oh, darling. (alicia/will)
Word Count: 2216
Rating: T
Summary: Oh, and if he kissed her then she'd taste like academia//Georgetown Era Will and Alicia, and Alicia, after. Like, a lot angsty.
She takes a bet that he would taste like tequila, if he kissed her, right then. He didn't like the taste - too bitter, too much - when he gets older, but she remembers him liking it back then. She thinks she remembers. It's the midnight pool party, and the backyard of some frat house is sweltering with the heat of sticky, drunk, young bodies; all clamouring to impress each other. She's tugging at her dress, and testing the water, and he's there - throwing himself into the pool, head thrown back in laughter and shoulders tense and legs bent and tipsy, over and over and over. He's dotting her dress with water, and he's exactly the kind of boy that would annoy her, but his mouth sits firm in a grin and his shorts hang around his hips god, beautifully, and she's nothing but endeared.
She takes a bet that she would taste like tequila, if he kissed her, right then. She's thrown back a few by the time he comes to introduce himself - unfettered by lime or salt or self control (she grows up, learns how to drink) - and she figures that her lips would taste like cheap alcohol, if he parted them with his tongue, and maybe he would get drunk off her, and maybe he would like it. He smells like chlorine, and his hair sticks up at all ends, and he trips over himself to woo her with his knowledge of Contract Law. She's a little light-headed, but she watches the way he shuffles his feet, and the way he cocks his head in a certain way and the way he pulls a smile around underneath his nose, because that's how he gets the ladies, and that's how he'll get her.
He's wrong, but she writes her name on his hand in marker anyway, and tells him to look out for her in the lecture; and their knees will knock together under the table and she'll pull her hair into a tight ponytail, and he'll let her scribble in the margins of his textbook, pages filled with affectionate reminders of statutory obligations; and oh, if he kissed her then she'd taste like academia.
(Kalinda comes to her house, and she brings pizza, and she brings tequila. Kalinda stops avoiding her phone calls, because Alicia is going mad, and Alicia needs her around. They don't talk, because it's been six days now, since, and they both loved him, and what else is there to say? They don't talk, but there is tequila, and they get quite drunk, and she holds Alicia's hand.)
-
He breaks up with Helena for her.
It's their third semester in, and just after the break, and there's an exam tomorrow. It's their third semester in, and just before the break she leant over a diner table while he was talking about Torts, and got cherry pie on her blouse, and kissed him. It's one of those rare Alicia moments, that only he really gets to see, where she untethers herself from the shackles of right and good and does what she wants, what makes her happy. He makes her happy.
His lips tasted like she thought they might - black coffee and too much sugar and pastry - and she thinks she knows everything about Will Gardner now. That his shoulder aches all the time, and he won't talk about his dad, and that he doesn't eat breakfast because his stomach is never settled when he wakes up, and that he likes the law, and that he loves her, and that this was bound to happen, and that his lips tasted like she though they might - his nose pressed against her face, and his hand in her hair.
It's been a year, and all she wanted to do was say something sultry, and undress him on the way back to her apartment, and have stupid amounts of sex with him; but she pulled her mouth from his and settled back into her chair and knitted her eyebrows in a frown and all she could think of was,
"I shouldn't have done that", stated to her coffee, and she'd hastily back-tracked to save face, because he was taken and she was being a fool. "I wasn't - it wasn't good timing, I -"
He shook his head then, face bent and sad, and took her hand and she stopped her tongue.
"I love you", he said, she knows he says it, but his words all sort of tumbled into one another, as his hands trembled a little and his mouth rose and fell between grin and frown and he told her he loves her, and he'd sort it out, and she had a stain on her shirt.
And then he's back, and it's just after the break, and there's an exam tomorrow, and he knocks his knees against hers in the study room and tells her about Helena. Somewhere in the back of her head, she's aware that he's made her the other woman now. That she made herself the other woman. Somewhere in the back of her head, she's aware that this makes her a bad, not very good person, that this doesn't fit in with her self-concept, and that she is awful, and they are wrong. But he's smiling at her over the top of his very large textbook, and her head is filled with Administrative Law, and she cannot fathom the brainpower to be angry. Instead she goes back to his place, and she quizzes him, and he makes her toast.
(She remembers making him pray, that night. She didn't believe, doesn't believe, but she remembers her stomach churning and she remembers kissing him when he gets an answer right, and remembers that his lips tasted like the crust she never eats from the toast he made her; and she remembers pulling away, and putting her nervous fingers on his broad shoulders and asking him to pray with her. She remembers feeling silly, but she remembers getting on her knees anyway, and folding her hands together, and watching him do the same, and asking whomever to please help them out.)
(She watches Grace pray for her. She doesn't believe, still doesn't believe, but Grace closes her eyes, and rests her head against her bedroom window and prays for her mother, who is very sad, and very alone, and prays for Will, who she never even met, who loved her mother, and was a good man, and feels no gunshot wounds now, where he is.
