giving up the gun (2/3)
To: dmosk@facebook.com
From: mark@facebook.com
Subject: you are a ridiculous human being
and dinner tonight needs to be at 8:30 or 9, not 6.
To: mark@facebook.com
From: dmosk@facebook.com
Subject: I knew you would crack
I will be making grilled zucchini, brown rice with kale, and roasted potatoes with rosemary, with brown butter cake for dessert and you will eat some of everything because according to an article I saw in Parenting magazine kale is good for knocked up ladies. also you are buying the food in exchange for me not purposefully blowing up your kitchen.
now leave me alone so I can have sex with my girlfriend.
To: dmosk@facebook.com
From: mark@facebook.com
Subject: wait
aren't you meeting Chris with Eduardo right now or something?
(I will ignore that you read Parenting magazine, but only for now).
To: mark@facebook.com
From: dmosk@facebook.com
Subject: i am a ninja
I have plans to lure her into a restroom.
(noted and appreciated)
To: dmosk@facebook.com
From: mark@facebook.com
Subject: oh god
never speak to me again please.
To: mark@facebook.com
From: dmosk@facebook.com
Subject: you know you love me
will you forgive me if we leave wardo with the check?
and it's not like we never heard your loud sex noises back at college, you know.
To: dmosk@facebook.com
From: mark@facebook.com
Subject: maybe
This conversation is over.
-
"Yo, bitches."
"Dustin," Eduardo grinds out, "you have a bad habit of popping up places unexpectedly."
"Yeah," Dustin grins, leaning over to kiss Chris on the cheek, "it's one of my charms."
Clearly Eduardo doesn't notice how relieved Chris is that a third party has appeared, because he mostly just looks pissed. He's making what Dustin used to call the angry rabbit face back at Harvard, and it all usually worked out back then because Wardo would make the face, Dustin would make the comment and get smacked upside the head, and then everything would be more or less okay. He misses when it was as easy as that to fix everything, he really does.
Right now, though, Eduardo just looks angry and Chris's eyebrows are almost at her hairline.
"Hi Dustin," she says, and scoots over in the booth. Dustin slides in next to her, accidentally kicking Eduardo under the table. His eyebrows draw together in consternation. "What's up?"
"Convinced Mark to let me leave early," he says, "and I was hungry. Are you guys finishing up, or staying for dessert?"
"We were getting ready to go," Eduardo says stiffly, but then Dustin holds up a hand.
"You haven't gotten dessert? But I have been to this place before and they have cheesecake, Wardo, do you not know the mystical wonders of cheesecake?"
Chris says, "you're strange," but she also flags down the waiter and therefore Dustin will count it as a win. Except Eduardo's kind of blinking, looking like a fish out of water, and how much time does it take to fall out of a rhythm? When it was Chris-and-Dustin and Mark-and-Eduardo shifting into and out of Chris-Dustin-Mark-Eduardo, they were always fine then, but it's only been four months since everything really fell apart, and now all their strings are loose and that magic that made them work, whatever it was, that thing is totally gone, like dissolved Elmer's glue from pre-k.
(A lot of his exuberance is faked right now; it's stressful keeping track of what's going on and who is mad at who).
"Is Mark at work?" Eduardo asks, quite abruptly. Chris is giving their orders to the waiter, asking for a pot of coffee too because she's brilliant like that and also probably really tired from dealing with all of them, and then there's Dustin.
Dustin is confused.
"Yes," he responds, after an appropriate time of casting around for an answer. "So was I, but then I left to come here."
"How much is Mark at work?" Eduardo presses on, and Chris's eyes are flicking from side to side like what, what is this, why is this happening now.
So Dustin says it. "What. What is this, Wardo, what?"
"How much is Sean at work?" Eduardo asks, ignoring Dustin's very polite inquiry. Chris sighs, like she's been through this endlessly over the past hour or so.
"Dustin," she says, "what does Mark do at work?" It's obvious that Eduardo has just been disregarding everything she's said, maybe because it isn't fitting into the pigeonhole he's assigned Mark. Dustin forgets that Wardo gets tunnel vision sometimes.
