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“What about this?” Jimmy asks, pulling a plaid blazer with enormous shoulder pads off the rack and holding it up to Kim. He gestures, letting it wave on the hanger. “This is pretty classy.”
Kim glances over to him from the aisle and snorts. “What am I, a Heather?”
“Hmm, okay,” Jimmy says, and he slips it back. He stifles a yawn behind his hand, then adds, “Just saying, you’re basically a big shot lawyer now.” And then, lighter: “You could up your game a bit.”
“Yeah, and Walmart is the place to do that,” Kim says dryly.
Jimmy shrugs. “You never know where fashion’s gonna strike next.”
“Well, I’ll try to keep vigilant,” Kim says easily, and she moves on.
Jimmy follows, stopping briefly to pluck at a bright green shirtsleeve, then a canary yellow one, before emerging from the sea of clothing racks behind her. The fluorescent lights vanish into the distance, marking out the depths of the store like a runway, and he brushes past the other shoppers and tall displays until he catches up with Kim.
She’s pushing her cart determinedly. One of the wheels twitches on its axle, wobbling as she follows aisles of linen and towels into the bathroom section. She stops at a shelf of shower curtains, shiny and colorful in their plastic packages.
Jimmy picks up one with red zigzags, then sets it back down. “I still don’t see why it’s such a big deal, anyway,” he says. He turns to her and wiggles his eyebrows.
Kim just shakes her head, lips lifting a little. “I already caught her going through some of my crim law notes,” she says, after a moment. “I don’t think Ellen believes in boundaries.”
“Must’ve made for some dry snooping.”
Kim laughs lightly. “She’s a real gunner. Thinks she knows more about the bar exam than I do, and she’s a 2L.”
“Hah,” Jimmy says. “You sure can pick ‘em, huh?”
“Beggars, choosers…” Kim says quietly. She moves a little further down the aisle, studying the shower curtains.
He trails after her, tapping a finger over the plastic packages. “What kind of monster takes a shower curtain with them when they move out, anyway?”
Kim makes a muffled noise of disgust. Another few steps down the row. She picks up a striped blue shower curtain, then sets it back down. Frowns.
Jimmy points to one with yellow-and-blue striped fish on it. “Go with the little fish?”
She chuckles and takes it from the shelf. Stares at it for a few moments, looks back to the display, then shrugs and tosses it in the cart. “Fish it is.”
They keep moving, down aisles of electronics and then home appliances. His eyes linger on a portable radio, but his bank account already feels painfully empty after paying his school fees and buying second hand textbooks, and he can just listen to music off the TV anyway. He yawns again, pressing his fist to his mouth.
Kim turns back to look at him. “You okay?”
Jimmy shrugs. “Yeah, just didn’t sleep well,” he says. He pauses for a second, then adds, “Dunno why.”
Kim frowns, studying him.
Jimmy chuckles, shaking his head dismissively. He can feel another yawn rising in him an he fights against it, pointing to all the coffee packets in her cart instead. “Careful about throwing stones here, skippy.”
“All right, all right…” Kim murmurs, glancing at the coffee too. She doesn’t say anything else, just keeps pushing the wobbly cart, eventually turning down an aisle with shelves of blenders, juicers—then coffeemakers.
There’s dozens and dozens, but Kim moves as if she knows exactly what she’s looking for. She stretches up to grab a large box, grunting as she lowers it to rest it on a shelf near hip-level, tilting it back to study the writing on the front. She stares at it for a long time, lips folded inward thoughtfully.
Jimmy moves away, looking at coffee grinders idly, turning over the packages to study the illustrations on the back, the stock photographs of smiling people. When he heads back, Kim’s still staring at the same coffeemaker.
“What’s up?” he asks, moving alongside her and examining it, too. He reads some of the colorful marketing text—Good coffee is for life and Start the day right—then chuckles. “Sounds pretty damn great.”
“Huh?” Kim shifts, turning to him. She blinks.
Jimmy smiles. He points to the box. “That the right one?”
