Cryptography For Beginners

Chapter 1

Chapter Summary

Chapter Notes

At first, Eduardo thinks the e-mail is spam.

It’s claiming to be from Mark Zuckerberg, for one thing. Eduardo hasn’t spoken to, e-mailed or even looked at Mark since the settlement two years ago, and he’s perfectly happy to keep it that way. The second thing he notices is that the subject of the e-mail is ciphertext, and the body of the e-mail is just an incomprehensible sequence of numbers:

10038259 10038205 10038263 10051970 10052049 10052045 10052048 10052048 10052059 9984929 9985000 9984934 9985004 9984929 10038162 10038164 10038146 10038153 10038209 10038144 10038159 10038209 9984992 9985010 9985010 9985001 9985006 9985005 9984996 9984943 9985752 9985681 9985752 9985684 9985687 9985678 9985693 9985752 9985665 9985687 9985677 9985750

It’s possible that someone is just spoofing Mark’s e-mail address. Dustin once tried to explain how easy it was to do that, but Eduardo had tuned him out after he said the word “telnet,” so he doesn’t really know any of the details of how to pull it off. But it’s easy enough that Dustin thought that maybe Eduardo would be able to do it himself, and so it must be pretty damn easy.

The problem with that theory is that the only people Eduardo knows who are capable of spoofing an e-mail address are the same people who would have to face Mark’s wrath for doing something like this. Ken Thomas -- who thinks it’s the height of comedy to change the height all of the chairs in the conference rooms so that everyone has to awkwardly re-position themselves during meetings -- doesn’t know the difference difference between BCC and CC. Tim Wagner -- who shares an office with Eduardo and spends 70% of his day on Facebook -- can barely figure out what a USB port is, much less how to plug anything into it. Dustin may have stuck by Mark during the depositions, but he’s not the kind of person who would fuck with Eduardo’s head like this for shits and giggles.

Then again, Eduardo didn’t think Mark would do anything like that, either.

It’s been established that he’s not such a great judge of Mark’s character, after all.

He gets another e-mail from Mark five minutes later.

Subject: decryption

`- ASCII

• decimal

• bitwise XOR by character

• key #1 is the date of the Christmas party`

It’s almost as cryptic as the first e-mail, and all of this feels a little off. Mark, for all his backstabbing, doesn’t play mind games. On the other hand, Eduardo doesn’t really know how Mark works. He never has. The pointer of Eduardo’s mouse hovers over the delete button for a very long time. He should do it, should just kick Mark the fuck out of his life for good. But in a way, that’s letting Mark win. Figuring out the puzzle is also letting Mark win, but if Eduardo manages to decrypt the message, then he won’t keep himself up at night wondering what the fuck Mark is doing to him this time around. If he’s going to punch Mark for this, he wants to know exactly why he’s doing it.

He decides to write a reply instead.

Subject: Re: decryption

What the fuck is this about, Mark?

Mark’s reply is almost instantaneous. Figures that he’s finally learned how to respond to e-mail in a timely manner.

Subject: Re: Re: decryption

It'll make sense eventually.

Eduardo wonders whether or not it’s worth the hassle to throw his laptop against the wall. It belongs to him, not his company, and he has family pictures and his resume and his music collection on the hard drive. Even with backups it’d still be annoying to recover it all. Plus, decent laptops are expensive.

It’d probably be a lot more cathartic if he threw it at Mark’s face, anyway.

----

And the thing is, Eduardo is mostly over Mark, as much as anyone is ever over a spectacularly disastrous break up. Never mind that they weren’t even dating at the time.

Eduardo is adjusting to life after graduating from Harvard. He’s been meeting the right people, dropping the right hints, investigating the right opportunities. He has a job in New York at the moment, doing low level statistical work at a venture capital firm. It’s not much, but it’s giving him a feel for the business that he wouldn’t get from going it alone. He’s got an office that he shares with two other people, and he has an apartment that sometimes looks more like a closet even though he could do better with the money he got from the settlement. He has a neighbor who will give him dinners in tiny tupperware containers because she thinks he’s too thin for his own good, and he has a guy who always remembers his order at the deli, and he has a girl he smiles at on the street as they walk past each other, even though he doesn’t know her name.

What Eduardo doesn’t have is the time or the patience to deal with Mark’s bullshit all over again.

---

“What the fuck is he trying to tell me?” he asks Dustin over the phone.

Eduardo can almost see Dustin shrug all the way across the country. “I have no idea, man. Mark doesn’t tell me personal shit, especially not when he’s evil-geniusing. You know that.”

On Eduardo’s screen, he has the Wikipedia pages for “bitwise operator” and “ASCII” open. It all makes sense to him in pieces, but he doesn’t quite know how to put it all together just yet. Mark is the only one who knows that, and no one knows what the fuck is going on in Mark’s head. This is low even for him. “I’m not asking for his social security number, here. I just want to know if I should be worried that Mark is going to sue me or trying to exact revenge on me by making me go insane or something.”

Dustin says, “I hate to say it, but if Mark was going to sue you, you’d already know about it, and Mark doesn’t hate you enough to want to make you go insane.” He sounds almost apologetic.

“But he does hate me enough to send me completely incomprehensible numbers that will probably make me go insane,” Eduardo says. He rubs his forehead. Fucking Mark. Why does everything have to come back to him?

“I’ll do my best to pry it out of him, man, but he’ll probably just stare at me until I go away. He’s a little terrifying like that,” Dustin says. He makes a noise that almost sounds like a shiver, and Eduardo doesn’t hate him or feel resentful or anything. It’s a lot easier to remember why he liked hanging out with Dustin in the first place. Dustin used to sit in his room and heckle Mark while Mark had his headphones on, completely wired in. The insults usually didn’t make any sense, a weird collection of non sequiturs and technical jargon, and half the time it was probably offensive to the French, considering the way Dustin liked to butcher the accent and every word in the language. Eduardo would just watch from the common room, as Dustin’s expressions became ever more exaggerated and Mark’s expression didn’t even flicker even the tiniest bit, and Eduardo would end up laughing so hard his sides would hurt.

“Thanks, Dustin,” Eduardo says.

---

Subject: Re: decryption

Which Christmas party?

Subject: Re: Re: decryption

The first one.

Eduardo’s been to a lot of Christmas parties, despite not celebrating the holiday himself. His father would go to a lot of them for business reasons, family gatherings, those sorts of things. Eduardo liked the cookies and sometimes he liked the trees covered in decorations and fake snow, but he can’t remember ever going to one of those parties with Mark around. At Harvard, all the students they knew were too busy with finals and travel plans for winter break to set up a party like that. Hillel did have a Hanukkah party every year, Mark, Eduardo, Dustin and Chris usually went to together, along with the rest of AEPi. They’d eat latkes and listen to mediocre klezmer and Mark would shove his hands in his pockets while Eduardo would dance like a dork with Chris, because nothing negated the gay guy ability to dance like klezmer music.

It hurts less than it used to, thinking back to the older, happier days. Eduardo’s not over anything that happened (and he’s not sure he ever will be), but he thinks that maybe he could have a conversation with Chris without flinching, and he can talk to his father on the phone without feeling like a complete failure. He digs up an old AEPi photo, a group shot of the brothers standing in a row. Mark is looking to one side, away from the camera. Eduardo himself is smiling brightly, looking straight on in the way his mom had always instructed him to do. He looks so fucking naive.

And then Eduardo remembers.

It was a stupid idea, but Eduardo wasn’t external social chair at the time, so he didn’t have any control over it. The brothers thought it was funny for AEPi to put on a Christmas party before Thanksgiving, and so they put on a Christmas party in early October. The decorations team went all out for that one, setting up a Christmas tree, red and green streamers, stockings, gingerbread cookies. They drew a line at a nativity scene, though there was some dispute over just how offensive it would be to have one. That was sophomore year. That was the party where Eduardo met Mark for the first time.

Back then Mark was just a gawky freshman hugging the walls, and Eduardo had felt bad for him in the way he felt bad for all the new frosh, still trying to feel their way around the college experience. Eduardo ended up talking to him over disgusting punch. Their conversation circled around idiots in the intro courses and how to spot the kids who couldn’t handle the math classes. Mark talked really fast, his sentences sharp and choppy, like he was always trying to spit all his words out all at once. Eduardo had liked Mark even then, liked Mark’s unblinking eyes and the odd curl of Mark’s mouth. He’d seen something there, a spark, a ferocity. Students at Harvard don’t lack ambition. but even then, Mark was different. Mark wasn’t going to let anyone stand in his way.

---

Eduardo has to go back through his old e-mails in order to figure out when that party even happened. Back then, he kept all his dates in a physical calendar, and he usually threw it out at the end of the year. No real reason to keep it around to clutter up his life.

But he does have all his old AEPi listserv e-mails, which means he has the original party announcement, complete with a tacky animated Santa GIF and Comic Sans font. Eduardo jots down the date listed: October 5, 2002. There are a few different ways Mark could have encoded that information into a numeric key.

1052002

5102002

2002510

2002105

10052002

20021005

20020510

Of course, it’s possible that there’s no way to decode the message at all, and Eduardo won’t get anything out of it. But that would be sadistic. Mark is a douchebag, but he’s not all that good at being a sadist. Sadism involves caring about the emotional state of the people around you.

There are online calculators that will do the bitwise XOR, which means it only takes about ten minutes per key for Eduardo to decrypt the whole message. It’s still annoying grunt work, and Eduardo still hates Mark for making him do it, but he’d forgotten what it could be like with a problem in front of him, having to take it apart piece by piece. Once, while Mark was drunk, he had rambled on for five whole minutes about why he loved programming as a means of solving problems. He had mumbled about how he liked making everything come together, liked making every piece fit and do its part. Mark usually gets more articulate and more mean while drunk, which had always amused Eduardo to no end, but that time Mark had been a little sleepy, fuzzy around the edges. It had made him look more human than Eduardo had ever seen him before, like there was something behind that cold, blank stare.

