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There’s a succinct way to describe the way his mouth tastes now: bitter. In the literal sense, like he’s always just coming off of throwing up stomach bile. Sure, he feels plenty bitter about other matters of his life, but the taste in his mouth is literal. There's nothing metaphorical about it.
After Kim left him that night, after she turned on her heel and stormed into the bedroom, audibly crying, his mouth tasted like blood. He only realized after she ran out of the door and he followed her halfway down the stairs that he had bitten his tongue. He was bleeding. When he opened his mouth to plead for her to stay, pinky-red blood dribbled onto his chin.
He didn’t wash his mouth out that night. He didn’t do anything besides sit on the couch and stare at the dark TV, willing Kim to walk back inside and fall into his arms and say, I thought about it, Jimmy, and I think we can fix this. And he would say, he knows he would have said this, he knew then he would have said it, I’ll do anything, anything. Tell me what you want me to change and consider it done. Let me fix this.
But Kim never came back. And she didn’t pick up her phone the next day. Jimmy didn’t leave a voicemail – the box was disconnected.
----
The thing is, he knows he’s a fuck up. He tries not to be, and he tries not to know it, but he’s far from an idiot. He knows that he’s a lot of things – smooth, smart, swift – but he’s a fuck up, too. Chuck told him that for years. Eventually, it started to stick.
He tried really, really hard not to fumble with Kim. He wanted her to be the one piece of his life that he didn’t irreparably destroy.
He would die for her, if she asked him to. He was ready to do it on that horrible night when everything fell apart, when Howard laid at their feet and Lalo stood over his body. When there was a gun in their face and Jimmy volunteered Kim to go, hoping and praying that she would get the fuck out of Albuquerque.
And then she didn’t. And he thought that meant something. He thought that meant everything.
----
The first time he has sex with another woman after Kim, it’s painful. They’re at a motel, and it’s pretty disgusting, but he couldn’t bear to do it in the apartment where Kim lingers at every corner.
When he still practiced elder law, he used to get stuck at the house of a widow. Her life was pretty sad, actually – children didn’t talk to her, husband was dead, cat was on its way out the door. She needed someone to talk to, and Jimmy wasn’t good at putting his foot down to her, so he listened.
“The worst thing,” she said once about her husband, “is the fact that I always expect him to be in the bed beside me. There’s a split second where I wake up and think he’s there, and then I open my eyes and he’s gone. And I’m alone.”
He thinks about that as he closes his eyes, pretends the woman beneath him is Kim. Similar blonde hair, similar blue eyes, but not quite. Her hair isn’t blonde enough; her eyes aren’t sharp enough. He tries to imagine her, imagine her face, imagine the feel of her waist, but he can’t do that, either. It’s been four months since she left, and he’s starting to forget the way she feels.
He finishes, the woman moans theatrically, and it’s over. He pays her and asks her to shut the door on her way out. He doesn’t kiss her, but he wonders if she would taste the bitterness coating his mouth if he did.
“Call me again, Saul,” she says, winking up at him. Her voice is too breathy.
“Sure,” he says, and they both know he probably will.
The next week, he rents a motel room. He calls her; she comes.
When it’s over, he puts his hands over his face, but he can’t even manage to cry. He just lays there on grungy sheets, praying that if he opens the motel room door, Kim will be on the other side, waiting.
----
He moves out of the apartment shortly after Kim leaves. It was her place, anyway, not his. He takes the fish. He doesn’t tell the next owners that the fridge is brand new.
At first, he sleeps in the office.
“What the hell.” Francesca says when she catches him two nights into it. “Are you sleeping here?”
“No,” he lies. He’s still wearing his boxers and t-shirt, and Francesca glares at him.
“That’s where I draw the line.” She points at the door. “Get out of here, go get a shower, and sleep somewhere that’s not here.”
“I sold the apartment.”
“So get a new place.” Her brow barely creases with pity, but it still creases. “We can go together over lunch.”
“It’s easier to stay here,” he says. He wonders if she can hear what he means: it’s better to be here than to be alone.
“Well, you can’t stay here.” Francesca throws open the door. “So, we’d better start looking.”
She slams the door shut behind her, but he can still hear her storming to her desk.
They go together at lunch. He rents at the shitty apartment complex on the other side of town. It’s all divorcees or husbands kicked out of the house, and he hates it, and Francesca wrinkles her nose at it, but at least there’s running water. It’s too quiet there, but at least he doesn’t glance in the bathroom in the morning and expect to see Kim standing there, drying her hair, tightening her ponytail, smiling over his shoulder.
Sometimes, the grief nearly knocks him over.
Sometimes, he can get ahead of it.
