“It’s not like that,” he said hastily, but the guilt that flashed over his face told me otherwise. “Look. I want to be fair to you. What do you like, what do—”
“No!” I said, glaring at him. “We are not doing that, do you hear me? No bargains, please, not for this. I’m just fine as I am, thank you.”
The corner of his mouth kicked up in a little smile.
“I could find something you wanted. I could give you something you wanted. I’m good at that. I’m the best.”
I tossed the rest of the demoniac down because I didn’t want to look at him being right, because he probably was. I hadn’t even reached the bottom of learning what I wanted, and even if he couldn’t give those things to me, maybe I liked that he wanted to try.
I licked my lips, ready to stand up and storm out in high drama, but then he was crouched down by the arm of my chair, looking up at me with those pretty eyes and absolutely no hint of Hell in him at all.
“Please, Jordan?”
That hint of vulnerability again, and I sighed, because even then I knew I liked it too much. He was older than I was, more important in every way that the world cared about, and the fact that he had to say please to me sat in my heart like a warming ember.
“You’re the only one that can do this, you know,” he murmured. “There’s no one else I could ask, no one else I could count on.”
He reached for my hand, but I moved it quickly away from him. I didn’t know why, maybe the demoniac. It was self-destruction in a pretty bottle, but there was something else and other about Jay Gatsby.
He looked faintly offended, but before he could capitalize on that, I nodded.
“Fine,” I said. “There are things that I don’t share, but I don’t suppose that Nick Carraway is one of them.”
Gatsby smiled, no artifice or seduction in it, but only relief. I gasped when he took my hand in both of his, squeezing tightly before letting go. No, I did not like it much at all.
“Someday, I’ll dance at your wedding,” he promised, and that hurt was smoothed over enough that I could laugh.
“As if anyone would be good enough for me,” I said lightly. “Shall I tell him that you hung the moon or that you defeated the Huns single-handedly at the Rh?ne?”
He hesitated, and I could see then what sort of creature he was. He wanted me to tell Nick just that, but in the end, he shook his head.
“You remember me from before I shipped out, don’t you? When I was with—”
“Yes.”
“Tell him about me then.”
That touched me unexpectedly. If he wanted Nick to know about who he was before, when he still had a soul, when he was only an ambitious young man who loved someone he couldn’t have, well, that was romance, wasn’t it? I had seen little enough of it in my life that I smiled a bit wistfully at him.
“All right. Now may I return to my world?”
“Of course, Miss Baker.”
He rose smoothly to his feet to give me a hand out of my chair and drew me to the door. Senator Hillcock was passing by, as neat as a doctor’s case full of morphine vials and scalpels, and he gave Gatsby a formal nod. Gatsby, smiling, touched two fingers to his temple in a brief salute.
“Honestly, these new money types,” he said.
* * *
It would have made some sense if Gatsby had released me to the crowd then, but he didn’t. Instead, he kept me by his side, my hand tucked firmly in his arm, and back in the living glamour of his natural setting, something shifted in him again.
He was my friend now, squiring me through the halls, taking care to steer me around the pile of debs at the foot of the grand stairway, and smiling just for me. Gatsby wasn’t showing me off, nor was he trying to impress me. Instead, when he leaned in closer to murmur something scandalous about that admiral or to tell me that a certain redhead’s dress would look much lovelier on me, I realized it was something otherwise.