They fuck sometimes. They always have.

It doesn't mean anything, it never means anything. It happens a few times, in her first year at the firm, then a few times a month, at the start of her second. It stops for a while, after that. She's not an idiot, so she knows it's about looking good, for him, about the way some housewife from the suburbs can reduce him to a puppy. She makes him soft, Alicia does, and as Kalinda's trying to figure out why, she makes her soft as well.

It doesn't mean anything, but when he shows up at her door a year after Alicia comes to the firm, tie loose around his neck and scotch on his breath, she doesn't need to ask and he doesn't need to say. They are similar creatures, she and Will, and she lets him fuck her against her bedroom door, then nudges him away after he's come.

"Want me to talk to her?" she asks.

"I have no idea what you're talking about," he says, straightening his tie.

Talk to him, she tells Alicia at work the next day. Anything said in voicemail doesn't count.

She doesn't know why she bothers, really. She doesn't know why she cares.

It happens a few more times, after that, and then there is Tammy and Will's trying this whole girlfriend and monogamy thing and God knows it's not something Kalinda wants.

The world shatters, then, and it's astounding, how sloppy he and Alicia are. Kalinda cleans up for them, for her. She tracks down security videos and credit card receipts, buries them before anyone even knows to go looking.

That was months ago, though, and now it's after midnight and his hands are tight around her hips as she moves above him. He's close, she knows, and she smiles, says his name the way she imagines that Alicia might have done, all warm and breathy, half whining in the dark. It's something she's thought about, but then, she thinks about how most people sound in bed ten seconds after she meets them. Will, she breathes again, and she can almost see it, the way Alicia would look at him, like he might just hold the solution to every problem she invented to keep herself locked into her miserable little life.

Will's eyes snap open, and he shakes his head. "Don't, K," he says, like he knows exactly what she's doing, and she nods.

"Sorry," she says, and she clenches around him, tries to get him back where he was. She sees the way he still looks at Alicia, too, like she hung the moon then told him he wasn't allowed to enjoy it. They are idiots, both of them, all wrapped up in imagined complications and obstacles. There's a vast difference between us, Will told her, once, and it had taken everything Kalinda had not to roll her eyes, then.

It doesn't mean anything that night, and it doesn't mean anything a week later, or the next week, or any of the weeks that follow. It's sex, and it's easy, and the two of them are alike enough to know that without saying it, are alike enough that they can separate the slide of skin against skin from the rest of it.

"I like this one," his doorman says to him one night, and he freezes, stops dead in his tracks. "I'm glad you worked it out."

"I have no idea what you're talking about," he says, and he clearly doesn't. Kalinda's a few steps ahead of him, though, in every sense of the word.

"We're not," she says, giggling in the elevator. "We're not."

She sees the moment when Will gets it, when he blinks. When he laughs. They are not dating. They've never been dating. They're not a couple, and they don't share meals or laundry or plans.

"No," he agrees. "We're not."

"Good," she says.

"Good," he agrees.

They fuck sometimes. That's all. They like it that way.