Archive of Our Own

i.
It takes a much longer time than Mike thinks for his life to set itself straight. He’s been at Pearson Hardman for three years, and he and Harvey are in the middle of trying to settle a cliché will dispute between their client and her mother’s illegitimate second daughter. This is what Mike thinks is what staying on the straight and narrow must finally feel like (if being a fake lawyer over being a pothead is still considered on  the straight and narrow, but Mike will take it). He just doesn’t see what’s coming.

It’s really another paid “favor” they’re doing for a long-time employer of the Pearson Hardman firm, a Mrs. Nicola Robinson, which explains why Harvey’s staying and rifling through pages right alongside Mike to look for possible loopholes in the dispersing of her mother’s assets. Specifically one that means they don’t get dispersed at all. Harvey’s scrubbing one hand over his face and holding a folder with a copy of the will in the other, still reading despite the exhausted gesture. It’s almost midnight, and Mike’s eyes are still acclimating from the bright, sharp shade of highlighter ink and neon sticky notes marking what he was looking at earlier for Louis.

“We’re not getting anywhere,” Harvey finally says, the folder he’s holding slapping on the table, and Mike lets himself drop the pretense of moving his eyes across the page like he was bothering anymore to read it. His own copy falls across his thighs when he frees his hands to lift them to his face instead, and slips further to the floor when he slouches down with his knees forward and spread. He doesn’t bother to pick it up. It rustles where it lands, bent awkwardly against his ankle and over his right shoe.

Harvey’s saying, “Let’s call it. This is hardly worthy of becoming an all-nighter.”

“God, this is bullshit.” Mike’s hands drag down across his mouth, mimicking Harvey’s own weary gesture, and then he jerks back up and turns, the angles of his body made sharper by his agitation. “She shouldn’t have us trying to do this when everything should go to who actually took care of their mother. Couldn’t we, you know,” Mike leans forward, spreading a hand out near Harvey’s knee, “Do our thing and make sure the right thing happens here?”

“Our thing is to do what our client pays us to. Unfortunately, this time nothing illegal is being done by our client to turn us off from her, so no.”

“It practically is.” Mike says, “She’s exceeding her privileges and exploiting our services, so she can deem what belongs to who and unfairly exact the mother’s estate.” He holds his hands open, and then folds his fingers back into his palms when Harvey only blinks once, and grins.

“That sounds a lot like what you’re suggesting we do.” His voice and his eyebrows and one corner of his mouth are lifted, and then he drops the scandalized impersonation an instant after.

“It’s different when it’s you and me.”

“Nice try, Mike.”

Mike stands and stretches his arms and then folds them on top of his head, grabbing his elbows. He thinks half their job is looking for loopholes in loopholes, and doing their not-thing anyway. Harvey says, “Don’t even.”

“Yeah right, you can’t read my mind.” There’s a popping sound, and Mike exhales. Harvey mutters something like, I don’t need to when it’s written all over your face. He leans back against the couch, unconsciously watching the lines in Mike’s shirt, the pull of wrinkles from his waistband.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Harvey says, though he’s still staring at Mike’s torso. Mike lowers his arms, and stands there with his hands settling on his hips, watching Harvey follow the motion. His gaze slides back up to Mike’s.

“Yeah,” Mike says, “Good night, then.”

Then they end up on Harvey’s couch in his office, with Mike’s knee jabbing into Harvey’s thigh and the heels of his hands dipping the cushions and wrinkling the leather by Harvey’s head. It makes Harvey’s neck curve just barely, since he’s still touching the back of his head to the seat, and makes his eyes hooded and glittering staring along the slope of his cheek up at Mike. And then his mouth’s bumping against Mike’s mouth, trying to stay and reposition at the same time. He hears the foot Harvey’s still got planted flat on the floor skidding on paper as he tries to push himself further up the couch, and giving out instead so he’s lower and Mike’s fallen between Harvey’s thighs.

Mike manages to lift himself up enough to get his knees on either side of Harvey’s hips, and Harvey’s tugging him down again by the back of his neck. His mouth is pushy and insistent, and almost inelegant, and Mike feels like he should have expected this is how Harvey would kiss. Just not kissing him. Mike parts his mouth and kisses back, just as eagerly like he’s proving something. Harvey’s got a grip on the back of Mike’s head with one hand, and his other’s molded around Mike’s ribs, keeping Mike in place. It’s hot against his side and leaves a warm handprint through the fabric of Mike’s shirt to his skin, and he smoothes it down to Mike’s thigh, gripping the back of it steadily, on every other beat of this pace he’s set between them.

Mike finally surges back, having to breathe. Harvey’s hand around his neck lowers to lay beside his head, his palm facing up. Mike says hoarsely, just, “Jesus, Harvey.”

Harvey’s practically beaming up at him, and Mike’s reminded that he’s sitting across Harvey’s lap, on top of his thighs and practically on top of his cock. His boss, in his office. Mike grips the back of the couch to slowly lift himself up and swing his legs over, so he’s standing instead beside the couch, and Harvey’s sitting up and straightening his vest. The impressions of his knees and hands disappear when Harvey adjusts his weight. All Mike smells for an instant is leather and Harvey’s cologne, and knows it’s transferred onto him. He feels rumpled, mussed. He was tired anyway, and dazed from staring at print and legal jargon for how many hours.

“So, uh,” he starts to say, while Harvey just looks up from under his eyebrows and sort of smirks and makes Mike stutter. “That was, was that, uh. What was that?” He ends up laughing awkwardly. He can feel his heart thudding under his chest still.

Harvey looks up at him, the stripes in his vest straight again and his hair slicked back and looking unbothered. Mike tries to smooth down his own hair. “Well, kid, I’m pretty sure that was years of adoration and sexual pining on your part, and an opportunity for some action finally presenting itself.”

“Okay, shut up.”

Harvey holds up his hands, and then spreads out his arms so they’re stretched along the back of the couch. He’s looking really too smug. Mike’s just standing in front of him, and he clears his throat and perches instead on the edge of a chair. He leans forward with his elbows touching his knees. Harvey bends over to lift the folder that dropped on the floor, sets it on the table instead, and then leans back and sits there too.

“So that should happen again, shouldn’t it?”

Harvey’s mouth breaks out into a smile. He answers, “Maybe after this bullshit’s through.”

