Fic: A typical Cary Agos (The Good Wife, Alicia/Cary) NC-17
Ahhh, a WIP happy ending! I started writing this story during season 2 of The Good Wife and, after years languishing as a WIP, I finally finished it in a burst of pre-s5 excitement. It was definitely fun and interesting for me to revisit Alicia and Cary’s earlier, prickly relationship in light of Florrick, Agos and Associates. I hope one or two readers find it fun and interesting, too.
(Apropos reminder that The Good Wife is fantastically compelling TV and this season promises to be an awesome shake-up.)
Title: A typical Cary Agos
Author: iridescentglow
Fandom: The Good Wife
Pairing: Alicia/Cary
Rating: NC-17
Word count: 7,959
Archived: AO3
Summary: Alicia’s looking for something easy. Cary’s looking for leverage. What they each end up with is something else entirely.
Note: Refers to the events of #2.04 (Cleaning House), but canon divergent for everything afterwards.
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A typical Cary Agos
Chapter 1. Hot Air.
Alicia knows who Cary is.
She sat in college classes with Cary. In dingy Georgetown bars, she sipped beer and laughed at Cary’s jokes. In her dorm room, decorated with Indigo Girls posters, she allowed Cary to take off her bra. Cary - one of the many Carys she has known, whose real name is lost to the ether - never bothered to return her calls.
Yes, Alicia knows all about Cary. He will never surprise her.
She knows without ever asking that he works out just enough to look good. He reads just enough to appear cultured. He has some benign trauma in his past (grandmother’s lingering illness, high school friend’s suicide) that he will reveal if ever he suspects he has become unsympathetic.
No need for a crystal ball: she can already predict his future.
He will meet a girl, one who will inspire him, challenge him. Maybe that’s the girl he will marry; maybe not. Either way, he will end up with a wife in suburbia. There will be kids, promotions at work, bigger houses, faster cars. And he’ll smile, smile, smile through it all, until he loses his teeth.
*
After her second deposition with Cary, Alicia’s car breaks down. Pastor Isaiah would probably suggest that it is God punishing her for considering lying under oath. She’s more inclined to blame her car mechanic, who thinks she’s an idiot and charges her to fix everything except what’s actually wrong with her car.
The fact that it starts to rain the moment she sets out to walk home in high heels - well, that’s just bad luck. Bad luck and Jacqui, who, this morning, told her it was absolutely not ladylike to wear a pencil skirt with flats. There’s definitely a conspiracy against her; it’s just more benign than God’s wrath.
She’s looking for a taxi - there are plenty on the streets, just none that are empty - when a car glides to a halt at the curb’s edge and Cary’s smile appears through the rain-flecked window.
“Need a ride?” he asks, lowering the window.
The rain has already plastered her hair to her head and water is now dripping uncomfortably down the back of her neck. Her feet hurt and the twilight is dwindling into darkness. Decorum, as well as plain common sense, dictates that her answer can only be: “Thank you, Cary.”
She arranges herself in the passenger seat and he slides back into the flow of traffic, effortlessly cutting off a driver who dared to drive at the speed limit.
“It’s really coming down, huh?” he says, after a few moments of silence.
On automatic, she tells him about her car trouble.
“Too bad, too bad,” he murmurs. “You live on Oxford, right?”
“Yes,” she says.
How could he know that? Has Childs set up surveillance on her? Is it really a coincidence that Cary was passing when her engine died? The paranoid questions snowball in her mind for a moment and then she remembers. He knows where she lives because he dropped her home one night last year. She almost laughs, remembering the sight of him with his tie undone and his suit jacket crumpled over a bar stool.
“I’m surprised you stopped,” she says. “I thought you’d just gun the engine, drive through a puddle and soak me.” She smiles to show she’s joking, but they both know she isn’t.
“C’mon,” he says, casting her a sidelong smile, “I’m not the bad guy.”
“You subpoenaed me, Cary.” She makes sure to keep her voice neutral, with just the slightest hint of reproachfulness.
“That’s work,” he says dismissively.
“Funny. It feels like a vendetta.”
He laughs. “Vendetta,” he repeats, as if tasting the word in his mouth. He doesn’t respond to her accusation. He just says, “I have always gone out of my way to be cordial to you.”
Of course, in his estimation, it is true. This time, she can’t keep from laughing.
“Ah yes,” she says, “our date.”
During their first month at Stern-Lockhart, he asked her to dinner.
He cornered her between meetings, stood too close and spoke in a low voice. Should really get to know each other… don’t want to be enemies… could probably learn a lot from one another. Although he was proposing a work dinner, she felt like she was back in college, being pursued by the captain of the crew team.
She began mentally referring to it as a “date” and even told Owen about it, courting his laughter. Of course, when the evening in question rolled around, Cary morphed from ardent pursuer into bad boyfriend. After assuring her he’d make reservations, he abruptly said he’d rather eat at a bar around the corner from the office, where steaks were half-price when you ordered a pitcher of beer. He spent the whole night talking over her and flirting with the female bartender. In turn, she ordered glass after glass of red wine - and drank so much that he had to drive her home.
“I thought I left those sort of dates behind when I married Peter,” she told Owen later over the phone, drunk and hysterical from the absurdity of her evening.
Owen’s answer was predictable: “You should have slept with him.” That’s what her brother says about every man she meets in these post-scandal days. “If you don’t get divorced, you get to have revenge sex. That’s how it works.”
Of course, she did not sleep with Cary, and they both wordlessly agreed that they need not “get to know each other” any further.
In the car, in the present, Cary’s eyebrows creep up his forehead. “Our date?”
“I misspoke,” she says quickly. “You were kind enough to treat me to dinner last year.”
“And you thought it was a date?”
“No, I misspoke.”
Cary ignores her, raising his voice to say, “Lady, if we dated, we would’ve done more than chew steaks in a bar.” For emphasis, he hits the steering wheel lightly with his hand.
They’re both silent for a few moments. They’ve hit traffic and the car can only crawl along the street at a maddeningly slow speed. Inside her shoes, Alicia curls her toes, hesitates, and then kicks off the evil court shoes completely. She rubs the big toe of her right foot against the arch of her left foot, easing the day’s tension for a fraction of a second.
The darkness outside, coupled with the rhythmic whirr of the windshield wipers, has created a false sense of intimacy inside the car. For the first time today, she speaks without checking herself.
“Tell me about a typical Cary Agos date,” she says.
The car has ground to a halt before a stoplight, so Cary is able to not only flick his gaze in her direction but twist his body completely, so that he’s looking at her. She smiles at him mischievously and then wonders how her expression registers to him. ‘Mischievous’ is a girlish attribute; she doesn’t know how it translates on her face now.
“None of this dinner and drinks shit,” he says at last. “I make an effort. One time, in college, there was a girl I really liked. I booked a balloon ride. One of those sunrise ones. Champagne breakfast afterward.”
“Very romantic,” Alicia says, although no perfect date of hers has ever required her to get out of bed at five a.m.
There’s a honk from the car behind them. The light has changed to green. Cary puts the car into drive and accelerates a little too hard to compensate for his lapse in concentration.
“Yeah, well,” he says, with his eyes fixed on the road, “I guess it wasn’t so romantic. The day we were supposed to go up, the guys who actually fly the thing said it wasn’t the right weather.”
“The great Cary Agos can’t control the weather?”
“I guess it’s the chink in my armor,” he says with a wry smile. “The balloon guys gave us the champagne anyway, so my date and I just drank all morning.”
“And fucked all afternoon, right?”
She’s genuinely not trying to shock him, but her question elicits a breath of astonished laughter from him anyway.
“A gentleman never kisses and tells,” he says, trying and failing to recover smoothly.
“A balloon ride’s a lot of trouble to go to if you don’t expect to get laid,” she says matter-of-factly.
Maybe she has succeeded in rendering him speechless. Maybe he’s just lost in a memory of fucking some petite co-ed while buzzed on cheap champagne and evaporated romance. Either way, he doesn’t reply. She peers out the window and realizes they’ve turned onto Oxford.
He parks the car outside her apartment building. (Good memory? she wonders again. Or has he been here more recently?) When he opens his door, she moves to do the same. It’s locked.
“I’ll get that for you,” he says and climbs out.
She is forced to watch as he slowly walks around the hood of the car. Only when he’s standing at the passenger side does he release her door lock. She quashes the desire to dive forward to open the door herself, knock him down and make a run for it. Instead, she makes herself wait patiently as he opens the door for her like a gentleman. She jams her stocking feet back into her shoes and climbs out.
Even after she’s out of the car, he doesn’t move, blocking her clearest route into the apartment block. She has the choice to either remain motionless, pressed against the side of the car, or elbow past him and appear rude.
“Thank you, Cary,” she says.
“My pleasure,” he says, almost sarcastically; a pantomime of good manners.
She says nothing.
“You know, Alicia,” he continues, “there’s no need for us to be enemies. I really used to respect you.”
It’s his old courting speech, updated for a new situation. He leans in close, voice just barely audible above the noise of the traffic. His eyes scan her face rapidly, never pausing long enough to meet her gaze.
“If you want to see a real Cary Agos date, just let me know.”
He finishes with a smile, one that adds, I’m playing with you.
She is supposed to be unsettled now. It worked last time, after all. But, though he has not grown or changed much in the last year, she has.
She hesitates for a fraction of a second and then she kisses him.
He is a lawyer right down to his soul, instantly adaptable to any curveball. He kisses her back, lips parting against hers to allow a slow sweep of his tongue inside her month. As she reaches out to grasp at him, her cold, ungloved hand finds his elbow. She feels his body press against hers. He is solid and warm, a stark contrast to the drizzle still falling from the sky.
Her apartment is on the fifteenth floor, and the view from its windows typically reduces people on the street to blank, faceless figures. For a second, she imagines she and Cary viewed that way, from high above, an indistinguishable kissing couple, stripped of every identifying attribute except their desire.
