Fic: Seeking (The Good Wife, Cary/Kalinda/Alicia) R
This is either a terrible week to post this fic or a perfect week to post this fic.
Feeling depressed over the disintegration of Kalinda's relationships with Cary and Alicia in the wake of 'Hitting the Fan'? Why not lose yourself in a s4-based wonderland of imagined polyamory? :D?
Title: Seeking
Author: iridescentglow
Fandom: The Good Wife
Pairing: Cary/Kalinda/Alicia
Rating: R/NC-17
Word count: 5,926
Archived: AO3
Summary: Cary suggests he and Kalinda combine commitment with threesomes. However, it soon becomes apparent that what Kalinda really wants is Alicia.
Note: Takes places during late season 4.
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Seeking
“I can’t give you what you need,” Kalinda said, already tired of rehashing this conversation again.
“You can,” said Cary, his voice just this side of edgy. “I need you. I want you.”
“Fine. Then I guess it’s you who can’t give me what I need,” Kalinda said bluntly.
“What, because you want to fuck women and I’m deficient in the pussy department?”
Kalinda rolled her eyes. “That’s not even half of it. But. If you want to put it that way.”
“So, what… we’re stuck in this holding pattern?” he asked. “Where you’re content to fuck women right up until you start missing me?”
Kalinda was quiet for a long moment. Then she reached out and touched his cheek. She looked at him meaningfully and brushed her thumb along the curve of his jaw.
“…Can’t it be enough that I do miss you?” she asked softly.
Cary stared at her lips: relaxed and ready to be kissed. She smelled rich and intoxicating, like humid air and hot spice, and it was all he could do to keep from reaching out and kissing her hard. It would be so easy to end this conversation and let her lead him into the bedroom.
“No,” he said with difficulty. “Sorry, Kalinda, but I can’t be your part-time boyfriend. Not anymore.”
Kalinda dropped her hand, the gentleness gone from her voice.
“We’ve been through this,” she said. “You’re saying you want commitment. But I can’t give you commitment.”
“I’m saying… I’m saying, why don’t we cut to the chase? Break the holding pattern. I get to be your boyfriend. Capital B. Boyfriend. Your totally cool boyfriend who’s totally cool with you fucking other women. As long as you do it with me along for the ride.” He paused, spreading his hands wide as if he were in closing arguments. “You get to fuck women. I get to watch you fuck women. Everyone’s happy.”
He leaned back in his chair and grinned. It was a grin with a 99% effectiveness to charm. It was, he knew full well, a grin that got him his own way most of the time. Kalinda looked far from won over, however. She let out a long, sighing breath, visibly irritated.
“Men always think they want threesomes,” she said.
“That’s because men always do want threesomes,” he said, his grin growing.
“No. Men want the porn version of threesomes.”
Cary paused to consider.
“Maybe,” he said at last. “But isn’t it worth a shot?”
*
When it came to finding a third party for their planned threesome, they decided to try it the old-fashioned way to begin with:
Saturday night. A crowded bar. A parade of beautiful women. A hive of buzzing bisexual inclinations just waiting to be exploited by a smile from leather-clad Kalinda.
Cary, seated opposite Kalinda in a booth, leaned back complacently. Like shooting fish in a barrel, he thought.
“Her?” he asked in an undertone. “Blonde. Three o’clock.”
“Hmmm… no,” Kalinda replied, sounding bored.
“Why not? You barely even looked!”
“Too blonde,” said Kalinda.
“Too blonde?”
“Yep.”
“Fine. Brunette in the corner,” he said.
Kalinda did actually take the time to look at this one. The woman was elegantly dressed, with shiny brown hair and a big smile.
“No,” said Kalinda, dashing his hopes.
“Oh, come on.”
“She’ll never go for it,” Kalinda said dismissively. “Too straight.”
Cary sighed and continued the hunt.
“Girl in the blue shirt, six o’clock,” he said, tripping over himself not to say, black girl, a fact that Kalinda let pass with a thin smile.
“Too young,” she said.
“She’s twenty one! She’s in a bar.”
“She’s seventeen with a fake ID.” Kalinda’s smile widened as she added, “Pervert.”
Cary was quiet for a long moment. Then he said:
“Okay. Bartender.”
The bartender was curvy, but with a hard-edged stance. She wore red lipstick, but retained an aggressive, almost masculine demeanor. She was tatted out, with dark hair that fell past her shoulders, and Cary thought he spied a tongue stud when she laughed. Not his type, perhaps, but definitely the kind of girl to interest Kalinda.
“No,” said Kalinda.
“Gimme a break.” Cary let out a low moan. “She’s hot and she keeps looking this way. She’s interested.”
“She’s interested in getting off shift and going home to her cats and her Netflix subscription.”
Cary tore his eyes away from the bartender and turned instead to scrutinize Kalinda.
“…You’ve already slept with her,” he said.
Kalinda gave an unconcerned shrug.
“Oh geez,” Cary said and then paused. “Does that make this more or less likely? Is she mad at you for some reason? Did you call her?”
“Never got a number.”
Cary released a long, slow breath, taking a moment to make a decision.
“She’s definitely looking,” he said and slid out of the booth. “I’m gonna go talk to her.”
Kalinda didn’t bother to reply and didn’t watch him as he left.
The crowd at the bar was beginning to thin and Cary positioned himself on a barstool near the hot bartender. He ordered a tequila and told her to pour herself one, too. She gave him a cool smile, one that said you’ll have to try harder than that, but she downed the shot anyway.
“Cary,” he said by way of introduction.
“Shayla,” she said with a guarded nod. “And you’re here with Kalinda, huh.”
“Yep… she told me all about you,” he lied smoothly, raising his eyebrows.
“…She’ll eat you up. You know that, right,” Shayla said.
“Oh, I know it,” Cary said with a grin.
A few minutes later, Cary was feeling confident in a job well done. He allowed himself a slight swagger as he walked back to where Kalinda sat.
“So?” Kalinda asked, sounding bored.
“She’s just punching out,” Cary said, unable to hide his grin as he took a seat across from Kalinda. “She’s gonna bring over a few drinks and then we’ll get out of here.”
Cary looked up to see Shayla enter his eye-line, carrying a big tumbler of what looked like whisky. He was about to scoot over and let her sit down, when Shayla reached out and dumped the whisky over Kalinda’s head. Shayla slammed the glass down on the table, her expression virulent, and then turned and stomped away.
“…Okay,” said Cary, handing Kalinda a napkin to wipe her face. “So I guess she was mad at you.”
*
After the failure at the bar, they tried Craigslist.
“Sexy South Asian woman…” Cary said, speaking as he typed, “seeks adventurous woman… for FFM threesome.”
“Why not ‘Desperate White Lawyer Guy’ seeks adventurous woman for FFM threesome?” Kalinda asked.
The two of them lounged in bed, the dim glow of Cary’s laptop screen the only light in the room.
“If it’s written by a guy, no one will respond,” Cary said dismissively.
“How do you know?”
“Everyone knows that,” said Cary. “What, you’ve never done the online hook-up thing before?”
“Guess I’ve never needed to,” Kalinda said.
“Ooh… ouch.”
Cary narrowed his eyes at her and she smiled playfully. She reached over and closed his laptop, setting it aside. Then she climbed on top of him, settling comfortably astride his hips in a way that suddenly didn’t feel too comfortable for Cary.
“How is this even gonna work?” Kalinda asked in a low voice, rocking experimentally against Cary’s growing erection. “What if we meet someone and it turns out to be a soccer mom with a perm? …What if it turns out to be a man?” She leaned forward and blew softly in his ear. “Or is that something you’re into?”
“We’ll get… pictures,” Cary said, trying to keep his voice even as Kalinda began to grind against him. “Anyway, you’d totally… go for the soccer mom. You love to corrupt women.”
Kalinda rolled her eyes, but her mouth was smiling when he caught it in a kiss.
*
The girl was… cute.
