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Marcie is six, and she doesn’t have much to do with the other girls.
She’s never liked girly things much, and her mom doesn’t try to make her. She only brushes Marcie’s hair when it’s so tangled she can’t get her fingers through it, and doesn’t make her put anything in it like the other girls have, pink sparkly scrunchies and headbands and things with flowers. She got a set of pink butterfly clips for Christmas. They’re somewhere under her bed now, gathering dust.
She doesn’t have much to do with the other girls, but she doesn’t have much to do with the boys, either. No-one really talks to her. She doesn’t especially want to talk to them.
She’s seven, and her cousin Donna is getting married. Her mom comes into her room, looking pretty in a flowery dress that flows to her knees, and asks her what she wants to wear to the wedding. Marcie gestures to her Cartoon Network t-shirt and shoves her fists in her pockets, anticipating a fight, but her mom just nods and kisses her on the top of the head, and she goes to the wedding in her favourite sneakers.
At the reception, some lady she doesn’t even know puts a hand on her arm. Marcie jerks away. She hates when strange people touch her, and this lady smells of the kind of perfume that doesn’t smell of anything, just smells. She half-crouches down so that she’s level with Marcie’s face, and Marcie resists the urge to punch her in the nose. She’s seven, not four.
‘Sweetie, didn’t your mom tell you you’re supposed to dress up for a wedding?’
Marcie looks her up and down. She’s wearing a bright turquoise jacket and skirt and one of those hats that aren’t even really hats, just bits of feather and straw and beads stuck together in a clump on the side of her head. ‘I don’t wanna dress like y-’
Her mom appears from nowhere to sweep her away, telling her to come tell the bride congratulations. Marcie can see the corner of her mouth twitching.
She’s eight, and she gets a dress for her birthday. She’s surrounded by her family, and she’s just old enough to know that the reason so many of her relatives have bothered to come is to distract her from the fact that she doesn’t have any friends to invite. The dress is white, with a single row of frills around the hem and pale green buttons. The aunt who gave it to her is beaming at her expectantly. Marcie fidgets, looking at the buttons rather than the eyes of any of the circle of people staring at her.
‘Why don’t you try it on?’ someone says, after a too-long silence.
It isn’t even a very girly dress, but it feels wrong. Marcie stares at herself in the mirror, tugging at the scalloped sleeves, and wonders why she can’t bear to have it touch her skin, why she feels itchy and trapped in the gauzy, flouncy fabric. She feels like one of those old-fashioned wooden toys, where you turn it around to put an astronaut’s head on a mermaid’s body. She feels ridiculous, half-expecting laughter when she drags herself downstairs, arms suspended awkwardly by her sides.
‘You look so pretty, Marcie.’ Her eyes are fixed on the ground, she doesn’t see who says it. She doesn’t get called pretty. Pretty has never been something she wanted to be, and it sounds wrong, as wrong as the dress feels.
‘Do you like it, sweetie?’ her mom asks quietly, and Marcie nods and blinks hard and doesn’t raise her eyes.
She’s eleven, and changing in the locker room, yanking her shirt over her head as fast as possible. She doesn’t wear a bra because there’s nothing there, but some of the other girls have starting screwing up their noses and giving her funny looks when they see her bare chest, so she changes with her back to everyone else, hunched into a corner. Even the other flat-chested girls- and she’s far from the only one- wear bras, or training bras, and cast longing glances at the filling-out chests of their classmates. Some of them wear padded bras that slip awkwardly around their chests with nothing to anchor them. Marcie doesn’t share their desire. There’s nothing to be especially proud of about her scrawny chest, but she doesn’t harbor any desire for change. She’s never cared much about her appearance.
Marcie’s twelve, and something is wrong.
Her mom glances at her chest one morning when she’s eating her Lucky Charms and makes a noise that she tries to stifle. Marcie puts down her spoon.
‘What?’
She looks away. ‘Nothing, honey. Just…’ Her eyes flicker, once again, to Marcie’s chest. ‘I was worried you were a late bloomer, like me.’
Marcie looks down at herself. There are two little points visible through her polo shirt, tenting the material, and she feels her face flush. ‘Oh.’
‘It’s nothing to be embarrassed about-’, her mom starts, but Marcie is gone. She locks the bathroom door, pulls off her shirt and stands in front of the mirror, breathing hard. The skin around her nipples is puffy, like what they did to her face at the dentist when she had to get a tooth out, and when she stands side-on to the mirror her chest is definitely no longer flat. She waits to feel relief, pride, anything, and feels only the urge to hide it, pretend nothing has changed.
