Fic: How to Fall in Love Completely and Never Be Found (The Good Wife, Alicia/Kalinda)
Title: How to Fall in Love Completely and Never Be Found
Fandom: The Good Wife
Pairing: Alicia Florrick/Kalinda Sharma
Rating: NC-17 for explicit sex
Spoilers/Continuity: Major spoilers through the current episode, "Nine Hours."
Warnings/Enticements: Adultery. Slightly rough sex.
Summary: Alicia is having an affair, she isn't breaking it off, and she isn't leaving Peter.
Word count: about 3,000.
Disclaimers: The Good Wife is the intellectual property of Scott Free, King Size, Small Wishes, and CBS. This original work of fan fiction is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License; attribution should include a link to this Livejournal post. This story is a labor of love, not money, so it's protected in the USA by the fair use provisions of the Copyright Act of 1976.
Notes: Written for girlsgunsfic for maekala. Love and thanks to annaalamode for a last-minute insomniac beta. Title is a nod to Radiohead.
*
Alicia and Kalinda were in bed together, trying to get a man released from death row. At the same time, Alicia was trying to figure out whether Kalinda was in love with her. Ever since meeting Kalinda's horrible ex-girlfriend and being told, nastily, that she wasn't Kalinda's type, Alicia had been working on that. Horrible Donna with her ostentatiously out-of-fashion pantsuit and ten-dollar haircut, the kind of public defender who lived to insist that everyone gaze upon her humble devotion to getting the scum of the earth cleared of parole violations and domestic abuse charges. If that was Kalinda's type, she could have it, but Alicia thought she could do better.
So, in between phone calls and waiting for documents to load, Alicia was trying to read the world's least legible woman. Kalinda had a certain smile that she wore when Alicia asked about her past or her personal life. Wouldn't you like to know? it said.
It wasn't like Alicia was telling Kalinda much, herself. She didn't mention that she slept alone in here, dreaming of Will and feeling ashamed, wishing she could dream of someone else. She didn't mention that Grace's new best friend creeped her out. She got two beers out of the fridge to start Kalinda talking and to keep her own mouth shut. Kalinda asked if Alicia's unrest had to do with Will; she pretended her own unrest had to do with Blake. You could always use men as an excuse.
The death row mystery broke open: an arson specialist, a change in forensic technology, a layover at O'Hare and Kalinda running off to catch a plane, catch an expert witness by the tail, and save a life.
And nothing. Kalinda wasn't harboring any secret desire, or she was determined to hide it, to never see it through. Alicia hurried to draft an addendum while Peter said on TV that his marriage, their marriage, was none of anyone's fucking business. Among other things, he was right, and he was her husband.
The surprise was not that Alicia and Kalinda saved a man from execution. That was a joy, a glorious relief, a small weight lifted from the terrible world. The surprise was that Kalinda came back so she could be there when Alicia called the judge, and then stayed, as if she needed an invitation to leave. "We did it, we saved a life," Alicia said, holding Kalinda's arms in her hands. Alicia checked her blind spots to make sure the kids were in their rooms and Jackie had gone home, and then she filled the elated silence with a kiss. Kalinda pushed Alicia back against the wall like an accusation, like she was under arrest. "Did you really mean to do that?" Kalinda asked, but she kissed Alicia before there was time for an answer, pinning Alicia so this huge kiss stood between her and the rest of the whole world.
~o~
Monday, Alicia went to work fearing awkwardness, not just with Kalinda but with Will, who would stare lovelorn at Alicia without realizing he was doing it, and also without any way of knowing that his stares were even more unnerving than usual. Even less nerving.
Alicia didn't see Kalinda all morning, but after lunch, Kalinda came to drop off some photos for a trial Alicia wasn't involved in. Alicia looked down at her desk and pretended to work, but Kalinda swung into her office, knocking on the open doorframe to startle her. "Have a drink with me after work?" It sounded like a peace offering, utterly nerving.
The bar Kalinda chose was a short walk from the office and in another world, a narrow brick tunnel, virtually unmarked, on a side street, a survivor of some previous layer of the Loop. All of the other customers were old men speaking Polish. Kalinda found them a table and negotiated with the bartender for beer. With her hands around her glass, as if making them too cold for Alicia to touch, she said, "What are we doing?"
"I don't know," Alicia said. "Do you want me to decide?"