That word catches her by surprise. Desire? She is jolted back into the moment by the realization that she’s actually enjoying this. Cary’s lips are soft and malleable; despite his bravado, there’s a slight tentativeness to his movements. It’s almost charming, and not at all what she would expect from him.
“Call your husband,” he murmurs, breaking the kiss for a moment, “tell him you’ll be late.”
She smiles, not at the insinuation (a cheap hotel room, a quick fuck, a lie to her husband), but because it sounds so rehearsed. She cannot be the first married woman to whom he has made this proposal. Is this how he honed his skills? Courting older women, who were desperate enough never to probe beneath his clear-skinned surface? Is that who she has become?
No. Not yet.
“Goodnight, Cary,” she says, pressing the palm of her hand to his chest and lightly pushing him away.
“Alicia…” he says, as she slips past him to leave.
She imagines she hears a forlorn note in his voice, but when she glances back, he looks inscrutable.
*
There are any number of ways to explain away the evening. Lingering feelings for Will projected onto Cary? A game of one-upmanship gone too far? A simple, irresistible impulse? But no, she’s not 19 anymore: no impulse is irresistible.
She feels that if she could only laugh about the memory, turn it into a ludicrous anecdote, it would lose its potency. She almost calls Kalinda and then thinks better of it. She actually does call Owen, but she just ends up talking about the kids. “God, your life is boring,” he drawls down the phone. “This stuff is better than Ambien.” Forever forced to play the prim older sister, she tells him that a good night’s sleep would do him good, then hangs up the phone.
In the living room, she tries to watch the news, but she keeps zoning out. Peter comes up behind her, rubbing her shoulder with one hand. “Stressed?” he asks. She knows it’s a come-on: the solution to stress for him has always been sex.
She smiles up at him, with a deliberately bland expression, and says, “I’m just tired. I told Owen he should get an early night. I should do the same.”
In bed, wide awake, she replays in her head the earlier encounter with Cary: seeing again and again his surprised expression when she used the word “fuck”; reliving over and over the moment when her lips met his.
In a few days, she will laugh about this, she decides again, resolute. But she’s not ready for the memory to lose its potency just yet.
*
Chapter 2. Conference Room Ten.
Three days later, Cary shows up in her office.
She returns from the file room to see him waiting in there. Courtney explains the situation with an apologetic smile and hustles away, perhaps interpreting Alicia’s silent reaction as anger. Alicia approaches across the bullpen slowly, watching him as he roams her office.
First, he folds his jacket over a chair, marking his territory. Then he inspects the photos arranged across her desk. They show an affable Peter in ‘weekend’ attire; much-younger versions of Zach and Grace, when they were the perfect age: old enough to tell her what was wrong and young enough to believe there was nothing she couldn’t fix. Cary runs his fingertip across the tops of the frames. He looks like a high-class auctioneer, assessing the value of her life’s work.
“Are you planning to serve me with court papers again?” Alicia asks, stepping into the office and closing the door. “Let me guess… I was jaywalking on Michigan Avenue.”
Cary is still standing at her desk. She crosses her arms and waits for him to move. He smiles and slides past her, pressing a little too close, so that she can smell his cologne, his expensive shampoo.
“Just a friendly visit,” he says, taking a seat on the other side of the desk. “We’re awfully friendly all of a sudden, aren’t we?”
He smiles lazily, reclining in his chair as if he’s planning to rear back like an adolescent schoolboy. She chooses not to rise to the bait and instead takes a seat, arranging herself primly behind her desk. She clicks her computer awake and checks her work email, as if she has better things to do than continue this conversation. (She does, in fact, have better things to do. There are perhaps a thousand things she should be doing that take precedence over Cary.)
Cary doesn’t take long to bore of the game. He leans forward and says:
“Want to fill me in on what happened the other night?”
“Of course, Cary,” she says, her eyes scanning an email about the theft of dishwasher salt from the seventh-floor kitchen. “You were kind enough to drive me home when my car broke down. It’s in full working order again now, as I’m sure you’ll be glad to hear.”
“Mmhmm. That’s what happened, is it?”
“Of course.”
When she looks away from her screen, she sees that the lazy smile is gone. A more perfunctory smile is lodged in place now, complete with dead eyes, set jaw. He looks the same way he does when he’s interviewing a defendant and knows they are lying. He handles the situation with his usual lack of finesse.
“We clearly have some sort of code going on here, Mrs Florrick. I’m just not sure I know what it is. When you ask to borrow a pen, should I assume that’s my cue to drop my pants? Maybe throw you onto the desk. How did it work with Will? I assume that’s over, now that you have your hooks into me instead. Did Will fuck you across the desk, or did you do it on the couch?”
She is silent, letting his words hang in the air. Then she says calmly, almost truthfully:
“There’s never been anything between me and Will.”
He looks away, out into the bullpen, and she wonders if he’s embarrassed to have shown his hand so quickly, so crassly. He mutters, “I don’t even know what to believe about you anymore.”
There’s a thrill in the fact that she has riled him. He thinks she’s deliberately keeping him hanging. He thinks she’s ruthless; he believes she slept with Will to keep her job, and now she’s trying to extract something from him in the same way.
She sees Cary. She sees his expensive suits and ill-fitting family legacy. She sees his smiling attempts at manipulation; maneuvers discovered in prep school, perhaps, then honed during college and law school, not in classrooms but in bars and backseats.
She sees Cary, but he doesn’t see her. To him, at first, she was a milk-and-cookies mom. Now he sees a calculating black widow. In spite of this fact - or maybe because of it - he desires her. She recognizes it as the same kind of desire displayed by construction workers who yell “hey, baby” and then switch to “fuck you, bitch”, if you fail to acknowledge them.
“I have my hooks into you?” she asks softly.
He sucks in a breath and then releases it slowly. It’s a yes.
Cary is easy. Easy to read, and - despite his attempts at coyness - easy to get. She can’t help but think of Peter at the same age. There was a time when Peter was easy to read and - yes, be honest, Alicia - easy to manipulate. If she’d genuinely wanted someone to challenge her, she would have married Will. She chose the eager-to-please puppy dog instead. More fool her, because she ended up with the shark anyway.
She feels like she has been treading water for more than a year now. One day at a time, as they say in AA. Just one more day, she tells herself each morning. For just one more day, she will be kind to Peter. (Peter. A puppy dog again. For now.) She keeps hoping to wake up and find it’s not an effort, that the kindness comes naturally. Yet, each morning, it’s the same. She can’t find the man that she loves in Peter anymore; she can’t find the woman that loved him inside herself. For a few sweet weeks, she thought that maybe Will could be her life raft. But no, it became apparent that all her baggage would drag him down, drown them both.
She’s tired of it.
She doesn’t want to be the teetotal twelve-stepper anymore. She doesn’t want to be grown up and considerate and pragmatic. Just for a little while, she wants something easy.
“Where did you take the intern?” she asks calmly.
“What?”
“The intern from Columbus, Ohio. The one who wanted to work at a real Chicago law firm. When you had sex with her, where did you take her?”
For a split-second, Cary is shocked, abashed at being found out. Then the smile returns.
“You knew about that, huh,” he says in a low voice. “Conference Room Ten. It’s right at the end of the corridor. No one ever uses it.” His grin grows. He has decided to view this as a victory - she must have been tracking his movements for months now, planning her seduction of him.
Is he right? Did she jealously watch Georgie - Georgina Johnson, Class of 2010, Go Buckeyes! - as she flirted openly with Cary? Did she imagine herself in place of Georgie, sighing as Cary kissed her, groping for his erection as they stumbled inside Conference Room Ten?
“Give me ten minutes,” she says. She realizes she sounds almost bored. When did she get so good at this? “Make sure Courtney sees you leave.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Cary drawls, standing up slowly. He sounds almost angry. Maybe he is angry. Maybe he really will leave. Maybe he’s the one with the upper hand after all.
For the next ten minutes, Alicia works on a brief for a divorce case. She answers a call from her daughter (yes, I signed the permission slip, Grace - it’s on the fridge). She deletes a series of Reply-To-All emails concerning the dishwasher salt drama. For the next ten minutes, she is Regular Alicia doing her regular job.
When the ten minutes are up, she waits another five. Regular Alicia remains hard at work. Finally, she gets up, spends a moment tidying her desk, and then leaves her office.
“Courtney, hold my calls,” she says as she sweeps past her assistant. It’s not an unusual request and she refuses to allow herself to blush.
Naturally, the walk to Conference Room Ten takes her past both Diane and Will’s offices. It’s a walk of shame before the act. She waits for one or both of them to catch her eye and call her inside, but neither of them does, and she reaches the stretch of conference rooms uninterrupted. She lengthens her stride, hurrying just a little as she nears the end of the corridor.
Maybe he won’t be there.
Maybe he really did leave.
Maybe he’s the one who’s playing her.
(Who is she kidding? They’re playing each other. She’s just not sure who’s winning.)
When she opens the door to Conference Room Ten, she thinks, for a moment, that it is empty. Then Cary’s hand snakes out to grasp hers. (He was hidden behind the door - he really is good at this.) Gently, oh so gently, he draws her into the room and closes the door behind her. It’s still early in the day, but the blinds are down and the room is murky with half-light.
As soon as the door clicks shut, Cary’s gentleness evaporates. With a deliberateness that verges on roughness, he pushes her against the back of the closed door and kisses her hard. Maybe he, too, noted the slight tentativeness with which he kissed her the first time, that evening in the rain. Maybe he has made a conscious decision to be forceful this time.
His sudden intensity is overwhelming and it takes her a moment to adjust to this new sensation, this new Cary. She returns his kiss and arches her back, pressing her hips into him. He gives a little ground, allowing her to nudge him backward, into the room. Then he changes his mind and slams her back against the door, hard enough to hurt. In response, she slackens, letting him control the speed of their kissing, their touching. For today, she can let him think that he’s winning.