"Has her headphones on all the time and codes and occasionally responds to my emails when they get irritating enough or when I put dancing gifs in them. Also, sometimes when it's absolutely necessary we drag her to meetings and hope that she won't piss off the people she needs to be nice to. And it's gotten worse since you came and-- since June, but I guess that's partially attributed to hormones, so maybe I'll have to forgive her for that," he responds promptly.
"What does Sean do at work?" Eduardo infuses the word Sean with a particular type of loathing. Dustin is impressed.
"He owns 7 percent of the company," Dustin says, "that's what happened in the end. He's not around much." He doesn't add because I discouraged him from doing so, even though it's totally the truth (and Mark doesn't know that yet either, so let's not tell him). "I think he might be in Panama right now."
"That's more than I own," Eduardo says, and Dustin has to inject with a currently because lawsuits can be effective in changing that kind of thing.
"At least you're not, like, exiled away because you have fucked-up behavior and paranoia," Dustin is trying to be helpful, but he has been sick of this for a really long time, and it's been so much extensive than it feels. It is also taking a very long time for their cheesecake to come, but that's totally beside the point.
He really wants that cheesecake. Something has to make coming out here worth it (besides haunting the depths of Mark's brain forever and ever, but that's always just been a work perk) and poor Chris is probably traumatized from the intensity of Eduardo's emotions.
"Fucked-up behavior and paranoia?" Wardo repeats, and Dustin is nodding sycophantically before he realizes that it might be better to stop.
Instead he says, "you probably should have punched him while you had the chance," and though that won't fix everything, Eduardo's shoulders do seem to relax.
"I'm glad that's out there," Chris says in that half-sarcastic and half-entirely-serious way of hers. Dustin knows she agrees, though she would never condone it. At that moment, their dessert arrives. Dustin digs in with fervor. "Anyways, what I've been attempting to tell you is that I cannot read Mark's mind, Eduardo. And furthermore, she hasn't told me much. I do have the benefit of being good friends with her, but that's about it. She's feeling unsure, she's confused-- she's twenty years old and pregnant, for god's sake, and she's irreconcilably fought with one of the few people who loved her for who she was."
"I didn't think of it like that," Eduardo says.
Dustin shrugs. "'Course you didn't. Have a bite of this man, you're missing out."
Eduardo says, "I need to, uh, I really need to go," and jumps out of his seat, throwing some money down on the table.
Chris raises an eyebrow. "At least he isn't stiffing us on the bill," she offers, before digging in.
"Yeah, but that was ruder than I would have given him credit for. It's Wardo. His super-power is politeness and class."
"Maybe he finally bought a clue," Chris says. "Or at least I can hope."
"Mmmm. Maybe." Dustin considers life for a moment. "Eduardo is really missing out with this cheesecake," he says, happily forking another bite into his mouth. "It's so creamy. Ohmygod."
"The effect this dessert has on you is kind of frightening," Chris sighs, "but it is rather good."
"Maybe we'll be nice and bring everyone back some," which is a wonderful idea if Dustin knows anything and clearly he does, because he is a Harvard student, albeit one taking a semester or two off. "Hey, where'd Wardo go, anyways? Back to his hotel to wallow in baby-daddy angst? Lawyer meeting?"
"I doubt it. I think he's decided that enough is enough."
Dustin glances up from scavenging up delicious crumbly bits of graham cracker crust. "He and Mark are finally going to talk about their feelings?"
Chris's smile is more than a little wry. "No, I think he's going to yell at her and see if anything he says sticks."
Dustin's head tilts. "A different strategy than I would have gone with, based on my time observing the subject. But it could be effective, right?"
"Maybe." Chris sips her coffee, grateful for the caffeine. "I'm not going to get any more involved than this than I already unfortunately am. It's giving me a headache."
"I know what you mean," Dustin responds. "Stress headaches, worried headaches, every type of headache imaginable. And being super cheerful to both of them also makes me want to kill both of them so there's that too, on top of everything else."