"You're the one with the husband." Kalinda was steely, her eyes almost completely hidden behind her lashes, her drink still untouched.
Alicia took a long sip of her own beer. "Would you? If I said I wanted to, would you?"
"It would depend on what you wanted me to do." Kalinda half-smiled, difficult on purpose, drawing things out. Wouldn't you like to know.
All of the obvious requests felt wrong. Alicia didn't want a girlfriend, a lover, a night of passion - anything that would negate their friendship. "Would you - would you kiss me again?"
Kalinda raised her glass to tap the rim of Alicia's sloshing a few drops of beer onto the table. "Of course. And cheers to that." Her face still closed off her emotions, and Alicia wondered if this was the most they ever broke through.
Alicia and Kalinda finished their drinks, talking abstractly and cautiously about work, about the men in the bar, how it felt like they were playing hide-and-seek with the everyday. Then, they returned to it, back to the parking garage together, and in the elevator, Kalinda turned and swept Alicia around to redeem her kiss.
"We'll have to work around - well, the rest of my life," Alicia said as they walked to her car. "Fortunately, Peter's busy with the campaign. I think I'm alone Friday night, if you -"
Kalinda kissed away the rest of Alicia's sentence, holding her against the hood of her car.
~o~
For Friday, Alicia reserved a room, nowhere memorable or fancy, a chain hotel off the highway in the suburbs with Express in the name. She'd learned on the job how not to leave a trail when you were having an affair. As she entered her credit card number on the hotel's website, she realized what she was doing. This was what it felt like to be unfaithful, a rush of danger tempered by the irritation of logistics.
So it would feel like a date, Alicia picked up Thai food, a bottle of wine, and seeing them in a display in a florist's shop next to the liquor store, a bouquet of out-of-season yellow daisies. She'd forgotten to take yesterday's dry cleaning out of the back seat, and among her blouses and Peter's dress shirts, she had a clean white tablecloth. Her hands were awkwardly full as she checked in, so harried she hoped she looked harmless. Inside, she texted Kalinda the room number, and she waited, wishing she'd brought a magazine, wishing she'd brought a vase.
Kalinda rushed in, late but poised, hanging up her coat before she came up to kiss Alicia. "The last time I did this, I walked in and the guy was naked." Alicia didn't want to hear any more, so she drew Kalinda into a deeper kiss, gloss-sticky and sweet. Into her lips, Kalinda said, "I like this better. I like you better."
Alicia rose, and feeling suddenly warm, took off her suit jacket. Kalinda pushed her back down into the armchair and knelt across her lap, kissing her forcefully. Kalinda shed her sweater; Alicia kicked off her shoes; they squirmed to unzip skirts and peel out of camisoles, to lose themselves in wild, slick kisses. They'd needed the gesture of the food and the wine, but they both knew what they were here for.
Kalinda was beautiful underneath the miniskirts and knee-high boots, her body soft in all the right places, her nipples dark against the full curve of her breasts. She hesitated, as if giving Alicia the chance to deny her, before sinking to her knees, holding Alicia's legs apart. I need more foreplay, Alicia started to say, but one dart of Kalinda's tongue proved her wrong. Alicia dug her fingers into the chair and arched up into Kalinda's mouth, pleading for more of it, coming like a nervous high school boy.
Was Alicia expected to match that? She worried as her breath slowed. She stood up and fixed her panties, longing to touch Kalinda but feeling like she needed lessons first. "Easy now," Kalinda said, slipping an arm around Alicia's waist and leading her to the bed. "I was just showing off. You can do whatever you're ready for. I know you don't have much experience with women."
"How do you know that?" It was a foolish question. If Kalinda wanted to know something, she found it out.
"I've met everyone you've dated since college," Kalinda said.
Alicia laughed because the truth had taken so little research, and that relaxed her enough to venture a kiss, which became a tour of Kalinda's sensitive body, the hollows and lines of her neck and shoulders, the sweet flesh of her breasts and belly. Uncharted territory made Alicia's hands shake. "It's all right," Kalinda said. "Next time."
Alicia expected Kalinda to be distant and disappointed, but she was chatty and silly, insisting they eat dinner in their underwear, telling stories about irrelevant, embarrassing things she'd witnessed on stakeouts. Elderly neighbors dancing the polka naked, a couple recording their own fetish porn, a man systematically eating an entire birthday cake - chocolate, white buttercream frosting, blue flowers - by himself. "The problem with my job," Kalinda said, turning pad thai noodles around on her plastic fork, "is I will always know more about you than you do about me. So I'm trying to give you a little. A little more."