She was not a soccer mom. She was definitely not a man. In fact, she was girl-next-door pretty. With freckles and straight brown hair; big, unblinking eyes and a long neck. According to her emails, she liked snowboarding and Russian literature. Cary wasn’t entirely sure what to do with that information.
The three of them - Cary, Kalinda and girl-next-door Lucy - took a seat in the window of the bar. Cary had chosen a quiet bar for this encounter, one with piano music and twinkly lights. He was pretty sure that Kalinda hadn’t slept with the waitress who brought over their drinks and of that fact he was glad.
“So, do you guys do this a lot?” Lucy asked, toying nervously with the straw in her rum and Coke.
“Yeah… once in a while,” Cary said smoothly, smiling to make her feel comfortable.
“He’s lying,” Kalinda cut in. “This is the first time.”
Lucy looked from Kalinda to Cary and back again. She laughed uncertainly.
“Guess the pressure’s on me, hey,” Lucy said quietly.
“Nope, no pressure,” Kalinda said in her calm voice. “Just something different. New people. New experiences.”
Kalinda reached out a hand and slid her fingers into the crook of Lucy’s arm. Lucy immediately stopped playing with her straw, as if Kalinda’s touch were accompanied by a crackle of electricity. The two women looked at each other - a long look - and Lucy licked her lips, a deep swallow showing in her long neck.
Cary felt a flicker of jealousy, seeing Kalinda’s attention turned on someone else, but it was chased quickly by curiosity. As Lucy leaned closer across the table, her hands grasping Kalinda’s hands, Cary studied Kalinda. Her eyes had grown softer since they’d entered the bar. As she drew Lucy in, her movements became more fluid; her expression less guarded. Cary felt like her armor had cracked open - just a millimeter or two, perhaps, but through the crack, he thought he might be able to see what lay beneath.
Suddenly, Cary felt the window beside their table reverberate.
His first thought was that someone had thrown something at the glass. But, when he looked up, he saw instead a very large man pound his fist against the window. Moments later, the same very large man came barrelling through the door. The vibe of the bar was laid-back and sophisticated, but apparently the very large man had not received the memo, because he immediately began yelling.
“WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON?”
At the same moment Cary stood up to shield the women from the random maniac who was bellowing at them, Lucy shrank away from Kalinda.
“Brian… what are you doing here?” Lucy gasped out, addressing the very large man, who apparently was not a random maniac, after all. He was Brian.
“What am I doing here? What are you doing here?” Brian shouted.
“Nothing!” Lucy exclaimed, holding out one placating hand to Brian. “These are just… some friends.”
“They’re not your fucking friends, Lu! They’re a couple of perverts you’re meeting for a THREESOME!”
If the sheer size of Brian and the volume of his ranting hadn’t commanded the attention of the rest of the bar’s patrons, then the word threesome had definitely done it. Piano music and weak cocktails were no match for the entertainment value being provided by their party. Kalinda, immune to embarrassment, sat straight-backed and thin-lipped, listening wordlessly. For his part, Cary slunk back down into his seat.
“You read my email?” Lucy burst out. “I can’t believe you read my email!”
“I can’t believe you’re cheating on me!” Brian retorted.
“I’m not cheating! Baby, I love you…”
“Don’t say that to me! I can’t even look at your face.”
Brian-the-giant suddenly looked close to tears. He turned away and took three giant strides toward the door. Lucy followed quickly behind him, murmuring, “I love you, boo boo, I love you…” She didn’t even bother to look at Cary and Kalinda, much less say goodbye to them.
Cary was silent for a long moment, staring straight ahead, as he waited for the attention of their fellow patrons to wane. Then he caught Kalinda’s eye and forced a smile.
“So… that went well,” he said jovially. “Let’s toast to Craigslist.”
Kalinda, however, didn’t crack a smile.
“This? This is what boyfriends do,” she said wearily. “They cause scenes. They mark their territory. Like their girlfriend is their property.” Kalinda let out an irritated breath. “This is why I can do without one.”
*
Over the next few days, work ate up every spare moment of Cary’s time. Yet when his mind wasn’t focused on the Macaulay Group’s $5million lawsuit, he found he couldn’t stop himself from brooding over the Lucy fiasco and Kalinda’s cold reaction to the boyfriend label.
It was almost a week before he got a chance to do more than stare at Kalinda across the Lockhart-Gardner bullpen. They met in the parking garage at 9 p.m. after a typical 13-hour Thursday.
“You wanna go to dinner?” she asked him.
“Only if the restaurant has a clothes-optional dress code,” he said, nuzzling close to kiss her neck.
“So… take out,” Kalinda said.
On their way to Cary’s apartment, they stopped at a hipper-than-average Chinese take-out place. It was busier than usual, because it had recently received some kind of foodie blog write-up, which probably meant Cary would soon have to find a new, less mainstream haunt.
As they waited impatiently for their food, Cary checked out the restaurant’s clientele. Specifically, the attractive, female clientele. Purely an academic exercise, of course. There was a petite redhead, but no, she was with a guy. There was a blonde whose order came up quickly and left in a hurry. Then his eyes found a hot black woman with high cheekbones and legs for days. Jesus.
He forced himself to look away. He put his arm around Kalinda and began making conversation about the difficulty of finding and retaining cool places to eat.
“God, you’re a pretentious asshole,” Kalinda said amicably. She shrugged out of her leather jacket and, in the process, slipped out of Cary’s grasp.
“It’s just really easy for good food places to get overrun with, like, tourists and families,” Cary said, shoving his hands into his pockets.
“So you’re upset about tourists,” said Kalinda.
Once again, his gaze strayed to the tall black woman, who looked almost as good in knee-high boots as Kalinda. She’d been standing alone for several minutes, which meant she definitely wasn’t with anyone. If only there weren’t a couple of huge stumbling blocks preventing him from approaching her. It was (maybesorta) okay to ask a woman at a bar if she wanted to have a threesome; it was less socially accepted to ask a woman at a newly-popular Chinese restaurant to have a threesome. Plus, Kalinda seemed to have put a sharp, emphatic pin in the whole idea of a threesome after the Lucy incident. He sighed and mentally tried to let the woman go.
“I’m upset about the knock-on effect,” Cary said. “Pretty soon prices will go up,” he added distractedly and snuck another look at the woman.
“So you’re worried you won’t be able to afford the food on your meagre salary.”
“Fine, make fun of me,” Cary said, “but it’ll probably be midnight before we get our food.”
“While we’re waiting, do you want me to go over and talk to the woman you can’t stop staring at?” Kalinda asked conversationally.
“What? I wasn’t-”
Kalinda rolled her eyes and turned away. Hips swaying perfectly, she walked over to where the woman stood. Kalinda smiled and Cary was able to lip-read hi, I’m Kalinda before her lips let forth a flurry of unreadable words. The woman smiled back and they… talked.
After fifteen minutes of watching them talk (talk, talk, talk), Cary was about ready to crawl out of his own skin. His number had been called in the interim, so now Cary stood awkwardly holding a bag of cooling Chinese food, watching as his girlfriend picked up another woman. Should he go over? Should he go wait in the car? What the hell was the etiquette here?
As he wrestled with these questions, Kalinda turned and walked back toward him. She was followed by…
“Cary, this is Alana,” said Kalinda.
Every ounce of courtroom training was required for Cary to smile and extend a hand like he was greeting an old friend.
“Ready to leave?” Kalinda prompted and it was immediately apparent that was she talking to Alana as well as Cary.
*
Later, Cary found he could recall the evening only in fragments. Snapshot images.
There was the sight of Alana unhooking her bra to reveal her small, firm breasts and Kalinda dropping her head to lick her nipples into hard nubs. The sight of Alana’s long, long legs hooked up over Cary’s shoulders was burned into his memory, as was the full-body jerk that reverberated through her muscular thighs as she came.
There were blurry moments, too, lost to alcohol and nerves. But Cary would never forget Kalinda’s panting, ragged breaths as Alana ate her out. He replayed at length the low tremor in Kalinda’s voice as she said, I want you inside me to Cary, while her pussy still flexed from Alana’s thumb against her clit.