She wants to scream at her, her eyes still heavy with tears and his voicemail still ringing in her ears, because that kid didn't even mean to shoot Will, and now he's not here anymore, he doesn't exist, and where's the meaning in that? Instead Alicia pads into Grace's room, and sits herself beside her, and puts her head on her shoulder and prays along with her.)
-
The problem is, they never really date. He's around a lot, and she likes him being around a lot - study partner and coffee-bringer and she'll laugh at his jokes and he'll kiss a path down the valley between her breasts, while she gasps into his hairline. He's around almost permanently when she moves into her new place, off campus, so much so that she almost asks him to move in (she never gets around to it, and he keeps his own place), and she supposes that his around-ness constitutes some sort of relationship. She supposes that they're probably lovers, they're definitely friends - but she steers them away from definition, and it's their undoing.
See the problem is, they never properly date, and sometimes Alicia's thoughts stray, sometimes Alicia thinks - when she moves into her own place, and asks him to stay over, and warms her December-cold hands on his bed-warm body - that he's around to abate the loneliness, and it is awful of her to use him like that. (She's wrong, of course, she loves him.)
Sometimes Alicia thinks that Will has put this all on her, and she should hate him for it. He broke up with somebody else for her, and that's huge, and how is she supposed to live up to that? Sometimes she thinks she should hate him, because she's the other woman now. (She's wrong, of course, she loves him.)
Most of the time, Alicia's just aware that their something isn't a something, and he is around, but he is not hers, and so when they fight (over some group presentation, or what they're having for dinner, or why she can't just commit, she can't really remember) and when she runs away and when she mets Peter, and sleeps with Peter, and brings Peter back to the apartment one night it's not really cheating, and she shouldn't really feel guilty.
Will doesn't stop talking to her, per say, when he finds out. She fumbles the words out onto the table in between their textbooks in the middle of the night, smiles and tries to make it casual, and tells him that she met someone when she went away.
"It's nothing serious, we're just, um, seeing each other."
Alicia thinks Will is going to cry for a moment, when she glances at him through her hair; and then she thinks she's over-estimating her own allure, and she's being an idiot, and he's fine.
" Oh, but. I thought -"
Is all the response she receives, and then he just kind of gazes at her, confusion and hurt piercing the icy exterior.
"Okay, cool."
He doesn't stop talking to her. It's just - his around-ness is much less around, and he doesn't ask to meet her at the diner where she kissed him anymore, and they'll still buy each other coffee, but all they talk about is the law now - his string of girlfriends is off-limits, Peter is off-limits. By the time graduation happens, by the time she's engaged, and valedictorian, and milling in the courtyard biting her lip and clutching her speech, they're barely talking at all.
(She still feels him around.)
--
By the time graduation comes, she thinks they've thoroughly ruined each other's hearts, and they're barely talking at all. So it sort of takes her by surprise when he wanders up to her, loose fitting suit beneath his gown (he grows up, learns how to wear a suit, god, he does), and clutching at his mortar board, and smiles at her. It's one of those pursed lip smiles, but it's there all the same, and it fits underneath that nose of his, and its directed at her.
"I never had a doubt", he says.
"Too right", she replies, and smiles then, one of those genuine Alicia smiles, all teeth; and leans into him a little when he stretches forward to press a kiss to her cheek. "You're okay too, I guess", she mumbles, and he chuckles, and he nods, and he leaves, and they don't talk for fifteen years.
(She still feels him around.)
(She knows it'll pass, and she won't feel him around anymore, and she won't feel like she's going mad. But right now he hangs limp in her unwashed hair and sits heavy on a pile of untouched work, and sometimes he fills her lungs up and she thinks she might drown in him, and she wouldn't have it any other way.
Diane understands. Diane orders them cocktails and Diane looks tired, and Diane stretches the firm's name back out to Lockhart/Gardner and refuses to change it for anyone. Which means that Diane has to deal with him very much around every every working day, watermarked on every inch of the place, and she wouldn't have it any other way. Diane understands.
Cary understands, a little. Cary's just lovely, and piles her work onto his desk, and wins every case, and goes with her to the courthouse, if she wants the company.
Peter doesn't understand. Peter will never understand. But it's early days, and he's trying to be sorry, and he draws her a bath and sits by the side as her muscles soak in the water, and he washes her hair, fingers fumbling around her ears. He's trying.)
--
She forgets things about him - slowly. She forgets like she forgot twenty years ago (to make room in her head for Zach and Grace and Peter and life). Days and weeks and months and years just happen and she has work to do, and she forgets his coffee order (double-shot something-or-other), and she forgets his favourite sports teams (obligatory Bulls nights in college slipping from her head), and she forgets the parts of the law that he loved the most, and the colour of the boxers he wore the morning he sat on her bed and played chords on the curve of her leg and asked her what being a parent was like.
She forgets things about him, but it's okay, because she remembers the big things. She remembers the big things about him and her, and the time he said he loved her in the diner, and the time he said he loved her on his phone, and sometimes she wakes up and the pain in her chest has abated, and she will put on makeup, and she will be okay. She will be fine.