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1.
“How come everybody always passes out on my bed?” Mark asks, stumbling into the doorway. Eduardo looks up from checking his email at Mark’s desktop, fingers stilling on the keyboard in the middle of an email to one of his Principles of Macroeconomics classmates. Mark’s clutching a beer in one hand and looking confused. One corner of his mouth is turned down, more than usual.
Eduardo looks over his shoulder. Dustin’s asleep on Mark’s bed, sprawled out, his mouth hanging open. Eduardo shrugs and glances back at up at Mark. “Go sleep in his.”
“But it’s my bed. Mine.”
“You’re drunk,” Eduardo says.
Mark seems to take a moment to think about that, or whatever it is that he does when someone says something that seems obvious yet he’s still managed to miss.
“Yes,” he says finally. Then he pales. “I’m gonna throw up.”
Eduardo groans and gets up to follow him into the bathroom, just in case he doesn’t make it before barfing. “How come I’m the only sober one here?” he asks, but it’s rhetorical, and Mark drops to his knees and pukes into the toilet.
“If you were a girl, I would hold your hair,” Eduardo says conversationally, “but instead I’ll hand you some paper towels, okay?”
Mark groans.
“Didn’t you ever get drunk before college?” Again, he doesn’t expect an answer. He just rips some towelling from the roll and presses it into Mark’s hand.
2.
Mark’s been sniffling into his sleeve and coughing into his elbow for three days now. “Seriously, man,” Eduardo says. “Take some DayQuil or something.”
“Don’t have any,” Mark replies, coughing through the words. He’s hunched over his keyboard, shivering.
Eduardo rolls his eyes and claps Mark solidly on the shoulder as he gets up. “Sit tight. I’ll be back.”
Mark doesn’t even look up as he leaves, and then doesn’t look up when Eduardo slips back into the suite. Eduardo’s sure that Mark hasn’t even moved. He empties the Walgreen’s bag on the bed and says, “Mark. Here. I got you some stuff.”
“What?”
Eduardo sets the box of Kleenex next to the keyboard with a thunk. Then he opens the box of DayQuil and rips off a square of the capsules, which he pokes Mark in the hand with until Mark takes them, looking confused.
“I don’t have time to be sick,” he says.
“Well, you’ve been sick all week, in case you really haven’t noticed.” Eduardo cracks open a bottle of water and passes it over. “I’m going to go now, because I really don’t want to get whatever it is you have. Don’t stay up all night, okay?”
He’s almost to the door by when he hears Mark say “thank you”.
3.
There’s about a foot of snow on the ground, and Mark is still wearing flip-flops. With socks, but flip-flops nonetheless. Plus, he’s Mark. So Eduardo isn’t all that surprised when he steps wrong and goes flying, sprawling face-first into a snowbank. There’s a couple upperclassmen passing them and laughter rings out. Eduardo ignores them and hauls a twitching Mark out of the snow. “Hey. You okay?”
“Fine,” Mark says shortly, trying to brush snow off his sweatpants and mismatched hoodie, but it’s obvious after one step-hop that he’s not fine.
Eduardo sighs to himself and grabs Mark’s elbow, gripping tightly, helping him limp along towards Kirkland. He’d buy Mark a decent pair of winter shoes, but Mark wouldn’t wear them anyway. “Is it your foot?”
“Possibly.”
“Knee? Ankle?”
Mark stops hopping and moves his foot experimentally, wincing. Then he announces, “Ankle. Definitely my ankle.”
Eduardo continues dragging him towards the res hall. There’s no elevator, of course, so Mark hops up the stairs one at a time. His face gets redder and redder, and Eduardo can tell he’s embarrassed, although Mark would never say it.
“You got hurt,” Eduardo says quietly, “it happens.”
Mark growls at him to shut up and open the door, propping himself up with a hand on the wall. Eduardo slips his hand into Mark’s hoodie pocket and grabs the keys. Mark sways slightly, so Eduardo grabs him around the waist and yanks him into the suite. “Couch, or your bed?” he asks.
“What?”
“I’m not letting you get up again for at least a couple hours, so do you want to be confined to the couch, or to your bed?”
Mark blinks at him, his face flushing again. “Oh. Um. Bed.”
Eduardo deposits him there, stacks some pillows under the foot Mark had been favoring. “Don’t move,” he says sternly.
“Okay.”
As he turns to check the fridge/freezer for ice, Mark catches his wrist. “Wardo - thanks,” he mumbles. He raises his eyes to meet Eduardo’s, and holds his gaze. “You’re always looking out for me.”
Eduardo gives him a crooked grin. “That’s what friends do, right?” He slaps Mark on the back and goes out to the living room.
There isn’t any ice, so Eduardo ends up fashioning a cold pack out of four beers and a towel. But Mark can walk normally again the next day, so it must do the job.
4.
“Whatever is happening over there, I don’t think it’s going so well for Mark,” Chris says, jerking his chin towards the far table, where Mark is talking to some girl that Eduardo doesn’t recognize. Or trying to talk. She’s saying something, but he looks bored. Which, on Mark, could mean any number of things. It probably means that whatever the girl is talking about, Mark has decided it’s not worth his brainpower.
She doesn’t seem to have noticed.
“Maybe we should save him from the inevitable,” Dustin suggests.
Chris shrugs. “It could be worse. It could be Natalie Portman.”
“As if,” Dustin laughs, and Eduardo has to agree.
“Mark’s probably the only guy on campus who hasn’t followed her around at least once,” he says.
Dustin takes a swig of his beer. “I thought girls like it when guys don’t chase them?”
Eduardo laughs, and sets his bottle down on the nearest table. He rolls up his sleeves with dramatic flourish. “Watch my beer, would you?”
“Good luck with your rescue mission,” Chris calls after him.
Mark looks something close to grateful as Eduardo slips up next to him and lightly touches his shoulder. “Oh,” says the girl, “I’m sorry, I didn’t -” and then she’s turning and walking away.
“What,” Mark says, blinking rapidly. “How did you get her to go away? How did you just - do that? I don’t even know what you did.”
“It’s a human thing, Mark, your robot brain wouldn’t understand,” Eduardo chuckles, and steers him back towards Chris and Dustin.
5.
“I broke up with Christy,” Eduardo says again, reveling in the feel of blood rushing to his head. He’s hanging upside-down off the edge of the couch, one hand pressed to the floor and one hand clinging to Mark’s jeans.
“You said that already.”
“But I did.”
“I know.”
Eduardo uses Mark’s leg to haul himself upright again, or at least sort of upright. He’s had a couple drinks and a couple hits, and the room is pleasantly blurry. He’s a little disgusted with himself for smoking pot he’s sure was Sean’s, but Sean isn’t even in the house. Eduardo has no idea where Dustin and the interns have disappeared to.
Mark is wearing a soft, fuzzy hoodie, and Eduardo rubs his cheek against Mark’s shoulder. “I’ve never broken up with someone - anyone before,” he sighs.
There’s a pause, or at least it feels like a pause. Then Mark asks, “Really?”
“Yeah.”
Eduardo falls sideways a little, ending up laying sort of in Mark’s lap. He half expects Mark to shove him away, tell him to get off, because Mark doesn’t really like people to touch him. But now that Eduardo thinks about it, Mark’s always let him closer than he’d let anyone else.
Instead of pushing him away, Mark’s hand floats down to his hair. Not stroking, just - there.
“I’ve only ever had girls break up with me. Before. Maybe - do you think I’m too nice?”
Mark makes a humming noise.
“Mark, are you listening to me?”
“Yes,” Mark says firmly, and Eduardo believes him.