Title: Heart to Heart

Author's Notes: I live. Surprise, surprise. I know that I promised a Roger/Mark thing about three months ago, but quite frankly, and this is everyone's excuse, school has me whipped. Math is killing me. This is just a little piece, the spawn of a wonderful night of sheer brilliance. Many thanks to GayApparel, I Heart Scrawny Jewish Boys, and Kellie, who may or may not have a username here, for encouraging the madness.

"Roger?"

Immediately on setting foot over the threshold of his home, Roger could tell that something was amiss. He stood in the doorway for quite a long moment, staring in like a deer in the headlights, pondering and wondering, turning about in his rather hollow head the consequences that would come to haunt him if he turned tail and fled versus those that would come to haunt him if he entered into the calm sort of chaos that was the loft.

"Mark?"

The whole place was, to use the term lightly, spotless. Not only could Roger see the floor, but it was shiny. As shiny as it could be, considering the years of scuffs and scratches that permanently marred the generally not-so illustrious hardwood. The shifting dunes of manuscript paper and pages torn from yellow legal pads, the books and pens and picks that tended to line the floor, all of them had been swept up and organized, placed into neon yellow and orange milk crates, conveniently labeled with names. (Roger himself, he noticed, had two crates, both orange, full of loose papers, stacked neatly one on top of the other.) The lofty windows had been cleaned up to a certain point, to the height where a small person could reach no higher while safely standing atop a card table or folding chair, and the setting autumn sun cast a rather warm glow over the too-clean-to-be-inhabited-by-Roger apartment.

"Dude, what happened?" the stupefied guitarist breathed, wandering mindlessly in with saucer-sized eyes and a half-open mouth. "W-what--? Are... are your parents coming over or something? Is it safe to wear pajamas?" Roger's pajamas, of course, consisted of nothing but his underwear, and so it was never safe to wear pajamas.

"No," Mark replied, quietly at that, from where he sat huddled on the couch, his chin on his knees. "They're not coming over."

Breathing a genuine sigh of relief, Roger kicked off his shoes, shucked his pants, and wasted no time in overturning the meticulously organized crates of belongings in order to distribute their contents unevenly across the floor from whence they came. "Thank God."

Mark, for his part, seemed to droop a bit, be it from watching as Roger destroyed his afternoon's work or watching as Roger destroyed his afternoon's work while shamelessly slinking about in his -plaid, of course- boxer shorts. Sighing lightly, he pressed his thumb and forefinger gently against his eyes, listening absently as Roger shuffled through a sea of junk.

"So...if your mom's not coming over, why's everything so clean? It's making my head spin."

Mark, of course, like the good little borderline obsessive-compulsive boy he was, cleaned when he was nervous. The approach of his parents naturally made him anxious, which would have explained the waxed and polished and dusted and shined flat, but as this wasn't the case, Roger was quite puzzled by his friend's habit.

"I mean, come on man," he said, crossing the room in the direction of the windows and running his thumb down the length of one pane of glass, scoffing when it came up free of grime. "This should be filthy. You're fucking with my feng shui."

Mark, who normally would have enjoyed such a comment, especially since he was sure that Roger knew nothing about decorating, merely buried his head a bit further into his knees and hugged his arms tighter around his legs. Around this time, Roger started to notice things besides the dazzling cleanliness that was threatening to suffocate him.

"Hey...Hey, Mark. What's wrong?" he asked, just about as lightly as was possible with Roger, as he casually knocked a too-straight stack of books to the floor on his route towards the couch. "You look like someone ate a small portion of your soul, threw it back up, rubbed it through your h--"

"Roger, can I talk to you about something?"

Blinking once, the musician shrugged his shoulders before flopping down onto the couch, making Mark bounce a bit on the other end and eliciting a terrible groan from the old springs. "Yeah, sure thing. What do you want to talk about?"

