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For the rest of the month and into most of July, Jimmy feels as if he only sees Kim in glimpses, in shuttered bursts of colorful scenes.
Like one night, when he walks into her bedroom and finds her standing before a wall of bright post-its, pinks and yellows and blues arranged in cascading towers, each scribbled with indecipherable shorthand. She writes something on another yellow one then peels it off and sticks it to the base of a line with a careful swipe of her thumb.
Jimmy moves to her and rests his palm on the small of her back. She turns, lowering her forehead to his shoulder for a short moment, before looking to her bed, to its covers spread with bull-clipped bundles of notes and loose papers in offset piles. The bed where it doesn’t look like she'll be sleeping for at least a few hours yet.
Or another glimpse: Kim with her feet up on her coffee table, surrounded by stacks of legal paper, arranged clumsily, leaf over leaf. Rising around her like so much yellowed corn. Jimmy picks up one of the papers. It’s covered in writing too messy for him to read—and probably for Kim to read, too.
“What’s this?” he asks.
She keeps writing, hand moving furiously, shaking her head, but he gets his reply about ten minutes later, when she lays down her pen and flexes her fingers. From her tone, you’d think that no time had passed at all: “It’s everything I know about unenforceable contracts.”
“Huh,” Jimmy says, wedging his thumb in his textbook as he closes it. He picks up a piece of paper again, staring at the scrawled ink, then looks to her. “Does this help? Can you even read it?”
Kim shakes her head, and he doesn’t know what question she’s responding to. Yes, she can read it; or yes, it helps. Maybe both. She yawns widely, then lowers her hand and nods to his lap. “What’re you working on again?”
Jimmy looks down to his textbook, still marked with this thumb. He shifts it so the title—Understanding Corporate Social Responsibility—is a little less visible from her angle. “Uh, marketing proposal for Howard, you know?” he says. And then he repeats what he’s said the last three times she’s asked the question, what he knows she hasn’t actually made space to remember: “Gonna do it right this time. Actually use that almost-degree. Remind myself how to speak their language.”
“Right,” Kim says distantly. She’s already looking back to her own work, already vanishing again.
Or another glimpse, on the indigo-striped second floor of HHM, when he sees her moving toward him, in and out of the squares of afternoon light. She hasn’t been in the mailroom for weeks now, but she doesn’t look any less tired for it—instead, she’s been spending longer days at her bar review, and Jimmy wonders why HHM didn’t just let her do this earlier, why they worked her to the bone for so long. As if they couldn’t get by with one less mailroom lackey for a few more months.
But here she is, carrying a stack of folders so tall she has to balance it against her chest: blue and green and marbled spines stacked high in her arms.
“Kim?” Jimmy says, slowing his mail cart in her path.
She stills, peering at him over the top of the stack.
He takes a couple of the heavy folders from the pile, and she lets him. “Everything good?”
“Mmm,” Kim says, rolling her head around, and he can almost hear the crunch of bones in her neck. “Pep talk from Howard. Took an hour.”
Jimmy lets out a disgusted noise. Once, it might’ve been exaggerated, but he’s starting to learn the value of an hour now, too. “Well,” he says lightly, “you do look pepped up.”
Kim glances down at her stack of folders and frowns.
“Here, I have ‘em,” Jimmy says, gesturing with the ones he’s holding—three heavy blue ringbinders, swelling with papers. “What are all these, anyway?”
“I wasn’t sure if Howard would be running late,” Kim says, taking the folders back from Jimmy and restacking them on her tower. “So I brought my notes.”
Jimmy gives a soft laugh. “Yeah.”
And Kim glances down the hall in the direction she came, then looks back to him. “Okay, Jimmy, I gotta go. I’ll see you later?”
He nods, but Kim’s already moving, stepping around the mail cart and past him, brushing against his shoulder. Jimmy touches his hand to the spot as he watches her disappear.
He doesn’t end up seeing her that night, or hearing from her until the next week. And it’s not even really a glimpse this time, just her voice on the other end of his phone late at night, as he lies back in bed and looks up at the blue light that shines through the small, square windows on the wall above him.
She doesn’t say much, just asks him about his day, and he tells her: that Ernie and Burt had somehow broken the breakroom vending machine; that Burt’s Sun Chips had gotten stuck and they didn’t hear the end of it; that Chuck had taken on a new case with lots of discovery. He tells her that he was just reading about the fascinating world of corporate philanthropy, and she says, For that marketing proposal? and after a beat he says, Yeah, for that marketing proposal, and anyway—and he keeps going, voice soft and lips close to the phone handset, until he hears her fall asleep on the other end of the line.
Or another glimpse, one night in her bed, when he wakes up to the sound of her voice and rolls over to see her lying there, talking in her sleep. He can make out some of the words, and it’s no wonder she’d looked so tired when she opened her door earlier that evening, if even her dreams are filled with claim preclusion and issue preclusion and judicial economy and other phrases that now fall hushed from her lips, her eyelids flickering like she’s tracing the letters over a blank page.
Her curtains are open a crack, and a line of blue light falls across the two of them and onto the wall of post-it notes, climbing the yellow tower to the ceiling. Jimmy lies there listening to Kim, his body heavy with lost sleep, his thoughts sluggish and hazy, letting her voice drift past him.
A few days later, he recognises some of the words. It’s late at night and he’s sitting beside Kim at the kitchen counter, boxes of take-out between them and his business textbook open in front of him. He hasn’t been reading it for a while now, though, just sitting with his head propped on his palm, staring distantly.
“…claim preclusion, same transaction test, same evidence test…” Kim is saying, her voice just above a whisper and her eyes closed. She’s holding her fingers out like she’s counting up numbers, and, as he watches, her thumb wavers, as if she’s searching for a corresponding thing to say.
“What’s that?” Jimmy asks, shifting on his stool so he’s facing her.
She doesn’t hear him at first, so he repeats it, and she looks up to him. “Huh?” she says, brow furrowing.
