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Over the next week, Jimmy finds himself thinking back to that night outside the Dog House more and more often. It’s strange to recall the loose-haired, jeans-wearing Kim when the one he meets at Hamlin, Hamlin and McGill sports increasingly darker bags beneath her eyes and moves with such a taut, frayed energy that his own muscles clench. Things are different from before midterms, because at least now she’s not completely withdrawing from Jimmy, but stress in Kim’s life strikes him as something a bit like the phases of the moon—and now, waxing, finals loom.
So when Jimmy arrives in the breakroom on Friday morning and finds Kim in her usual spot with her back to the door, he’s worried but not surprised by the shift in her demeanour. She’s clicking a pen furiously, her shoulders wound so tight they might as well be humming, and he can almost hear her teeth grinding from the doorway.
“Kim,” he says as he approaches, and he rests a hand on her shoulder.
She starts, twisting back to face him.
Jimmy leaves his hand where it is for a moment, and then he gives her a shoulder a squeeze and releases it. “Everything okay?” he asks.
Kim just keeps clicking her pen and slowly shakes her head.
He pulls out a chair and turns it so it’s facing her and sits, palms on his knees. “Can I help?” he asks. “What can I do?”
“Nothing,” Kim replies lowly. She sighs. “Unless you have a copy of Hubert’s Tort Law, Policies, and Practice.” At Jimmy’s grimace, she drops her head into her hands and groans. Her voice comes out muffled from behind her fingers: “Fuck law students.”
Jimmy chuckles at the sudden vitriol. “Not saying I don’t agree, but any particular reason?”
Kim lowers her hands and looks at him, bleary eyed. “Just hating myself for trying to skimp on course materials.”
“What about the HHM library?” Jimmy asks. Although he wouldn’t have the first clue how to begin, he adds, “Want me to go check for that Hubert whatever?”
“No point, it’s not there,” Kim says. “And the college bookshop has run out, and I can’t find anybody to sell me their used one, and the only copy in the college library is overdue by a month now so I’m pretty sure that asshole has just decided to keep it!” She lets out a huff of breath. “I hope they choke on it.”
“Damn,” Jimmy says. He taps his palms on his knees. Rubs them back and forth over the cheap blended fabric as the clicking of Kim’s pen resumes, syncopated and arrhythmic. Jimmy frowns. “I could ask if Chuck has a copy?”
Kim glances up at him.
“His house is full of the moldy old things,” Jimmy says with a shrug.
“Would you?”
“Yeah, ‘course!” Jimmy says, clapping his hands together. He pushes his chair back and stands, then pauses. “But write it down? I’ll never remember otherwise.”
She scratches the name on the bottom of her legal pad. “Tell him I’ll return it by Monday. And that any edition is fine. I’ve made notes from other relevant books but they all constantly cite back to the Hubert and I just really don’t want to miss something.” With the last, Kim tears off the bottom of the notepad and hands it out to him.
Jimmy takes the piece of paper from her, glances at it, then tucks it into his pocket. “I’ll go check now, he might already be in his office!” He meets her gaze and smiles, then glances down at her hands. “But maybe let go of that pen before you sprain a muscle,” he adds lightly.
Kim uncurls her grip on her pen with visible effort, staring at her hand as if it were a stranger’s.
“Hey, Kim?” Jimmy says, and he waits for her to look up before adding, “I’m on it.” He winks at her, then ducks out the door.
Burt is arriving just as Jimmy gets to the line of elevators, so Jimmy rushes to catch his one before it leaves—brushing past the younger man and slipping an outstretched arm between the doors. They bounce back open and Jimmy hurries into the cabin.
“Jimmy?” Burt asks from the lobby, bewildered.
“I’ll see ya soon, Burt!” Jimmy calls as the doors shut between them. As the floor display ticks upwards, he runs his hand over his mouth, pinching his bottom lip between his thumb and forefinger.
Then the number finally shifts to a three, and the elevator doors open with their usual musical trill. The cubicles here are still mostly empty, and most of the lights are switched off. As Jimmy walks down the hallway, he nods hello to the few associates who are sitting, bleary-eyed, over their morning coffees.
He shoves one hand into his pocket, crossing his fingers over each other.
And, miraculously, the door to Chuck’s office is half open, a soft orange light spilling from within.