~o~
Having an affair was frighteningly easy. Alicia's years as a political wife had made her an expert scheduler and an expert leaver-outer of details. She worked so late as it was, no one noticed an extra hour or two taken for herself. Kalinda was an expert at hiding in plain sight: mom-and-pop restaurants in non-trendy neighborhoods, a different generic business hotel for every sleepover. And everything wrapped in the white lie of friendship, their lunches together in Alicia's office, Kalinda dropping by Alicia's apartment to deliver documents she could have e-mailed, making out in the handicapped stall of the ladies' room in the courthouse. After all the scheming, stealing kisses felt like actual theft.
No one seemed to have a clue. Not her family, not their colleagues at Lockhart Gardner, especially not Will with his weird new girlfriend and his staring. But it started to turn, of course, as all things did. Secrets were like water balloons people tossed back and forth, and eventually they sprung leaks even if you were careful not to let them explode in your hands.
Kalinda had stopped by to ask a few questions about a case that Alicia could have answered on the phone, and then she stayed for half an hour, standing in the kitchen not quite touching Alicia, not quite undressing her. As Alicia saw her out, kissing her cautiously on the cheek, she saw Zach in the living room, waiting to ask a question, or maybe just watching.
"Mom?" he said, not the beginning of a specific request but a call for her. As big as her children had grown, they still sometimes seemed to need her without knowing why. She gave him an unsolicited hug, which he accepted for a few moments before squirming out of it and reclaiming his teenage dignity. "Mom, are you cheating on Dad?"
There was no answer to that question. It was like a Zen koan: what is the sound of your son catching you in an affair? She let her silence bounce around the room long enough to confirm his suspicions.
"I won't tell Dad if you are," Zach said.
"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to do this - to do this to you and Grace. I'll break it off."
"No." Zach lunged forward as if to physically stop her. "I know what your marriage is for. You don't think I could, but I do. And she's - she's nice." It didn't sound like "nice" was the word he was thinking of, but it'd do.
Alicia shook her head, unable to see her next move, hoping her vision would clear. But she only saw her son and the secret he was swearing to keep.
~o~
"Why don't you come over to my apartment for a change?" Kalinda said, as if Alicia had been the one resisting. Kalinda was in Alicia's home far more often, and that was laden with the dangers of family members, campaign managers, and school friends who might be enemies tomorrow. Kalinda lived alone, but Alicia had assumed all along that it required special access, like the Bat Cave.
It was, as expected, rather dark and rather small, but clean and comfortable, peaceful. The bed, with its tall posts and pile of soft blankets, was clearly the safest place in the inner sanctum, and a perfect place to make love. Alicia had studied hard and caught herself up, learning the language of tongues and hands, the geography of body parts that didn't need words when they were her own but desperately did when she was thinking about Kalinda's. After coursing through euphemisms and vulgarities for a sleepless night (Peter's snore just audible in the next room), she'd settled on vagina, which might have been inaccurate or old-fashioned but sounded romantic, like a woman's name, as well as familiar.
Kalinda liked something big inside her, to be filled up, and it surprised Alicia that her fingers suited that need, that they could take up the right amount of space. Kalinda liked to be held down, liked to hurt, and she said none of those things, not directly. She left Alicia to guess until she had it right and then rewarded her.
Tonight, Kalinda left her boots on. She'd figured out that Alicia liked her in her heels, something Alicia hadn't realized until Kalinda had begun making a point of it. High heels gave Kalinda's hips a natural sway, made her body long. Tonight, she caught Alicia's back with her heel as she rode Alicia's fingers, and it hurt, bleeding a little or swelling into a bruise, but Alicia wanted to feel wounded.
Kalinda seemed to break open when she came, as if the veneer that subdued her emotions briefly shattered, only to pull itself back together again as she held Alicia next to her.
They made popcorn and watched a movie, the most domestic they'd been together, sinking into Kalinda's ancient couch and into each other's arms. When the movie had gotten slow in the middle - another plot device to stretch it out to two hours - Kalinda said, "Don't ever leave your husband for me."
