Fic: How One Thing Leads to Another, A Story of Coincidence [The Social Network][2/2]
<-- part one
iv.
When Mark said they would have to go a little out of the way, he really wasn't kidding.
Forty-five minutes into the drive, the city growing thinner and more sparse outside the window, Eduardo starts to understand why Alicia-Desarae considered it such a treat to go all the way to Wal*Mart for Taco Bell.
She falls asleep against the door, her knees tucked up onto the seat. Her shoes light up flickeringly every time they hit a hard bump, but she doesn't stir. There's something with a lot of bass playing on the radio, familiar -- Mark's taste in music hasn't really changed since he gave Microsoft the middle finger over his mp3 player back in high school. Eduardo keeps closing his eyes to it, jolting awake again when the DJ comes in between songs, his accent thick.
The Zuckerberg house turns out to be nothing like what Eduardo was expecting; small and tucked onto the end of a housing development, close enough to the M4 that when Mark throws the car into park and shuts the engine off, Eduardo can still make out the ghostly sounds of traffic. Beyond it is a copse of trees, eerie-looking in the dark, and the house itself is dark-colored, all wood paneling like somebody built it with the vague idea of a cabin in mind. Compared with the neighbors, the lawn is horrifically overgrown.
"What?" goes Mark, seeing the way Eduardo eyeballs the choked-up weeds and the tall grass. What probably just looks unkempt in the daylight looks positively dangerous at night. "It actually helps with keeping up anonymity, if you can believe it. And what's so natural about carefully-manicured lawns, anyway?"
He goes around to the other side of the car, opening the passenger-side door. Alicia-Desarae twitches sleepily when he reaches a hand around her to unbuckle her seatbelt, but doesn't open her eyes. Mark smiles knowingly.
"Come on," he says, coaxing. "I know you're awake. You're just faking sleep so I'll carry you into the house. I'm wise to your tricks, you know."
She remains stubbornly still.
He sighs. "What were you saying earlier about wanting the same treatment as everybody else? You don't see me carrying Eduardo into the house."
"I'd like to see you try," Eduardo scoffs, standing off to the side. Mark's eyes flick to him, resting briefly around the extra weight he's put on in the past twenty years, and so therefore misses it: Alicia-Desarae's mouth twitching involuntarily with a smile. He lifts his eyebrows at Mark, nodding at her.
She knows she's been had, so she stretches her arms up, saying sleepily, "I'm not ten yet, though."
This earns her a snort, and Mark slips his arms under her body as she wraps hers around his neck. He hefts her up with some difficulty -- she is nine years old, after all, and Mark is relatively short. He bumps the car door shut with his hip before Eduardo can get it, and carries her as far as the front step before he sets her down so he can unlock the door.
Inside, it's dark and quiet. Keying in an alarm code that looks longer than most of Eduardo's college textbooks, Mark bends down as Alicia-Desarae toes out of her shoes, scooping them up and putting them in a cubby full of shoes: men's sandals, worn and peeling along the soles; little girl tennis shoes with velcro straps; animal-print kitten heels that Eduardo imagines must belong to Mrs. Zuckerberg, since he doesn't think they're really Mark's style. He leaves his shoes by the door, not sure if guests get a cubby hole.
"Bed?" Alicia-Desarae asks hopefully.
"Nuh-uh," Mark's voice is stern. "Not until you do your hair."
The prospect of more work made her scrunch up her nose in disgust. "Do I have to?"
"That was the agreement, remember? We let you get relaxer because you said you could do the work to keep it nice."
From the face she makes, Eduardo gets the impression that, like most children, Alicia-Desarae had made the promise of later work without fully contemplating what that work might be, just because she wanted a result now. "If you and Mom hadn't given me the worst hair in the world, I wouldn't need relaxer," she grumbles, vehement.
"You caught us," Mark drawls, completely unsympathetic. "We planned it that way. There was a check-list. 'Give daughter hair like a circus freak.'"
They're bickering again, so Eduardo slips around them, hoping to explore before Mark remembers that he'll have to drive him back once his daughter is tucked up in bed. There's a staircase immediately in front of him, leading to what he assumes are the bedrooms, and around it, he catches a glimpse of low night-light on kitchen surfaces, and what looks like a living room. He heads for the latter.
