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The car was practically bouncing with how much Jesse was jiggling his leg. It was frankly irritating Mike. He gave Jesse a dirty look from the corner of his eye.
Jesse noticed him and rolled his neck. “What?” he asked curtly.
Mike didn’t say anything to begin with, so he felt he owed Jesse no response. He put his full attention onto the road ahead.
“What, dude? Just say it! You clearly got something to say!” Jesse was aggravated by Mike’s tendency to go mute.
“Have a cigarette,” Mike suggested, breaking his no smoking rule for the second time. It may calm the kid down in the absence of stronger substances.
Jesse squinted at him, wondering if this was some kind of test. “What?”
“Just the one and never again,” Mike slowly instructed him, not looking away from the road.
“Alright,” Jesse mumbled and pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket. This guy was even harder to understand than Mr. White. Jesse lit his cigarette and rolled his window down slightly. He took a drag and leaned back in his seat. He felt Mike looking at him again through the rearview mirror. “What?” he complained, calmer than last time.
Mike looked back at the road and then briefly back at Jesse through the mirror. “You remind me of someone,” he reticently admitted.
“Yeah?” Jesse leaned closer towards Mike, hoping to find out more.
Mike responded how he responded to most things; with silence.
Jesse rolled his eyes and leaned his head against the headrest. He took another drag and let some ash out the window. “Does he look like me…?” he asked, fishing for some more information.
“No,” Mike answered firmly.
Jesse sighed again and jiggled his leg even more energetically. “Does he talk like me…?” he searched for some kind of connection.
“No,” Mike replied bluntly.
“Was he… a meth head?” Jesse cynically guessed, bitterness in his tone.
“No.”
“Oh, come on, yo! This is like a game of 21 Questions!” Jesse said with exasperation.
Mike tried not to smirk. The kid was jonesing and needed a distraction, Mike figured this could work. “We were associates.”
“Yeah?” Jesse’s eyes lit up, thrilled by the chance of having an actual conversation. “You guys do this kinda thing,” he gestured between them and the road ahead, “or…” he trailed off.
“No. Something different.” Although Nacho was long dead, Mike didn’t wish to go into too much detail.
“What was his name?” Jesse asked out of pure curiosity.
Mike looked at Jesse out of the corner of his eye and then back at the road. “Nacho.”
“Nacho?” Jesse laughed. “Like, his name?”
“Yeah, like his name…”
Jesse chuckled slightly and tapped some ash out of the window. “He really like nachos or something?”
“No… it was short for something,” Mike almost felt as though he was talking to Kaylee.
Jesse furrowed his brow and chuckled again, taking another drag from his cigarette. He couldn’t think of what Nacho could be short for, and he figured Mike wouldn’t tell him. “So this Nacho guy, what was he like?”
Mike sighed, remembering the moment Nacho shot himself. All of that could have been avoided if he’d let Hector be. “He was smart… but he made some stupid decisions.”
“You think I’m smart?” Jesse said with a smirk.
“No,” Mike immediately replied. “I said he was smart.”
“Yeah… but you said I reminded you of him.” Jesse flicked his cigarette butt out of the window and breathed out the final bit of smoke.
“I didn’t say what parts of you reminded me of him,” Mike said dryly.
Jesse rolled his eyes playfully and slumped back into his seat. It felt nice to know he reminded Mike of someone. He never reminded Mr. White of anyone. Jesse assumed Mr. White never thought of him at all. Maybe Mike did though… Jesse looked back at Mike and then realised something. “Wait… so, you’re talking past tense?” Normally past tense with a former co-worker didn’t mean anything, but in this business it did.
Mike nodded slightly.
Jesse sat up more in his seat. “So what happened to him?!”
A moment of silence passed. “He got shot in the head.”
Jesse’s leg abruptly stopped jiggling.
“Damn…” Jesse sighed, lounging back and looking up at the car’s roof. He needed a moment to process this. “So, like, who shot him?” he asked a few seconds later.
That was for Mike to know and for Jesse not to find out. Mike stayed silent and stony faced.
Jesse squinted at him, aggravated that he wouldn’t finish the story. “…Was it you?” he hesitantly guessed, filling in the blanks.
“No!” Mike looked away from the road briefly to give Jesse a slight scowl.
“All right, geez,” Jesse scoffed. “So who was it?”
Mike said nothing, and his face returned to having no expression.
After a minute or so, Jesse gave up and rolled his eyes, not so playfully this time. “Are you, like, tryna teach me a lesson or something?”
“Kid, I’m not trying to teach you anything.”