“Smashed, unfortunately. A shame, but the demoniac was worth it, don’t you think?”
“Is that a story you often tell to people you want to get on your side?” I asked.
“It is the story I am telling you,” he said with a different smile, and that smile tugged at me to suggest that he wouldn’t tell just anyone. I was special, and the low warmth from the demon’s blood in my stomach suggested that it was true.
But I knew that Nick had been special as well, and the stunned, overwhelmed look I remembered in Nick’s eyes reminded me again to sit up a little straighter, keeping what was left in the thimble glass rather than drinking it right away.
“Is that meant to convince me to tell you a story as well?”
It was too blunt for him, I could tell. He wanted something agreeable, something sweeter around the edges, but I was never very good at sweet.
“Do you remember me?” he asked instead, looking down at his glass. There was something almost vulnerable in his tone.
I used the opportunity to look him over. By this point in the evening, most men had at least unbuttoned their jackets if not done away with them altogether. He still looked as if he were straight from his dresser, the part in his hair as precise as the cream slash in an expertly made black velvet. His shoes shone as if he had purchased them new for the occasion, and the patent leather echoed only poorly the glossy black nail on his ring finger.
It was on the tip of my tongue to say that I didn’t remember him, not in the least, but then he looked up at me. It spun me a little, because it felt as if he were letting me see all the way to the center of him, that empty room, and it wasn’t empty because there was nothing to fill it with. No, there was a mansion full of things and people waiting to fill it, and a legion of demons, likely, standing by to do the same.
It was empty because he had refused to fill it, held off, barred the door. It was too easy to see how someone might stumble into such a place and be lost forever. A person could never fill that place. It would take a story.
The door snapped closed, and the look that Gatsby gave me was alarmed. I had seen too much, more than he intended; that wasn’t the way it was supposed to go. I turned back to my glass, taking another tiny sip to give us both time to recover.
“Jordan, I need your help.”
Whatever I had anticipated from him, it was not that. My eyes felt too big in the dimness of the room, as if they were gobbling up all the light that they could to form an image of him. It wasn’t easy, the demoniac in my blood told me. There was too much to him, something bigger than a person should be, as if I could not see every part of him at once.
“Of course you do,” I said pertly, and he smiled as if I had said something genuinely amusing.
“Will you talk to Nick for me? Will you tell him about me?”
“I don’t know anything about you,” I said. “And I like him. Why should I?”
His smile got a little harder before it relaxed into something more rueful. That looked enough like the truth that I blinked.
“Because I am a romantic. I always have been.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It is,” he insisted. “I need to speak to Nick. I need him … to know who I am, who I really am.”
“You spoke to him on your own just fine earlier,” I protested, but he shook his head.
“No, of course I didn’t,” he said. “We were at a party, we spoke of the war, and his head was getting turned every few moments by some distraction or another.”
I wondered for a moment if he remembered the same conversation I did. I learned later that it was entirely possible that he didn’t.
“I don’t like to involve myself with other people’s love affairs,” I lied.