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The first thing Kim Wexler learned about James McGill was that he was terrible at sitting still.
That wasn’t strictly true. Kim learned a few things before she’d even had the chance to meet him. First, that he was Charles McGill’s little brother and he was moving to New Mexico from Cicero, Illinois. She also heard that he liked to go by Jimmy instead of James. And although no one knew the exact reason why he was moving, all the HR ladies were gossiping more than usual, so it must have been something next to scandalous.
But his inability to sit still is the first real thing about Jimmy McGill that Kim learned.
They’d been briefly introduced on the morning of his first day, before she had to rush off to the third floor with the mail cart. Burt took on the task of showing Jimmy the ropes in the basement, so Kim didn’t end up seeing him again until lunch time.
He sat alone a couple tables over from her, slowly munching his way through a bag of chips that she saw him buy from the vending machine. Kim wasn’t paying him much mind, too preoccupied with whatever law class she had been studying for at the time.
The quiet crunching of his chips wasn’t enough to break her focus. She did notice his foot started tapping after a while, but Kim didn’t let this bother her either, especially since she was known to do the same thing whenever she got anxious. At some point, he got up to pour himself a cup of coffee, and Kim briefly thought to herself that it wouldn’t help with the foot-tapping. Finally she heard the crumpling of the empty chip bag, amplified by how quiet it was in the small room, and she assumed that would mark the end of Jimmy’s lunch break.
But instead of throwing it away, he started unfolding and recrumpling and twisting the loud plastic. Repeatedly. His foot kept on tapping too. Kim grit her teeth. The man was looking around the room disinterestedly, appearing bored and completely oblivious to the disturbance he was making.
It didn’t take long for her to become fed up with it, and she shot him a silent glare. A few seconds went by before Jimmy caught her eye, and when he did, he smiled sheepishly and quickly gathered the chip bag and the paper coffee cup to throw away, then promptly exited the breakroom to go make noise elsewhere.
Kim took a deep breath and got back to her textbook.
Later that afternoon, it was her turn to train him on all the paperwork. When he couldn’t find a pen lying around the mailroom, she handed Jimmy one that she always kept with her. He practiced filling out some forms for the rest of their shift and tried to give the pen back at the end of the day. Kim told him to keep it – for a legal office that relied on signing contracts and taking diligent notes, the mailroom happened to be horrendously understocked. That, and Kim knew her fellow mailroom lackeys were notoriously bad about stealing pens and leaving them in the most inconceivable places.
Jimmy tucked the pen carefully into his shirt pocket, and Kim noticed him carrying it there when he walked in the next morning.
And at lunch that second day, Jimmy sat down again a couple tables over from her with another bag of chips and a cup of coffee. Kim mentally prepared herself for another break filled with foot-tapping and bag-crinkling, but instead when Jimmy finished eating, the room stayed silent, not a foot tap to be heard.
Kim glanced up from her textbook, and she watched as he doodled on a napkin with the pen she had given him. He was biting his lip, looking entirely focused on whatever it was he was drawing. It made Kim smile before she quickly straightened her face and returned to studying.
She never did find out what was on the napkin that day, since he crumpled it up with the rest of his trash before going back to work. But as Kim left the break room, she mentally tacked on an addendum to the first thing she learned about her new co-worker: Can’t sit still, unless he’s drawing.
Several conversations and many smoke breaks later, Kim found that her list of Jimmy-isms was growing ever longer. Good at making friends with just about anyone and everyone. Eats from the vending machine, but only because he’s living at a hotel. Says things that make her laugh more than she means to. Carries a lighter on his person at all times but never cigarettes. Likes to read flashcards to her on his own time, for some unknown reason.
He was doing that last one late at night before her midterms, when she finally had to ask him, “Don’t you have something better to do?”
Kim felt a little bad for phrasing it in that way, especially after she saw the hurt look on his face at her words. But he must have picked up that she wasn’t angry with him, and she didn’t want him to leave. She was just extremely puzzled as to why he was here with her doing this instead of a million other possible things.
Jimmy shrugged, the hurt falling off his face only to be replaced with something a little more guarded. “Not really,” he said casually, doing absolutely nothing to clear up the issue.
Kim sighed and gestured for him to keep reading off her notecards.
A stack of vocabulary words later, Kim was reviewing a few pages in her textbook when Jimmy’s foot-tapping started, followed shortly by pen clicking. And as much as Jimmy had already endeared himself to her, the piercing noises did still make it difficult for Kim to focus.