Her mom knocks on the door. ‘Marcie, honey, let me take you shopping this weekend, okay? We need to get you a bra.’
She grits her teeth and says nothing.
After gym, she changes in the corner like she always has, filled with dread that someone will notice or comment. No-one does. She feels as though she’s been granted reprieve, but she doesn’t know what from.
Eventually, after much argument, she goes bra shopping with her mom and stands frozen, staring into space, as the strange woman touches her chest and wraps the measuring tape around her torso and eventually declares her a 32A, the tone of her voice suggesting that this is something she should take pride in. She picks the plainest, least girly training bras she can find, grateful at least that she doesn’t have a high enough cup size to fit any of the pink-and-white ones, the rose-patterned ones, the ones trimmed with lace. Marcie fingers the tiny white bow in the centre of her plain white crop top, and feels like she did when she was eight, standing in front of the mirror in a frothy white dress.
When she gets home, she shuts herself in her room and carefully, methodically, cuts the bows off every one of her new bras.
Marcie is thirteen. They’re on a field trip to some incredibly dull museum, and she’s at the back as usual, not paying much attention. The guide asks something to which she actually knows the answer, and she raises a hand more out of instinct than anything else. He points at her. ‘Yeah, um, boy at the back.’
People titter, turn around to look at her. The titters increase when she doesn’t say anything, the answer gone completely out of her head. Oh, he thinks.
It takes him a moment to realise that people are still waiting for him to speak. ‘Um. Sorry. Can I go to the bathroom?’
He stands looking between the bathroom doors, asking a question that’s never been there before.
It’s like a switch has been flipped. He flinches when he hears his parents talk about him as her, when his teachers remark on what a bright girl he is. He can’t stand to hear his own name, because it doesn’t feel like his own name anymore.
It isn’t a difficult leap, not for a bright kid like him. Marc sounds too European, like the sort of cool kid he so obviously isn’t. Mark, with a k. It’s such an ordinary name, it shouldn’t feel special or important. It doesn’t sound like it should be anyone’s secret, so he can pretend it isn’t, compose mundane sentences in his head that fill him with a strange, secret satisfaction. Mark does his homework. He writes it out, Mark Zuckerberg, his name, in the back of his history textbook and then rubs it out, erasing it as thoroughly as he can.
Mark is thirteen, and he wakes at five in the morning to find his underwear filled with blood.
No, he thinks. Please, no. He strips off his bloody briefs and drops them into the toilet, tries to flush, but they don’t go down, just swirl around and around the bowl, staining the water yellow, then red as he flushes over and over. He wheels round at the knock on the door, hands shaking.
‘Marcie? Sweetie? Are you okay?’
He holds on to the sink, taking big, heaving breaths, and tries to form words, but nothing comes out. He feels like if he opens his mouth, he might be sick. More knocking. ‘Honey, what is it? Open the door.’ Mark doesn’t move. ‘Marcie, please.’ The knocking gets louder. He’s filled with a sudden dread that his dad might wake up, too, and that’s the only thing that makes him pull up his pyjama pants and fumble to unlock the door. He can still feel the blood, sticky and drying on his thighs.
She looks from him to the toilet bowl, and her eyes soften. ‘Oh, honey. You didn’t have to- it’ll wash.’ Mark makes a brief, abortive attempt to find something to fish his underwear out of the toilet with. ‘It’s too late now. Don’t worry, sweetie, it doesn’t matter. I’m sorry if I didn’t- if you didn’t- this is normal, you know that, right? All girls-’
‘I’m not a girl’, Mark gasps, his legs almost giving way under him. He clings tight to the porcelain rim of the sink. ‘Please, please don’t, Mom, please, I’m not a girl, don’t call me a girl.’
She makes him stay home from school, puts him to bed and brings him soup like he’s a little kid with a sore throat. Mark lets her. She sits on the side of his bed, stroking his hair. He closes his eyes.
‘My name is Mark’, he says, not sure if it’s even loud enough for her to hear. Her hand stills for a moment on his hair, then starts again.
‘Hi, Mark.’
Mark is seventeen and his name is Mark Zuckerberg. It says so right there on the piece of paper in front of him, the one he can barely hold with his shaking hands. His mom kisses him on the side of the head.
He’s pretty sure he’s not supposed to enjoy filling out college applications. He relishes each one, each time he gets to write his name, his real name.
His Harvard acceptance letter is addressed to Mark Zuckerberg.