“What are you reciting?” he asks.
Kim's eyes flicker between his own for a moment, then she holds up one of the bull-clipped stacks of papers on the countertop. CIV PRO, it says, in sharp black letters on the front “Memorising this,” she says.
“The whole thing?”
“No,” she says shortly, flipping over the first few pages and then cursing.
“I recognise it,” Jimmy says, and he waits for Kim to look back to him before nodding. “Kept me up all night with that last week.”
She frowns. “I did? How?”
“Mhm. Speechmaking in your sleep. Little private off-Broadway show, just for me. Passionate, intimate.”
And Kim groans, dropping her head onto her arms.
“Maybe throw it away a bit more, next time—hey, hey, I’m kidding,” Jimmy says, laying a hand on her shoulder. “It was like five minutes, then you conked out again.”
“God,” Kim murmurs, voice muffled in her forearm.
He rubs her shoulder, pressing his thumb into the soft fabric of her t-shirt. Her hair falls over her neck onto the dark countertop—gold on grey. He wonders what he’d do if she fell asleep like this, at just after midnight, at least three hours before she’s been calling it recently. Whether he’d leave her here to sleep with a crick in her neck, or nudge her awake for more relentless studying.
But she lifts her head off her arms before he has to decide, rubbing at her eyelids with her forefinger and thumb.
So Jimmy covers a yawn with his fist, and then looks down to his own book again. He still has an essay to write, due in a couple of days, but he can throw it together tomorrow, especially if he doesn’t hear from Kim—and what difference does getting an A or a C make at this point anyway? As long as he ends up with the course credits, who cares? But he drags himself out of bed before the sun is up the next morning, heading off to the CNM library to hurriedly copy down sources from the back pages of other books, as if he’s done more research than he really has.
And then, suddenly, it’s the day before the bar exam. An ever-looming presence finally on the horizon. If there’s one thing that Jimmy has always been able to glean from Kim’s notes it’s tomorrow’s date, the 27th of July, and beside it a vanishing number, smaller and smaller every time he sees it: ten days to go, eight days to go, five days to go, two days to go.
And now, standing next to Kim as she stares at the flat, beige face of the Albuquerque Convention Center, Jimmy thinks he knows what she sees superimposed on it: an enormous floating zero, zero days to go—nothing.
“Hey, not bad,” Jimmy says, nudging her with his elbow, turning her gaze to him. “Didn’t take too long, so you won’t have to leave early tomorrow.”
Kim hums thoughtfully and starts to move away, back toward her car. “Yeah, but it’ll be morning traffic,” she says, as he follows alongside her.
The plaza outside the convention center is enormous: huge squares of beige cement punctuated by lampposts and benches that are painted bright blue, and a single copse of trees. The evening sun beats down, hot and rippling across the concrete, and a large fountain made from offset brown stones kicks up the smell of chlorine.
“I really should’ve done the test drive in the morning,” Kim continues, “but that last day of bar review, you know?”
“How was it?” Jimmy asks, skimming his hand through one of the jets of water as they pass—it’s warm.
“Mind numbing as usual,” Kim says. “Waste of time. Most of ‘em have gone off to get drinks, anyway.”
“Least you had time to get your bearings here before it got dark, huh?” Jimmy says.
Kim just nods, and she slips her backpack around to the front to rummage through the pocket for her car keys. Jimmy waits beside the passenger door, staring back down toward the convention center, past the glittering fountain. The signs for tomorrow’s bar exam had been up inside the building already, and the rope markers for where to queue in the morning, and the big warning reminders of all the things prohibited from the center during the exam.
He hears Kim curse and turns back. She’s managed to unlock the car and has already settled into the driver’s seat, so he opens his door and slides in, but she’s hunting through her backpack for something else now.
“Shit!” she hisses, and she hauls an enormous folder out and flicks through it, pages and pages of bullet points separated by colorful dividers. All the way to the end, then back to the top, then—“Shit!”
“What’s up?”
Kim hands him the enormous folder wordlessly and twists to look over at the backseat, where piles of bull-clipped papers are sprawled along the fabric. She rifles through them, movements sharp and frantic.
“Kim?” Jimmy says.
“Have you seen a piece of paper?”
“Uh…” he says, lips twitching.
“—found it!” she gasps, and she twists back, a folded square of white in her grasp. “Thank god,” she says, closing her eyes for a moment, breathing heavily. When she opens her eyes, she looks at him sitting there, her overflowing ringbinder of notes in his hands. “Oh, you can put that over the back now.”
“Gee, thanks,” Jimmy says, hefting it through the gap in the seats and settling it somewhere on top of all the other papers. “Jesus, Kim, what’re all these back here, anyway?”
“Those are just my outlines,” Kim says shortly, scanning the paper in her hands. It’s crowded with such tiny, dense writing it’s a wonder she can read it at all.
“And that folder?” Jimmy says.
“That’s my outline of my outlines.”
“Okay,” Jimmy says mildly. He taps the paper in her hands with his forefinger. “And what’s this then, the outline of the outline of the outlines?”
“Yes,” Kim says simply.
“Okay,” Jimmy says again. He sits there quietly while she studies it, and then finally reaches for it. It lifts easily from Kim’s loose grasp.
She frowns. “Jimmy…”
“Kim,” he says gently. He stares at her. “I’ll keep it safe, okay?”
She stares back, gaze hard.
“Just breathe for a minute.”
Her eyes soften. “All right,” she says quietly. “Just a minute?”
“A minute.”
She tilts her head back onto the headrest and closes her eyes. Keeps them closed for one minute, two minutes. Five minutes. He can tell she’s not asleep, can tell by how rigid her shoulders are, can tell by the way her eyelids twitch.
And then finally, he leans closer. “Listen, Kim,” he murmurs. He gestures with the page of microscopic writing, the tiny incomprehensible abbreviations arranged in lists and sublists. “If you don’t know this already, you won’t by tomorrow. Why don’t we just get some dinner?”
