The Hard Way is Easy (Kalinda/Alicia)

For The Good Wife Summer Comment Ficathon on LJ

Prompt: Alicia/Kalinda, the hard way submitted by doesn't_go_away

There was a hard way and an easy way.

The easy way was to ignore her. Ignore the sad looks and shaking hands. Ignore the destroyed eyes and hesitant stride. Ignore her glossy hair and shining eyes. Ignore her.

And it was even easy to ignore her own feelings—to shove down into an unvisited corner of her mind the anger and confusion. Ignore the heavy shroud of loss and perfidy. Ignore her broken heart and screaming mind.

Oh, the unfairness of it all. The irony.

When her life had fallen apart last year, when the media had mapped out again and again Peter's infidelities, she had held her head high. She had toughened up. She had learned to listen to her own counsel.

And once she had joined Lockhart & Gardner and met Kalinda, she had asked the woman point blank whether she had slept with Peter. Alisha had wanted to know, needed to know, before she dared to trust. And she had trusted. She had spent more and more time with Kalinda, shared more and more of herself. Opened up her heart.

It wasn't so hard to slowly lower her guard because she had admired Kalinda—admired her confidence, her intelligence, her cunning, her autonomy. And her no-nonsense demeanor. She may have acted mysterious and sensual, but to Alicia she had seemed open and accessible.

And then the truth had come out, and everything had become hard. It became hard to breathe, hard to swallow, hard to stand. Alisha could not look at the woman, the woman who had stared her in the eye and denied fucking her husband. She could not fathom how she had allowed this woman, this betrayer, so close. Too close.

She had not wanted to think about it. Had not wanted to talk about it. Had not wanted to acknowledge the heartbreak she felt—much worse than the hurt she had felt when she had found out about Peter' s indiscretions.

Who could she trust, if not her closest friend? That friendship had been built upon a faulty foundation, though. And Alicia had found herself sitting in the rubble, wondering how she would ever rebuild her life.

Alicia had wondered why she felt such rage—not toward Peter, but toward Kalinda. And she had slid into that realm of the hard—gingerly picking her way through feelings that had hidden behind shots of tequila and wry looks and shoulder bumps and small smiles. And finally, Alicia had understood.

She needed to do this the hard way.

"Harder," a moan brought Alicia back to the present moment. She could do that. She could do it the hard way. Alicia thrust her fingers more forcefully into Kalinda, twisting them and rubbing the rough patch mercilessly as Kalinda bucked and writhed, panted and cursed. Alicia swallowed her passionate shrieks with a demanding kiss as the body she was pinning down convulsed for several moments. It was so easy to control Kalinda at such times, so easy to strip her of all her artifice, all her emotional armor. It was easy to admit that she would rather rebuild trust with this bewitching woman than to continue to shut her out. As hard as it was, it was easier than living with a broken heart.

Ignoring her feelings had been hard. Confronting Kalinda with them had been hard. Kissing the dumbfounded woman had been hard. But feeling that kiss returned had been easy. Accepting heartfelt apologies had been easy. Allowing Kalinda to make love to her had been easy.

It turned out that sometimes the easy way and the hard way were synonymous. And sometimes what one thought was hard was actually pretty damn easy.