A/N: Getting into Cary & Kalinda is scary. They are so difficult to write for but there are too few fictions for them around here, so I thought I'd contribute. This will be a short-story. 4, 5 chapters at most and it's set after the season finale. Will and Alicia are not the only ones with things left unsaid. Let's hope I wasn't too off-base with Cary here. If so, I apologize in advance.

Who was still so old-fashioned to send wedding invitations by mail? On golden paper to boot?

Arabesquely handwritten, velvety to the touch wedding invitations. There had to be some kind of rule that assumed a negative RSVP when the whole presentation was so ridiculously pompous.

Instead, he RSVPed Yes and put the note in the pile for the secretary to send out. When you were the head of a newborn firm and an Innocence-project buddy was marrying the daughter of a judge, you did not say no.

Each event was an opportunity to swap business-cards, to court clients. A wedding was the perfect venue. Open bar, cynical people sneering at the happy couple and waiting to be hand-held to a new law-firm.

Alicia's life seemed to be entrenched in night-parties at the Opera, at the opening of a foundation, at the awards ceremony for something or other. As the First Couple of Illinois, she and her husband were always honored guests. Eli had come to their firm but in exchange he had required her presence to a number of appearances.

She despised it all, the parties, the mandatory networking, the boredom, the people, he could clearly see it, but she did it anyway. He had to pull his weight and go to a self-important, ostentatious wedding.

The last time a wedding-invitation had come to his work place, someone had intercepted it. She had come to his office waving it in her hand and he had smirked and lowered his eyes, prepared for a slaughter.

"Mr and Mrs Ryland and Mr and Mrs Sutton require the honor of your presence to the wedding... here take it, I got bored already."

"The Suttons and the Rylands, generous people that they are, are asking me if I have a plus one."

He didn't truly know what had been that day that had led him to ask her the question. But he had.

"Soooo, do I have one?"

"How would I know? Unless you're seriously asking me to go to a wedding with you. In which case the answer is "Not a chance in hell" but I'd imagine you know that one."

"Why not? You'd get to be seen on the arm of the most intriguing man in the room. Plus people get drunk and are depressed at weddings. Perfect time to wheedle secrets."

"People tell me secrets even when they're not drunk or in a taffeta dress. That's how good I am."

She had delivered her last line with that trademark demeanor of hers that combined her slightly raised eyebrow with her expression that was the love-child of a smile and a smirk. Then she had left his office and they had never talked about it again.

This time he could not even get close to obtaining a rejection from her.

Lately all he had been receiving were menacing glares and malicious smirks anytime she found something that would inevitably destroy his or Alicia's case and help "Gardner & Associates" to a new win. Robyn was a spectacular investigator but Kalinda was animated by the fire of revenge and there was no stopping her. Or Will for that matter. They hadn't spared any resource to sink what used to be their co-workers.

What kind of chit-chat could he have at the wedding?

No, I'm not with anyone... Being name-partner is hard work... Yes, we left Lockhart/Gardner, it was time for a change...No, don't worry I'm not forgetting to have fun...

Fun, what a foreign world.

Friends were sending him invitations to big social gatherings but that was about it.

He had tried hanging out with some of them but the distance his job had put between him and his personal life had taken its toll. Entertainment by conversation was scarce and instead of putting up with the farce for much longer, he had just stopped. Some of them were envious to the point of animosity of his having a partnership with the wife of the Governor, some couldn't understand the risks he had taken. Some others... who knew?

Family was out of the question.

What was left if he desired something more than work?

Drugs? He had been staying far away from those ever since Alicia has covered his being high with Will and Diane. Days off were a commodity name-partners didn't trade in.

Sex? He could go out of his office, take the elevator down and in the block he would find two or three bars with plenty of potential for a one-night stand. He had done it. He might do it again. Yet, somehow it felt like the kind of behavior he had outgrown.

Or, maybe, he was afraid of going that route because he knew what he could expect. He could expect to become Will Gardner. In his forties, still boyishly charming, never married, on the list of most-eligible bachelors, with a bevy of beauties around him.