Kim makes a humming noise and shakes her head slightly, eyes still closed.
“You’re just gonna fry your, you know,” Jimmy says, and he touches the side of her forehead. When Kim opens her eyes, he draws back his hand. “You gotta give it a rest. Get a real night’s sleep for once. Eat some brain food.”
Kim’s eyebrows rise. “Brain food?”
“Yeah, sure. Sushi,” Jimmy says, nodding. “All those good omega whatevers, right?”
And she smiles softly, still shaking her head. She doesn’t say anything.
So he leans away again, settling back into his seat. Out the front window, a yellow New Mexico flag flaps from a blue lamppost.
“Or we could do Flying Star?” Kim says quietly.
He turns to her and smiles. “Yeah,” he says. “We could definitely do Flying Star.”
The restaurant is crowded, the voices of other patrons loud, and there’s clattering and hissing and shouting coming from the kitchen. Jimmy jabs his fork into a breakfast sausage and then pops it into his mouth, chewing slowly. The table between him and Kim is loaded with various other half-finished all-day breakfast offerings: flapjacks and french toast and home fries.
Kim takes a long drink of her water, the ice cubes rattling, then sets down the glass. She idly pokes at a slice of french toast, but then lowers her fork, laying it down on her plate.
“Better now?” Jimmy says. “Not thinking about the you-know-what?”
Kim makes a small scoffing noise. “Of course not,” she says. “How could I be?”
He chuckles.
Kim rolls her head around on her neck, and again Jimmy thinks he can hear the crack of her bones, and then she exhales. She rubs her face, the pads of her fingers pressing into her eyelids. Lowers her hands and stares at him blearily.
Jimmy makes a sympathetic face. “All good?”
“Mm,” she says, nodding, and she studies him for a bit. “Budge up.” She slides around the booth toward him, then settles her head onto his shoulder, and says, “Okay if I sleep here?”
“Okay,” he says softly. “I’ll eat all the rest of this food by myself, though.”
“Like to see you try,” Kim murmurs into his shoulder, and he chuckles. After a moment, she shifts, lifting her head up, though she’s still leaning against him.
They sit together like that in silence, staring out at the other tables. At the back of Jimmy’s mind, a quiet voice reminds him of the dwindling days left before his final public speaking presentation, a voice that sounds like a knuckle tapping gently on glass—soon, soon, soon, it seems to say, hollow and rhythmic.
But instead, he stares at a table of middle-aged guys: old friends, he thinks, from high school or college. They look like they were athletes back in the day, now gone to seed. Except the one closest, whose biceps still burst from his sleeves as he crosses his arms over his chest. The vein in his neck is visible even from here.
And a smile grows on Jimmy’s face. He jostles Kim gently, then points over at the guy, hand low above the table. “See Jean-Claude Van Damme over there?” he murmurs.
Kim looks in the direction. “With the Cobb salad?” she asks.
“Yeah,” Jimmy says, and he looks to her. “Reckon I could take him?”
Kim peers up at him at that, and then she snorts.
He chuckles. “Okay, maybe not, fine,” he says, but he’s thinking about a hypothetical that always drove Marco and the other regulars insane at Arnos, and he shifts so that his arm’s hooked over the back of the booth behind Kim. He darts another glance down to her, then says cockily, “I reckon I could win a fight with any animal, though.”
Kim studies him, clearly already sensing a catch, because instead of playing into it she sidesteps, teasing: “Even a goldfish…?”
“Yeah, easy,” Jimmy says brightly. “I’ll Kevin Kline that thing. Delicious.” He nudges her again. “What about you? Think you could take—like, I dunno, a house cat?”
She frowns, considering it. “I could probably outsmart one if I had to.”
“Right?” Jimmy says. “Exactly. If it’s life or death.”
“Right,” Kim says, and her eyes twinkle, and she relents: “But, any animal?”
“Sure!”
Kim laughs, shaking her head. “Go on then, fine, let’s hear it. A tiger.”
Jimmy shrugs. “I mean, I can shoot it, right?”
“Hah,” Kim says. “Obviously cheating.”
And Jimmy’s really smiling now, a big shit-eating grin. “Cheating?” he says, mock offended. “The tiger can have a gun, too, if the tiger wants a gun.”
“Okay, okay,” Kim says, chuckling. “What if it sneaks up on you?”
“I mean, come on, Kim, we have to agree on terms, right? A staged battle, it’s only fair,” Jimmy says, and he can already hear her groaning when he adds, “Me and the tiger each get time and money to prepare. So I’m coming in there in a full tank, guns blazing, just—” He drives his hand through the air, making sound effects.
“God,” Kim says, and he can feel the vibrations of her laughing against his side. “This is so dumb.”
“If the tiger asks for a tank, it can have one too!” Jimmy says loudly. “Fair’s fair.”
“Okay, okay, I gotcha,” Kim says, and she’s grinning now, too. “So, like, a king cobra—”
“Right—”
“—and me and the snake each get as much time and money as we need to prepare—”
Jimmy nods rapidly. “I love it, I love it.”
“—or, I don’t know, a gorilla—”
“Yes!” Jimmy says, jabbing his finger forward.
“—and you tie a banana to a landmine, or something, throw that onto the battlefield right away—”
“—or a gas mask and some poison gas!” Jimmy says, and he drops his arm down from the back of the booth over Kim’s shoulders. “Yeah, you got it. That’d fuck that monkey right up.”
Kim snorts, pressing her face into his side, shaking her head.
“See? Look out, animal kingdom,” he says softly. “Nothing can stop us.”
And he leans back against the booth, sighing lowly. He stares out at the people eating in the restaurant, Kim a warm weight against his side.
He doesn’t think about all the work waiting for him back at home, just like he’s sure Kim doesn’t think about the bar exam—and it’s just the two of them, propped against each other, watching the other diners, watching the lights of the cars along the street outside, each pretending not to think.