“I’m serious, Jimmy. You can go home. You really don’t have to help me if you don’t want to.”
“I want to,” he said defensively, the tapping and the clicking both ceasing as his focus snapped back to her.
“Then make yourself busy. Just for a little while. Please.”
“Yeah, okay. Sorry.” He glanced around the table until his eyes landed on a small pile of empty notecards. Jimmy looked up at her, asking for permission silently. Kim nodded, and with one last click of the pen, he got to work filling in the white space with dark blue ink.
As the night wore on, they went through her flashcards a few more times, and in between Jimmy dutifully committed to whatever artwork he was inking onto the extra index card. Kim finally called it a quarter after nine, and as Jimmy helped her clean up the table, Kim wondered (and it wouldn’t be the last time) what the hell he was doing here.
She still hadn’t seen what he’d drawn over the last hour or so, and she was desperately curious to know. So Kim kept a careful watch on the notecard until Jimmy stuck it in the same hand as their empty coffee cups and headed towards the trash can, about to throw it away.
“Wait, Jimmy!”
“Huh?”
“I want to see it.”
Mild embarrassment seemed to cling to him, and Kim had to quickly add looks cute when he blushes to her running list – where she could think about it later. Now though, she held out her hand to him and he reluctantly passed over the small piece of paper.
He’d sketched out a mock-up of an old wanted poster with an unfinished woman at the center, and Kim hoped her own blush didn’t show too much when she realized the woman was supposed to be her. In the drawing, she had a stack of books tucked under one arm and a pen held up like a gun in her other hand. Wanted: Kim Wexler, he wrote at the bottom. Straight-A Student at Large.
“Sorry,” Jimmy muttered, standing across from her with his hands tucked in his pockets. “I just uh… I guess you could say I take inspiration from my environment.”
“It’s okay. It’s good,” she replied quickly, still taking in the drawing, still trying to understand what it meant. If it meant anything.
Jimmy stepped closer to her and pinched the top of the notecard, trying to take it back. “Here, I can toss it for you.”
“No.” Kim snatched the drawing away from him, holding it where he couldn’t reach – she almost laughed at the shocked look on his face. She cleared her throat and calmly walked back towards her seat. She tucked the notecard in between the open pages of her textbook and then shut it away. “It’ll make a nice bookmark.”
When Jimmy started law school, not too long afterwards, he was reluctant to take anything from the HHM law library, just in case Chuck could somehow find out about it. So Kim lent him all of the textbooks she hadn’t already sold, and the rest he rented from the UMN library or had to buy for himself. Kim never said anything, and neither did he, but she often caught him doodling in the margins whenever they sat and worked together.
After he graduated and passed the bar exam, he brought them all back to her apartment and apologetically let her know that he maybe sort of might have ruined her nice law school textbooks. Kim told him it was no big deal, since all the books would be doing now was sitting on her shelf, making her look smart.
This was a lie – although she didn’t know it at the time – because a year or so after that, Kim hadn’t seen Jimmy in any meaningful capacity for a long while. She was busy trying to move up in her career and he was busy begging for PD overflow cases.
Often, Kim liked to do a lot of the after-hours grunt work from home, where she could sit around in her pajamas and eat messy takeout with no one there to bother her. But she soon found out that working from home also meant she couldn’t just run down the hall to the law library any time she needed to reference cases.
Luckily she still had those old textbooks on her shelf, and one night she pulled one of them out and opened it to a random page only to find it almost completely covered with pen marks. On some pages there were exaggerated caricatures of defendants and famous judges. Latin phrases were detailed in precise block letters with their definitions hastily scribbled beneath. Looping and repeating patterns that had nothing to do with the text were penned in the margins until they ran off the page.
Kim didn’t get much more work done that night, too preoccupied with flipping through the old book and missing Jimmy more than she realized.
***
Then there were all those times when they’d fall into bed together and Kim would get to feel Jimmy’s artwork instead of just admiring it on paper.
He couldn’t sit still. He liked to draw. He liked to touch. He liked to move his hands all the time.
Before they really got together, sometimes Kim would let him stay the night. Against her better judgment, she might curl up into his side and rest her head on his shoulder and pretend there weren’t so many reasons they couldn’t have this. That’s when he would start tracing nonsense figures onto her shoulder or her back, all the while telling her ridiculous stories or slowly falling asleep beneath her.
