I jerked back from her soft touch, my heart pounding, because there had been a chance, not a large one, maybe, but one nonetheless, where I might have gone with her, if only she hadn’t forgotten that I might not get to come back.
“Stop,” I choked. “Stop, stop, I’m not in love with you, you can’t treat me like this.”
She looked at me stunned.
“Of course you are,” she said, and the thread between us snapped, stinging me hard as I stared at her. The rain flowing down my face suddenly felt warmer, almost like blood.
Of course I am, I thought, but I wasn’t Jay Gatsby. Love wasn’t enough for me, and Daisy had proved it would never be enough for her.
I turned on my heel and ran for the house.
She called my name twice, faltering, and then she stopped.
I walked through the house, trailing water over the parquet floors, out the front door, and then I kept walking. I had picked wretched shoes for this, dark forest green suede to match my green dress, so I took them off and let them swing from my hooked fingers.
I sloshed through the soft grass by the side of the road, and every time a car came up from behind me, I thought it might be Daisy sending for me, or even Daisy herself in her blue roadster.
If she stops me before I make it to the main road, I might forgive her, I thought, and it horrified me.
She didn’t, however, and instead the car that stopped for me came from the opposite direction.
It was Nick, dressed in a good suit I hadn’t seen before, his eyes red and hollow.
“Oh it’s you,” I said as he pulled up in front of me.
“Come on,” Nick said, and when I got a stubborn look on my face, “please. Please, Jordan.”
He opened the door for me, and we drove back to West Egg as I slipped my shoes back on.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
We took the main road in, and Gatsby’s palace loomed up in front of us. From across the Sound, it looked like a ruin, a reminder of the wages of sin. Now, coming up on it before we veered to Nick’s house, it looked … normal. Just a building, though a beautiful one. It still gleamed as if at any moment it might burst like fireworks on a hot July night, as if it still had some kind of potential for glamour and for beauty. It likely still did, for it had survived Jay Gatsby, and now anything was possible. We all had.
For one horrid moment, I thought that Nick would take us to the mansion for some reason. I let out a held breath when we pulled into his own weedy drive.
“His funeral was today,” he said when he saw my relief. “His father is staying there now.”
“How was it?” I asked, and his mouth tightened.
“A pauper’s affair,” Nick said. “I’ve seen mass graves given better.”
“Is that why you were in East Egg? To see if you could shame Daisy into going?”
He blinked at me in confusion. He hadn’t been thinking of Daisy at all.
“No. I … I couldn’t stay there, and I couldn’t stay here. It was too much. I wanted you.”
“He never liked me all that much,” I said coldly. “I don’t think he always liked you either.”
Nick flinched from me as if I had struck him. I suppose I had. He gave me his hand out of the car. We ended up walking slowly through the rain to his door, as if neither of us wanted to remember the last time we had dashed from the water to his doorstep. We were different people now. We didn’t run through the rain together.
“You’ve forgotten a few dresses here,” Nick said. “You should change, you’re soaked.”