He’s eighteen when he meets Eduardo. It’s a freshman mixer, his first week at Harvard, and he’s standing awkwardly in a corner- why does he always seem to end up in corners?- clutching a plastic cup and resisting the urge to fiddle with his hair. He does that when he’s nervous. Used to do that. It’s a girl habit, he reminds himself, which is why he doesn’t do it anymore. A few people have made stilted attempts at conversation with him, but his general unsociability is only exacerbated by his determination to pass, to not screw up his chance at a fresh start. No-one here has heard of Marcie Zuckerberg. No-one ever will.
‘Hi’, says someone by his ear, and Mark jumps, nearly spilling his drink. His first impression is that this boy is beautiful, huge dark eyes and long limbs and a frankly unnecessary amount of hair. He quashes that thought instantly. Finding boys attractive is just another girl instinct he thought he’d trained himself out of.
‘Hi’, he says, after a pause that’s too long by several seconds. The boy doesn’t seem to notice. ‘You looked lonely.’
‘I wasn’t’, he blurts. The boy laughs. ‘I’m Eduardo.’
‘Mark’, he says, with just slightly too much emphasis. ‘Zuckerberg.’
Eduardo wets his lips with his tongue. Mark tries not to look. ‘So, Mark. Know any good icebreakers?’
‘If I did, would I be standing on my own in the reject corner?’
Eduardo laughs. The line of his neck does something very distracting when he laughs. ‘You shouldn’t be so rude about this corner. I’m standing in this corner.’
Mark makes a gesture that he hopes encompasses Yes, well. ‘You’re wearing a suit to a fresher’s mixer.’
‘I hope you’re not implying what I think you’re implying. My father wouldn’t be pleased if I got called a reject by a freshman.’ He’s smiling, but it looks less real than before. Mark has the strange urge to put a hand on his arm or shoulder, a bizarre anomaly given that he’s had the urge to initiate physical contact maybe twice in his life.
‘So wait, you’re not?’ he asks instead. ‘Why?’ Eduardo looks a little confused, and he feels the need to clarify. ‘I mean, why are you here? Do you just really like flat lemonade? Coming to a fresher’s mixer when you’re, what, a sophomore, that’s really cool. This is absolutely not the reject corner.’ He realises even as he says it that he’s managed to be even more insulting. This happens a lot when he tries to rectify his mistakes. Eduardo stares at him for a long moment, during which Mark’s cup threatens to slip out of his sweaty palm. Then he throws back his head and laughs. ‘Are you always like this?’
‘Do you always hang around the young, impressionable freshmen?’ Mark fires back, because when he finds himself in a hole of his own making, his first instinct is to dig for dear life. ‘Should I be concerned about your intentions?’
‘I’m mingling’, Eduardo says, with a frankly ridiculous amount of dignity. ‘Socialising. Forming connections.’
‘I’m sure you’ll be glad to have made this particular connection.’ Self-deprecation seems like a good recovery strategy even if it is a Band-Aid on what is probably at this point an open wound. Eduardo smiles.
‘I’m sure I will.’
Mark’s known Eduardo three weeks when he has a panic attack because of him. He’s never met someone so warm, someone who pays attention to him, who stares intently at him when he speaks as if he’s trying to see into his soul, and if Eduardo is seeing into his soul, what exactly is he seeing?
It’s ridiculous. But he can’t shake the worry that the only reason other people have accepted him at face value is that they just didn’t care. He finds himself avoiding Eduardo’s eyes sometimes, scared that he’ll look into him and see what he’s afraid is still there to be seen.
‘What?’ he asks a little too sharply one Saturday afternoon a few weeks into their friendship, breaking off in the middle of a rant about his Art History class. Eduardo has spent the entire rant gazing intently into his face as if he’s considering painting him. Mark’s tempted to ask if he has something on his face, but that seems like a girly thing to ask.
Eduardo blushes and looks away. Mark immediately feels as if a spotlight has been turned off his face. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean- sorry.’
He glances away. ‘Do you stare at everyone like that?’ Or am I different?
‘Not everyone’, Eduardo says quietly. Mark goes cold. ‘I have to go.’
He can feel Eduardo’s eyes on him all the way out of the room.
Mark doesn’t see Eduardo for a week. There’s a knock on the door at nine thirty in the morning, when Mark is still in his pyjamas, and he stumbles out of bed and opens the door without thinking. He freezes at the sight of Eduardo. He’s wearing actual pyjama bottoms, thank god, not boxers, but he’s also wearing a thin t-shirt and no binder, and panic rises in his throat. He crosses his arms over his chest, praying it doesn’t draw attention.
