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“Are you seriously high right now?”
Faith was a fool’s virtue. Investing in other people was impudent under the best of circumstances, but to blindly believe that they would follow through in the absence of any proof smacked of sheer stupidity. Nacho had made it this far in both business and life because he was not stupid, a rare quality that demanded confidence only in himself—nobody else. The population at large was extraordinarily unreliable and prone to making idiotic decisions; he, on the other hand, could be trusted to make the right choice every time. It made sense to save his faith for himself.
Allotting any of that precious resource to Jesse Pinkman was the kind of idiotic decision that Nacho so ardently avoided. Even the most unguarded moron would hesitate to place anything—let alone their trust—in this kid’s clumsy hands. He was irresponsible and undisciplined and fatally naive, the kind of reckless specimen that had first inspired Nacho to renounce faith. Fuck, Jesse had asked him just last week how to fill out a check. Believing that Jesse of all people could stick to his sobriety and make a dent in cleaning up the mess of his life was irrefutably foolish, yet Nacho had done it. If love—or whatever they were calling this emotional arrangement—was making him soft, disappointment was tanning those newly mushy parts of him to an impenetrable leather.
“What?” Jesse finally said, squinting in the penny-bright sunlight. The expression was reminiscent of how his papi would strain to make out the tiny text on shop receipts without his reading glasses, which might have been endearing had Nacho not been thoroughly pissed.
“I thought we were done with this. You knew I was coming over too,” Nacho added. He could tolerate the weed, but no blunt produced a slack-jawed stupor of this caliber. The unfocused, glazed eyes gazing torpidly into his own had seen a pipe last night, and judging by his confusion, the comedown was proving particularly intense. A glance through the doorway and into the slovenly living room confirmed Nacho’s suspicions. Jesse would typically make some effort to clean up his place in anticipation of a visit, even if this process exclusively involved shoving clutter into corners and closets that Nacho inevitably opened. No such attempt had been made in his drug-fueled state. Fuck, if the rakishness of his sandy hair was any indication, this was his first time out of bed today. “Seriously, it’s insulting. We’ve been—”
“Wait, wait, wait, I’m sorry.” Jesse absently waved a pleading hand at Nacho, using the other to shield his eyes. “Can we, like, take this inside? It’s so fucking… The sun’s crazy today.”
As reluctant as Nacho was to indulge any of his requests right now, he hardly wanted any of Jesse’s nosy neighbors eavesdropping on this lecture. He walked into the foyer and slammed the door shut behind him; Jesse flinched at the resulting thud.
“Aghh… Man, why?”
“I’m not here to baby you. I can’t stand here and force you to take care of yourself,” Nacho continued icily. There was no reason to mince words, not with Jesse’s brain fried by meth. “You’re not stupid, Jesse. You know what doing this leads to. You’re better than that.”
Jesse continued to stare uncomprehendingly at him; Nacho might as well have spoken in his native tongue for how little Jesse absorbed. The kid had lived in Albuquerque for twenty-five years and still couldn’t order for himself at an authentic cantina. “I dunno what you’re talking about. Wha’sit lead to?”
What meager patience Nacho had arrived with wore out in one exhaustive burst. “I’m leaving. Sleep the rest of this off.”
“But… you just got here,” Jesse insisted in that same scattered, sleepy voice. He sounded almost wounded—like a child whose friend refused to play with him at recess. Something in Nacho’s chest that had seen significant movement since meeting Jesse squirmed, a concerned flutter curdled by his present annoyance. Nacho wasn’t going to fold, but fuck, why did Jesse have to sound so crushed?
“Go sleep this off,” Nacho repeated. He glanced at the bare mattress thrown haphazardly onto the living room floor, irritated as always by its presence. Jesse wasn’t exactly hurting for money: why couldn’t he just buy a bedframe and put that thing in the bedroom where it belonged? Fully recovering from this comedown probably wouldn’t be especially comfortable there on the floor, but a pillow would improve the experience and he at least had—
Wait.
The stain had initially flitted through his field of vision undetected. Blood was hardly a novelty in their profession, so much so that his gaze no longer stuttered upon encountering a scarlet smear or the rusty remains of a drained artery. Its presence, however, was incongruous enough with the harmlessly gross interior of Jesse’s place to warrant a second look. Nacho stepped into the living room to better study the pillow crumpled against his mattress, knowing that the coppery blotches scattered across its surface were blood but nevertheless hoping he was mistaken. A cursory glance was all he needed to confirm his suspicions and renew the uncomfortable fluttering under his ribs. Meth had nothing to do with this situation.
