``Nikita Lytkin˚₊‧⁰⁴

You had always been drawn to incapable men. Either you liked taking responsibility for them, or you were simply attracted to freaks with poor hygiene and no backbone. Your boyfriend was one of them: next to him, you looked better, almost like some heroine who had inexplicably chosen to pay attention to him.
Artyom had been a wall between you from the very beginning. You told yourself that since Nikita had known him for much longer, it was perfectly normal for the two of them to spend more time together than Nikita spent with you. But over time, there was simply too much of Artyom in your relationship.
Nikita would merely lower his eyes to the floor whenever you tried to bring it up and asked him to distance himself from Artyom. Unlike him, you genuinely cared about the relationship. Whenever you complained, Nikita would simply nod in silence and promise to change, yet every time, you would find him with his best friend again. You could never truly replace Artyom in his life—the person without whom Nikita seemed to have forgotten how to exist on his own.

Nikita’s apartment greeted you with the familiar smell of dust and dampness. Only after you came around did it begin to resemble, even briefly, a place where someone actually lived. You had planned to spend that evening alone together, accompanied by the sticky silence that was Nikita’s constant companion. You pushed the bedroom door open. The familiar scene unfolded before you: the two of them sitting side by side, their shoulders almost touching, as though your presence in this apartment had always been secondary. Artyom cut himself off mid-monologue and slowly raised his eyes to you. There was no surprise in them—only that same unspoken hostility that had appeared at the very beginning of your relationship with Nikita and had never disappeared since.