He gets good at getting ahead of it. Really good. He remembers what Mike told them about Howard. One day, they’d wake up and realize they hadn’t even thought of him. He knows he can never forget Kim, but he wants to come pretty damn close.
Eventually, he buys a mansion. He can afford it, and Kim would hate it because it’s ridiculously tacky, so he buys it. He stops sleeping with blondes; he keeps sleeping with prostitutes. He stocks his cabinets with strawberry Nutrigrain bars – Kim’s least favorite flavor. He buys the brand of cologne that Kim made him throw out once because of how sleazy it smells. He decorates his office as garishly as he can and as Francesca can stomach, and imagines how much Kim would laugh at it.
Sometimes, he takes note of how everything that he does revolves around forgetting Kim, which means that everything that he does revolves around Kim. He tries to hate it, but he can’t. He tries to hate her, and it makes him sick. No matter what happens, he can’t hate her. He’ll love her until he’s dead.
He starts drinking a little more. Smokes a little more. Eats stuff that isn’t very good for him. Dresses like a funhouse clown.
And he tries, he tries with everything he can, but he can’t scrub the bitter taste out of his mouth.
----
A year and a half into it, here’s the truth about Jimmy McGill: he’s confined to the early hours of the morning and the late hours of the night. Other than that, he’s effectively dead. Maybe he died the night Kim left. Maybe he died the night Howard was killed. Maybe he died when Chuck killed himself. It doesn’t really matter.
Jimmy McGill is a disaster. Jimmy McGill wakes up in the morning and cries. First thing. Nothing ridiculous and nothing dramatic, especially if there’s a woman in his bed, but he cries. You're always down, Jimmy, Kim told him once, and she was right. He is. He'll be down forever, and every time he thinks of Kim, it's another kick. What can he do?
Thinking about Kim is agony. Every time he does, something tightens in his chest to the point of snapping. So he cries. And then he gets up, dons his headset, and calls Francesca. Jimmy McGill off, Saul Goodman on.
Here’s what’s great about Saul Goodman: nothing, therefore everything. He’s a sleaze ball, which feels good to lean in to. He’s rude. He’s conniving. He’s smart. It’s a cathartic role to slip into, and Jimmy does it easily. He knows he’s more Saul than Jimmy now, that he’s slipped and fallen and everything has shattered, but it makes it easier.
Saul exists from the hours of 6:50 a.m. to 10:50 p.m. After that, he’s hung up beside the flashy suit jackets in the closet and Jimmy McGill takes over again.
That’s when he’s allowed to be sad. That’s when he’s allowed to weep and moan and cry.
And then eventually, he falls asleep. He dreams of Kim, of reaching into thin air and trying to grasp, of gunshots and blood leaking all over fake hardwood floors. Sometimes, he dreams of Lalo killing Howard again. Sometimes, Lalo turns the gun on Kim. Mostly, it's vague shapes and vague colors and sharp images of Kim.
Then his alarm goes off, and he feels the sharp pain in his chest and the tears unsticking behind his eyes, and Jimmy lives out his final moments for the morning.
At 6:50, he gets out of bed. His headset goes on, and Saul Goodman wakes up for the day.
----
A year, six months, and two weeks to the day that Kim left, Jimmy can’t sleep. It was a long day at the office, and the hurt that Kim left him with feels fresh and raw for some reason. He can’t sleep, and his stomach aches too much to eat, and his phones just sitting there, so he picks it up.
He’s not really thinking. He wishes he is, but he isn’t, and that’s what makes him dial the most familiar phone number he ever has. He hopes it hasn’t changed. If she left it as it was, then that means something. That means everything.
It rings once, twice, three times. Four. Five. Six. Before the seventh, the line clicks, and Jimmy can faintly make out something like breathing.
Holy shit. Fuck. There’s Kim, separated by a phone line, alive and breathing. Jimmy’s dreamt so many times that she’s died. He’s woken up in the morning and dreaded hearing about an obituary somewhere. Sometimes, he has Francesca check for him.
“Kim?” Jimmy asks, and there. He’s spoken to her for the first time in a year and a half. The bitter taste floods his mouth, but it’s never really gone away. It’s gotten a little muted, but it’s still there. Always there. Mike may have been wrong - it may never go away.
Kim is silent on the other line. He thinks that maybe he hears a hitch in her breathing. An acknowledgement.
“I miss you,” he confesses, but it isn’t really a confession. “I’m sorry.”
For missing her. For dragging her into his disasters. For everything.
He’s met with quiet, which he expected. He doesn’t know what else to say to her, how to express the hole she left in his chest that he can’t fill, so he doesn’t say a word.
Neither of them hang up. He rolls over in bed, listens to her quiet, and shuts his eyes.
When he falls asleep, he still has the phone pressed to his ear. Kim still sits silently on the other line.
It means something, and it means everything.