Nacho returned to Jesse, who was still standing in the foyer as if awaiting further instructions. “Turn around.”
Jesse blinked at him. “What?”
Sighing, Nacho took Jesse’s shoulders in gentle hands and swiveled him around. Sure enough, his hair was matted with gummy gluts of half-dried blood; the skin of his scalp shimmered rawly beneath those damp curls. The wound seemed superficial, but the quantity of blood shed was not at all insignificant, especially to Nacho.
He palpated the shallow gash with what he believed to be a light touch. Jesse jerked away violently enough to startle Nacho’s fingers away, reaching back to shield the affronted area from further insult. Nacho managed to catch his wrist before Jesse could touch the wound himself and further agitate it; the man’s pulse pinged erratically against the prominent knob of his radial head.
“Don’t touch it,” Nacho cautioned. Jesse reluctantly lowered his hand with an involuntary whimper that set every stagnant part of Nacho’s chest in motion. While Jesse wasn’t at all the incompetent idiot that Nacho had marked him as after their first encounter, there was a weirdly pathetic quality about him redolent of a small, distressed animal. This aspect of his personality occasionally exasperated Nacho, but more often than not made his sternum buckle urgently like a collapsing steeple.
“That fucking hurts, dude,” he mumbled miserably, sounding enough like his regular self to snap Nacho out of his sappy reverie.
“Well, of course it does, you bashed your head on something. Did you have a seizure?”
“Umm…” Jesse turned back to Nacho, the haziness of his usually voltaic eyes making it abundantly clear that he had experienced a seizure and concussed himself in the process. “Maybe? I dunno. Why?”
“Because unless someone came in here and threw you against the wall, I don’t know why else you’d have blood on your head.” He paused, a cold spurt of dread gushing down his spine. The possibility of someone coming in and throwing Jesse against the wall was frighteningly plausible: they both wore targets on their backs. “No one came here last night, right?”
“No. I don’t think so? I mean, you came here.”
Nacho rolled his eyes in spite of himself. “I know I came here, I meant—whatever. So nobody else was here?”
“Man, you’re asking, like, a lot of questions,” Jesse murmured, absently rubbing one temple with the heel of his palm. His hair was teased into the same riot of spikes and twisted curls that resulted from a day of beanie-wearing under the desert sun. It was cute, almost distractingly so. Nacho knew better than to let this observation see the light of day given Jesse would not hesitate to weaponize it against him, but a momentary lapse probably wouldn’t kill him. At the very least, Jesse wasn’t going to remember it.
“I’m trying to figure out how you get yourself into this shit,” he said fondly. Moving with a caution typically reserved for cornered animals, Nacho tweezed a stray lock of Jesse’s hair between his thumb and forefinger and tucked it back into place.
A dreamy smile crossed the man’s scruffy face. “You should grow hair. So I can do that. I wanna see you with hair.”
“Not in this weather. Now, come on, you really do have to sleep this off now.”
“Yo, what is ‘this’?” Nacho disregarded the question in favor of once again braving the living room, this time kicking aside stray jumbles of clutter to establish a navigable path between the foyer and that awful mattress. The last thing he needed was Jesse tripping over a pair of his own discarded jeans and sustaining a second head injury. “Hey, my stuff.”
Nacho bit back a snappy comment about his stuff being perfectly capable of relocating itself to a closet or a cabinet or anywhere else but the floor. Instead, he grabbed the plaid comforter slung haphazardly across the sofa and gave it a precautionary sniff—notes of crisp linen and synthetic lavender. An unexpected swell of pride blossomed at the base of his throat. Despite his best intentions, Jesse struggled with remembering to complete mundane tasks like laundry; Nacho had since learned that this forgetfulness was more the result of ADHD than laziness. Besides, he had his own issues with getting things done on those mornings where he woke up to find that his bed had become a bottomless pit. Judging by the sweet scent of detergent though, he had been washing this blanket on a somewhat regular basis. It was something to admire in its own strange, slightly pitiful way.
Jesse wandered over like a child tailing their parent through the grocery store. “Are you cold?”
“This is for you,” Nacho replied, shoving the comforter into Jesse’s hands. “You need to get a real bed. I can’t stand looking at this mattress.”
“It’s a real bed,” Jesse said without much conviction. He then twisted away from the picture window as if to shield himself from the sunlight spilling through and shredded an exhalation through gritted teeth. “God. Why’s it so fucking bright today?”