The thought always made Kim feel silly, but sometimes she would imagine herself as a canvas. And when Jimmy would be kissing down her chest, when he would move this way or that, when his fingers twirled through her hair afterwards, he was really freeing some great piece of art from her skin – her body a canvas and his lips a fine brush, painting her in all sorts of colors.
Over the years, there were too many sketches and doodles and cartoons for Kim to really keep track of or remember. Some, she was sure, were meant for her. But many of his creations just seemed to spill out of his brain whenever he was bored or distracted or scheming.
On the whiteboard Kim kept on the fridge as a running grocery list, the pictures of eggs and soy sauce sketched out in Expo markers instead of the words themselves. She always tried to avoid erasing them, but soon enough the board would fill up and she would have to make room for new ones.
The night she found his legal notepad tucked into the sheets of their bed. The yellow pages were filled with indecision and a complete loss of direction, but the Wexler McGill logos were the one sure thing that she found. It broke Kim’s heart a little bit, knowing she wouldn’t be able to give that to him.
How nervous she felt, handing him the yellow coffee mug that she’d carefully modified with red nail polish. She made something for him this time, and it seemed so small and plain compared to everything he could do. Kim hadn’t been sure how much he liked it, at first. But then he carried it around with him every day, and it made her feel unreasonably pleased.
And stuck to the back of a picture frame, their collection of rainbow sticky notes. Her neat handwriting on some and his precise drawings on the others. A horrible work of art they’d made together this time – one that extended beyond anything that could be contained on a piece of paper. Kim hadn’t been able to bring herself to peel those small colored squares off the frame, instead leaving the task to Jimmy or whatever nameless, clueless mover had been hired to take the rest of their stuff away, right after everything came crashing down.
***
Even later still, when New Mexico and Jimmy McGill were supposed to be long gone in her rearview mirror, Kim pulled one of the few books off of her bedroom shelf in Florida. When she had packed this one up in her old apartment, it had seemed innocuous enough – just a classic novel she had read in her prerequisite undergrad English class. Now it seemed Kim was bored enough with puzzles and Glen’s TV shows to pick up something she had already read.
But when she cracked open the cover a piece of paper fell out. It looked like it had been torn out of a spiral notebook, with its blue lines and uneven edges. On one side there was just a simple drawing of a goldfish with a bowtie. On the other side, there are some hastily scribbled words that read Maybe you’ll find this one day. Do you think Swimmy looks so-fish-ticated here?
Kim slammed the book closed quickly, like something in it was about to bite her. Then she shoved it back onto the shelf. She never considered throwing the note or even the whole book away, but it sat there untouched for a long, long time, as did the rest of the books on her shelf.
***
Nowadays, it still sort of hurts to look at anything Jimmy draws. But that’s only because Kim can read his letters and she can smile at his doodles, but she can’t see him whenever she wants to.
Some weeks, she gets envelopes in the mail that are stuffed with stacks of torn notebook paper – pages upon pages that are covered back to back in Jimmy’s handwriting. He can be chatty, like he always was, saying all the things he wants to tell her but doesn’t get to.
Other weeks, he’ll only send a single page that’s barely half-filled with his scribbles. The words that are there tend to be more subdued and withdrawn – a stark difference from the man she used to know but a reminder that they’ve both changed. (For the better. Or at least she has to hope it’s for the better).
But even in his briefest letters, Jimmy always makes sure to fill up the rest of the page with something else. Random patterns she imagines he must complete while sitting on the top bunk of his jail cell. Detailed sketches of the basketball court or the view from his window that seem like they must have taken him hours. Comic strips of the ridiculous conversations he overhears in the rec room and disturbances that he witnesses in the cafeteria.
The best weeks are the ones when she has time to make the trip to see him in person. Kim stopped their less-than-legal private visits as soon as she decided to become a lawyer again. But for a few hours at a time, Kim still gets to sit across from him and stare at his face and listen to his voice and feel his cuffed hands trace little figures onto her palms.
***
Half-motivated by the more she was always after and half by the consuming desire to see Jimmy free again, Kim retakes the bar exam and starts her own practice. A few days after she’s sworn in, she gets a letter in the mail from Jimmy. At first it doesn’t look like anything out of the ordinary, and in the envelope she finds the usual lined paper with Jimmy’s handwriting. But something else is folded up inside the pages – a notecard with a drawing of her on it, this time with dark hair and holding the scales of justice – and it reads – Wanted: Kim Wexler, lawyer at large.
She smiles and hangs it up on the wall of her new office.