Eduardo doesn’t look at his chest. For once, Mark is grateful that Eduardo seems to like looking deep into his eyes. ‘Hey.’
Mark swallows, mouth dry. It’s an effort to speak, especially when he knows that a squeak in his voice could make things worse. ‘Hi.’
There’s an awkward pause. Eduardo shuffles. ‘Listen…I’m sorry about…I didn’t mean to weird you out, man.’
It’s meaningless. It’s ridiculous. But it makes a difference, all the same. Mark shrugs, expressionless, suppressing the little burst of satisfaction. ‘It’s no big deal.’
Mark can never remember exactly how he acquired Chris and Dustin. He asked Chris once, and got a stress toy lobbed at his head for his trouble, possibly because of his use of the word ‘acquired’. They’re just…there, turning up to his room with pizza (he starts setting his alarm ten minutes earlier so he can be sure never to answer the door inadequately dressed), dragging him to unfeasibly lame parties at Alpha Epsilon Pi. Dustin always tries to get him to approach girls, when he’s not failing at doing so himself. Eventually he resorts to bodily dragging Mark in the direction of the girls, which generally makes them run away. He tries this with Chris a few times, too, until Chris grabs both his wrists in an iron grip and gently but firmly explains that he is really not interested in girls. This lets Chris mostly off the hook, but does lead to Dustin, in a probably well-meaning attempt at open-mindedness, trying to steer Mark towards a group of guys, instead.
Mark does the sensible thing, and bolts. Chris finds him about five minutes later, steadily tearing a plastic cup into strips.
‘If this is a gay crisis, let me say first of all: been there.’
He doesn’t speak. He can’t, breath still tight in his throat. Instead he stares down at the shredded cup, turning it over in his hand. Chris looks sympathetic, understanding. It feels as though a hand is tightening on his throat. ‘I’m not-’, he attempts, but Chris either doesn’t hear or dismisses it. ‘Look, Mark, if you want to-‘
‘I’m not gay’, he spits, words far too harsh. The silence is stifling. Chris is frozen, mouth thin. Then he nods. ‘Right. Sorry, dude.’
Mark doesn’t say anything. He stares at the plastic in his hand, the wall, anything but meet Chris’s eyes.
He makes it up to Chris the only way he knows how, through a combination of pretending nothing ever happened and allowing him to play (i.e. beat) Mark at Halo. He still feels pretty shitty about it, though, which is probably why he lets Chris drag him and Dustin to one of the LGBTQ Society’s fundraisers.
‘I’m educating you’, Chris says, who isn’t actually holding onto the scruffs of their necks but is still managing to give off that vibe. ‘I refuse to be friends with anyone who doesn’t at least attempt to be an ally, and frankly you’ve got a long way to go.’ This is mostly directed at Mark, who is about to object, since Dustin is the most offensively heterosexual person he’s ever met, before he remembers that he deserves it.
Mark ends up in the corner with a plastic cup of Coke, but since this is more or less what he does at every social event, ostensibly heterosexual or otherwise, he figures Chris can’t really criticise him for it. Surely this counts as equal opportunity, or whatever. Chris has disappeared, and Dustin is deep in conversation with a guy he doesn’t know, who to Mark’s surprise is showing no signs of wanting to punch Dustin in the face, but Mark is somehow less bored than he usually is when he ends up in this position. He’s never been one to people-watch, and yet he finds himself content to do pretty much that.
The thing is, he’s aware intellectually of what the T in LGBT stands for, but he’s never felt part of any sort of ‘community’. The only label he’s ever felt comfortable applying to himself is ‘male’, and it seems to him counterproductive to be proud of what’s different about him, certainly to advertise it or to let anyone know, because then they’d know, and he wouldn’t just be a boy to them anymore.
So there’s no sense of having come home to his people, or anything. He watches people, tries not to stare too obviously at tattoos or rainbow Mohawks, and it takes about an hour before he notices the other, less obvious things. He’s never been very observant. But there are boys in baggy polo shirts with chests that look compressed, one smoothed-out lump rather than just flatness, who sit with their legs conspicuously wide apart and walk with swaggers that border on overdone.
He wonders if that’s what he looks like, and feels his chest tighten a little at the thought, that someone in this room might look at him and see trans and not just boy. He’s never really used the word to describe himself even in his innermost thoughts. The only purpose it’s ever served in the history of Mark Zuckerberg was as confirmation, through furtive Googling sessions in his early adolescence, that yes, boys like him existed.
He pulls the zip further up on his hoodie, and that’s when he spots a familiar head of ridiculous hair on the other side of the room.