None of the keys Eduardo uses gives him a full result, which maybe he should have expected since Mark only gave him the clue for the first key. He’ll probably need all of them to decrypt the message.

But one thing sticks out. The key 10052002 gives him this result:

19025 18975 19029 32 115 111 114 114 121 80387 80458 80388 80462 80387 18992 18998 18976 18987 19043 18978 18989 19043 80450 80464 80464 80459 80460 80463 80454 80397 81786 81715 81786 81718 81717 81708 81727 81786 81699 81717 81711 81780

Most of the numbers are outside the range of normal ASCII characters, but 32 115 111 114 114 121 are not.

Eduardo pulls up the Wikipedia page for ASCII again and translates each character by hand.

And then he stares at the result for a long, long time, because he’s not sure why Mark wrote it, why it’s there. It’s just one word. The others are still encrypted, and who fucking knows what they are, but what really hits Eduardo in the gut is that Mark made this the word Eduardo would decrypt first, that Mark designed this to be the first word Eduardo would see.

s o r r y

---

It’s late in New York (but not in California), almost midnight, and Eduardo’s has been spacing out in all of his meetings all day. He’s still trying to puzzle out what Mark’s endgame is here, trying to figure out if Mark is setting him up for even more pain and suffering down the line. Eduardo’s figured this part out, at least, the part where he learns that people aren’t fundamentally decent, and you can’t fucking trust anyone. His dad used to tell him that, when he was younger, and Eduardo had thought it was one of those things that adults said, like freaking out over weed and sex, that turn out to be a little bullshit. He figures that maybe parents do know better, after all.

Eduardo sits down on his bed, presses his phone to his ear. “Do you mean it?” he asks.

There’s a quiet moment on the other end of the line. Eduardo can hear the slow exhalation of breath. “Yeah,” Mark says, having the decency not to pretend like he doesn’t know what Eduardo’s talking about.

Mark sounds the same as he always does. He still sounds like Mark, still a little detached from his own words. “What the fuck, Mark?” Eduardo says, but he’s not as angry as he could be. This is at least half an apology from Mark, and that’s what he’s always wanted, right? For Mark to acknowledge his fucking existence?

“I do mean it,” Mark says. “All of it. But I think it’s better if you figure it out yourself.”

Eduardo rubs his forehead. “How many keys will I need to decrypt the whole thing?” It’s always like this, every single fucking time, and you would think Eduardo would know better by now. Mark giveth, and Mark taketh away.

Mark pauses. “Five,” he says. “You’ve already figured out the first one.” He yawns. Eduardo can imagine Mark rubbing his eyes and curling up on the nearest patch of mattress he can find, the way he always used to after a long coding stretch. Eduardo used to think it was cute.

It can’t be that late out in California. Eduardo wonders if Mark is still at work or if he’s gone home for the night. Mark never really had a conception of a work-life balance. Eduardo’s been carefully maintaining his own. He goes out to the bars with his coworkers and his loose circle of friends on the right nights, and he goes to concerts or plays or Broadway musicals with his closer friends, and he goes running in the mornings with the cute intern who works on the floor below him. She laughs at his stupid jokes, and she doesn’t seem like she wants to set his apartment on fire. Things would probably be different if she didn’t have a boyfriend, but she does. “Four more, then?” Eduardo says. He can handle four more of these. If he keeps telling himself that, it might actually become true.

“Four more,” Mark agrees.

After Eduardo hangs up from the call, he realizes that he’s just had an entire conversation with Mark without lawyers present, and it didn’t even end with destruction of property. Eduardo hadn’t been sure that was even possible anymore.

---

He finds the next key in his inbox in the morning.

Subject: key #2

- your investment

Eduardo stares at it while he’s shoving some cereal in his mouth for breakfast. At first he thinks it’s about his investment portfolio, but that makes no sense. Mark wouldn’t bother to go through the effort of breaking into Eduardo’s accounts, and Mark doesn’t give a shit about Eduardo’s shares in Microsoft and Google. Eduardo has trouble believing that Mark gives a shit about him at all.

And yet, Eduardo has a message that’s been encrypted five times with five different keys, because Mark can’t fucking talk or write things out like a normal person. Eduardo really misses the days when Mark kept a blog, because that was the best way to keep track of Mark’s mental state at any given moment in time. Talking to him in person wasn’t nearly as useful.

Eduardo doesn’t have too much time to think about it during work, because he has meetings and deadlines and people to call. Eduardo does love this work, loves picking apart the numbers to get to the truths that lie at the heart of them. He loves going through the mess of statistics and graphs and half-doctored financial reports and building up a mental picture of what a company must look like on the inside. He was so fucking young when Facebook happened, and it hurt like a bitch when everything fell apart, but he can’t regret it or anything it taught him.

Tim invites him out for drinks after work, but Eduardo doesn’t really like any of the people who are going, and he wants to figure out what Mark’s decided to tell him this time. He makes up a story about needing to take some of his work home. Tim shrugs like he doesn’t care.

Eduardo gets home as the sun dips below the Manhattan skyscrapers. They’ve been having a heat wave, and his shirt sticks to his back, and the air smells like heated up tar. He thinks about Mark on the other side of the country, building his empire, and for a moment, this life feels so very small.

---

The number Mark used for this key is less obvious this time.

He tries using the amount of money spent on lawyer fees during the lawsuit.

He tries the number of Facebook shares he currently owns.

He tries the $1000 he gave Mark at the beginning, when the future had seemed so fucking bright.

None of them work.

He gets the sinking feeling that it’s that number, the one that always makes the bile rise up in his throat, the one that always reminds him of the way Mark had said, “Hang on, just checking your math on that,” his eyes cold and angry and blank. Eduardo goes through and XORs all the remaining numbers with 19000, and he gets this result:

105 39 109 s o r r y 94267 94322 94268 94326 94267 8 14 24 19 91 26 21 91 94330 94312 94312 94323 94324 94327 94334 94261 95554 95499 95554 95502 95501 95508 95495 95554 95515 95501 95511 95564

There are only five numbers that translate into readable characters, but only the first group of three translates into something coherent.

i ' m   s o r r y

Eduardo closes his eyes. He thinks about all the ways he could fill in the rest of the sentence. “I’m sorry I hate you so much.” or “I’m sorry you’re such a moron.” He doesn’t try to count the characters he has left to translate, because that way just lies misery and madness.

He takes a deep breath, because Mark said he meant it, all of it, and the choice of words is deliberate. Mark doesn’t do anything by accident, and for the amount of effort he put into setting it up, every step must have been planned out perfectly in advance. The choice of key is probably an acknowledgement, in Mark terms, of Eduardo’s contribution to Facebook.

Mark is kind of shitty at this “apologizing” thing, it turns out. Eduardo should not be as surprised as he is. He decides to reply to Mark’s latest e-mail anyway.

Subject: Re: key #2

I'm not ready to forgive you, but I do appreciate the gesture.

Eduardo kind of understands where Mark’s coming from with this bizarro scavenger hunt. It’s a lot easier writing things down than saying them out loud. Maybe it’s even easier under five layers of encryption.

---

“Are you sure you haven’t hired someone to slip Mark happy pills or something?” Dustin asks, the next time they talk on the phone. Mark still hasn’t sent Eduardo any clues about the next key, and Eduardo’s considering how he might be able to try all of the possible keys. Unfortunately, he’d have to learn how to program first, and he doesn’t have the time for that.

“Wait, what?” Eduardo says. He flops down on the bed, because he’s not sure he wants to have this conversation while standing upright.

“He smiled today,” Dustin says around a mouthful of chips. Eduardo can hear him chew it, which is really just disgusting. “And then he even told one of the developers he thought her code was clean and well-structured.”

Eduardo snorts. “That’s not grounds for accusing me of drugging him, man.” He can’t even imagine what it must be like to work for Mark now. He was bad enough when he was constantly distracted and sleep-deprived from working on Facebook non-stop. Now that he has work days and a lot more people to manage, Mark must be insufferable.

“I think there may have been some dimple, dude. Chris even searched his office for mysterious-looking pods. You must have given him the good stuff.” Dustin sounds like he’s just discovered peanut butter and banana sandwiches or something. Eduardo can practically feel Dustin’sglee radiating from the phone.

That makes Eduardo’s neck heat up with embarrassment for some reason. “Whatever,” he mutters.

---

A few days later, he gets a friend request from Mark. The e-mail sits in his Inbox, mocking him with its utter absurdity.

Mark Zuckerberg wants to be friends on Facebook.

Eduardo focuses on his work, trying not to remember the warm, pleased feeling he got when Dustin told him that he was making Mark happy. He has reports to write, companies to research. His boss isn’t an asshole any more than anyone else Eduardo has ever worked with in the industry, but he’s still demanding and loud. Eduardo barely has time to think, and he likes it that way. Much less upsetting than wondering why Mark wants to be friends again. There are three more keys left. Mark just needs to give him the rest of them, and then it’ll be over. He won’t have to deal with this anymore.

And then Mark calls. “I’m not fucking with you,” he says by way of greeting.

“You could have fooled me,” Eduardo says, sleepy because it’s one in the morning and Mark can’t fucking add three to anything.

“It wasn’t -- I wasn’t mocking you or anything,” Mark says. The usual edge in his voice is worn smooth, and Eduardo hates him so fucking much for having the audacity to be earnest and almost nice right now, when it’s too fucking late at night. Eduardo still has nightmares about the depositions sometimes. He’ll wake up at night gasping and twisted up in his sheets, because he can still see the cold, blank look on Mark’s face as Eduardo did his best not to fall apart on the other side of the table.

