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It hadn’t been double-dating so much as some kind of demented four-way with really clear rules on who could touch who. Dustin had been quite proud of this analogy when it occurred to him, but Mark just looked up (barely) from the screen with his default blank expression. “Okay.” Chris had made some amused/horrified face and Eduardo had launched into a discussion about blended families. It should be noted that both Eduardo and Dustin had been a little drunk at the time, while Chris and Mark were sober. This happened sometimes. It still happens now.
The thing is that Chris is Dustin’s best friend, and Eduardo is Mark’s. But that doesn’t mean that it would be a good idea at all for them to fuck. Each other, that is. Dustin is pretty sure that fucking Mark was his best idea that year. Crucially, when he is fucking Mark, neither of them can be expected to be coding. And when he is not at that moment fucking Mark, but comes up with the solution to some hacking issue that no one else could solve, there is a reasonable prospect that his boyfriend will be suitably impressed by the story when he gets home from work. Possibly impressed enough to reward him with blowjobs. It works for them.
Dustin loves Chris, he totally does, and he loves that Chris has causes and reads history for fun and doesn’t get why GTA is awesome. He loves Chris more than pretty much anyone, but Eduardo and Chris fit together. Back at Harvard, the two of them had been one of those couples that girls cooed over. Dustin and Mark were the couple that no one could actually believe existed. Seriously, Dustin had like thirty-minute conversations with girls where ‘my boyfriend, Mark’ was a primary component and they still thought he was screwing with them. He has yet to figure out why that happened. Mark is funny – if not necessarily polite – and he’s a better programmer but he still brought Dustin in right from the start. It’s a challenge to make him laugh, sure, but Dustin has a pretty good success rate with that, mostly because he doesn’t get offended when Mark has obviously stopped listening. By each other’s counting, they go together just fine. Most of the time, anyway.
During their first fight – which was shortly after Dustin and Chris’s third fight, and Mark and Eduardo’s hundredth fight – Dustin had got properly mad at him. This whole thing started because Chris had taken Eduardo’s side one time against Dustin and Mark, and in the ensuing trauma (two whole days of frosty silence) the two of them had ended up making out in Eduardo’s dorm. After that they didn’t fight as a four very often (they still don’t). But this time Dustin was angry enough to say, “yeah, well that’s because Eduardo loves you too much to be stupid enough to try and date you.” Mark’s face, then, Dustin couldn’t get out of his head for a while. Because it was true but not true – Eduardo wants Mark to be a good person, he believes that Mark is a better person than he is – and Dustin just wants Mark. Dustin loves Mark with less storm than Eduardo does, but more pardon. Dustin loves Mark, and he tells him that a few hours after their first fight. He hadn’t meant to make Mark think different.
What people don’t get, or don’t realise, is that it’s always been all four of them. Maybe things would have wound up differently if the whole double-date stroke platonic foursome hadn’t happened, but it did. They’re tangled up now, two sets of best friends and two couples, and all that overlap. So while Dustin has an encyclopaedic knowledge of places to bite which will cause Mark to go offline for a minute or two, he also knows exactly what Chris sounds like when he’s being frenched up against a wall. Eduardo pushes Chris up against doorways, Chris’s cheeks flushed and Eduardo’s hands in his hair. Gentle, careful. The way there’s no profit in behaving around Mark. They had asked Chris, in Palo Alto that first summer, if he was worried about Eduardo in New York. Chris had smiled and said, “He needs to try. I’ll see him when he visits.” And okay, Eduardo had run up the phones a little, checking in so often, but he had seemed to spend a lot of time discussing PR campaigns with Chris, just the two of them. Dustin had never investigated that one very closely. He had already heard or seen quite enough of the two of them at Kirkland.
The next part had been worse, with Chris and Wardo finishing college and Dustin and Mark so embedded in the company and on the opposite coast. Eduardo had looked Mark in the eyes before they boarded the plane and said, “Make sure there’s something here for us to come back to.” Mark had just nodded. It had been Mark and Dustin then, for a while, and some parts of it were great and sometimes Dustin missed Kirkland. Those days he lay on the couch with Mark and called Chris while Mark pretended he wasn’t trying to listen in on the call.
It had taken a little longer to pick up on the way that he kind of loved Eduardo too, in a definitely platonic, my best friend would kill me, kind of way. Eduardo ended up in hospital with a weirdly intense dose of the flu, with Chris and Mark out of town doing the PR thing. Dustin had found himself in Massachusetts again almost without thinking about it, ignoring nurses who told him he couldn’t get into the room because it was Wardo, damn it, and where else would he be? Dustin had tried to explain this to Mark later on, not expecting much of a response. Mark had nodded and said, “It would be better if Chris was here too,” which was as close as he would ever get to admitting that he missed them.
And it is better now, with all four of them in the offices. It’s late but they’re busy and they might as well be busy together. On the couch, Mark’s legs are hooked over Dustin’s, with just about enough room for both of their laptops in the space. Dustin drums absently on Mark’s thigh, waiting for the code to finish loading. He calls, “Have the two of you decided yet? Are we going to support cute puppies or even cuter kittens? These decisions are important you know.”
Eduardo doesn’t even look away from the pages, raising one finger in Dustin’s direction. His head is bent close to Chris, as the pair of them look at proposals for a foundation. Chris says, “We’ve decided on funding to teach social skills to programmers exhibiting a tragic lack of them. There are some really sad cases out there, and I think Eduardo and I should try and address the problem.”
Mark laughs, disrupting the balance of Dustin’s laptop. Dustin says, “You know he’s insulting you as well.”
“I decided it was probably fair. There’s a reason we keep those two around.”
“Pity?”
Eduardo throws a ball of paper at Dustin’s head, showing surprisingly good aim.
Mark rubs the abused spot with his thumb, in a moment of distraction or misplaced concern or whatever. He says, “I like the free computer one.”
“Well, of course you like the computer one,” Eduardo says.
“Not as a sole project,” Mark says. “But it does fit with our goals and with the company, plus it’s a good cause. We should help kids that want to get here – we were lucky, I don’t see the harm in trying to spread it around a little.”
“We did do a little work as well,” Dustin points out. “They need to do that too.”
“Yes,” Mark admits, “but luck helps.”