Peter always liked it rough. At first, she simply endured it. She’d let him fuck it out of his system the first time, and then, when he grew hard for a second time, there was a chance for more gentle Lovemaking. As the months turned into years, however, she began to enjoy the slam-slam-slam, fuck-me-and-make-it-hurt sessions more than the slow-motion soul-bonding. Was an affinity for rough sex just a part of her sexuality that she was slow to uncover? Or did Peter mold and shape her into what he wanted? It’s unnerving to realize that some of her sexual proclivities may not even be her own.
Cary and Alicia undress with the same haste, the same angry passion. As she unzips his pants and unbuttons his shirt, she rips off one of the buttons. Good. Let him walk out of here looking like someone who just got fucked. She makes sure her own jacket and camisole slide off more easily, pooling on the floor at their feet with the rest of their clothes.
He withdraws the condom from his pocket and deftly rolls it on. Was he self-assured enough to have put it there this morning, before work? Or is it just his habit, because there’s always a girl - or a pathetic married woman - waiting to fuck him? When he hoists her up to enter her, she wraps her legs around his waist. It’s been a long time since Peter was agile enough to fuck her standing up. However, Cary’s first thrust is awkward and she feels the slightest ebb of disappointment.
Then, suddenly, there’s the sound of a door opening.
She freezes. Stupidly, she thinks that it must be the door to Conference Room Ten - despite the fact that she’s spread against the back of said door. There’s a flurry of noise and chatter, audible through the thin wall that separates them from Conference Room Nine.
Cary thrusts again.
“Litigation support staff meeting, Thursdays, two p.m.,” he murmurs in her ear, before pausing to suck her earlobe into his mouth.
Thrust.
Of course he knows this. Of course he still remembers. All those overworked paralegals and secretaries, meeting to grumble about their superiors. He probably used to bring them pastries, courting their secrets.
She realizes that hearing his voice has made her wetter. For most of their rendezvous, she’d been half-convinced that it was Peter - a younger Peter, an easier Peter - that she was fucking. But no, this is Cary. Cary, who was almost her friend and yet never her friend. Clueless Cary. Conniving Cary. Cary, whose life is still a neatly-wound ball of yarn. Cary, who might be coming unravelled even at this moment.
She wants to hear his voice again.
“Tell me how many of them you fucked,” she says in a low voice.
Thrust.
“…A few.”
Thrust.
“Who?” she asks.
Thrust.
“…Kate…” he says.
Thrust.
“…Susie…”
Thrust.
“…Am. An. Da.”
One name, three syllables, broken up by ragged breathing. He’s probably lying. He’s probably never even spoken to these women, but as their chatter filters through the wall into Conference Room Ten, Alicia finds she’s getting closer.
Thrust.
She wants to ask more questions, but she senses that Cary is beyond the point of being able to form coherent sentences. “Fu-uck,” he stutters. It’s followed by a moan at the back of his throat, which he quickly chokes off.
Thrust.
“GodAliciaGod,” he mutters.
Silently, she congratulates him on remembering her name. You might just as well have called me Amanda, she thinks scornfully. But then she realizes that he’s looking at her now. Really looking. Like he’s trying to memorize her.
And then.
His mouth unhooks, dropping open. His body bucks and then, just like that, he comes and it’s over.
Alicia knows before he’s even slid out of her, set her down on the floor, that he either doesn’t know or doesn’t care that she hasn’t come yet.
She slackens against the door and watches as he gathers his clothing and begins to dress. What has she achieved from this quick, dissatisfying fuck with Cary? The question skitters across the surface of her mind as she looks at Cary and notes the way that, suddenly, he refuses to look at her.
The briefest of glances - inscrutable again, as he indicates she must move in order for him to open the door - is all she receives before he’s gone. The scent of sex is all he leaves behind.
Out in the corridor, another door opens at the same moment.
“Cary Agos!” a bright, female voice exclaims.
“Oh, hey there, Amanda…
Alicia thinks she might have caught a note of panic in his voice - did he check his hair nervously? adjust his jacket to hide the missing buttons on his shirt? - but it is quickly smoothed over. Cary carries on the conversation with Amanda loudly, confidently. Amanda’s answers are only an indistinct murmur through the wall, but Alicia knows that Cary wants her to hear what he’s saying.
“…Great to see you…”
“…No, you look amazing…”
“…Yeah, had a meeting with Diane earlier. Left my jacket in the conference room…”
“…Yeah, yeah… I know… Would lose my head if it wasn’t screwed on…”
“…I know… Need someone to remind me, though…”
“…You would make an excellent job of that…”
“…State’s Attorney’s office can’t afford you…”
“…Tempting offer, Amanda, tempting…”
As Alicia listens to Cary’s practiced patter, his off-hand seduction, she slips two fingers between her legs and brings herself to climax.
*
Chapter 3. Hotel.
The week that follows is quiet.
Too quiet.
She spends the first three days feeling relieved when Cary doesn’t call or stop by. She spends the next three days feeling much less relieved. On the seventh day, when the feeling of wanting to crawl out of her own skin gets too much, she calls Owen to confess. She’s looking for absolution or affirmation or something like that.
“I did it. I had sex with Cary,” she says, without pre-amble. She has locked herself in the master bathroom. Taps running. Sotto voce.
Owen replies, “Who’s Cary? Wait, don’t tell me, I don’t care… You fucked someone else! Good for you.” He pauses. “But why now?”
“I just wanted to. Like you said. Revenge sex.”
“Was it gooooood?” he purrs.
“It was-” (Hot. Disturbing. Not enough.) “Fine.”
“Ugh, you’re feeling guilty, aren’t you? Only you would feel guilty after revenge sex.”
No. Not guilty.
She’s feeling…
Embarrassment, probably. A creeping sense of Puritan shame, undoubtedly. But she’s not feeling guilty. Definitely not guilty.
The answer to how she’s truly feeling is lodged somewhere inside the memory that she cannot stop replaying: the way that Cary looked her in Conference Room Ten right before he came. It’s a look that feels seared into her skin.
She remembers Cary’s words: You have your hooks into me.
*
On Friday morning - day eight - she goes into the office and opens up her email account. Lodged between the spam and CCs, she spies Cary’s name immediately.
The email’s subject line reads: Pick a hotel.
The email itself is blank.
She deletes it immediately and then empties her trash. Will the higher ups be able to know that she has received and read it? Is there some sort of spying program on her computer?
(Zach would know. She can’t ask Zach.)
The truth is, she doesn’t care.
She finds the number of a hotel.
*
Alicia was a homemaker for fourteen years. As a result, she has certain talents, which are arguably no less useful or more useless than the ability to regurgitate case-law at the drop of a hat.
Alicia knows hotels.
There were always clients and friends and client-friends of Peter’s who needed a place to stay in Chicago. Choosing the right hotel was a delicate maneuver. Frilly, ‘cosy’, ornate. Ostentatiously expensive, or the same price tag but with careful, stylized blandness. Pick the wrong hotel and risk offending the Steinbergs or the Travertons.
She treats the exercise of finding a hotel on this occasion with the same delicacy. She picks a big hotel, located downtown. It’s a good hotel, but not extravagant. It’s chic, but a couple of years past trendy. It has a noteworthy restaurant in the foyer, so if someone spots her there, she can say she was dining.
Alicia wonders if she has discovered the secret of housewives everywhere: the same talents it takes to manage a home can also be used to manage an affair.
It is with a whisper of trepidation that she gives her credit card details to the hotel clerk over the phone and then emails Cary details of their rendezvous. She waits for her conscience to kick in and stop her, but it never does. She feels only a queasy, girlish excitement of a type she’d long since forgotten she was able to feel.
*
The hotel room is beautiful: cream and tan in color scheme, with clean lines and tasteful décor. A stylish, oversize desk lamp forms a focal point for the room; a design flourish from an overpaid interior decorator. The south-facing window, with its view of the city, fills the room with rich, midday sunlight.
However, as soon as she enters the room, she draws the curtains, replacing the sun with gloom. The effect is immediate: she is not in Chicago anymore; she’s not even sure she’s Alicia anymore.
Without undressing, without even removing her shoes, she lies down on the bed. She stares at the ceiling, silence roaring in her ears. She can’t help but think about Peter and his prostitutes, meeting in hotel rooms just like this one. Is she just like him now? Trading self-respect for sex.
There’s a light knock on the door.
“Come in,” she calls.
She doesn’t get up. She just props herself up on her elbows and watches as he enters the room. He pauses to let his eyes adjust, to take in the sight of her on the bed, and then he closes the door.
He offers no greeting and neither does she.
He puts down his briefcase and takes off his suit jacket, folding it carefully over the back of the chair in the corner of the room. Each of his movements is unhurried. With the same deliberateness, he rolls up the sleeves of his shirt. (She must have seen him do this dozens of times, yet today it makes her breath catch in her throat.)
He reaches for his tie and inserts a thumb into its knot. Slowly, he works it loose. The half-light makes his expression hard to read. The tie joins his jacket on the chair back. Then he advances.
Alicia doesn’t react. She just… watches. Waiting.
Cary kneels at the foot of the bed. With the same unhurried calm, he removes her shoes, one by one. Methodical. His hands move up her legs, the barest pressure of fingertips against nylon. As his hands reach her thighs, she adjusts her hips just enough to allow him to push at the hem of her suit skirt. He pulls at her tights and again she shifts, allowing him access. He reveals her bare legs in sections, slowly, until he rolls her tights off her toes and lets them drop to the floor. Her underwear follows, until she is naked under the wadded fabric of her skirt.
For a brief moment, he pauses. He presses a thumb into the arch of her foot. His eyes - bright with intent - meet hers. And then he spreads her open.