Jimmy grins, striding over to it and rapping on it once with the back of his knuckles. “Chuck?” he calls out, and he starts to push the door inwards. “Mind if I—”
Chuck looks up at him from a chair by the window. Beside him is another man, old and unfamiliar, who blinks at Jimmy inquiringly. “Jimmy?” Chuck prompts.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt—” Jimmy says.
“Is this the famous James?” the old man says. He rises to his feet and steps closer, leaning on a cane and studying Jimmy with twinkling eyes.
Chuck stands now, too, like he’s operating on a slight delay. “Of course. This is my brother, Jimmy. Jimmy, this is Mr. Hamlin.”
“George, please,” George Hamlin says, and he closes the remaining distance between them and offers his hand. Jimmy shakes it; George’s grip is firm, papery. “You prefer to go by Jimmy?”
Jimmy nods once.
“Jimmy it is, then,” George says. He has a jowly, distinguished look, his face aged with deep lines. He looks, Jimmy thinks, like William Holden in Network—he has that kind of old-fashioned handsomeness, like you can see the sun on his skin, the years of cigarette smoke. His eyes are piercing, almost winking. They seem to shine with weathered idealism—and Jimmy remembers that this is the man who started a law firm all on his own, who was stuck in a tiny two-room office until the mythical Charles McGill came along and built the Hamlindigo-blue towers of HHM.
“George has just returned from medical leave,” Chuck says solemnly.
“And fitter than ever,” George Hamlin adds, tapping his cane on the ground. “I think I’ll get the other hip replaced next year, just for fun.”
Chuck gives a polite tinkle of laughter.
“Glad to hear you’re doing well,” Jimmy says, a bit stiffly. The next words come out just as awkwardly: “It’s nice to finally put a face to the name.”
“I might well say the same,” George says, inclining his head. “We’re delighted to have you. One of the shortest partner meetings in recent memory, I believe! In fact, I think Chuck here was the only one to voice any misgivings—always scrupulously fair, this one.” He pats Chuck on the elbow.
Chuck gives another small laugh at this, and then he frowns. “Did you want something, Jimmy?”
“Oh, yeah!” Jimmy says, nodding. He withdraws the piece of paper from his pocket, unfolds it, then hands it over to Chuck. “Do you have this book?”
Chuck’s brows pinch together as his eyes scan the paper. “Tort Law, Policies, and…Jimmy…” His voice trails off and his face visibly pales, then he looks up from the note. “Jimmy, what have you done?”
“What?” Jimmy blinks.
Chuck takes a step towards him, angling his body to exclude George Hamlin, to trap Jimmy in a one-on-one conversation. His voice, when it comes, is low and intense: “We made an agreement when I hired you, remember?”
It seems suddenly as if the walls of the office are growing, swelling outwards. Jimmy opens his mouth and, hopelessly, just repeats, “What?”
Chuck steps closer, moving in with the crushing walls. “Tell me why you need this book.”
“I don’t need it,” Jimmy says, and then at Chuck’s displeased expression he quickly clarifies, “I mean, I don’t. Kim does.”
“Pardon?” Chuck says.
“Kim needs it,” Jimmy repeats.
Chuck exhales. “Ah,” he says, voice returning to his normal tenor. “Ah, of course. Your friend Kim.”
“Yeah. She’s studying for finals,” Jimmy adds.
Chuck scans the paper again as if seeing it anew, then looks back it Jimmy. “Can’t she check this out from the university library?”
“Somebody already has the only copy,” Jimmy says. “They won’t return it.”
“Ah,” Chuck says, again.
“Hey, if you don’t have it, that’s fine,” Jimmy says, and he inches back towards the door. “I thought you might keep one hanging around.”
“Kim…Wexler, is this?” George says, and Chuck starts a little, as if he had forgotten the older man was there. George reaches out for the piece of paper, taking it gently from Chuck. He glances at it for a moment then returns to Jimmy. “I’m afraid I don’t have that exact title. Hubert was always a little…overwritten for my tastes. Chuck?”
Chuck shakes his head. “It’s possible I have an old edition tucked away in my attic, but I wouldn’t even know where to begin looking, Jimmy. Maybe Ms. Wexler can find another student to lend her their copy?”
“Yeah,” Jimmy says. He creases the paper sharply and looks down at it, then shoves it deep into his pants pocket. “Yeah, maybe.”