It turns out to both be the living room, and not quite; it's got the worn look of a frequently-used room, one a child is in and out of constantly, but it doesn't have the desktop set-up he'd expect a room that Mark frequents to have. Instead, there's a ring of sofas and armchairs, all facing the long, glass windows that expose the front patio and the lawn, weedy as it is all the way to the tree line. Bookshelves line the walls, and Eduardo drifts over, curious -- he'd have thought if anyone would have migrated to e-readers without fuss, it would be Mark. The shelves are a mix of thin children's books and numerous paperbacks, set at the respective eye-levels of their readers. One of them is pulled out half-way; Eduardo fingers the beaten-up spine, smiling faintly.
My Mouth is a Volcano. This had been one of Lydia's favorites when she was little, too; a story about a boy who always said what was on his mind, even when those words were hurtful. He learns that not every thought in his head is so important that it needs to be shared; sometimes, they're so important they need to be kept secret, and it's okay that everyone has secret words rumbling in their tummies, because it's important not to hurt people. A good story, he thinks, for a Zuckerberg.
There's another book sitting on the arm of the armchair by the patio door, some gritty-looking true crime novel he doesn't recognize. A bookmark sticks out of it, a little over half-way through.
Eduardo's parents had taught him two different surefire ways to get the measure of a man. Eduardo's father said you did it by taking stock of how he treated his lessers, which -- while being a darkly ironic thing to say, if you think about how Mr. Saverin treated Eduardo over the years -- didn't help him in this case, because Mark let his employees play Pac-Man in the middle of their work day and his chairman make cracks about how he was training his spawn to replace her, and let his daughter eat sugary snacks after midnight.
Eduardo's mother, on the other hand, said the quickest way to get the measure of a man was to look at what he used to mark his place in book. Everyone looks at their bookmarks; it's the best place to keep the most important reminders.
Sinking down into the armchair, he flips the book open; he catches a couple receipts when they try to flutter out. There's also an appointment card for Alicia Zuckerberg, but the biggest thing of all is a postcard -- the front, he's surprised to see, isn't some pretty landscape but a bold-print saying in some thick stencil font:
1) wake up
2) swag
3) go to sleep
4) repeat
Which makes him grin. There's tight, cramped script on the back, postmarked the week before, from a location Eduardo can't quite read. It's signed Love, Maura.
That's my mother's -- he remembers Alicia-Desarae starting to say, and smiles to himself. He's glad he wasn't the only one who didn't immediately catch the subtle pronunciation difference between Maura and Moira.
Still. There are stranger coincidences in the world than Mark and Eduardo having married women with similar names.
A scuffle, and Mark appears in the doorway, looking curious. There's a pounding of feet from overhead that suggests Alicia-Desarae didn't get her way for once, and is expressing her displeasure by stomping.
"Is your wife not home?" Eduardo asks, perplexed.
Mark and his wife met in 2005 at the annual Bay Area freeze mob, performed every year, tongue-in-cheek, in the enormous lobby of the Googleplex -- an event that had, ironically, been organized that year for the first time through Facebook. The story, if you believe Wikipedia, is that the two of them posed together by the drinking fountain, Mark bent to drink and her interrupting him, the water streaming past their frozen faces, him looking up and her looking down and their eyes locked for the full ten minutes. Their respective poker faces made them exquisite to behold.
Apparently, another way to get the measure of a man is to stare unblinkingly into his eyes for ten minutes. Who knew.
Her first deployment after that (Iraq, before the wedding, before anybody even really knew that they were dating,) marked a noticeable spike in the intensity Mark felt about his job; a ripple that went through the spiderweb-like business world, tugging even at the far-flung edges out where Eduardo and his kind lived, because now for once, Mark was on the same side of the line as the people he was trying to reach -- he knew how it felt, when sometimes the easiest way to communicate with a loved one stationed overseas was Facebook.
