Work Text:
She wore her little disguise and then thought she had the right to be offended when someone took it at face value.
Why’d he want to live out there? Didn’t matter. People lived everywhere. Bloom where you’re planted. Plant yourself wherever you’d like. And the lawyers would keep cutting up the land, deciding which parts were for people and which were for call centers and shipping logistics hubs.
She could still feel the dust on her, fine and soft.
And why’d she tell him? It was true, all of it, but she told him, because why? Because she wanted him to see that she understood, that they were the same, that she wasn’t one of them, not really, and yes, she told him because she thought he would be moved by her, that he wouldn’t want to deny her, Kimberly Wexler, erstwhile daughter of the plains, a single thing. That she’d earned it. That he should give up his home because she’d had to do the same thing, over and over.
She never told anyone anything about her childhood, was tightlipped at college, law school, the mailroom, every job she’d ever had. She didn’t lie, everything was factual: Nebraska. Small town. Didn’t really see her dad. Nothing much to the last one, how many people had said, “Oh, me neither” in response over the years? Even when she applied for college, she knew the financial aid office would see the Expected Family Contribution and know what to do with it. She wasn’t going to gild the lily with a personal statement sob story.
There was a general consensus you were supposed to strip your life for parts if you wanted to make sure to get everything you possibly could. She’d been sort-of-friends with a girl named Meghan, a second violin in the RCHS orchestra, who asked her to proofread her applications for Nebraska and Creighton and KU. Meghan had written about her great-grandma dying during her sophomore year. This was the worst thing that had happened to Meghan in all of her 17 years on earth.
You’re just like the rest of them.
Jimmy in his white socks on the balcony, doing bar tricks for her.
///
She’d told him all of it a long time ago.
They’d known each other for about six months when he invited her to come over to Chuck and Rebecca’s for dinner. She spent $8.95 on a bottle of wine at Albertson’s that looked, maybe, okay? She was making $5.22 an hour and brought peanut butter sandwiches for lunch every day.
“What do you think?” She showed the bottle to Jimmy in the car when he picked her up. The external passenger side handle had broken off so he had to pop it open from the inside. You have to finesse it, he said, giving it a thump with the side of his fist. It only really became awkward when she had to stand there waiting while he unlocked his own door and then slid over to open hers. It makes me look like a cad, he complained. But they didn’t make these handles anymore, apparently, but his guy said he’d be on the lookout.
“It’s perfect. Well, you know I have no idea. Looks good, though.”
“It says it has playful, earthy notes.”
“Chuck won’t say if he hates it. Rebecca will love it.”
“I just don’t want to embarrass myself. Should I even bring it? I can return it, right?”
“There is no possible universe in which you could embarrass yourself.”
She was learning about the social grace notes that you had to play. A lot of them revolved around alcohol. What to order at an HHM Holiday Reception, how long to nurse that first drink, what kind of gift worked for a win in court, what worked as a hostess gift. The thought actually didn’t count. It could make things worse. How did people learn what was good wine and what was bad wine? She suspected that maybe none of them knew, either, and were just pretending with each other. But she knew enough to know you couldn’t show up to your boss’s house with strawberry Boone’s Farm.
Rebecca met them at the door.
When Chuck came into the foyer to greet them, wiping his hands on a dish towel, Jimmy had been holding the bottle of wine while Kim took her coat off and handed it to Rebecca. Kim felt silly, like their roles had accidentally been reversed. She wasn’t used to handing her coat to anyone. Rebecca was wearing artsy rich lady jewelry, the overpriced kind that you can only buy in museum gift shops. Kim was wearing a cardigan she’d bought at Fashion Bug three years earlier.
“Hmm,” Chuck said, taking the bottle from Jimmy and eyeing it. “Well, this is—”
“This is from Kim,” Jimmy said, cutting Chuck off before he could say whatever small and shitty thing he was going to say when he thought Jimmy had brought the wine. “I can’t take credit.”
“It’s just a little—” Kim circled her hands in the air, then brought them together, trying to make herself stop with the nervous gestures. “I wanted to bring something. To say thank you for inviting me.”
“Kim. It’s a pleasure to have you here. I’ll get the wine glasses out.”
