In the middle of it, I turned my head and though the angle was all wrong, I could see into the orchard on Gatsby’s property, and I saw myself there, watching with eyes that hadn’t even fallen on Nick yet or on Gatsby himself for that matter. I tasted that fruit again, sweet and bright and lovely, and I started to laugh.
There’s this moment, during good sex at least, where you forget how you’re meant to look or what you think a properly self-contained creature should look like. My hair was full of bits of bark, one of my garters had given up entirely, and I didn’t even like to think of what my paint was doing on my face, but none of it mattered at all when I could feel just the barest innocent threat of Nick’s teeth against me.
I went over with my hand over my mouth, still not quite ready to give him more, but he groaned when he felt me shake, pressing against me even harder. He was so enthusiastic that I had to give him a hard shove backwards at the end, pushing and then dropping back against the tree because I would fall otherwise.
He rose unsteadily to his feet, and I saw with satisfaction how I had ruined him. His face was flushed and slick, eyes starry, and a grin that didn’t know what to do with itself on his red, red lips.
“Just a minute … Just give me a minute and…”
“You don’t have to—”
“Think I would if I had to?”
That shut him up, and he braced his hands on either side of my head against the tree as I reached down to unbutton his trousers and return the favor. My wrist ached, and I suspected he was holding back to make it last, but he finished with his face buried in the crook of my neck and I decided that fair was fair.
When he got his breath back, before I was quite ready to be done with the satisfaction, Nick tried to put us both in order, buttoning up his trousers and pulling out a single sad handkerchief before staring at it in dismay as if wondering which disaster it could possibly help.
“No, come on,” I said, dragging him down towards the water. “When you can’t fix a thing, the best course of action can be to ruin it all so that no can see what truly happened.”
Nick laughed, and I wondered if that was what love was, making someone forget the pain that gnawed at them and would not stop.
After the rain of the week before, the water was murky and gray, frigid like January. Nick grabbed me as if he expected me to be able to warm him. My dress floated around me like a swirl of green liqueur in vodka, I lost my drawers entirely, and Nick kissed me so hard I lost my breath as well.
“Why, you’re affectionate,” I murmured, ruffling his hair, and it occurred to me without much rancor that with me, he was permitted to be.
We hauled ourselves out of the surf, our shoes dangling from our fingers. A car filled with women dressed like bright buttery flowers chugged by, and we waved merrily at them before we crossed the road back to Nick’s front door. We were at our best, I decided, when we were just the two of us on our own, but of course that changed once we crossed the threshold.
In the parlor, Daisy and Gatsby sat on either end of Nick’s sofa like children on a seesaw, Daisy with her knees curled up and her face full of tears, a tremulous smile on her face. When she saw us, she leaped up in a showy flourish, dabbing furiously at her flushed cheeks with the pads of her fingers until all gracious, Gatsby offered her a handkerchief.
Gatsby—
What does it look like when a thousand-year hunger gets a taste of what it’s craved? His eyes were pale before, but now there was something blackened and charred about them, sending up wisps of steam that I could almost feel but not see. He was still buttoned up to a nicety, but there was something stripped to him, as if we had come in from the water and caught him in the midst of shedding his skin like a snake. I took a step back, bumping right into Nick’s chest, and from the way he held my hand, I could tell he saw it too. Daisy didn’t react at all.
“Oh there you two dears are,” she said, drying her face furiously. “We were just beginning to wonder where in the world you might have gotten to. Nick, your house is just the dearest thing, but there’s not much space to lose oneself, is there?”