“Enough left for another cup, Jimmy?” Ernie asks, stepping up beside Jimmy in the breakroom kitchenette the next day.
Jimmy swills the remaining coffee around inside the pot and frowns. “Yeah. Dunno if you wanna chance it, though. It’s kinda gross.”
Ernie shrugs and holds out his empty mug.
So Jimmy fills the offered cup. “We need Kim back, really,” he says. “She has the knack. Refuses to teach me.” He makes a tsking noise with his teeth. “But hopefully before she gets her results and leaves us for good, huh?”
Ernie laughs softly, as if not sure how to respond.
“Bar exam’s today, actually,” Jimmy says lightly. He drops down at the table and rubs his eyes. “I mean, day one of two.”
“Oh, wow,” Ernie says. He perches in the chair next to Jimmy. “Two days? Must be tricky.”
“Mm,” Jimmy says, feeling a twinge in his stomach. “I mean, if she’s that stressed?” He whistles.
And Ernie just laughs again, then nods. “Right,” he says. He takes a sip of his coffee, then sets his cup down on the breakroom table, but holds onto it. There’s a soft tinking noise as he taps the porcelain. Jimmy glances at his tie. Little zebras today. “So,” Ernie says, eventually. “Are you two, uh…?” He makes a gesture.
Jimmy takes a quick sip of his coffee. Lowers his mug and shrugs. “Yeah, I mean…” And then he thinks, fuck it, and nods firmly. “Yeah. We are.” Somehow actually saying it makes something swell in his chest, and he grins at Ernie.
“She seems, uh, cool,” Ernie says, smiling back. “She’s pretty.”
“Yeah,” Jimmy says brightly, and he feels warm toward Ernie suddenly, too, like he wants to take the kid out for ice cream or something and just talk for a few hours, but instead he just says, “She is cool, yeah,” and he smiles.
The smile stays on his face for a long time. He keeps forgetting it’s there—and then he catches himself reloading a paper tray or putting in an order with the printer and grinning.
He doesn’t end up hearing from Kim at all that day. He’d awoken that morning to find her already gone, though it wasn’t even light out yet, and he’d showered and dressed then caught an early bus into the office—the first time he’d made it to the breakroom before the others in weeks. He’d cracked open a textbook and tried to jot down some notes, sitting there, head in his hand.
They rehearse persuasive strategies in his public speaking course that evening, poor Ellis sweating and struggling at the front of the group. Afterwards, Jimmy goes to the library, printing off a sample speech from one of the library computers, and then riding the bus home again, the vibrations drifting from the window through his skull.
That night, he’s inside the convention center, an enormous room filled with row after row of desks, each topped with a blue book. The blue dots of the blue books go on and on so far he can’t see the end of them. He tries to find his space, looking for his name on the sheets, but none of the names are his—though he can’t exactly read them anyway. It’s just dense black writing, scribbled shorthand.
In the distance he sees his mother walking between the desk rows, stopping and pausing like she would stop and pause on their trips when he was a kid, pointing to something, whispering some deduction about the old man across the street or the woman down the grocery aisle.
She slows and starts now, flitteringly, like a butterfly.
Behind him, he can hear a hollow knocking sound, a knuckle on glass. He turns back, but there’s nothing there—just more blue books and more brown desks, on and on into darkness.
And then the knocking is behind him again—soon—and he jerks around, and his mother is Kim, sitting with her back to him at a distant table, her head in her hand, asleep—and he starts rushing to her—soon, soon—and the knocking is growing louder, and louder, and loud—
He wakes up. He’s twisted in his bed, tangled in the sheets. He peels his face from the damp pillow and looks at his bedside clock: three-thirty. He exhales.
Then, loud: another knock at his door.
What? he thinks, still sleep-thick, wiping a hand over his face and peering into the darkness. He reaches for his lamp and thumbs it on, spilling yellow light through the apartment, bringing the real world back into focus.
Another hollow knock. Jimmy slips out of bed and pads over to the door, sliding the chain off the hook and then opening it.
Kim stands in the threshold, dark under the landing, and behind her all the hazing streetlamps and the quiet buzzing of the street. She doesn’t say anything, just twists past him and into his apartment. He closes the door behind her and turns to face the room.
“Sorry, I was—” he starts, and he leans his back against the door and wipes the base of his palm over his damp bangs. Kim’s standing in his kitchen, staring at seemingly nothing, frozen. She’s wearing one of the old shirts she sleeps in, but with jeans, like she just threw them on before coming here. “Jesus, Kim, is everything okay?”
She nods slowly.
“How’d it go?” he asks.
And she looks to him now, eyes meeting his. “Hm?”
“Don’t tell me you walked here, again,” he says, weakly, but as soon as he’s finished saying it, Kim tosses her car keys onto his tiny kitchen table, where they land, skittering, on the wood.
And then she moves to him fluidly, hands coming up to his chest, palms cold through the worn fabric of his shirt. She kisses him hard, and her lips are cold, too, nearly frozen, and then she pulls back. In her shoes, with him barefoot, she’s almost as tall as him. She lays her forehead on his own, breathing surprisingly heavily.
“Went well, huh?” Jimmy murmurs, lowering his hands to her waist and resting them there.
And she’s kissing him again, hard and choppy, arrhythmic, her hands fisting in his shirt. She pulls him closer briefly and then presses him back against the door, and his hipbone hits the door handle with a sharp burst of pain. He grunts, and she releases his shirt, the cotton loose and stretched, and slips a hand down over his stomach and beneath his boxers.
“Oh, hello,” he says, chuckling and smiling at her, but Kim doesn’t smile back.
She starts to move her palm over him, dry and rough and almost painful. He hisses, drawing his hips back, but she keeps going, faster and and rougher and now definitely painful, sandpaper on his skin, and Jimmy grabs her wrist.
“Kim,” he says, tightening his grip. “Kim, Kim.”