“Thankfully I’m sure Ms. Wexler’s finals won’t live or die based on Hubert, the old fart,” George says, smiling softly. “But tell Kim to stop by my office some time, would you, Jimmy? I had a good feeling about that one when I picked her for the program, and so far she’s exceeded every expectation.”
Jimmy smiles. “Sure, I’ll let her know,” he says. He nods to George Hamlin, who’s leaning heavily on his cane and watching Jimmy with bright, sharp eyes. And he murmurs a goodbye to Chuck, who still looks rattled, and Jimmy’s really going to need to ask Kim what the hell a fucking tort is—because, whatever it is, it brought back into his brother’s eyes a severity he hadn’t seen since Cicero.
Outside the office, he stares out the tall windows of the corridor for a minute, taking in the vast Albuquerque sky and breathing slowly, hand on his stomach.
Everybody is just starting to get to work when Jimmy returns to the mailroom, and he catches Kim’s eye over the sea of binders and papers and solemnly shakes his head. He can see the way her shoulders slump from here.
“Late, McGill?” Ron asks, wiping at his perpetually hay-fevered nose with his handkerchief.
“Bathroom,” Jimmy says, and he makes a little pained expression.
Ron scowls.
“My stuff’s already in the breakroom,” Jimmy adds, gesturing to his locker. “Look, see? There’s my jacket.”
“All right, then,” Ron says, and he moves down to the morning’s mail and starts sorting through it with the methodical swiftness of a man who’s been doing the same job for forty years. The Elder Hamlin’s man, Henry had said of Ron, and now that Jimmy’s met George, he couldn’t imagine a stranger pairing.
Jimmy wanders over to join Kim in the back corner, taking a handful of photocopied sheets from her and silently sorting them at her side, shuffling the papers with a gentle shifting noise, like sand.
Kim accepts the collated pages when Jimmy hands them to her, and she slips them bunch by bunch into the jaws of a waiting stapler, slamming her palm down on the top of it with each bundle. Slam. Slam. Slam.
“Hey,” Jimmy says, holding his hand out and hovering it above her own for a moment. He offers her a little smile and pulls his hand back. He tilts his head. “Whose face are you imagining?”
“No one's face,” Kim says grimly. She slams her palm down again. “Everyone’s face.”
He grimaces.
Slam.
“Ouch,” Jimmy whispers. He watches as she exhales slowly and runs a hand down her face, visibly exhausted. “I'm sorry about the book,” he murmurs, sliding the folded scrap with the title on it back to her, and then he stares down at the mess of documents before him.
He hears rather than sees Kim shrug. “Thanks for trying, anyway,” she says.
“You’re welcome,” Jimmy says softly. He works for a little, and then stills. “Hey,” he says, turning to look at Kim again, “you’ll never believe who I met, though. George Hamlin!”
Kim raises her eyebrow. “He’s back?”
“Yeah, he was in Chuck’s office. He’s not what I expected. Oh, and hey”—he taps Kim on the arm with the back of his hand—“before I forget, he asked you to stop by and see him some time.”
“Really?” Kim asks.
“Mhm,” Jimmy says. He catches Ron looking over at them and refocuses his attention on the documents before him. “Knew your name. Said you…what was it? Exceeded his expectations.” He shoots Kim a sly grin.
Kim looks down at her hands, smile ghosting her lips. “He really champions the college scholarship program here, so he gave me my first interview. We talked about, oh…baseball, of all things.”
“The crack of the bat,” Jimmy says dramatically.
Kim gives a snorting little half laugh.
“The…smell of the turf,” he tries.
“Yikes,” Kim says, flicking him a smile. “Stick with movie talk.”
Jimmy looks at her sideways. “That obvious, huh?”
“Oh yeah,” Kim drawls. She staples another bundle of papers, pressing her palm down precisely.
Jimmy studies her. Her brows are drawn together, the crease between them painfully deep, and her eyes are rimmed with the redness of late nights and early mornings. She holds out her hand for another set of documents, and he fumbles to quickly hand them to her. Kim murmurs a thanks, and Jimmy nods, and then returns to the piles before him. The two settle into a rhythm, moving fluidly together.
“Actually,” Jimmy says after a few minutes, looking around the table then up at Kim, “Do you still have that paper with the book title?”
Kim reaches over and picks it up from beside the growing stack of completed documents. She hands it back over to him, eyebrows lifting in the unspoken question.