“Right,” Mike says, clapping his hands together and rubbing his palms in circles on each other. “Okay.”

The next afternoon he finally finds just what their client needs, some qualifier in the will that could keep the other daughter from getting what’s rightfully hers, and supposedly the perfect solution. Mike’s about to get on his bike outside of the firm, and he’s thinking again that he’ll just take some long way on his bike path and spin past the half-sister’s neighborhood, just in case he should see her outside.

But before he can do that he receives a call from Rickling Rehabilitation & Nursing Center. He has to take his helmet back off to take the call, and he tips his head forward and catches it in his palm and balances it to sit instead on one end of the handlebars. He wonders if the call’s about a problem with the bills, even though he obviously knows he paid them in advance. What the woman on the other end of the line has to tell him is that his grandmother died. She passed away a couple of hours ago. Mike tries to convince himself while the woman talks him through the details that it was all a matter of time, at her age, with her condition. He doesn’t realize he’s been given everything he needs to know and said goodbye until he understands the hollow absence of sound means the call’s ended.

Everything gets put on hold, and Mike stands on the sidewalk outside of Pearson Hardman with his cell phone still in his hand, not knowing whether he should move.



ii.
Mike knows his eyes are shot to hell, but that could be from anything else, lack of sleep, for one. But he bundles the weed back into its baggie and into the tin can he’s got to stow it, his emergency stash refilled after the three year old weed he found in there and hadn’t dared smoke, and pushes himself up to answer the door anyway.

“Hang on,” he calls, and abruptly coughs into his fist. He undoes the locks and turns the knob, and Harvey’s standing in his doorway, leaning against the doorjamb. His eyebrows lift when he looks up at the door swinging open. Mike doesn’t feel surprised to see Harvey here. He’s trying not to feel much right at the moment.

“Hey,” he says. Harvey watches him, and Mike steps blindly back, saying, “Uh, come on in?”

Mike picks up the loose pieces of his usual mess, just more outspread than usual, and puts them randomly back on top of bigger piles knowing he won’t remember where he put what later. The empty Chinese takeout containers end up in the sink and he gathers up the sheets of paper strewn across the couch, records and contact lists that are actually unrelated to Pearson Hardman for once, and piles them haphazardly in a spot on the floor next to the end of the couch once he finds no where else to put them. He sees Harvey roll his eyes, but otherwise Harvey doesn’t say anything, not even a comment said mock half-wondering like, This is where you live? In three years, Mike hasn’t actually moved. Just one last thing he still holds on to, in case everything should backfire.

The place smells like weed, that tangy, almost sweet scent caught under a whiff of smoke. Harvey must smell it, probably, but he settles at the little kitchen table like he’s oblivious it’s the scene of the crime. Mike sniffs and leans awkwardly against his couch instead. Harvey looks strangely docile, his neck bent forward and his hands stuffed into the pockets of the windbreaker he hasn’t taken off. Sitting in Mike’s apartment.

Mike wipes the back of his sleeve under his nose, re-crosses his arms. He feels fidgety, jittery under his skin. “So, uh, what are you doing here? I didn’t even think you knew where I live.”

“Would you sit down? You’re making me feel guilty just looking at you.”

Mike ducks his head, a completely guilty reflex that’s as good as admittance. He lets his arms slowly drop, and he lowers back into the chair he was sitting in before, and eventually settles as un-awkwardly as he can with his elbows bent on the table, and leaning his cheek into the heel of his hand.

“What you found was good. It’s exactly what Nicola would need,” Harvey says.

“So that’s all done with?” Mike wonders if that’s supposed to be good or bad news. Maybe that’s just why Harvey’s here. To let him know how he left things.

“Yeah,” Harvey eventually says. “Yeah, Mrs. Robinson’s finished with us.”

“Okay,” Mike says. “That’s good, I guess.”

Harvey sits still and ignorant while Mike feels every second of the really awkward silence they’re sitting through. He could joke and make some crack about Harvey caring about him, if he’s not here about the case after all, and Harvey could keep his smile carefully unmoving and neutral while he doesn’t deny it, like usual. But the thing is, Mike feels like he kind of stubbed that out when he finished smoking the joint he just did. The thing is Harvey’s sitting here, of course not caring at all, just showing up in Mike’s apartment at the worst possible time, actually, and Mike feels like he’s disappointed him. Like Harvey shouldn’t have bothered showing up, or maybe this is exactly why he did. That would be worse. Mike laughs and immediately sighs, and he shifts lower with his palm across his forehead, staring up to Harvey.

“Aren’t you gonna give me shit?”

Harvey sighs, a slow exhale out his nose, before he says, “I don’t know, what do you think, Mike? Do you need a speech?” Mike feels like Harvey’s asking, Aren’t you a grown goddamned man yet?

He starts too harshly, ironically, “It’s just one regress, I swear. I think an exception’s allowed.”

Harvey’s gaze is aimed up and not at Mike, and his eyes move gradually from left to right like he’s tracing the ceiling trim behind Mike’s head. Mike wonders if he’s refraining from rolling his eyes again at Mike’s state of living. Mike lets his own eyes rove across the hairs of his arm almost invisible against the table as a backdrop, both lit yellow.

“She wouldn’t want me doing this,” Mike says then. It’s been three days since she died. And he’s backtracked three years. He’s tilting back, until his shoulders hit the chair.

“It’s just one time, like you said.” Harvey shifts forward then, his windbreaker rustling where it rubs against itself, and he reaches almost idly and fingers the corners of the tin box. He taps it right in the center of its lid though, once, some unconscious aggressiveness he still has in his movements. “Right, Mike?”

Mike smiles too wryly, he can tell, he can feel it stretch, and he straightens his mouth out again. “I keep my promises. I will,” he says. He made a promise to his gram, too. He hasn’t forgotten. Harvey’s stopped, holding himself where he is to regard Mike.

“I promise,” Mike says, more soberly, and Harvey looks down and then nods. His focus shifts back around Mike’s apartment.

“Couldn’t have said it better myself. Well, I could, but I guess I’ll just save my breath.” Mike smiles quick and small, while he roves up to his hand and rubs the knuckles of his fingers on one hand painfully in the other.