That was the image he projected to the world but he had worked around him long enough not to be fooled. All of those were merely smoke sculptures that hid his love for one woman. That one woman that he had helped, cuddled, defended and that had stolen clients from him when he wasn't looking.

He hadn't neither questioned nor judged Alicia's decision. Merely reveled in it. And going behind Will's back hadn't fazed him that much. Not compared to how terrible he had felt in betraying Diane.

However, he pitied his ex-boss. The white-to-black change in his countenance and in his dealings with Alicia spoke of a profound pain.

At times, he caught himself wishing that his actions had left in Kalinda a fraction of the trace Alicia's actions had clearly left in Will. It was a petty thought that he generally brushed away. He didn't want her to suffer per se, he just needed some kind of signal that he mattered to her more than the myriad of men and women she used and played for information.

Because the last piece of the private-life puzzle was love. And despite all his efforts, despite having repeated to himself over and over again that it was a dangerous idea and that he should forget her very existence, Kalinda had taken residence in a very special position in his life.

She had become the woman he was perennially on the verge of falling in love with.

One little push from her would suffice to make him her fool.

He had come close.

She had protected him from a certain layoff and gave him the necessary space to finalize his project.

She had let him compliment her.

They had slept together and he had completely understood why all those conquests of her were still at his beck and call even after years.

They had shared secret smirks across the crowded bullpen.

Then it had all gone terribly wrong.

He hadn't known how to proceed, what step to take. Kalinda was no normal woman. He had threaded softly, trying not to push too hard and scare her into a precocious retreat but he had fumbled with the right decisions. She had told him long before that she was unknowable to him. 3 years later and he still hadn't even scratched the surface of who Kalinda Sharma was.

The timing had been off. He had found some sort of equilibrium with her but then he had focused on his firm. He owed it to himself and to his partners in crime. He couldn't possibly let it all go. He had tried to bring her with him, to give them a new lease, a new chance at work and something else and then...

He refused to take all the blame. She had been impervious to any plea, unreasonable in her demands for money. Didn't she know that he valued her expertise, her intelligence, her instincts, her in general more than anybody else in the world?. He had been losing the reins of his enterprise before the start line. He had seen in Robyn the only way to stop the chaos and re-assess his power over his future. He had taken it.

Kalinda had seen it as a personal back-stabbing.

Maybe she was right.

Maybe she wasn't.

He had learned that there were two sets of rules in their world: the ones that Kalinda obeyed, which amounted more or less to the motto "be faithful to yourself" and the ones for everybody else. She could play people, tweak them, invade their offices, their privacy. She could leverage her friendships and her bosses and get away with it all, a smile and her image unblemished. She had even partly gotten back in Alicia's good graces after having slept with her husband. The impossible made possible.

She had this unique way of asking for help. The vulnerability that came with admitting the need for an external hand did not touch Kalinda. It didn't even exist in her. She moved from person to person like Chicago Royalty. She went through the motions of making a request but she didn't truly ask. She was owed. She didn't have helpers or friends. She had servants that satisfied her whim for knowledge. Helping her felt like a pleasurable duty. A duty nonetheless.

He was tired of her self-entitlement.

This last year, he had been put through a grinder. He had been beaten, he had been humiliated and then used by his father, he had been offered a equity partnership that had then disappeared and then he had thrown all of his energy into a new endeavor, trying so hard to keep all the pieces together. She had witnessed at least some of it.

Hadn't he earned just a little bit of respect for how he had handled things? Didn't she care for him just a little bit? He did not expect sympathy from a tough problem-solver like her. He didn't even want it. But respect? Acceptance? Friendship?

Hadn't she been the one to tell him that she couldn't give him what he wanted because they worked together? Couldn't she see that at least one of the obstacles had been taken away?

He was not going to be Will Gardner. He needed to start or end this thing with Kalinda once and for all.

He had allowed her to be angry. He had allowed her to stew in her revengeful mood. He had accepted her not wanting to hear his side of the story. He had taken the looks, the whispers, the scowls.

He wouldn't anymore.

He was due some slack-cutting from her. Time to cash it in.