“Okay,” Eduardo says, closing his eyes so he doesn’t have to stare at his ceiling. “I believe you.”

---

There’s another e-mail from Mark in his Inbox in the morning.

Subject: key #3

- the number of friends you have

That’s almost too easy, because there’s only one metric that Mark would ever use. Eduardo hasn’t really used Facebook since the dilution. He still has his account, and he still gets e-mails every once in a while from Facebook, but he’s done his best to ignore it. He has a pile of friend requests that have accumulated (including Mark’s) over the years, but he hasn’t touched them. Right now, Eduardo has 122 friends, and that number hasn’t changed since he decided to remove anyone who even remotely had a connection to Mark.

It’s becoming easy to see patterns in the numbers now. The next word is mostly likely going to come out of the 8 14 24 19 91 26 21 91 chunk of his current message, so he decodes that first as a chance to verify that he has the right key.

He tries 122 first. What he gets back is this:

r t b i ! o !`

All the numbers are valid characters, close but not quite. Eduardo doesn’t have time to dwell on it, because at that time it’s already seven, and he needs to head out to work.

It’s another day of dealing with Charles, the douchebag who works two offices down. Eduardo can’t even remember his last name, and he’s happier that way. Charles is under the mistaken belief that he shits gold, and Eduardo’s known enough people with genuine intellect and talent to know that Charles actually just has his head stuck up his ass. Or maybe one of his parents does. Eduardo’s not sure about the details. Either way, it means that Eduardo has to work through lunch just to get everything done, eating a sandwich in one hand while typing with another.

He kind of misses being able to bitch to Mark about the assholes in his econ classes. They would sit in Mark’s room, and Mark would grunt or nod at the appropriate times while Eduardo complained about idiots who couldn’t fucking pay attention in class and who asked stupid questions because they were too busy texting as the professor tried to explain simple mathematical concepts.

On the subway, jammed between twenty people and having a little trouble breathing, Eduardo realizes why the numbers aren’t working on the latest key. It’s so stupidly Mark, arrogant and presumptuous and almost sweet in an arrogant and presumptuous way. Eduardo laughs out loud, which gets him funny looks from the other passengers, and he bites down on his lower lip to keep his smile under control.

Mark is such an asshole. Eduardo really has missed him.

---

When Eduardo gets home, he decodes the message using the number 123, and he confirms the friend request from Mark.

The message now looks like this:

i ' m   s o r r y 94272 94217 94279 94221 94272 s u c h   a n   94209 94227 94227 94216 94223 94220 94213 94286 95545 95600 95545 95605 95606 95599 95612 95545 95584 95606 95596 95543

It doesn’t say as much as the other ones, but Eduardo is pleased all the same. There’s nothing that Mark’s thrown at him that’s stumped him just yet, and he’s still riding the high of a correct answer. He kind of wants to run around his tiny apartment and do jumping jacks and solve all of Project Euler tonight. Eduardo loves math problems, loves puzzles, and he still kind of hates that Mark apparently knows him well enough to know that.

Subject: Re: key #3

You didn't know I'd confirm the friend request.

Subject: Re: Re: key #3

No, but I hoped you would.

And maybe that’s the thing that Eduardo never quite understood about Mark, how he could stare down uncertainty and shrug like it was no big deal. Eduardo’s always been better off with a plan laid out before him, a script to read from. He’s built his own life up so carefully according to the rules he’s been given. It’s always been easier to do what his father expected of him, easier to excel at school and work in finance. The thing about Mark is that no one’s expectations of him could be higher than the ones he’s set for himself. Eduardo wonders what that must be like. He wonders if he’ll ever get a chance to find out.

---

A few days later, Mark updates his status to say that he’s planning to visit his parents two weeks from now. Mark still hasn’t sent Eduardo the fourth key yet.

Dobbs Ferry isn’t too far from New York City, and Mark’s going to be flying in and out of JFK anyway.

“If you’re going to be around the city at all, feel free to drop by,” Eduardo says to Mark’s cell phone answering machine. He’s not sure what he’s doing. He’s not sure he’s ready to face Mark down in person again, especially after everything, but he wants to. He wants to know that he’s capable of it, that they’re capable of it. They’re not quite friends, and they’re not quite enemies, and they’re not even deliberately ignored acquaintances. It leaves Eduardo feeling off-balance, unsettled.

He gets a message on his own cell phone the next day. “Yeah, that would be good. I can leave my parents’ place on Saturday. My flight’s around two PM on Sunday. I’d have to stay at your place overnight.” He sounds like Mark, more like he’s stating a fact than asking a question.

Eduardo texts him in response, because he hates playing phone tag, and for some reason Mark’s phone answering message kind of freaks him out. He almost sounds polite on it. Yeah, that sounds good. I'll pick you up from Grand Central.

---

The Thursday before Mark’s visit, Eduardo gets a Facebook message from Kumar, one of the older members of the Harvard Investment Association. He’s passing through New York on his way back to Boston to visit his girlfriend, and he wants to know if Eduardo has time for a drink on Friday. It sounds great. Eduardo’s always liked Kumar. He always knew how to crack the right joke to lighten the tension when people started getting ridiculously intense about the ethics (or lack thereof) of short selling, and when they took Econometric Methods together, he was always willing to point Eduardo in the right direction when Eduardo got stuck on a problem.

Friday is really bad. Ken fucks up some numbers, and Eduardo is forced to scramble to get the right ones on all the documents while everyone else looks confused. After that, having a drink with an old friend sounds like the best idea Eduardo has ever heard.

“You’re looking like you need one of these more than I do,” Kumar says as he waves down a waitress. Eduardo lets him order for him, because Kumar was a beer connoisseur in college, and he’s never steered Eduardo wrong before.

“Yeah, tell me about it,” Eduardo says. He’s not out to get drunk, but he’s definitely willing to go for tipsy.

They chat for a bit, catching up on mutual friends. Kumar’s not quite ready to propose to his girlfriend just yet, even though they’ve been dating for as long as Eduardo’s known him. Eduardo still hangs out with one of Kumar’s best friends, who he knows through the Phoenix. The weather in San Francisco is really nice this time of year. And then Kumar decides to drop the bomb.

“I just started up my own firm this year with a few guys I met at Stanford,” he says. “You’ve got a good feel for the tech industry, man. Where you are right now is bullshit. You have more experience with startups than the rest of them combined.”

Eduardo says, “And look where that turned out, huh.” He takes a good long sip of his beer. Maybe he does want to get drunk.

“Zuckerberg’s a dick, don’t get me wrong, but he didn’t ask you to be his CFO because you’re a total moron. I’m sure he had his reasons for pulling that shit with the dilution, but I don’t care what they are. If you’re willing to leave your job and move out to California, we’d love to have you,” Kumar says. “I wasn’t joking about how nice San Francisco is right now.”

“Shit,” Eduardo says. “Give me a week, and I’ll get back to you on that.”

Kumar says, “Take your time. I know it’d a big change for you. It was good seeing you again, man.” He shakes Eduardo’s hand before he leaves.

---

The problem with taking up Kumar’s offer isn’t that it involves quitting his current job or that it involves moving out to California. Eduardo’s more than happy to tell his boss at work to fuck off, and he likes the thought of getting away from the mood-swinging weather of the East Coast after four years in Boston and two years in New York.

No, the problem with taking up Kumar’s offer is that it’s fucking terrifying. Eduardo can barely sleep Friday night, because all he can think about is all the ways this whole thing could fall. Sure, he has enough money to make sure he’s set for life, and he is completely aware of the fact that you don’t get anywhere without taking chances. It’s just that he’s already gone through one spectacular disaster in his life, and he’s not sure if he’s ready for another.

Mark shows up in Grand Central Saturday evening with a backpack and a duffel bag slung over one shoulder. He looks the same as he always does, wearing a Harvard t-shirt underneath a gray zip-up hoodie along with his signature fuck-you flip flops. He looks more like himself than the kid playing dress-up in a nice shirt and tie sitting across from Eduardo during the depositions.

Grand Central Terminal is one of Eduardo’s favorite places in all of New York City. There’s something about the grandeur of the building that feels like New York to him, like it’s part of this huge sprawling city that Eduardo currently calls his home.

“Hey,” Eduardo says as Mark frowns at his iPhone.

“Hey,” Mark says without looking up. He taps out a response to something, and Eduardo feels like he’s a third wheel to Mark and his phone. Or, more accurately, Mark and Facebook.

That’s been true for longer than Eduardo cares to remember.

Mark finishes up with his text or e-mail or whatever, and then he looks right at Eduardo and smiles. It’s a little disconcerting, because Eduardo had forgotten what it was like to get Mark’s full attention, and it’s especially unsettling with Mark’s lips curled up to one side, like he’s happy to see Eduardo. “You look -- you look good,” Mark says.

Eduardo blinks. “Thanks,” he says automatically.

Mark’s more familiar with Manhattan than Eduardo is, considering how long Mark has been living in Westchester County, practically next door, but he doesn’t complain or criticize when Eduardo sets the agenda. They end up eating dinner at Eduardo’s favorite Korean hole-in-the-wall, where they end up eating at a tiny table that barely fits the both of them, much less the four tiny side dishes that come with their meals.

They mostly talk about Eduardo’s job, because it’s better than dodging conversations about Facebook and the people who work there. Eduardo can’t really talk about any of the details of the actual work he’s doing, so he mostly ends up complaining about everyone he hates and why he hates them. Mark is good at listening in the same way a brick wall is good at listening, and back at Harvard, Eduardo used to talk out solutions to his econ problems to Mark’s back, knowing that Mark wasn’t really paying any attention. Eduardo even gets around to mentioning Kumar’s offer in vague terms.

