“Have you had that happen?”

Nura’s voice was soft and silken in the night. Magpie filled his lungs with smoke from the cigarette and exhaled towards the open window. He could almost see Nura’s expression even without looking; the slightly wrinkled nose, the displeased frown of his eyebrows about smoking in bed, lips that were almost parted in protest.

But just like everything else about Magpie, Nura put up with it.

Magpie pressed the still-lit head against the ashtray and rolled to his side to look at Nura, whose tattoos and eyes gleamed golden in the streetlights stretching inside the room.

“Yeah,” he said, eyes guarding over Nura’s expressions as he spoke, “I’m missing a piece of a tooth in the back of my mouth. ‘S not a big deal, just can’t eat chocolate on that side of my mouth.” Nura’s expression was displeased again, but his voice had no pity or traces of sympathy when he spoke again.

If there had been any, Magpie would have ended the conversation there and then.

“Who did that?”

It was August. Magpie had known Nura for almost two years, and the proximity between them was still a recent development that had led to a hot summer in more ways than one.

It had also led to questions Magpie still didn't know how to feel about.

“My ex. Although it was only because I made him upset.”

And from there, he had moved to a single room apartment way too expensive for him, eventually through a brief spell of homelessness, until he had ended up here, a shithole at the edge of the town.

Nura didn't seem to share his opinion about the place. He loved it for no reason, where Magpie loved it simply because it was his, and that nobody else had a key to the door.

“The problem was,” Magpie murmured, staring at the ceiling this time, “at the end everything I did made him upset. Shit didn’t get better in the end, just worse.”

"Ouch," Nura offered in empathy. Magpie shrugged the word off and hoped it would make the topic roll off too. If he would think about it too hard, there was a chance he would get sad about it.

It was the same with Nura, too. His amnesia. The way Magpie didn't ask about it, more than on a surface level.

"I can’t remember shit about anything aside from some stranger picking me up from a hospital a year ago."

Even when he did care about his friends. Even when at some point, he had wanted to ask if Nura truly hadn't realized how shit contract he was working.

"What else can I do? Where else would I go?

Doesn’t it already say a lot that the one to pick me up was a complete stranger? That no one else came to see me during the month I was there?"

When Nura had disappeared and his "agency" had turned out to be an elaborate front for human traffic and drug rings, Magpie had wondered if he should have said more, even at the risk of breaching his own policy of mind your own business.

But Nura had appeared back in Magpie's life, just as if he had never been gone in the first place. And things seemed to be looking up for him. 

"And you didn't… have anyone ever since?" Nura's voice was the kind of cautious that suddenly felt dangerous in the intimate setting of the dark apartment and bare bodies.

“I’ve had plenty of people since,” Magpie replied with a smirk and inhaled smoke from the cigarette, “it’s hardly a secret.” It was a preference, but also a deflection. A reminder in place of words you are not special.

Which was exactly the problem, because Nura was very quickly becoming someone special. Not necessarily in a romantic or sexual sense, not in the love story of the century sense, definitely not in the ‘can’t live without you’-sense.

It was, at the same time, more and less than that. Nura was a best friend. A soulmate. A confidant.

“I know what your type for shagging is,” Nura said and shifted to be able to look at Magpie better. There was a bespoke smile on his face, the kind Magpie had never seen Nura give to anyone else. “Just wondered what your type would be for relationships.”

Magpie leaned over to leave the almost-finished cigarette on the ashtray by the bed. The words hung around his neck like a noose. Everything in the room was suddenly too much - no.

It was just Nura that was too much in this apartment Magpie had carefully built as his shelter, a fortress that would keep others at a comfortable distance.

“My type is no relationship,” Magpie replied, and hoped his tone was far enough from emotional authenticity that Nura would recognise the response as a rejection. "Going to use the toilet."

In the bathroom Magpie locked the door and leaned his forehead against it.

There was only so many times you could tell yourself it's not your fault. When things seemed to repeat in patterns, obviously it was you, not them.

The one mistake Magpie was willing to both acknowledge and change was getting in a relationship to begin with. He wasn't calloused, which was added to the problem. He started to care about people. Imagine things like future beyond this moment.

And then things would inevitably start to fall apart the moment he would give in to the caring.

This was fine. This was his way of staying close, his little confession in every moment spent together, this little denial and promise, because friendships rarely ended on a breakup.

In the space of time it took to move to the toilet seat he allowed himself to imagine, for a moment, that Nura lived here and there was a future to be had like that.

It was a quaint little dream which required nothing of his imagination that didn't already exist, but by the time he moved to wash his hands he had already shelved it neatly to the back of his mind.

When you were an avid smoker, you learned to step away from things that smelled like gasoline.

And Magpie wasn't willing to kick his habits just yet.

Nura was waiting with his phone out, dropping it at the sight of Magpie with a gesture that suggested he had been just waiting for Magpie to come back.

"Sorry," he said as Magpie settled on the bed, "we can talk about something else." Magpie scoffed at the worn cliche, the apology, the inherently pretentious nature of the situation.

And then he grinned, because sometimes pretending was how you showed affection.

"Don't worry 'bout it," he said and slumped down next to Nura on the bed. Nura smiled, and that was that. Sometimes apologies were that simple.