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Nick has never considered himself a sentimentalist when it comes to mostly anything.
Jay Gatsby, however, is a completely different story.
It’s been nearly five years since the first time Jay had pulled Nick down onto him, and while, yes, Jay had recently been shot, Nick wouldn’t trade that moment for anything. So, here he is. Being sentimental. Writing his love stories. Nick writes about men like him and Jay, men who risk the world just to stay with those whom they love. And, if he’s being honest, he writes about himself and Jay, how they’ve gotten to where they are in the world. How stupidly and obscenely rich Jay had found himself and how he wanted someone to spend it on and how Nick very willingly fits into that role.
Nick writes the occasional piece for a magazine. He writes what he likes, codes it as well as he can so as to be appealing for the stuffy editors who publish his works. He writes while Gatsby swims in paperwork, sitting across from him in the study of Jay’s – their – gigantic house.
When Nick’s lease on the house next door was coming to an end, Jay had, in a rather embarrassing way that involved flowers and lots of tripping, asked Nick to move into the mansion with him.
“It does get ever so lonely here by myself,” Jay drawled to him, sat on the counter with ice on his lip (re: tripping). As if Nick were ever going to say no.
The days spent in the four and a half years since that particular day have really been no different than before, except now there was no running back and forth between the two houses in rainstorms. Their clothes lay in separate closets, and they do still technically have separate beds, even if just to keep up appearances. The house staff knows, they must, but they get paid too much to care about their employer’s life, just like they keep his own line of work in a perpetual state of plausible deniability.
Their mornings all begin the same, waking up, tangled in each other in the fine silk bedclothes. They dress, often together, stealing glances and touches like lovesick teenagers. They take coffee and breakfast in a sitting room that overlooks the harbor, reading the newspaper and discussing the events of the coming day. Often, one of them will have business meetings in the city, and leaves the other with a kiss and the promise he will be home for tea.
The rest of the day is spent like that; unfortunately apart on some days, but blessedly close on others. On days they have no meetings, they will work together in silence in the large study, facing each other, stealing looks and feigning innocent when caught by the other. Nick clacks away on his typewriter, a beautiful green and gold unit Jay had purchased for him, while Jay did, well. Nick wasn’t really even sure what he did.
With midday comes lunch. If Nick is alone he will often sit through the hour, preferring to keep his mind focused on his writing. The staff has stopped knocking on the door to the study to ask. He never answers. But with Jay there, he always gets dragged downstairs to their small dining room and placed in front of whatever extravagant meal the chef has prepared. Jay, who looks at Nick as if he is the meal.
They sometimes have guests for tea, often Jordan or Daisy. Jordan will either come alone or with one of her new “friends,” comfortable in the fact she does not have to save face when in Nick and Jay’s home. Jordan chats about her latest golf games and the latest queer happenings in the city. Nearly every time she comes for tea their conversations spill into dinner, and she gives up the dirtier, one might say, news when the wine starts flowing.
Daisy, sweet Daisy, knows the nature of Nick and Jay’s relationship too. Nick didn’t know how – whether if it was Jordan or just a lack of care on their part. But she herself could not care much less than she does. She finds it amusing. That these two men would be drawn together over her, of all people. Daisy only stays for tea. She sometimes brings Pammy, a now overly rambunctious five-year-old, keen on greeting her uncles by barrelling into their legs.
“I’m afraid we must get back for dinner,” Daisy will say, each time, and Nick will nod. He wishes he could get his cousin and niece out of that awful house, away from Tom, who has only become even more unkind with time. Nick has offered, but Daisy refuses. She believes she must stay.
It takes twenty minutes to pry Pammy away from Jay’s legs.
Dinner is always an elaborate affair. They sometimes dine with guests, but often just the two of them on the corner of the long table. Lit many a time by only candles (“Romantic sap,” says Nick. Jay can’t deny that.), their features softened by the warm, golden glow. They eat, trading stories and jokes and making fun of whomever they had been in meetings with that day.
Later in the evenings they will sit somewhere in the house, mostly silent, with drinks in their hands, and just think. Sometimes they will read books, other times pressed into each other, reveling in closeness and letting the comfortable silence lay. They sit on the back porch on warm summer nights and in the blue parlor room when the nights fall frigid in the fall and winter.
They might sit for just minutes or they might sit for hours on end, just being with each other in a way the day has not allowed thus far. Eventually, they find their way up to bed, climbing the grand staircase still glued to each other. Their nights don’t, contrary to the thoughts of some, always end in the heat of passion. Those acts are becoming less frequent – we're getting old, Nick thinks, amusedly, at his ripe old age of thirty five. If anything the distance between makes the act so more enjoyable, more heated, more passionate, more pleasurable, that every time it happens Nick wonders why they don’t do it more often.
He will wake the next morning and remember why.
They dress for bed, together again, landing just where they had started the day, ready to repeat it all, every day.
At the end of their fifth year together, the house was starting to feel all too big. Nick had thought that since he’d moved in – the rooms collected dust quicker than the maids could feather it away, and it bothered Nick to no end – but Jay seemed to enjoy the extravagance of having more house than they could handle. Up until New Year’s, 1928, when Jay had suggested moving to the city. They were hosting Jordan and Jordan’s friends, all falling in their own social scene, and the proposal caught Nick, tucked into Jay’s side one minute to midnight, off guard. Nick blinked, said yes, and kissed Jay as the clock struck twelve.
In the new year, they find a quite fabulous fifth-floor apartment downtown, with gilded details and rich, dark wallpaper in every room. The flat has two bedrooms, a small library, a lovely kitchen, and grand windows stretching from floor to ceiling in the parlor. Jay sells the house in West Egg for a sizeable sum to a young couple who will need all those rooms much more than him and Nick.
They are closer to Jordan now, which Nick enjoys. And they go out now! Jordan brings them to clubs and speakeasies she has thoroughly scouted out and decided to be safe, and they drink and watch people like them up on small stages, performing as if the whole world were in the crowd.
Nick makes it a year in the gilded apartment before he looks up at Jay one day while they work, with loving eyes and a sincere voice, reaches for Jay’s hand and says “let’s move to France.”
So they move to France.
It’s wonderful.
They barely have to worry about affection in public. They sit on the same side of the table in cafes, touching hands over shared bottles of wine and fine cheeses. They cook for themselves – well, Nick does. They quickly learn Jay is an utter disaster in the kitchen. They laze their days away with much of the same activity as before, but now, in France, of all places.
They take long weekends in Paris and exchange thin, golden rings that get them stares while they dine in magnificent restaurants and take leisurely strolls in the Jardin du Luxembourg. Jordan writes them, promises to visit, and Nick writes back that he would want nothing more. They receive a letter from Daisy, detailing Pammy’s reaction to “Uncle Nick and Uncle Jay are in France, darling.” The eight-year-old had knocked one of Daisy’s vases over. She promises to visit, too.
Nick still writes, and Jay becomes less restless, busying himself with learning French and working his way through their large library. In the evenings, they dance, glasses of wine forgotten on a side table, windows open to the ocean breeze, with smooth, quiet music droning from a gramophone somewhere.
Looking back, Nick gets, well, sentimental. He can’t help from thinking, cliche as it is, about what he did to deserve all of this. This life, with the man he loves in a new country, in the constant throes of love and life.
And, well. It’s just grand, isn’t it?