The pornographic parts of the evening were certainly memorable, but Cary found himself revisiting the less tangible moments of hotness, too. Kalinda’s face featured larger than life in his memory; the play of emotions in her expression. Her wanting. The seeking and the satisfaction.
At the end of the evening, Kalinda bade farewell to Alana with a long kiss. The lust in her bearing was palpable as her hands lingered on Alana’s body. Yet, when the door closed behind Alana, Cary found that Kalinda was more (and not less) contented. When it was just the two of them again, Kalinda was warm, relaxed - affectionate, even.
Later, the two of them lay beneath tangled sheets in bed. Cary picked at cold Chinese food from wax cartons and relished licking his fingers. Kalinda watched him with arched eyebrows.
“Happy?” she asked wryly.
“Sure…”
Kalinda rolled her eyes. “Of course you are.”
“Kalinda… I know what you think, but… I didn’t want to have a threesome for some lecherous dudebro reason. I just wanted to see a different part of you.”
Cary paused. He waited for Kalinda to make a sarcastic comment, but she was quiet. Serious. Listening.
“I want to see every part of you,” he continued. “The ones you hide from the world. The pretty parts. The pretty ugly parts. I want you. All of you.”
He drew her close into a honey-glazed kiss. Then she settled against his chest, apparently still deep in thought.
“It could be like this, you know,” he said softly, wrapping his arms around her. “I can share. I can do that. And… whoever you want, I want that for you.”
The moment he finished speaking, Kalinda stirred. Cary felt a sudden stiffness in her body; her warmth cooling into detachment. She disentangled herself from his embrace and scooted across the bed, bare feet swinging down to meet hardwood floor.
“Kalinda-” he began.
“Cary, it’s late, I’m leaving,” she said.
Her voice was perfectly even, but she didn’t meet his gaze.
“Kalinda, what did I-”
He reached for her, but she pulled away.
“You want it to be simple,” she said, pulling on her clothes. “But it’s not simple.” The strain was showing in her voice now, her fingers fumbling to zip up her skirt. “The person I want-”
Kalinda gulped in a breath and said:
“The person I want doesn’t want me.”
*
From across their shared office, Cary watched her idly.
Alicia.
He remembered when they’d first met. His first impression of her: total MILF, although too prim for his taste. But, yeah, okay, he watched that shitty porno. The one with her and Eliot Spitzer’s wife getting it on. The porn version of Alicia didn’t even look like her.
Alicia looked up and noticed Cary staring at her.
“Something on your mind?” she asked distractedly, flipping through a case file.
“Uh. Have you seen Kalinda?” he asked.
“No, she’s out of the office all day. Macaulay case. Why, you need something?”
“It can wait,” said Cary. “Hey, we should do something after we wrap this case. Celebrate.”
“What if we don’t win?” asked Alicia archly.
“Commiserate, then.” He paused. “I’m serious. Drinks or something. You, me and Kalinda.”
“And Will and Diane?”
“No. Just the fourth years,” said Cary.
“And Kalinda,” said Alicia.
“And Kalinda.”
“…You’re being careful with her, right?”
Cary couldn’t help but laugh.
“Are we having a safe sex talk? Or is this a break-her-heart-and-I’ll-hunt-you-down talk?”
“Neither,” Alicia said briskly, returning to her file. “And you should know that Kalinda’s heart doesn’t break. So be careful.”
*
Alicia looked around Cary’s high-ceilinged white box of a loft apartment and smiled her lawyer smile.
“Great place,” she said unconvincingly.
“Thanks,” said Cary.
He uncorked the bottle of red in his hand and poured three glasses of wine, handing out two to his guests and keeping one for himself.
“And I love these little asparagus things,” said Alicia.
She bit into the hors d’oeuvre with a click of white teeth.
“Yeah, you never knew I could cook, right?” Cary said, taking a drink from his wine glass.
“He had it catered,” said Kalinda, speaking to Alicia but looking at Cary.
“She knows!” said Cary. “It was a joke.”
Kalinda raised her eyebrows at him. “Funny.”
There was a silence that lasted a moment too long to be comfortable.
“So when are the others getting here?” Alicia asked finally.
“Oh, they couldn’t make it,” said Cary.
Alicia frowned. “None of them?”
“Nope. Busy lives, I guess.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Cary saw Kalinda’s face change as realization dawned on her.
“Well… a toast,” said Cary quickly. “To… I guess to settling the Macaulay case with a higher than expected payout lacks panache. So… to victory!”
They all raised their glasses to toast. For Kalinda’s part, she looked capable of using the wine glass as a weapon, although managed to resist doing so.
“To victory,” they all chorused.
Instead of sipping her wine, Kalinda took two long swallows from her glass. She put down the glass on the coffee table with so much force that it almost broke. Then she turned to Cary and said, in a perfectly calm voice, “Can I talk to you in the kitchen?”
Cary nodded, forcing out a bland smile for Alicia. He and Kalinda walked through to the kitchen, leaving Alicia in the living room. The moment the two of them were alone, Kalinda rounded on Cary.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
“I’m having a gathering,” said Cary, trying not to react to the fact that Kalinda was kind of scary when she was angry.
“A gathering of three fucking people,” said Kalinda. “This is, by far, the most juvenile thing you’ve ever done. How exactly do you propose to seduce Alicia? Because mid-price Merlot and canapés aren’t going to do it.”
“I guess not,” Cary said snidely, refusing to be cowed by Kalinda. “But maybe you’ll be able to work your voodoo magic on her. Whisper, whisper, whisper, and suddenly she’ll fall into bed with you. Isn’t that what you do?
“It’s not voodoo magic, Cary. I talk to women like they’re human beings. I find out what they want.”
“So talk to Alicia. Find out what she wants.”
Kalinda didn’t respond and Cary realized he spied a rare emotion in her eyes: fear.
“Fuck you, Cary,” she said at last.
“Kalinda-” he began, but she had already turned to leave.
He followed her through to the living room, where she grabbed her coat and unhooked her scarf from the hat rack. “Bye, Alicia,” she said hurriedly, without looking at Alicia or waiting for a reply. She headed for the front door.
“Kalinda, wait-” Cary called out, but she ignored him.
She let the door slam closed behind her.
Alicia, who’d taken a seat on the couch, raised her eyebrows but said nothing. She took a sip of her wine while Cary sank down next to her on the leather sofa.
“Shit,” he muttered.
There was a brief silence and then Alicia spoke up.
“Great party,” she said. “Intimate. Parties involving dozens or even several people are just so noisy.”
She smiled mischievously and he couldn’t help but smile back. Alicia continued sipping her wine and Cary took a moment to look at her. Alicia Florrick. Still a MILF - that was self-evident. Not so prim anymore - had that just been a façade, or had life at Lockhart-Gardner changed her?
Full of post-law-school hubris, he’d probably once believed that he could seduce Alicia easily. Desperate older woman looking for excitement - an easy conquest for a young buck. Now, of course, that idea struck him as laughably naïve. These days, Alicia seemed terrifyingly complicated to him. She was unreadable. Unknowable. She was a lot like Kalinda in that respect. Self-contained, self-controlled. Difficult to penetrate (haha), difficult to get inside.
“You’re in love with her, aren’t you?” Alicia asked conversationally, breaking Cary’s spiralling train of thought. “Kalinda, I mean.”
He moved his head in a non-committal jerk, because he honestly wasn’t sure how to respond.
“Sorry, Cary,” Alicia said, setting down her now-empty wine glass. “But you’d do better to find someone else.” She stood up, smoothing down her suit skirt. “When you get right down to it, Kalinda only really looks out for Kalinda. If you want more from her, you won’t get it.”
Advice imparted, Alicia crossed the room to retrieve her coat and purse. Cary stood up, too, following her to the door. It took him a moment to form his closing argument.
“I know you hold grudges, Alicia,” he said, slowly, carefully. “But you’re wrong about Kalinda.” Here, he was unable to keep the angry bite out of his voice. “She doesn’t just look out for herself. She looks out for you, even if you try hard not to see it.”
He paused before delivering his final comment, to make sure the jury-of-one really heard him.