“Oh, uh…”
“I get it, it’s a big commitment,” he says. He taps the writing on the box. “Good coffee is for life. You’re basically getting married.”
And Kim laughs quietly at that, but continues to study the box.
“When did Andrea move out? A week ago?” Jimmy prompts.
She nods.
“So that’s a week on HHM coffee alone? No way to live, Kim.”
She nods again.
Jimmy holds out his hands to take the box from her, but eventually she just gives a sharp nod. She shifts past him to nestle it in the shopping cart herself, making space between the ringbinders and lint rollers.
“You see the toasters anywhere?” she asks, and she doesn’t meet his eyes, just peers past him down the long, fluorescent aisles of the Walmart.
“Uh—” Jimmy starts, glancing over at the signs that hang above the shelves.
But she moves on before he can really answer, the loose wheel on the shopping cart shaking as she heads down the next aisle, shoes creaking on the linoleum.
And Jimmy leans against the shelf of shower curtains, eyes closed.
There’s a steady throb of pain in his bad knee, a constant twinge he hasn’t felt in years. Probably from sleeping at his tiny kitchen table earlier this week, legs crammed underneath the wood, head down and drool sticking to the pages of his textbook. He’d awoken to the blaring of his alarm from across the apartment.
He bends to rub his palm over his knee, just for a moment, and then he forces his eyelids up and follows Kim.
The high windows are open again in the public speaking classroom, but they’re not doing much good. The air inside is heavy with heat, and Jimmy can feel dust crawling on his skin—or maybe that’s just sweat, dripping down the back of his neck, soaking his collar. He’s already yawned twice in the last few minutes, and he fights against another one. The heat seems to want to worm its way into his brain, moving sluggishly through his body toward his skull.
Yesterday, Jimmy’s business class had been in an enormous lecture theatre. It had been so cold in there he was almost shivering in his short-sleeved button up, but here the air-con is clearly not working, and the heat of the day is trapped in the close space, thick between them all.
He shakes his head to clear it then turns to the ponytailed kid beside him. Ellis is still wearing a long-sleeved hoodie despite everything, though today it’s for a different theme park. I Survived the King Cobra, it says on the back.
Ellis flicks through his mottled grey exercise book, pages of messy writing and doodles flashing past. “Shit,” he says, face red. “I mighta left it at home?” He rubs the sleeve of his hoodie over his sweat-damp upper lip.
Jimmy glances over to where Professor Reiss is helping the two students across the horseshoe of desks. As he watches, Reiss twists to look back at the air-less vent, her forehead creasing, clearly only half listening to whatever they’re saying.
“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me.”
Jimmy turns.
The woman next to him, Samantha—or Sam, he remembers—is staring at him. She’s a couple of years older than him, and her brown bangs are damp from the heat like he knows his are, sticking together in clumps. Her glasses slip along her nose, and she pushes them back up then points to Jimmy’s legal pad.
Jimmy looks down at it. They’re all still working on selling themselves. Selling why they’re here. Reiss hadn’t used that word, but that’s how it feels to him. Features and benefits—what Jimmy McGill can do for you. His paper is divided into four quadrants.
“Prison?” Sam prompts at his silence, and she nods to the word on the paper, half-smile on her face. “Jeez. Some people have all the luck.”
Jimmy raises his eyebrows, but her tone is light. He says, “Luck?”
“So you got out, reformed your life, and now you work at a law firm?” She sighs. “Instant A+ material.”
Jimmy laughs. He looks to Reiss and then pauses. Turns back to Sam. “Yeah, and wait until you hear about my work with old people.”
Sam makes a wounded noise. “Oh God, I don’t want to know.” On her own paper, she has the same four quadrants. In the biggest letters in the high importance quadrant is: Sounded fun?
Jimmy just smiles. He looks away again. After a moment, he flicks to a blank page in his legal pad. Writes the date at the top and underlines it. He closes his eyes and opens them with effort, then wipes the back of his hand over his forehead. “Jesus,” he says, and he tugs on the knot of his tie, loosening it and then slipping it over his head.