There was jazz on the stereo, playing at the perfect level. Everything was perfect, the lighting, the tablecloth, the candles flickering against the dark wood. “It’s like Barry Lyndon in here,” Jimmy said to her as he steered her into the dining room. Chuck and Rebecca apparently didn’t have a TV. He was a board member at Opera Southwest and UNM Children’s Hospital. Rebecca’s profession, her actual job that paid her real American dollars, was concert violinist.
Kim thought it was going well. The conversation, if not exactly easy, was relatively comfortable. She was good at asking questions of people who loved to talk about themselves. Chuck would never think of himself as that kind of person but she knew he probably was.
“So, how did you end up in Albuquerque? I know you went to school at Georgetown Law, right?”
“Well, it’s maybe not the most colorful story,” he said, gearing up for something with a strange excitement in his eyes. “Pretty straightforward, I guess. My journey is nothing like Jimmy’s illustrious path to Albuquerque, I can tell you that.” He laughed and Kim knew she was supposed to laugh, too. She gripped her knee under the table, tried to smooth her expression. Next to her, she could see Jimmy moving the roasted potatoes around on his plate in their balsamic glaze. He gave a half-hearted cough of a laugh.
“I’m sure you’ve heard the story?” Chuck tried again.
“I just meant that Georgetown is on the east coast. It’s a big geographical jump.” Kim looked at him evenly, pretending she didn’t know what he meant. She hoped her chest wasn’t getting pink, flushed with righteous anger. For Jimmy, yes, but for anyone who hadn’t blithely gone, with no mistakes, from Georgetown, to clerking, to starting a white-shoe law firm. She was so angry she probably could’ve stuck one of their beautiful, well-polished forks in her leg right now and not felt a damn thing. How dare he.
“I got a position clerking at the Tenth Circuit,” he said. “Up in Denver. From there, a short hop, skip and jump to working with George. Would anyone else like some more wine?” He scraped the chair away from the table and went back into the kitchen.
///
The complex on Harper Dr. was quiet and clean. She’d moved in a year after she was hired as an associate at HHM. It was a definite step up—in-unit washer/dryer, central air, dishwasher, garbage disposal, balcony, two parking spots. It felt decadent. No window unit threatening to end it all, rattling and dripping in the New Mexico summer. Central air purred. The dishwasher hummed. The bathroom was enormous, tub and shower, so big you’d think it had been a mistake by the builders. She rarely saw the neighbors, which suited her fine. They all went to work, they strapped their mountain bikes to their cars and headed out to the mountains early on the weekends. They had dogs that wore bandanas and whom you could imagine happily loping beside them on a trail as the sun rose.
Saul Goodman had followed him home last night. You can’t pretend to be something for very long without it becoming at least a little bit true. Good for Saul.
But he wasn’t there when she got home tonight. Blown away in the wind. Only Jimmy.
It was good luck to peel the label off a beer bottle in one piece. What had they done, then?
They were both laughing as the door to the balcony clicked shut behind them and he pressed her up against it.
“You’ve got a good arm, Wexler.”
She delicately stepped on the top of his foot, black heel tapping just so, and pulled him flush to her, nails scraping up his back; he was getting hard already. You’d want him in the foxhole with you, shoot first and ask questions later.
He took her head in his hands and kissed her eyelids, her jaw, her hairline, her cheeks. So gentle she could cry. You know me, she thought, but didn’t say it because she didn’t want to break the spell as he silently rocked his hips into her, over and over, god, Jimmy. She pulled her skirt up so she could get his thigh between her legs, right where she needed it to be, his jeans adding just the right amount of friction.
He was usually talkative, telling her exactly what he was thinking, what he was doing, how he couldn’t believe his luck, yes, right there, would you, yes, I was thinking about this today, in court, I couldn’t concentrate, yes, I’m gonna, are you, oh Kim-Kimmy-baby-yes-please-oh-Kim... But tonight—
They’d tried telepathy once while watching Svengali. He’d claimed to know exactly what she was thinking. Maybe he’d been right.
He kissed one corner of her mouth, the other, then nipped at her bottom lip before kissing her deeply, his tongue hot.