The miserable looking boy on the other end of the couch seemed to shrink into himself, purposely avoiding Roger's eyes by staring down at the tops of his shoelaces. He twiddled his thumbs and wrung out his hands, tugging on each of his fingers and listening for the soft 'pop' of each knuckle cracking. He looked around, up at the rafters, down at his shoes, out into his perfectly clean little wonderland, and then banged his forehead into his knees, much to his friend's confused stare.

"Mark... is this going to be one of those stories where I have to fill in the blanks? Because I'm really not good at those, and I'm really fucking hungry, so if it's going to take a while... can I at least make a sandwi--"

"Roger, do you and April have sex?"

Roger wasn't sure if his jaw dropped because the ever-polite Mark Cohen had just interrupted him twice in as many minutes or because the ever-bashful Mark Cohen had just said the word 'sex' without bleeding profusely from the nose. He hesitated a moment, feeling a strange knotting in his chest, not unlike that feeling felt by parents on giving their preadolescent children 'The Talk,' carefully thinking on how to put what he wanted to say gently and tastefully.

"No, Mark. No, we don't. That 'Uugh...fuck...Roger, faster...please...oh God, yes...uhh...harder...' thing is our secret code for, 'How are you doing tonight, dear? Are you well?'" So much for tasteful.

Mark, who had blushed a brilliant shade of scarlet at Roger's imitation of his rather vocal girlfriend, flattened his hands to the top of his head and peered out at Roger from over his knees, his glasses practically fogging up from the heat of his face.

"Th-that's not what I mea--"

"Well, that's what you said. You said, 'Roger, do you and April have sex?'" The smirking guitarist exaggerated Mark's uneasy stammer and briefly mocked his posture, much to the glowing of his friend's face. "What did you mean? 'Roger, do you and April have wild, hot, earth-shatteri--"

"Do... do you always have sex? I-I mean..." Letting his thought die, a very pink-in-the-cheeks Mark sighed, defeated, and made a very general gesture with his hands, one which could have been interpreted to mean just about anything.

Roger leaned back into the arm of the couch and scratched the back of his head a bit, trying to judge by Mark's posture just what he meant by 'always.' He and April, while not exactly attached at the crotch, spent quite a bit of 'quality time' together, and the loft's thin and makeshift partitions did little to hide that little fact. Then again, perhaps Mark was asking if they physically were always having sex, if they thought about sex when they weren't together and had sex when they were (Roger was guilty); Mark had a nasty tendency to take things too literally.

Correcting Mark's vague sweep of the hands by moving his right index finger in and out of his left fist, Roger grinned a bit and shrugged his shoulders. "What do you mean? You've got to know when we do, so if you just take that away from all the times when we don't, you've got your answer."

"Do you..." The bespectacled youth seemed to consider this for a moment, then shook his head into his knees when he realized that it hadn't been the answer he had been looking for, as he hadn't asked the question he wanted to ask. "I-- do you... when you want to, do you?"

"Is Maureen using you?" Roger's face darkened a bit, and not with the blood in the cheeks that was customary of Mark. "Because if she is, that bitch is going down. Nobody fucks with my little Marky."

From his modified fetal position, Mark groaned and held the top of his head in his hands.

"Oh..." Roger blinked, stroking his quick-growing stubble. "Oh... Nobody does fuck with m--"

"C-could you please just... just answer? Please, Roger?" There was a sort of desperation to Mark's voice, enough that Roger could, for once, focus on only the issue at hand: his friend cowering on the other end of the couch.

"Well... yeah, I guess I do, Mark. I mean, if April's being a real bitch, she'll sometimes tell me to just go fuck myself, but usually... yeah, we do." On seeing Mark's shoulders sag even further, Roger heaved an exasperated sigh and willed himself to shut up, thus forcing the boy into doing less of the questioning and more of the talking. "Why?"