“I can’t find my answers,” Ellis says, slamming his book closed. His face is blotched and red, and he grunts, bending down to hunt through his backpack, pulling loose sheets of paper out onto the desk—more doodles and notes, then what looks like poetry or song lyrics.
Sweat curls into the dip of Jimmy’s temple, prickling on his skin.
And then, with a mechanical rush, the air-con kicks on. He hears it before he feels it, a long thin hissing that finally blasts from the ceiling vent down into his damp hair, cracking over his scalp. It ices the sweat at the back of his neck, standing the hairs on end.
With it comes the smell of old dust and something burnt, something sharp and acrid, but Jimmy doesn’t care. He leans back in his chair, tipping his face upward, feeling the cold air on his cheeks and lips and eyelids.
Some time later, Ellis cries triumphantly, and Jimmy pries his eyelids open and sits forward. Ellis unfolds a piece of paper, where his own four-quadrant assignment is messily filled out, just in time for Professor Reiss to reach the three of them.
Jimmy watches his laundry sloshing in the machine, the soap-frothed water seething at the edges of the circular glass. He rubs at his eyes. They feel dry—and maybe it’s the heat, or maybe it’s just that they haven’t been closed for long enough in the last few weeks.
So he closes them now, shifting in the plastic laundromat chair, trying to get comfortable. At least when he gets back to his apartment it won’t be filled with dirty clothes anymore. Just empty takeout boxes and beer bottles.
The machine before him whirrs calmly. The water sloshes.
Jimmy exhales, sinking into the hard chair, but as he starts to feel himself drifting, he forces his eyes open. Cracks the book on his lap and stares blankly down at the dancing letters. He has no idea what they say.
He looks away again.
There’s an “Open” sign hanging in front of the window near him. Little blue lights encircle the word, shifting back and forth.
At a table nearby, an old man folds white shirts slowly and methodically, back hunched.
The Laundry Quarters, the place is called, a pun that now mostly makes Jimmy think of a barracks, but it’s the closest laundromat to his place, just a two minute walk. Long rows of machines stretch out beneath the flickering white lights.
He needs to go. Needs to get his clothes dry, and needs to make it home before midnight, and needs to finish this chapter, and then finish the next chapter, and then sleep….
…and then sleep. He wakes to a hand on his shoulder, and blinks with dream-thick eyes up at a bearded old man in a drab blue hoodie. The man grunts at him.
“Mmrf?” Jimmy manages.
“Driver says this’s your stop.” The old man jerks his head toward the front. “Said to give you a shove.”
Jimmy turns, staring out the window to where a familiar line of shops glows with yellow and red lights in the dark. He mumbles something and reaches between his knees for his backpack and then stands abruptly. Looks out at the shops again then shoulders past the old guy, who calls out, “Hey man, you’re welcome!” as Jimmy moves down the aisle, a little unsteady on his feet.
The driver is a balding man with a birthmark on the side of his neck. Jimmy’s thanked him evening after evening on his way home, and does it again now, more heartfelt than usual—and the driver responds as he ever does, a twitched smile and jerked head.
Jimmy descends the bus stairs to the sidewalk, landing heavy on his soles.
The night air feels tight around him, woollen.
It moves slow in his throat as he blinks again at the shops, momentarily lost. What does he—
He needs to get home, he thinks. Needs to eat something, needs to find the textbook he lost last night, needs to shower and rinse off the sweat of the day and finish his business essay and finish his public speaking talking points and then sleep…
…and then sleep, he thinks, steadying himself against the counter, and then I can sleep, just get this handed-in and get it out of my head and it’s done, and I don’t have to worry about it anymore—
But the words he’s just heard finish twisting through his head and he blinks.
“What?” Jimmy says, squinting down a the red-haired kid over the business school counter. “Seriously?”
“The hand-in time was five o’clock,” the kid repeats, staring up at Jimmy weakly. “Uh, it says right here on the sheet. So I gotta stamp yours, sorry.”