She pushed him lightly, pulling his shirt over his head, walking him backwards over to the couch. She was straddling him, shedding her jacket, her bright blue blouse, her bra. Skirt still up around her hips so she could press down onto his stomach. His hands sliding up to hold her breasts, thumbs brushing, while he stared at her face the whole time.
She didn’t know what she wanted, she wanted everything, all at once, right now; she wanted him to lay her down and eat her out, make her come over and over and over with his mouth and his hands, kneeling on the carpet next to her, knocking the coffee table away, sweaty and desperate, one hand on her stomach, holding her down, be patient, baby; she wanted to shove him back and suck his cock, god the feel of it in her mouth, her hand firm at the base, the slight softness of his stomach on her cheek, his hand tugging her hair, riding his leg; she wanted to curl up beside him, clinging like a fern, and sleep. She wanted them be so close to each other that you didn’t know where they ended and began. Wanted him to be inside of her, what a thing, the first people in the history of the world to figure it out, to figure out that you could do this, that you could be inside another person. Yes, yes, that’s what she wanted.
“C’mere.” He said it so soft she could’ve imagined it. He helped her down next to him, facing him. They kissed for what felt like hours.
He unzipped her skirt. When she started to hurry, he rubbed her back, hey. She toed her heels off and they dropped to the floor. He started to unbutton his jeans and she took over for him, standing up to peel them down his legs, shimmy his boxers off. She reached down and yanked one sock off and then—
“You want me to lose the socks? I don’t know, I think I look good.” He stretched out like a centerfold, hands over his head, totally naked except for the one white sock on his left foot.
She laughed and took her underwear off and lay back down with him, giving his dick a couple of strokes as she did. Then she hooked her leg over his hip so they could look at each other while they fucked. So they could talk a little. It was so sweet when it was like this.
“Very alluring, right?” he said as he nudged forward, tilting her a little to get leverage. He groaned a little in an undignified but extremely sexy way. She would have done literally anything he’d asked of her just then.
“Jimmy,” she said, rubbing her nose against his.
“That’s me.”
///
“You want to talk about it?”
She was resting on his chest, tracing his name with her finger, as if she were placing a protective spell on him. Please stay Jimmy. JMM, she wrote. JMM.
“I’d like to get a little drunk, actually,” she said. “Just a little.” She held her thumb and forefinger an inch apart.
“I think we can arrange that.”
///
“He thought I was the same as them.”
“Well, he was wrong.”
“Was he, though? Because we’re all out there trying to do the same thing.”
“If you weren’t doing it, someone else would be.”
“That’s a terrible argument.”
“Oh, I know.”
“It’s not fair, Jimmy.”
Life isn’t fair, her mom loved to say. It was true, of course, but the way she said it—like she’d had Kim specifically to impress this upon her. Like she brought a new life into the world in order to tell her that she should expect absolutely nothing. Her one joy was telling Kim how shitty life would be. Put it on the family crest.
She had hoped to tilt the balance. A little. She knew that it wasn’t something that could be truly fixed, maybe ever, but if she could place even a few grains of sand on the good side, on the side of righteousness, fairness, then wouldn’t that be something?
“It’s not. It’s definitely not fair.”
“Maybe Acker was right. About me.”
“You weren’t lying. You weren’t trying to play him.”
“Maybe it would’ve been better if I were. Wouldn’t it have been better to be ginning up sympathy with some sad, fake story than to be using something real?”
The only person she’d ever told before this was Jimmy. Ever! And she’d coughed it up like it was nothing out there, telling this stranger about running out onto the cold concrete in her bare feet and Holly Hobbie nightgown, secondhand winter coat on top. Her mom throwing garbage bags filled with everything she could grab into the backseat of the car next to Kim. All because Rich and Kevin had told her to drive to Tucumcari and fix things.
“Do you think he should take the deal?”
“I think—We never got a deal, you know? Nobody ever offered my mom $18,000 to leave. And I think he thought I was trying to make a connection, like I wanted him to say, oh, it’s not so bad, this lawyer’s been through it too, I should just be a trouper, and maybe I was, but I think I was mad, too, you know? Like…how dare he turn that down? He has people driving all the way the hell out there, over and over, begging and pleading, offering him cash. Do you know what we could’ve done with $18,000? Well, I mean, I know what she would’ve done with it, but you know what I mean. He’d owned a house for 30 years.”