His tongue teases slowly into the wetness between her legs. If Cary kisses like a lawyer, Alicia thinks distractedly, he also gives head like a lawyer. He seeks out her most sensitive areas, tracks her responses and then attacks accordingly. The result is devastating: she’s a keening, helpless wreck within minutes. As her body bucks against his tongue, there’s little point in pretending otherwise: he is winning.
What surprises her is how present she is in the moment. Thoughts of Peter have disappeared. When she grows close to orgasm, it is Cary’s name that rolls to the tip of her tongue. She grits her teeth, forbidding his name from passing her lips, releasing only a whimper as she comes.
Her earlier coolness is long gone. Now she is nothing but heat. Her body still reverberating with the aftershocks of orgasm, she craves the touch of skin. They undress each other haphazardly, all clumsy fingers and desperate kisses.
Considering how unspectacular their first sexual encounter proved to be, she’s surprised at how easily they find a rhythm when pushes inside her this time. He rises above her, locking her with his eyes, and she feels utterly connected to him.
Her second orgasm flows out of her and this time she can’t help it, she calls out his name. “Cary…” she murmurs, a ragged breath splitting the word into two distinct sounds.
*
Lying together afterward, they kiss. He has a boyish enthusiasm for it, perhaps because he is not yet far enough removed from the days when it was all he could expect from a date. Slowly, playfully, they kiss; pausing to rearrange limbs and then kissing some more. Their bodies are spent, but they still crave more from each other.
Eventually, the breaks between kisses grow longer and the amicable silence stretches.
“…Was it good for you?” Cary asks, his voice soft and close to her ear.
She laughs. She can’t help it.
“Sorry, that was a dumb thing to say,” he says with a grin and she’s reminded again of how young he is.
“Yeah, it was good for me,” she says, sharing his grin.
There’s a warmth to the moment; a strange, unearned intimacy. Sex does not equal closeness, yet in this moment, she feels so close to him. It’s as if they’ve cracked opened up a door to what might be. He strokes her hair, and looks at her with wide-eyed intensity. Another kiss; another glimpse of a different life.
Inevitably, despite their attempts to extend the moment, real life creeps back in.
“…What’s the time?” he asks.
“Almost two…” she says, checking her watch.
“…Shit. I have court. You too?”
“No, not this afternoon.”
“Mind if I grab the shower first?” he asks.
“Go ahead.”
He plants one final kiss on her lips and then scrambles out of bed. She smiles at his energy. (By contrast, she feels that she could sleep for a week.) She watches him cross the room naked, his body lean, muscular and bearing the slightest trace of swagger.
What’s alarming is how quickly her affection for him turns to suspicion.
She feels a niggle in the back of her mind. It is vague yet impossible to ignore. It’s bothering her… Something about his silly was it good for you question… Like he was trying to trap her… Forcing her to voice her desire…
She’s out of bed before she has a clear idea of what she’s going to do. Distractedly, she finds her clothes and pulls them on in a hurry. She can hear the shower running in the en suite and it sounds to her like a ticking clock.
There’s probably nothing…
She’ll just check…
To make sure…
She grabs his briefcase and throws it on the unmade bed.
It turns out that snooping is an art and it isn’t one she’s very good at. (Kalinda would be ashamed.)
In fact, she’s still rifling through the contents of Cary’s briefcase when he emerges from the bathroom, with a towel wrapped around his waist.
*
Chapter 4. Caught.
He takes a long moment to look at her and assess the situation. Then he stretches lazily, combing his fingers through wet hair.
“Find anything interesting?” he inquires mildly.
“No.”
“What were you hoping for?”
She says nothing.
Slowly and deliberately, he removes the towel from around his waist and roams the room naked, searching for his clothes. As he begins to dress, he continues to talk.
“Oh, that’s right,” he says. “You thought I’d want to record this. Maybe bug the room. Give the press another sex tape to add to your husband’s.” He changes tone and says, “Does she do this for you?” The inflection is dead-on; it’s the type of impersonation that can only be achieved as a result of dozens of listens.
Alicia keeps her face composed.
“It would be a good strategy on your boss’s part,” she says evenly. “Reveal his opponent as weak, shiftless - not even his wife remains loyal to him. It would destroy Peter’s campaign.”
Almost fully dressed now, he shoulders his jacket with a flourish and grins like she has revealed too much.
“That’s what you want, isn’t it? To destroy him?” he asks.
“No,” she says honestly.
“Why else would you do this? Why else would you fuck around?”
“Stop talking,” she says dismissively.
His grin disappears. She has aggravated him. He reaches over and grabs his briefcase from the bed, snapping it shut.
“Might want to check the lamp instead,” he says in a cold voice, gesturing to the ostentatious, over-size lamp that sits on the hotel room desk.
“I showed up at the hotel a few minutes before you,” he continues. “Tagged the lamp with a tiny camera. Aimed it at the bed. The footage is being sent straight to a computer in the State’s Attorney’s office. Childs will see it before the end of the day.” He pauses and enunciates his next words in a low, deliberate voice. “The way you came for me.”
(She can’t help it, despite the coldness in his voice - or maybe because of it - her clitoris twitches.)
“Maybe he’ll leak it immediately,” Cary adds. “Maybe wait until the week before the election. Maximum impact. I’ll get a promotion, obviously, when Childs is re-elected.”
Alicia tries to remain calm as she crosses the room to where the lamp sits. Innocuous just moments ago, now its showiness seems to taunt her. She fumbles around the rim of the lamp shade and feels Cary’s eyes on her back.
If he’s telling the truth, it means-what? Yet more humiliation; perhaps more than she can stand. Everyone she knows will see the tape. Peter. Jacqui. Zach and Grace. Will. People will declare her morally bankrupt. People will pretend to know her, based merely on an hour’s hotel room footage. The idea is crushing.
She grabs the lamp by its stem and searches more frantically for the camera. She hears the sound of the hotel room door opening, but she doesn’t turn around.
“You won’t find it,” Cary says as he allows the door to swing shut on his way out. “There’s nothing there.”
*
The knowledge that her affair with Cary will not, in fact, become tabloid fodder should be a relief. However, she feels only emptiness as she checks out of the hotel and returns to normalcy.
It will go like this, she decides:
She will do what she is supposed to do. She will work and she will work well. She will be a devoted mother to her children. She will play the forgiving wife. She will be cool and congenial to Cary when their paths cross.
She will erase the last few days from her memory. And, with no evidence to prove anything happened, perhaps those stolen moments with Cary really will be erased from history.
Delete. Overwrite. Move on.
*
She expects Cary to keep his distance - stay complicit in her plan to pretend that nothing ever happened - so it’s a shock when he shows up at her door just a few hours later.
It is eight o’clock in the evening. It is Family Night. She can hear Peter and Zach’s voices from the living room; music from Grace’s bedroom. And Cary is standing in the corridor of her apartment building, looking unruffled.
Immediately, she steps out into the corridor and closes the front door, leaning against it. She can still hear Grace’s music.
“Cary… you can’t just…”
“Don’t worry, I’m not staying,” he says. “I just came to give you this.”
Cary holds out a manila envelope to her. Their hands do not touch as she takes it from him. She snaps the fastening open and a sheaf of photographs spills out.
They are, it is immediately obvious, long-lens photos. Each one features her… and Will. There are dozens of shots of the two of them. Shots of them standing close together. Shots of them laughing together. There is a frame-by-frame version of a hug that, she recalls, only lasted 20 seconds in actuality, but here appears pornographically drawn out. The hospital back drop reveals that particular set of photos must have been taken during the Lifestate case.
“Childs never knew about us,” Cary says in a low voice. “But he’s been gathering evidence on you. For a while now.”
“These aren’t-”
“I don’t care, Alicia. I don’t care if you slept with Will. But put these photos out there and everyone will think you did.”
“So… what, you came to taunt me?” she asks, pushing the photos back inside the envelope with a vicious jab.
“I came to tell you I deleted the digital versions,” he says. “Shredded the rest of the prints. That”-he gestures to the envelope-“is all that’s left.”
There’s a long moment of silence as the realization of what he has done for her sinks in.
“I don’t care what you do with them,” Cary adds. “I just didn’t think it was fair. For Childs to do that to you.”
“Cary…” she begins, but she doesn’t know how to end the sentence.
Cary… I’m sorry.
Cary… I think I might feel something for you.
Cary…
He looks at her for a long moment, like it might be the last time he gets to look at her without the burden of pretending. Then he turns to leave.
The moments in life where you reach a crossroads aren’t usually clear-cut and Alicia can feel this one slipping away from her already. She knows that she won’t stop him. She knows that there’s nothing left to say. But she also knows that - though it is slipping rapidly through her fingers - she still has a choice.
Here, in this moment, she could choose Cary.
She can almost see what it would be like. To be in a relationship with Cary. He’d take her to trendy, expensive restaurants. People would stare at them, but then people always stare. Cary would lean in close and whisper, they’re jealous, and then they’d fuck in the bathroom between courses.
Cary would charm her kids, of course. Grace would want to date him herself; Zach would be hesitant, but Cary would win him over. He’d know the right things to say. Cary always knows the right things to say.
Alicia remembers how she felt in the hotel room with Cary: that unearned, misplaced sense of intimacy between them. Perhaps that was a genuine glimpse of the future. The two of them could spend each night in each other’s arms, earning that intimacy, building something solid and unshakeable.
The fantasy of a life with Cary is fleeting. A middle-aged woman’s idle daydream.
“Cary,” she calls after him, “I don’t think I even know half of who you are.”
He glances back at her, eyes narrowing a fraction. She realizes that he doesn’t get it. To his ears, it sounds like an insult somehow. But she means it as an apology.
“Thank you for the photos,” she says at last. “You’re… a gentleman.”
“Nope,” he replies. “Just a guy.”
“Alicia…?”
It’s Peter’s voice, on the other side of the door, pulling her back to her real life.
“Goodbye, Cary,” she says, absurdly formal.
“Goodbye, Alicia,” he says, equally staid.
