Novembers
A/N: If you're wondering why I don't write that much, this is why. When I do it usually gets out of hands and my characters, Alicia especially, end up doing what they want, which is usually nothing. Anyway, I needed to let my feelings out, so this was written. I hope you enjoy, and if you do, please let me know? Reviews are love! (Also, I still don't have a beta and English still isn't my native language, so all the mistakes are still mine.)
It's cold. It's cold and it's raining, and Alicia hates it, she hates November with a passion. She's generally always disliked the fall as a whole thing, but November, man, November she can't stand. It has something to do with the fog and the rain, but it's mostly the cold. It's not that she dislikes it, winter is nice. There's snow and Christmas and lights and Chicago stops being gray for a while, it turns white and golden with shining decorations and trees. She's allowed to put on sweaters (colorful ones, too) and nobody questions it when she ditches skirts and heels for pants and boots, because hey, it's cold, and snowy, and slippery, and generally pretty nice. But the fall, the late fall, halfway through November until Christmas lights fill the streets, it's the grayest Chicago gets all year.
It's not just the streets, she thinks, and okay, yeah, the streets are pretty gray, but it's mostly the people.
Everyone's tired, she guesses, everyone's tired and sad, disappointed with another year turning out wrong, stressing with company bills not adding up right and generally depressed because it's November, nobody's ever happy in November, right?
Well.
She remembers a particularly nice November a couple years earlier, one where the cold was compensated by long hugs and mornings in bed, the gray erased by the colorful, provoking dresses she would dare to put on, regardless of the chilly temperatures, because she liked being stared at, the sadness covered by secret red lipstick smiles and dangerous, exciting rendezvous happening during lunches, dinners, weekends, or the fifteen minutes break the judge just granted the counterpart for no apparent reason.
Her final month with Will didn't feel like an ending, didn't feel like closure, it just felt like love being made and lips being kissed while warm arms defended her from the cold of a month she used to hate.
The following November, the next year, her first as an actually single woman, felt endless, every day longer and every case harder and every person sadder. Will barely checked into work, being suspended and all, and what's worse, he barely looked at her, which, well, meant she wasn't wearing provoking dresses or red lipstick anymore, and everything was at his grayest.
This one though, this one's worse.
It's colder, and sadder, and the genius who furnished her new office at Florrick & Agos picked a gray couch and a silver looking desk, and everything feels like ice when she touches it, whether it's people's hands or the cool surface of her table, so all she does all day is basically shiver.
She doesn't like how Florrick & Agos sounds, she thought she would, but she doesn't. The lack of Will's surname somewhere in that phrase makes it sound like shame, like sin and just plain wrong, and she just shivers all the freaking time.
She's not single this time, she's the First Lady of Illinois and she's often at the arm of Mr. Governor, who shows her off with a smile to his politician friends and excuses himself earlier from work so he can take her home, fuck her somewhere in the bathroom and come and go long before she's even there, but hey, sex is sex.
He's changed, she'll give him that, he kind of cares about her this time, but so has she. She's changed too, and now, she's the one who maybe, just maybe, doesn't really care that much anymore.
She misses Will, especially when she's cold.
Not the animalistic sex, not the burning passion -well, that too- but the way he would look at her across a crowded room, in the middle of a boring arbitration or an endless fight between clients, and she would feel warm on the inside.
She remembers how the feeling would start from under her stomach, down there in her lady parts and heat her up to her cheeks, leaving her pink and warm while others complained about the bad weather.
Now, his eyes feel like ice when they meet hers, they're sad and disappointed and hurt, and they just make her colder, emptier and grayer.
She wonders how such a warm shade of light brown can turn that cold, how those loving, big sweet eyes can seem that distant and unfriendly now, but she also knows she's brought it to herself, and she shivers some more.
For once, the company bills aren't part of the November equation, bringing more good news than anything else in her life does at the moment.
Her firm's doing well, they have a 75% winning stat, new clients coming in practically every week and Cary's over the moon about it, constantly reminding that "We've made it, Licia, we've made it big."
He's cheerful and sparkling, and she thinks that maybe he's the only thing in Chicago that isn't gray lately.
She also knows things aren't probably as rosy at Lockhart/Gardner - which is just Gardner and Associates now (yes, that sounds wrong) and just as surprisingly, company bills are part of her November equation once again.
Diane has left, she's a judge now, and hell, everyone else has left as well.
Within the first month at the new firm they've gotten more job applications that they could accept, but because the whole point of starting a new firm was that it didn't all have to revolve around the money, they made everyone's salary a little lower -including their own- so they could hire the people that they still called friends.
Will's still standing though, with half of his clients left and two thirds of his employees gone. Nobody's betting on Gardner and Associates anymore, he's just that suspended lawyer with a shady reputation that nobody wants to be associated with.
Cary doesn't seem to care though, and neither does anyone else for that matter, and she wonders what'll happen when he inevitably goes bankrupt and needs a job again.
Part of her wishes he'd turn at her door to ask for her help like she did with him five years earlier, but she knows he wouldn't.
She's gone too far and she's ruined him, and it's all, all her fault.
He's never giving her those heated looks again, she can forget about it and try to fall in love with her husband, or she can just hope November ends soon and takes away all the gray at least for a while.
It's cold, though. Inside her, she means, it really freaking feels cold and empty without Will's eyes looking for her across the hallway, without the awkward smile he'd give her when they rode the elevator together and memories filled their minds, it's cold without his simple presence making her feel warmer, and she wonders if she'll ever even get accustomed to his absence, or if she'll just miss his eyes on her for the rest of her life, constantly feeling that cold.