‘Eduardo’, he says out loud, and several people turn and look at him. His first instinct is that it makes no sense for him to be here, but then a small voice asks: what if it makes perfect sense? What would it mean if Eduardo looked at him because he’s a boy?
Mark is attracted to girls, but girls have never been attracted to him. No-one has. To be attractive to a girl, a straight girl, has always been there in the back of his mind as a potential goal to be reached. It would prove something, even if it could never go anywhere. He supposes for a gay guy to be attracted to him would sort of mean the same thing.
But then, Dustin is here, too, and Mark is small and awkward and just as unattractive a boy as he was a girl. He pushes the thought out of his mind.
Eduardo turns and his eyes light up. He waves, exaggerated and ridiculous, and lopes over. ‘Mark!’
‘Fancy seeing you here’, Mark says, not thinking. ‘I mean- I didn’t mean-’
Eduardo laughs. ‘It’s okay, Mark. You can imply that I’m gay without impugning my honor.’ He raises an eyebrow. ‘So what brings you here?’
‘I’m not gay’, Mark says, too loudly. Several people turn and glare at him. ‘I like girls. They just don’t like me.’
Eduardo looks at him. Mark squirms internally. ‘The banner doesn’t just say ‘G’.’
‘I’m not a lesbian, either.’
Eduardo rolls his eyes. ‘That’s not what I-’
‘Chris made me come’, Mark blurts, and immediately feels like he’s six years old. Chris made me do it. Eduardo laughs, but something has shifted in his eyes. ‘I mean, uh, I’m meant to be expanding my horizons, right? Chris thinks I’m inadequately educated, or something.’ Eduardo doesn’t say anything. A semi-awkward silence descends. ‘Does this fit your father’s definition of mingling?’ he asks, because for some reason being an asshole comes easier to him than any other form of communication. Eduardo’s jaw tightens. ‘Not really.’
‘Good’, Mark says, a little too aggressively, and Eduardo smiles.
Erica doesn’t look at him the way Eduardo does. In fact, she is not much at all like Eduardo. Mark has no idea why she should be, why the thought crosses his mind at all. Maybe it’s that Eduardo’s friendship, with his constant, unfeasible niceness, and the way he gazes at Mark (at everyone, he corrects himself), is the closest Mark’s ever come before to someone being into him. That feels like it should be a depressing thought, but somehow it doesn’t really bother him. He guesses he doesn’t really care that much.
Erica doesn’t seem to care much, either. Mark likes that about her. She doesn’t care that he’s small and bony-shouldered and looks nothing like the kind of guys pretty girls like her are supposed to swoon over. She doesn’t swoon over him, but she sometimes laughs at the things he says, the kind of things that make Eduardo’s eyes go all sad and reproachful, and she’s pretty and dresses nicely (insofar as Mark has any way of telling) and generally looks like the sort of girl nerdy boys like him should be proud to date in college.
He likes talking to her, and he likes hanging out with her, and he sort of forgets that dating is supposed to entail anything else for a while until they’re hanging out in his dorm, Erica idly watching as he works on a problem set for one of his classes, and then she huffs out a little sigh and shifts up close to him on the couch and Mark turns to see what she’s doing and she kisses him, one hand steady on his jaw.
Mark doesn’t move. Erica does most of the moving, slipping her other hand into his hair, and when her tongue brushes his lips he parts them, because it seems like the thing to do. He’s kind of afraid to kiss back, in case he’s so awful at it she runs screaming, so he just sits there. Erica pulls back. She’s even prettier up close like this, lips shiny and slightly parted and a crease forming between her eyebrows.
‘Mark?’ Her shiny brown hair forms a curtain around her face. Mark sort of wants to stroke it, but he thinks that might be weird. ‘Mark. Are you okay?’
‘What?’ says Mark intelligently. ‘Uh. Yeah. Why would I not be okay?’
Erica raises an eyebrow. ‘I don’t generally take ‘limp and unresponsive’ as a positive sign when it comes to guys.’
‘Oh.’ He feels like he’s done something wrong. Probably, he should have kissed back. ‘Sorry.’
She sighs. ‘Don’t apologise. Just- did you not want me to kiss you?’
‘No!’ Mark says hurriedly, and then, realising how that might be misconstrued, ‘I mean, uh, yes.’ Erica just looks at him. The feeling that he’s doing things wrong is only getting stronger, so Mark cranes awkwardly forward. Erica meets him halfway.
It’s sort of nice, now he’s expecting it. Erica’s lips are soft and a little sticky with lipgloss, and when he plucks up the courage to use his tongue he can taste it, some kind of very sweet fake fruit. After a minute, he slides a hand into her hair. It’s even softer than it looks.
