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“Why Jordan…” I started, mindless.
She then glanced upward, all sharp edges and arched brows, lips full and pursed perfectly around a filtered cigarette. She’d been a picture of calm in my mind's eye as the blood-red of her lip stain transferred to the white of the cylindrical body. Stained and set alight. She held it between two fingers. Looked at it, eyes heavy lidded. It was stained and set alight. Not unlike the scenes Jordan oft let unfold before her eyes. Ever the observer. Like glancing into a mirror, more often than not. But whether she watched to her delight, indifference or amusement often perplexed me.
That dilemma was not helped by the way she looked at me with something sardonic playing across her features, clearly waiting for elaboration as I slept on my feet, all the while looking her smack-dab in the face.
I straightened taking a puff of my own cigarette, an anodyne to my hyperactivity. Smoothed the breast of my jacket. Looked out at the emptiness of some street in Manhattan. Midnight had come and gone. I needed not pull my watch out to know such. “You’re unlike any other woman I’ve been with."
"Any other woman." She echoed, and it hit me like a sharp riposte, but perhaps it was meaningless. Likely it was not.
“Flatter me, will you? How so, Carroway?”
“You’re beautiful, sure. Quite a beauty, but something about you. There’s something…”
Her eyebrow raised impossibly further.
It tumbled from my lips before I could dress it into something more articulate. I was not as skilled as Gatsby in that arena. There was no 'old sport', or 'kind miss' to curtail my forwardness. “Rather masculine. Not in your face not in your shape. Rather your…"
“ Your manner.”
She grinned, white teeth on full display. “You’re not the first to say it. What with my love for sport and my..." She snorted humorlessly. “defiant nature. Unladylike." She threw her head back to rest upon the brick backdrop behind us. A harsh exhalation of breath from her nostrils left her nose flaring.
“I’ve always had a mannish air. Maybe even in my thinking.” And something clouded her expression, gone as soon as it came.
“Well, don’t say that of yourself. You're quite sweet. Lovely." I found myself embracing her, mindlessly, thoughtlessly. So unlike myself. There was nothing tender between our distance. There could not be and so there wasn't. There was not much sweet or lovely about the woman as she stood before me either. But still, the words didn't feel deceitful as they settled in the balmy air of mid-July.
She looked up at me all sharp edges and arched brows. Still, soft blonde lashes framed steely gray eyes that too had softened and didn't regard me with humor, or her usual cool interest. They were so unguarded and saturated with something. With affection said a tinny mocking in my mind, and an ache in my ribcage. Sudden, fleeting, and utterly unwanted. Her unfocused gaze was more likely a byproduct of her intoxication. An occasion that marked my third time in such a state, or perhaps fourth, or fifth.
Still, though, her lips pressed thin and grave and yet another knife to my saccharine delusions as she dropped the butt, stomping it out without moving closer to me or backing away. Without breaking our connection. A string between us, some unspoken bond from her pupils to mine, delicate as the tendrils of wind that rustled her hair and drawn taut as her expression. Yet still, unbroken. “If you mean having your wits about you, there’s not much wrong with that. It’s the mark of a champion."
Jordan giggled, as if I'd said something downright titillating. “No, Nick. My wolfishness." Jordan chuckled again as if she'd made some great joke.
"My eyes... they're perhaps similar to yours at times. If you understand." Something tugged at her lips and she cleared her throat. Something, something, something.
And my cigarette was between her lips, and I thought of it. She took it and turned from me all at once.
Her eyes were similar to mine. A man's ambition, it was not. It had nothing to do with the lengths she'd go to defend herself from criticism. A man's eyes... no, my eyes. And for a moment I thought of our first meeting. The quasi-quaint disaffected air she'd put on at that convivial dinner party. Her eyes tracked her target as if looking through a scope. Sparing glances at me, and enough to the other man in her presence to save face. Any time they were in the same room, she'd had eyes on the hedon whose whim Jordan had no qualms following. She had none of the fire, defiance in her eyes as she did so. And I understood it.
'I hate careless people.' her words echoed in my mind. Unless she loved one.
I nodded, imperceptibly almost, and yet her shoulders dropped from their tensing.
"Have you got eyes for me, Jordan?"
She smiled. "I've got eyes like yours, Nick. And yours wander."
I felt the air rush from my lungs as she said it, and some visceral heat suffused through me. Whether it was shame or a searing hot interest perplexed me.
She kissed me, and her cold hand came to rest upon my cheek. "We can't all get what we want." And her voice too was soft with something, something perhaps not for me.
And I felt my facade crack a bit, my honesty be picked apart by the woman in front of me as if she had a right to bash me for all her usual prevarication.
I took the cigarette she offered back, some small act of magnanimity, a salve for the truth to her words, not sure whether to be bitter or breathless but some deeper understanding was between us.
But still, there was something cathartic that slipped itself comfortably between the lines, and I'm sure she felt it. Some burgeoning camaraderie.