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The fish tank bubbles quietly, burbling through the silence of the apartment. The fat orange fish inside swims aimlessly from one end of his tank to the other, over and over. There is no rhyme or reason to his movements, but the fish doesn’t know this. The fish is simply a fish.
Kim watches the fish go by with tired eyes and wishes she could be him; no rhyme or reason to her movements, and she doesn’t know it. She’s simply a lawyer.
“Kim?”
She turns abruptly in her seat, and the fish darts away from her and bonks into the opposite wall of the tank. “Hey.”
Jimmy rubs a hand across his face and crosses the room carefully as he approaches the wary animal that is Kim Wexler. “What are you doing up? It’s…” he checks the clock on the wall, “three in the morning.” He pulls up a seat next to her and sets himself easily against her side, right where he belongs. “You know what I told you about thinking too much.”
“Yeah.” A pack of cigarettes fumbles away from Kim’s hand once, twice, before she grabs it and pulls it to her chest. The box is about empty, save for three sticks that rattle sadly against each other when they move. She slips one out and waves it in Jimmy’s face. He smiles, lighter already in hand.
The balcony provides Kim with a gentle breeze from the sky—the type that makes her white-knuckled grip on Jimmy’s warmth burrow deeper in her chest when his shoulder clips hers. The lighter fails to start a few times, stinging the tip of her thumb, before it catches with a chink. The end of the cigarette tips into the tiny flame and billows up, up into the sky between Kim’s face and Jimmy’s.
“I told Acker about my mom,” Kim says. Jimmy looks soulfully at her with that gaze he reserves only for moments like this, and it makes her heart pull. “I don’t know what I was thinking. He didn’t take it, obviously…”
“Obviously,” Jimmy echoes softly with a shrug of his shoulder.
“But I don’t think that was even the worst part.”
Jimmy slides the cigarette from her fingers into his and takes a short huff. “No?”
Kim looks over the edge and her mind brings her back to precariously hung beer bottles and glass smashing. She doesn’t get much sleep anymore, she thinks. “He thought I was lying. Thought I was telling some sob story to make him move.” Kim leans over Jimmy’s shoulder, where he quietly allows her a hit from the cigarette. She blows the smoke out through her nose, feeling much like a tired old dragon. “I don’t know what else he wants from me. I guess… I thought he would understand that I was trying to understand.”
“Well, you can’t please everybody,” Jimmy tells her kindly, “and I get it. Trying to please people. Chuck was the same way.” He turns his eyes towards the stars, eyes twinkling in the dim light. “I mean, God forbid I ever mentioned Mom in front of him after she died. He’d get all ‘Jimmy, being stuck on the past won’t change how you act in the present!’” He waves his hands in a facsimile of his brother’s mannerisms, the orange light of the cigarette panning across his features. He settles, arms crossed over each other on the railing. “People like that, they don’t believe in change.”
Kim sneaks her hand over his and takes the stick for herself, recapturing the end in a flame and taking a long whiff. “I guess.” She coughs when the cigarette goes down the wrong pipe. “I just… I thought acting differently would get his attention. Whenever I wanted my mom to notice me, I’d… act out. I hated it, but it worked.” She takes another hit from the cigarette, cancer burning in her teeth. “I was always praised for bad behavior, because bad behavior worked. Not that talking to him like that was… I’m saying I failed, Jimmy.”
Somehow, the equal and opposite hold Jimmy has on her own feelings tightens in response. “You… you didn’t fail, Kim. You don’t fail.” He chuckles. “Why do you think I’m here with you?”
She shakes her head. “I mean… I started yelling at him before that. Bad. And it didn’t work. It failed to get the attention I wanted. The whole backstory thing was sort of a last resort.” She takes one last biting gasp of the cigarette and pushes the smoke between her teeth. “Maybe I should’ve said something about my dad.”
“What, the runaway?” Jimmy begs her pardon, before reaching down to the two half-empty beer bottles from the other night. He holds them up, clinking them together. “I think the mom thing is sadder. Tugs on the heartstrings.”
The beer audibly swishes down the gullet of the bottle when Jimmy takes a hefty swig of one of them. His throat bobs in desperate gulps before he chucks it off the balcony. It shatters against the ground and glass spills across the concrete. Jimmy doesn’t flinch. Kim takes the second bottle for herself.
“Yeah, I guess so.” She takes a tentative sip of the alcohol before swapping the lip of the bottle with the end of the cigarette.
The light becomes a fire behind Jimmy’s eyes. “What if your dad ran away and became my dad?” he asks, taking her bottle and throwing it as hard as he can in a different direction.
“Eugh, Jimmy,” Kim scolds, “don’t make it weird.”
Through the smokescreen at the end of her cigarette light, Jimmy laughs. It’s the one moment Kim has where she thinks she can see Saul Goodman fully slipping quietly away from the forefront of his mind. “I’m just being hard on you,” he teases.
They both calm in the quiet of the moment. “I don’t know why they’re trying so hard. They have two good lots in Tucumcari and they’re specifically choosing the one with liver spots and wrinkles.”
At this, Jimmy offers her a smile. “You know bankers,” he tells her. “They always have a cash-grabbing stick up their ass.”
Kim laughs. “Not even Chuck liked them.”
“No!” Jimmy bursts out. “Even he knew they were the worst. God, Mesa Verde is just…”
“So awful,” Kim finishes. She bumps Jimmy’s shoulder, smiling. “But it’s not a bad payout.”
“It better not be,” Jimmy responds, “because with what you’re doing for them, they should be rubbing your feet and feeding you grapes. You’re like goddamn… Mesa royalty. Mesa Morado.”
The cigarette goes out and the soft orange glow keeping them company disappears. Kim taps the stick against the railing before tossing it. It lands somewhere behind the neighbor’s car. “We have grapes inside,” she tells him, “why don’t you give me a little rehearsal?”
“Deal,” Jimmy replies quickly, holding out a hand, “if I can pick the TV show.”
Kim looks at him, at only Jimmy McGill, and smiles when she takes his hand. “Deal.”