"Don't kill anyone, please. I don't think my parents would approve of my dating a serial killer."
"They already don't like me," Dustin pouts. "So would it make a much of a difference?"
"They don't mind you," Chris says, "it's just that they look at you and all they see is a person who is having sex with their daughter."
Dustin scratches his chin. "Aha. It all makes so much more sense now." He points his fork accusingly. "Though I will also add that Mark's mom loves Eduardo and they have done dirty, dirty things to each other."
Chris shrugs. "Maybe if you wore more suits."
The fork does a dramatic figure eight in the air. "Blasphemy!"
-
He is cold. It isn't the weather-- California in September is lovely-- but inside. He is cold.
It should be number one on a list of things not to expect: the person who you are suing for millions of dollars is pregnant with your baby. Eduardo is fairly sure that this kind of thing only happens on bad telenovelas, and even then there is probably much more crying, hatesex and make-up sex, and emphatic declarations, but so far with him and Mark there's just been some shock and quiet anger in a ladies' room.
At least they got the setting right.
It's a really warm day outside. Mark will be inside, Eduardo knows, eating candy and coding, since there is no one at the office to wrangle her out of the habit otherwise-- Chris and Dustin being gone and Sean being irrelevant. (He likes that thought much more than he'd care to admit).
His phone buzzes. It's Chris.
don't do anything stupid
i wasn't planning on it, he texts back. He's sure that she and Dustin are both shaking their heads right now and scarfing down cheesecake and talking about him and Mark, or maybe they're making out because they're finally, blissfully alone and away from other people's problems.
Eduardo's more than a little surprised when no one tries to stop him from entering the Facebook offices-- a good omen, considering that the last time he was there he was escorted out by security. There aren't many people around but it's lunchtime, when the normal people eat.
Mark is at her desk though, wired in with omnipresent headphones on, hunched over her laptop. The sight of her is so ingrained, so familiar, that it makes his heart hurt a little. Eduardo walks up to her and takes the headphones off. It has an instantaneous effect; Mark hits Control+S and turns around.
"What the hell do you think you're-- oh. Eduardo. What the hell are you doing here?"
"We needed to talk," Eduardo says. His back is ramrod-straight. "This is a good time."
Mark turns back to the computer screen. "Not for me."
"Too bad." He reaches over her shoulder and closes the laptop. Mark looks indignant.
"You could have ruined--"
"I saw you save it," Eduardo interrupts. "Where can we go that's quiet and private?"
Mark shrugs mulishly. "Nowhere here, it's too open. There might be a coffee shop nearby."
"You're not supposed have caffeine when you're pregnant, I'm sure of it."
"They do sell other things there." She pulls on an old, loose sweatshirt over her tank top. With some surprise, Eduardo realizes that it's one of his from college, one that he had thought went missing at least a year ago.
"Fine," he says. "Let's go."
The walk there is short and tense. When they arrive at the cafe, Mark, with a pointed look on her face, orders a chamomile tea and a scone. Eduardo just gets a coffee. "So," he says to start, sitting down heavily.
"You're probably not supposed to be here with me."
"Let's just skip past that part of the conversation, Mark, it's getting old."
She takes a sip of the tea, then puts it down and makes a face. She's always hated herbal tea. "Why are we here, Wardo?"
He looks at her directly for maybe the first time since this whole thing started. Notes the drawn look on her face, notes how she hasn't really gained any weight except what is expected, and all of that is in her belly. She looks like she's about to collapse, and down in the pit of his stomach, Eduardo feels something that he had thought was hard and compacted beyond repair soften.
"You look pathetic," he points out.
"Okay, fine, but that's not what you came here to say. I would appreciate it greatly if you just-- said it." Mark picks at her scone, pulls out each and every raisin and stacks them on her place, arranges them in groups according to the Fibonacci sequence even though she is only able to get up to five.
