorry?" says Eduardo, who is tracking the length of Mark's body with promisingly dark eyes, making Mark bite his lip to keep his grin in check. "What?"

"A tab," Mark repeats. "You said I had a clean slate, do you remember?"

Eduardo leans back against the table. "Yeah," he says, and Mark trembles, overcome, just for a second, with how far they've come.

That's stupid. He must have caught some kind of Valentine's Day disease -- but, looking at Eduardo in his wrinkled blue-grey shirt leaning against the kitchen table, he decides he can live with that, for now.

Eduardo says, "How opposed are you to the idea of getting dirty?"

"I just had a shower," Mark says, inanely, and then, taking in the colour rising in Eduardo's cheeks, "Why?"

Eduardo moves to one side, and there is a glass bowl filled with Valentine-pink frosting behind him on the table. Eduardo raises an eyebrow at him, and Mark hears, again, because it's never far from his mind, I'm not always very nice.

And okay, maybe it takes Mark a second to click properly, because he has spent the last couple of weeks watching Eduardo make so much frosting that he just expects the glass bowl to be sitting on the bakery table all the time, but then he looks at the curl to Eduardo's mouth, how dark his eyes are, and he gets the message fast.

He shrugs, as casually as he can. "Not especially," he says, and Eduardo takes one step across the room to him, and kisses him, messy, rough, until Mark's head is spinning.

"Good," he says, "because I was thinking of fucking you on the floor."

Mark laughs, a little reflexive thing, shocked, wanting.

"That's hygienic," he says, exhilarated, delighted. "Could you get closed down for that?"

Eduardo takes Mark's face in his hands and licks into Mark's mouth again, dirty, until Mark inhales sharply and grabs his hips with tight, desperate fingers. "I won't tell if you won't," says Eduardo, grinning wickedly at him, and tugs him down to the floor.

And so that is how Mark ends up lying on his back on a bakery's kitchen floor, covered in mostly licked off frosting, with Eduardo nosing up under his jaw, biting his way back down, and yes, okay, he should definitely have seen this coming from the moment he started hiding behind his laptop to watch Eduardo lick frosting off his fingertips.

This is one time Mark does not care in the slightest about not being three steps ahead of the game because Eduardo is currently licking frosting off the inside curve of Mark's right elbow, holding Mark's wrist over his head against the hard tile floor, which should probably be more sticky and less of a turn on than it is. And, because Eduardo is a high-achiever or whatever, he's also balls-deep inside Mark and just not moving, and Mark is bright red and whining, and, fuck it, if anyone thinks they could stay unmoved by any of that, then they are clinically insane.

"Fuck," says Mark, wrecked, bucking his hips up arrhythmically, taking shallow breaths, "Wardo, fuck - please - "

Eduardo leans down, holding Mark's gaze, and bites at Mark's nipple, swirling his tongue over the frosting with exaggerated relish. He starts jerking Mark off in earnest, curling pulls of his hand, and snaps his hips, and Mark comes all over his own stomach, strung out, body bowing up off the kitchen floor. He heaves in huge, airless breaths; Eduardo smirks against his chest and Mark doesn't even have the energy to be indignant.

He's actually got pins and needles in his toes, which should possibly be vaguely alarming, but the fucks that Mark gives at this moment are utterly and completely negligible. He shudders as Eduardo slides out of him, and shudders harder when Eduardo slips his fingers inside instead, crooking them to press just there.

"Fuck," Mark says, in a rasp of a voice, trembling. "Jesus, Wardo."

Eduardo crooks his fingers again, deliberate, and Mark shakes, everything too much, with jangling, too sharp pleasure.

"Good?" Eduardo asks, sliding his fingers out, and Mark bites down on a doubtlessly ruined noise, refusing to let Eduardo win, because, even now, he's just that petty.

"That is such a redundant question," Mark says, because, seriously, he's splayed out and sweating against the kitchen tiles, and his voice sounds like it's mostly rough breath, and Eduardo is grinning, self-satisfied, and it's simultaneously ridiculously attractive and unbelievably infuriating. The two sort of work together to make Mark want to blow him till he's sobbing Mark's name, undone.

"It's all right if you need to take a moment," says Eduardo, crawling up to bite at Mark's collarbone while Mark tries to remember how to make his limbs work again, and he sounds so pleased, so smug, so fucking self-composed despite the fact that Mark can feel how hard he is, his hips pressing insistently against Mark's thigh, that Mark groans and rolls them over right then, muscles protesting, pushing at Eduardo's chest with one hand until Eduardo's shoulders hit the tile. Eduardo grins, and fumbles the condom off, and, okay, Mark is definitely not cleaning this fucking kitchen after this. He will watch. And laugh. But not clean.

He bends at the waist and just takes Eduardo straight in his mouth, before he can say anything else, and Eduardo goes, "Fuck," gratifyingly, straight away. Mark isn't gentle, and he uses his teeth more than is polite and twists his hand around the base too sharply, and Eduardo bucks up and says, brokenly, "Mark, Mark," and comes.

Mark collapses back on the floor the moment Eduardo's done, and throws an arm over his eyes.

"So," he says, as steadily as he can, listening to Eduardo panting unevenly, coming down, beside him. "Happy Valentine's Day, I guess."