“She loves you.”
Alicia stood motionless. Her coat lay folded, forgotten, over her arm. Her purse dangled from the tips of her fingers. She looked lost for words. Cary took a moment to appreciate successfully unsettling Alicia, who was still visibly trying and failing to process the implications of what Cary was saying.
“Think about it,” Cary said. “You know it’s true.”
“No, I don’t know it’s-” Alicia began, but couldn’t seem to finish her sentence.
“My point is,” Cary continued, “I know what I want. Kalinda knows what she wants, even if she won’t pursue it. The third point in this equation is you. So I guess it’s time to figure out what you want, Alicia.”
*
The next week passed like nothing had happened.
At the office, Alicia didn’t mention the evening - Cary’s revelation; her own silence on the matter - and stayed clipped and courteous as they talked about work. If she were anyone else, he might have tried to parse their interactions for subtext; ferret out her feelings via manipulation. But this was Alicia. Unknowable, unreadable Alicia.
That week, Kalinda slept over at Cary’s apartment twice. On the one hand, Cary was glad that she seemed to have erased their argument from her memory. On the other hand, she seemed distant even when she was in his arms. Each night, she arrived late and left early - a lot more like he was a hook-up than a boyfriend.
When Saturday rolled around, he spent the morning at the gym, running for hours on the treadmill to try and catch the Kalinda in his mind. In the afternoon, he steeled himself and swung by her apartment building.
When the elevator doors opened on her floor, he saw immediately that Kalinda’s front door was open. He heard voices as he walked the corridor. When he was just meters away, a brunette woman emerged from Kalinda’s apartment.
When she spotted him, Alicia smiled - a weird, knowing smile that he couldn’t quite decipher. She was dressed casually, in slacks and a soft wool sweater. No make-up. The contrast to her work attire - suits and pantyhose and red lipstick - set Cary further off axis.
“Don’t worry, I’m just leaving,” Alicia said to Cary, with another cryptic smile.
She left before he could reply. Her footsteps down the corridor were quiet in her flat shoes.
“What was that?” Cary asked, as Kalinda appeared in the doorway of her apartment.
“I don’t know,” Kalinda said with a slight frown.
Kalinda stared down the empty corridor for a long moment.
“Nothing, probably,” she said.
But Cary thought he saw something like hope in her expression as she leaned up to greet him with a kiss.
They spent the rest of the day together. It was a quiet, unremarkable day of errands and Netflix and take-out dinner. They didn’t discuss Alicia, yet Cary noticed that Kalinda seemed almost buoyant. Less far away, at any rate.
*
For someone who wasn’t unnaturally attuned to Kalinda’s movements, her interactions with Alicia over the week that followed would have seemed completely normal.
An investigator at a law firm discussing cases with a top lawyer. Two colleagues eating lunch together. Smiles exchanged in the corridor. Laughter over a shared joke.
It was nothing that would seem out of the ordinary, except to Cary it felt like the earth was changing underfoot.
When, on Friday, Kalinda said, “I’ll see you later, but I’m meeting Alicia for a drink now,” it sounded utterly benign, but Cary knew it was anything but.
*
Cary worked late, doing tasks that could have waited until Monday, in a bid to ignore his impulse to try and unravel the intricacies of Kalinda’s relationship with Alicia.
It was past eleven when his phone buzzed on the desk. He read the message-
You’re needed. Come over. (Kalinda’s place.)
-and then did a double take.
He’d been expecting a message from Kalinda, but no - he checked again - this was from Alicia.
Work forgotten, he left Lockhart-Gardner to the night watchman and drove over to Kalinda’s apartment block. The doorman waved him inside and he took the elevator to Kalinda’s floor, his nerves jangling at every lurch upward.
At Kalinda’s door, he knocked and waited. At first, there was no response. Then he heard a muffled voice - a familiar voice, but not Kalinda’s voice - call out, “It’s open.”
He’d seen Alicia at the office a few hours previously, where she’d been dressed in a charcoal jacket and white camisole. Now - when Cary opened the door and took in the sight in front of him - he saw that the jacket lay wadded on the floor and both straps of Alicia’s camisole had slipped off her shoulders, revealing an inch of her bra. She’d been wearing pantyhose earlier, too, but now her legs were bare. Her suit skirt had ridden up and her bare thighs gripped Kalinda as she sat astride her on the couch in Kalinda’s living room.
For her part, Kalinda was flushed. Her hair was loose and she wore even less clothing than Alicia, spread out beneath the other woman, panting and feverish. Seeing Cary, Kalinda arched upward and rocked Alicia back. She climbed off the couch. Breaking connection with Alicia caused a slight, full-body shudder in Kalinda. (Cary, for the first time, saw where Alicia’s hands lay, her fingers stroking at the heat between Kalinda’s legs.)
Kalinda, loose-limbed and uncoordinated, weaved across the room to Cary. She placed her hands on either side of his face and kissed him hard. She smelled like sex and tequila and he’d never wanted her more.
*
Porn had not prepared Cary for this.
The sex he could handle, but this wasn’t a threesome that ended at two a.m. In porn, the hot MILF merely faded away at the end of the scene. But Cary had to walk into his office and see Alicia on Monday morning.
When Monday morning arrived, Cary exited the elevator wearing his best poker face. Alicia, seated on the couch in their office, took one look at him and started laughing.
“What?” he asked.
“Nothing,” said Alicia. “You just look like the cat that got the cream.”
Cary glanced across the Lockhart-Gardner floor - he watched a couple of first year associates disappear into a meeting room, but it was too early for real foot traffic. The floor was mostly empty. He leaned over cupped Alicia’s face with his hand, fingers pushing into the hair beneath her ear. He looked at her for a moment and then kissed her lightly on the lips. Her hesitation was palpable, before she gave in and returned the kiss.
The thrill - of being allowed to kiss her; of each kiss holding echoes of Kalinda - was still fresh and unfamiliar.
“Stop it,” Alicia said at last, her voice low and unconvincing. “This is work. Very bad form to mix business with… whatever this is.”
“Pleasure,” Cary said, taking a step back and grinning (a little like the cat that got the cream, but only a little). “You can say the word.”
“…Pleasure,” Alicia repeated, her voice rich and reproachful. Yet her eyes gleamed and… oh fuck. This was gonna be hard work.
And, indeed, in the weeks that followed, it was hard work. Two headstrong women and him in the middle. At times, it was a whole hell of a lot of fun, but it wasn’t like they were suddenly one big, happy ménage à trois.
There were complications. Alicia was still married, for one thing - although, Cary soon learned, only technically. And, the thing about a MILF was, she was a mom. When, after a post-work quickie, he tried to pull Alicia back into bed with him and Kalinda, Alicia said firmly, “Parent-teacher night. Can’t be late.”
Kalinda and Alicia had some definite issues, also. He’d observed in the past that Kalinda often had heavily loaded conversations with Alicia that purported to be about one thing, but were actually about something else entirely. He now found out that the two women were capable of having sex in much the same way - full of subtext and multi-faceted fucking.
Cary was a pretty straightforward lover - he wanted to get off and he wanted his partner(s) to get off, too. Yet, with Kalinda and Alicia, there were undeniable layers. Sometimes the sex was light-hearted and messy-fun. But Alicia also liked to punish Kalinda in bed - withhold her orgasm or manipulate her vibrator with merciless thrusts - and though these instances wrought the most intense, wracking climaxes from Kalinda, afterward, there was tension.
Yet following the tension came relief. Each time, Cary observed, the tension would dissipate and Alicia would reach for Kalinda with a trembling, fragile kind of forgiveness. And then Kalinda would smile, her heart written all over her face.
The inclusion of Alicia in Cary’s relationship with Kalinda had laid bare some new parts of Kalinda. Her armor was cracked open wider than ever before. She was still guarded, still intensely private, but there was a new lightness to her bearing. She smiled differently.
Cary reflected that it was worth every complication to see Kalinda’s smile. He remembered his words to Kalinda, so carelessly expressed: Whoever you want, I want that for you.