“You’ll see,” Jimmy says, and he tucks the paper into the front pocket of his shirt then pats it once. Safe and sound.
“Can I help you with anything?” the shop-owner, an old woman wearing a pair of glasses round her neck on a chain, asks.
“Uh, I’m good,” Jimmy says, looking back down at the rack of clothes before him. He rifles through, the hangers jangling on the metal. A shirt catches his eye and he peers at it: Nirvana, Sliver. Nah, not quite. “Just browsing,” Jimmy adds, returning his gaze to the shop-owner.
“Okay. Let me know if you change your mind,” the woman says, and she wanders back to her little desk near the back of the thrift store.
Jimmy rifles through the shirts again, humming buoyantly to himself. It’s Saturday morning, and he feels light on his feet, ready for anything. He lingers over some vibrantly-patterned pieces, running his fingers down the silk, plucking out a sleeve here and there to peer closer at, before moving on. Finally, he arrives at a checkered shirt: red and short sleeved, and exactly the right amount of ugly.
He hangs on to it as he keeps looking, sliding past corduroy jackets and black turtlenecks until—a bit ratty, slightly off white, with purple lettering, there it is.
Chevy Chase is… Fletch, the t-shirt proclaims.
“Bingo,” Jimmy murmurs, and he carries the two items to the back of the store.
The old woman looks up at him over the top of her glasses.
“How much for these?” he asks, laying the checkered shirt and the Fletch tee over the counter.
She frowns, pulling the paper tags out and examining them. “Ten for the button up, five for the t-shirt.”
Jimmy’s eyes fall on a rack of glasses to the left of the counter and he spins it, then lifts off a thick-rimmed pair and tries them on. Everything is a bit sharper than usual, but it’s not too headache-inducing. He slips them off and lays them on top of the shirts. “Twenty bucks for the lot?”
The woman agrees, and Jimmy hands over the cash then takes his purchases back to the changing room.
He swaps out his own shirt for the Fletch tee and layers over the checkered shirt, buttoning it up halfway and tucking it into his jeans. The sleeves of the Fletch shirt stick out beneath the sleeves of the button up, and Jimmy fiddles with them for a little bit then leaves them as they are. He musses his bangs a little, then unfolds the glasses and puts them on.
Perfect.
The law library on the UNM campus is an unambitious kind of building, set against the rest of the law buildings and boasting the same square architectural style as most of the city. Jimmy pushes his glasses up his nose and steps through the doors, taking in the tall shelves crammed with the same kind of dully academic-looking texts that populate Chuck’s house.
There’s a help desk near the entrance, and Jimmy approaches it. “Uh, hi,” he says, reaching the counter and tapping his palms on it alternately, one-two-three. “Hello, I’m hoping you can help me.”
“Yeah?” the guy behind the counter says dully. Drew, his name-tag reads, pinned lopsidedly on his loose flannel shirt.
“Yeah,” Jimmy repeats. He affects a troubled sigh and taps his hand on the counter again nervously. “Could you find a book for me? I’ve looked on the shelves, but…”
“Name?” Drew prompts.
Jimmy imagines howling to the moon. “Saul Goodman.”
Drew sighs. He raises his eyebrows. “Name of the book?”
“Oh, right,” Jimmy says, and he pulls the paper from his pocket. He reads out the title, and Drew types it into a glowing green field on his computer screen, then hits a key forcefully.
“Arnold Hubert?” Drew asks, tossing his hair out of his eyes.
“Yeah, that’s the one,” Jimmy says, pushing his glasses back up his nose. “Old Hubert. But, like I said, it’s not on the shelf.”
Drew slides his chair down the length of the desk and rifles through a box of rectangular cards, flicking quickly through a couple and then shifting to a different box marked, Overdue. He pulls a card out and scans it, then slides back down to Jimmy. “It’s overdue,” he says blandly. “I can put your name on the wait list.”
“No, no, that’s okay,” Jimmy says quickly. “It’ll be someone from my class. Finals, right?” He laughs and adjusts his glasses again. “We’re like a bunch of wolves. It’s not Barry, is it?”
Drew looks at him expressionlessly. “I can’t tell you who checked out the book.”
“No, of course not,” Jimmy says. “Only—I just need to quickly find a couple of…uh, facts and figures, you know? So if I knew who had it, I could swing by their dorm and look up that stuff. Then you wouldn’t have to bother with the whole wait list thing.”