And then she looks up and seems to actually see him again. Her face breaks, suddenly opening, and he knows at once that the exam didn’t go well after all.
She folds into the crook of his neck, tucking her cold forehead into the sweat damp corner of skin. He presses his hand to her hair and then stands there, frozen, as Kim starts silently shaking, violent tremors that seem to run out of her and through his own skin. Gasps that he can feel against his neck but can’t hear.
He feels like he’s back in that dream again, and the only sound around him is the hollow thudding of some distant hand. He knows that this time it’s just his own heart in his ears, and that the rest of the world is quiet. So he leans against the door and presses Kim closer to him, his lips moving in silent patterns, his thumb tracing soft words on her spine.
Some time later, she pulls back.
He loosens his hold and peers into her eyes. “What happened?” he murmurs.
Kim draws away from him, and he drops his arms. She sits down at his kitchen table, staring at the wooden surface, expression flat. Jimmy looks to his cupboards, wishing he had tea, wishing had something other than beer and coffee. He fills a glass with water and sets it down in front of her, then heads to the bedroom. Spots his jeans on the floor and pulls them on quickly, then drags a spare chair back with him and wedges himself into the corner of the table, opposite Kim.
They sit for minutes in silence, until Kim reaches for the glass of water and takes a long drink then sets it down.
“What happened?” Jimmy asks again, studying her face. She doesn’t look at him.
“I fucked it up,” Kim whispers, eyes drilling into the wooden surface.
He slowly shakes his head, back and forth. Then he just says, “How?”
And she looks at him now, almost in surprise. “How?”
He shrugs, but gives her a small smile. “Yeah,” he say easily. “How’d you fuck it up?”
She just exhales slowly. Her eyes are wide, as if she’s seeing something really far away. “God, Jimmy, d’you know, I can’t even remember what the questions were now.” She flexes her right hand, stretching out her fingers then relaxing them. “But I knew it would happen. I blanked. First question, I’m reading it, and I guess I psyched myself out because I just”—she raises her eyebrows, as if stunned at herself—“I didn’t know. I didn’t know any of it.”
Jimmy frowns. He shifts closer. “What did you do?”
She looks down at her hand now, still flexing her fingers. “I waited,” she says simply. Another finger flex. “And waited. For half an hour. And hoped that I’d remember something.”
“And did you?”
Eventually, she nods. “Yes, but—”
“So, that’s not so bad—”
“—but after lunch I ran over time for an answer, I was so caught up writing I didn’t even hear the bells, I used up half the time for the next essay, so I had to—” and he can see her breathing, faster and faster.
He rests a hand on hers. “Kim,” he says.
She meets his eyes.
“You need to sleep,” he says lightly. He glances over at the clock. “It’s almost four.”
She makes a low, groaning noise.
He squeezes her hand. “Want me to drive you home?”
“Home?” she says, brow creasing.
Jimmy wonders how it’s possible that she still has to go through another full day of this. Still has to sit down again in that room in—hell, in just a few hours. “I dunno how long it takes to get to the convention center from here,” he murmurs, “and it’s all the way across town.”
“Oh,” she says, and then she nods. “Right. Okay.”
“Okay,” he repeats.
He picks up her keys from the table, and they head out to her car, moving slowly across the complex and then settling into the darkened interior of Kim’s Taurus. Jimmy clicks his seatbelt on and turns to her.
“Don't worry if you fall asleep on the way, I’ll just carry you inside, okay? Like Rambo,” he says, doing half-hearted bicep flex before he turns the key in the ignition.
“Hah,” Kim says softly. She leans against the passenger window, her forehead pressed to the glass.
They drive through the empty city streets, past the vacant taxis and colorful delivery trucks of early morning, the stereo off and the wheels humming over the road. Jimmy darts glances sideways every so often, but Kim doesn’t sleep.
She just sits there, eyes open, head against the glass.
The next day, Jimmy waits in the evening light of the city plaza outside the convention center. He sits on one of the bright blue benches, holding a cooling coffee in one hand and a warming beer in the other. The beer’s in a brown bag, and condensation dampens the paper, seeping into his slacks before he notices and holds the bottle off to one side.
Eventually, people start to emerge from the doors. Some are whooping and laughing and yelling to each other, but most are just worn-out zombies, and Kim is definitely one of the latter when he spots her—a rush of blonde hair between all the stooped heads. She moves with the masses, almost wayless.
“Kim!” he calls, and he trots over to her on the edge of the drifting crowd.
She looks up at him blankly, and then gives him a small smile.
And Jimmy feels a bit stupid now, but he draws her away from the flow of the others. “Couple of options,” he says, holding out the coffee, then the beer, then the coffee again.
Eventually, she reaches for the coffee, fingers covering his as she takes it slowly. “Thank you.”
“Congratulations,” he says. “Thought you might want to celebrate, you know?”
She nods, then glances down at the coffee in her hand as if already surprised to discover it there.
Jimmy touches her arm gently. “You okay?”
She nods again. She stands there, folds her lips inward, then says: “I think I’m just empty.”
Jimmy makes a soft noise. He looks out toward the thinning crowd then back to Kim. “Where’re you parked?”
Kim points, and they head in that direction, following the flow of the others again. She bumps into his arm a couple of times as they move in between groups of sluggish people, past the bright, chlorine-scented fountain and out into the parking lot, where Jimmy spots Kim’s car and redirects her, nudging into her side.
She gets into the passenger seat without saying anything. Just sits there and hands him over the keys and lowers her head against the window again, and it’s like nothing has changed since the night before—except, somehow, she looks even more hopeless having finished the exam than she did with it still ahead. Loose hairs spill from her bun. She doesn’t brush them from her face. Her eyes are glazed.
Jimmy stashes the unopened beer over in the backseat with the others, then slips the key into the ignition. But he lets it go, laying his hand on his knee. He tilts his head and studies her. “What are you thinking about?”