Now he felt the truth of it; it was a promise he had no choice but to keep.
Feeling depressed over the disintegration of Kalinda's relationships with Cary and Alicia in the wake of 'Hitting the Fan'? Why not lose yourself in a s4-based wonderland of imagined polyamory? :D?
Title: Seeking
Author: iridescentglow
Fandom: The Good Wife
Pairing: Cary/Kalinda/Alicia
Rating: R/NC-17
Word count: 5,926
Archived: AO3
Summary: Cary suggests he and Kalinda combine commitment with threesomes. However, it soon becomes apparent that what Kalinda really wants is Alicia.
Note: Takes places during late season 4.
-----
Seeking
“I can’t give you what you need,” Kalinda said, already tired of rehashing this conversation again.
“You can,” said Cary, his voice just this side of edgy. “I need you. I want you.”
“Fine. Then I guess it’s you who can’t give me what I need,” Kalinda said bluntly.
“What, because you want to fuck women and I’m deficient in the pussy department?”
Kalinda rolled her eyes. “That’s not even half of it. But. If you want to put it that way.”
“So, what… we’re stuck in this holding pattern?” he asked. “Where you’re content to fuck women right up until you start missing me?”
Kalinda was quiet for a long moment. Then she reached out and touched his cheek. She looked at him meaningfully and brushed her thumb along the curve of his jaw.
“…Can’t it be enough that I do miss you?” she asked softly.
Cary stared at her lips: relaxed and ready to be kissed. She smelled rich and intoxicating, like humid air and hot spice, and it was all he could do to keep from reaching out and kissing her hard. It would be so easy to end this conversation and let her lead him into the bedroom.
“No,” he said with difficulty. “Sorry, Kalinda, but I can’t be your part-time boyfriend. Not anymore.”
Kalinda dropped her hand, the gentleness gone from her voice.
“We’ve been through this,” she said. “You’re saying you want commitment. But I can’t give you commitment.”
“I’m saying… I’m saying, why don’t we cut to the chase? Break the holding pattern. I get to be your boyfriend. Capital B. Boyfriend. Your totally cool boyfriend who’s totally cool with you fucking other women. As long as you do it with me along for the ride.” He paused, spreading his hands wide as if he were in closing arguments. “You get to fuck women. I get to watch you fuck women. Everyone’s happy.”
He leaned back in his chair and grinned. It was a grin with a 99% effectiveness to charm. It was, he knew full well, a grin that got him his own way most of the time. Kalinda looked far from won over, however. She let out a long, sighing breath, visibly irritated.
“Men always think they want threesomes,” she said.
“That’s because men always do want threesomes,” he said, his grin growing.
“No. Men want the porn version of threesomes.”
Cary paused to consider.
“Maybe,” he said at last. “But isn’t it worth a shot?”
*
When it came to finding a third party for their planned threesome, they decided to try it the old-fashioned way to begin with:
Saturday night. A crowded bar. A parade of beautiful women. A hive of buzzing bisexual inclinations just waiting to be exploited by a smile from leather-clad Kalinda.
Cary, seated opposite Kalinda in a booth, leaned back complacently. Like shooting fish in a barrel, he thought.
“Her?” he asked in an undertone. “Blonde. Three o’clock.”
“Hmmm… no,” Kalinda replied, sounding bored.
“Why not? You barely even looked!”
“Too blonde,” said Kalinda.
“Too blonde?”
“Yep.”
“Fine. Brunette in the corner,” he said.
Kalinda did actually take the time to look at this one. The woman was elegantly dressed, with shiny brown hair and a big smile.
“No,” said Kalinda, dashing his hopes.
“Oh, come on.”
“She’ll never go for it,” Kalinda said dismissively. “Too straight.”
Cary sighed and continued the hunt.
“Girl in the blue shirt, six o’clock,” he said, tripping over himself not to say, black girl, a fact that Kalinda let pass with a thin smile.
“Too young,” she said.
“She’s twenty one! She’s in a bar.”
“She’s seventeen with a fake ID.” Kalinda’s smile widened as she added, “Pervert.”
Cary was quiet for a long moment. Then he said:
“Okay. Bartender.”
The bartender was curvy, but with a hard-edged stance. She wore red lipstick, but retained an aggressive, almost masculine demeanor. She was tatted out, with dark hair that fell past her shoulders, and Cary thought he spied a tongue stud when she laughed. Not his type, perhaps, but definitely the kind of girl to interest Kalinda.
“No,” said Kalinda.
“Gimme a break.” Cary let out a low moan. “She’s hot and she keeps looking this way. She’s interested.”
“She’s interested in getting off shift and going home to her cats and her Netflix subscription.”
Cary tore his eyes away from the bartender and turned instead to scrutinize Kalinda.
“…You’ve already slept with her,” he said.
Kalinda gave an unconcerned shrug.
“Oh geez,” Cary said and then paused. “Does that make this more or less likely? Is she mad at you for some reason? Did you call her?”
“Never got a number.”
Cary released a long, slow breath, taking a moment to make a decision.
“She’s definitely looking,” he said and slid out of the booth. “I’m gonna go talk to her.”
Kalinda didn’t bother to reply and didn’t watch him as he left.
The crowd at the bar was beginning to thin and Cary positioned himself on a barstool near the hot bartender. He ordered a tequila and told her to pour herself one, too. She gave him a cool smile, one that said you’ll have to try harder than that, but she downed the shot anyway.
“Cary,” he said by way of introduction.
“Shayla,” she said with a guarded nod. “And you’re here with Kalinda, huh.”
“Yep… she told me all about you,” he lied smoothly, raising his eyebrows.
“…She’ll eat you up. You know that, right,” Shayla said.
“Oh, I know it,” Cary said with a grin.
A few minutes later, Cary was feeling confident in a job well done. He allowed himself a slight swagger as he walked back to where Kalinda sat.
“So?” Kalinda asked, sounding bored.
“She’s just punching out,” Cary said, unable to hide his grin as he took a seat across from Kalinda. “She’s gonna bring over a few drinks and then we’ll get out of here.”
Cary looked up to see Shayla enter his eye-line, carrying a big tumbler of what looked like whisky. He was about to scoot over and let her sit down, when Shayla reached out and dumped the whisky over Kalinda’s head. Shayla slammed the glass down on the table, her expression virulent, and then turned and stomped away.
“…Okay,” said Cary, handing Kalinda a napkin to wipe her face. “So I guess she was mad at you.”
*
After the failure at the bar, they tried Craigslist.
“Sexy South Asian woman…” Cary said, speaking as he typed, “seeks adventurous woman… for FFM threesome.”
“Why not ‘Desperate White Lawyer Guy’ seeks adventurous woman for FFM threesome?” Kalinda asked.
The two of them lounged in bed, the dim glow of Cary’s laptop screen the only light in the room.
“If it’s written by a guy, no one will respond,” Cary said dismissively.
“How do you know?”
“Everyone knows that,” said Cary. “What, you’ve never done the online hook-up thing before?”
“Guess I’ve never needed to,” Kalinda said.
“Ooh… ouch.”
Cary narrowed his eyes at her and she smiled playfully. She reached over and closed his laptop, setting it aside. Then she climbed on top of him, settling comfortably astride his hips in a way that suddenly didn’t feel too comfortable for Cary.
“How is this even gonna work?” Kalinda asked in a low voice, rocking experimentally against Cary’s growing erection. “What if we meet someone and it turns out to be a soccer mom with a perm? …What if it turns out to be a man?” She leaned forward and blew softly in his ear. “Or is that something you’re into?”
“We’ll get… pictures,” Cary said, trying to keep his voice even as Kalinda began to grind against him. “Anyway, you’d totally… go for the soccer mom. You love to corrupt women.”
Kalinda rolled her eyes, but her mouth was smiling when he caught it in a kiss.
*
The girl was… cute.
She was not a soccer mom. She was definitely not a man. In fact, she was girl-next-door pretty. With freckles and straight brown hair; big, unblinking eyes and a long neck. According to her emails, she liked snowboarding and Russian literature. Cary wasn’t entirely sure what to do with that information.