“I thought you didn’t want me to put you on the wait list.”
“Right!” Jimmy says. “Right, exactly. I mean, how many schmucks are on there already?”
Drew closes his eyes briefly, then slides his chair to another part of the desk and rifles through a different box. “Hubert, Tort Law? Three people.”
“So it’d be weeks before my turn, right?” Jimmy says. “I’ll be lying on a beach drinking margaritas by then.”
Drew shoots him the driest look yet.
“Okay, whatever, maybe not,” Jimmy says, holding up his palms. “But listen, this asshole is obviously just gonna return it after finals and lump the fine, right? You cool with that?” He gestures around them. “Whatever happened to freedom of information?”
“I can’t control people’s stupidity,” Drew says.
“Sure, that’s true,” Jimmy says. He breathes in, feeling a kind of crisp clarity, like a hit of oxygen, and he moves his hands before him, flowing. “And people are pretty damn dumb, I’ll give you that. Doing what the man says, day in, day out, following their stupid little rules.” He stops moving suddenly and clicks his fingers. “Hey! Just like you!”
Drew sneers at him. “What?”
“Yeah, with your cards over there. The suits in charge want you to sit behind this desk for what, five, six bucks an hour, and make sure the little guy can’t fight back against dumb idiots like this asshole who’s”—Jimmy leans closer over the desk—“who’s fuckin’ monopolizing the one book we need to pass our finals and graduate the hell out of here.” Jimmy frowns, then delivers the closing shot in a low voice, tête-à-tête: “That’s not right, dude.”
Drew stares at him for a moment, then groans and flicks his hair back from his eyes again. “Ugh, whatever, man. Here,” he says, and he passes over the card.
Jimmy plucks it out of his hand and scans it quickly. There’s a long list, two columns, due dates and names—and there, at the bottom: MAR. 27 ‘92, Brad Colhoun. Jimmy grins, and he gestures to Drew for a pen, who hands one over peevishly. Jimmy scribbles Brad Colhoun’s name on the back of the torn notepaper from Kim, then tucks it back in his pocket and slides Drew back his pen.
“Thanks,” Jimmy says, tapping the counter one last time and moving away.
Drew just groans.
“Oh, hey—” Jimmy pauses and turns back, waiting for Drew to look up before continuing: “Is there a payphone nearby?”
Jimmy sighs. The pizza box in his hand is cold, and the bottom is starting to get a little damp, soggy from the grease. He balances it on his left palm and pushes his glasses back up his nose, then steps through the front door of the dorm block. There’s a common area immediately to the left, thankfully, and this one is nicely populated too—students watching TV and playing cards.
“Hey, you guys seen Brad?” Jimmy calls, ducking in.
One girl looks up vaguely from the Game Boy in her hands. “Who?”
“Brad,” Jimmy repeats. “Law school. Second year.”
The girl scrunches up her face.
“We’re studying together. I brought a, well…” Jimmy gestures with the pizza. “Pepperoni and mushrooms. Half olives. The olives are for me.”
“Okay,” the girl says, and she goes back to her Game Boy.
Jimmy’s already dreading the long walk to the next block of dorms indicated on the campus map scrunched in his back pocket, but he tries one more time. “Brad Colhoun?”
“Oh, Colhoun?” one of the guys says.
“Yeah!” Jimmy says. “He in his room?”
“Man, don’t let him hear you call him Brad,” the guy says, and he frowns at Jimmy. “You’re studying with him?”
Jimmy affects a little grimace. “It’s uh…tutoring stuff,” he says, wondering if Brad’s the type of guy to do the tutoring or to be tutored.
He finds out soon enough, when the Game Boy girl says, “Woof, good luck.”
“Thanks,” Jimmy says. “Anyway, hey, I haven’t been in this building before. How do I get to his room?”
“He’s on four,” the guy says. “Right next to the men’s.”
The girl chokes out a laugh.
“Thanks!” Jimmy says, and he swings away, still balancing the pizza on his hand. He can’t find any elevators, so he takes the stairs, and he’s breathing heavily by the time he gets to the fourth floor. He wanders down the hallway—the carpet here looks a little worse for wear, but the place is pretty nice, overall, with big square windows at the end of the corridor that let in the bright New Mexico sunlight.