“So when are you quitting?” Mark asks, after he swallows a bite of his Japchae.

“What?” Eduardo says. He hadn’t mentioned quitting at any point during the conversation. “I haven’t decided to quit yet.”

Mark’s eyes narrow an almost imperceptible amount. “I don’t remember you being this much of an idiot in college,” he says with his usual lack of inflection.

“Funny, I do remember you being this much of an asshole in college,” Eduardo says.

Mark shakes his head. “You just spent twenty minutes telling me how much you hate the people you work with, and then you told me that you’ve got another job that’s lined up with someone you don’t hate. Why aren’t you quitting again?”

Eduardo can’t tell Mark any of the real reasons, that he can’t let himself fuck it all up again, that he’s always been bad at taking the same chances that Mark does. Maybe Mark’s right. Maybe Eduardo is being a moron about this. “Fuck you, man,” Eduardo says, but he laughs a little. He thinks about how reckless Mark makes him feel, sometimes, like it’s not so weird to take the chances he’s been given and just run with them.

He punches Mark in the shoulder, and Mark smiles.

---

In the morning, Eduardo wakes Mark up by throwing balled up pieces of newspaper at his face, a common practice at the Kirkland suite. Chris had this thing about alarm clocks, and the three of them ended up with an agreement to wake each other up, because Chris was a freakish early riser anyway. Somewhere along the way, it turned into throwing discarded syllabi or essays at each other in the mornings, as much about laziness as anything else. Eduardo doesn’t know when it started, but he does remember the first time he woke up with Systems problem set in his face and Chris yelling about how they needed to get their asses down to the dining hall for breakfast.

Mark wakes up in stages, the same way he always does, stumbling to wakefulness. The time difference between New York and California isn’t doing him any favors. Eduardo mostly sits around reading the Sunday edition of the New York Times, trying not to laugh at Mark too blatantly. “You want to grab some brunch?” Eduardo asks.

“Mpfh,” Mark says, nodding, which probably means “yes” in his native language. Eduardo had forgotten that Mark could be like this, as human as anyone else. Over the years, it had been easier to build up this monster in his head, and while most of it is true, it’s not the whole truth about Mark either. Mark is apologizing in pieces, in a way that means a lot more to Eduardo than $600 million or a 5% stake in Facebook. Mark also gets bedhead and doesn’t yell at Eduardo for throwing things at his face and dispenses useful, if douchey, advice when Eduardo needs to hear it.

They don’t really talk during brunch because Mark is still half asleep and the place they go to is crowded and noisy, but afterwards, they sit on a bench in the nearby park as Mark tries to decide how soon he needs to get to the airport. Eduardo watches the people go by, some with their dogs, some with their earbuds and athletic shorts, some with their rollerblades and skateboards. It’s a warm, sunny day, not too hot, and the park is filled with people. Eduardo finds it soothing.

“Why did you do it?” Eduardo finally asks. His voice sounds so quiet, but he knows Mark can hear him.

He can feel Mark go still next to him, and Eduardo thinks he’s ready to hear Mark say anything, but he can’t let himself look at Mark’s face. Mark says, “You weren’t there. We kept telling you to come out to Palo Alto, and you weren’t there. It was like you didn’t want to hear us or something, like you didn’t even care. Then you froze the account, and I was so fucking angry. I’m not-- I do mean it. I am sorry.” He doesn’t say it in the same tone of voice he used at the depositions, calm and a little cruel. He says it in the same tone of voice he used in the hallway after he left Eduardo stranded at the airport, almost pleading. Eduardo hadn’t been ready to hear it from him then. All he could hear was that Mark was leaving him behind and that in itself was terrifying enough to crowd everything else out.

Eduardo closes his eyes, and all he can hear is the hum of the city around him and his own ragged breath in his ears. He’s not sure he can handle this. Forget eleven. When he’s around Mark, all of Eduardo’s emotions feel like they’re dialed up to twelve. “I don’t think I’ll ever really be able to forgive you,” Eduardo says, finally. “But this is the closest I’ll ever get.”

He opens his eyes and looks at Mark, who is the same as he always was and yet somehow different.

Mark looks back.

---

After Mark’s left on a taxi headed for JFK, Eduardo finds a photograph taped to his bathroom mirror.

It’s a picture of a water gun fight on a small grassy field. Eduardo doesn’t recognize most of the people in the picture, but he does recognize Dustin. Dustin is getting sprayed in the face by a Super Soaker, his face scrunched up in self-defense. He’s wielding his own Super Soaker and laughing with his whole body, big and over the top, the same way Dustin always is. There are a few trees and a tennis court in the background. Eduardo has no idea what it means.

On the back of the picture, written with a Sharpie and Dustin’s loopy handwriting:

**Dustin “the Mos” Moskovitz & Co.

the center of the known universe (or close by, anyway), ‘06**

In Mark’s chicken-scratch handwriting and a ballpoint pen:

key #4

There’s an arrow pointing to “the center of the known universe.”

It’s puzzling, sure, but Eduardo doesn’t have time to really dwell on it, because he has whole lot of other shit he needs to take care of, and all of it is a lot more important than whatever else Mark has to say to him. It takes him five hours of pacing up and down the length of his apartment before he has the guts to commit to his plan in its entirety. Five hours of going over the pros and cons. Five hours to think of the reactions of his parents. Five hours to think over housing options and his salary and his proximity to Mark Zuckerberg.

It’s still worth it, because at the end of those five hours, he’s made a decision, and he’s not going to back out now. He calls up Kumar. “I want in,” he says, and he doesn’t give himself time to second-guess himself.

It turns out that Eduardo can start in about a month, plenty of time for him to quit his job and to pack all his things and go.

He gets his formal offer letter by e-mail in the morning.

He turns in his formal two weeks’ notice on Tuesday.

He doesn’t tell his father anything about it, which is probably the most stressful part of this whole thing.

It’s still fucking terrifying, and it’s all happening so fast, but Eduardo is hanging on this time. This time, he’ll make sure to come through it with his limbs still attached and his head still on. He’s not some twenty-one year old kid with more money than sense anymore, and he’s not going into this confused and uncertain and relying on Mark to steer them straight. He’s got his eyes open. He knows exactly where he’s going.

---

“No can do,” Dustin says, when Eduardo finally gets the time to ask him about the picture. “Mark got my silence as payment for telling me what he’s up to. I kind of like my desk where it is, and if I’m not too careful, he might put me with the sysadmins. But, you know, you’d be really proud of how annoying I was when I was trying to get the truth out of him.”

“Damn,” Eduardo says. He was really hoping that this one would be easy.

“You know that you could probably brute force the rest of the keys, right?” Dustin says. “You probably could have brute forced the whole thing, to tell the truth. With this sort of encryption mechanism, encrypting it several times doesn’t really make it any more secure. It just means you put more effort into encrypting it. XOR is commutative.”

Eduardo says, “You know that I’m not good enough at programming to brute force something like that, right?”

“Oh, right,” Dustin says, sounding thoughtful. “And Mark would probably take away my third monitor if I ever helped you with that.”

“Third monitor?” Eduardo asks.

“And if I brought in one of my own, Mark would probably instigate some kind of freakish cold war, and I would end up with nethack removed from my computer at work, and then how would I know if my female archaeologist can get the Amulet of Yendor and ascend? Huh?”

“You’re speaking a foreign language to me at this point,” Eduardo says, “but it’s okay. I get it. Mark’s vengeance is cold and unmerciful.” It comes out less bitter than it sounds in his head.

In the end, he’s kind of glad that Dustin can’t help him out with this one. Eduardo wants to see how Mark has set the rest of it up, wants to pick apart these tiny bits of Mark-logic and figure out what they mean. Eduardo wants to play all the way through, no cheating.

And besides, he’s never been a big fan of walkthroughs anyway.

---

Eduardo doesn’t have a lot of stuff in New York, so he can pack pretty light, but packing is still a surreal experience. He hadn’t realized that he’d accumulated so much stuff. He finds dozens of mismatched pens collected from conferences, a Harvard sweatshirt that is way too small for him and probably belonged to Christy, the book about the first dot-com bubble his father gave him after Eduardo started his current job, the pamphlet about finding Jesus that someone had shoved into Eduardo’s hands as he was leaving the subway station near his house. He even runs across an old picture of Mark flipping off the camera while wired in, his eyes still fixed on the screen in front of him. Eduardo snorts when he finds it, and it feels like something’s loosened inside of him, like he can laugh at Mark with something besides resentment. He thinks about convincing Dustin to make it Mark’s profile picture.

After he asks about it, Kumar gives him a quick rundown of the best places to live on his budget inside the city, but Eduardo won’t be able to find some place that’s available immediately and also worth living in. He’ll need to be sleeping on someone’s couch or spare bed while he gets all that straightened out.

Dustin has a big place in Palo Alto and a car.

So does Mark for that matter.

Even though their relationship is a lot better than it used to be, Eduardo doesn’t think he can handle being around Mark full time, so he shoots Dustin an e-mail about staying at his place while he gets into contact with some of Kumar’s friends about housing.

Dustin writes something back that has a lot of exclamation points.

Eduardo hasn’t figured out the fourth key yet. It’s obviously a location, the place where the photograph was taken, but the picture is too new, and Eduardo doesn’t recognize the tennis courts or the trees or the grass. Eduardo has tried the street addresses of Mark’s house, Dustin’s house, Chris’s house, the Facebook offices (both of them, new and old), and of the place they lived in that summer when everything went to shit. None of them work.