The angle is a little awkward, Erica twisted to the side with her legs still pressed alongside his, and after a few moments she sighs a little into his mouth and turns so that she’s straddling his knees. Mark’s heart thumps loudly in his chest. Erica’s hand winds into his hair, and he thinks absurdly of Eduardo, how he sometimes tugs one of Mark’s curls and seems to find it endlessly entertaining to watch it spring back into place. Her hand moves down over his neck and then down to touch his chest and Mark’s stomach is suddenly a cold vortex of panic. He jerks violently away, heart pounding, and his hands fly upwards to cover himself before he remembers that that’s something a girl woulddo. Erica slips backwards and lands on the floor.
‘Fuck’, he says, voice strained, heart thumping, ‘sorry- are you-’
Erica picks herself up, smoothing her skirt. The crease between her eyebrows is back. She regards Mark for a long moment, and this time he can’t think what to do to smooth things over.
‘Mark…Have you not done this before?’ Her voice sounds different. Mark hesistates for a moment before giving a sort of half-nod, not meeting her eyes. It’s the truth, or part of it. Erica sits back down on the sofa next to him and puts her hand over his.
‘We can take it slow’, she says, the corner of her mouth twitching, with that sarcasm Mark likes so much about her. ‘I won’t try any funny business, I promise.’
He can’t quite ignore the surge of relief.
Erica keeps her word. They keep kissing, and Mark starts to think he’s getting better at it, but her hands almost always stay in his hair, or occasionally rest on his shoulders. It’s a relief, but it also rankles a little, being treated like a skittish prom date, so one day when they’re kissing on the couch again he moves his hands abruptly from her waist up to her breasts. Erica makes a mmpfh noise into his mouth. He can’t tell if it sounds pleased or not, but she makes no attempt to move his hands away. It’s as far as they ever get.
He finishes his second beer and reaches for the mini-fridge. Mark drinks and types and lies, and ignores the stray thought that reminds him of the boys at his school, the ones who would pretend to grab at his breasts and come away with ‘handfuls’ of empty air, who would wave a tissue in front of his face and ask if it fell out of his bra.
She’s a 34B, as in barely anything there. False advertising.
It’s five am. Mark is drunk and exhilarated and exhausted, and he can’t stop staring at his laptop screen. Eduardo puts a hand on his shoulder. When he turns to look at him he looks just like Mark feels, wild-eyed and drunk on exhaustion and victory.
‘Mark’, he whispers, grinning, voice edged with hysteria. ‘Mark, we-’
‘I know, Wardo’, Mark half-whispers back. There’s really no reason to whisper, Dustin and Chris are both passed out and sleeping like the dead, but he feels the urge to humour him.
‘Mark’, Eduardo whispers again, and his face moves closer. Mark opens his mouth before he knows what he wants to say.
‘I know’, he whispers again, inanely, and he doesn’t know what he knows, but it doesn’t matter because Eduardo makes a little sound between a sigh and a laugh and presses his lips against Mark’s.
Eduardo’s lips aren’t as soft as Erica’s. There’s no sticky taste of lipgloss, and they’re chapped in places, and the taste is overwhelmingly different. Mark is still euphoric and a little dizzy, and he tugs Eduardo down by the front of his shirt, because Eduardo is standing and he’s still in his chair and that just seems silly, and somehow they end up on the floor, Eduardo half-between his knees, both of them out of breath and giggly.
Eduardo kisses him again, and he isn’t giggling anymore. Mark’s hands scrabble in the front of his shirt, searching blindly for a grip, and settle on clutching at his shoulders. Eduardo kisses harder than Erica ever did, like he wants to, like he isn’t just occupying time. He feels a flash of anger in his gut that spurs him on, and he tangles one of his hands into Eduardo’s ridiculous hair, kissing him almost violently, and he doesn’t spare a single thought to any of the things he learned about kissing technique through Erica, because none of them seem relevant.
‘Mark’, Eduardo whispers against his lips, and how many times has he heard that voice say his name?
How many times has he heard Eduardo say his name?
Mark freezes. Eduardo tries to kiss him again, but Mark doesn’t respond, and he draws back, eyes wide.
‘Mark?’ Eduardo sounds suddenly scared. ‘Is it-’
‘Erica’, Mark says stupidly, and that was clearly the worst thing he could have said, because Eduardo’s face goes blank and his eyes go dull. ‘I mean- I’m not- I just broke up with a girl, so. I’m not-’
‘I know.’ Eduardo isn’t meeting his eyes. ‘I know, I just thought- I thought- I don’t know.’ His voice gets smaller and smaller.