The three of them - Cary, Kalinda and girl-next-door Lucy - took a seat in the window of the bar. Cary had chosen a quiet bar for this encounter, one with piano music and twinkly lights. He was pretty sure that Kalinda hadn’t slept with the waitress who brought over their drinks and of that fact he was glad.
“So, do you guys do this a lot?” Lucy asked, toying nervously with the straw in her rum and Coke.
“Yeah… once in a while,” Cary said smoothly, smiling to make her feel comfortable.
“He’s lying,” Kalinda cut in. “This is the first time.”
Lucy looked from Kalinda to Cary and back again. She laughed uncertainly.
“Guess the pressure’s on me, hey,” Lucy said quietly.
“Nope, no pressure,” Kalinda said in her calm voice. “Just something different. New people. New experiences.”
Kalinda reached out a hand and slid her fingers into the crook of Lucy’s arm. Lucy immediately stopped playing with her straw, as if Kalinda’s touch were accompanied by a crackle of electricity. The two women looked at each other - a long look - and Lucy licked her lips, a deep swallow showing in her long neck.
Cary felt a flicker of jealousy, seeing Kalinda’s attention turned on someone else, but it was chased quickly by curiosity. As Lucy leaned closer across the table, her hands grasping Kalinda’s hands, Cary studied Kalinda. Her eyes had grown softer since they’d entered the bar. As she drew Lucy in, her movements became more fluid; her expression less guarded. Cary felt like her armor had cracked open - just a millimeter or two, perhaps, but through the crack, he thought he might be able to see what lay beneath.
Suddenly, Cary felt the window beside their table reverberate.
His first thought was that someone had thrown something at the glass. But, when he looked up, he saw instead a very large man pound his fist against the window. Moments later, the same very large man came barrelling through the door. The vibe of the bar was laid-back and sophisticated, but apparently the very large man had not received the memo, because he immediately began yelling.
“WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON?”
At the same moment Cary stood up to shield the women from the random maniac who was bellowing at them, Lucy shrank away from Kalinda.
“Brian… what are you doing here?” Lucy gasped out, addressing the very large man, who apparently was not a random maniac, after all. He was Brian.
“What am I doing here? What are you doing here?” Brian shouted.
“Nothing!” Lucy exclaimed, holding out one placating hand to Brian. “These are just… some friends.”
“They’re not your fucking friends, Lu! They’re a couple of perverts you’re meeting for a THREESOME!”
If the sheer size of Brian and the volume of his ranting hadn’t commanded the attention of the rest of the bar’s patrons, then the word threesome had definitely done it. Piano music and weak cocktails were no match for the entertainment value being provided by their party. Kalinda, immune to embarrassment, sat straight-backed and thin-lipped, listening wordlessly. For his part, Cary slunk back down into his seat.
“You read my email?” Lucy burst out. “I can’t believe you read my email!”
“I can’t believe you’re cheating on me!” Brian retorted.
“I’m not cheating! Baby, I love you…”
“Don’t say that to me! I can’t even look at your face.”
Brian-the-giant suddenly looked close to tears. He turned away and took three giant strides toward the door. Lucy followed quickly behind him, murmuring, “I love you, boo boo, I love you…” She didn’t even bother to look at Cary and Kalinda, much less say goodbye to them.
Cary was silent for a long moment, staring straight ahead, as he waited for the attention of their fellow patrons to wane. Then he caught Kalinda’s eye and forced a smile.
“So… that went well,” he said jovially. “Let’s toast to Craigslist.”
Kalinda, however, didn’t crack a smile.
“This? This is what boyfriends do,” she said wearily. “They cause scenes. They mark their territory. Like their girlfriend is their property.” Kalinda let out an irritated breath. “This is why I can do without one.”
*
Over the next few days, work ate up every spare moment of Cary’s time. Yet when his mind wasn’t focused on the Macaulay Group’s $5million lawsuit, he found he couldn’t stop himself from brooding over the Lucy fiasco and Kalinda’s cold reaction to the boyfriend label.
It was almost a week before he got a chance to do more than stare at Kalinda across the Lockhart-Gardner bullpen. They met in the parking garage at 9 p.m. after a typical 13-hour Thursday.
“You wanna go to dinner?” she asked him.
“Only if the restaurant has a clothes-optional dress code,” he said, nuzzling close to kiss her neck.
“So… take out,” Kalinda said.
On their way to Cary’s apartment, they stopped at a hipper-than-average Chinese take-out place. It was busier than usual, because it had recently received some kind of foodie blog write-up, which probably meant Cary would soon have to find a new, less mainstream haunt.
As they waited impatiently for their food, Cary checked out the restaurant’s clientele. Specifically, the attractive, female clientele. Purely an academic exercise, of course. There was a petite redhead, but no, she was with a guy. There was a blonde whose order came up quickly and left in a hurry. Then his eyes found a hot black woman with high cheekbones and legs for days. Jesus.
He forced himself to look away. He put his arm around Kalinda and began making conversation about the difficulty of finding and retaining cool places to eat.
“God, you’re a pretentious asshole,” Kalinda said amicably. She shrugged out of her leather jacket and, in the process, slipped out of Cary’s grasp.
“It’s just really easy for good food places to get overrun with, like, tourists and families,” Cary said, shoving his hands into his pockets.
“So you’re upset about tourists,” said Kalinda.
Once again, his gaze strayed to the tall black woman, who looked almost as good in knee-high boots as Kalinda. She’d been standing alone for several minutes, which meant she definitely wasn’t with anyone. If only there weren’t a couple of huge stumbling blocks preventing him from approaching her. It was (maybesorta) okay to ask a woman at a bar if she wanted to have a threesome; it was less socially accepted to ask a woman at a newly-popular Chinese restaurant to have a threesome. Plus, Kalinda seemed to have put a sharp, emphatic pin in the whole idea of a threesome after the Lucy incident. He sighed and mentally tried to let the woman go.
“I’m upset about the knock-on effect,” Cary said. “Pretty soon prices will go up,” he added distractedly and snuck another look at the woman.
“So you’re worried you won’t be able to afford the food on your meagre salary.”
“Fine, make fun of me,” Cary said, “but it’ll probably be midnight before we get our food.”
“While we’re waiting, do you want me to go over and talk to the woman you can’t stop staring at?” Kalinda asked conversationally.
“What? I wasn’t-”
Kalinda rolled her eyes and turned away. Hips swaying perfectly, she walked over to where the woman stood. Kalinda smiled and Cary was able to lip-read hi, I’m Kalinda before her lips let forth a flurry of unreadable words. The woman smiled back and they… talked.
After fifteen minutes of watching them talk (talk, talk, talk), Cary was about ready to crawl out of his own skin. His number had been called in the interim, so now Cary stood awkwardly holding a bag of cooling Chinese food, watching as his girlfriend picked up another woman. Should he go over? Should he go wait in the car? What the hell was the etiquette here?
As he wrestled with these questions, Kalinda turned and walked back toward him. She was followed by…
“Cary, this is Alana,” said Kalinda.
Every ounce of courtroom training was required for Cary to smile and extend a hand like he was greeting an old friend.
“Ready to leave?” Kalinda prompted and it was immediately apparent that was she talking to Alana as well as Cary.
*
Later, Cary found he could recall the evening only in fragments. Snapshot images.
There was the sight of Alana unhooking her bra to reveal her small, firm breasts and Kalinda dropping her head to lick her nipples into hard nubs. The sight of Alana’s long, long legs hooked up over Cary’s shoulders was burned into his memory, as was the full-body jerk that reverberated through her muscular thighs as she came.
There were blurry moments, too, lost to alcohol and nerves. But Cary would never forget Kalinda’s panting, ragged breaths as Alana ate her out. He replayed at length the low tremor in Kalinda’s voice as she said, I want you inside me to Cary, while her pussy still flexed from Alana’s thumb against her clit.