And, just like that, whatever they had is over.
Over, but not erased, she thinks as she opens the door and steps back into her old self. Only the two of them will ever know about their affair, but in a slight, imperceptible way, it has changed them both.
(Apropos reminder that The Good Wife is fantastically compelling TV and this season promises to be an awesome shake-up.)
Title: A typical Cary Agos
Author: iridescentglow
Fandom: The Good Wife
Pairing: Alicia/Cary
Rating: NC-17
Word count: 7,959
Archived: AO3
Summary: Alicia’s looking for something easy. Cary’s looking for leverage. What they each end up with is something else entirely.
Note: Refers to the events of #2.04 (Cleaning House), but canon divergent for everything afterwards.
-----
A typical Cary Agos
Chapter 1. Hot Air.
Alicia knows who Cary is.
She sat in college classes with Cary. In dingy Georgetown bars, she sipped beer and laughed at Cary’s jokes. In her dorm room, decorated with Indigo Girls posters, she allowed Cary to take off her bra. Cary - one of the many Carys she has known, whose real name is lost to the ether - never bothered to return her calls.
Yes, Alicia knows all about Cary. He will never surprise her.
She knows without ever asking that he works out just enough to look good. He reads just enough to appear cultured. He has some benign trauma in his past (grandmother’s lingering illness, high school friend’s suicide) that he will reveal if ever he suspects he has become unsympathetic.
No need for a crystal ball: she can already predict his future.
He will meet a girl, one who will inspire him, challenge him. Maybe that’s the girl he will marry; maybe not. Either way, he will end up with a wife in suburbia. There will be kids, promotions at work, bigger houses, faster cars. And he’ll smile, smile, smile through it all, until he loses his teeth.
*
After her second deposition with Cary, Alicia’s car breaks down. Pastor Isaiah would probably suggest that it is God punishing her for considering lying under oath. She’s more inclined to blame her car mechanic, who thinks she’s an idiot and charges her to fix everything except what’s actually wrong with her car.
The fact that it starts to rain the moment she sets out to walk home in high heels - well, that’s just bad luck. Bad luck and Jacqui, who, this morning, told her it was absolutely not ladylike to wear a pencil skirt with flats. There’s definitely a conspiracy against her; it’s just more benign than God’s wrath.
She’s looking for a taxi - there are plenty on the streets, just none that are empty - when a car glides to a halt at the curb’s edge and Cary’s smile appears through the rain-flecked window.
“Need a ride?” he asks, lowering the window.
The rain has already plastered her hair to her head and water is now dripping uncomfortably down the back of her neck. Her feet hurt and the twilight is dwindling into darkness. Decorum, as well as plain common sense, dictates that her answer can only be: “Thank you, Cary.”
She arranges herself in the passenger seat and he slides back into the flow of traffic, effortlessly cutting off a driver who dared to drive at the speed limit.
“It’s really coming down, huh?” he says, after a few moments of silence.
On automatic, she tells him about her car trouble.
“Too bad, too bad,” he murmurs. “You live on Oxford, right?”
“Yes,” she says.
How could he know that? Has Childs set up surveillance on her? Is it really a coincidence that Cary was passing when her engine died? The paranoid questions snowball in her mind for a moment and then she remembers. He knows where she lives because he dropped her home one night last year. She almost laughs, remembering the sight of him with his tie undone and his suit jacket crumpled over a bar stool.
“I’m surprised you stopped,” she says. “I thought you’d just gun the engine, drive through a puddle and soak me.” She smiles to show she’s joking, but they both know she isn’t.
“C’mon,” he says, casting her a sidelong smile, “I’m not the bad guy.”
“You subpoenaed me, Cary.” She makes sure to keep her voice neutral, with just the slightest hint of reproachfulness.
“That’s work,” he says dismissively.
“Funny. It feels like a vendetta.”
He laughs. “Vendetta,” he repeats, as if tasting the word in his mouth. He doesn’t respond to her accusation. He just says, “I have always gone out of my way to be cordial to you.”
Of course, in his estimation, it is true. This time, she can’t keep from laughing.
“Ah yes,” she says, “our date.”
During their first month at Stern-Lockhart, he asked her to dinner.
He cornered her between meetings, stood too close and spoke in a low voice. Should really get to know each other… don’t want to be enemies… could probably learn a lot from one another. Although he was proposing a work dinner, she felt like she was back in college, being pursued by the captain of the crew team.
She began mentally referring to it as a “date” and even told Owen about it, courting his laughter. Of course, when the evening in question rolled around, Cary morphed from ardent pursuer into bad boyfriend. After assuring her he’d make reservations, he abruptly said he’d rather eat at a bar around the corner from the office, where steaks were half-price when you ordered a pitcher of beer. He spent the whole night talking over her and flirting with the female bartender. In turn, she ordered glass after glass of red wine - and drank so much that he had to drive her home.
“I thought I left those sort of dates behind when I married Peter,” she told Owen later over the phone, drunk and hysterical from the absurdity of her evening.
Owen’s answer was predictable: “You should have slept with him.” That’s what her brother says about every man she meets in these post-scandal days. “If you don’t get divorced, you get to have revenge sex. That’s how it works.”
Of course, she did not sleep with Cary, and they both wordlessly agreed that they need not “get to know each other” any further.
In the car, in the present, Cary’s eyebrows creep up his forehead. “Our date?”
“I misspoke,” she says quickly. “You were kind enough to treat me to dinner last year.”
“And you thought it was a date?”
“No, I misspoke.”
Cary ignores her, raising his voice to say, “Lady, if we dated, we would’ve done more than chew steaks in a bar.” For emphasis, he hits the steering wheel lightly with his hand.
They’re both silent for a few moments. They’ve hit traffic and the car can only crawl along the street at a maddeningly slow speed. Inside her shoes, Alicia curls her toes, hesitates, and then kicks off the evil court shoes completely. She rubs the big toe of her right foot against the arch of her left foot, easing the day’s tension for a fraction of a second.
The darkness outside, coupled with the rhythmic whirr of the windshield wipers, has created a false sense of intimacy inside the car. For the first time today, she speaks without checking herself.
“Tell me about a typical Cary Agos date,” she says.
The car has ground to a halt before a stoplight, so Cary is able to not only flick his gaze in her direction but twist his body completely, so that he’s looking at her. She smiles at him mischievously and then wonders how her expression registers to him. ‘Mischievous’ is a girlish attribute; she doesn’t know how it translates on her face now.
“None of this dinner and drinks shit,” he says at last. “I make an effort. One time, in college, there was a girl I really liked. I booked a balloon ride. One of those sunrise ones. Champagne breakfast afterward.”
“Very romantic,” Alicia says, although no perfect date of hers has ever required her to get out of bed at five a.m.
There’s a honk from the car behind them. The light has changed to green. Cary puts the car into drive and accelerates a little too hard to compensate for his lapse in concentration.
“Yeah, well,” he says, with his eyes fixed on the road, “I guess it wasn’t so romantic. The day we were supposed to go up, the guys who actually fly the thing said it wasn’t the right weather.”
“The great Cary Agos can’t control the weather?”
“I guess it’s the chink in my armor,” he says with a wry smile. “The balloon guys gave us the champagne anyway, so my date and I just drank all morning.”
“And fucked all afternoon, right?”
She’s genuinely not trying to shock him, but her question elicits a breath of astonished laughter from him anyway.
“A gentleman never kisses and tells,” he says, trying and failing to recover smoothly.
“A balloon ride’s a lot of trouble to go to if you don’t expect to get laid,” she says matter-of-factly.
Maybe she has succeeded in rendering him speechless. Maybe he’s just lost in a memory of fucking some petite co-ed while buzzed on cheap champagne and evaporated romance. Either way, he doesn’t reply. She peers out the window and realizes they’ve turned onto Oxford.
He parks the car outside her apartment building. (Good memory? she wonders again. Or has he been here more recently?) When he opens his door, she moves to do the same. It’s locked.
“I’ll get that for you,” he says and climbs out.
She is forced to watch as he slowly walks around the hood of the car. Only when he’s standing at the passenger side does he release her door lock. She quashes the desire to dive forward to open the door herself, knock him down and make a run for it. Instead, she makes herself wait patiently as he opens the door for her like a gentleman. She jams her stocking feet back into her shoes and climbs out.
Even after she’s out of the car, he doesn’t move, blocking her clearest route into the apartment block. She has the choice to either remain motionless, pressed against the side of the car, or elbow past him and appear rude.
“Thank you, Cary,” she says.
“My pleasure,” he says, almost sarcastically; a pantomime of good manners.
She says nothing.
“You know, Alicia,” he continues, “there’s no need for us to be enemies. I really used to respect you.”
It’s his old courting speech, updated for a new situation. He leans in close, voice just barely audible above the noise of the traffic. His eyes scan her face rapidly, never pausing long enough to meet her gaze.
“If you want to see a real Cary Agos date, just let me know.”
He finishes with a smile, one that adds, I’m playing with you.
She is supposed to be unsettled now. It worked last time, after all. But, though he has not grown or changed much in the last year, she has.
She hesitates for a fraction of a second and then she kisses him.
He is a lawyer right down to his soul, instantly adaptable to any curveball. He kisses her back, lips parting against hers to allow a slow sweep of his tongue inside her month. As she reaches out to grasp at him, her cold, ungloved hand finds his elbow. She feels his body press against hers. He is solid and warm, a stark contrast to the drizzle still falling from the sky.
Her apartment is on the fifteenth floor, and the view from its windows typically reduces people on the street to blank, faceless figures. For a second, she imagines she and Cary viewed that way, from high above, an indistinguishable kissing couple, stripped of every identifying attribute except their desire.
That word catches her by surprise. Desire? She is jolted back into the moment by the realization that she’s actually enjoying this. Cary’s lips are soft and malleable; despite his bravado, there’s a slight tentativeness to his movements. It’s almost charming, and not at all what she would expect from him.