Kim makes a soft humming noise. “Sleep.”
He chuckles. “Yeah.” But he still doesn’t turn the keys, and Kim doesn’t close her eyes, either. “How’d today go?” he says. “Better?”
Kim just shrugs.
Jimmy doesn’t say anything for a long time, and then he exhales. “Home and sleep, then?” he says again, helplessly.
“God, yes,” Kim says, finally closing her eyes, and Jimmy cranks the keys—but then her eyes snap open again. “No,” she says, putting her hand out over his on the gearstick. “Not yet. Let’s…”
He shifts back into neutral, sitting there with the car idling. “No?”
“No,” Kim says softly. “God, I’m so damned tired, I can’t sleep. Let’s just…” She tips her head back against the headrest, eyes closed. Jimmy wonders what she’s picturing, but he doesn’t have to wonder for very long, because she says, “Let’s just go. Run away…make a new life.”
“Yeah?” Jimmy says softly.
She smiles slightly. “Mm,” she hums. “Over the border.”
“All right,” he says.
She’s silent for a time, then she says, “I’ll sell tables.”
Jimmy blinks. “Tables?”
“Sure, I’ll learn to make ‘em,” Kim murmurs, nestling her head back into the headrest. “How hard can it be? Flat top, four legs. Boom.” She opens her eyes and looks at him. “And you…you can catch fish.”
Jimmy makes a little face. “Fish?”
“Or I’ll catch the fish, too,” Kim says mildly. “I’ll be like that old man. Out there with the fish. Out on the water.”
Jimmy chuckles. “Okay.”
Kim makes a distant humming sound, staring out through the front window. And then, wistfully: “I can already hear the waves.”
“I think that’s blood in your ears,” Jimmy says. He laughs, and Kim joins in softly. “All right,” he says. “Yeah, let’s go somewhere.” He puts the car back in first gear and takes his hands off the wheel and holds them up to her. “Tell me where to go.”
Kim waves a hand. “Just go.”
So Jimmy edges onto the accelerator and off the clutch and they drift forward, toward the line of blue parking bollards—
“No, no, stop,” Kim says, laughing, reaching over to grip his thigh, and he hits the brakes.
“No?” he says, hands still up. “Not go?”
“Not go, not go,” she says, her laughter softening, and she releases his leg. “Not that way.”
“Okay, okay,” Jimmy says. “Which way?”
And she makes a show of peering at the parking lot around them. It’s slowly emptying. “All right, backwards this time—”
“Got it,” Jimmy says, and he wedges the gearshift into reverse then starts rolling backwards, hands off the wheel, toward the line of cars behind them. “Which way—”
“Left, left!” Kim says, reaching over—
He grabs the wheel and whips the car suddenly to the left, then slams on the brakes, tyres screeching. He grins over at her.
A couple of people stare at them from inside a nearby car. Kim’s Taurus is stopped diagonally across a line of empty parking spaces, still idling in place. At the sight of the bystanders’ stunned faces, Jimmy waves a polite hand and shifts back into first gear and cruises away, through the rows of the parking lot and out onto the street.
“Jesus, you’re a shit driver,” Kim says.
“Well, you know, my dad was a brick,” Jimmy says, grinning at her, but he slows to a slightly more careful stop at a set of red lights.
As they wait, he leans over and hunts through the glovebox for a cassette. He pops one into the player and slowly turns the volume up, nodding his head along, grinning. Kim’s lips twitch as he cranks it higher and higher.
Someone behind them honks—the light’s on green—and Jimmy jams down the accelerator, getting out ahead of everyone and then shifting in front of the cars in the next lane. He sees a freeway onramp coming up, and he takes it.
The traffic is moving smoothly, somehow, and Jimmy drifts between it all, following the roads out to the edge of the city. He turns the stereo up even louder, heavy guitars groaning against the cheap speakers.
He doesn’t tell Kim that he has a speech to do tomorrow night, he doesn’t tell her that it’s worth half his grade and that he still has so much work to do, work that he’s been putting off and putting off—
He just floors it, faster and faster, passing the other cars, curving in between lanes as Kim leans back beside him, glancing at him with bright eyes that flash beneath the street lamps.
Then the traffic thins completely, and the freeway opens before them. Kim cranks her window, and Jimmy winds his down, too. The wind whips through the car, snapping across the air like electricity. His bangs flutter against his forehead and into his eyes. Kim’s hair, freed from its bun, curls around her head, sticking to her lips as she smiles, but she just peels the threads away again and again, tucking gold behind her ears.
Out the front window, Jimmy sees the blinking lights of a plane coming in to land, low over the freeway and down toward the airport. And he grins—yes.
They drive on, the songs on the tape getting louder even though Jimmy hasn’t touched the volume. He lifts his left hand from the wheel and holds it out the window, flattening his fingers and palm. It feels like he should be able to stop the whole car with just this, just this one hand, and he cups the air then releases it, cups then releases it. The wind hits his forearm, fluttering like wings.
In the distance, the dark mountains don’t seem to move at all. Streetlights flash past in bursts of noise, rushing fragments of sound, and the wind boxes his left ear, hollow.
Out the window, he weaves his hand up and down. The air feels like a waterfall, like he’s shaping it with his palm, changing the way it flows from the land before them to the land behind them. It feels like they’re driving up into the night—driving up a dark stream, falling through the sky.
Jimmy stops the car in the flat desert beyond the city, on the border of a long trail of lights. He idles for a moment then shuts off the engine, staring at the dark shape of Kim beside him. She doesn’t say anything. She hasn’t spoken since they left the city plaza. Just the two of them beside each other, and the stereo, and the wind.
He opens his door and ducks out into the darkness. Kim follows, stepping off the dirt verge on the side of the road here and over the dry grass. Leaves crunch beneath his shoes, and he descends the sharp embankment, then looks back to make sure Kim’s still behind him—and she is, dropping down swiftly, sure-footed.