It’s entirely possible that they were on some bizarre retreat somewhere that Eduardo will have to track down, but that doesn’t seem likely. It’s got to be something simpler than that.

But he’s got more important things to focus on, Eduardo’s life is a mess of legal paperwork (his own lawyers checking it over), a pile of hastily packed boxes in his living room, pages and pages of Craigslist ads for two weeks.

And then he moves across the country.

---

“Shit,” Dustin says, checking his phone while he’s picking up Eduardo from SFO. “I need to stop by Facebook for a bit.” Eduardo only has a suitcase and a duffel bag with him, and Dustin grabs the duffel out of his hands. All Eduardo’s other stuff is being shipped from New York to Dustin’s place, but it still feels like a weekend trip, one of the ones he’d do from time to time during that summer, the one they don’t talk about anymore.

Eduardo shrugs. “Yeah, sure.” He’s too tired -- worn out from the flight and the nerves -- to put up a fight, and he knows that Dustin wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.

It’s still sunny outside, one of the advantages of a midday flight. Dustin talks about all the weird hobbies he’s picked up since Eduardo last saw him, like jet skiing and rock climbing and playing ARGs. The highway rolls by, looking like highways everywhere until they pull into Palo Alto, headed for the new Facebook offices. Eduardo hasn’t been anywhere near the new Facebook offices. He hates them, mostly the idea of them, even more than the old Facebook offices, the place where Mark -- well, where all of that happened. He hates the reminder that Mark could and did do all of it without him, that Mark thought it was necessary to throw Eduardo aside in order to do it all in the first place.

The actual visit is uneventful. Eduardo waits by the car while Dustin runs inside, just looking around the mostly-full parking lot and taking in the California sunshine. It was raining in New York when Eduardo left. Dustin runs back out half an hour later, and then they’re on their way.

They pass by a park with a tennis court, a few trees, a field full of green, green grass, only about two minutes away from Facebook, and Eduardo tilts his head to the side so he can get a better look at it. It’s the place from the picture. He knows it, it must be-- he’s been thinking about this all wrong.

“What’s the zip code of the Facebook offices?” he asks Dustin.

Dustin grins, same as he always does. “You know I totally badgered him into using that picture as the clue, right? He was going to do something boring involving latitude and longitude. But you know Mark, always knows a good idea when he sees one.”

Eduardo laughs, because fuck, he’s turned his whole entire life around, and he has no idea how that happened. He’s sitting in a car that’s just left the Facebook parking lot, and he’s talking to Dustin Moskovitz about Mark Zuckerberg, and he’s not in college anymore, and it doesn’t hurt. He says, “Yeah, but what’s the zip code?”

---

The zip code is 94304, and Eduardo decrypts the message as he settles into Dustin’s guest room, after he hangs up his suits for the coming week and tosses his dress shoes into a corner.

The resulting string is:

i ' m   s o r r y 32 105 39 109 32 s u c h a n 97 115 115 104 111 108 101 46 1369 1296 1369 1301 1302 1295 1308 1369 1280 1302 1292 1367

It looks like there’s a huge chunk of text that’s still encrypted with the final key, but it turns out that Mark gave up an entire sentence.

i ' m   s o r r y   i ' m   s u c h   a n   a s s h o l e . 1369 1296 1369 1301 1302 1295 1308 1369 1280 1302 1292 1367

Eduardo calls Mark up, not even bothering to check what time it is. Mark might even still be at work. “You should be,” he says without preamble.

“What?” Mark says.

“You should be sorry you’re such an asshole,” Eduardo says, and he can’t even sound angry about it. He has written proof that Mark is sorry that he’s an asshole. Whatever else life throws at him, Eduardo will be able to treasure that.

“Did Dustin give in and just tell you the answer?” Mark says, flat as always, but there’s a warmth underneath his words, something Eduardo thought they might have lost in the midst of the lawsuit and the depositions.

Eduardo snorts. “I am capable of figuring things out for myself, you know.” It’s so much easier talking to Mark with the bright flush of victory underneath his skin.

Mark makes a noise that could be skeptical or could be amused. Eduardo isn’t sure. “How was your flight?” Mark asks, changing the subject.

Eduardo tells him.

---

In the morning, he gets another e-mail.

Subject: key #5

-once there was a way to get back home

---

Dustin lives about five minutes away from Facebook, so he volunteers to walk to work every morning and let Eduardo drive into San Francisco with his car. Eduardo hates the commute, because it’s long and exhausting, and the majority of it is traffic. If Eduardo never has to see a bumper sticker that says “You can’t fix stupid, but you can vote it out of office,” ever again, it will still be too soon.

He has found an apartment in SoMa that he really likes, (698 Natoma Street, Apt #8), close to a bus line that will take him straight to work, but the lease won’t start for another month yet. Eduardo is stuck in Dustin’s house until then.

Kumar’s firm is a lot smaller than the one Eduardo just left, which means Eduardo is supposed to do the work of three people, or at least have the skills of three of them. He finds that he likes it, likes the added responsibility and the added work and the extra pressure. Their office is cramped and intimate compare to what Eduardo’s used to. Everyone is expected to pull their own weight.

His mentor is a woman named Nadine, who is terrifying in her sheer competence. She makes Eduardo feel like a fourth grader trying to understand calculus. On the first day of work, she hands him a stack of reports and tells him that she wants them sorted into categories by the end of the day. Eduardo does the best he can while trying not to feel like he’s in a race against the clock. At the end of the day, she looks over Eduardo’s work and tells him as nicely as possible that he’s an idiot for accidentally grouping the flourishing e-commerce company and the ambitious-but-flawed social networking startup together even if their feature sets overlap.

“But you haven’t lost us millions of dollars yet,” she says by way of encouragement. “I consider that an accomplishment.”

Weirdly enough, Eduardo is actually flattered. “You know, I think I’m going to really like it here,” he says.

She just laughs at him and hands him another stack of reports to read for tomorrow.

Kumar takes them out to drinks that night. They do the cheesy, touristy thing of taking a cable car to the bar, and Eduardo ends up hanging on to the side, a warm summer breeze on his face. There’s this moment, where they climb to the top of a hill. Eduardo can see the city stretched out in front of him, with the bay just beyond it, almost golden in the evening light, and he realizes, all of a sudden, that he’s happy -- truly fucking happy. He doesn’t think he’s ever been happy like this before.

He grins as they start their descent, and Kumar slaps his shoulder, grinning with him.

---

Mark visits him at Dustin’s house the first weekend after Eduardo starts his new job. Dustin is off doing something else -- rock climbing, Eduardo thinks -- so it’s just the two of them, still sizing each other up, still trying to figure out what they are to each other.

Mark stands in the foyer and shoves his hands in the pockets of his hoodie. He glances over Eduardo’s boxes, his suitcases, the pieces of Eduardo’s life that are waiting to be moved again. “I’m glad you finally got the balls to move out here,” Mark says. On almost anyone else, it would sound like an insult, but with Mark it just sounds like he’s stating a fact in the most dickish way possible.

Eduardo rolls his eyes and shakes his head. “I’m glad, too,” he says. He spent all of yesterday before trying to figure out the best places to buy food near his new apartment, trying to memorize the bus schedules. His life is remaking itself into something new, and he doesn’t know what it will be in the end. He’s looking forward to seeing what it becomes. He’s not scared of it anymore.

“When are you moving in to your new place?” Mark asks, his eyes flicking past Eduardo towards the living room and kitchen.

“In a couple more weeks,” Eduardo says, “but I’ll still visit you guys from time to time.” He’s going to have friends in San Francisco, sure, but he has friends here, too, and he doesn’t want to give that up. Dustin’s already talking about movie and/or video game nights and insisting that he’d totally be willing to pick Eduardo up from the Caltrain station when he comes by and let Eduardo crash on his spare bed if he needs it.

Mark smiles, really smiles, his eyes lighting up like he’s just gotten an idea better than Facebook, just a hint of teeth. Eduardo feels something lurch inside his chest. Mark is looking at him like he’s actually seeing him. That’s always made Eduardo’s skin feel like it’s been put on too tight, but now it feels like it’s sucking all the air out of his lungs too. “Good,” Mark says. He rocks on the balls of his feet for a moment, like he’s considering something, and then he disappears into the kitchen so he can help himself to some of Dustin’s beer.

Eduardo grabs his own bottle out of the refrigerator and follows Mark out onto Dustin’s back porch. Dustin’s back porch has a rickety metal table and even-more-rickety metal chairs that look incongruous next to his shiny, top-of-the-line grill. There are a few trees in the back yard, but during this part of the day, there’s no shade. It’s midday, just after noon, and the sun is bright overhead. Mark settles down in one of the chairs, squinting a little in the light, and Eduardo joins him.

Maybe it’s something about Palo Alto, or maybe it’s something about being away from New York, but Eduardo’s noticing all these little things about Mark that he’d forgotten over the years, like the way Mark carries this ancient, faded bottle opener on his keyring and the way Mark narrows his eyes when he’s thinking about things that are happening somewhere else. There are all these pieces of Mark that Eduardo’s been very determined never to think about again, and now they’re right here, once again larger than life.

They end up talking about Eduardo’s job, about the people people Eduardo’s met, about the mountains of work he has to do. Mark gives off the impression that he’s only half-listening, same as always, but when Eduardo’s done talking, Mark smirks.

“I was right about quitting, wasn’t I?” Mark asks.

Eduardo laughs and shakes his head. “Oh, shut the fuck up,” he replies.

The topic ends up on Facebook after Eduardo asks about Chris, and like always, talking about Facebook makes Mark come alive, all his words coming out too fast like he can’t keep them all in. “We don’t want to stop at social networking,” he says. “Facebook won’t just be a website you waste your time on, it’ll be an extra layer on top of the internet, an entire online identity you can use anywhere.”