‘Okay’, Mark hears himself say. He gets up, dusts himself off. ‘Night, Wardo.’
If Eduardo replies, he doesn’t hear it.
Eduardo is waiting for him when he comes out of the ad board hearing, hunched down inside his clothes against the chill. He falls into pace behind Mark, and gently berates him for having single-handedly alienated every woman on campus, and Mark snarks back at him, and things almost feel normal.
Until they reach Mark’s door, and he realises that Eduardo has, seemingly unconsciously, followed him back to his dorm.
‘Uh’, he says. ‘Did you just follow me home?’
Any other day, Eduardo would roll his eyes in that affectionate mother hen way of his, and follow Mark into his dorm, and their conversation would continue unabated. But today Mark is frozen outside his door, unable to make eye contact or think of anything to say. Eduardo is staring at the doorknob, and Mark gets the feeling that he’s very deliberately being not looked at. Usually he wouldn’t mind, but Eduardo always looks at him. That’s what makes him Eduardo.
‘Mark…’ Eduardo says, and Mark knows that he should head him off, brush off whatever he’s about to say, but his lips won’t move and the air he needs to make words won’t come.
‘Mark-’ Eduardo starts again, and Mark feels like something is rushing towards both of them like a speeding train, and he doesn’t know if he wants to leap out of the way, or stand and face it. ‘Mark, I’m sorry, I know I shouldn’t but I have to…’ Eduardo stops and take a breath. ‘You kissed back. I need… I need to know why, so I can deal with this thing and move on and things can be normal again.’
Mark doesn’t speak. He doesn’t realise how long he’s gone without speaking until Eduardo laughs, high and unnatural, and says ‘Okay, yeah, great, that’s the answer you want to that question, ringing silence.’
‘Oh’, says Mark vaguely. ‘Right. Yeah.’ Then he continues to not speak.
‘Okay’, says Eduardo in his I’m Not Panicking voice. ‘Okay. How about I make suggestions and you can nod or shake your head. Okay?’
‘You just said ‘okay’ like forty times in a row’, Mark points out. Eduardo makes a noise of frustration, the kind that signals that he might start tearing at his hair at any moment. ‘I mean, okay. I mean. Yeah. Shoot.’
He doesn’t say anything right away. Mark notices that once again, Eduardo is not looking at him. ‘Pity?’
‘No’, Mark says immediately, and shakes his head for good measure. ‘Don’t be an ass, Wardo.’
Eduardo laughs. ‘Okay. Just trying to shut me up?’ Mark shakes his head. ‘Success-induced euphoria? Sleep deprivation?’
‘No. And…maybe, yeah. Yeah.’ And there it is again, that light going out of Eduardo’s eyes. Mark always thought that was just a metaphor, and kind of a stupid one, but his eyes really do look duller.
‘So what you’re saying’, Eduardo says carefully, ‘is that you wouldn’t have kissed me if you weren’t semi-delirious with exhaustion?’
‘No!’ Mark says, more to make Eduardo look less sad and withdrawn and careful than anything else. It hangs in the air, and Mark knows even before he’s fully processed it that he’s said something bigger than he meant to.
‘So’, Eduardo says, and he still sounds careful but it’s a different kind of careful, like he’s trying to hold something back, something the opposite of careful, ‘are you saying that…that there might be a situation in which you would kiss me when you’re not sleep-deprived?’
Mark only thinks about it for a second before he nods. Something at the back of his mind is telling him that he has to stop, now, that this is the person he’d promised himself he’d never be again rearing her ugly head, but he can’t seem to focus on that when Eduardo is in front of him, looking at him like that.
‘Can that situation be this situation?’ Eduardo asks, very slowly. The lights in his eyes are coming back to life. Mark nods.
This kiss is not like the last kiss. This doesn’t have the blurred corners and faint dizziness of five am, the weird floating state where his thoughts don’t quite connect to one another. This time, his thoughts connect to each other very fast, and most of them are Eduardo is kissing me and Eduardo backed me into the door, how did that happen? and that is Eduardo’s hand on my ass.
And then it’s that is Eduardo’s hand on my chest, and it turns out that there are some ways in which kissing Eduardo and kissing Erica are the same.
He wrenches away, but something is screaming at him that it’s already too late, that he let Eduardo’s hand linger just a second too long. It’s that same lizard-brain instinct that told him as a teenager in public bathrooms which guys he shouldn’t make eye contact with. Eduardo is frowning. Mark’s legs feel like they might crumple under him like paper.
