Robert felt he needed to make as much of an impression as possible in those initial days because he needed everyone to perceive him as normal—that was his plan—but it also seemed to me, and later to Thom Wright, when it was too late, that Robert Mallory was already playing a kind of game with us. And it didn’t help that his beauty made me feel as if I was collapsing inside—it didn’t offer pleasure, it just created confusion and caused a faint, dull pain in my chest. I was the only one, I believed then, who intuitively understood that Robert’s handsomeness was going to alter everything around
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