There's a picture, floating out there on the Internet somewhere (and in one of Eduardo's flash drives, in a box he probably needs to pick up from their old house before Moira takes it as permission to throw it away,) because nobody really knew what they had until later, of the day those troops came home; you can just see, in the background behind someone else's cheering, happy face, Mark and Maura wrapped around each other, Maura's face buried in Mark's neck and her fatigue-print cap transfered to his head.
There's no faking the the kind of raw expressions they wore, and Eduardo couldn't even muster up an echo of bitterness that Mark at least remembered to pick her up from the airport, because it wasn't the same at all.
Her second deployment (South Africa during the 2016 riots, so soon after the birth of her daughter that it had people shifting and muttering about how America treated those that defended them in wartime, asking a soldier to leave her newborn daughter like that,) Mark joined her briefly as a civilian, a mysterious two-month absence that nobody knows much about, in that hand-waving way the military does sometimes. The same taciturn manner of speaking that made Mark a nightmare in the board room earned him tight-lipped friends among the other soldiers. Mark and Maura both came home safe -- Eduardo didn't even know they'd been gone until the news of their return cropped up in the corner of his Google dashboard.
"Who, Maura?" Mark goes, like there's some other wife they could be talking about. And then, "Oh, she actually does work from our private island in the Philippines."
"Really?" Eduardo blinks. He thought Mark had been kidding about that.
"Well," Mark twitches his shoulders, not quite a shrug. "Tahiti, and it's just a beach house, clustered in with a bunch of other over-the-top resort-like places. I don't remember exactly, I've only been a couple times. A whole island might have been nice, but I guess the market isn't as good as it used to be, or something."
Eduardo can't quite tell if Mark is fucking with him or not, so he stays quiet, tucking the true crime novel in between the cushions of the armchair.
It's a good choice, actually, because Mark seems to be debating something with himself, his eyebrows low and pulled together. He shifts his weight, socks scuffing where the tile of the hallway meets the carpet. Eduardo hears a mutter that sounds an awful lot like, but it's Wardo, before Mark comes into the room, folding himself down into the chair directly opposite him, the cluttered length of a coffee table between them.
"She's with her boyfriend," he announces.
Eduardo feels his eyebrows leap spiritedly up his forehead.
"Um," he fumbles, because Mark looks like he's waiting for the inevitable question that will follow, which in turns makes Eduardo want to exceed expectations and not ask the inevitable, but he isn't sure how to avoid it. "Are you guys ... divorcing, then?" he manages finally. The prospect fills him like a cold leaden weight to the stomach; Eduardo and Moira wound up to be nothing but another statistic, but he would have liked it if the fairy tale story of the soldier and her nerd had a happier ending. Considering what Eduardo had sacrificed, it didn't seem like asking much that Mark should get everything he wants.
Mark looks at him for a moment, careful and considering. In the half-light, his eyes look strange, thinned to slits. Even from here, Eduardo knows their color; the grey-blue pallor of them, like fog or mist.
"No," he shrugs, unceremonious. He scratches at his chin through the grey-flecked goatee, and his words come out of him, halting. "He'd been there, even before me. There are always people who linger, you know, people you can't quite bring yourself to forget. Then she met me, and we were --" he trails off, eyes ticking left to right like he's flicking through a mental dictionary for the right word.
"Perfect," Eduardo supplies, because that's what Wikipedia said, what Ashleigh said (disgustedly,) what Dustin said (less disgustedly,) what Moira said (touching the backs of her knuckles to his face, like she was proud of him for noticing.)
"Yes," Mark allows. "I could offer her more, so she married me. It sounds bad, I know," he continues, and Eduardo fingers the trim on the armchair a little guiltily, because he'd been thinking exactly that; something about the flat way Mark said it, like he and Maura had made an Excel spreadsheet listing pros and cons of one husband over another. "But when you get past the other things our marriage is -- love, trust, all the good things -- then it's mutually beneficial, too. People don't waste my time at parties because I'm not single, and she can keep loving Dan without ever worrying that they're going to screw up what they have by getting married."
The name clicks in the back of Eduardo's head, the same way Alicia's had earlier. He knows Dan, he realizes with a startled jolt; he'd been Mark's best man at the wedding, a curly-haired, gap-toothed man who looked so similar to Mark that Eduardo had assumed he was a close cousin or something. He hadn't gone to the wedding (that had been back when you needed several vaccinations to go to Nigeria, and Eduardo hadn't been up to date,) but he listened to Dustin complain about how he'd been relegated to groomsman.