After another moment, Harvey stretches his arm across the back of his chair, looks over his shoulder around the room. He’s mostly eyeing the takeout in the sink. “When’s the last time you even left your apartment? And please tell me no one else has been here.”

He’s got that half-smile on that he adorns, his mouth curling around the corner that Mike can see in his profile. Mike neglects to tell Harvey that his apartment always looks like this, not just when he’s in the throes of mourning and sorrow or whatever this is supposed to be called.

Mike didn’t see anyone at the funeral because there wasn’t one. Simple cremation was the plan, and the urn’s with the few remaining possessions of his parents. Mike thinks about who would’ve shown anyway. Mike thinks of Trevor, still out in Montana, maybe, Mike doesn’t even know where in the world he is. He can no longer place him. Mike thinks of Jenny who he hasn’t seen since the months of their breakup, years ago, though she’s still living in New York as far as he knows. After that the list runs short. Maybe Rachel, maybe Donna, two people actually in his life presently. He almost feels desperate enough to include Kyle and the other associates who haven’t burned out yet, or even Louis Litt. But no, no one. “Uh, no,” Mike answers. “Besides you, not really.”

He feels himself trembling, crumpling. He can see the force of it by watching Harvey’s expression as his face turns back again, and his eyes widen fractionally. Mike looks away and tries to smile again, but it’s wobbling dangerously off his face this time. He runs a shaky hand through his hair and settles it over his mouth. His voice will be too thick if he tries to talk, but he feels like he needs to say something.

He says, “She was - the only other person I had-”

“Mike,” Harvey says, and from some other kind of reflex he reaches out as if he means to grab at Mike’s hand. Mike feels like his head’s swimming, or he’s drowning or something in the wake of all of this. Like he’s straining against something simple and just wrong that could send him suddenly under. He feels like only now he’s officially an orphan.

“Eugh,” he says, and pinches the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger, while he’s snorting laughter. Harvey’s reach falls short, and his hand lays flat on the table between them. Mike just needs a moment to collect himself again. He can’t believe he’s practically breaking down in front of his boss, in his shitty apartment with the shitty tin holding his marijuana next to Harvey’s wrist.

“Sorry,” he says. “That wasn’t, uh, really fair, I haven’t gone out in a few days and I’ve just been alone and feeling sorry for myself. I didn’t mean to put whatever on you, or anything. Um. I’m fine. Sorry, about that.” Jesus, he’s babbling. He smiles wide and shut. “Hey, at least I got to miss the end of the Mrs. Robinson thing.”

Harvey looks him over, almost purses his lips. He asks, “When are you coming back?”

Mike hadn’t needed to look up the firm’s policy for bereavement leave since he’d read the employee policy the first time. He just never thought he’d need to know it, for some reason. Mike has to think to remember what day it is though, and he has to tell Harvey again that it’s not the same. Harvey aids him with Friday. “I guess after the weekend, then.”  

Harvey says, “Good.” Mike’s almost surprised when Harvey stands up and leaves the tin can where it is instead of taking it with him or something, away from Mike.

He walks Harvey to the door and rests his forearm against it as he holds it open. He practically wobbles over to the entrance, and he feels like he made it there with his eyes half-closed. He feels exhausted.

“Sorry,” he says again, waving a hand in the air, at himself. His eyes are definitely red from unshed tears, now.

Harvey stands in the hallway, holding himself with his usual steadiness and ease. His hands are in his pockets, and his back almost curves with his chest subtly pushed out, and his face is turned looking back at Mike in the doorway. Mike finally gets that Harvey came to see him.

“Keep your head up, Mike,” he says.



Mike straightens his vest and hitches his bag higher on his shoulder to lean against the cold metal bike rack, so he can balance on one leg and reach to unroll the hem on the other and cover his ankle again. He walks in and shows his I.D. and takes the elevator, and then he’s slinging his bag over his head and setting it down and pulling his chair up by dragging on his ankles, and he’s back in his cubicle.

Mike was gone three and a half days and the weekend from Pearson Hardman. Harvey tells him it was surprisingly quiet, and this leads to his conclusion that Mike was the cause of most of the trouble they had. Mike shoots back that at least he’s mostly always been the solution too. It’s not the best defense, Mike admits to himself.

“Alright, I want you to read these. I need you to get caught up for the sale, and this is everything to do with the company.” Harvey drops the stack down with a grunt over the wall of Mike’s cubicle. Mike takes one of his earbuds out and lets it hang on its wire.

“What am I looking for?”

“Nothing. Like I said, you’re getting caught up. Get me when you’re finished, and bring these back with you.”

“Aye, aye.”

Mike’s read all of it a little over four hours later. He carries everything stacked between his arms with his hands folded under the bottom, and puts the papers on top of Donna’s wall when he sees Harvey on the phone on the other side of the glass. He sighs after he gets them up there and smacks a hand on the top, and then smiles to Donna, looking all accomplished. She doesn’t seem impressed.

“Mike.”

“Yeah. Hi.”

She turns with her chair, and then turns back to Mike, holding a coffee cup in her hand. Mike reaches out for it by reflex as she holds it up. “Oh. Thank you?”

She holds her hand up and flat and swivels it on her wrist. “Welcome back.”

“Oh, thanks.”

His fingers twitch against the side. Donna lowers her arm and lays it folded on the desk, leaning forward slightly, and looking up at him. She says lower, “I’m so sorry, Mike. How are you doing?”

He almost got hit by a car on the way here, if that’s any indication for how well he’s really doing. “I’m okay.”

“If there’s anything you need, Mike.”

Mike feels his eyebrows rise upward, but he manages to say genuinely, a third time, “Thank you, Donna.”

Mike has the urge then to make some joke in very poor taste about how if he had known all it would take was his grandmother dying for Donna to be nice to him he would have said she was much sooner. It’s jarring, and he shuts his eyes for an instant against it, only noticeable if someone was looking. He hopes Donna isn’t. He lifts the lip of the cup to his mouth, says instead, “Ugh, oh my god, what is that?”

“That is pumpkin, Mike. ‘Tis the season.” She spins back to her monitor and starts typing.

He holds the coffee awkwardly in both his hands, leaning his elbows outspread beside the stack of files. He watches Harvey slide a hand into his pants pocket, and hold the phone beside his smirking mouth with his other. Mike leans behind the stack again, nodding in Harvey’s direction. “What’s that about?”

