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It’s not that he was flirting, unless flirting was just about wanting to really see someone. People thought that someone like him — good-looking, young, cool clothes — was going to be dismissive, and when he wasn’t, when he was just easy and open with them, they glowed. It was a feeling he tried to re-create a hundred times a day, in every interaction. It also calmed him. If he looked at someone and they looked at him and there was a true connection, no matter how brief, then it meant that he didn’t need to replay the encounter anxiously afterwards, trying to find where it had all gone wrong.
