If anything, it only made him more endearing to me.
There was something attaching in the way he carried those two selves together, not perfectly, not without contradiction, but sincerely. And perhaps because of that, I found myself wanting to know more. I even began urging him to tell me about his past life, partly out of curiosity, partly out of affection, and partly because understanding that other self felt like another way of understanding the boy I had always cared for.
And each time he spoke to me, even if only briefly and with that faint reluctance of his, I found myself smiling without meaning to.
It was a strange feeling.