"Y-you never... can't?" How unlike the little photographer-slash-writer, to use a double negative. "W-what I mean is... you always do? If you-- if you want to, and she wants to, can you? Always? Y-you never, uhm... run into a... any sort of a...problem?" Mark's voice simultaneously grew higher and quieter, ending in what was little more than a whispered squeak, which complimented quite nicely his scarlet face.

"Dude. Mark." Roger laughed a bit, nearly unbelieving, and rested the back of his head against the couch. "Is this about condoms?"

Oh, how Mark wished it were about condoms. "No..."

"Then what's it about? Come on. What the Hell are you talking about, then?"

"I can't have sex," Mark blurted out, immediately reddening and hiding his face in his hands. "I can't do it."

To Roger, this made very little sense; while Mark certainly wasn't the sexual fiend that he was, Maureen was quite persuasive and quite horny, and Roger knew damn well that there was no possible way in which Mark could resist her, especially once she had one hand already in his pants. Besides, he could still vividly remember the morning that Mark had refused to leave his room, out of shame of what his roommates would say when they realized that he had been quite noisily 'de-virginized,' as he had put it.

"Sure you can," he reasoned, furrowing his brow a bit. "Yeah, you definitely can. Just the other night, I know that I heard--"

"I can't," Mark whimpered into his hands. "Not now."

"Well, of course you can't now; Maureen isn't even here."

"She went out," the troubled boy sighed. "She's so mad at me, Roger. She went out because she's mad at me."

"Mark, you're not making sense. Maureen goes out all the time, even when she's not mad at you; you know how much she shops. Why even worry?"

"She's mad, Roger," Mark groaned. "I don't think I've ever seen her so frustrated, and I know that she says she's not mad at me, but she is. I know she is, because it's my fault, whatever's wrong."

Ever the problem-solver, Roger waved a hand dismissively and shrugged his shoulders. "I suggest make-up sex," he offered. "Believe me: Maureen will forget everything."

"You don't get it: there is no make-up sex. There can't be make-up sex, because there can't be any sex at all," the pathetic photographer whimpered, hugging his knees up even closer to his chest. "There's something wrong with me, Roger."

"No sex?" The enormity of the situation was beginning to reveal itself to Roger, who suddenly seemed quite a bit more interested. "Wait, why? Are you pulling that scared virgin thing again?"

The blonde boy pouted a bit, not entirely thrilled by Roger's view of his cautious approach to sex. "No."

"Well, what's up, then?"

Mark hesitated a long moment, before punning weakly. "Well... not me."

"What do you mean?" Roger was not good with puns, and his initial ignorance to the play on words made it even more difficult for Mark to say what needed to be said.

"I'm not… up," he repeated quietly, mumbling into his knees and blushing furiously all the way into the tips of his ears. "It just won't… I think there's something wrong…"

With a grace period of five or ten seconds, the double-entendre gradually became clear to Roger, who stared shell-shocked at Mark, mentally strangling himself so as to repress a laugh that was sure to slip if he wasn't careful. "So… you can't—" Crudely demonstrating with his arm, the indiscreet musician chuckled slightly as Mark nodded his head, earning him a horrified look from the boy across the couch.

"I-it's not funny!" he cried, hugging his arms around his chest and staring up at Roger with pain in his eyes and shame written all across his face. "I thought you'd understand!"

"Mark," Roger sniggered, stroking his chin in a vain attempt to keep himself from laughing. "How would I understand? I've never had E-" At the sight of just how pathetic Mark looked, Roger heaved a sigh and lazily got to his feet, moving over to Mark's end of the couch and squishing the smaller of the two of them into the back to allow himself room to squeeze in next to him. "You really can't do it?"

