3.
Kalinda meets Will at their bar that night. The voice mail he left was brushed with casual regret—he was out of the office when it all went down, sorry he missed her and he hopes she's okay—and she's been carefully packaging the whole experience to allow Will to find it amusing, but when she sees him in a back corner fingering a draft beer she knows that her day behind bars won't even come up. Will stares into the rows of bottles with an air of confusion, wearing the unmistakable expression of someone who has lost Alicia Florrick.
Kalinda slides onto the stool beside him and orders two glasses of Scotch without saying a word. The bartender knows her—there have been a couple of delicious, urgent knee-tremblers beside the bathroom door after last call, a couple of observations about Lockhart/Gardner's opposing counsel's drunken revelations moaned against Kalinda's earlobe. Robyn is her name, Kalinda remembers grinding the word out as she came on the woman's fingers, but she's having trouble calling the surname to mind.
She waits for Will to start talking, deliver his usual nonsequitur opening line, but he stays silent, and Kalinda doesn't mind. She doesn't have anything to say herself.
Tomorrow she'll be in the office again, with Alicia, and everything will be different and everything will be exactly the same. Worse, now that calling upon Cary or Dana as a resource is out of the question. Now that Kalinda needs to subject her instincts to serious scrutiny. Now that she's lost the last of her ability to resist Alicia's sway and now that Alicia knows the lengths to which Kalinda would go for her. Kalinda drinks; beside her, Will mirrors her actions. After a day of shaking, the firm, slow burn of the alcohol is a relief.
Once Kalinda had survival skills; she excelled at keeping her head above water. That was how Will met her, how Peter Florrick knew her. But not Alicia. Now Kalinda staggers about as if detached from an iron lung, gasping and struggling for air.
Three silent Scotches in, Kalinda rubs her calf against Will's, the leather of her boot as alert as her skin.
Kalinda knows Alicia didn't understand what she meant when she told her, "I'm the same person." Will glances at her once, sideways, quickly, his nose a question mark. He gestures to Robyn for a fourth round, polishes off the warm beer that he's had from the beginning, and lets his hand drop to Kalinda's thigh as he puts the glass down.
Kalinda would kill someone to spare Alicia pain, of course, but if she were Leela again, with the same needs and the same opportunity, she would sleep with Peter Florrick in a second, even if she could have imagined Alicia, even knowing she and Alicia would both be hurt like they had never been hurt in their lives.
They dispose of their last drinks in short order, Kalinda choking, just slightly, as her breath quickens. Will's right hand stays beneath Kalinda's skirt; with the other hand he digs a few twenties from his coat pocket, laying them out for Robyn on the bar.
It's the basic difference between them, Kalinda thinks as she shrugs on her coat while Will hurries furtively into his. For Alicia, sex causes problems. Kalinda can imagine how Alicia ended things with Will, that expression of stiff, pained regret slashed across her face, whispering that it was too hard, too complicated, probably something to do with her children. Kalinda doesn't blame Alicia for that, not at all, though if she could speak coherently in the woman's presence she would point out the error in her logic—it's not the sex that causes the problems, it's the feelings. But maybe Alicia doesn't separate those out.
Kalinda's boots click on the marble floor as she strides out into the cold air, knowing that Will will follow her, and that if he didn't it wouldn't really matter.
It's different for her, she's not like Alicia. Sex offers solutions—sometimes to the problem of simple horniness, sometimes to something thornier. Kalinda's problems and Will's are definitely of the latter variety, but both of them seem to know the right answer. Alicia wouldn't understand.
In the alley behind the bar, Will presses Kalinda to the brick wall and kisses her with a desperation that has nothing to do with her. She arches up against him, not thinking about anything except his lips against her neck and his erection pushing on her hipbone, how sweet it all feels and how much she needs it.