"I wasn't going to," Alicia said. "You know I can't."
"I'm not a very good full-time girlfriend. I didn't want you to expect that. I - I have exactly as much time for this as you do."
"I know." That was why they worked.
~o~
Alicia felt, after that night, that it was serious - serious in its lack of commitment, in its stability and promise of a future. She was stuck the next day in the office, taking hours of depositions, and Kalinda brought soup, joking that she wished it were the weekend or the '60s so she could bring Alicia a martini along with it. In Kalinda's guarded eyes, Alicia saw the giddiness of romance and a long path ahead, or maybe she was just seeing her own reflection.
The next witness was late, and Kalinda was off breaking and entering. When Alicia thought about crime, she felt like a criminal; the rest of the time, she just felt love. But that was always the problem: people felt their justifications and forgot about the law, and that's where they got in trouble and hired Alicia to sway juries with extenuations, contexts, and doubts. When you didn't cover your tracks, that was all you had. Cover your tracks, play by the rules, or beg for mercy.
Alicia and Kalinda were leaving tracks behind them. Alicia had been pretending not to see them, but it was time to hire the cleaning service. She called Eli Gold on his new, secret, un-bugged-so-far phone, not because she liked or trusted him, but because she needed a service and he could provide it. "I'm having an affair," she said when she reached him. "I'm not willing to break it off, and I'm not going to leave Peter."
"Thanks for letting me know," Eli said.
"You're not going to ask who it is?"
"I know who it is," he said. "Or, better, I know who it isn't, and there's only one other possibility, and with a woman you can pretend you're just best friends until the day you die." She could hear the smarminess in his smile. His face was the opposite of Kalinda's mask: it said so much that no one could see the real emotion beneath the noise. "I will bury this, Alicia. Don't worry. Unless I tell you to worry."
She felt like Eli had sealed her vows and pronounced Kalinda her wife. When Kalinda came to meet her that evening, for a romantic meal in Little Village where no one would recognize them or speak their language but there would be candles on the tables, Alicia didn't tell her about the conversation with Eli, and when Kalinda asked her what was wrong, what was different, Alicia said it was nothing, a long day in a long string of long days that Kalinda made longer, but sweeter and warmer and, somehow, quiet, perhaps because secrets meant silence.
Fandom: The Good Wife
Pairing: Alicia Florrick/Kalinda Sharma
Rating: NC-17 for explicit sex
Spoilers/Continuity: Major spoilers through the current episode, "Nine Hours."
Warnings/Enticements: Adultery. Slightly rough sex.
Summary: Alicia is having an affair, she isn't breaking it off, and she isn't leaving Peter.
Word count: about 3,000.
Disclaimers: The Good Wife is the intellectual property of Scott Free, King Size, Small Wishes, and CBS. This original work of fan fiction is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License; attribution should include a link to this Livejournal post. This story is a labor of love, not money, so it's protected in the USA by the fair use provisions of the Copyright Act of 1976.
Notes: Written for girlsgunsfic for maekala. Love and thanks to annaalamode for a last-minute insomniac beta. Title is a nod to Radiohead.
*
Alicia and Kalinda were in bed together, trying to get a man released from death row. At the same time, Alicia was trying to figure out whether Kalinda was in love with her. Ever since meeting Kalinda's horrible ex-girlfriend and being told, nastily, that she wasn't Kalinda's type, Alicia had been working on that. Horrible Donna with her ostentatiously out-of-fashion pantsuit and ten-dollar haircut, the kind of public defender who lived to insist that everyone gaze upon her humble devotion to getting the scum of the earth cleared of parole violations and domestic abuse charges. If that was Kalinda's type, she could have it, but Alicia thought she could do better.
So, in between phone calls and waiting for documents to load, Alicia was trying to read the world's least legible woman. Kalinda had a certain smile that she wore when Alicia asked about her past or her personal life. Wouldn't you like to know? it said.
It wasn't like Alicia was telling Kalinda much, herself. She didn't mention that she slept alone in here, dreaming of Will and feeling ashamed, wishing she could dream of someone else. She didn't mention that Grace's new best friend creeped her out. She got two beers out of the fridge to start Kalinda talking and to keep her own mouth shut. Kalinda asked if Alicia's unrest had to do with Will; she pretended her own unrest had to do with Blake. You could always use men as an excuse.