Donna quirks an eyebrow. “C’mon, Donna, what’d I miss?”

“Nothing, honestly.” She shrugs. “It’s another lawsuit, no big deal.”

Mike stares, and then figures out the vagueness around the way Donna says another lawsuit and comes up with, “Harvey’s being-? Harvey. They do know who he is, right?”

She smirks. “It’s strange when someone isn’t threatening to sue him.”

“Yeah, but no one actually files the thing, c’mon.”

“Well they do all get dropped. Hmm, what d’you know.”

Mike looks back toward Harvey’s office. Mike bends one knee and holds his foot pointed against the floor.  “Harvey probably just pisses someone off enough every so often to uphold his reputation.”

He brings one hand down to touch the back of it to Donna’s shoulder. She follows it with her eyes and blinks down at it. “Hey, what’d he do though?”

Donna scans the room and then leans conspiratorially forward, and Mike follows and leans closer too. She opens her mouth, and then she whispers, “If you want to know you’ll have to ask Harvey.”

It’s Mike’s turn to not look impressed.

“Hey, what are you getting sued for?” Harvey’s put down the phone and is walking out of his office toward them, and Mike asks as soon as the door opens. His eyes fall on Donna. They smile back at each other, Harvey’s not so much amused as Donna’s, and then Harvey’s aiming it back at Mike, waving a finger at the stack of papers. “Did you read all this, or have you just been gossiping this whole time?”

“Yeah. It’s all up here.” Mike points a finger at his head.

“Alright, good. We’re meeting with him in two minutes.”

Harvey didn‘t even consider that Mike might not have finished in time. Mike feels almost glad - relieved - that he wasn’t overestimated coming back.

“Okay, let me put my coffee-”

“How about in the trash.” Harvey curls his hand firmly over the back of Mike’s neck, to steer him around. Donna lowers the stack of papers behind her desk as Harvey moves him and Mike away.

Mike’s smirking as they walk, and Harvey bends Mike’s head foreword and then lets up like he didn’t realize he was doing it. “What?”

“Nothing. Just that I’m barely gone, and look at the trouble you get into.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

He squeezes the back of Mike’s neck until it’s almost painful, and then his hand slides away, skimming over the top of Mike’s back, and they file into the conference room where their client’s waiting.



It turns out the charges being pressed against Harvey are by the same Mrs. Nicola Robinson, now formerly represented by Pearson Hardman. Mike doesn’t know this though before he spots her sitting in the waiting area, doesn’t pay attention to the man sitting next to her. Mike grimaces before he walks over, holding out his hand and saying, “Mrs. Robinson, hi, how did things turn out?”

“Mike Ross,” she says, her hands folded over her purse in her lap. Mike drops his own hand after a moment. “Mr. Specter’s assistant.”

“Uh, yes. Associate, actually. Can I… help you with something? Are you here to see him?”

“Oh, I’m here to see Mr. Specter.” Mike only stares, and she says, “But it’s good you’re here too, actually, because you should be given credit as well for helping Harvey go behind my back. And you have the gall to ask me how things turned out?”

The man beside her touches a hand to her arm, and she glances sidelong at him before staring back to Mike.

“Uh,” is what Mike comes up with. He finally catches on that the man is another lawyer, and an expensive one by the cufflinks alone, and these are the people suing that Donna told him about. And things have just gotten really awkward. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what - I’ve been on leave, actually, so-”

“Well here’s what happened, Mr. Ross. I hired this firm for one reason, and you and Mr. Specter instead did the exact opposite of my express wish.” The man says her name, hushed, but she suddenly bursts, “No - I was offering more than the amount this firm asks, to keep my half-sister from being able to hold on to the house that belongs to my family, not to find the one possible disqualification to instead inform her of it so she could turn the solution moot-”

Mike’s listening to Mrs. Robinson, and passively catching on that Harvey’s been being such a bullshitter. Mike’s listening, but he’s only hearing one thing from her and he snaps, “Well it’s not actually about what you want, Mrs. Robinson, for Christ’s sake.”

They both sit there on the couch, rigid, stunned. Just twin pairs of eyes looking up at him for the evidence somewhere in his face that he just said that. She says, “Excuse me?”

“Maybe it’s you who should have been more concerned with honoring your mother’s wishes, instead of throwing money at us to get what you wanted. I can’t believe that you have the audacity to even ask for this favor.” He says all this evenly and low, in a tone that stops her from interrupting him once. “I mean this whole thing should make you feel like a really, terrible person. Really it should. This is the woman who raised you, and where were you when she needed someone to take care of her? You weren’t within seven hundred miles of her while she was bed-ridden and dying, and that means to me that you lost the right to step within even a foot of that house afterward. You deserve it least of all, yet you’re trying to cheat her and the one person who actually was there looking after her and the house. You know what? You’re the half-sister. You’re actually not even half of what I’ve seen Rita Ricci to be. But here’s the real thing, Mrs. Robinson - your mother’s will is always going to be her recognition that you don’t deserve to have the house, because she probably knew you goddamned wanted it and you still didn’t get it. So get your head out of your ass and do right by her at least in this, ‘cause it’s your last chance.”

She stares, mouth agape and speechless. Mike squints and adds suddenly, “Suing your own lawyer? Really?”

She finally composes herself, enough to say, “I won’t hesitate to include you in this lawsuit, Mr. Ross-”

“Yeah, you go for it. Let’s see how that pans out against the city’s two best.”

She stands then, almost slowly, intimidating if Mike wasn’t so goddamned furious. The man with her stands too, following her to his feet.

She says, low and barely restrained, “You can tell Mr. Specter that I won’t be negotiating with him any further.”

Oh, Mike thinks. Shit. “Um, this was all just my own, personal, opinion by the way, I was in no way speaking for Mr. Specter-”

She stalks past him with her lawyer at her heels, and Mike closes his eyes while clenching his jaw. The elevator dings somewhere behind him, and he doesn’t move until then. When he finally does turn around he sees Harvey standing there, stopped like the rest of the room sensing the tension and listening in.



Harvey’s staring out the window on his side of the car, en route to court that same afternoon, while he half-smiles and asks, “How many times have I said that you are a reflection of me? No, really, I want a number.”