His head is in his hands. "I- I don't know, okay? I don't know what I want to say. I should be mad at you. No, you know what, I am furious with you. You are my best friend, Mark, and yet you keep all these things from me and you do it all the goddamn time."
"Are?" She asks. "Not were?"
"I can't tell," Eduardo says dully. "I can't fucking tell because you do all this shit to me and I let you, and then I do something about it and it still hurts to look at you! And if it didn't hurt, I would absolutely despise you."
"But you don't."
"I am so angry it makes me cold." His voice is quiet. "But anger is not hatred. Give me time for it to fester, but I'm not there yet."
She knocks the raisins out of order and starts stacking them in a pyramid. "It hurts to look at you too. Across the room in the deposition-- or-- and I have this constant reminder of you with me, all the time, and I can't get away from it because it is literally inside of me. You can get away from me. Fuck, you ran away from me. You left me behind once you stopped understanding. I can't ever do that again now because of a fetus that's fifty percent you and fifty percent me because one day she's going to want to know about her goddamn father."
Eduardo's eyes stay steady. "No, it was you who abandoned me, Mark. There's no rewriting history."
"You froze the account."
"You set up meetings without me!"
"So maybe it wasn't just me and maybe it wasn't just you, okay, maybe we both made a whole fucking mess of everything." Mark's starting to breathe heavily, and she can feel a knot of anger forming below her breastbone. And this-- this is good, this is awesome, because she hasn't been pissed off at him like this yet, hasn't felt that ice-cold rage that allows her to forget the soft memories she has from less than a year ago, still painful and fresh and carrying a misty sheen. "I told you, Wardo! I told you I needed you, I said that I needed my CFO--"
"And then you fucked Sean Parker and as an extra special bonus you fucked me out of my own company!" He stands up, the chair making a sharp noise as it teeters backwards and falls, hard. "I don't think that you needed me so much then, did you Mark? Once Sean came along and seduced you with visions of this thing that I was apparently preventing you from?"
She stands up too. Eduardo's too tall for her to be on an equal eye-level, but Mark's had some practice this last few months of making herself look taller than she is, and throws her shoulders back and brings her chin up. "I never had sex with Sean," she hisses, "and can you get that through your jealous fucking head? I told you that. I thought it was established and if not, I will say it under oath. And if your lawyers want me to prove it once and for all, there can be a paternity test. I meant it when I said that I needed you, Wardo. I may not need you now, but I certainly did then. And whatever I might have done, you fucked me over too."
"You don't have the right to call me Wardo any more," he says, and stalks out of the cafe, leaving her with the check.
-
To: mark@facebook.com
From: dmosk@facebook.com
CC: esaverin@gmail.com
BCC: christi.hughes@harvard.edu
Subject: you guys are fucking idiots
You guys are fucking idiots.
-Dustin
To: dmosk@facebook.com
From: mark@facebook.com
Subject: go away
you're not helping
To: mark@facebook.com
From: dmosk@facebook.com
Subject: when has telling me that ever worked?
yes i am
To: dmosk@facebook.com
From: mark@facebook.com
Subject: fuck you
I know you're back in the office by now so get back to actually doing your goddamn job
To: mark@facebook.com
From: dmosk@facebook.com
Subject: work
you are creating a very hostile work environment and I do not appreciate it.
To: dmosk@facebook.com
From: mark@facebook.com
Subject: i don't care
I don't care
-your boss
To: dmosk@facebook.com
From: esaverin@gmail.com
Subject: Re: you guys are fucking idiots
That's obvious, asshole.
To: esaverin@gmail.com
From: dmosk@facebook.com
Subject: asshole? really?
nah, it's you and Mark who are the assholes. I'm just a concerned (and very very very pissed off) friend.
To: dmosk@facebook.com
From: esaverin@gmail.com
Subject: yes, asshole
seriously Dustin, stay out of this. It is between Mark and me and our lawyers now.
To: christi.hughes@harvard.edu
From: dmosk@facebook.com
Subject: our friends
I have had it up to HERE with them and here is a place very very far away beyond the sun, accessible only by a super-awesome rocket ship.