Jimmy exhales through his nose. “Jesus,” he says, tight through gritted teeth. He glances away, to the tidy foyer, feeling his pulse heavy in his head, then looks back to the kid. “You’re shitting me. Christ.”
“Uh, I can make it, uh—five-twenty,” the kid says. “I saw you walk in then, before you found me at the desk here.” He looks down at his red stamp and turns one of the numbers back a couple of digits.
“Fine,” Jimmy spits. “Whatever.” He slides his essay over the counter and sneers. It falls off the edge and toward the kid in a whirl of papers, but Jimmy turns on his heel, walking in time with the pulse that throbs hot under his skin.
He just needs to get to his public speaking class, he thinks, clenching his jaw. He just needs to give his test speech, just needs to make it through listening to the others’ talk without closing his eyes, just needs to not tip his head back under the cold air and then slip away and then sleep…
…and then sleep. He can hear the word, unspoken, hissing in his brain, as he stands in the HHM breakroom, waiting for the coffee to brew. The machine is hissing, too. He leans against the benchtop. Tilts his head back to rest against the cabinets above the sink. Closes his eyes.
Like a river, he thinks. Like a quiet river, and he’s drifting. He feels cold now, sometimes. As if his body can’t regulate his temperature right, as if it’s just offloading unimportant jobs to keep his brain awake. When he feels like that he’s more like he’s water shifting in swirls beneath sheet ice, waiting for a thaw. Waiting for the top to crack.
A hand on his chest.
He opens his eyes.
It’s Kim. She frowns at him, then pulls her hand back. “Still sleeping badly?”
“Just resting my eyes,” he murmurs.
But Kim keeps frowning.
“I’m good, Kim,” he says.
“Yeah?” she says. The coffee finishes brewing with a click, and she reaches for the jug and then pours a cup and holds it out to him.
“Thanks,” Jimmy murmurs, taking it.
“Want me to drop you tonight?” she says, lifting her eyebrows. “Maybe?”
Jimmy drinks slowly, feeling the coffee tingling out from his throat and through his veins, and then he lowers the cup. He sighs. “Don’t you have to go to the library?”
“Nah,” Kim says lightly. “I have plenty of books back at my apartment.”
Jimmy opens his mouth to decline, but then he pauses. Takes a moment to remember the day. It’s a Friday. He doesn’t have classes.
And Kim continues before he says anything. “Let’s get some food,” she says crisply. “I have a two-for-one coupon for that Chinese place near mine. Yeah?”
So Jimmy nods. He can hang out with Kim for a little while, he thinks. Put off all his work for just a few hours, pretend it doesn’t exist for a movie or two. Then when Kim wants to study, he needs to head home, needs to catch up on his readings, needs to learn the answers for Monday, because the business professor has started calling on him more often ever since that late essay, and he needs to make progress on his next assignment, and he needs to finally clean up the place, and then sleep…
…and then sleep. His eyes snap open.
The familiar fruity smell of Kim’s shampoo clings to the pillow beneath his head, to the comfortably-heavy duvet on his shoulder. There’s a dark shape in the bed in front of him, shifting with quiet breaths.
He rolls around onto his other side slowly and peers at Kim’s glowing alarm clock. It’s a little after one in the morning. He smothers a groan into the pillow. Maybe his body is just used to waking up after a couple of hours now.
Guilt itches in his stomach. He didn’t read as much as he needed to. He didn’t study as much as he needed to. Hours of lost time gone. Instead, watching Kim’s eyelashes flutter closed as she sipped her beer, watching her wet her lips after lowering the glass, he’d stared at her hungrily, and she had noticed, and the two of them had moved almost mechanically to the bedroom.
He curls his knees up closer to his chest.
Kim shifts behind him, the mattress sinking as she approaches, but when she touches his back, he still jumps. She withdraws her hand for a moment as if wary, but then lays her palm flat on his shoulder. A warm point of gentle pressure, and he stays still, keeping his breath steady. After a while, she lightly trails her fingers over his spine, in and out of the ridges of the bones. Up beneath his shoulder blade, then down again to ripple over the ridges, then up.