The pornographic parts of the evening were certainly memorable, but Cary found himself revisiting the less tangible moments of hotness, too. Kalinda’s face featured larger than life in his memory; the play of emotions in her expression. Her wanting. The seeking and the satisfaction.
At the end of the evening, Kalinda bade farewell to Alana with a long kiss. The lust in her bearing was palpable as her hands lingered on Alana’s body. Yet, when the door closed behind Alana, Cary found that Kalinda was more (and not less) contented. When it was just the two of them again, Kalinda was warm, relaxed - affectionate, even.
Later, the two of them lay beneath tangled sheets in bed. Cary picked at cold Chinese food from wax cartons and relished licking his fingers. Kalinda watched him with arched eyebrows.
“Happy?” she asked wryly.
“Sure…”
Kalinda rolled her eyes. “Of course you are.”
“Kalinda… I know what you think, but… I didn’t want to have a threesome for some lecherous dudebro reason. I just wanted to see a different part of you.”
Cary paused. He waited for Kalinda to make a sarcastic comment, but she was quiet. Serious. Listening.
“I want to see every part of you,” he continued. “The ones you hide from the world. The pretty parts. The pretty ugly parts. I want you. All of you.”
He drew her close into a honey-glazed kiss. Then she settled against his chest, apparently still deep in thought.
“It could be like this, you know,” he said softly, wrapping his arms around her. “I can share. I can do that. And… whoever you want, I want that for you.”
The moment he finished speaking, Kalinda stirred. Cary felt a sudden stiffness in her body; her warmth cooling into detachment. She disentangled herself from his embrace and scooted across the bed, bare feet swinging down to meet hardwood floor.
“Kalinda-” he began.
“Cary, it’s late, I’m leaving,” she said.
Her voice was perfectly even, but she didn’t meet his gaze.
“Kalinda, what did I-”
He reached for her, but she pulled away.
“You want it to be simple,” she said, pulling on her clothes. “But it’s not simple.” The strain was showing in her voice now, her fingers fumbling to zip up her skirt. “The person I want-”
Kalinda gulped in a breath and said:
“The person I want doesn’t want me.”
*
From across their shared office, Cary watched her idly.
Alicia.
He remembered when they’d first met. His first impression of her: total MILF, although too prim for his taste. But, yeah, okay, he watched that shitty porno. The one with her and Eliot Spitzer’s wife getting it on. The porn version of Alicia didn’t even look like her.
Alicia looked up and noticed Cary staring at her.
“Something on your mind?” she asked distractedly, flipping through a case file.
“Uh. Have you seen Kalinda?” he asked.
“No, she’s out of the office all day. Macaulay case. Why, you need something?”
“It can wait,” said Cary. “Hey, we should do something after we wrap this case. Celebrate.”
“What if we don’t win?” asked Alicia archly.
“Commiserate, then.” He paused. “I’m serious. Drinks or something. You, me and Kalinda.”
“And Will and Diane?”
“No. Just the fourth years,” said Cary.
“And Kalinda,” said Alicia.
“And Kalinda.”
“…You’re being careful with her, right?”
Cary couldn’t help but laugh.
“Are we having a safe sex talk? Or is this a break-her-heart-and-I’ll-hunt-you-down talk?”
“Neither,” Alicia said briskly, returning to her file. “And you should know that Kalinda’s heart doesn’t break. So be careful.”
*
Alicia looked around Cary’s high-ceilinged white box of a loft apartment and smiled her lawyer smile.
“Great place,” she said unconvincingly.
“Thanks,” said Cary.
He uncorked the bottle of red in his hand and poured three glasses of wine, handing out two to his guests and keeping one for himself.
“And I love these little asparagus things,” said Alicia.
She bit into the hors d’oeuvre with a click of white teeth.
“Yeah, you never knew I could cook, right?” Cary said, taking a drink from his wine glass.
“He had it catered,” said Kalinda, speaking to Alicia but looking at Cary.
“She knows!” said Cary. “It was a joke.”
Kalinda raised her eyebrows at him. “Funny.”
There was a silence that lasted a moment too long to be comfortable.
“So when are the others getting here?” Alicia asked finally.
“Oh, they couldn’t make it,” said Cary.
Alicia frowned. “None of them?”
“Nope. Busy lives, I guess.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Cary saw Kalinda’s face change as realization dawned on her.
“Well… a toast,” said Cary quickly. “To… I guess to settling the Macaulay case with a higher than expected payout lacks panache. So… to victory!”
They all raised their glasses to toast. For Kalinda’s part, she looked capable of using the wine glass as a weapon, although managed to resist doing so.
“To victory,” they all chorused.
Instead of sipping her wine, Kalinda took two long swallows from her glass. She put down the glass on the coffee table with so much force that it almost broke. Then she turned to Cary and said, in a perfectly calm voice, “Can I talk to you in the kitchen?”
Cary nodded, forcing out a bland smile for Alicia. He and Kalinda walked through to the kitchen, leaving Alicia in the living room. The moment the two of them were alone, Kalinda rounded on Cary.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
“I’m having a gathering,” said Cary, trying not to react to the fact that Kalinda was kind of scary when she was angry.
“A gathering of three fucking people,” said Kalinda. “This is, by far, the most juvenile thing you’ve ever done. How exactly do you propose to seduce Alicia? Because mid-price Merlot and canapés aren’t going to do it.”
“I guess not,” Cary said snidely, refusing to be cowed by Kalinda. “But maybe you’ll be able to work your voodoo magic on her. Whisper, whisper, whisper, and suddenly she’ll fall into bed with you. Isn’t that what you do?
“It’s not voodoo magic, Cary. I talk to women like they’re human beings. I find out what they want.”
“So talk to Alicia. Find out what she wants.”
Kalinda didn’t respond and Cary realized he spied a rare emotion in her eyes: fear.
“Fuck you, Cary,” she said at last.
“Kalinda-” he began, but she had already turned to leave.
He followed her through to the living room, where she grabbed her coat and unhooked her scarf from the hat rack. “Bye, Alicia,” she said hurriedly, without looking at Alicia or waiting for a reply. She headed for the front door.
“Kalinda, wait-” Cary called out, but she ignored him.
She let the door slam closed behind her.
Alicia, who’d taken a seat on the couch, raised her eyebrows but said nothing. She took a sip of her wine while Cary sank down next to her on the leather sofa.
“Shit,” he muttered.
There was a brief silence and then Alicia spoke up.
“Great party,” she said. “Intimate. Parties involving dozens or even several people are just so noisy.”
She smiled mischievously and he couldn’t help but smile back. Alicia continued sipping her wine and Cary took a moment to look at her. Alicia Florrick. Still a MILF - that was self-evident. Not so prim anymore - had that just been a façade, or had life at Lockhart-Gardner changed her?
Full of post-law-school hubris, he’d probably once believed that he could seduce Alicia easily. Desperate older woman looking for excitement - an easy conquest for a young buck. Now, of course, that idea struck him as laughably naïve. These days, Alicia seemed terrifyingly complicated to him. She was unreadable. Unknowable. She was a lot like Kalinda in that respect. Self-contained, self-controlled. Difficult to penetrate (haha), difficult to get inside.
“You’re in love with her, aren’t you?” Alicia asked conversationally, breaking Cary’s spiralling train of thought. “Kalinda, I mean.”
He moved his head in a non-committal jerk, because he honestly wasn’t sure how to respond.
“Sorry, Cary,” Alicia said, setting down her now-empty wine glass. “But you’d do better to find someone else.” She stood up, smoothing down her suit skirt. “When you get right down to it, Kalinda only really looks out for Kalinda. If you want more from her, you won’t get it.”
Advice imparted, Alicia crossed the room to retrieve her coat and purse. Cary stood up, too, following her to the door. It took him a moment to form his closing argument.
“I know you hold grudges, Alicia,” he said, slowly, carefully. “But you’re wrong about Kalinda.” Here, he was unable to keep the angry bite out of his voice. “She doesn’t just look out for herself. She looks out for you, even if you try hard not to see it.”
He paused before delivering his final comment, to make sure the jury-of-one really heard him.
“She loves you.”
