Chapter Text
June 21st, 1923.
Nick was slouched in one of Gatsby’s patios, sprawled like a man halfway between leisure and collapse. The breeze, listless though it was, offered fleeting reprieve from the oppressive heat pressing against his skin like wet velvet. The air hung heavy with salt and cigarette smoke, clinging to his three-piece suit as if it were second, suffocating his skin.
It was another sweltering summer afternoon in West Egg—one of those indecently hot days when even the sky seemed bored. His collar had wilted hours ago, and his starched cuffs drooped like flags at half-mast. The suit, once crisp, now felt more like ceremonial armor—an expensive trap in which to perish gracefully.
It felt uncanny to find himself here again—among the very people he’d once sworn off with silent conviction, the crude and careless crowd he had promised never to entertain. And yet, when Gatsby’s invitation arrived—discreet and handwritten—there had been no real will in Nick to refuse.
“Nicky,” Daisy drawled from across the terrace, her voice soft and laced with languor. She was draped across a wicker chaise in a dress the color of champagne foam, the fabric clinging in all the right places as if it had been made solely for her. “You look positively ghastly.”
Jordan, perched beside her with a cigarette held elegantly aloft, exhaled a ribbon of smoke and regarded him coolly. “Had a little too much giggle water, darling?” she asked, arching a brow.
“I’m—” Nick attempted to rise, only to waver slightly. “I’m just fine.”
The lie didn’t carry. The world shimmered at the edges. His vision tunneled briefly, and the sun, smug and relentless, bore down on him with theatrical cruelty.
In an instant, both women were on their feet—Daisy all flutter and silk, Jordan all structure and sharpness. Daisy touched his arm lightly, the way one might test the temperature of a bath. Jordan took hold of his elbow with the decisiveness of someone accustomed to cleaning up other people’s messes.
“My word, Nick,” she said, her voice dry as gin. “You’ve gone all to pieces. Best get you horizontal before you pitch headfirst into the shrubbery.”
Nick gave a hollow laugh. “Wouldn’t want to bleed on Gatsby’s begonias.”
“You’ve already wilted,” Jordan murmured, adjusting her grip and guiding him toward the house.
Behind them, Daisy’s voice floated like a melody carried on the heat. “We ought to fetch him a julep. That always sorted things out back in Louisville.”
Jordan glanced over her shoulder. “You want to fetch it, darling?”
Daisy didn’t answer. She only sighed and sank back onto the chaise, as if the effort of compassion had already exhausted her.
Nick’s weight leaned heavier into Jordan’s side as they walked, though he tried to disguise it with a gentlemanly posture. The heat still clung to him—tropical, inescapable. He was aware of how his shirt stuck to the small of his back, the faint tremor in his legs, the slightly too-fast beat of his pulse. But he didn’t speak. He simply let her guide him down the marble corridor, his eyes half-lidded, drifting over Gatsby’s gilded sconces and fluted doorframes as though he’d fallen into a dream.
“Honestly,” Jordan muttered under her breath, “you men wither at the first bead of sweat. A little gin and sun and suddenly it’s the trenches.”
Nick tried to smile. “Feels more like the crypt.”
But before they reached the guest room, a figure cut into their path—silent as a shadow, but gleaming with intent. Jay.
He emerged from the far end of the hall like a specter summoned from marble and linen. Immaculate. Poised. A pressed white suit skimmed his frame, untouched by the day’s humidity. His tie, dove-grey silk, was pinned with something that looked absurdly expensive, and yet somehow invisible—one only noticed it after everything else had already impressed you.
Jordan halted, half-turning, her grip on Nick tightening instinctively.
“Jordan,” Gatsby said, his voice low and deliberate, “I’ll take him from here.”
Her gaze flicked between them. “He’s barely vertical. I doubt he even knows his own name.”
“I know it.” Nick’s voice emerged weakly.
Jay’s smile was slight, private. “He’s a friend. Let me see him to bed.”
Jordan hesitated—partly out of concern, partly out of curiosity, Nick thought. Most of them hadn’t kept in touch since the trial of Wilson, but Jay made it his mission to dine with Nick once a week. Jordan released her grip after a second, smoothing her hand down her skirt as if dusting off the moment.
“Suit yourself.” She glanced at Nick with raised brows. “If he starts reciting war poetry or talking to the walls, send for me.”
“She’s terribly fond of dramatics,” Gatsby murmured, stepping beside Nick. His hand slid beneath Nick’s arm, firmer and surer than Jordan’s had been. There was something practiced in the way he supported him—effortless and close, without being patronizing. “Come now, old sport. You need air.”
Old sport.
Nick allowed himself to be guided. Their bodies brushed as they walked—an occasional touch of shoulder, the glancing pressure of Gatsby’s palm against the small of his back when they turned a corner. Nick didn’t speak. His throat felt dry, his skin hot and tight inside his suit. But he noticed the faint scent that clung to Gatsby’s collar—cologne and citrus and the faintest trace of tobacco, though Nick had never seen him smoke.