His face is almost entirely hidden, but Mike makes out the faint curl of his mouth. It doesn’t actually tell him much to gauge Harvey’s mood. “Four,” Mike eventually says. “Listen, Harvey-”

“Save it.” He says, “I’ve already called and rescheduled anyway. They know, like I know, that this is all for show and won’t actually amount to anything. If you want to make it up to me, say you’re sorry, you can apologize to Mrs. Robinson for today.”

“Yeah, sure.” Harvey stares, and Mike says, trying for more serious, “Okay. Of course.”

They ride along for almost a minute longer, and then Mike turns his head and starts, “So you went and told-” He faces forward again when Harvey holds up a finger, and says, “Alright.”

Harvey sighs and sinks his forehead against his fingertips. “Nicola wasn’t supposed to find out I was the one who went to her sister anyway.”

“So how did she?”

“Hell if I know, keeping tabs on Rita, something like that that I should have definitely guessed. This whole thing was a blunder from the start.” Harvey mumbles something that sounds exactly like, The worst part was Jessica chewing me out.

“Ah well, Harvey,” Mike says, mock consoling. He adds, “I can’t say it doesn’t make me happy you did it.”

Harvey lifts his face and holds his mouth against his fist instead, his teeth almost touching to his knuckles. The car slows to a stop in front of the courthouse, and Harvey turns before he opens the door. His mouth splits open and tilts despite his efforts to hide it. “It was actually almost worth it to see you shit on her.”

“Oh man, did you see her face after the part where I said you’re the half-?” Harvey slams the door shut. “Okay, never mind.”



“Donna says you’re looking for a new apartment?” They’re only through the doors of the building on the way inside to court. Harvey’s holding his cellphone in his hands and walking, and he says, “She texted me, and it reminded me.”

“Well if Donna’s your source, then why is that a question?”

Harvey claps him on the back, and his hands go back to his phone. He goes on, “Something pricier, right? It’s good. It’s about time you learned how to spend money.”

The neighborhood Mike’s looking around isn’t even that much more expensive. He’s supposed to be a Harvard graduate who can’t afford anything better while he’s paying off loans for the rest of his life. He just needed to move from his old place. They both know what it really is, or Harvey wouldn’t have said anything. It’s Mike moving on, letting go. First it was a briefcase locked in his drawer, and now it’s an apartment. And now it’s everything. Mike checks his watch face on the inside of his wrist, and says, “Excuse me a sec.”

The lights in the bathroom make everything stark and blue and clinical. Mike runs the faucet and leans on his elbows to cup his hands under the water, bringing them to his face and then just letting it run. The lights over the mirrors are making the lines near the sides of his mouth stand out, and making shadows  hood his eyes, and he suddenly feels overtired when he sees it on his own face. He didn’t intend to go off on Nicola Robinson. He feels everything threatening to flood back in at once, and then Mike turns the valve back off and shakes himself, looks down blankly past the edge of the counter. He breathes slowly out his mouth. “Keep your head up,” he mumbles.

Harvey’s frowning at him when he comes back out. “You okay?”

Mike can see Harvey replaying his scene with Mrs. Robinson and thinking now about why Mike reacted the way he did. Mike twists his mouth to one side as he sniffs, and he answers with, “Yeah.”



They’re finishing up the night before the firm’s holiday break. Mike and Harvey exchanged ties like last year that neither of them will actually wear. Harvey has too much taste where Mike lacks any at all, and it’s going to end up being a horrible tradition.

He watches Harvey pick up a baseball and duck his head to stare at his hands too as he fiddles with it, running his nails over the threads, and he nods barely as he listens to Mike rattle off discrepancies he’s found in the financial records of a company a client’s planning to form a merger with, on and on. Harvey sets the baseball back down, and places his hands on the desk behind him instead, contemplating Mike. Mike’s gaze flickers up to his as he keeps talking, and then he comes to a finish.

Harvey keeps standing there, weirdly expectant. Mike slowly turns the cover of the folder in front of him over, feeling completely self-conscious as he does it. Mike clears his throat in some attempt to clear the air. He nods his head slowly up and down, and says, “Okay, well, there’s that.”

“Do you want to grab a drink?”

Harvey straightens and brings his hands to button his jacket. Mike stares. “I thought there was a plane you had to catch,” he says slowly.

“Are you actually worried that I’d miss my flight, or is that a no?”

“No,” Mike says, and then, “No I mean, sure.”

It’s the sort of place that’s got dimmed white lighting that’s faintly smeared in the edges and corners of the bottles on the shelves, and over the polished black wooden surfaces. Mike’s pretty sure he has to be wearing a three-piece suit just to get in. Mike’s only got a rough taste for less than half the things on the drinks list, all obscure names for something with rum and something else with vodka, and they just order beers anyway.

“To me.” Harvey smiles just barely open enough to catch the wet glimmer over his front teeth. He lifts his beer up and then tilts it back.

So they’re celebrating something. Mike doesn’t know if he’s disappointed or if he should be relieved that this is more of the familiar. “Is this just for general Harvey-ness or is there something specific you’ve done?”

Harvey tips the mouth of the bottle from his own while his eyes follow the edge of it going down, and licks his lips before he says, “Nicola Robinson’s dropped all ideas of a lawsuit.”

“Hey, good.” There should probably be more enthusiasm in that.

Harvey sets his beer back down on the bar, the glass bottom thunk-ing on the wood. He says almost exasperated, “Mike. What’s bothering you?”

Mike looks up and catches Harvey staring, before he quickly looks away to aimlessly trace the shape of bottlenecks side by side on the wall across the bar. Mike’s ready to say something like, Since when do you care if something’s bothering me, to expect Harvey’s smooth comeback to save face, If it bothers you then it affects you, and if it affects you then it affects your work and that very much concerns me. Harvey asks instead, “No luck on the apartment hunt?”

“What? No, I think I’ve found a place.”

He turns the bottle between his hands with his fingertips on its sides. It takes a long time to complete a rotation and come back around. When it does Mike stops prolonging. He leans his head against his palm, facing Harvey but looking away, down at the other hand he has encircling the base of his beer.

“It’s just, that. Do you ever feel like you’re just stuck, or even like you’re going backward?”

He says immediately, “I’ve never felt that, no.”

It’s such a typical Harvey response, and in the face of Mike’s mood now. It causes Mike to snort at him, and tugs at the corners of his mouth at the same time. “Yeah, okay.”