Eventually, she tugs on his shoulder, and he rolls onto his back. He lifts his arm up so she can curl into his side. “Hey,” she murmurs.
“Hey,” Jimmy says softly, settling his hand on her arm.
“Thought you were gonna be dead to the world,” Kim says.
Jimmy sighs. “Guess not,” he says. Then, after a moment: “Sorry if I woke you.”
He feels her shake her head against his chest. She traces little circles on his stomach. After a while, she says, “Everything okay?”
Jimmy nods. “Yeah.”
Kim doesn’t respond.
“Just, you know. Crazy dreams,” Jimmy says. “Gotta stop watching the horror channel late at night, huh?”
She flattens her hand on his stomach at this, moving her palm lightly up over his ribs. She makes a little humming noise at the back of her throat, then finally says, “Jimmy…you’re not back—” But she sighs. Shifts her head so she’s looking up at him in the dim room. The red light of the alarm clock glows in her pupils. She folds in her lips. “You’re not hurt?”
“Hurt?” Jimmy repeats, word emerging high and thin.
Kim runs her palm over his ribs again. She doesn’t elaborate, doesn’t explain the question, and eventually she just draws her palm back, curling her fingers inward so her hand rests against the side of his waist in a loose fist. She’s quiet for a long time, and then, softly, she says, “You know, the pass rate for the New Mexico bar exam is eighty percent.”
Jimmy blinks. “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” Kim says. The hand against his side twitches a little. “Higher for first timers, too. It’s after you’ve already failed it once that the pass rate tanks. But sometimes I…” She exhales. Presses her mouth to his chest, and doesn’t continue.
Jimmy rubs her shoulder. “Those’re just numbers. Doesn’t mean anything.”
She hums. When she speaks again, it seems like a completely different topic: “What was that scam you told me about? Where no matter what got picked, it always added up to, what was it, 1066?”
“1089,” Jimmy says warmly, moving his hand over her skin. “Yeah, people ate that up. Got some good nights out of that before everyone in Cicero figured it out.”
Kim nods against him, and he’s half waiting for her to talk more about numbers meaning things and the bar exam, but instead she says, “In Cicero?”
He tilts his head to look down at her. It’s hard to read her expression in the dimness, and she’s not looking at him, anyway. “Yeah,” he says, finally.
She nods again. And then, even quieter: “You ever think about doing that again?”
“What?”
And now she does look up at him, and he can see her eyes even in the darkness, wide and kind, but—worried?
Jimmy frowns. He hasn’t thought about that guy in weeks, hasn’t even felt that gnawing tug in his chest. He just shakes his head.
A moment passes, and then Kim nods yet again, slower this time. “Okay,” she says. She shifts, pulling back a bit, then pats his chest. “Back to sleep? You want some space?”
“Nah,” Jimmy says. He squeezes her shoulder. “This is nice.”
So she tucks herself into his side again, hand resting lightly on his chest, leg tangled between his. He can feel her breath on his skin.
“What about you?” he murmurs, some time later. He rubs his thumb in small circles over her arm. Squeezes it and adds, “How are you?”
There’s a long silence, just Kim’s breath on his skin. He finally feels her words more than he hears them, gentle on his chest, like ghosts: “I’m good.”
He nods.
A few minutes later, Kim runs her hand over the spot where he felt them land. It’s as if she’s wiping them away, brushing them off his skin.
And then sleep…
…and then sleep. He just needs to make it a few more minutes, then he can leave. The air con is a cold sheet above him at least, as Professor Reiss wraps up, telling them about next Tuesday’s lesson plan, reminding them of how much they need to get done over the weekend.
Jimmy lets the ice sweep over his skin.
Reiss finishes talking. There’s the general clattering of everyone packing away their things, but he lingers for a moment longer. Listens to the chairs scrape back and the door swing open and shut.
A yawn claws its way out of his chest and he stifles it with his fist.
“You look good.”
He opens his eyes. Sam is still here, standing with her bag slung over her shoulder.
“Thanks,” Jimmy says dryly. “I feel good.”