Probably because Mark didn't want you to deliver the best man speech, Eduardo had rationalized for him.
That's a valid point, Dustin allowed. I know things about Mark that should NEVER see the light of day.
"We tried it, Dan and I," Mark says conversationally, while Eduardo's still turning this information over in his mind, and he chokes on air.
He's not implying what Eduardo thinks he's implying, could he? "You mean, like ..." he starts, and then goes as tongue-tied as a child, unable to wrap his mind around the idea of it.
Mark smiles, reptilian. "Polyamorously? Yes. But," that shrug again. "We like each other well enough, we're friendly, and the sex isn't disappointing --" he rolls his eyes when Eduardo makes an involuntary too much information! noise, like he caught something in the back of his throat. "But if we lived with each other on a permanent basis, we'd kill each other. We're too alike."
"So," Eduardo wets his lips. "You just, trade off, or ... You let her --"
Mark's eyes narrow, sharpening so fast that Eduardo's teeth click shut of their own accord.
"There's no sacrifice about it," he goes fiercely, his nose crinkling up at the thought, disgusted, the way he'd been when Chris first suggested that maybe he was going to have to apologize for FaceMash. "I don't let them get away with anything. They're happy. I love that they're happy --" His forehead relaxes, face smoothing out into an expression Eduardo has only seen a couple times. "My wife is happy, Wardo. Isn't that amazing? Me, Mark Zuckerberg, I am capable of making a woman happy."
Eduardo smiles, his heart stuttering funny inside his chest, like it just tried to grow two sizes at the words.
"Two," he says, and Mark tilts his head. "Two women. Maura and Alicia."
Mark's lips split, peeling back off his teeth, and it's like this whole conversation has taken the years right off of him, because Eduardo sees nothing but Harvard Mark in him right now, his smile the same boyish lilt he got whenever he had an idea so brilliant he couldn't wait to get it out.
"Yes," he goes, a wealth of wonder in his voice. "Our daughter."
The pain of it lances sharp through the sides of Eduardo's ribs, and he ducks his chin down, unable to look at Mark's smile for a beat longer.
There's a long pause, hovering just close enough to uncomfortable to be noticeable, but then Mark pushes himself out of the other chair, saying, "You can stay here. For the night, I mean."
"You don't have to do that," Eduardo replies, kneejerk, even though he'd seen it coming since he got into the car -- Mark never leaves his daughter home alone, she said so herself.
The twitchy shrug is back. "I know," he says, and that's it.
Eduardo smiles, because throughout the years of getting second-hand stories about Mark's success, this is what he missed the most: the simple, easy way Mark can dissect a person and know exactly how to get to them. It's not hard to trust him, he finds. After all, Mark has been the capable, hardworking, edgy CEO for far longer than he was ever that asshole kid with a chip in his shoulder. They've always seen the best in each other, Mark and Eduardo have, completely unable to help it, which is what made it so much more painful when all they could fight about was the worst.
A sudden thud on the stairs announces Alicia-Desarae's return. They listen to her go through the kitchen, searching, before she appears in the doorway, wearing a themed pajama set, her hair tucked up under a clear shower cap that shows the mess of it has been twisted inexpertly into curlers.
Mark crosses the room to her, tilting her head this way and that as he tucks the cap more firmly down over her head, checking the treatment she used. From here, Eduardo sees his fingers come away oily.
He nods, satisfied, and when Alicia-Desarae squirms away, protesting, he squats at her, good-natured.
"Hey, guys!" she goes, and holds up an object it takes Eduardo a moment to recognize as the camera from before, pink and plastic. "Say cheese, okay?"
It's not a real camera, of course, but it doesn't stop the way Eduardo gets out of his seat, going to Mark's side. It's instinctive, the easy way they fit under each other's arms, even after all this time. Mark's fingers clench along the ball of his shoulder, his own shoulder a bony nudge in Eduardo's armpit. They lean into each other, smiling for Mark's daughter.
"Click!" she says happily.
v.
