Chapter 9: Four Months Ago Part Two

The memories start to come back to him—they'd fucked in this kitchen, Lalo had kissed him for the first time that day, had chastised him to go slowly, to not be afraid—but Nacho pushes them away.

He had said his goodbye the night before, had said it with Lalo touching every part of him and bringing tears to his eyes, and that is that. All the rest is carrying out the orders.

But, Nacho realizes, he has always been a bad soldier.

-

It was a plea.

It was to say: Get your shit together.

It was to say: I know what is going to happen and I want it to happen but make me not want it to happen.

It was to say: Stop making me already miss you.

-

Their whole life together in that apartment, just the two of them and that little fish in its happy home, swimming on even with Lalo's tapping. The lawyer had that to return to after whatever disaster he met in the desert. The lawyer has that and so too does his wife.

-

Middle of nowhere, Mexico. No witness but each other. Pull the car over. Have the car pulled over. Not even a need for a gun. Overpower the other man. Your hands around his neck. Wring, and wring again. Twist. His last breaths filling your open mouth. His face turning an ugly purple.

Your memories of that beautiful face, the bruised color of death and the boggled bloody eyes.

Too intimate.

The sun rises and they hide.

The moon falls and they move.

Nacho did not do it.

Lalo would not have done it had he known. Not then.

-

Not just of his homosexuality, but of his lifestyle, his disregard for others, his tastes, his likes and dislikes. The obviousness that conceals something balled up deep inside. He has a soul. He feels love. He feels sorrow.

But he has spent over forty years covering those facts up like a patient bricklayer smoothing brick after brick on pliant mortar with a patient, steady trowel. Lalo is not a monster; he is a man, and that makes what Nacho feels and what Nacho does all the worse.

-

A red undershirt. Nacho's red undershirt. Nacho's red undershirt from the first time they'd touched each other on Hector's garage floor, wrestled and fucked afterwards, that slow grind like the sharpening of a knife on a block.

That time didn't really change anything, he realizes. It would have happened eventually. He wished it'd been later; he wished he'd held out for longer; he wished it would have only happened in his dreams;

he wishes so many things, but here he is on a fucking chaise lounge in Lalo Salamanca's walk-in closet in Mexico, counting down the hours until the man's death staring at that undershirt, clearly clean,

because Lalo would not carry around something crusted over with old semen, but he carries that clean undershirt with no use but what it represents. Serial killers take trophies. So do people in love.

In Nacho's safe at home, hidden behind stacks of money so he does not have to look at it, lies, crumpled, unwashed,

Lalo's shirt that he had put underneath Nacho's back when they'd fucked on the car at the abandoned track in Albuquerque. Here, in Mexico, miles away, is its twin.

There is such little difference between me and you.

-

His hand falls. Lalo seizes it, laces their fingers together, and Nacho really wishes he wouldn't do that.

Chapter 10: Epilogue

"Talk to me," Lalo instructs.

"I don't want to."

Lalo smiles, a reflex to Ignacio's once adorable stubbornness. "I don't care. You have to."

-

all of the little things that make him Ignacio, all of these things Lalo knows, and knows completely, and it is to know and to be known, it is, the victory and the loss,

the sickness at the bottom of your stomach, the bile at the top of your throat, the weightlessness of falling, the heaviness of being. And Lalo lets Ignacio guide them away, again, together, forever.