She chuckles. She moves as if to leave, and then pauses. “You know, there’s a cafe on campus that serves pretty decent espresso.”
His brain perks up automatically at the word. He thinks about the pile of work in his backpack, and the bigger pile of work waiting for him back at his place, and he stayed with Kim again last night so the stack of readings and assignments seems bigger in mind than when he’d left because he now has even less time to do them all. At that thought, another yawn bursts out of him, and he stifles it, then laughs. “Okay, I could use a quick coffee.”
They end up sitting down outside the cafe before Jimmy’s thought too much about it, before he’s thought about how happy he is to keep adding papers to that metaphorical pile if it means he doesn’t have to look at it again for just a little while longer. As if it’s hit a tipping point, and one lost hour, one lost evening, one lost day doesn’t really matter anymore.
He settles at the table, rubbing his thumb and forefinger over his eyes. It’s warm outside, and there’s a dry breeze blowing between the buildings. Sam’s bangs flutter around her forehead. Little yellow and red flags crack above them in the wind.
Their coffees arrive quickly, small espressos in colorful cups. Jimmy reaches for the sugar packets.
“Oh no,” Sam says solemnly.
“What?” Jimmy says, raising his eyebrows.
She shakes her head at him, smiling. “You’ll ruin it.”
“Oh yeah?” Jimmy says, and then he shrugs and takes a cautious sip. It’s bitter and sour and sweet, and not terrible. As he swallows, he gives an exaggerated grimace.
Sam laughs warmly.
“Not bad,” Jimmy says, shrugging. He waits a moment, then adds, “It’d be better with sugar.”
“Fine.” She waves at hand at him dismissively.
The wind rises, snapping the triangular banners, and then dies down again. Jimmy stirs the sugar into his drink, and then takes another long sip.
Sam looks at something down the gap between the buildings, and then she glances back at him. “So how long you been in Burque?”
It takes Jimmy a second to realize she means Albuquerque. He answers, words that still surprise him: “Little over a year.”
Sam nods. “What do you think of it?”
And Jimmy cradles his tiny coffee and shrugs. “I don’t know yet.”
Sam chuckles. “I don’t know yet, either,” she says, then adds, “and I've been here my whole life.”
He nods. The yellow and red flags shift in the wind. It’s nice sitting here with the warm breeze, with the strong coffee already thudding through his veins. Not like Cicero at all, he thinks, as always, never like Cicero, where half the streets are unchanged since Capone drove down them.
Albuquerque feels like it’s still being discovered. Like the desert.
He thinks of the national monuments and old hotels that might be just over the wide and dark horizon waiting to finally emerge, waiting to be discovered after a quiet drive.
Sam sets down her cup with a clink.
“So,” Jimmy says mildly, aware of how long he’s been quiet, wanting to fill the silence. “Uh, you taking any other classes?”
“Nah,” Sam says. “Just seeing what suits me. I’m in no rush, I already got a decent job.”
“Yeah,” Jimmy says. He remembers his sheet of paper from weeks ago, where under ‘future goals’ he’d just written, Get my degree and nothing else. But he nods. “What d’you do?”
“Family business,” she says. “We sell specialty parts for furniture. Like, you know, fittings, fasteners, other components. Got a wholesale store up in Alameda.”
“Nice,” Jimmy says, nodding.
She glances away, again studying something in the distance, then she exhales. “Man, I don’t know about you, but I’m always so hungry after those classes.” She meets his eyes, and hers are soft and bright. “If you ever wanted to get dinner sometime…”
And Jimmy’s pulse increases the same way it’s done ever since he was a teenager, but he says, “Uh, I’m already seeing somebody.”
Sam nods as if she’d been half expecting that answer, and her face stays relaxed, warm. She shrugs. “No big.” She drains the last of her coffee then smiles at him. “Well, if things ever change, I’d like to get to know you better.” The smile dims a little. “I hope that’s not too blunt, but I’m just so tired of it all. I like to get things out in the open.”
Jimmy chuckles, and he studies her again, studies the way her smile reaches her eyes as she sits opposite him. “Not too blunt,” he says.
