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"Saul Goodman."
“That isn’t your real name.”
He doesn’t know what to make of her. Her lips are parted, painted shimmery mauve, but her jaw is set; he looks at her eyes but not into them. Her shoulders are clenched up to her earlobes; her shoes are half a size too large.
She’s right. It isn’t his real name.
“Fair enough,” he chuckles. “It’s – McGill. I’m sure you’ve done your research.”
“I have.” She doesn’t return the favor of laughing politely about his dead brother. Fair enough, again. “You changed your name in ‘04. I’m sure I’ve been filled in as to why – the brother, the girlfriend. She’s running for district attorney in Santa Fe now. That won’t be a problem, I assume?”
“I – no.” And he doesn’t want to address this. He doesn’t want to touch this with a ten-foot pole. The deeper it goes, the worse it gets; if he so much as touches Kim’s influence on his own career, it’ll all combust. He sets his own jaw, a mirror image to hers; he pretends it’s nothing. Because it isn’t. It isn’t anything. “She and I – no. We have an agreement.”
“Fine.” She swallows half the sentence; she sounds determined. “I won’t –”
“No.” It’s choked coming out. “It won’t be a problem.”
“Fine.” She finally offers her hand. Her palms are smooth; too moisturized, actually, like Howard’s hands – carefully avoidant. The hands of someone who has chosen not to work any kind of manual labor, out of preference, not necessity, or at least, that's what she wants people to think. “Lydia Rodarte-Quayle. What is your real name? I know, of course, but I’d like to hear it from you.”
“Jimmy McGill.”
She smirks in response; she knew, of course. If Fring didn’t tell her, then Mike did. But he focuses on the hardly-noticeable parallel marks between her brows; he focuses on her white-knuckle grip on the pen in her hand, the half-inch of grey at her temples, the half-inch of space at the backs of her heels. He remembers how Kim used to buy her heels half a size too big: Your feet swell when you’re standing all day, it’s common knowledge to size up when you’re in court. He looks at her white knuckles and the chain-link charm bracelet at her knobby wrist; the set of her jaw, the way she looks as if she might break apart, and he thinks.
He thinks: I’d like to take her apart before she breaks.
He thinks: Or, she could take me.
He doesn’t know. And that’s what excites him.
She says, “I wanted to hear you say it yourself,” and her handshake is self-consciously brisk, while his is clammy; he cringes when she breaks it off half a beat too soon. “It’s a pleasure doing business with you.”
*
“Connecticut,” he says. The bar is bright and dark and loud around them. The tequila is going straight to both their heads; they plied it off a guy with twice the ego he should've had, and it almost felt good; it almost felt like it used to.
She clenches. Again. He’s gotten so good at noticing when she clenches. “Not quite,” she says, and he tips his head back, laughing.
“Close enough,” he says. “Drink.”
She does, ruefully, rolling her eyes as she does. When she slams her shot glass down on the table, he cocks his own head to the side, all faux innocence. Because he’s curious — actually curious, not just playing along. There was something to the way she denied it that made him wonder about the truth. The louder people are when they deny it; the closer it is to being spot on. He knows this, but. “Not exactly?”
She closes her eyes. “Long story,” she says. Knuckles white on her glass again. He takes all of it in for a moment: her pencil skirt, too tight; her grip, too firm; her hair, too straight; her teeth, too white. Nothing is as it should be if his sources are right about her (roughneck New England; group home; U of Conn; white knuckles from the very start) and everything makes him wonder.
And still, he wonders: isn’t it the same, on her side of the table? The fuchsia pocket square, the lavender oxford, the Crest Whitestrip smile, the Pagalacci demeanor? Isn’t it all a farce, to some degree?
“Chicago,” he says. “Or, well — the Chicago suburbs. I only guessed Connecticut because of your — hair.”
“My hair,” she repeats.
“The bun. It’s too,” and he gestures with one finger in a cyclone motion, “tight. Trust me.”
Her jaw clenches again; then she reaches behind her head and undoes her hair, shaking it out over her shoulders, and flashes him a dazzling fake smile as she does it. It makes his whole body tense; it makes his cock throb; it makes him white out for a moment, if only just — wondering. “Pioneer Valley,” she says. “Western Massachusetts. Nice of you to make the distinction."
It’s not so hard to lean in and grin. There’s no real space between them; he doesn’t kiss her, but he says it with half a centimeter still between them, his hand high up on her thigh under the booth: “Would you like to come home with me?”
She laughs in a huff between her teeth; he feels her quad release the tension she’s been holding in. “I thought you’d never ask,” she says, and he sucks in a tense new breath of his own.
*
He drives.
He’s used to this, and yet he’s not. Kim only let him drive when she needed to get so drunk she let go of everything. Near the end, that was most nights. But driving with another woman in the passenger seat still feels foreign enough to have him on edge; still feels new enough to make him take note. She isn’t vacant, she doesn’t let herself fall at ease the way Kim did. Maybe that’s learned; maybe that’s innate. Frankly, all he knows right now is that she’s Gus Fring’s right-hand woman and she’s typically wound tight enough to catch a knife between her front teeth. The former would, realistically, beget the latter. He doesn’t know why he’s surprised.
He pulls up to his own condo, and parks in the carport; he takes a moment before he exhales. Waits for her to inhale and take over, kiss the bad idea out of him or simply diffuse the moment by tumbling forward into whatever stupid thing they do next, all of her own accord. But she’s smarter than he is. She tips her head back against the head rest of his Cadillac and she says, “Go on.”
He chews the inside of his cheek. Weighs the consequences. “I plead the fifth."
“Bullshit,” she says. “Incriminate yourself. I’d like to hear it.”
He laughs. Despite himself. Despite it all. He thinks, maybe, he could incriminate himself in front of this one.
“My brother had me disbarred,” he says. “That’s why I changed my name. I was tired of being — a McGill.”
In the dim lit of the carport, she lifts a shoulder in a half-shrug, tips her head to the side, makes him want to kiss her. “Everyone’s running from something,” she says. “Yours could be worse.”
He laughs, tips his chin down and sees the tension fall out of her posture. He’s studied Kevin Costner enough to know that this one’s a winner. “Could it be?”
He waits to be kissed. When she does, she laughs against his mouth, digs her nails gently into his forearm, makes him strain against his seatbelt before he undoes it. “Yeah,” she says as she draws away. “It could be much worse.”
He believes her.