Harvey turns and leans with his back against the bar, and leans on his elbows, letting his hands dangle from his wrists. Harvey waits, and then says, “So what are you talking about?”

“This thing with the will, and Mrs. Robinson and Rita… I don’t know, I was just having the longest streak I’ve ever had without. Screwing anything up. It doesn’t even feel like three years have passed sometimes. Actually,” he says, softer, “Now it feels kind of worse.”

Even when Mike was at his all-time high for screwing up, his gram was still there. Now without her, even on the good days, feels worse.

Harvey’s looking strange, and magnanimous, is the only way Mike can describe it. The way he’s sitting is oddly open, but all Mike can see is his profile and his eyes downcast. It’s this side Harvey’s always had, these rare moments where he’s relaxed and the Harvey Specter who goes to Rita Ricci’s house can be seen.  He turns enough, sliding his elbow back to grab his beer with the same hand, and then he’s looking right at Mike and holding his beer back up.

“Well look, Mike. We came out better than just on top, again. Rita Ricci gets what’s rightfully hers, and Nicola Robinson got hers too.”

It’s all very indulgent, Mike thinks. He thinks he must look pretty pathetic for Harvey Specter to dole out encouragements. Harvey tips the neck toward Mike, and Mike finally nods and taps his own lightly against it. “There you go,” Harvey murmurs. They drink, Mike facing the bar and Harvey facing the room.

Mike only stays for the one beer. He stands as he leaves, and spreads his arms and says to Harvey and the other patrons, A merry Christmas to us all, my dears, God bless us! and Harvey turns to the bar in order to ignore him, and mutter, Bah humbug, instead of Tiny Tim’s line. He pats Mike belatedly on the back when Mike walks by to the door.

Mike ends up spending Christmas watching the football game on tv around the miniature fake tree on his coffee table, while nursing a bottle of some fancy and unpalatable wine that’s from Rachel. His usual piles look smaller in this bigger place, and he wonders if they’ll grow to be proportional or if he’ll actually end up organizing things. His jacket and his bag are still lying in the doorway beside his shoes from when he got home the night before. He slouches down on the couch, his back almost horizontal to the seat, and he stretches his legs straight and crosses his heels on the edge of the table. The bottle is leaving a wet circle where it rests on his shirt over his stomach.

Mike sighs, pushing the bottle up and sinking it back down with each breath, and he thinks he needs some friends. He thinks about what he’d normally be doing, visiting the nursing home with garland up around the windows and flimsy, metallic silver snowflakes hanging from the ceiling, playing some card game. He thinks about what Harvey’s doing right now in Chicago, at Chicago’s annual Specter family gathering. Mike drinks faster and starts to feel warmer, like he’s buzzing now. He closes his eyes against the emblazoned helmets and the crowds of faces, shuts his ears from the sports announcers slipping something in about Christmas every five minutes, and imagines Harvey’s weight on him, how Harvey might touch him, if he were here.



iii.
This New Year’s Mike decides he’s getting drunk. He’d be obligated to spend New Year’s at the Pearson Hardman firm’s party no matter what, and he tries to reason that any other year at this time he’d still be missing his gram.

He’s working on getting drunk by establishing a two foot perimeter around the mini bar that he’s not allowing himself to step outside of. Once Mike’s getting into it and getting a kick out of inflating tales other associates are bringing up about Harvey’s badassery, someone’s grabbing his arm, and it’s Donna leading him away saying, “Alrighty, take a walk with me.”

He lets her drag him inside the bathroom, where she leaves him to lean against the partition beside the sinks while she bends in front of the mirror. Mike says, “Hey, isn’t this the ladies’ room?”

She looks at Mike in the mirror and smirks, small and open-mouthed. “Well, I wasn’t going to use the men’s room, Mike.” Donna looks almost exactly like she does in the office, dark skirt and shiny blouse and heels, except she’s got a purse hanging from her elbow. She’s looking herself over, touching up the lipstick on her mouth. She straightens and drops the lipstick tube back in her purse.

“Do you mind if I take a piss? I really have to piss,” Mike says. He shuts himself in a stall while Donna watches him walk behind her by tracking him in the mirror. Mike flushes and comes back out, glancing down and zipping up his fly. Donna smiles close-lipped, and shuts her eyes while her eyebrows lift toward her hairline.

“Very demure, Mike.”

“Hey, have you seen Harvey?” Mike moves over to the sink beside where Donna’s standing, leaning with her hands folded over each other and turned toward him. He lets the water run over his hands, and she hands him a towel from the dispenser behind him. “I haven’t seen him yet tonight.”

“Oh, Mike. Even if I knew where he was, I wouldn’t tell you. I don’t think you want to find Harvey in your current state.”

“Oh, whatever,” Mike says, his mouth tilting, and he leans over. “Donna. Please, I am such a happy drunk.”

She says, “Yes, well, if that’s supposed to mean that you couldn’t possibly annoy Harvey, the thing is Harvey might just be your buzz kill.”

“Oh,” Mike says, swaying slightly. Donna’s nodding, intoning, Mm-hm. “That’s… You’re probably right. I think that you’re actually kind of being the buzz kill. Better you than Harvey?”

“Yup,” she says, her eyes widening, and then she’s sauntering out. Mike leans the small of his back against the counter with the row of sinks set in it, on the heels of his hands too, and faces the empty room. “She abandoned me in the ladies’ room,” he mutters.

He walks out and looks down the curving hallway back toward where the noise of the party is coming from. He can hear the raucous, booming countdown to midnight, and then the cheering as they reach the new year mark. He thinks about going back and joining in. He’d end up with some random dude almost wrapped around his ribs, and someone else slapping him on the back and managing to knock the teepee hat on his head askew, but he wouldn’t even notice it, lifting both his arms straight up in the air and whooping too. That’s when the party’s supposed to start. But after the initial explosion down the hall, Mike’s already slipped innocuously away.

He ends up wandering much farther away than he intended from the bar to Harvey’s empty office, letting himself in and walking in the dark toward the silhouette of the lamp against the window, clicking it on and washing the view out with the light that’s cast over Harvey’s desk. It’s like there’s a floating room suddenly outside in the air, tens of stories up. He folds his hand over the edge of a shelf and hangs his weight on it, pulling himself upright while he surveys the rows of records on the wall. He eventually tips a random one out, and his fingers try to pry the record from its sleeve but the paper’s grabbing tight on its round sides. He feels drunk and clumsy down to his fingertips. He turns it over and over, half-heartedly looking for its weak spot or something to help him out.

