Work Text:
Kim jolts awake, the sound of a knock echoing in her ears. She pushes herself up to a sitting position and swings her legs over the edge of the couch, perched on the edge of the cushion as she strains to make out where the sound came from. There’s low music playing from her television, the DVD menu looping a cheerful tune and she nearly thinks she was dreaming, until—
She hears it again. Three steady raps on her front door.
Tossing a blanket aside, she tiptoes into the entryway, flattening a palm against the cool wood to peer through the peephole.
Jimmy appears in profile, looking down the hallway, and it almost feels like she’s still asleep. She hasn’t heard from him in weeks, and the fisheye lens throws back a distorted view, giving the vision of him a dreamlike quality of recognition despite the part of you that can tell it’s not real, knows it’s unfamiliar.
She pulls her face back, worrying her lip between her teeth for a moment before flicking the lock.
Jimmy’s head snaps towards her when she pulls the door open, and now she can see a fine layer of snow dusting the sleeves of his coat.
A white Christmas, she thinks, toes curling against the rug as the frigid air rushes into her apartment.
“Sorry,” he says, catching her surprised expression. He holds up his right hand like he’s being sworn in, the cell phone cradled in his palm promising to tell the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. “I tried to call.”
“Oh,” she says dumbly in response, rubbing her fingers across an eyelid, wiping a trail down her cheek. “It’s okay. I fell asleep.”
She doesn’t need to ask—she can tell he’s been drinking by the way his eyes dart around her face, focusing and unfocusing across her features. As if he’s seeing her through a camera lens, unable to keep the image sharp.
He looks more exhausted than the last time she saw him. Drawn.
She steps aside and Jimmy hustles over the threshold, dropping his phone on the coffee table before flopping down gracelessly onto the couch. He’s still wearing his coat, body facing away from her as he leans into the cushions.
Crossing her arms over her chest, Kim tilts her head to one side.
“Do you want some water?”
“Mmm,” he says into a pillow. “Maybe.”
She pads into the kitchen, glancing at the time over the stove—it’s late, too late for him to have come straight from dinner.
She grabs a glass and flicks the tap, watching the water edge towards the fill line like sand skidding through an hourglass. Each second drags her further from the quiet resignation of another holiday alone and into his comforting gravitational pull, but tonight that somehow feels strange, foreign. She idly wishes she could ask for a recess. Your honor, if it pleases the court, may I request a moment to gather my thoughts?
Water reaches the place where her thumb is gripped around the glass, and she snaps the faucet off. Time’s up.
She turns, making her way back towards the couch and handing over the glass over as she sits. There’s a gulf between them, Jimmy’s body tucked firmly into the corner as she perches on the edge.
He takes a long drink, tipping the glass back, and she watches the line of his throat as he swallows.
“Were you at Chuck’s?”
His eyes meet hers over the rim of the glass and he brings it down, setting it on the coffee table next to his cell phone.
“Yeah.” He doesn’t offer anything else so she shifts her position to mirror his, leaning closer.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
Jimmy laughs, but it sounds brittle, hard—like he’s trapped under a layer of ice, cold and unreachable. His gaze turns up to the ceiling, then back down to meet hers. “Do you want to talk about it?”
Kim frowns, her body drawing back, and something passes over his face. A ripple under his frozen expression.
His eyes drop down to his lap and Kim follows his gaze, watching his fingers twitch before he reaches an arm out, palm settling on the soft cotton above her knee. She jumps as though his touch delivered an electric shock.
And Jimmy immediately draws back, as if the energy coiled inside of him has actually singed both of their skin. She almost thinks she can hear the air crackling, a current humming between them.
She looks up again, but he doesn’t meet her eyes.
“It hasn’t been the same,” he finally starts. “Since...”
She tips her head to the side, unsure if he’s answering her previous question or not. Since their mom died? Since Rebecca left? Since last year, when he showed up at her door after renting half of Blockbuster, but they barely got through even one movie because they—
Her fists ball at her sides, frustrated with herself for not being able to follow.
She feels the hush like a chill settling over her skin again. If she looked towards the front door, she imagines she might find it still hanging open, gusts of snow blowing in through the entryway.
At a loss, she offers: “I was dreaming about you.”
It’s a white lie. She can’t remember exactly what she was dreaming about before he knocked on the door, but it’s not as though he hasn’t appeared regularly in her subconscious over the last few weeks.
He looks startled. “About me?”
She’s been in the shadowy early morning of the mailroom at HHM and Jimmy has to hold her up to make a pot of coffee because she’s not tall enough, she can’t reach the counter; she’s been in the back of the nail salon, the dryer rumbling on the other side of the door as she tries to help Jimmy make his bed, but the fitted sheet keeps flying out of her hands; she’s been in the courtroom where she can feel him watching her but every time she scans the gallery she can’t find him, and when she finally turns towards the judge, it’s Jimmy’s face behind the bench. The gavel bangs against the block, and she wakes up with her heart pounding in her chest.
“Yeah,” she says. “We were up at the top of Sandia Peak, like last summer?”
His brow knits together, taken aback by the direction of her story, but he nods.
“We were waiting for the tram back down, but in my dream, we had just missed the last one. We had to hike before it got dark.”
His lips twist up in surprise.
“And somehow on our way down, I realized I was late for the bar exam. I was supposed to be sitting my second day. At the diner over on Central.”
Kim watches his face get softer, so she describes how it felt like she was stuck in mud as they tried to beat the sunset; how even in her dream the sky was still beautiful, pink and yellow and purple; how halfway down the mountain she realized she was dropping her notes but when she picked them up, she couldn’t read them because they were in Jimmy’s chicken scratch handwriting.
He laughs, and with the movement of it he shrugs out of his coat, dropping it onto the floor.
So she keeps talking, plucking out memories that feel both vivid and fuzzy at the same time, watching as his features thaw until he’s scooting closer to her and tentatively pressing a kiss to her shoulder, sliding down the couch until his head is resting in her lap.
She cards her fingers through his hair, nails scratching gently against his scalp as the television screen suddenly turns blue, picture and sound fading away. Its soft buzz fills the silence in the room.
“It was bad.”
Kim brushes his hair back from his face. “Hm?”
“It was bad,” Jimmy repeats. “Chuck got upset and blamed it on this being the first holiday he’s spent without—” he takes a deep breath, and it feels like he takes the hum of the room with it, draining the air. “Without family.”
Her jaw tightens, fingers curling around his chin. She brushes the edge of his lips and she thinks if she concentrates hard enough, she might be able to trap his compassion in her palm, pull it back and show him: See?
The warmth remains this time, but it still feels dense, like snowbanks piling up around them.
“I’m sorry, Jimmy,” she says after a moment, fingertips drifting up to stroke his cheek. She feels him shrug his shoulders.
“’M glad you’re here,” he mumbles against her leg, curling his body inward.
She hears the implication and swallows around it, lets it settle in her stomach.
Somehow, though, it doesn’t feel as heavy as she expected it would.
Jimmy’s breaths grow even against her thigh and after a moment, she considers waking him to get him into bed—to offer a night not spent on a sofa, for once. But she knows he’ll be gone before she wakes regardless, zipping across town to pick up newspapers and deliver groceries. Racing the sun.
“Me too,” she whispers back to the empty room, and she lets him sleep.