[...] What Tom began to understand now was that the same wanting that had looked to him like a sign of confidence really made Trevor a slave. He was a single-minded machine of desire, a straight arrow of want. He had an urge for something outside himself, constantly, endlessly. He’d wanted people, of course (and what was there more explicitly telling of an unquenchable thirst for people than the life of a pick-up artist?), he’d wanted places, he’d wanted recognition. Maybe that hunger, that need to engulf more life within himself that had seemed foreign and blissful to Tom, maybe that hunger wasn’t good. Maybe it wasn’t even pleasant. It made him shiver to say it—especially since it seemed to imply the opposite was true of himself—but for a brief, lucid moment it sounded undeniably true: people like Trevor would never be happy.