The men’s bathroom has a door on either side of it. Jimmy stops at the first one and knocks a couple of times, but there’s no answer. He presses his ear to the wood and listens. No sound of anyone moving inside. He knocks again, then sighs, and walks past the men’s room and stops at the other door. He can hear soft music from behind this one, and he shifts the pizza again then knocks hard, twice.
The door opens to reveal a skinny guy, who has floppy hair like Robert Sean Leonard in Dead Poets Society and a scrunched, weaselish nose. “What?” he says.
“Brad?” Jimmy asks.
Brad’s face grows even more weaselly. He glances at the pizza box in Jimmy’s hand, then back to Jimmy. “You want something?” he says.
“I sure do, Brad,” Jimmy says winningly. He steps through the open doorway and glances around the dorm room: it’s a bit unkempt, but not too messy. There’s a battered old acoustic guitar leaning against the wall and a pile of comic books on the desk with several empty soda cans perched atop them.
“You from student services…?” Brad asks.
“Nope!” Jimmy says, and he moves deeper into the room, studying the piles and books closely, then he sighs. “Listen, Brad, today’s your lucky day.”
“Huh?” Brad says, mouth curling. “I win a pizza or something?”
“What?” Jimmy says.
Brad silently points to the pizza box in his hands.
“Oh, no, this is for me,” Jimmy says, waving his free hand. “Today’s your lucky day because you’re about to make a very good deal.”
Brad makes a little grunting noise, and then he gestures to the door. “I think you should leave. I didn’t say you could come in.”
“I guess not, I guess not,” Jimmy says, and he sits on the edge of Brad’s single bed and sets the pizza box down beside him. Hopefully some of the grease seeps onto the covers, he thinks, and he leans back and looks around the room casually, then snaps his gaze back to Brad. “Hubert. Tort Law, Practices and something-or-rather. You know it?”
Brad’s mouth hangs open gormlessly.
“It’s a book,” Jimmy says. “It’s a library book.”
“You’re from the library?” Brad says, eyebrows drawing together.
Jimmy closes his eyes and runs his hand over his face, then looks at Brad squarely. “I'm not from the library, no. All I'm here to find out is: how much do you want for it?”
“What?”
“How much do you want for it?” Jimmy repeats, and he pulls his wallet from his pocket, cracking open the velcro. “I’ll buy it from you. Name your price.”
Brad leans down and opens a drawer in his desk, shuffles through it for a moment, then pulls out a blue, clothbound book. It's truly enormous. Silver lettering pressed into the cloth gives Hubert’s name and the full title. “You want…this?”
“Yes,” Jimmy says crisply.
Brad studies it carefully, and Jimmy wonders if he’s even cracked it open. “I don’t know,” he says. “I need to return it to the library.”
Jimmy makes a dismissive noise. “Oh, so suddenly after over a month you’re gonna care about that? Come on, Brad. How much?” He holds out his hands, wallet in his left. “Let’s make a deal!”
“I mean, I dunno…I’m gonna owe like almost a hundred bucks in lost item fines if I don’t take it back,” Brad says.
Jimmy wishes he knew whether that was accurate or not. He should’ve asked Drew, the charmer. Something about Brad’s flickering gaze makes him suspect the number is exaggerated.
“So…I’ll take, uh, two hundred bucks?” Brad says, peering at Jimmy. He shifts in his chair, and his eyes dart to the window for a moment.
“Hmm,” Jimmy says. He stands, counts out a few notes. “Tell you what, Brad, how about we make it an even hundred? That covers the fees. More than, I imagine,” he adds sardonically. “And considering how you already owe the library what, a buck or two a day for the last month, and that’s assuming you return it right now…” He holds out five twenties, stopping just shy of Brad’s reach.
“Hundred and fifty?” Brad says, gaze flicking between Jimmy and the bills.
Jimmy just waits. He stares at Brad for a while, then something on the desk catches his eye, something between all the comic books and legal pads and soda cans. Jimmy grins. “Hundred and twenty,” he says, “And you throw in those.”
Jimmy races to the gate of the apartment complex as another man is leaving, and he catches it before it closes, ducking through with a nod of thanks. He glances around—there’s an interior courtyard surrounded by blocky, almost cartoonish, beige buildings. The courtyard itself boasts a few benches and green trees, and concrete pathways that weave through the brown ground.