“A pretty good run.”
“Do we own a house? No. Do we have $18,000? No.”
“Hey. We’ll get a house.” He tightened his arm around her, pulling her closer. His imagination had stopped just short of $8k when he told Lalo what his new rate was.
“Tell me what it’ll look like.” She took a long pull from her beer. When she tried to set it down, it fell over and spilled onto the carpet. Oh, well. She’d get another. Who cares.
///
They took a shower because she still felt dusty. He tasted it on the back of her neck.
He was washing her hair, fingers making lazy circles across her head. It felt insanely good, like her scalp was floating away from her body.
“You’re so nice,” she said, reaching back to pat his head. She’d opened a bottle of red when the beers ran out. They’d had a brief debate over whether wine counted as liquor in the old rhyme, but that was a problem for their tomorrow selves.
Having a broken arm had been hell. Until then their joint showers had been purely focused on pleasure. But she had to admit, if only to herself, that she liked it when he washed her hair. He got pretty good at drying her hair, too, pulling it back neatly in a clip. He knew not to acknowledge what he was doing, continuing their conversation as he wrapped a plastic takeout bag around her cast, THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU in red letters down the front. She’d never been to therapy but she knew that they’d probably tell her that it was all because no one had taken care of her as a kid. But so what? What was she supposed to do with that now?
People didn’t understand him. How could they not understand him? He was nice, she really meant it. He was the nicest person she knew, the nicest person she’d ever met, the only person that mattered. The funniest person in the world. A misunderstood genius. If other people were sparklers, he was a box of fireworks you had to drive to the next state to get. How did the rest of them not see that?
She had shown great restraint in not killing Ericsen with her bare hands when she called Jimmy a scumbag. You don’t know the whole story, she’d said instead and went to commit a little light mail fraud.
Chuck had Jimmy in a vise his entire life and Jimmy just took it. Again and again. Chuck thought Kim was like him. “You’re great at fitting in,” Jimmy had once said. “Take it as a compliment. I wish I could do that.” But all she felt was shame, trying to be something she wasn’t in her sleek black suits. They know. Growing up, her biggest fear was being found out. But it turned out it felt even worse to pull it off, to have someone like Chuck tell her “I think you have a bright future at HHM. You remind me a little of myself, I have to say.”
Howard, you almost (but only almost) had to feel bad for—terrified of being seen as a dilettante, a poor little rich boy playing pretend. Veal soft. Still— I’ll kill you, she thought, sending the arrow directly at his chest every time he had called Jimmy “Charlie Hustle,” his condescending little pat on the head.
Any time she’d done something bad, no one could believe it. The perfect alibi. He’d taken the fall for things he didn’t do all his life because he no one could believe he wouldn’t have.
///
“No more after this,” she said, reaching for the glass, downing half of it. “Court in the morning. And then I have to figure out how to…fix everything.”
“Piece of cake.” He had total faith that she’d be struck with inspiration, but what good was inspiration if your work of art was a Mesa Verde call center?
They were sitting on a towel on the bathroom floor, still naked and pink from the hot water, the hotter the better. Jimmy was painting her nails, for old times’ sake, her foot propped up on his knee. She held their cigarette to his lips so he could take a drag while he worked.
“You haven’t gotten any better at this.”
“You gotta let me practice more."
“I’m glad you don’t live in a nail salon anymore,” she said, reaching out to flip his damp hair back and forth, over to the right and then back to the left. “I’m glad you live here.”
He looked up at her, tongue at the corner of his mouth in concentration. “Too late to change your mind now.”
///
They left Chuck and Rebecca’s house cordially, after dessert and coffee.
Later. At Jimmy’s studio apartment, lying at opposite ends of his thrift store couch, feet in the middle, lit only by the lava lamp he’d had since high school and the TV almost on mute, playing late night infomercials.
“Their house is beautiful.”
“Oh, is it? Hadn’t noticed.”
“What would you put in all those rooms, though?”