“Good.”
And the silence feels more comfortable now, somehow, so Jimmy doesn’t do anything to fill it. Eventually he finishes his own coffee, and they stand, pushing in their chairs and each leaving some cash on the table. As they move away, Jimmy turns to face the direction Sam had been looking. The sky glows pink and yellow with the setting sun.
He sees Sam stop beside him out of the corner of his eye and turns. “Thanks for the coffee,” he says.
“Of course,” she says. She gives a half grin that rises on one side of her face. “Just trying to help you make your mind up about the place, right?”
Jimmy smiles. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, I’ll let you know.” He looks out at the sun dipping beneath the peaks of the distant rooftops and thinks of the wide desert horizon.
Jimmy pokes at his sweet and sour pork, shifting the meat around in the carton, watching the pieces tumble and stick to each other. Eventually, he abandons it and just leans forward and puts the box on Kim’s coffee table, then settles back and props his head on his hand.
He has a headache right behind his left eye, probably from staring at microscopic print for too long last night. It’s been tapping on his skull ever since he woke up, wanting to be let out. He closes his eyes briefly then opens them, and when he opens them, Kim is watching him.
He gives her a small smile, and she straightens out her legs, resting them on his lap.
The TV is set to a local news station, muted. Jimmy hasn’t been paying attention to it at all, but he stares at the silent set, letting the picture swim in his vision. The screen becomes ribbons of shifting colors, growing even brighter as the news gives way to commercials. A tropical beach turns into streaks of gold and blue. A ski resort becomes white and green.
Jimmy blinks, and looks away—looks down at his lap. Kim's feet are a comfortable weight on his thighs. He runs his hand down one of her shins, over the curve of her ankle, settling his palm onto the arced top of her foot. He stares at his hand lying there like he’d stared at the TV, letting the image of it drift in and out of focus.
The door to Kim’s roommate’s room opens, and the roommate herself emerges in a flurry: Ellen, small and intense, with dark eyes seem to drill into Jimmy’s every time she looks at him. She strides into the kitchen and fills a mug with coffee from the pot, but lingers on her way back, staring.
“Hi, Ellen,” Jimmy says mildly.
She ignores him, looking to Kim instead. “Is he gonna start paying rent if he stays here so often?”
Kim’s eyebrows crawl up towards her hairline. Her eyes narrow. She doesn’t say anything for some time, until finally: “Is that my coffee?”
Ellen huffs, lips fluttering, and returns to her room without answering. Her door closes with a snap.
“Hah,” Jimmy says softly, and he grins at Kim. “Still at war, then?”
Kim just shuts her eyes briefly.
“Beggars and choosers, right?” Jimmy says.
“Think I should rephrase that beggars thing, actually,” Kim says. “You couldn’t give her away.”
Jimmy chuckles, and then a yawn rises from his stomach. He presses his fist to his mouth.
Kim catches it from him and yawns widely, too. “Damn you,” she murmurs afterwards, and then she studies him for a moment. Shrugs. “You’re not here that often, anyway.”
He frowns. “I’ve been here most nights this week,” he says lightly.
Kim looks surprised, gaze skimming over his face and off into the middle distance as if she’s calculating something. Her eyes flicker for a moment, then shift back to his. “Really?” she says softly.
“Yeah,” Jimmy murmurs. And his metaphorical and literal piles of school work have been growing bigger and bigger while he’s been here. He’s even had to slip out of bed a couple of nights, hoping Kim won’t notice, locking the door to her bathroom and sitting on the toilet beside the yellow-and-blue fish on the shower curtain. Squinting his way through chapters that seemed to get longer and longer, the font smaller and smaller.
Kim presses her fingers into her eyelids. She exhales once, steadily, slowly. A careful rush of breath.
He rubs his palm over the top of her foot, feeling the warmth of it through her sock, and then squeezes gently.
She exhales again. This time it’s less steady, her breath stuttering a little. Her shoulders are perfectly still, as if she’s trying not to move them.