He half-turns when he hears the faint shudder sound the door makes as it opens behind him, and there’s Harvey, looking from Mike to the record Mike’s flipping between his hands. Here’s Harvey, showing up where Mike is just like old times, like he’s still been following him, silently watching out for him and making an appearance when he sees the need to. Mike thinks Harvey’s very intuitive like that, and Mike finds himself grinning over at him.

“Hey,” Mike says, drawing the word out. Mission Drunk is still accomplished. He’s having a really hard time getting the record out of its sleeve, and he spins it over again. “Oh, hey, Charles Bradley. He’s like your favorite or something.”

Harvey walks to Mike, Mike turning fully to him while he’s still peering down at the record. Harvey plucks it from his hands and slides the disc out easily, lifts the needle and lowers it back down when the record’s in place. What Mike can only identify currently as jazzy stuff starts to play. “First, what have I said about touching my records? And second, how did you end up here? Aren’t you supposed to be getting mauled by other shit-faced associates right now?” He snaps the elastic holding Mike’s hat on under his chin, and Mike mouths, Ow, and takes it off.

“First, you’ve never said anything about your records. The only thing you’ve mentioned ever is about me touching your balls.” Mike stops, and then starts laughing. He accidentally stumbles a few steps and finds a surface for his hand to lean on, Harvey’s desk, while Harvey stays standing where he is watching after Mike’s trail. “Oh my god, dude, that came out so wrong.”

Harvey smiles at him, half-open and slanted. “That was, actually, completely unappealing.”

“What, my brain doesn’t impress you anymore?”

“That goddamned memory of yours isn’t doing you much good right now.”

Mike’s still laughing, but he reigns himself in, holding up a finger and then another when he realizes that isn’t enough. “Second, there are no locks on these doors, they’re, like, weird and glass and totally not made to be locked, and Donna’s post is currently empty, so. Hey, wait, did Donna guess I was in here? She’s, like, an alarm system on top of everything else.”

“Fine, why are you in here?” Harvey ducks his head to watch the record turn. The track moves on, and Mike stares distracted as it keeps spinning.

“Something hasn’t happened yet,” is what ends up coming out of his mouth.

Harvey looks over at that, eyes flicking over Mike. Mike goes on, “A click in my head. Yes sir, the click in my head that makes me feel peaceful.”

Harvey stills, until recognition shows in the tilt of his head. “Are you giving me a quote from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof right now?”

“Now I’m waitin’ for that click, and I don’t get it.” Mike flops down on the couch with a big sigh once he finds his way to it. He doesn’t realize his eyes have closed until he opens them again and sees the ceiling, his head craned over the back of the couch. Listen, I’m all alone.

Harvey shakes his head. Mike laughs while lifting his hand to his brow, “I’m very fun to watch movies over with.”

Mike kneads his forehead with his fingertips, his elbow pointing in the air. His eyes shudder closed again, and he feels himself drifting, aimless and woozy and feeling vertiginous feelings when he puts himself in the dark. He groans, quietly, and tries to get a grip on things again. He catches Charles Bradley’s muted wailing of how long.

“Mike.” Harvey’s leaning over him, and Mike jumps at how near Harvey got. He watches Harvey’s hand as it moves and grips lightly around Mike’s arm, and he’s talking next to Mike’s ear, his breath barely touching and just twitching the ends of his hair. “Do you want to go to my place or yours?”
 
It comes out of Harvey’s mouth sounding, actually, completely nonchalant, like he’s only asking a question instead of using a pick-up line. It throws Mike off for a moment trying to figure out which one it’s meant to be. It’s actually a weird tension between intimate or fond, either one kind of strange. Harvey’s just far enough, just an inch far away enough, that Mike isn’t certain which message Harvey’s trying to convey in body language. Mike wonders if Harvey’s drunk at all.

“Uh, you do realize how completely wasted I am, right?”

“Yeah, Mike,” Harvey says, looking like he’s humoring Mike, probably because it’s transparent how drunk Mike is, at least.

“So you’re saying that you’re either going to make me stay at your place, or you’re going to follow me home? For… not sex?”

“I’d prefer my place.”

Mike stands up slowly, giving plenty of notice for Harvey to straighten and also because the room spins if he moves too fast. Harvey moves away to stop the music. He lifts the needle, slipping the record back in its sleeve and setting it beside the record player. Mike says as slowly, “Okay.”

Harvey’s acting all professional and strangely really not drunk on the ride to his place, keeping to his side of the cab. It’s when they park and Harvey’s leaning closer to Mike to reach and pass bills up to the front. He catches Mike’s eye when he’s pulling away, and he smiles almost cat-like at him, the stretch of his lips slow and wide and beyond the teeth in his mouth, the corners in shadows. It’s like another of those risks he likes to take, another risk with Mike. That’s when Mike realizes Harvey isn’t drunk at all. Mike feels a throbbing under his skin, almost heady. Harvey does things like this sober.

They make it up to Harvey’s apartment before Mike tries smoothing a hand between Harvey’s suit jacket and his ribs, and Harvey smiles when all Mike finds are more layers, his vest and shirt in the way to bare skin. “I really don’t expect you to put out,” Harvey’s saying, though he still looks interested. Mike’s eyes feel heavy-lidded, and he’s staring at Harvey’s mouth and then tripping down to stare dazedly straight at his chest.

“I have been drinking. A lot.”

“Again, I know,” Harvey says, and presses his mouth to Mike’s. He can probably taste the alcohol.

Mike’s plucking at the lapels of Harvey’s suit jacket, and Harvey takes the cue and slides it off his shoulders, drapes it across the back of the nearest chair.

“Why,” Mike starts to say, before Harvey’s mouth catches on Mike’s again.

“Why what?” His mouth moves down Mike’s neck, across his jaw and behind his ear, and Mike tries to hold his train of thought.

“Why my place or yours then?” he says. “I mean, why wouldn’t you let me go home by myself?”

Harvey’s still planting his mouth against Mike’s neck, and Mike barely hears him when he says, “I didn’t think you should be alone tonight, Mike.”