Mark finally puts Alicia-Desarae to bed; it's so late now that even the nighttime insects have stopped making noise.
Tucked up again in the armchair by the patio door, Eduardo watches the mist creep in through the tall grass, silvery and eerie in the light of the setting moon, and listens to the murmuring exchange of voices upstairs, low with the rhythm of routine.
Eventually, Mark comes back downstairs, carrying in his arms a bundled-up combination of pillow and blankets, which he'd plainly taken from a closet somewhere. He drops them onto the arm of the sofa, and then he looks at Eduardo and he asks, like the question has been sitting at the tip of his tongue all night, "How come you never had children?"
Eduardo closes his eyes.
Maybe if they hadn't had the discussion about Maura, who had enough room in her heart to love two men, Eduardo wouldn't have the strength to talk about it, but as is, he turns his head in the dark and answers, "I did."
He catches the motion in his peripheral; the startled jerk of Mark's chin, the questioning blink. All tells he's seen before.
"Well. She wasn't mine," he corrects himself, because people with fathers like Eduardo's never go on to reproduce if they can help it. There's too much overwhelming terror there, a fear of becoming those fathers and treating their children the same way they had been treated. Not wanting to inflict that on the next generation is too deeply ingrained; the best thing Eduardo can do is to not pass that gene on, the propensity for neglect and violence. "She was Moira's from a previous relationship. Her name was Lydia," the name comes off his tongue, as musical as it was the first time he said it, in his office, watching a bright-eyed toddler bounce on Moira's hip.
And Mark isn't stupid. He crosses the room, and instead of taking the other chair like he had before, he comes right over and folds himself on the ground in front of Eduardo's chair, limbs bending like pipecleaners, and Eduardo takes a moment to be envious -- he can't get himself up and down from a sitting position on the ground without the aid of a prop anymore, it's embarrassing.
Mark's eyes track him, calm and watchful, and the sorrowful twist to his lips is the only indication that he knows how this story is going to end.
"What happened?" he asks anyway.
He's told the story so many times by now that it isn't the words themselves that hurt him. "We were at the supermarket, the three of us -- milk, bread, eggs, that kind of thing -- and we lost track of her. For five minutes --" is as far as he gets, before it slams back into him and his throat closes up.
Never, never, never in his life, not even during that long-ago lawsuit, has Eduardo ever poured over any single length of time as obsessively as he has those five minutes; from Lydia's tiny hand stealing a butterscotch from his pocket as he weighed fruit, to the moment Moira turned her head, wondering, hey, where did Lydia get to? The face of every stranger is entrenched into his mind, every minute detail, from the fruit stacked on the stands, the scuffs the carts had made on the linoleum, the flickering bright lights. For years afterwards, any kind of grocery store at all triggered waves of nauseating sense memory.
What happened to his daughter? Where did she go?
Those are the questions that haunt him. Every horrible thing that ever happened to him seemed diminished in the face of that.
"Five minutes of inattention was all it took," he says quietly. "They never found her. They still run the Amber Alert sometimes, you know, back home."
The hope, though?
The hope is the worst part. You never give up on hope, not even when you give up on everything else, not even when the hope hurts nearly as much as her absence.
Mark listens, saying nothing, as Eduardo scratches at a dry patch of skin along his hairline and says, somewhere in the direction of the carpet, "She'd be fifteen now. Fifteen, can you believe it? She'd be in high school, Mark, doing high school things, and she'd be taller and maybe she'd need braces. Or what if she had glasses? Do you think other kids would have made fun of her for having glasses, or would she be that chic girl? These are the kinds of things I wonder every single day," he shrugs. It's not self-pity, really, it's a statement of horrible fact. Moira and Eduardo never had children of their own: each beating second of a new child's life would have been an enemy and a reminder. They each had their own careers, and they were always busy, always going places. It would have been too easy to turn away in a supermarket for another five minutes.
It was the one thing they agreed on without question -- they were never going to risk it.
There were other factors in the divorce, of course, but they don't kid themselves. It got too hard, the art of not looking at each other and wondering, why weren't you watching her?
They sit there for a long moment, Mark down on the floor and Eduardo sitting in an armchair that smells a little like somebody spilled Glade over it recently.