The death row mystery broke open: an arson specialist, a change in forensic technology, a layover at O'Hare and Kalinda running off to catch a plane, catch an expert witness by the tail, and save a life.
And nothing. Kalinda wasn't harboring any secret desire, or she was determined to hide it, to never see it through. Alicia hurried to draft an addendum while Peter said on TV that his marriage, their marriage, was none of anyone's fucking business. Among other things, he was right, and he was her husband.
The surprise was not that Alicia and Kalinda saved a man from execution. That was a joy, a glorious relief, a small weight lifted from the terrible world. The surprise was that Kalinda came back so she could be there when Alicia called the judge, and then stayed, as if she needed an invitation to leave. "We did it, we saved a life," Alicia said, holding Kalinda's arms in her hands. Alicia checked her blind spots to make sure the kids were in their rooms and Jackie had gone home, and then she filled the elated silence with a kiss. Kalinda pushed Alicia back against the wall like an accusation, like she was under arrest. "Did you really mean to do that?" Kalinda asked, but she kissed Alicia before there was time for an answer, pinning Alicia so this huge kiss stood between her and the rest of the whole world.
~o~
Monday, Alicia went to work fearing awkwardness, not just with Kalinda but with Will, who would stare lovelorn at Alicia without realizing he was doing it, and also without any way of knowing that his stares were even more unnerving than usual. Even less nerving.
Alicia didn't see Kalinda all morning, but after lunch, Kalinda came to drop off some photos for a trial Alicia wasn't involved in. Alicia looked down at her desk and pretended to work, but Kalinda swung into her office, knocking on the open doorframe to startle her. "Have a drink with me after work?" It sounded like a peace offering, utterly nerving.
The bar Kalinda chose was a short walk from the office and in another world, a narrow brick tunnel, virtually unmarked, on a side street, a survivor of some previous layer of the Loop. All of the other customers were old men speaking Polish. Kalinda found them a table and negotiated with the bartender for beer. With her hands around her glass, as if making them too cold for Alicia to touch, she said, "What are we doing?"
"I don't know," Alicia said. "Do you want me to decide?"
"You're the one with the husband." Kalinda was steely, her eyes almost completely hidden behind her lashes, her drink still untouched.
Alicia took a long sip of her own beer. "Would you? If I said I wanted to, would you?"
"It would depend on what you wanted me to do." Kalinda half-smiled, difficult on purpose, drawing things out. Wouldn't you like to know.
All of the obvious requests felt wrong. Alicia didn't want a girlfriend, a lover, a night of passion - anything that would negate their friendship. "Would you - would you kiss me again?"
Kalinda raised her glass to tap the rim of Alicia's sloshing a few drops of beer onto the table. "Of course. And cheers to that." Her face still closed off her emotions, and Alicia wondered if this was the most they ever broke through.
Alicia and Kalinda finished their drinks, talking abstractly and cautiously about work, about the men in the bar, how it felt like they were playing hide-and-seek with the everyday. Then, they returned to it, back to the parking garage together, and in the elevator, Kalinda turned and swept Alicia around to redeem her kiss.
"We'll have to work around - well, the rest of my life," Alicia said as they walked to her car. "Fortunately, Peter's busy with the campaign. I think I'm alone Friday night, if you -"
Kalinda kissed away the rest of Alicia's sentence, holding her against the hood of her car.
~o~
For Friday, Alicia reserved a room, nowhere memorable or fancy, a chain hotel off the highway in the suburbs with Express in the name. She'd learned on the job how not to leave a trail when you were having an affair. As she entered her credit card number on the hotel's website, she realized what she was doing. This was what it felt like to be unfaithful, a rush of danger tempered by the irritation of logistics.
So it would feel like a date, Alicia picked up Thai food, a bottle of wine, and seeing them in a display in a florist's shop next to the liquor store, a bouquet of out-of-season yellow daisies. She'd forgotten to take yesterday's dry cleaning out of the back seat, and among her blouses and Peter's dress shirts, she had a clean white tablecloth. Her hands were awkwardly full as she checked in, so harried she hoped she looked harmless. Inside, she texted Kalinda the room number, and she waited, wishing she'd brought a magazine, wishing she'd brought a vase.