Can we lock them in a room together and not let them out
please
please
pleasepleaseplease
-
Eduardo was always tender with her. He was gentler than she thought she deserved, soft and caring and fucking tender, and his anger now is in such sharp contrast that Mark doesn't know what to do with it.
It would be something as simple as sitting on a bed in Kirkland studying together, leaning into each other until they were melting out of themselves, but Eduardo would always be doing something-- stroking circles on her ankle, tapping out a beat on her calf-- that would bring her back to herself, and so she never minded the contact at all.
Now he looks at her with so much disbelief, like he can't believe that ever happened, like memories of touch and falling asleep on each other and not even caring about waking up with stiff necks, like all of those are nothing to him.
And Mark wants to keep the field level, so Mark plays along.
-
Dustin is still at work. And yes, Chris knows that it's because he took off around lunchtime to see her, but Dustin is at work, Mark is with her here, and there's something a little backwards about that, isn't there.
It's also because Mark is clearly in distress. Chris has known Mark for a while now, and usually she's-- controlled. Calm. Not robotic, because Mark does feel things, but usually they're hidden pretty deeply away so that she won't get distracted. She saves her words for when they're necessary, saves her emotions until she has time for them.
"We can't talk to each other," Mark says. She's curled into a ball on what is nominally Chris's bed, head pressed to her knees. "Every time we try we end up screaming and furthermore we keeping fighting in public, which the company can't--"
"Okay," Chris says, "Mark--"
Her head tilts up. "And it's not that I don't want to talk to him, I do, because there are things he needs to know." Mark's leaning into her now and it's more like she's comforting her six-year-old cousin, not her twenty-year-old genius friend.
"And you tell him, and then he gets upset," Chris confirms. Mark nods.
"Yeah."
A sigh. "Right, okay, I'll just ask it. Mark, not only what are you trying to tell him, but how?"
Mark blinks. "The truth."
"Your truth, or the truth?"
"Either. Both." Mark shrugs. "Everything looks bad from his side of it. I got really angry, earlier. It felt good."
"That isn't constructive," Chris feels the need to point out.
"It was then," Mark responds. "But then I told him that I won't ever be able to forget him even if I try, and I think that upset him the most, like, he didn't want me to forget him as much as he's trying to forget me?"
"Again, what exactly did you say?" Chris pulls Mark a little closer, and she closes her eyes.
"I said that he ran away from me first. And I said that I couldn't do the same because I had this reminder of him, half him and half me, and it was inside me and I won't ever get away from it for the rest of my life."
"You said a lot of things that probably hurt there," Chris says. "Look, this might be crazy, you can laugh at me for suggesting it if you want-- but why don't you just apologize?"
Mark looks up at her. "I deserve an apology too," she says. "I actually did say that much, that it was both of us."
"Maybe he doesn't want to acknowledge that yet."
"He should."
"Don't be purposefully obtuse, I know exactly how smart you are." Chris pushes her hair back behind her ears. "If you say sorry-- if you give an inch-- he might give you two."
-
Once upon a time, back at Harvard when they were first falling into being them, Eduardo recited poetry to her.
Mark knows that he picked it up from Chris, who was reading her way through Harvard's Intro to English Lit classes and therefore constantly leaving books lying around, but it doesn't change the fact that yeah, Eduardo once recited to her a Byronic love poem.
Mark had blinked and told him she would understand it better in binary, and that had startled a laugh out of him. And then she had followed it up with a quote from Measure for Measure (which she now knows thanks to Chris is one of Shakespeare's "problem plays" and was first performed in 1604; midterms were driving her friend batshit insane), telling Eduardo "you are ever precise in promise-keeping", and then he had said I love you once he thought she had fallen asleep.
She hadn't, and she didn't tell him that she could hear him, but she thought that the next morning, when she had touched his shoulder and looked down at him, soft and unguarded, that he might have known anyways and didn't really care.
-
To: esaverin@gmail.com
From: mark@facebook.com
Subject: byron
Once you told me that I was all that's best of dark and bright.