“Call your husband,” he murmurs, breaking the kiss for a moment, “tell him you’ll be late.”
She smiles, not at the insinuation (a cheap hotel room, a quick fuck, a lie to her husband), but because it sounds so rehearsed. She cannot be the first married woman to whom he has made this proposal. Is this how he honed his skills? Courting older women, who were desperate enough never to probe beneath his clear-skinned surface? Is that who she has become?
No. Not yet.
“Goodnight, Cary,” she says, pressing the palm of her hand to his chest and lightly pushing him away.
“Alicia…” he says, as she slips past him to leave.
She imagines she hears a forlorn note in his voice, but when she glances back, he looks inscrutable.
*
There are any number of ways to explain away the evening. Lingering feelings for Will projected onto Cary? A game of one-upmanship gone too far? A simple, irresistible impulse? But no, she’s not 19 anymore: no impulse is irresistible.
She feels that if she could only laugh about the memory, turn it into a ludicrous anecdote, it would lose its potency. She almost calls Kalinda and then thinks better of it. She actually does call Owen, but she just ends up talking about the kids. “God, your life is boring,” he drawls down the phone. “This stuff is better than Ambien.” Forever forced to play the prim older sister, she tells him that a good night’s sleep would do him good, then hangs up the phone.
In the living room, she tries to watch the news, but she keeps zoning out. Peter comes up behind her, rubbing her shoulder with one hand. “Stressed?” he asks. She knows it’s a come-on: the solution to stress for him has always been sex.
She smiles up at him, with a deliberately bland expression, and says, “I’m just tired. I told Owen he should get an early night. I should do the same.”
In bed, wide awake, she replays in her head the earlier encounter with Cary: seeing again and again his surprised expression when she used the word “fuck”; reliving over and over the moment when her lips met his.
In a few days, she will laugh about this, she decides again, resolute. But she’s not ready for the memory to lose its potency just yet.
*
Chapter 2. Conference Room Ten.
Three days later, Cary shows up in her office.
She returns from the file room to see him waiting in there. Courtney explains the situation with an apologetic smile and hustles away, perhaps interpreting Alicia’s silent reaction as anger. Alicia approaches across the bullpen slowly, watching him as he roams her office.
First, he folds his jacket over a chair, marking his territory. Then he inspects the photos arranged across her desk. They show an affable Peter in ‘weekend’ attire; much-younger versions of Zach and Grace, when they were the perfect age: old enough to tell her what was wrong and young enough to believe there was nothing she couldn’t fix. Cary runs his fingertip across the tops of the frames. He looks like a high-class auctioneer, assessing the value of her life’s work.
“Are you planning to serve me with court papers again?” Alicia asks, stepping into the office and closing the door. “Let me guess… I was jaywalking on Michigan Avenue.”
Cary is still standing at her desk. She crosses her arms and waits for him to move. He smiles and slides past her, pressing a little too close, so that she can smell his cologne, his expensive shampoo.
“Just a friendly visit,” he says, taking a seat on the other side of the desk. “We’re awfully friendly all of a sudden, aren’t we?”
He smiles lazily, reclining in his chair as if he’s planning to rear back like an adolescent schoolboy. She chooses not to rise to the bait and instead takes a seat, arranging herself primly behind her desk. She clicks her computer awake and checks her work email, as if she has better things to do than continue this conversation. (She does, in fact, have better things to do. There are perhaps a thousand things she should be doing that take precedence over Cary.)
Cary doesn’t take long to bore of the game. He leans forward and says:
“Want to fill me in on what happened the other night?”
“Of course, Cary,” she says, her eyes scanning an email about the theft of dishwasher salt from the seventh-floor kitchen. “You were kind enough to drive me home when my car broke down. It’s in full working order again now, as I’m sure you’ll be glad to hear.”
“Mmhmm. That’s what happened, is it?”
“Of course.”
When she looks away from her screen, she sees that the lazy smile is gone. A more perfunctory smile is lodged in place now, complete with dead eyes, set jaw. He looks the same way he does when he’s interviewing a defendant and knows they are lying. He handles the situation with his usual lack of finesse.
“We clearly have some sort of code going on here, Mrs Florrick. I’m just not sure I know what it is. When you ask to borrow a pen, should I assume that’s my cue to drop my pants? Maybe throw you onto the desk. How did it work with Will? I assume that’s over, now that you have your hooks into me instead. Did Will fuck you across the desk, or did you do it on the couch?”
She is silent, letting his words hang in the air. Then she says calmly, almost truthfully:
“There’s never been anything between me and Will.”
He looks away, out into the bullpen, and she wonders if he’s embarrassed to have shown his hand so quickly, so crassly. He mutters, “I don’t even know what to believe about you anymore.”
There’s a thrill in the fact that she has riled him. He thinks she’s deliberately keeping him hanging. He thinks she’s ruthless; he believes she slept with Will to keep her job, and now she’s trying to extract something from him in the same way.
She sees Cary. She sees his expensive suits and ill-fitting family legacy. She sees his smiling attempts at manipulation; maneuvers discovered in prep school, perhaps, then honed during college and law school, not in classrooms but in bars and backseats.
She sees Cary, but he doesn’t see her. To him, at first, she was a milk-and-cookies mom. Now he sees a calculating black widow. In spite of this fact - or maybe because of it - he desires her. She recognizes it as the same kind of desire displayed by construction workers who yell “hey, baby” and then switch to “fuck you, bitch”, if you fail to acknowledge them.
“I have my hooks into you?” she asks softly.
He sucks in a breath and then releases it slowly. It’s a yes.
Cary is easy. Easy to read, and - despite his attempts at coyness - easy to get. She can’t help but think of Peter at the same age. There was a time when Peter was easy to read and - yes, be honest, Alicia - easy to manipulate. If she’d genuinely wanted someone to challenge her, she would have married Will. She chose the eager-to-please puppy dog instead. More fool her, because she ended up with the shark anyway.
She feels like she has been treading water for more than a year now. One day at a time, as they say in AA. Just one more day, she tells herself each morning. For just one more day, she will be kind to Peter. (Peter. A puppy dog again. For now.) She keeps hoping to wake up and find it’s not an effort, that the kindness comes naturally. Yet, each morning, it’s the same. She can’t find the man that she loves in Peter anymore; she can’t find the woman that loved him inside herself. For a few sweet weeks, she thought that maybe Will could be her life raft. But no, it became apparent that all her baggage would drag him down, drown them both.
She’s tired of it.
She doesn’t want to be the teetotal twelve-stepper anymore. She doesn’t want to be grown up and considerate and pragmatic. Just for a little while, she wants something easy.
“Where did you take the intern?” she asks calmly.
“What?”
“The intern from Columbus, Ohio. The one who wanted to work at a real Chicago law firm. When you had sex with her, where did you take her?”
For a split-second, Cary is shocked, abashed at being found out. Then the smile returns.
“You knew about that, huh,” he says in a low voice. “Conference Room Ten. It’s right at the end of the corridor. No one ever uses it.” His grin grows. He has decided to view this as a victory - she must have been tracking his movements for months now, planning her seduction of him.
Is he right? Did she jealously watch Georgie - Georgina Johnson, Class of 2010, Go Buckeyes! - as she flirted openly with Cary? Did she imagine herself in place of Georgie, sighing as Cary kissed her, groping for his erection as they stumbled inside Conference Room Ten?
“Give me ten minutes,” she says. She realizes she sounds almost bored. When did she get so good at this? “Make sure Courtney sees you leave.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Cary drawls, standing up slowly. He sounds almost angry. Maybe he is angry. Maybe he really will leave. Maybe he’s the one with the upper hand after all.
For the next ten minutes, Alicia works on a brief for a divorce case. She answers a call from her daughter (yes, I signed the permission slip, Grace - it’s on the fridge). She deletes a series of Reply-To-All emails concerning the dishwasher salt drama. For the next ten minutes, she is Regular Alicia doing her regular job.
When the ten minutes are up, she waits another five. Regular Alicia remains hard at work. Finally, she gets up, spends a moment tidying her desk, and then leaves her office.
“Courtney, hold my calls,” she says as she sweeps past her assistant. It’s not an unusual request and she refuses to allow herself to blush.
Naturally, the walk to Conference Room Ten takes her past both Diane and Will’s offices. It’s a walk of shame before the act. She waits for one or both of them to catch her eye and call her inside, but neither of them does, and she reaches the stretch of conference rooms uninterrupted. She lengthens her stride, hurrying just a little as she nears the end of the corridor.
Maybe he won’t be there.
Maybe he really did leave.
Maybe he’s the one who’s playing her.
(Who is she kidding? They’re playing each other. She’s just not sure who’s winning.)
When she opens the door to Conference Room Ten, she thinks, for a moment, that it is empty. Then Cary’s hand snakes out to grasp hers. (He was hidden behind the door - he really is good at this.) Gently, oh so gently, he draws her into the room and closes the door behind her. It’s still early in the day, but the blinds are down and the room is murky with half-light.
As soon as the door clicks shut, Cary’s gentleness evaporates. With a deliberateness that verges on roughness, he pushes her against the back of the closed door and kisses her hard. Maybe he, too, noted the slight tentativeness with which he kissed her the first time, that evening in the rain. Maybe he has made a conscious decision to be forceful this time.
His sudden intensity is overwhelming and it takes her a moment to adjust to this new sensation, this new Cary. She returns his kiss and arches her back, pressing her hips into him. He gives a little ground, allowing her to nudge him backward, into the room. Then he changes his mind and slams her back against the door, hard enough to hurt. In response, she slackens, letting him control the speed of their kissing, their touching. For today, she can let him think that he’s winning.