There’s something in the way he’s talking that reminds Eduardo of the night Mark pitched Facebook to him outside Caribbean Night in the freezing cold, so wrapped up in his own head he couldn’t even feel the encroaching frostbite. He’d been so excited, Eduardo remembers, even if it was only noticeable if you knew Mark well enough to see the tension in the set of his shoulders, the twitchy energy in the movement of his hands. It makes Eduardo’s chest ache, a reminder of when things had been so much simpler between the two of them.

Eduardo knows nostalgia is dangerous, especially when it comes to Mark.

Mark pauses partway through his spiel. His eyes are focused on a point to the right of Eduardo’s head. “I didn’t-- I really am glad you decided to move out to California, Wardo.” He doesn’t sound any different than usual, but there’s an emotion in there, underneath the words, that Eduardo can’t quite name.

The sun is dipping lower now, and the trees are casting shadows on Mark’s face. It’s a beautiful evening, clear and warm and quiet.

Mark’s expression, as always, gives nothing away.

---

The last part of the message sits on Eduardo’s computer, still encrypted.

Once there was a way to get back home.

It’s a lyric from a Beatles song, “Golden Slumbers,” off of Abbey Road. Eduardo doesn’t understand the significance. Mark’s never been a huge fan of, well, any particular type of music. He’ll listen to whatever Dustin listens to or what’s on the radio at any given point in time, but his own musical tastes have always seemed frustratingly undefined. It makes sense that he listens to the Beatles -- hell, Eduardo’s mom hates all English-language pop music and she listens to the Beatles -- but it doesn’t feel quite right. Still, Eduardo tries a bunch of Beatles-related numbers: the track number of “Golden Slumbers” (14), the year Abbey Road was released (1969), the length of the song according to Wikipedia (131). None of them produce anything interesting.

“Just one hint, man,” Eduardo says to Dustin over dinner. He’s beginning to go around in circles, double and tripe-checking his work. Last night, he spent two hours researching the birth dates of everyone who has ever been in some way connected to the Beatles.

Dustin shrugs. “This endgame stuff is the only thing I couldn’t get out of him. Sorry, dude.” He scarfs down a mouthful of Pad Thai and looks apologetic.

“He hasn’t become a Beatles fanatic since Harvard, has he?” Eduardo asks. Mark’s only status updates are about leftover pizza and complaints about how wrong people are on the internet.

That makes Dustin laugh. “Nah. He’s going through a weird LCD Soundsystem phase at the moment. Every time I see him he’s blasting ‘All My Friends’ over his headphones, and it’s kind of freaking me out, to be honest.”

Eduardo sighs. “There’s no way I’m going to ask Mark for help with this.” He’d rather have someone perform open heart surgery on him without anesthesia.

He sometimes wonders what it must be like inside of Mark’s brain, wonders if it’s possible that it’s more beautiful than ugly inside there. Eduardo’s seen Mark when he’s angry, vicious and unforgiving after Erica dumped him, cold and dismissive towards the Winklevii, nasty and furious over the phone. Mark’s anger is untouchable and dark, and it always scares the fuck out of Eduardo whenever he sees it, especially now that he knows what Mark’s anger can do, now that he’s had it directed towards himself.

But he’s also seen Mark when he’s building something, seen Mark when he’s consumed by the desire to create, and Eduardo’s always wondered what that must be like, to see something so vast and complex behind your eyelids.

Eduardo’s seen Mark put effort, real effort, into asking for forgiveness, however awkward and unwieldy that attempt may be. He’s seen Mark say he’s sorry and sound like he means it, and that’s a lot more than Eduardo ever thought he would get.

After dinner, Eduardo rereads the decrypted portions of his message and studies at the remaining encrypted numbers. He thinks of what Mark must have seen when he’d been put this whole puzzle together, what sorts of words and numbers must have rattled around in his head.

He likes to think that Mark found them beautiful, too.

---

Eduardo spends a few weekends in San Francisco, mostly just walking around, getting a feel for the streets near his apartment, getting a sense for the city as a whole. He does the touristy things, like wandering through Chinatown to Fisherman’s Wharf, visiting Lombard Street and Alcatraz, seeing the Palace of Fine Arts. He walks across the Golden Gate Bridge and spends a few moments on the beach, watching the water lap against the shore.

The weather remains pleasant, sunny and cool and clear. James, one of his friends still back in New York, has mentioned that they’ve been having summer thunderstorms, ones that roll in and out on a moment’s notice. All the people Eduardo meets are friendly and gracious and welcoming. It’s a little disconcerting.

Eduardo’s always known that different places have their own personalities. He remembers the acute culture shock of moving from São Paulo to Miami. He remembers the subtle but important differences between Boston and New York. San Francisco, the whole Bay Area, has this energy to it, the remnants of a Gold Rush-fueled optimism. It creeps underneath the skin, makes the world look brighter, rosier. Eduardo feels caught up in it whenever he visits.

Maybe that’s why Mark was so determined to move Facebook out here. Boston’s an old city with an old personality, stubborn and small and proud of it. Maybe Mark realized that the East Coast wasn’t going to be big enough for what he was seeing in his head. Maybe that’s why it had to be Palo Alto.

Eduardo didn’t understand that when he was stuck in New York and Facebook had seemed so very far away. He didn’t understand that when Sean was around, getting involved where he didn’t belong, when there was Christy and New York City, offering him everything he could possibly want for his career, his future.

Eduardo’s not in love with San Francisco just yet, but give him a few more months, and he thinks he just might be.

---

“Fuck you, Moskovitz,” Mark snarls as he mashes the buttons of his controller. The crowd gathered around them lets out a cheer as Dustin’s tiny avatar does something violent to Mark’s tiny avatar on screen.

Dustin isn’t even fazed. “It’s not my fault you suck,” he says.

Mark snorts, and then his tiny avatar punches Dustin’s tiny avatar so hard Dustin’s avatar goes flying off screen. Eduardo laughs and takes a sip of his beer as Chris shakes his head besides him. It’s a Friday night, and Dustin apparently had a nerd penis-measuring contest over who deserves the title of Best Super Smash Brothers Player at Facebook, which is why Dustin’s living room is filled with four product managers, three developers, one sysadmin, a CTO, and Mark Zuckerberg, along with five pizzas and several cases of beer.

Eduardo isn’t participating in the impromptu tournament, because the last thing he wants to do is embarrass himself around a bunch of hardcore gamers. Chris got his ass kicked in the first round, and now he and Eduardo are catching up in the kitchen, trading incompetent-coworker stories and mocking programmer eccentricities. Eduardo doesn’t know Chris that well, but they’ve always been on good terms, even after the ugly fallout. Eduardo always knows who made the decisions in the end, and Chris didn’t have a hand in any of it.

Eduardo is listening to Chris bitch about obnoxious users when another cheer goes up, and the television announces that Donkey Kong is the winner of the round. Eduardo looks up to see what’s going on, and Mark’s standing up, Mark’s shaking hands, Mark’s finding Eduardo’s eyes across the room, and Mark’s smiling, just a hint of a smirk underneath.

It feels like a kick in the gut.

The last time Eduardo was here, in a moment just like this, he gave Mark $18000 and his blessing to go to California, and Mark hired a couple of interns, and he smiled at Eduardo like Eduardo had given him the fucking universe. The reminder cuts deep, reopening old wounds. Eduardo can’t -- he can’t take the smell of the alcohol and the sounds of cheering nerds, and he can’t take Mark standing there, surrounded by a group of people that can’t quite touch him. He can’t be in this room right now.

“I’ve got to--” Eduardo says to Chris, ducking outside so he can get his breathing under control again. He’s not that person anymore, he has to remind himself. He’s not so fucking stupid, so fucking trusting. He’s not going to fucking see Mark smiling at him like that and think that maybe--

It’s dark and quiet on the porch. The air still smells like Palo Alto, like something Eduardo can instantly recognize but still can’t properly name. He can almost see the stars overhead, even with the light spilling out from the house. He couldn’t ever see the stars in New York.

The porch door opens behind him, and Eduardo listens to the sound of it sliding open and then shut again. Dustin sent to retrieve him, probably. Eduardo doesn’t bother to check.

Then there’s a hand pressed against his arm, warm, a little sweaty from gripping a controller. It’s not Dustin. “Hey,” Mark says.

It’s impossible to make out Mark’s features with the light at his back. Mark doesn’t say anything else, doesn’t ask if Eduardo’s okay, doesn’t try to fill up the silence with his usual stream of words. He just stands there, waiting it out. That’s probably for the best, because Eduardo would probably punch Mark if he said anything else right now.

They stand there for a few long moments as Eduardo collects himself, as Eduardo reminds himself of where they are right now. He reminds himself that it wouldn’t have been better if he never learned the truth about Mark, that the ax would have fallen eventually. It was easier to pretend that Mark wasn’t Mark when Mark’s anger hadn’t been directed at him. It was easier when the target was Erica or the Winklevoss twins or the final clubs as a whole. It was easier to only see the light in Mark’s eyes as he sat in front of the computer, to see the ambition and the hidden passion and all the other good things, the things that were easy to love.

It takes Eduardo a while to realize that Mark is touching him. Mark doesn’t touch people, as a rule. He’ll let people touch him, sure. He’ll let Eduardo put a hand on his shoulder, and he’ll let Chris kick his feet, and he’ll even let his mom pull him into a gigantic bear hug every time he sees her. But Mark doesn’t ever touch people first.