Eduardo pants out a laugh, and rolls sloppily over to put his face on Mark's chest despite the fact that Mark is slowly becoming uncomfortably aware of how sticky he is, just all over, smeared frosting and cooling sweat and come, his inner thighs wet, the tile against his back wet too, and how the hell did this become his life?

Not that he's complaining.

Eduardo presses kisses against the centre of Mark's chest, throwing an arm over Mark's waist. Soon, Mark is going to start being bothered about how naked he is on the floor of Eduardo's fucking place of work, but that's going to be another minute at least. For now, he just puts an arm over Eduardo's shoulders, and lets himself have this.

"Happy Valentine's Day," Eduardo says, completely sincerely, and Mark is in a relationship with a guy who spent the last three weeks researching the best way to make fondant hearts, and he is so fucking in love it is just plain stupid.

//

Seriously.

Fondant hearts.

//

Mark wakes up with the duvet twisted around his legs and his face mashed into the space between the two sets of pillows, and it takes him a minute, grimacing around the taste of his own breath and adjusting to the idea of being conscious, to notice the other side of the bed is empty. He's rolling over, bleary, when there's a voice from the doorway. Mark blinks until Eduardo comes into focus, morning-rumpled.

"Morning," says Eduardo, standing there at the foot of the bed with a tray in his hands, wearing a tee and black boxer-briefs and nothing else, with his hair still stupid from sleep and the marks of the pillows still pressed faintly pink into his cheeks, like he rolled straight out of bed and into the kitchen, to make this before Mark could wake up and get up too. He adds, redundantly, "I made pancakes."

"I see that," Mark says.

He's thinking distantly about the added traffic to the site overnight, this morning, relationship statuses changing and wall posts multiplying with congratulations, celebrations, commiserations, the potential holiday crash always looming in his mind, but he's also looking at Eduardo holding a breakfast tray and smiling at him, and he thinks, if he gets this wrong, he'll be the stupidest man alive.

Eduardo rolls his eyes, warmheartedly, and comes to sit down on the side of the bed.

Somehow Mark has got himself not only an actual person who actively wants to spend time with him, but who also bakes and makes pancakes and cuts them into hearts for the morning after Valentine's Day and brings fucking breakfast to bed on a tray with maple syrup in a little heart-shaped ramekin. It's so revolting, and so lovely, and the sort of thing a million girls would probably kill to use as their Facebook status, and it's almost too saccharine for Mark to put up with, but he supposes he can find it in himself to tolerate it.

Mark raises himself up on his elbows and just leans over to kiss the pillow creases on Eduardo's face, and then to kiss his mouth, and to slide a hand up under the worn blue cotton of his tee, and Eduardo makes a sound of acquiescence and also of forgetting about the pancakes, and presses Mark down onto his back, and leans in to suck a hickey just under his jaw.

Half a lazy, handsy hour later, Eduardo hangs over the edge of the bed to pick up the breakfast tray and frowns.

"The pancakes will be cold now," he says, like no-one ever invented the microwave, and Mark leans over to grab the tray off him, and then he actually looks properly at the pancakes for the first time.

Oh, god.

Okay, is that -- are they --

"Wardo," Mark says, in this not entirely even voice, "are they pony-shaped pancakes?"

"I don't know," says Eduardo, grinning wickedly, self-satisfied, and Mark's stomach is hot and he's so stupidly in love. "They could be horses. I'm not an expert in equine-shaped consumables."

"I hate you," says Mark, and Eduardo throws his head back and laughs, and then Mark drags him back down onto the bed.

When they surface again -- because, okay, there is morning sex and then there is the fact that Eduardo has made pancakes and no-one is eating them -- Mark gingerly picks up a pony pancake by its little flimsy leg.

"Please don't eat me," says Eduardo, in this stupid high-pitched voice, resting his chin on Mark's shoulder. "I'm too young to die!"

"Fuck off," Mark tells the pancake, and takes a bite.

Eduardo is laughing into the crook of Mark's neck. "Pony murderer," he accuses.

Mark leans over and folds another pancake in half, eating it with his fingers and no syrup. It tastes fine. It tastes like a regular pancake, but cold, and a little sticky. He makes exaggerated chewing noises, puffs his cheeks out just to watch Eduardo squawk and roll his eyes all fondly.

"At least let me warm them up," Eduardo says. "Let them go warmly to their deaths."

"They're fine," Mark says, reaching over to dip the bitten end of the pancake in the little syrup ramekin. "See?"

Eduardo makes a face, but then he darts in and bites into the pancake roll in Mark's hand before Mark can, licking deliberately at Mark's fingers. Mark makes a noise of outrage, and dips his finger in the syrup and draws a sticky line down Eduardo's cheek, and then Eduardo just laughs and tips the whole ramekin over Mark's bare chest, sleep-warm, and just as Mark is reacting, he ducks down and starts to lick the syrup away. Mark swats at Eduardo's head in fake protest, but he lets himself be pushed back into the mess of pillows and duvet, and neither of them bat an eyelid when the breakfast tray gets kicked to the floor.

/fin/

*
eu te amo: I love you

\o/ \o/ \o/ thank you for reading, this was a labour of love and also excessive sugar consumption.

also apologies for the abject lack of promised unicorns, but, um, oh god, all I can say to that is watch this space, but maybe not for a while. YOU DID NOT SEE THAT.

Current Mood: thirsty
Current Music: the ice is getting thinner - death cab for cutie