Instead of the guest room, Jay steered them down another hallway. The air cooled with each step. The décor became subtler, quieter—no chandeliers or grand oil paintings, only tall windows and sheer drapes that swayed in the breeze like breath.
“Where—” Nick started, but he knew.
“My room,” Jay replied. “There’s a better fan, and fewer interruptions.”
Nick blinked. “Is that… entirely necessary?”
Gatsby glanced at him with a faint smile. “Indulge me.”
The bedroom was nothing like the rest of the mansion. It was simpler. Still beautiful, yes, but clean-lined and sparse. Dark wood, ivory walls, a writing desk, a low settee near the window. And the bed—vast, yes, but somehow understated, its white linen perfectly creased, as if no one had dared sleep there.
Nick knew it well from the previous months, but with summer came facades.
Gatsby helped him onto the edge of it.
“Lie back,” he said gently. “You’ll feel better once your head’s down.”
Nick hesitated.
But Jay was already crouching to undo his shoes. The gesture startled him—not just the act, but the familiarity of it. Nick and Jay had gotten drunk plenty of times, and he was now only thinking of all the mornings he would wake with no shoes. Gatsby’s fingers, long and precise, worked quickly over the laces.
“I can manage,” Nick murmured.
“I don’t doubt it. But you should not have to.”
The words sat between them, heavier than they ought to have been.
Nick lay back. The bed was cool beneath him, the pillow like air. His breath slowed. Gatsby adjusted the fan so it blew directly toward him, then turned back, rolling up his shirtsleeves with slow, practiced motions.
“I’ll fetch some water,” he said.
Nick watched him cross the room, watched the movement of his back, the confidence that laced every step. Something was intoxicating about it. Not just the way he looked—but the way he looked at him. As though the rest of the world had ceased to exist. Nick cut the thoughts immediately, feeling like a fool for letting the ideas cross his mind. Jay loved Daisy, no matter how much the woman denied him. Jay was a man. Nick was a man.
What happened months ago —hours even upon the arrival of Daisy and Jordan— was just thought candy, never to be talked about again.
When Jay returned, he handed Nick a glass.
“Drink. Slowly.”
Nick sipped. His fingers brushed Jay’s when he passed the glass back. The other man didn’t move.
Their eyes met for a moment longer than necessary.
“You’re very good at this,” Nick spoke reassuringly. “Taking care of people.”
Jay smiled faintly. “It’s not difficult. When you care about them.”
The room thickened. Not with heat now—but with something else. Something able to be named—and deeply familiar. A current, continuous, and unhurried, running beneath the surface of every word.
“I don’t imagine you do this for all your guests,” Nick quizzed.
“No,” Gatsby replied simply.
Silence stretched, the fan humming softly. Nick’s gaze wandered—Jay’s rolled sleeves, the veins in his forearm, the faint sheen of sweat at his temple now that he was close.
“You should take off your jacket,” Gatsby said after a moment. “You’ll overheat again.”
Nick hesitated.
“Do you mind?”
Gatsby shook his head. “Not at all.”
Nick sat up slowly. Gatsby helped him again, unbuttoning the jacket’s front, sliding it from his shoulders like it were some shared ritual. Their hands brushed. Nick exhaled—whether from heat or something else, he wasn’t sure.
“There,” Gatsby said, voice lower now. “Better?”
Nick nodded, and Gatsby set the jacket aside, folding it with surprising care.
Nick fell back again, his shirt damp against his skin. He could feel Gatsby’s eyes on him—assessing, not ogling. Not quite. But present. Not looking away.
“You always seem so composed,” Nick said suddenly. “Do you ever let go of it? The performance?”
Jay sat on the edge of the bed—not close, not touching, but near enough that Nick could feel the warmth of him.
“Once,” he said. “A time ago.”
“With Daisy?” Nick asked, before he could stop himself.
Gatsby didn’t answer right away. “With someone I trust.”
Nick turned his head, meeting his gaze. “Do you trust me?”
Another silence. Then Jay smiled—wry, wistful, just on the edge of sad.
“More than I should.”
Nick wanted to say something—wanted to pierce that perfect mask, if only for a second. But instead, he reached up, brushed a hand over his own damp forehead.
“You’ll be fine,” Gatsby murmured, rising again. “Just rest.”
But Nick caught his wrist—lightly, instinctively.
“Stay.”
Gatsby’s body stilled. His hand was friendly beneath Nick’s fingers. They looked at each other—not with fear or surprise, but with a mutual understanding that didn’t need articulation.
“I won’t be long,” Gatsby let out calmly. “Just a moment.”
Nick let go.
He returned five minutes later, jacket gone, collar undone. He held another glass of water, which he placed beside the bed.
Without asking, he sat down again—this time closer.
Nick closed his eyes. “You know, sometimes I think no one here is really awake. Everything’s champagne and phonographs and laughter with nothing underneath. Except maybe you.”
“That’s a dangerous thing to believe,” Jay clashed.
“Why?”
“Because I’m not real either.”
Nick turned his head again. Gatsby’s face was only a foot from his.
“You feel real.”
Jay’s throat moved. “That’s the trick, isn’t it?”