“Kim?” Jimmy says carefully, sitting up.
She lowers her hands. Her eyes are dry, but red-rimmed all the same—red-rimmed with tiredness and some other emotion Jimmy can’t place. Her lips tremble, ever-so-slightly.
He tightens his hold on her foot. Frozen, watching her.
“I can’t keep it all in my head,” she says, the words finally spilling from her like water, like water bubbling up from a cracked lake.
“Keep what in your head?” Jimmy murmurs, thinking she’s talking about how often he’s spent the night, but then he clicks and says, “The bar exam?”
And her words keep coming: “I can’t. I can’t do it. When I look at my notes, I know them, but I just can’t keep them all in my head, Jimmy.” She breathes out through her nose once, quickly, eyes darting upwards, and then she looks at him again. “It’s too much. I can’t hold on to it all.”
He nods, head bobbing up and down stupidly, not knowing what to say.
“Sometimes I try to think of a case and it’s like…it’s like”—she gestures wildly with her hands, vague and uncertain circles before her—“nothing, like pulling on nothing.” Her chest keeps moving, rising and falling with rapid breaths. She looks away from him again and swallows, and then looks back. And softer: “What if that happens in the exam?” Her eyes shift between his, small movements, left and right. “What if I'm sitting there and it’s all gone? And then I’m…” A repeat of her vague gesture, and Jimmy finishes her sentence in his head: nothing.
He stares at her.
And she stares back, eyes wide and dark. She presses her lips together and raises her eyebrows, and he squeezes her foot even tighter. As if he can help hold her together from here. As if he can hold her to him.
And then within seconds she changes. She seems to pull inward, eyes shifting away, shoulders rising like she’s enclosing herself between the ridges of them.
She shifts her feet off his lap. Twists them over the edge of the sofa and gets up, collecting their empty takeout containers from the coffee table. He watches her bustle away to dump them in the garbage, then move back past him down to her bedroom.
But even the way she moves betrays her tiredness. The careful steps, the hesitation on the threshold of her room as if she’s forgotten why she wanted to go in there. The hand that briefly touches the doorframe as she finally passes through it. He can hear papers rustling as she sorts through her own mountain, and he knows it’s taller and much more precarious than his own.
And much harder to climb.
So Jimmy leans forward and reaches for his backpack where it’s tucked under the coffee table, pushing aside his shoes to snag one of the straps and then pulling it out. He hunts through for his business textbook. Lets it fall open to the right chapter, the one he’d abandoned at four o’clock last night.
When Kim comes back to the living room a few minutes later, he can already feel the pressure headache throbbing behind his left eye again, is already losing track of the long-winded sentences. She sits down beside him, a binder filled with her own well-organized notes tight in her grip.
She flicks through it then sighs and glances over at him. Frowns and peers at his book, then says, “I thought—” She seems to catch herself. Smiles warmly at him. “You’re giving the marketing another chance with Howard?”
And Jimmy opens his mouth. He glances down at the textbook then back up at her. The warmth of her smile seems almost to caress his skin, and he feels himself saying, “Yeah.” He blinks. She’s still smiling. “Yeah,” he repeats, stronger this time, shaping the word intentionally. “Another shot. Uh—I mean, I still don’t wanna work in the mailroom forever, right?”
“Right,” Kim says softly. Her smile doesn’t dim. It lingers on her closed lips, flickering like a flame.
And Jimmy swallows. “Especially not—” He gestures to her vaguely, then says, “You know.”
She exhales in something almost like relief, and the walls seems to come down again—and with them, she moves. She shifts to him, reaching for him and lifting a hand up and rubbing her thumb over his lips, as if she’s seen her own version of flames in them, and she’s damping them out before she can kiss him—and then she does, and he kisses back, humming.
She moves over him, her knees bridging his hips. Her fingers are tight on the nape of his neck, and he tucks his hand up under her shirt, pressing hard on the small of her back, and she’s moving against him, breathing in ragged glimpses that he hears minutes after he feels them—
—and he lets the mountains grow bigger and bigger and bigger, out of sight.
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