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"Have you noticed that we're getting all the downsides of a relationship here but none of the fun," Thiel says, apropos of nothing, one of the countless times Boerne has taken the whole 'mi casa es su casa' thing a bit too far and made himself at home in his flat.
Boerne looks up from the plate of food he hijacked, fork hovering in the air halfway to his mouth. "There's a fun part to relationships? In my experience, there's only the disastrous and the, well." He waves his hand around hazardously in a nondescript gesture, and Thiel backs off slightly to avoid getting blinded with the fork. "The slightly less disastrous."
He snorts. "It figures that you would think so."
"What's that supposed to mean, Thiel, hm? It's not like you have the best track record with relationships yourself. At least my former partners didn't feel the need to move to Australia just to get away from me."
"It's a shame you never got that urge," Thiel mutters under his breath.
"Ha! You wouldn't even know what to do without me."
Sometimes, he does wonder how the professor and his oversized ego both fit into the same room. "Right. It's a miracle I survived the first forty years of my life without you stealing my food and hijacking my couch and generally being a pain in the ass."
The irony is far from subtle, but Boerne reacts as if he didn't notice, nodding solemnly. He finishes the pasta, wipes his mouth with the napkin and gets up, patting Thiel's shoulder in passing. "Well, don't worry. Now that I've come to enrich your life with my presence, you don't have to make do without me anymore. And I have no intentions to emigrate to a country where they eat kangaroos, so I'll be around for a while."
"Wonderful," Thiel says. He manages to inject a suitable amount of sarcasm into his voice, but the broad, stupid smile on his face stubbornly resists all attempts to be hidden away.