Francesca rolled her eyes at the shouting coming from Saul's office. That Pinkman kid barged in, again, and now he and Saul were having it out at the top of their lungs while she and the rest of the waiting room pretended they couldn't hear. (So much for confidentiality.)
"Jesse, for the last time, NO!" Saul barked. "Whatever you're planning to do to Gus Fring, forget it! If you try to kill him, his bodyguards will turn you into raspberry smoothie before you even get near him. If you rat on him to the DEA, he'll find a way to weasel out of it – because unlike you, he knows more than one lawyer – and you'll get stuck holding the bag. Do you know what the sentence is for guys like you? Twenty years in federal prison! And let me tell you, skinny white boys from the 'burbs do not do well in federal prison. If you're lucky and you don't get shanked at the end of your first week, you'll be somebody's bitch and just get fucked in the ass by your 300-lb cellmate every night."
Jesse stood there and seethed for a few seconds. (Fucking prick always has to be right.) And then, propelled by instinct or madness or adrenaline, he reached across the desk, grabbed Saul by the tie and pulled him in for a kiss.
To this day, he doesn't know why he did it. But Saul's lips were warm and surprisingly soft and they finally stopped moving, and for a moment Jesse forgot about Gus Fring, the DEA, and the son-of-a-bitch who got him into this mess.
At first, Saul panicked when Jesse took hold of his tie. But when their lips met, Saul's world tilted 90 degrees and his eyes fluttered shut and he just paused for a moment. He's mostly into women, but if you got enough drinks in him, he'd admit to a little experimentation back in his Cicero days, and maybe once or twice since then. In the back of his mind, he wonders how long it's been since he kissed anyone like this, just kissed without any expectations. (Kim… no, don't think about that now.)
After one glorious moment, Jesse pulled away from Saul. The older man had a scowl on his face as he stormed around the desk to loom over Jesse.
"Listen, yo," Jesse stammered, eyes wide with fear. "I, uh, I don't know what I was thinking, maybe I'm in one of those fugue states or whatever…"
Without a word, Saul cupped Jesse's face with his hands and kissed him again. Clumsily, he wrapped one arm around Jesse and their mouths slipped open and Jesse tasted like cigarettes and cheap tacos and Saul didn't care. He didn't know he needed this – they both needed this – until it happened and now he can't imagine how he went this long without it.
Jesse kissed him back enthusiastically, noticing Saul's stubble (so that's why my girlfriends always wanted me to shave) and the way his lips and tongue moved and the way he tasted of day-old donuts and the bottom of the coffee pot and he wanted that for breakfast every day. He realized he shouldn't have been surprised that someone as talkative as Saul could do other things with his mouth. An image of another of those skills popped into Jesse's mind, but before he could do anything about it, the two of them pulled apart.
The older man smiled at him, one arm still around his shoulders, and it was a real shit-eating grin, not that fake lawyer smile he'd seen so many times before. Jesse returned the grin and he'd felt this way before and Jane's face cropped up but he shoved it back down, not now, he told himself, just enjoy this because it might not happen again.
Jesse looked up at Saul and wondered how they came to be holding hands. "So, uh… we should, like, do this again?"
"Come around the back of the building at five tomorrow. I'll make sure Francesca scares off anybody who's waiting," Saul said around his smile. "And stomp out of here like you're pissed off at me; I don't want people to get suspicious."
Jesse let go of the lawyer's hand and gave him a cheeky smile. "You got it," he told him as he arranged his face into a scowl and loudly kicked an end table on his way out. He hollered, "Bitch!" over his shoulder as he stormed through the door. The door slammed shut and Saul just shook his head and chuckled before asking Francesca to send the next client in.
That was how it began, and Gene refuses to think of how it ended. The furtive departure to Omaha with Jesse off God-knows-where, no goodbyes, just here one minute and then gone.
Gene peers through the venetian blinds in his dusty duplex. Rain pours down in sheets and pea-sized hail clatters down while the thunder booms. Nobody will be out tonight; nobody will see him pull the battered shoebox out of his closet with the remnants of Saul and Jimmy. Beneath the pinky ring and the VHS tape is a battered photo of a young man with sandy hair – a mug shot, how he got ahold of it he can no longer remember – and Gene digs it out and weeps into his scotch.