“I’ll never be done repaying him,” Jimmy said, and it meant, she knew, that Chuck would never accept any amount of repayment. It would always require more-more-more. Jimmy could place it reverently in his hand, gold coins, and he’d toss it away and ask for more. Even these occasional dinners were a way of getting him to genuflect.
If you save someone but you never want them to change, what kind of savior are you?
“Well, whatever. Dinner was good, huh? How ‘bout that chicken?”
He put the crook of his elbow over his eyes.
“Yeah. Jimmy—”
“It’s fine. I’m fine.”
She chewed the side of her thumb, watching him.
“Jimmy. Hey.” She nudged him with her foot. “Ask me about my childhood.”
“Do what?”
“Come on. This is a limited time offer.”
He propped himself up on his elbow, unsure of where this was going.
“So hey, Kim. Where’d you grow up? What was it like?” The first time he met her he knew she would take her time unfolding. Some people thought she was cold, she said, which seemed impossible to him. She was like an orchid, warm and strange and requiring a deft touch. He was willing to apply himself.
He wished he were mysterious, the strong and silent type, but he unfortunately could not shut the fuck up and found himself telling her about Chuck the second time they hung out, how when they’d arrived back in Albuquerque, he wouldn’t let Jimmy crash at his place. What would you put in all those rooms. Instead, Chuck fronted him two weeks of pay (a loan, repayable with interest) so he could get a hotel until he found an apartment.
“I bet you drove all those Nebraska boys crazy, huh?” He felt a twinge of jealousy when he said it, thinking about some corn-fed dumbasses in football jackets, which he recognized made absolutely no sense because for one, he was the one here in the dark of his apartment with her right now and two, they hadn’t even kissed yet, but he was pretty sure he was going to end up doing increasingly stupid things until that particular pressure was relieved.
“So, my dad. I think he’s probably dead now. I don’t know for sure but I’d put money on it. Which would be a fitting tribute. By the time I was six, I knew that I shouldn’t get my hopes up when he said he’d be there. I, uh, I guess sometimes I try to have a little sympathy for my mom, but it’s hard, you know? I know her life wasn’t easy. But she made it harder. And she made everyone else’s life around her harder, too. Mostly we lived in apartments. A motel here or there. The really good ones had two bedrooms. The bad ones I slept on the couch and we kept a chair shoved under the doorknob. Rent was late, every month. She’d say it would never happen again, every month. We’d skip out in the middle of the night so we wouldn’t get evicted. One time we did get evicted and one of the deputies who came, he had a daughter in my class. Well. You know. My mom wished she’d never gotten pregnant, which was sort of fair enough, because she wasn’t a good mom. Maybe there’s no such thing, I don’t know. But when I was a kid it seemed like there was. Sometimes she was drunk and sometimes she was depressed. She’d stay in bed all day. She’d fall asleep and I’d tip toe in and take her cigarette and put it out. I had to be so quiet because she’d get so mad if she was still awake.”
She’d started doing it after she saw a burn that went all the way down to the mattress. Around seventh grade, she started taking a drag or two before stubbing it out in an ashtray. She looked at herself in the bathroom mirror, holding it like a middle school Barbara Stanwyck, tilting her head as she exhaled. She wished she didn’t look so much like her mom.
“All I wanted to do was figure out how to fix her. If I could figure out the right thing to do or say to make her happy, then—I don’t know. I don’t know what I thought would happen. I thought it would be different. It was a losing game but I didn’t know that then. So I just kept at it. I just didn’t want it to feel like that anymore. Did you ever read The Boxcar Children when you were a kid?”
“Yeah. They kept their milk in a cold stream. That always stuck with me for some reason.” His voice cracked a little as he tried to keep it light and even. They talked constantly but he’d never heard her say this much in one go.
“I don’t know, it’s stupid, but I’d read things like that and I’d think, maybe I could just run away. Figure it out on my own.”
“Live in a boxcar.”
“It didn’t seem any worse, I guess.”
“Kim. Hey.”
“I don’t—I never tell people any of this.” She was staring at the popcorn ceiling. He rubbed the bottom of his foot across her ankle. “There’s more,” she said. “But I’ll tell you another time.”