Peter always liked it rough. At first, she simply endured it. She’d let him fuck it out of his system the first time, and then, when he grew hard for a second time, there was a chance for more gentle Lovemaking. As the months turned into years, however, she began to enjoy the slam-slam-slam, fuck-me-and-make-it-hurt sessions more than the slow-motion soul-bonding. Was an affinity for rough sex just a part of her sexuality that she was slow to uncover? Or did Peter mold and shape her into what he wanted? It’s unnerving to realize that some of her sexual proclivities may not even be her own.
Cary and Alicia undress with the same haste, the same angry passion. As she unzips his pants and unbuttons his shirt, she rips off one of the buttons. Good. Let him walk out of here looking like someone who just got fucked. She makes sure her own jacket and camisole slide off more easily, pooling on the floor at their feet with the rest of their clothes.
He withdraws the condom from his pocket and deftly rolls it on. Was he self-assured enough to have put it there this morning, before work? Or is it just his habit, because there’s always a girl - or a pathetic married woman - waiting to fuck him? When he hoists her up to enter her, she wraps her legs around his waist. It’s been a long time since Peter was agile enough to fuck her standing up. However, Cary’s first thrust is awkward and she feels the slightest ebb of disappointment.
Then, suddenly, there’s the sound of a door opening.
She freezes. Stupidly, she thinks that it must be the door to Conference Room Ten - despite the fact that she’s spread against the back of said door. There’s a flurry of noise and chatter, audible through the thin wall that separates them from Conference Room Nine.
Cary thrusts again.
“Litigation support staff meeting, Thursdays, two p.m.,” he murmurs in her ear, before pausing to suck her earlobe into his mouth.
Thrust.
Of course he knows this. Of course he still remembers. All those overworked paralegals and secretaries, meeting to grumble about their superiors. He probably used to bring them pastries, courting their secrets.
She realizes that hearing his voice has made her wetter. For most of their rendezvous, she’d been half-convinced that it was Peter - a younger Peter, an easier Peter - that she was fucking. But no, this is Cary. Cary, who was almost her friend and yet never her friend. Clueless Cary. Conniving Cary. Cary, whose life is still a neatly-wound ball of yarn. Cary, who might be coming unravelled even at this moment.
She wants to hear his voice again.
“Tell me how many of them you fucked,” she says in a low voice.
Thrust.
“…A few.”
Thrust.
“Who?” she asks.
Thrust.
“…Kate…” he says.
Thrust.
“…Susie…”
Thrust.
“…Am. An. Da.”
One name, three syllables, broken up by ragged breathing. He’s probably lying. He’s probably never even spoken to these women, but as their chatter filters through the wall into Conference Room Ten, Alicia finds she’s getting closer.
Thrust.
She wants to ask more questions, but she senses that Cary is beyond the point of being able to form coherent sentences. “Fu-uck,” he stutters. It’s followed by a moan at the back of his throat, which he quickly chokes off.
Thrust.
“GodAliciaGod,” he mutters.
Silently, she congratulates him on remembering her name. You might just as well have called me Amanda, she thinks scornfully. But then she realizes that he’s looking at her now. Really looking. Like he’s trying to memorize her.
And then.
His mouth unhooks, dropping open. His body bucks and then, just like that, he comes and it’s over.
Alicia knows before he’s even slid out of her, set her down on the floor, that he either doesn’t know or doesn’t care that she hasn’t come yet.
She slackens against the door and watches as he gathers his clothing and begins to dress. What has she achieved from this quick, dissatisfying fuck with Cary? The question skitters across the surface of her mind as she looks at Cary and notes the way that, suddenly, he refuses to look at her.
The briefest of glances - inscrutable again, as he indicates she must move in order for him to open the door - is all she receives before he’s gone. The scent of sex is all he leaves behind.
Out in the corridor, another door opens at the same moment.
“Cary Agos!” a bright, female voice exclaims.
“Oh, hey there, Amanda…
Alicia thinks she might have caught a note of panic in his voice - did he check his hair nervously? adjust his jacket to hide the missing buttons on his shirt? - but it is quickly smoothed over. Cary carries on the conversation with Amanda loudly, confidently. Amanda’s answers are only an indistinct murmur through the wall, but Alicia knows that Cary wants her to hear what he’s saying.
“…Great to see you…”
“…No, you look amazing…”
“…Yeah, had a meeting with Diane earlier. Left my jacket in the conference room…”
“…Yeah, yeah… I know… Would lose my head if it wasn’t screwed on…”
“…I know… Need someone to remind me, though…”
“…You would make an excellent job of that…”
“…State’s Attorney’s office can’t afford you…”
“…Tempting offer, Amanda, tempting…”
As Alicia listens to Cary’s practiced patter, his off-hand seduction, she slips two fingers between her legs and brings herself to climax.
*
Chapter 3. Hotel.
The week that follows is quiet.
Too quiet.
She spends the first three days feeling relieved when Cary doesn’t call or stop by. She spends the next three days feeling much less relieved. On the seventh day, when the feeling of wanting to crawl out of her own skin gets too much, she calls Owen to confess. She’s looking for absolution or affirmation or something like that.
“I did it. I had sex with Cary,” she says, without pre-amble. She has locked herself in the master bathroom. Taps running. Sotto voce.
Owen replies, “Who’s Cary? Wait, don’t tell me, I don’t care… You fucked someone else! Good for you.” He pauses. “But why now?”
“I just wanted to. Like you said. Revenge sex.”
“Was it gooooood?” he purrs.
“It was-” (Hot. Disturbing. Not enough.) “Fine.”
“Ugh, you’re feeling guilty, aren’t you? Only you would feel guilty after revenge sex.”
No. Not guilty.
She’s feeling…
Embarrassment, probably. A creeping sense of Puritan shame, undoubtedly. But she’s not feeling guilty. Definitely not guilty.
The answer to how she’s truly feeling is lodged somewhere inside the memory that she cannot stop replaying: the way that Cary looked her in Conference Room Ten right before he came. It’s a look that feels seared into her skin.
She remembers Cary’s words: You have your hooks into me.
*
On Friday morning - day eight - she goes into the office and opens up her email account. Lodged between the spam and CCs, she spies Cary’s name immediately.
The email’s subject line reads: Pick a hotel.
The email itself is blank.
She deletes it immediately and then empties her trash. Will the higher ups be able to know that she has received and read it? Is there some sort of spying program on her computer?
(Zach would know. She can’t ask Zach.)
The truth is, she doesn’t care.
She finds the number of a hotel.
*
Alicia was a homemaker for fourteen years. As a result, she has certain talents, which are arguably no less useful or more useless than the ability to regurgitate case-law at the drop of a hat.
Alicia knows hotels.
There were always clients and friends and client-friends of Peter’s who needed a place to stay in Chicago. Choosing the right hotel was a delicate maneuver. Frilly, ‘cosy’, ornate. Ostentatiously expensive, or the same price tag but with careful, stylized blandness. Pick the wrong hotel and risk offending the Steinbergs or the Travertons.
She treats the exercise of finding a hotel on this occasion with the same delicacy. She picks a big hotel, located downtown. It’s a good hotel, but not extravagant. It’s chic, but a couple of years past trendy. It has a noteworthy restaurant in the foyer, so if someone spots her there, she can say she was dining.
Alicia wonders if she has discovered the secret of housewives everywhere: the same talents it takes to manage a home can also be used to manage an affair.
It is with a whisper of trepidation that she gives her credit card details to the hotel clerk over the phone and then emails Cary details of their rendezvous. She waits for her conscience to kick in and stop her, but it never does. She feels only a queasy, girlish excitement of a type she’d long since forgotten she was able to feel.
*
The hotel room is beautiful: cream and tan in color scheme, with clean lines and tasteful décor. A stylish, oversize desk lamp forms a focal point for the room; a design flourish from an overpaid interior decorator. The south-facing window, with its view of the city, fills the room with rich, midday sunlight.
However, as soon as she enters the room, she draws the curtains, replacing the sun with gloom. The effect is immediate: she is not in Chicago anymore; she’s not even sure she’s Alicia anymore.
Without undressing, without even removing her shoes, she lies down on the bed. She stares at the ceiling, silence roaring in her ears. She can’t help but think about Peter and his prostitutes, meeting in hotel rooms just like this one. Is she just like him now? Trading self-respect for sex.
There’s a light knock on the door.
“Come in,” she calls.
She doesn’t get up. She just props herself up on her elbows and watches as he enters the room. He pauses to let his eyes adjust, to take in the sight of her on the bed, and then he closes the door.
He offers no greeting and neither does she.
He puts down his briefcase and takes off his suit jacket, folding it carefully over the back of the chair in the corner of the room. Each of his movements is unhurried. With the same deliberateness, he rolls up the sleeves of his shirt. (She must have seen him do this dozens of times, yet today it makes her breath catch in her throat.)
He reaches for his tie and inserts a thumb into its knot. Slowly, he works it loose. The half-light makes his expression hard to read. The tie joins his jacket on the chair back. Then he advances.
Alicia doesn’t react. She just… watches. Waiting.
Cary kneels at the foot of the bed. With the same unhurried calm, he removes her shoes, one by one. Methodical. His hands move up her legs, the barest pressure of fingertips against nylon. As his hands reach her thighs, she adjusts her hips just enough to allow him to push at the hem of her suit skirt. He pulls at her tights and again she shifts, allowing him access. He reveals her bare legs in sections, slowly, until he rolls her tights off her toes and lets them drop to the floor. Her underwear follows, until she is naked under the wadded fabric of her skirt.
For a brief moment, he pauses. He presses a thumb into the arch of her foot. His eyes - bright with intent - meet hers. And then he spreads her open.
His tongue teases slowly into the wetness between her legs. If Cary kisses like a lawyer, Alicia thinks distractedly, he also gives head like a lawyer. He seeks out her most sensitive areas, tracks her responses and then attacks accordingly. The result is devastating: she’s a keening, helpless wreck within minutes. As her body bucks against his tongue, there’s little point in pretending otherwise: he is winning.