Jimmy spots a staircase and makes his way up to the third level, the top of the complex. He wanders around the balcony—301, 302, 303…305. There it is. He pauses outside the door, and glances at the Hubert book in his free hand. After a pause, he lowers the pizza box to the floor and takes the book and tucks it beneath the front of his shirt, glancing down and smoothing out the fabric to make sure it’s as well hidden as it could ever be, for such a thick book. He picks up the pizza box again, shifting it between his hands.
Then he rings the buzzer.
After a moment that feels like an eternity, Kim opens the door. She’s dressed casually, her hair loose, but she still looks stressed, and her eyes are dark from lack of sleep. She blinks, looks at him up and down, then blinks again. “Jimmy?” she says. “What—”
“Reverse directory,” Jimmy says. He grimaces. “Sorry.”
But Kim just starts laughing. She stares at his chest then looks back at his face and lets out another snort of laughter. “Wh—what’re you supposed to be?”
Jimmy glances down at himself: the tucked in checkered shirt, the half-revealed purple Fletch logo on his chest. And he’s still wearing the thick-framed glasses, too. He reaches up and touches them, then grins at her with the silliness of it all.
“Well, come on in, Clark Kent,” Kim says, pulling the door wider for him and stepping back so he can pass through.
Kim’s apartment is tidy and much more artfully decorated than his own. The front door opens right into the kitchen area, and there’s actually a bowl of fruit set out on her counter. Down from the kitchen, open plan, is the living area, with a long couch opposite a decent television set and a cabinet of video tapes. At the far end of the room, glass doors open onto a little balcony.
To the right of the main room are three doors—bedrooms and a bathroom, Jimmy guesses.
“You brought…pizza?” Kim says, taking the box from him and then frowning. She feels the bottom, then she opens it. “You brought cold pizza?”
Jimmy takes off his glasses, and he blinks to clear his vision.
Kim studies him and her lips twitch. “And what’s this under here?” she asks, leaning over and poking at the square shape of the book beneath his shirt. “You expecting me to punch you like Harry Houdini?”
But Jimmy just grins. He shifts Kim’s hand away from his stomach and steps deeper into the apartment, then turns back to face her. “Hey, Kim?” he says. “When’s your birthday?”
Kim frowns, then says, “…February 13th. You missed it.”
“Nah, I’m just late,” Jimmy says. He pulls the tort law book out from the front of his shirt and hands it over to her. “Happy Birthday.”
Kim freezes in place. If Jimmy couldn’t see her chest rising and falling, he might even think she’d stopped breathing. Her eyes are trained on the book, so he keeps holding it out, his hand moving a little—and how can Kim be so perfectly still when he can’t even keep his hand steady—
Then an enormous grin shatters over her face, like an ice sheet cracking, and she looks up at him with bright eyes and starts laughing, bubbling peals of sound that seem to echo through the room.
“What?” Jimmy asks, still holding the book, smiling a little but glancing around. He gives a soft chuckle. “Kim, what? What’s so funny?”
“Jimmy…” she says, beaming, and even with his eyes closed, even through a crackly handset, even down miles and miles of copper wire, Jimmy would be able to hear her smile in the way she says his name, the way it rounds off at the edges and rises, joyful, at the end.
He grins. “So, you were right about that asshole who—oomf!”
—because Kim has just leant up and pressed a hard kiss to the edge of his smile, and she’s gripping the back of his head tightly, and he can feel each of her fingers like fire through his hair—
And then just as quickly she lets go. She stares up at him with shining eyes. “Jimmy,” she says again.
“Kim,” he says, grinning so hard it hurts.
He realizes he’s still holding the book, and he offers it out again, and Kim takes it. She runs her palm over the cover for a moment, then cracks it open, flicking through the pages slowly and carefully. Her eyes dart over the words and she gives a little laugh. “Just as boring as I hoped!” she says. “This...I have to go get the rest of my notes.” She looks back up at him, grips his elbow once, then races down to the far door on the right. She calls out, voice muffled: “Come tell me how you found it! I can listen while I sort!”
“Yeah,” Jimmy says, staring after her. He reaches up and touches the edge of his mouth. There should be clichés for a time like this, he thinks dumbly. There should be metaphors. There should be words. But Jimmy can’t think of any words.
“Bring the shitty cold pizza!” Kim calls some time later, maybe seconds or minutes or hours, and Jimmy shakes himself, picks up the box, and follows her.
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