A handsome and confident young man, a few years older, approaches them. He’s wearing an expensive leather jacket that looks at home on him, almost accidental. He flips easily between French and English, bums a smoke from the girl and proceeds with an irresistible seduction. It’s a cruel display of power. The North African no longer shimmers or flashes his brilliant smile. His posture collapses and all vitality is drained from his face as the girl, now laughing and alert in a different way, lights her cigarette off of the newly dispensed one held so perfectly in the stranger’s hand.
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