He found it here a long time ago, back when he used to come out this way in the evenings, lonely nights at the Ramada Hotel. The enormous fence alongside the airport—with a gap, just there, in the wire.
“We could get through that,” he says quietly, pointing.
Kim looks to him. Her eyes are shining, and she smiles. It blazes on her face.
And Jimmy’s relieved that she understands, that he’s not going to have to explain the idea, like he’d had to with Marco, once, waiting at the edge of a locked railyard. That he just wants to go in there, to be among it all, hidden in the darkness where he doesn’t belong, and everyone moving around him, heading out of the city, off into the night.
But then Kim’s smile falters. She laughs softly, shaking her head. “God, I almost—” she says, and she breathes out, a shaky, stuttering thing. She presses her thumb and forefinger to her eyelids for a moment, then lowers her hand. “Jimmy,” she says warmly.
And he smiles. “Yeah,” he says.
“I—” she says, and she looks to the gap in the fence again. Out on the runway he can see the slowly moving lights of a grounded plane, red and white flashing on the wings.
So Jimmy moves to the fence, feet crunching through the dry grass. He stops short. “Reckon that one’s coming toward us?” he says lightly.
Kim doesn’t say anything.
There’s no warning signs he can see on the fence, but he taps the back of his hand on it tentatively, then, when it seems safe, weaves his fingers through. He stands there, watching the blinking lights until he feels Kim draw up beside him. She threads her fingers between the chainlinks too. He hears her sigh.
The plane turns. The red lights grow brighter and brighter, flickering as they pass wind flags and distant poles, as the plane slowly faces the two of them. There’s a long silence, so long he wonders if there’s something wrong—but then the sudden rush of an engine, loud even from so far away.
Vibrations run through the earth, first gentle and then harder, and Jimmy finds himself stepping backward, as if the plane is going to keep coming and coming and smash through the fence, and the engine groans, and the lights approach and approach and approach, and the ground shakes through his bones—but then, suddenly, the plane lifts from the runway, tugged upward.
And Jimmy keeps moving backward, his feet uneven beneath him and Kim beside him, until he hits the steep embankment, leaning back against the earth and dirt and hard grass as the plane rushes far above them, the lights flashing on its wings and belly, screaming with a mechanical whine that seems to grow louder even as the plane gets further away.
The wind from it hits them late, shaking the fence, the wire creaking.
Jimmy twists onto his side, looking at Kim, and she's staring up at the empty sky, hair wild around her face. He feels a humming beneath his skin, like electricity, like he’s drunk. He laughs deliriously, and shakes his head, and says her name.
And he wants to say something else—wants to tell her that she did it, that she’s done with it all now, and shouldn’t she be happier, shouldn’t she be screaming—but she’s still not even looking at him—so instead he moves back up to the fence and grabs it and shouts for her, his voice cracked and sharp, and he almost thinks he can hear it echoing back to him, rolling over the runways.
Beside him now: Kim, her hands on the fence, too.
Jimmy calls out to the planes again, still no words, just harsh sounds and the maybe-echo of his voice over the cement. He laughs, and that seems to bounce back to him, too, buoyant.
And he looks to Kim again—at her eyes, dark and shadowed but still blazing with some unknown light, at her lips that fall open and then freeze—
And he wants to say: do it, Kim, for god’s sake just do it—shout, and scream, and break through this damn fence right now, because you’ve been at this for years, years and years with no break and now it’s done—so come running over these dark runways, and get caught, and talk your way out of it with me and then scream and then run some more, hand in hand.
But out near the buildings now: smaller lights, like cars.
And Kim points to them.
Jimmy lets himself buy into the game of it all, lets himself get caught up, even though there’s probably no way anyone could have seen them or heard them. He tugs on Kim’s hand and feels that childish rush of fear and adrenaline, and he laughs brightly, giddily, and the two of them scramble up the dirt bank and back to her car.
“Shh—shh,” Kim hisses, wrestling with her key in the lock. Jimmy waits beside her, silent, but she glares over at him anyway. “Shh!”
He holds up his palms, grinning. She manages to wrench the door open, and as they move through the threshold he presses his hand into her back, and with his other he shuts the door behind them, and it slams—
“Shh!” Kim hisses again. “Ellen—”
“Hi, Ellen!” Jimmy calls out, leaning forward, and Kim presses her hand to his mouth, looking down toward her roommate’s room. After a beat of silence, Jimmy nips at her palm, and she lifts her hand away and grins, then she kisses him, laughing against his lips.
They move slowly toward Kim’s bedroom, trying to be quiet, but Jimmy hits his shin into the coffee table and yelps, and Kim giggles, holding him upright as he grabs onto his leg.
“No, go on without me—” Jimmy groans, pretending to push Kim away.
“Shh, she’s gonna wake up—” Kim says, tugging on his arm
“She’s fine, let her hear—”
“You don’t have to look her in the eye and ask for rent,” Kim says, but she’s grinning, and she finds his wrists and grabs them, one in each hand, pulling him back to the bedroom.
Jimmy stumbles after her, trying to keep his feet under him. “Wait—wait—”
And then they’re through the door. Kim pushes him up against the post-it note wall. The papers crunch up beneath his back, crinkling, and Jimmy chuckles into her mouth.
“Mmm—hang on,” he says, turning his head, and he reaches over to peel off a yellow one, but a dozen more come with it, a thread of snaking post-its.
Kim gasps solemnly. “Oh no,” she whispers, dragging out the words. “There goes comm prop.”
Jimmy twitches his hand, but the chain dangles, stuck to his finger.
She reaches out and snags it from him, tossing the ribbon of yellow behind her and murmuring, “I’m never gonna need that, anyway.”
Then she’s kissing him again, pressing her thigh up between his, and Jimmy grabs her hips, digging his fingers into the soft flesh beneath her jeans. She tugs at his button-up, freeing it from his pants and then pulling it over his head—
“Stop—” Jimmy gasps, and he reaches for his collar, because he’s still wearing his tie from work, somehow, but Kim slows his hands. She weaves the red-striped fabric through her fingers, then pulls him toward the bed, tugging gently.