"No." Mark tipped his head back and groaned, anxious and frustrated in more ways than one. "And Maureen… she's going to go if I can't… you know…"

"Well… maybe it's not Maureen you want," Roger suggested, slowly slipping an arm around his friend's waist and leaning in close to him. "Maybe… maybe you've been looking in the wrong place this whole time, Mark." With that said, Roger planted his hand quite firmly against Mark's crotch, eliciting a squeak from the blushing blonde. "Maybe Maureen's not doing it for you because you'd much rather be with… someone like me." Groping quite casually, Roger stared into Mark's eyes, which were more shocked than half-lidded with pleasure. He continued to fool around only until it was obvious that he was earning no sort of reaction from Mark, who was staring, wide-eyed, right up at him. "Or… Okay. Maybe not."

"Er… Roger, could you…" Nodding down towards his pants, a very scarlet Mark gestured for Roger to remove his hand, which still rested below his belt.

"Oh, yeah. Sorry about that."

A very long, very awkward period of silence followed, while Mark lamented his personal problem and Roger bemoaned the fact that his generally magic touch hadn't been able to do anything for his suddenly impotent friend. Was Mark blind or something? Was he really incapable of being attracted to the man who was, quite possibly, the most attractive person in New York, nay, in the world?

"Hey," Roger finally said, stretching and pulling himself off the couch, scratching as he often did, "Wait right here, okay? I've got a plan."

While Mark was normally a sensible enough boy to know that a Roger plan was bad news, he was far too miserable over his little issue to care much, so he watched Roger head up to their lofty rooms with a hopeless expression, sighing and groaning and just generally being a despondent little mess.

Roger, for his part, set about collecting anything in his room that could possibly assist Mark with a little bit of self-help: magazines, for Roger had plenty, a pair of handcuffs, scarves, a few condoms, just in case, and other various little tools. On a second thought, he threw into his weighty box of things a few of Collins' magazines, too. Just in case everyone's suspicions about Mark turned out to be true. When he felt that he had gathered enough to put his plan into action, the very self-assured rocker made his way back downstairs and into the kitchen, carelessly shoving his box into their tiny bathroom, slicking back his hair, and calling to Mark.

"Okay, you can come see now!"

Heaving a sigh, Mark slinked off the couch and in to Roger, looking lamely up at him with a, 'Well-what-now?' expression once he was standing in front of him.

"Mark," Roger whispered, putting a hand on his friend's shoulder and slowly moving in closer to him. "Mark, Mark, Mark…"

But in one fluid motion, Roger swept a much smaller Mark to one side and through the bathroom door, which he immediately pulled shut and barricaded, much to his roommate's cries of protest.

"You're really sick, you know?" the boy called, banging on the other side of the door with his fists balled. "Roger, come on! Let me out!"

"Nope!" Roger called back, taking a seat at the kitchen table and kicking his feet up. "Not until you're finished."

Mark made an incredulous little noise as he daintily picked up what looked like a pair of little black clothespins. "Well… what do—what am I supposed to finish?"

"Oh, you'll figure it out."

"Roger, this is so…"

"Ah-ah. You're wasting time, Marky."

Groaning audibly, Mark reluctantly took a seat on the ledge of the bathtub, sifting through Roger's box of things with an expression crossed between repulsion and terror. Roger, naturally, was quite pleased with his brilliant idea and rewarded himself with a handful of Cap'n Crunch. While he was munching away, the phone began to ring. This didn't mean, of course, that he was going to pick it up, unless it was someone really good calling; if he went to answer it, he might miss something with Mark.

"Mark," the answering machine finally whined, "This is your mother calling. I'm not sure if you remember me, dear, but we remember you, and we were just calling to wish you a happy start to the Holy Days, Mark, and a happy Rosh Hashanah. Sweetheart, we really wish that you would come home and celebrate with us. We miss y-"

Scoffing, Roger crossed to the phone and picked it up, but only to set it back down again, successfully cutting Mark's ever-worried mother off, letting her speak to a dead line for all he cared. For the moment, he had much better things to do than listen to Mrs. Cohen ramble on and on about some holiday. Not that Mark would care, anyway.

Author's Notes: So, what think you? Review, and there may just be more to come. There's always more room for Roger and Mark awkwardness.