They are both absolutely silent.
Finally, Mark straightens up, nodding decisively. He looks up at Eduardo and tells him, "It's not possible to tell the sex of a fetus before it's five months into development," which makes Eduardo blink, trying to follow what that has to do with anything.
And then he catches the set to Mark's jaw and the determined look in his eye and he gets it. This is Mark's idea of an exchange: Eduardo trusted him with a dark secret, so now Mark gives him one in return.
"I'd gone in with Maura for an ultrasound at 21 weeks, and the doctor told us we were having a girl, and I ..." he frowns, then rallies against his instinctive need to bite this down, and continues. "My first feeling was disappointment. I'd kind of wanted a son, like, so far I'd been picturing doing father-son things. I don't know, it was ... it was just a moment, you know, this very brief moment and I knew it was wrong as I was thinking it, but I don't think I'll ever forgive myself for it." He meets Eduardo's eyes again. "Alicia hadn't even been born yet, and I was already disappointed in her."
"But she's amazing," says Eduardo, knowing that the basis for him saying so is weak at best: he's only known her for the length of a fashion show and a car ride, and he's pretty sure half of it was him trying not to see bits of Lydia in her, but it does the trick. Mark's face softens, relaxes into a besotted smile, the same look he'd worn in the CS lab, holding a manilla envelope with Eduardo's money in it and their first intern standing with him. #24 vanishes from Eduardo's bucket list as quietly as if it never was.
"Yeah, she is," Mark goes.
They are quiet some more, but they're smiling now, and it's easier to keep quiet and keep smiling than it is to break this.
Then Eduardo says, very low and very serious, "Mark."
Mark rocks forwards onto his crossed legs, his face turned up to him, inquisitive.
"Mark," Eduardo tells him. "I respect you. You're a good man, but," and his voice drops further, with all the seriousness of I'm not coming back to 30%, I'm coming back for everything, and a wealth more age and power behind it. "If you ever, ever let your daughter out of your sight again, like you did today, I will bash your head into pieces, do you understand?"
Mark looks at him for a beat, and Eduardo can tell that they are both listening now. For once, they are both listening.
"If something ever happened to Alicia because of me," Mark says, very soft. "I'd do it myself."
vi.
When he wakes up, the midmorning sun is coming in through the window, so bright that it highlights the dust motes in the air and falls across the spines of the books on the bookshelves in a way that will turn them pale after long exposure.
He tilts his head up, neck creaking in protest (what you gain in wealth, maturity, and dignity with age, you lose in ability to sleep on sofas like frat boys,) and finds Alicia-Desarae standing over him, her face upside-down and very, very close.
"Ah!" he yelps, recoiling.
There's a cat he's never seen before sitting on the arm of the sofa, its head aligned with the girl's and tilted in the exact same way, peering at him. Its face is a mottled mixture of brown and a lighter toffee color, and its whiskers flare forward when he jolts, disturbed. Alicia-Desarae grins. Her hair, he notices, is tamer-looking today, pulled out of her face with two big pink barrettes, shining in the light. This must be the result of all that fuss earlier.
"He's awake!" she roars, making him cringe at the volume.
"It's bright," he returns croakily. "I thought the sun didn't shine on this side of the world."
"I know!" she goes, voice soaring up in delight. "It's so exciting! If you weren't, like, old, I would take you to the pond with my friends and me, it's really cool."
Eduardo doesn't even want to touch the "old" comment, but he's pretty sure he wouldn't be altogether comfortable around a swampy pond with a bunch of nine-year-old girls, regardless. "My friends and I," he corrects her.
"That's what I said," she returns promptly, and spins on her heel, darting off and leaving Eduardo with the unimpressed-looking cat. It's wearing a collar as bright pink and flashy as everything else Alicia-Desarae owns, and he wonders if that means it's a girl cat or if Mark's daughter just likes dressing it up as a furry extension of herself.
He rolls himself up into a sitting position, picking the crud out of the corner of his eyes and then, not sure what the extent of his welcome is in this household or where he's allowed to poke his head into, he pulls his blanket towards him and starts folding it, for lack of anything else to do.