Kalinda rushed in, late but poised, hanging up her coat before she came up to kiss Alicia. "The last time I did this, I walked in and the guy was naked." Alicia didn't want to hear any more, so she drew Kalinda into a deeper kiss, gloss-sticky and sweet. Into her lips, Kalinda said, "I like this better. I like you better."
Alicia rose, and feeling suddenly warm, took off her suit jacket. Kalinda pushed her back down into the armchair and knelt across her lap, kissing her forcefully. Kalinda shed her sweater; Alicia kicked off her shoes; they squirmed to unzip skirts and peel out of camisoles, to lose themselves in wild, slick kisses. They'd needed the gesture of the food and the wine, but they both knew what they were here for.
Kalinda was beautiful underneath the miniskirts and knee-high boots, her body soft in all the right places, her nipples dark against the full curve of her breasts. She hesitated, as if giving Alicia the chance to deny her, before sinking to her knees, holding Alicia's legs apart. I need more foreplay, Alicia started to say, but one dart of Kalinda's tongue proved her wrong. Alicia dug her fingers into the chair and arched up into Kalinda's mouth, pleading for more of it, coming like a nervous high school boy.
Was Alicia expected to match that? She worried as her breath slowed. She stood up and fixed her panties, longing to touch Kalinda but feeling like she needed lessons first. "Easy now," Kalinda said, slipping an arm around Alicia's waist and leading her to the bed. "I was just showing off. You can do whatever you're ready for. I know you don't have much experience with women."
"How do you know that?" It was a foolish question. If Kalinda wanted to know something, she found it out.
"I've met everyone you've dated since college," Kalinda said.
Alicia laughed because the truth had taken so little research, and that relaxed her enough to venture a kiss, which became a tour of Kalinda's sensitive body, the hollows and lines of her neck and shoulders, the sweet flesh of her breasts and belly. Uncharted territory made Alicia's hands shake. "It's all right," Kalinda said. "Next time."
Alicia expected Kalinda to be distant and disappointed, but she was chatty and silly, insisting they eat dinner in their underwear, telling stories about irrelevant, embarrassing things she'd witnessed on stakeouts. Elderly neighbors dancing the polka naked, a couple recording their own fetish porn, a man systematically eating an entire birthday cake - chocolate, white buttercream frosting, blue flowers - by himself. "The problem with my job," Kalinda said, turning pad thai noodles around on her plastic fork, "is I will always know more about you than you do about me. So I'm trying to give you a little. A little more."
~o~
Having an affair was frighteningly easy. Alicia's years as a political wife had made her an expert scheduler and an expert leaver-outer of details. She worked so late as it was, no one noticed an extra hour or two taken for herself. Kalinda was an expert at hiding in plain sight: mom-and-pop restaurants in non-trendy neighborhoods, a different generic business hotel for every sleepover. And everything wrapped in the white lie of friendship, their lunches together in Alicia's office, Kalinda dropping by Alicia's apartment to deliver documents she could have e-mailed, making out in the handicapped stall of the ladies' room in the courthouse. After all the scheming, stealing kisses felt like actual theft.
No one seemed to have a clue. Not her family, not their colleagues at Lockhart Gardner, especially not Will with his weird new girlfriend and his staring. But it started to turn, of course, as all things did. Secrets were like water balloons people tossed back and forth, and eventually they sprung leaks even if you were careful not to let them explode in your hands.
Kalinda had stopped by to ask a few questions about a case that Alicia could have answered on the phone, and then she stayed for half an hour, standing in the kitchen not quite touching Alicia, not quite undressing her. As Alicia saw her out, kissing her cautiously on the cheek, she saw Zach in the living room, waiting to ask a question, or maybe just watching.
"Mom?" he said, not the beginning of a specific request but a call for her. As big as her children had grown, they still sometimes seemed to need her without knowing why. She gave him an unsolicited hug, which he accepted for a few moments before squirming out of it and reclaiming his teenage dignity. "Mom, are you cheating on Dad?"
There was no answer to that question. It was like a Zen koan: what is the sound of your son catching you in an affair? She let her silence bounce around the room long enough to confirm his suspicions.
"I won't tell Dad if you are," Zach said.
"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to do this - to do this to you and Grace. I'll break it off."
"No." Zach lunged forward as if to physically stop her. "I know what your marriage is for. You don't think I could, but I do. And she's - she's nice." It didn't sound like "nice" was the word he was thinking of, but it'd do.