What surprises her is how present she is in the moment. Thoughts of Peter have disappeared. When she grows close to orgasm, it is Cary’s name that rolls to the tip of her tongue. She grits her teeth, forbidding his name from passing her lips, releasing only a whimper as she comes.
Her earlier coolness is long gone. Now she is nothing but heat. Her body still reverberating with the aftershocks of orgasm, she craves the touch of skin. They undress each other haphazardly, all clumsy fingers and desperate kisses.
Considering how unspectacular their first sexual encounter proved to be, she’s surprised at how easily they find a rhythm when pushes inside her this time. He rises above her, locking her with his eyes, and she feels utterly connected to him.
Her second orgasm flows out of her and this time she can’t help it, she calls out his name. “Cary…” she murmurs, a ragged breath splitting the word into two distinct sounds.
*
Lying together afterward, they kiss. He has a boyish enthusiasm for it, perhaps because he is not yet far enough removed from the days when it was all he could expect from a date. Slowly, playfully, they kiss; pausing to rearrange limbs and then kissing some more. Their bodies are spent, but they still crave more from each other.
Eventually, the breaks between kisses grow longer and the amicable silence stretches.
“…Was it good for you?” Cary asks, his voice soft and close to her ear.
She laughs. She can’t help it.
“Sorry, that was a dumb thing to say,” he says with a grin and she’s reminded again of how young he is.
“Yeah, it was good for me,” she says, sharing his grin.
There’s a warmth to the moment; a strange, unearned intimacy. Sex does not equal closeness, yet in this moment, she feels so close to him. It’s as if they’ve cracked opened up a door to what might be. He strokes her hair, and looks at her with wide-eyed intensity. Another kiss; another glimpse of a different life.
Inevitably, despite their attempts to extend the moment, real life creeps back in.
“…What’s the time?” he asks.
“Almost two…” she says, checking her watch.
“…Shit. I have court. You too?”
“No, not this afternoon.”
“Mind if I grab the shower first?” he asks.
“Go ahead.”
He plants one final kiss on her lips and then scrambles out of bed. She smiles at his energy. (By contrast, she feels that she could sleep for a week.) She watches him cross the room naked, his body lean, muscular and bearing the slightest trace of swagger.
What’s alarming is how quickly her affection for him turns to suspicion.
She feels a niggle in the back of her mind. It is vague yet impossible to ignore. It’s bothering her… Something about his silly was it good for you question… Like he was trying to trap her… Forcing her to voice her desire…
She’s out of bed before she has a clear idea of what she’s going to do. Distractedly, she finds her clothes and pulls them on in a hurry. She can hear the shower running in the en suite and it sounds to her like a ticking clock.
There’s probably nothing…
She’ll just check…
To make sure…
She grabs his briefcase and throws it on the unmade bed.
It turns out that snooping is an art and it isn’t one she’s very good at. (Kalinda would be ashamed.)
In fact, she’s still rifling through the contents of Cary’s briefcase when he emerges from the bathroom, with a towel wrapped around his waist.
*
Chapter 4. Caught.
He takes a long moment to look at her and assess the situation. Then he stretches lazily, combing his fingers through wet hair.
“Find anything interesting?” he inquires mildly.
“No.”
“What were you hoping for?”
She says nothing.
Slowly and deliberately, he removes the towel from around his waist and roams the room naked, searching for his clothes. As he begins to dress, he continues to talk.
“Oh, that’s right,” he says. “You thought I’d want to record this. Maybe bug the room. Give the press another sex tape to add to your husband’s.” He changes tone and says, “Does she do this for you?” The inflection is dead-on; it’s the type of impersonation that can only be achieved as a result of dozens of listens.
Alicia keeps her face composed.
“It would be a good strategy on your boss’s part,” she says evenly. “Reveal his opponent as weak, shiftless - not even his wife remains loyal to him. It would destroy Peter’s campaign.”
Almost fully dressed now, he shoulders his jacket with a flourish and grins like she has revealed too much.
“That’s what you want, isn’t it? To destroy him?” he asks.
“No,” she says honestly.
“Why else would you do this? Why else would you fuck around?”
“Stop talking,” she says dismissively.
His grin disappears. She has aggravated him. He reaches over and grabs his briefcase from the bed, snapping it shut.
“Might want to check the lamp instead,” he says in a cold voice, gesturing to the ostentatious, over-size lamp that sits on the hotel room desk.
“I showed up at the hotel a few minutes before you,” he continues. “Tagged the lamp with a tiny camera. Aimed it at the bed. The footage is being sent straight to a computer in the State’s Attorney’s office. Childs will see it before the end of the day.” He pauses and enunciates his next words in a low, deliberate voice. “The way you came for me.”
(She can’t help it, despite the coldness in his voice - or maybe because of it - her clitoris twitches.)
“Maybe he’ll leak it immediately,” Cary adds. “Maybe wait until the week before the election. Maximum impact. I’ll get a promotion, obviously, when Childs is re-elected.”
Alicia tries to remain calm as she crosses the room to where the lamp sits. Innocuous just moments ago, now its showiness seems to taunt her. She fumbles around the rim of the lamp shade and feels Cary’s eyes on her back.
If he’s telling the truth, it means-what? Yet more humiliation; perhaps more than she can stand. Everyone she knows will see the tape. Peter. Jacqui. Zach and Grace. Will. People will declare her morally bankrupt. People will pretend to know her, based merely on an hour’s hotel room footage. The idea is crushing.
She grabs the lamp by its stem and searches more frantically for the camera. She hears the sound of the hotel room door opening, but she doesn’t turn around.
“You won’t find it,” Cary says as he allows the door to swing shut on his way out. “There’s nothing there.”
*
The knowledge that her affair with Cary will not, in fact, become tabloid fodder should be a relief. However, she feels only emptiness as she checks out of the hotel and returns to normalcy.
It will go like this, she decides:
She will do what she is supposed to do. She will work and she will work well. She will be a devoted mother to her children. She will play the forgiving wife. She will be cool and congenial to Cary when their paths cross.
She will erase the last few days from her memory. And, with no evidence to prove anything happened, perhaps those stolen moments with Cary really will be erased from history.
Delete. Overwrite. Move on.
*
She expects Cary to keep his distance - stay complicit in her plan to pretend that nothing ever happened - so it’s a shock when he shows up at her door just a few hours later.
It is eight o’clock in the evening. It is Family Night. She can hear Peter and Zach’s voices from the living room; music from Grace’s bedroom. And Cary is standing in the corridor of her apartment building, looking unruffled.
Immediately, she steps out into the corridor and closes the front door, leaning against it. She can still hear Grace’s music.
“Cary… you can’t just…”
“Don’t worry, I’m not staying,” he says. “I just came to give you this.”
Cary holds out a manila envelope to her. Their hands do not touch as she takes it from him. She snaps the fastening open and a sheaf of photographs spills out.
They are, it is immediately obvious, long-lens photos. Each one features her… and Will. There are dozens of shots of the two of them. Shots of them standing close together. Shots of them laughing together. There is a frame-by-frame version of a hug that, she recalls, only lasted 20 seconds in actuality, but here appears pornographically drawn out. The hospital back drop reveals that particular set of photos must have been taken during the Lifestate case.
“Childs never knew about us,” Cary says in a low voice. “But he’s been gathering evidence on you. For a while now.”
“These aren’t-”
“I don’t care, Alicia. I don’t care if you slept with Will. But put these photos out there and everyone will think you did.”
“So… what, you came to taunt me?” she asks, pushing the photos back inside the envelope with a vicious jab.
“I came to tell you I deleted the digital versions,” he says. “Shredded the rest of the prints. That”-he gestures to the envelope-“is all that’s left.”
There’s a long moment of silence as the realization of what he has done for her sinks in.
“I don’t care what you do with them,” Cary adds. “I just didn’t think it was fair. For Childs to do that to you.”
“Cary…” she begins, but she doesn’t know how to end the sentence.
Cary… I’m sorry.
Cary… I think I might feel something for you.
Cary…
He looks at her for a long moment, like it might be the last time he gets to look at her without the burden of pretending. Then he turns to leave.
The moments in life where you reach a crossroads aren’t usually clear-cut and Alicia can feel this one slipping away from her already. She knows that she won’t stop him. She knows that there’s nothing left to say. But she also knows that - though it is slipping rapidly through her fingers - she still has a choice.
Here, in this moment, she could choose Cary.
She can almost see what it would be like. To be in a relationship with Cary. He’d take her to trendy, expensive restaurants. People would stare at them, but then people always stare. Cary would lean in close and whisper, they’re jealous, and then they’d fuck in the bathroom between courses.
Cary would charm her kids, of course. Grace would want to date him herself; Zach would be hesitant, but Cary would win him over. He’d know the right things to say. Cary always knows the right things to say.
Alicia remembers how she felt in the hotel room with Cary: that unearned, misplaced sense of intimacy between them. Perhaps that was a genuine glimpse of the future. The two of them could spend each night in each other’s arms, earning that intimacy, building something solid and unshakeable.
The fantasy of a life with Cary is fleeting. A middle-aged woman’s idle daydream.
“Cary,” she calls after him, “I don’t think I even know half of who you are.”
He glances back at her, eyes narrowing a fraction. She realizes that he doesn’t get it. To his ears, it sounds like an insult somehow. But she means it as an apology.
“Thank you for the photos,” she says at last. “You’re… a gentleman.”
“Nope,” he replies. “Just a guy.”
“Alicia…?”
It’s Peter’s voice, on the other side of the door, pulling her back to her real life.
“Goodbye, Cary,” she says, absurdly formal.
“Goodbye, Alicia,” he says, equally staid.
And, just like that, whatever they had is over.
Over, but not erased, she thinks as she opens the door and steps back into her old self. Only the two of them will ever know about their affair, but in a slight, imperceptible way, it has changed them both.