Alicia stood motionless. Her coat lay folded, forgotten, over her arm. Her purse dangled from the tips of her fingers. She looked lost for words. Cary took a moment to appreciate successfully unsettling Alicia, who was still visibly trying and failing to process the implications of what Cary was saying.
“Think about it,” Cary said. “You know it’s true.”
“No, I don’t know it’s-” Alicia began, but couldn’t seem to finish her sentence.
“My point is,” Cary continued, “I know what I want. Kalinda knows what she wants, even if she won’t pursue it. The third point in this equation is you. So I guess it’s time to figure out what you want, Alicia.”
*
The next week passed like nothing had happened.
At the office, Alicia didn’t mention the evening - Cary’s revelation; her own silence on the matter - and stayed clipped and courteous as they talked about work. If she were anyone else, he might have tried to parse their interactions for subtext; ferret out her feelings via manipulation. But this was Alicia. Unknowable, unreadable Alicia.
That week, Kalinda slept over at Cary’s apartment twice. On the one hand, Cary was glad that she seemed to have erased their argument from her memory. On the other hand, she seemed distant even when she was in his arms. Each night, she arrived late and left early - a lot more like he was a hook-up than a boyfriend.
When Saturday rolled around, he spent the morning at the gym, running for hours on the treadmill to try and catch the Kalinda in his mind. In the afternoon, he steeled himself and swung by her apartment building.
When the elevator doors opened on her floor, he saw immediately that Kalinda’s front door was open. He heard voices as he walked the corridor. When he was just meters away, a brunette woman emerged from Kalinda’s apartment.
When she spotted him, Alicia smiled - a weird, knowing smile that he couldn’t quite decipher. She was dressed casually, in slacks and a soft wool sweater. No make-up. The contrast to her work attire - suits and pantyhose and red lipstick - set Cary further off axis.
“Don’t worry, I’m just leaving,” Alicia said to Cary, with another cryptic smile.
She left before he could reply. Her footsteps down the corridor were quiet in her flat shoes.
“What was that?” Cary asked, as Kalinda appeared in the doorway of her apartment.
“I don’t know,” Kalinda said with a slight frown.
Kalinda stared down the empty corridor for a long moment.
“Nothing, probably,” she said.
But Cary thought he saw something like hope in her expression as she leaned up to greet him with a kiss.
They spent the rest of the day together. It was a quiet, unremarkable day of errands and Netflix and take-out dinner. They didn’t discuss Alicia, yet Cary noticed that Kalinda seemed almost buoyant. Less far away, at any rate.
*
For someone who wasn’t unnaturally attuned to Kalinda’s movements, her interactions with Alicia over the week that followed would have seemed completely normal.
An investigator at a law firm discussing cases with a top lawyer. Two colleagues eating lunch together. Smiles exchanged in the corridor. Laughter over a shared joke.
It was nothing that would seem out of the ordinary, except to Cary it felt like the earth was changing underfoot.
When, on Friday, Kalinda said, “I’ll see you later, but I’m meeting Alicia for a drink now,” it sounded utterly benign, but Cary knew it was anything but.
*
Cary worked late, doing tasks that could have waited until Monday, in a bid to ignore his impulse to try and unravel the intricacies of Kalinda’s relationship with Alicia.
It was past eleven when his phone buzzed on the desk. He read the message-
You’re needed. Come over. (Kalinda’s place.)
-and then did a double take.
He’d been expecting a message from Kalinda, but no - he checked again - this was from Alicia.
Work forgotten, he left Lockhart-Gardner to the night watchman and drove over to Kalinda’s apartment block. The doorman waved him inside and he took the elevator to Kalinda’s floor, his nerves jangling at every lurch upward.
At Kalinda’s door, he knocked and waited. At first, there was no response. Then he heard a muffled voice - a familiar voice, but not Kalinda’s voice - call out, “It’s open.”
He’d seen Alicia at the office a few hours previously, where she’d been dressed in a charcoal jacket and white camisole. Now - when Cary opened the door and took in the sight in front of him - he saw that the jacket lay wadded on the floor and both straps of Alicia’s camisole had slipped off her shoulders, revealing an inch of her bra. She’d been wearing pantyhose earlier, too, but now her legs were bare. Her suit skirt had ridden up and her bare thighs gripped Kalinda as she sat astride her on the couch in Kalinda’s living room.
For her part, Kalinda was flushed. Her hair was loose and she wore even less clothing than Alicia, spread out beneath the other woman, panting and feverish. Seeing Cary, Kalinda arched upward and rocked Alicia back. She climbed off the couch. Breaking connection with Alicia caused a slight, full-body shudder in Kalinda. (Cary, for the first time, saw where Alicia’s hands lay, her fingers stroking at the heat between Kalinda’s legs.)
Kalinda, loose-limbed and uncoordinated, weaved across the room to Cary. She placed her hands on either side of his face and kissed him hard. She smelled like sex and tequila and he’d never wanted her more.
*
Porn had not prepared Cary for this.
The sex he could handle, but this wasn’t a threesome that ended at two a.m. In porn, the hot MILF merely faded away at the end of the scene. But Cary had to walk into his office and see Alicia on Monday morning.
When Monday morning arrived, Cary exited the elevator wearing his best poker face. Alicia, seated on the couch in their office, took one look at him and started laughing.
“What?” he asked.
“Nothing,” said Alicia. “You just look like the cat that got the cream.”
Cary glanced across the Lockhart-Gardner floor - he watched a couple of first year associates disappear into a meeting room, but it was too early for real foot traffic. The floor was mostly empty. He leaned over cupped Alicia’s face with his hand, fingers pushing into the hair beneath her ear. He looked at her for a moment and then kissed her lightly on the lips. Her hesitation was palpable, before she gave in and returned the kiss.
The thrill - of being allowed to kiss her; of each kiss holding echoes of Kalinda - was still fresh and unfamiliar.
“Stop it,” Alicia said at last, her voice low and unconvincing. “This is work. Very bad form to mix business with… whatever this is.”
“Pleasure,” Cary said, taking a step back and grinning (a little like the cat that got the cream, but only a little). “You can say the word.”
“…Pleasure,” Alicia repeated, her voice rich and reproachful. Yet her eyes gleamed and… oh fuck. This was gonna be hard work.
And, indeed, in the weeks that followed, it was hard work. Two headstrong women and him in the middle. At times, it was a whole hell of a lot of fun, but it wasn’t like they were suddenly one big, happy ménage à trois.
There were complications. Alicia was still married, for one thing - although, Cary soon learned, only technically. And, the thing about a MILF was, she was a mom. When, after a post-work quickie, he tried to pull Alicia back into bed with him and Kalinda, Alicia said firmly, “Parent-teacher night. Can’t be late.”
Kalinda and Alicia had some definite issues, also. He’d observed in the past that Kalinda often had heavily loaded conversations with Alicia that purported to be about one thing, but were actually about something else entirely. He now found out that the two women were capable of having sex in much the same way - full of subtext and multi-faceted fucking.
Cary was a pretty straightforward lover - he wanted to get off and he wanted his partner(s) to get off, too. Yet, with Kalinda and Alicia, there were undeniable layers. Sometimes the sex was light-hearted and messy-fun. But Alicia also liked to punish Kalinda in bed - withhold her orgasm or manipulate her vibrator with merciless thrusts - and though these instances wrought the most intense, wracking climaxes from Kalinda, afterward, there was tension.
Yet following the tension came relief. Each time, Cary observed, the tension would dissipate and Alicia would reach for Kalinda with a trembling, fragile kind of forgiveness. And then Kalinda would smile, her heart written all over her face.
The inclusion of Alicia in Cary’s relationship with Kalinda had laid bare some new parts of Kalinda. Her armor was cracked open wider than ever before. She was still guarded, still intensely private, but there was a new lightness to her bearing. She smiled differently.
Cary reflected that it was worth every complication to see Kalinda’s smile. He remembered his words to Kalinda, so carelessly expressed: Whoever you want, I want that for you.
Now he felt the truth of it; it was a promise he had no choice but to keep.