Another beat. The fan stirred the curtains, the outside world holding its breath.
“I don’t know what any of this means,” Nick spoke up, more to the ceiling than to Jay. “You. Me. This house. Sometimes I think I’ll just disappear into it all.” He looked up, watching as the ceiling expanded the longer he stared at it without blinking.
“You won’t,” Jay conveyed, voice teasing. “I’d notice.”
He was enjoying Nick’s intoxicated rambles, never able to get much out of the man while sober. Nick was simply like that. Polite.
Their eyes met again.
This time, it wasn’t electric. It wasn’t explosive. It was slow—like dusk folding over a landscape. Jay’s gaze flicked down to Nick’s mouth, then back up. A subtle shift. Barely a breath.
He didn’t lean in.
But he didn’t lean away either.
“I should go,” he whispered after a moment.
Nick didn’t answer.
Jay stood, reaching for the glass on the table.
“Try to sleep. If you wake feeling worse—call for me.”
Nick nodded.
Jay hesitated again at the door, hand resting on the frame.
“I meant what I said,” Nick murmured. “About you being real.”
Gatsby’s eyes eased. “Sleep well, Nick.”
And then he was gone.
And he wondered—not for the first time—whether the version of Jay he saw was real.
Or whether Jay had chosen to be real only for him.
Nick lay back against the pillows and tried to count his breaths, tried not to think. But thinking came anyway, uninvited and shapeless, like humidity clinging to the back of the neck.
It had been months—a year?—since that godless summer when everything collapsed. When Myrtle Wilson died in the road and Gatsby’s name, once only murmured in admiration or suspicion, had suddenly been shouted in every parlor and paper across New York.
And George Wilson—grief-stricken, empty-eyed George—had done what the city had nearly willed him to do. He’d gone to Gatsby’s house with a pistol and trembling hands, ready to make sense of a senseless world the only way he knew how. Nick had arrived just in time to see George being pulled away, to see Jay— his Jay—still breathing.
Still standing.
There had been a trial. A brief one. George pleaded to attempted murder and was sent away—first to the Tombs, and then somewhere upstate. Nick had visited him once. The man hadn’t spoken a word.
And then, without ceremony or discussion, the world moved on.
Nick exhaled through his nose, letting the ceiling blur.
The oddest thing, he thought now, wasn’t that no one talked about it.
The oddest thing was that everyone was still here.
Daisy and Tom had returned from their escape—weeks abroad, lounging in European hotels, pretending to be shattered. Jordan had remained, of course, floating through parties and lunches and polo matches with the same lean boredom she wore like a signature scent. Even Jay— especially Jay—had simply reopened his house.
The invitations went out again.
The orchestra returned.
The lawn was trimmed.
The pool was cleaned.
And just like that, the past was tucked away like a photograph turned to face the wall. No one spoke of Myrtle’s shattered body. No one spoke of George, or of Daisy’s shaking hands in the night, or of Tom’s roaring denial that it could ever have been his fault. No one mentioned Jay’s convalescence, the way his arm had been bandaged for weeks, the still-healing scar that ran under the cuff of his shirt.
They all played their parts. Civilized. Polished.
Nick turned his head toward the empty side of the bed where Gatsby had sat. His scent lingered faintly on the linens: clean starch, bergamot, and amber or sun-warmed paper.
It unsettled Nick how easily they’d all slipped back into orbit around Gatsby again. How comfortable it had become. As if tragedy, when gilded in enough champagne and silk, simply ceased to exist.
And yet, for all the effortless smiles and invitations, there was a charge in the air none of them could quite touch—a hairline fracture beneath the dinner table, under the jazz and roses. They were all pretending. Not just that nothing had happened—but that it hadn’t mattered.
Nick’s hand found his chest, resting over his heart like a child might after a nightmare.
He hadn’t forgotten.
He remembered Daisy’s face the night Myrtle died—how pale she’d gone, her mouth trembling but her voice flat. He remembered the way Jay had stood at the end of her driveway in the dark, like a soldier waiting for a telegram that never came.
He remembered how no one had apologized.
Not Tom. Not Daisy. Not even Gatsby.
Only Nick had seemed to realize something had changed in the marrow of them all—that they were not quite people anymore. Only ghosts of what they had pretended to be.
And now?
Now they dined together. They swam and smoked and flirted again. They danced. They dressed in their whites and posed for photographs in the garden. And not once— not once—had anyone said Myrtle’s name.
But Nick remembered.
And he remembered Jay’s eyes, too—earlier that evening, when he’d brushed Nick’s damp hair from his forehead, when their faces had been close enough to blur. He remembered the importance of that look. Not lust. Not quite.
But something.
Nick rolled onto his side and stared at the drawn curtain, wondering what it would take to make someone like Gatsby fall apart. Or worse—what it would mean if he already had, and this mask, this elegance, this perfection, was all that was left behind.
They were all acting like the tragedy had passed.
Nick wasn’t so sure.
Maybe it was still happening. Mum. Invisible. One silent dinner at a time.
And maybe Nick was the only one left who knew.