Mark’s skin is still warm. His thumb is brushing Eduardo’s elbow. He’s still Mark. Eduardo should be telling him to fuck off, but he finds that he doesn’t want to. Mark’s apologized for being an asshole, and he’s touching Eduardo’s arm, and Eduardo wants to forget that thing in the living room. He wants Mark out here with him, where it’s quiet, where there’s no Facebook to take him away.

When he’s ready to go back inside, Eduardo turns to Mark and says, “Thanks.”

Even though Mark is barely more than a shadow out here, Eduardo can see the corners of his mouth pull into a smile, small and sweet, and Eduardo knows this one is only for him.

---

Eduardo’s other theory about the last clue is that the song lyric refers to something that happened at Harvard, back before everything fell apart between them. Maybe Mark thinks of home as Cambridge, Harvard, Kirkland, the CS labs he used to live in. Maybe that’s what he’s trying to get back to. Eduardo tries a few different things: Mark’s favorite CS course (143 - catalog number 6401), the number of the Kirkland suite (11), the running tally of Facebook server crashes that could be directly attributed to Dustin (34 by the time they packed up and moved to out to Palo Alto). Still nothing.

Eduardo is at a complete loss, but maybe that’s okay. He and Mark are friends again, even with all the pain and heartbreak between them. Maybe Eduardo doesn’t need the rest of the message, doesn’t need to know what it said, doesn’t need to know what it means.

But he wants to. The fact that there is a clue he can’t figure out, a problem he can’t solve -- it worms its way into his brain.

There’s something Mark wants to tell him that he can’t understand, and that’s the most frustrating part of all.

---

One day after work, Eduardo gets back to Dustin’s place to find an unfamiliar car in the driveway and a sock on the front door.

He calls Mark up. “I know this is kind of weird, but I think I’ve just been sexiled from Dustin’s house, and I need someplace to sleep for the night.”

Mark snorts. “So that was what that was all about,” he says. “I’m still at Facebook if you want to come find me here.”

Eduardo still hasn’t been inside the new offices yet. The last time he was here, he may have nodded at some confused-looking Facebook employees walking by in the parking lot, but that’s about it. Mark’s PA is the one to greet Eduardo at the door, because it’s after normal work hours and everything is locked down. She takes him up to Mark’s office, which only contains a simple metal desk, a couch, and a swiveling desk chair by way of furniture. Mark isn’t coding. He’s on speaker phone with someone from Australia from the sound of it, talking APAC strategies.

Eduardo still has problems believing that Mark is an adult now, that Mark is capable of running a company that is larger than six guys sitting in a room in front of their computers. He watches Mark working here, his eyes narrow and intent and sharp, and the idea gets a lot less ridiculous.

After Mark’s done with the conversation, he scribbles some quick notes in a notebook and grabs his backpack. Whatever else Mark might be, he still looks like a college student, like he’s just wandered out of the CS labs and stumbled into the offices of one of the fastest growing companies in America.

“Ready to go?” Eduardo says.

“Yeah,” Mark says. He nods to his PA as they walk past her.

Eduardo follows Mark’s car back to Mark’s place. It’s late enough that most of the traffic has cleared out, and the roads are empty and dark. Eduardo tries not to find it too unsettling.

When they get to Mark’s front door, Mark says, “You still haven’t figured out the last clue, have you?” He’s fumbling with his keys, figuring out which one is which. Mark’s house large but modest, plain-looking. Mark’s always had a weird relationship with money. Eduardo’s never understood it.

Eduardo says, “I hate to break it to you, Mark, but there’s a difference between difficult and impossible.”

Mark says, “I know that.” He gets the front door open and pauses for a moment before deactivating the security system. “The security code is 1-4-0-1. You’ll need it to get out in the morning.” He glances at Eduardo before turning away.

And maybe it’s just because Mark was just talking about it or maybe it’s because Eduardo’s tired, but something lines up in Eduardo’s head, and he thinks, Oh.

Mark shows Eduardo where the guest room is, points out the bathroom and the kitchen before he heads into the study on the second floor. “I’ve got some more stuff to take care of. Let me know if you need anything. The wireless network with the strongest signal is the one you want to use.” He studies Eduardo for a moment, and that feeling comes back, that crazy, lurching, exhilarating feeling. Eduardo thinks they might be on the edge of something, ready tip over, ready to find out what’s on the other side. But then Mark turns away, and Eduardo remembers that this is how it always is. He’ll always be chasing after Mark, trying to get that feeling back.

It’s stupid to think that things might be any different now.

---

Eduardo has his laptop with him, and as soon as he has a spare moment, he looks at the last encrypted section of Mark’s e-mail. It feels like a lifetime ago when Mark sent it to him, and maybe it was.

He uses 1401 as the key to decrypt the rest of the message, and he gets this:

32 105 32 108 111 118 101 32 121 111 117 46

He’s almost afraid to translate it, to find out what it means. He takes a deep breath before pulling up his new favorite ASCII table, and then he types out the translation of each character with shaky fingers. He stares at the result on his screen.

i    l o v e    y o u .

He gets up before he can lose the nerve and walks into the study, where Mark’s back is facing him from the doorway. Eduardo’s fingers have gone completely numb at this point. “What the hell, Mark?” Eduardo says, and his voice sounds unnaturally calm. It’s not about trusting Mark at this point; Eduardo doesn’t trust him. It’s about the way Mark always comes in and turns everything in Eduardo’s life upside down, for better or for worse. Eduardo doesn’t know how much more of this he can take, and seriously, what the fuck.

Mark stops what he’s doing, sitting up straight. “You figured it out, then.” He sounds exactly the same as he always does, like they might as well be discussing a badly-written article in the Crimson or complaining about the pancakes in the dining halls. He’s still not facing Eduardo.

“I couldn’t have figured it out until now,” Eduardo says. “But you made it pretty obvious.” He’s torn halfway between strangling Mark to death and shoving Mark up against the nearest wall so that he can stick his tongue down Mark’s throat.

Mark shrugs. “I didn’t want you to know until I was ready to tell you.”

Eduardo is really beginning to wonder where he can get some piano wire. Mark always has to make it about himself, doesn’t he?

“I’m still going to move to San Francisco,” Eduardo says, because he thinks he might be getting better at translating things from Mark-speak into English. He can see the shape of an offer in the use of “home” in the clue and the way Mark handed over the security code to his house like it was no big deal. Mark doesn’t do anything in half-measures, apparently.

“Okay,” Mark says. His shoulders tighten, and Eduardo thinks that this might be the first time he’s ever seen Mark afraid of anything.

“Mark, look at me,” Eduardo says.

Mark turns around and looks straight at Eduardo, his mouth pursed into a thin line. The intensity of his stare gets Eduardo the same way it always does, a warm, shivery feeling chasing its way down Eduardo’s spine. Eduardo leans over and kisses him, pressing their lips together. It’s gentle at first, but then Mark makes a soft sound in his throat and he grabs a handful of Eduardo’s shirt. He slides his tongue into Eduardo’s mouth, and Eduardo feels dizzy, like his blood is rushing everywhere too fast inside him. He’s still trying to catch his breath when Mark pulls back. Mark is breathing slightly harder than normal too, and his eyes are darker, and his mouth is red and wet.

Eduardo really wants to fuck him. “You could have just told me,” Eduardo says.

Mark blinks at him. “I did,” he says.

Something snaps in Eduardo, because then he’s dragging Mark out of the chair so that he doesn’t have to lean over as much to kiss him. Mark’s fingers curl around the back of Eduardo’s neck, holding him close. Eduardo backs Mark up against the nearest wall and presses a thigh between Mark’s legs. He can feel Mark half-hard in his jeans, and he can feel Mark’s breath mingling with his own. He really, really wants to see Mark come, wants to see if he can make all of Mark’s walls drop for just one moment.

It’s not difficult to put pressure on Mark’s cock with his thigh, and every one of Mark’s tiny, aborted reactions becomes one of the hottest things that Eduardo’s ever experienced. The quick intake of breath when Eduardo scrapes his teeth along Mark’s jaw. The slight parting of his lips when Eduardo rubs one of his nipples through his t-shirt. The stuttering jerk of his hips every time Eduardo shifts his weight. The glassy, unfocused look to his eyes, like Eduardo has made Mark’s -- Mark’s -- brain slow down for a little while.

And then, the soft whine Mark makes when he does finally come inside his jeans, shuddering all the way through it, his eyes closed and his head thrown back, everything written all over his face.

It’s almost terrifyingly hot, and Eduardo thinks about addictions and Mark and how it’s really bad to mix those things together. His own cock is hard in his slacks, and all he wants to do is rub off against Mark’s hip. Mark must have the shortest afterglow ever, because it only takes a few seconds before he’s undoing Eduardo’s belt and pulling Eduardo’s cock out of his pants. He looks up at Eduardo, all of that pinpoint intensity focused on Eduardo’s face. It makes Eduardo flush, because he’s sure Mark can see how much he wants this, how much he needs it. He’s sure Mark can feel Eduardo’s cock twitching and leaking in Mark’s palm.

“How long do you think you’ll last?” Mark asks, a breathless undercurrent to his usual monotone. He gives Eduardo’s cock one rough stroke, and Eduardo shivers all over.

“Fuck, Mark,” Eduardo gasps. He’s so wound up after seeing Mark come that it’s not going to take much at all. “Not -- not long.”

“Okay,” Mark says, and the friction of his hand on Eduardo’s cock is so perfect, tight and fast and unrelenting.

It’s only about a minute after that, with Mark’s mouth warm and wet against his neck, that Eduardo comes too.

Afterwards, Mark hands Eduardo a tissue with a raised eyebrow. His face is still a little flushed from his orgasm, and there’s something soft in the curl of his lips. It undercuts Mark’s usual flatness, gives him all sorts of shape and dimension that Eduardo’s never seen before.