Alicia shook her head, unable to see her next move, hoping her vision would clear. But she only saw her son and the secret he was swearing to keep.
~o~
"Why don't you come over to my apartment for a change?" Kalinda said, as if Alicia had been the one resisting. Kalinda was in Alicia's home far more often, and that was laden with the dangers of family members, campaign managers, and school friends who might be enemies tomorrow. Kalinda lived alone, but Alicia had assumed all along that it required special access, like the Bat Cave.
It was, as expected, rather dark and rather small, but clean and comfortable, peaceful. The bed, with its tall posts and pile of soft blankets, was clearly the safest place in the inner sanctum, and a perfect place to make love. Alicia had studied hard and caught herself up, learning the language of tongues and hands, the geography of body parts that didn't need words when they were her own but desperately did when she was thinking about Kalinda's. After coursing through euphemisms and vulgarities for a sleepless night (Peter's snore just audible in the next room), she'd settled on vagina, which might have been inaccurate or old-fashioned but sounded romantic, like a woman's name, as well as familiar.
Kalinda liked something big inside her, to be filled up, and it surprised Alicia that her fingers suited that need, that they could take up the right amount of space. Kalinda liked to be held down, liked to hurt, and she said none of those things, not directly. She left Alicia to guess until she had it right and then rewarded her.
Tonight, Kalinda left her boots on. She'd figured out that Alicia liked her in her heels, something Alicia hadn't realized until Kalinda had begun making a point of it. High heels gave Kalinda's hips a natural sway, made her body long. Tonight, she caught Alicia's back with her heel as she rode Alicia's fingers, and it hurt, bleeding a little or swelling into a bruise, but Alicia wanted to feel wounded.
Kalinda seemed to break open when she came, as if the veneer that subdued her emotions briefly shattered, only to pull itself back together again as she held Alicia next to her.
They made popcorn and watched a movie, the most domestic they'd been together, sinking into Kalinda's ancient couch and into each other's arms. When the movie had gotten slow in the middle - another plot device to stretch it out to two hours - Kalinda said, "Don't ever leave your husband for me."
"I wasn't going to," Alicia said. "You know I can't."
"I'm not a very good full-time girlfriend. I didn't want you to expect that. I - I have exactly as much time for this as you do."
"I know." That was why they worked.
~o~
Alicia felt, after that night, that it was serious - serious in its lack of commitment, in its stability and promise of a future. She was stuck the next day in the office, taking hours of depositions, and Kalinda brought soup, joking that she wished it were the weekend or the '60s so she could bring Alicia a martini along with it. In Kalinda's guarded eyes, Alicia saw the giddiness of romance and a long path ahead, or maybe she was just seeing her own reflection.
The next witness was late, and Kalinda was off breaking and entering. When Alicia thought about crime, she felt like a criminal; the rest of the time, she just felt love. But that was always the problem: people felt their justifications and forgot about the law, and that's where they got in trouble and hired Alicia to sway juries with extenuations, contexts, and doubts. When you didn't cover your tracks, that was all you had. Cover your tracks, play by the rules, or beg for mercy.
Alicia and Kalinda were leaving tracks behind them. Alicia had been pretending not to see them, but it was time to hire the cleaning service. She called Eli Gold on his new, secret, un-bugged-so-far phone, not because she liked or trusted him, but because she needed a service and he could provide it. "I'm having an affair," she said when she reached him. "I'm not willing to break it off, and I'm not going to leave Peter."
"Thanks for letting me know," Eli said.
"You're not going to ask who it is?"
"I know who it is," he said. "Or, better, I know who it isn't, and there's only one other possibility, and with a woman you can pretend you're just best friends until the day you die." She could hear the smarminess in his smile. His face was the opposite of Kalinda's mask: it said so much that no one could see the real emotion beneath the noise. "I will bury this, Alicia. Don't worry. Unless I tell you to worry."
She felt like Eli had sealed her vows and pronounced Kalinda her wife. When Kalinda came to meet her that evening, for a romantic meal in Little Village where no one would recognize them or speak their language but there would be candles on the tables, Alicia didn't tell her about the conversation with Eli, and when Kalinda asked her what was wrong, what was different, Alicia said it was nothing, a long day in a long string of long days that Kalinda made longer, but sweeter and warmer and, somehow, quiet, perhaps because secrets meant silence.