To: mark@facebook.com
From: esaverin@gmail.com
Subject: Re: byron
It's just a line from a poem, Mark.
To: esaverin@gmail.com
From: mark@facebook.com
Subject: Re: byron
What's gone and what's past help
Should be past grief
To: mark@facebook.com
From: esaverin@gmail.com
Subject: Re: byron
That's Shakespeare, not Byron. I do know how to use Google.
I thought that you could only relate to code. You didn't define any variables in that last email, did you.
To: esaverin@gmail.com
From: mark@facebook.com
Subject: Re: byron
I need to talk to you.
To: mark@facebook.com
From: esaverin@gmail.com
Subject: Re: byron
What's different this time than last?
To: esaverin@gmail.com
From: mark@facebook.com
Subject: Re: byron
You've opened the emails, so obviously you have some interest in finding out.
-
When she opens the door, Eduardo is lying on the bed with a laptop on his stomach, graceful and relaxed, reading stock quotes and the business section of the New York Times. She's seen him like this a thousand times, this is not a new sight, but now, somehow, it's changed.
Mark has to keep reminding herself how different everything is, because slipping and falling on your ass gets tiring after a while.
"Oh," Eduardo says, "you're here."
She enters the room even though she hasn't been invited in and hovers around the doorway. "Hi," Mark says. It is a nothing word, a pitiful beginning, and she will do better than that in the next ten seconds. And she does. "I'm sorry," she says, and though those two words are only marginally bigger than the first one, they hold within themselves so much more.
Her skin doesn't feel as tight anymore.
Eduardo says, "what?" and looks up from his laptop.
"I'm sorry," Mark repeats. "For what happened. For everything that's happened, from June to now. Up to and including whatever's been going on at the depositions."
"Okay," Eduardo says evenly. "So why tell me this now?"
That's a good question, Mark thinks. She could defend herself and her business decisions, open up a wound that's barely scabbed over, go back to the pattern of the past few days. But that hasn't been working, and she can't run away-- she doesn't want to-- and maybe this time something different will work.
"Because I miss you," she says.
Eduardo rubs at his eyes. "That's a terrible reason," he responds. "But you can come in."
-
Here's the thing: Mark doesn't regret doing what she did for her company. It's the kind of move that pretty much labeled her a heartless bitch through the Valley, but what she did made the best business sense at the time. If Eduardo was an impartial outsider studying her in one of his economics classes then he would have seen it.
But it's different when it's your best friend doing it to you. Maybe she finally gets that now.
"You miss me," Eduardo repeats, making room for her on the bed. He closes his laptop. "What's making you say that?"
"I, um, I have a doctor's appointment in a week," Mark begins, "and I just got the emailed reminder from my assistant right after we, ah, had words. And I realized that, you know, physically and biologically, you're as much as part of this as I am, and not in a bad way."
"You said it hurt to carry around a reminder," Eduardo points out. He's always had a terrible poker face, and even she can see through his expression that he's hoping that this conversation might end better. She's hoping it too, she truly is. Anger stopped being satisfying, maybe, or detachment hurt more than she could say.
Mark looks down at her hands. "I don't feel that way all the time," she says quietly. "All it really does is emphasize how much you should be here during this with me."
"Not to continue circling around the subject, but can I remind you that you wanted me gone. You wanted me gone so much you drew me out of the thing that was keeping us together." Eduardo has a headache now, right between the eyes, and Mark can feel one beginning to thud its way into existence.
"Facebook was never the only thing that was keeping us together," Mark says. "If you thought -- I never meant for you to think that. I said I needed you, and that-- that's not going to change, that hasn't changed in the time we've been apart. I didn't just need your money for Facebook, Eduardo, I needed you to be there partnered with me all along." She kisses him on the lips and while he doesn't kiss back at first, he is unresisting. "I've been told that I'm not the best at communicating-- maybe I just never used the right words."
Mark leaves him there sitting on the bed, not wanting to overstep anymore than she already has.