“I’ll take care of the light. You get in bed.”
Nacho waited for Jesse, however bewildered by the command, to oblige before going to draw the blackout curtains. If nothing else, he could count on Jesse to do as he was told—and wasn’t that a chilling thought? He had issued countless instructions to Jesse in the past few minutes, and the kid had obeyed without regard for insidious intentions or proof of purpose. Even if he had been in his right mind, Jesse would have complied because he had faith in Nacho, in that gilipollas Walt, in every member of their self-preserving little circle. They had all exploited his ingrained loyalty to some degree, Nacho included. He had learned to disavow faith, but the trait was practically stitched into every strand of Jesse’s DNA and there was no extirpating it without the risk of a complete unraveling. It instilled in Nacho an incredible power, one he reminded himself to exercise with care.
Jesse was fastidiously studying his pillow when Nacho returned, brow furrowed. As Nacho took a tentative seat on the edge of the mattress, Jesse glanced up at his companion with a somber expression. “Is this blood?”
“Yeah. You hit your head and bled a little back there. That’s why you need to get some rest, yeah?” His voice was gelatin-soft, drained of authority.
“Yeah… Lame,” Jesse added petulantly, dropping his head onto the stained pillow. “Agh. Fuck. That still hurts.”
“It’ll probably hurt for a while. But we’ll deal with that later, okay?”
“Mmm.” Too exhausted to conjure a proper response, Jesse closed his eyes and drew himself into the smallest, most inoffensive shape possible underneath his comforter. Within seconds, he was asleep.
Nacho sat by his side for a long moment, first measuring the crests and dips of Jesse’s breathing, then contemplating his next move. A few weeks ago, he wouldn’t have hesitated to leave now that everything was squared away: after all, he wasn’t beholden to Jesse any more than he was obligated to hang out with Victor or Tyrus or any of their other “coworkers”. However, their dynamic had since… shifted. He couldn’t expect either of them to shrug off that bone-dry desert night under the stars, the screaming match that had escalated into a physical brawl that had escalated into a passionate kiss. While they hadn’t discussed the incident—both lacking the vocabulary to accurately describe exactly what had transpired—they had started spending time together outside of work. They still fought ruthlessly and couldn’t agree on much, but their relationship had evolved to such a point that Nacho could not in good conscience abandon Jesse.
If not for the risk of causing a ruckus, he might have tackled the chaotic wasteland that was Jesse’s kitchen or dug out the Roomba for a much-needed tour of the second floor. He considered texting Mike to inform him that Jesse would likely be out of commission for the next week before deciding against it: no one needed to know that the two of them were associating outside of business hours. Their boss was not above pitting his employees against each other like fighting dogs, and Nacho had done quite enough battle with Jesse for the time being.
Jesse rolled over behind him with a hoarse moan. Nacho glanced back at him to find the man still sleeping, albeit restlessly; his face was pinched into a rictus of pain. That foreign squirming in his chest returned with a vengeance, drawing him closer to Jesse as if he were a planetary body that had caught Nacho in its gravitational pull. The headache must have seeped through his battered skull and into his unconscious mind, which was hardly fair given all the effort expended to get him to sleep.
Fuck. And he had actually anticipated getting things done today.
Nacho rocked himself onto his back and stiffly rolled his shoulders in the vain attempt to locate a comfortable position on this loathsome mattress without shaking Jesse awake. His efforts to establish a courteous berth of space between them was instantly thwarted by Jesse himself, who wasted no time scooting closer to Nacho. The kid tossed and turned in his sleep like a loose bullet shell ricocheting around the sun-baked interior of Mike’s car, although this particular migration could probably be blamed on Jesse seeking body heat. Either way, he was a needy bastard.
“You’re lucky you’re cute,” Nacho whispered, taking careful hold of that same errant lock of Jesse’s hair. “Because we are not doing this again. Not until you get a real bed.”
Jesse did not respond. However, the arrangement appeared to have ironed most of the distressed wrinkles out of his visage, which was incentive enough for Nacho to stay parked by his side. If Jesse was going to place his unconscious faith in Nacho to keep the hammering pain at bay, Nacho would treat it with the reverence that it deserved. His trust might not have been a rarity, but it was still precious to Nacho.
Softly, beneath the staticky din of humming crickets: “I thought you didn’t even like me.”
“I like you, chulo .” The strand of hair was in its rightful place, but Nacho’s hand didn’t stray from its gentle perch on Jesse’s crown. “Believe me.”