He falls on top of her, knees either side of her hips, and Kim grunts.
“You good?” he asks, pushing himself up.
Kim nods, staring at him. She loosens his tie slowly, unthreading the fabric, and then slips it over his head, dragging the rest of his shirt with it and throwing it all across the room. Jimmy watches his clothes land and then turns back to Kim, and she reaches for him, threading her fingers through his shirt-mussed hair, smoothing it out, and then pulling him down to kiss her. “Jimmy,” she murmurs, against his lips.
“Hey—” Jimmy murmurs, and then he pulls back, smiling. “What happened to quiet, huh? You’re—mmph”—he leans down, kisses her again—“throwing me all over the place.” He runs his fingers up beneath Kim’s shirt, and then he’s pulling it over her head, tossing it away to join his clothes.
“You were right,” she says, sitting up a little so he can undo the clasp of her bra. “She’ll live.” And Kim stares down at his hands as he trails his fingers back around to the front of her chest and slips her bra off.
“Mhm,” Jimmy says, softly. “But is that really living?” He rubs his thumb over a nipple, tracing little circles around it as it hardens, his mouth hanging open. And he settles back, still straddling Kim’s hips, and moves on to the other one, her chest rising and falling as they both watch his hands, dark against her pale breasts.
“Think she’s got a little crush on you, you know,” Kim murmurs, after a while. She plays with the edge of his slacks, pulling them out and then letting the fabric lightly flick back onto the skin of his stomach.
Jimmy laughs. “Oh yeah?” He shakes his head. “I dunno, always bragging about the law stuff? Reckon she’s got one on you.” He grins, lifting himself off Kim and rolling away so they can each shimmy out of their pants. “And I mean, come on, who wouldn’t?” he says lightly, as he moves back, waiting for her to throw her jeans aside and then settling back between her legs. “Look at you,” he says, staring down at her on the bedspread, the yellow light pooling in the hollows of her chest, in the rising peaks of her clavicle. He leans down to place a kiss directly on her breastbone, and then murmurs into it: “Wow.”
“Shut up,” Kim says, and she tugs at his hair, pulling his head up to hers. She kisses him for a minute, then shifts her hips up, reaching between them. “C’mon, hurry up.”
“Yeah,” Jimmy says, grinning. “Okay, yeah, I’m hurrying.” He positions himself, then sinks into her slowly and sighs, squeezing his eyes shut, pressing his forehead to hers. He holds still for a moment and exhales, breathing heavily, and says, “God, Kim, I could never…” He grunts, and clenches his teeth, and then starts moving. “You’re…I—” but he catches himself.
He swallows the next two words, kissing her instead.
Jimmy wakes up first the next morning. He turns over in bed to see Kim curled toward him, her face relaxed and soft, glowing with the light that spills through the blinds they forgot to close last night. Her hair falls across the pillow, gossamer threads that dangle over her cheeks and move gently with her breath. Jimmy feels a tugging in his stomach, and he wants to reach out and rub a curl of hair between the pads of his fingers, but he doesn’t.
Eventually, he slips out of bed, hunting for his clothes and then pulling them on as he moves softly out into the living room. He shuts the door behind him with a gentle click, and picks up Kim’s phone to call HHM, leaving a message to say that he’s off sick, talking at just above a whisper and standing as far away from her door as the cord will let him.
He’d dropped his backpack down by the door last night, and he grabs it now, hunting through for his public speaking notes and the sample speech he’d printed out weeks ago. He reads over it for a while, then gets up again, setting the coffee going, searching through the fridge for anything to eat. He finds a half-finished pizza from the last time he was here, still in the box, and he takes that with his coffee back into the living room.
A little while later, Ellen emerges, already dressed for class, her bag slung over her shoulder. She glances at Jimmy, then at Kim’s closed door, and her face softens. “She okay?”
Jimmy nods. “Sleeping,” he says. “She was running on fumes, you know?”
And for a moment he thinks he sees something like fear in Ellen’s face, but she shakes it away. She looks down at the pizza. “Can I have a slice?”
“Go for it,” Jimmy says, and he holds out the box.
She takes a piece, eating it in snatched bites while she finishes getting ready: packing up a sandwich, filling a travel cup with coffee, and then heading out the door.
And Jimmy works, reading over the sample speech, hunting around for all his notes, trying to mould everything into some kind of cohesive shape with style and structure and persuasive strategies to make Professor Reiss happy. He slowly finishes the pizza and writes, turning over sheet after sheet.
At noon, when Kim still hasn’t emerged, he heads to the kitchen and puts on a fresh pot of coffee. Rifles in her junk drawer for some menus. Flicks through a few idly, then he sets them on the counter and heads towards her room.
He opens her door carefully, peering inside. She’s still asleep, curled up under the covers, and after getting the sun all morning it’s hot, almost stuffy, so he pads over to the thermostat and adjusts the temperature a little then turns around.
Kim’s eyes are wide open, gazing at nothing.
“Oh! You’re up,” he says dumbly. He smiles. “Morning—well, almost.”
Kim just nods, still not looking at him. She’s staring at the post-it wall, at the ribbons of color, and he turns between it and her and then gives a soft laugh.
“Everything okay?” he asks. He turns to the wall again. He looks at the crumpled paper from last night, at the missing strand of yellow notes. He looks at the incomprehensible letters that cover the colors, abbreviations and secret meanings. Somehow containing everything she needs to know.
When he turns back, Kim’s eyes are finally on him.
Her pupils shift between his own, left and right, careful precise movements, like she’s counting something down. Her gaze is dark and cold.
Somehow it’s as if she’s still not really looking at him at all.
But her words are definitely meant for him. They crack through the room like thunder, flashing bright before he hears them: “Why are you lying to me?”
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