‘Mark…’ Eduardo says, very slowly. Mark can’t speak. All of his energy is focused on not cutting and running. ‘Are you wearing a…sports bra?’
Don’t, Mark says, don’t, you have to stop, but the words don’t make it to his mouth.
‘Eduardo-’ he starts, but that’s as far as he can get. He crumples against the door. ‘Don’t, please don’t, you can’t, not you.’ Eduardo reaches out, trying to hold him up, and Mark jerks violently away, barely restraining the impulse to lash out.
‘Can we at least talk about this inside?’ Eduardo asks, using the tone of voice someone might use on a wounded animal. Mark holds out the keys. He’s numb with panic, cold and hot at the same time. He lets himself be guided into the living room.
‘Mark, you know, whatever it is…’
‘I’m a guy’, Mark hisses. ‘I haven’t been lying to you. I don’t care if you don’t want to make out with me anymore, but-’
Eduardo looks baffled. ‘When did I say you weren’t?’ Then his eyes flick, just for a second, to Mark’s torso, and back to his face. ‘Oh. Oh, Mark. Why didn’t you say-’
‘Don’t.’ Mark wants to cover himself, wants to bury himself in as many blankets as he can find so he can’t feel Eduardo’s eyes on him anymore. He feels naked and ugly and wrong. He wants to scrub at his skin until it erodes. Eduardo takes a step towards him and Mark recoils. ‘All I want is for you to forget about this, okay. No-one here was supposed to know, Wardo. This was my new fucking start.’
‘Mark-’ Eduardo starts, and stops. ‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘It matters’, Mark says. ‘This doesn’t go away if you tell me you don’t care, Wardo. Even if I believed you, it would still matter.’
‘Can’t I-’ Eduardo says, and reaches out. ‘Mark, please, let me-’
‘Help?’ Mark spits, and he can feel something rising in his throat. ‘That’s great, you want to help me. A minute ago you wanted to make out with me, but you want to help me, that’s something, I guess I should be grateful for that, right?’ Eduardo is staring at him. He opens his mouth as if to speak. Mark cuts him off.
‘I get it, Wardo, really. I’m not an idiot. You like dick. It’s pretty fucking obvious, it always has been. Now you can be out and proud, congratulations.’
‘That’s bullshit.’ Eduardo’s voice is low and almost angry, and it makes Mark want to laugh because what does he have to be angry about? ‘You have to know how long I’ve wanted this for, Jesus, even you must have-’
‘Yeah, well, I’m sorry to let you down.’ Mark’s hands are shaking. He balls them into fists, nails digging into his palms. ‘You can stop, Wardo. I know you feel guilty, but I’m not going to let you fuck me just so you can feel better about- about being disappointed, or whatever.’
Eduardo gapes at him. ‘Jesus Christ, Mark. Of all the- you think after all the shit I’ve gone through with you, this is what’s going to put me off?’
Mark’s mouth is dry. ‘That’s the most romantic thing anyone has ever said to me.’ It’s a little sad how close it is to the truth. Eduardo moves to kiss him and he jerks back.
‘Do you not want this?’ Eduardo asks, his voice soft. ‘Tell me if you don’t want this, and I’ll- I’ll go.’
Mark opens his mouth, but something stops him from speaking. His instinctive reaction is to tell Eduardo to go, to squeeze under his desk with his headphones on and code until he can’t think in anything but numbers. But he doesn’t want that. It’s just the safest option. He’s tired of the safest option. ‘I don’t want you to go’, he says, and he only realises the truth of it as he says it. ‘I don’t- I’m really fucking messed up, Wardo.’
Eduardo nods. ‘I’m okay with that.’
Something swoops in Mark’s stomach. If he doesn’t put his foot on the brakes now, everything might change. Every rule that he’s structured his life around is in danger of being broken. It’s pretty fucking terrifying. ‘How do you know?’
Eduardo shrugs. ‘I guess I don’t. Maybe I need a chance to prove it.’ Mark looks blank. ‘I’m asking you to let me try.’ After a moment, he manages to nod.
‘Do you wanna kiss me’, Mark asks, ‘or what?’ Eduardo steps in closer to him and tilts his face up and kisses him, so very gentle, and Mark doesn’t want gentle. He kisses back, harder, tangles his hands in Eduardo’s hair hard enough to hurt, and he likes the way it makes Eduardo gasp against his lips. ‘I’m not going to break if you touch me, Wardo.’ He hopes that it’s true.