“In the beginning, you asked -- and I said that I meant it, all of it.” Mark says, the words coming out fast and clipped. “I still do.” His eyes are very blue and very open.

“Okay,” Eduardo says, leaning over to kiss Mark again, because this feeling inside him is so intense it’s almost painful. “I believe you.”

---

In the morning, Eduardo crawls out of bed before Mark does. His commute is approximately twelve times longer than Mark’s is, and he really needs to get back to Dustin’s place to change before work.

He scribbles a note and slaps it on the bathroom mirror and drags on all of his clothes. Mark is still tucked into bed with the blanket up to his shoulders, his chest rising and falling with each steady breath. Eduardo considers taking one of the mail fliers for Best Buy that are sitting on Mark’s kitchen table and throwing it at Mark’s face, but Mark probably does need his sleep before he pulls another one of his fourteen hour work days.

The sock is no longer on Dustin’s door when Eduardo gets home, thank god.

Eduardo reaches into his pocket for his keys, but he feels something strange and he freezes. There’s extra key jangling loose inside his pocket, one he didn’t have yesterday. He holds it up so that he can get a better look at it, and then he shakes his head and laughs. Of course the security code wasn’t going to be the last key Mark was going to give him. It’s an invitation of sorts, one that Eduardo tends to take up every time he ends up in Palo Alto. He slides the key onto his keychain, giving it an extra squeeze for good luck.

Their future is uncertain. He’s not sure whether or not they’ll be able to overcome everything that’s happened, whether or not he and Mark can ever turn this into something good, really good. But he’s still looking at this chance, this opportunity, and he wants to run with it as far as he can.

When he has some free time that evening, he sits down in front of his laptop again with the bitwise XOR calculator and a translation table between ASCII and decimal numbers open in the background. It’s not so different doing things this way around.

When he’s done encrypting his message with the street address for his new apartment, he writes an e-mail and sends it off, laughing. He can imagine the look on Mark’s face when he gets it, the slight furrow of his brow in confusion, the slight downward turn of his lips into a frown.

It shouldn’t be so bad, though.

Eduardo’s pretty sure Mark will figure it out.

Eventually.

Subject: ciphertext

key: don't be a stranger.

723 666 726 725 716 735 666 707 725 719 666 718 725 725 662 666 731 713 713 722 725 726 735

FIN.

Chapter 2: Timestamp Meme

Chapter Summary

For the prompt from mariekebrel: What happens one year after Cryptography for Beginners?

Chapter Notes

Originally posted on Tumblr.

The note is stuck to the refrigerator in Mark’s house, but he only ever goes into the kitchen for like, beer and baby carrots, and there’s a new big feature at Facebook that Mark needs to usher into existence, so he misses it for a whole three days. Or, at least he thinks it’s been three days since Eduardo last spent the night. His sense of time has gotten blurrier now that he’s ostensibly an adult. He can’t remember when things happen anymore.

The note reads:

240 185 244 240 234 234 185 224 246 236 185 248 234 234 241 246 245 252

in Eduardo’s messy looping handwriting. There’s a slant to some of the letters that happens when Eduardo is annoyed or angry about things. This isn’t the first time Mark’s seen it.

No hints to what the key might be, but Mark is pretty good at this by now. It’ll only take a bit of time to look at--

His cell phone rings. “Where the hell are you?” Chris says. “The guys from India will be here in twenty minutes.”

“I’m on my way,” Mark says. “Pull the stick out of your ass.” He grabs a banana from the kitchen counter. It’s already beginning to go brown and spotty, but it still tastes okay, if a little mushy.

Over the phone, he thinks he hears Chris mutter something about never letting Mark’s assistant take days off again.

---

Mark has about five minutes to himself during lunch, and he calls Eduardo. “Got your note,” he says.

“Did you?” Eduardo says. He sounds distracted as well. Mark can almost make out the sound of Eduardo’s typing, the staccato rhythm of his fingers on the keys. “I have a lunch meeting in ten minutes, so if you have something to say, you better make it quick.”

“You didn’t leave a hint,” Mark says. He takes a bite out of his sandwich, as much as he can fit into his mouth. His mom would be disappointed in him, but he’s managed to perfect the slightly gross art of talking and eating at the same time.

“I didn’t want to give you one,” Eduardo says, passive-aggressive as always.

“Fine,” Mark says, even though it does kind of piss him off. Just a little bit. “See you tomorrow?” Tomorrow’s Thursday. Eduardo always comes by on Thursdays.

“Yes,” Eduardo says. “Shit. I have to go.”

“Bye,” Mark says, and then he hangs up.

---

Mark doesn’t mean to work until 9pm. He just starts doing some stuff, and then there’s some more stuff to do, and then he’s the only one left in the office, and the sky outside is dark. He thinks about going home, but then he’d probably be tempted to crawl upstairs and fall asleep, and he wants to solve this before Eduardo gets here tomorrow or he decides to take another flamethrower to their relationship, whichever one happens sooner.

He pulls out Eduardo’s note. He takes one of the numbers (248) at random and translates that into binary:

1111000

The largest bit here represents 128, and the ASCII characters only goes up to 127, which means that the key has to exist somewhere between 128 and 256. That doesn’t narrow it down by a whole lot, but it does give Mark something to work with.

He looks back at the numbers:

240 185 244 240 234 234 185 224 246 236 185 248 234 234 241 246 245 252

All he needs to do is guess one of the letters correctly, and then he’ll have the rest of the thing decoded. A frequency chart could show some sort of pattern that could help. He lists all of the letters out from most frequent to least frequent.

• 185 - 3
• 240 - 2
• 234 - 2
• 246 - 2
• 248 - 2
• 244 - 1
• 224 - 1
• 236 - 1
• 241 - 1
• 245 - 1
• 252 - 1

The 185 sticks out like a sore thumb from the other numbers. That means it’s probably not a regular letter. A different character, then? Most of the ASCII lowercase letters are between 97 and 122, but the space character is 32, unique enough to cause that sort of pattern. Three spaces means four words, not so unusual for Eduardo’s encoded messages.

Mark tries it out. The XOR of 185 and 32 is 153. Mark puzzles over that number for a bit. It doesn’t sound familiar, but sometimes he has no fucking clue how Eduardo’s brain works.

He runs the numbers through a Python script he tossed together the first time he and Eduardo went through this, and he blinks a few times as a result.

i    m i s s    y o u    a s s h o l e

---

He drops off into bed as soon as he goes home. He can worry about Eduardo’s message later.

---

In the morning, he has to go into work early to take a phone call with some interested investors from Russia. The time difference is awful. Mark hates having to be on his best behavior when he’s half-asleep and cranky, but Chris is right there to be formal and polite and smooth things over for him. Mark just has to sit there and not say something horribly offensive, which is easier said than done.

The rest of the day goes moderately better. The engineering team is experiencing some sort of release hangover for the rest of the day, which is nice, because it means Mark can stop getting pissy at Dustin for promising things and then not delivering on them. All of Mark’s meetings end on time with good (or at least satisfactory) results. The late night Mark pulled yesterday is paying off, somewhat. His e-mail inbox is almost approaching manageable.

By the time 4:30 rolls around, Mark says, “I’m taking the rest of the day off.” His assistant -- a pretty, surprisingly mellow girl named Lindsey -- raises her eyebrows like Mark just said he wanted to go skinny dipping on the North Pole or something.

“Well, your calendar is free,” she says, “but--”

“No, I’m taking the rest of today off,” Mark says. “Don’t let anyone try to schedule anything. I mean it.” He shoves some papers and his laptop into his bag, and then he escapes out one of the back doors into the parking garage before someone can corner him to ask him questions.

---

Eduardo always gets to Mark’s place earlier than Mark. He likes taking an early BART train, before the commuter rush can hit, and then napping or doing some extra work on Mark’s extremely comfortable and extremely expensive couch while he waits for Mark to get home.

Today it’s not all that different, except that the sun is still out when Mark opens the front door. Eduardo’s snoring lightly on the couch, arm sprawled over his head. His face is relaxed, calm, boyish and smoothed over with sleep. He startles at the sound of Mark walking in.

He blinks a few times, clearing away the sleep. His forehead furrows. “Mark?’ he asks, like he’s not sure he believes it. He checks his watch.

“What does 153 mean?” Mark asks. He grabs a diet Coke from the kitchen and pops it open.

“Oh, so you figured out then?” Eduardo says. He rubs his face and sighs. “Chris made a comment about it last weekend, something about how you’re practically working 153 hours every week. That note, I don’t know-- I’m not sure why I wrote it.”

“I’m getting more than two hours of sleep each night,” Mark says. The Coke is fizzy as he drinks it, the bubbles burning slightly as they slide down his throat.

Eduardo rolls his eyes, but then his lips twist up into a small smile. “You’re home early.”

Mark shrugs. “This week hasn’t been so bad.” He puts the soda can down and lets Eduardo reel him onto the couch, tucked right up against Eduardo, their hips bumping together. “And it’s Thursday.”

Mark doesn’t know what he said, but Eduardo still lights up like someone said something nice about him on Valleywag. “Good. I’m glad we’re on the same page here,” he says. “We’re going to need to have a conversation about work-life balance later.” Mark still has no idea what exactly he said, but he likes Eduardo better when he’s not about to sulk out of his own skin and not leaving mildly needy, passive aggressive notes on his kitchen appliances. And with the extra time from leaving work early well-- well, it doesn’t suck either.

“People in glass houses,” Mark mutters, but Eduardo ignores him.

He pulls Mark into a deeper kiss, slow and easy and drawn out. “Later,” Eduardo says, breath warm against Mark’s lips.

“Okay,” Mark says.