He can hear Alicia-Desarae, her footsteps pattering around in the kitchen. A toaster coil springs, and her voice yelps, "Mine! Mine, mine, mine."
"Please," Mark's voice interjects. He sounds frightfully awake, like he hadn't sat cross-legged on the carpet, watching Eduardo migrate from armchair to couch and staying until he fell asleep.
"Mine, please," she echoes obediently.
Plates clatter. Eduardo smells waffles and syrup.
A moment later, Mark appears in the doorway, yesterday's pants hauled haphazardly over his hips and a clean shirt hanging loose on his bird-like frame; his feet are bare, which makes Eduardo blink a little bit, because it's been a surprisingly long time since he's seen those long bones and crooked toes. The corner of Mark's mouth twitches at the sight of him straightening the folds of the blanket.
"Hey," Eduardo goes by way of greeting, dropping the blanket on top of his pillow. "Thanks for ..." he gestures.
Mark makes an acknowledging noise but says nothing. He stands there, watching, long enough that Eduardo feels his mouth begin to pull up at the corners, amused and a little bit perplexed.
"Are you --" he starts, but Mark seems to make up his mind in that second, because he pushes himself off the doorframe and crosses the room to where Eduardo's sitting. Such is the expression on his face that in his sleepy state, Eduardo doesn't even question it, not even when Mark stops right in front of him, not even when Mark's hand lands on his shoulder, not even when Mark bends at the waist.
And then Mark's mouth is on his and Eduardo doesn't know what to think.
The last time he kissed a boy was when he was fourteen, his freshman year of high school, and admittedly, he didn't know what to do then, either. That ... that had been the 90s, which, okay, sure, it hadn't exactly been the Dark Ages, but the perpetually-awkward sex ed courses didn't cover homosexuality in those days, so Eduardo had been under the assumption that it just wouldn't work; that his lips and Julian's would just slide away from each other like repelling ends of a magnet. After all, it's always men and women you see kissing in movies and stuff, so didn't that mean that men couldn't kiss men, even though they both had lips to kiss with?
Well, obviously he got proven wrong on that count, and he remembered it being incredibly weird and wet, and he'd told Julian afterwards that he wasn't interested, was that okay? (Julian got over it -- he'd always been much more confident than Eduardo and it worked for him.)
After that ... well, he didn't actively avoid men, per se, it was just, whenever he wanted to kiss someone, usually a girl was the first one brave enough to kiss him first, and then there was Moira and Eduardo wouldn't have looked at anyone else even if they landed in front of him naked.
So it doesn't really register at first; Eduardo's preoccupied with the unfamiliar sensation of Mark's goatee scraping against his chin and the pressure of his hand on his shoulder before he even realizes that this is a kiss, Mark is kissing him, lippy but not demanding, not the pecking way of somebody's aunt, but the way you'd kiss on your first turn at spin-the-bottle, when you desperately, desperately want somebody to like you enough to kiss back.
Settling his fingers against Mark's hip, catching a belt loop, Eduardo stretches his neck up, canting into the pressure, and Mark makes a pleased noise. The kiss gets a lot wetter at that point, but that's okay, it's not unpleasant. He's 42, and it thrills through him, as exciting as if it was all completely new.
"What?" Eduardo manages, when it finally breaks.
It's the most coherent question he can form at the moment.
Mark's hand catches against the side of his face briefly, thumb skimming the line of his jaw, and then he pulls away.
Retreating, he tosses over his shoulder, almost casual, "You're not the only one with a bucket list."
He disappears into the kitchen, where Alicia-Desarae greets him at high volume with her proposal about going to the pond with her friends. Mark asks her if she has everyone's number.
"Oh, please," she goes, long-suffering, and then, "Breakfast, Eduardo, come on!" as more plates go rattling.
He has a meeting in Dublin later today, and he should probably get them to drive him back to his hotel first and change, so that he doesn't walk in there wearing the same clothes he wore on the plane, complete a dark brown bowler cap with the Irish flag tucked into the brim -- that might not go over well.
Smiling to himself, his mouth still tingling with the phantom pressure of Mark's, Eduardo pushes himself to his feet and goes to join them.
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fin