His skin shifts where Harvey moves his forehead briefly against Mike’s. Mike notes what day it is they’re consummating this on, and wonders if he should mention it to Harvey just to get him to roll his eyes. His breath shudders from his lungs. “So, you didn’t think that.”

Harvey smiles, and Mike feels it against his own mouth. “That’s right.”

Harvey’s pulling Mike around and closer to him by grabbing the backs of Mike’s arms. He shuffles Mike’s steps backwards, until he’s crowding him against the wall. They’re both still standing as Harvey ducks his head and pulls at Mike’s belt, and pushes his hands between the hem and Mike’s waist, reaching almost down to his elbows. His fingertips are cold on Mike’s thighs, and then they’re trailing back up. Mike lifts a hand and grips Harvey’s forearm, leans his forehead against Harvey’s shoulder as Harvey finds his cock and rubs. Mike’s eyes are cast down, and they’re both still wearing their shoes, polished slick and black.

Mike starts panting, and he presses his forehead into Harvey’s shoulder more, subtly moving for leverage. “Harvey-”

Harvey immediately lets go, his hands retracting too quickly, and it leaves Mike spinning. But then he steers Mike toward the bed instead, laying him down and pressing down on top of him. He kisses Mike again, and Mike realizes they’re both still staring. Harvey pulls away to drag Mike’s pants down his legs, pauses for a moment as Mike scrabbles to toe his shoes off, and then the hem of his sock bunches when his pants come off. He leaves Mike’s boxers on, and Mike’s still wearing his shirt, his vest, one piece of his three piece suit still on. His own jacket lays sprawled over the corner of the bed, and his tie must be buried under it or wherever it got taken off without Mike noticing.

Harvey’s mouth moves down his neck and over the skin he’s exposing unbuttoning Mike’s shirt. Mike lays breathless and dizzy, just trying to swallow. He hears Harvey say, hushed, “You with me?”

Mike can only see the top of his hair, and he sweeps a thumb back and forth across Harvey’s shoulder. “Yeah,” he says back.

Harvey plants his mouth solidly on the center of Mike’s chest, unbuttoning down to his navel. Mike swallows again, and feels like he’s suddenly breaking out in a cold sweat. He squeezes his eyes shut. He makes himself dizzy again, and even more nauseous, and he thinks, Oh, come on.

“Oh, fuck, wait-”

He shoves at Harvey’s shoulder and then stumbles to the bathroom (lucky guess at which direction it’s in, really), and retches into the toilet bowl. The toilet in Harvey’s bathroom, in Harvey’s apartment. His stomach clenches and he coughs over it again. He moans, and reaches for some toilet paper to rip off and wipe his mouth with. He hears Harvey fall onto the bed, abject mood apparent even from that sound.



The next day Mike walks into work and is met with a raised eyebrow and a smirk from Donna, who of course knows that he left with Harvey. Mike assures her that he in fact did not get any. He called a cab home after that, trying not to notice the look on Harvey’s face so he wouldn’t have to remember it as he was swinging his door shut after Mike, and Mike made his way downstairs crouched in the elevator and hanging from the handlebar trying not to retch again and waiting for the doors to open to let him out. Overall, not a great New Year’s, and the morning after wasn’t so great either.

“Mike, get in here.” Harvey holds the door to his office open for Mike to catch.

“Yeah, what’s up?”

Mike looks around the room and wonders where his hat ended up. It would’ve made a nice little souvenir, but Harvey probably already threw it out. Harvey’s saying, “Drop whatever else you’re doing, I’ve got something more important.”

“Okay, what is-” Mike’s eyes fall on the record he’d taken out on New Year’s, sitting on the corner of a shelf instead, and he’s struck suddenly by the notion that Harvey and Donna are the only people left who know the truth when it comes to Mike. They’re the only ones who know who Mike really is by knowing this secret he has. It separates him from other people, from having real relationships, when he has to lie about the past decade almost of his life, his education and then this job. It’s not entirely healthy that having Donna and Harvey are all Mike thinks he wants. Mike’s found probably the only two he can trust, who are still here.

“Mike?” Harvey starts following Mike’s line of sight, and Mike reaches out and grabs Harvey’s sleeve between the knuckle of his index finger and his thumb. Harvey looks down almost sharply, alarmed. Mike stutters there and then drops his hand.

“Whoops,” Mike says, and smiles hastily into Harvey’s confused face, with his eyelids squashed down. “Sorry, what is it you’ve got for me?”

Mike takes a step back, and Harvey watches him go. He lets another moment hang between them, and then he slowly starts filling Mike in, and Mike lets his brain soak it up.



Harvey finds him outside after work on the curb, waiting to see a cab, and stands beside him.

“You don’t bike in the winter,” Harvey observes.

He squeezes Mike’s elbow as Mike moves to raise his arm, and draws Mike’s eyes to his. Harvey doesn’t look away, until he does to call the cab himself. He walks toward it as it slows alongside the road. After another moment, Mike sidles in after him.  



iv.
Mike doesn’t realize things are moving on in his life, even after three months when he wakes up four mornings in a row in Harvey’s bed instead of his own. Mike wakes up with his back to Harvey’s chest, his knees bent and Harvey’s tucked under them, and wrapped up in all of Harvey’s sheets and leaving Harvey uncovered. Harvey sleeps with his boxers on and his white cotton undershirt, and his arm heavy around Mike’s waist and his forehead pressed to the plane of bare skin between Mike’s shoulder blades. Mike’s ended up there the past four mornings because Harvey likes to nudge Mike over and roll on top of him, making Mike lift his hips and rub against him to untwist the sheets around and around his torso and legs. The mornings start with Mike moaning Harvey’s name sort of obscenely, and then they each roll away so Harvey can go use the gym while Mike uses his shower.

Mike keeps a spare suit at Harvey’s after the first morning he comes to work wearing the same one as the day before, planning to change into his spare suit there, but not before Louis who always shows up to work on time spies him and says, “Well Michael Ross.” Mike hears his name like that the rest of the day, Michael Ross, like it’s supposed to sound as if he’s finally discovered his identity, as if he’s moved up through some further rite of passage.

He goes with Harvey to get coffee from his usual stop on the way to work for four days. He doesn’t ride his bike to work for four days, even though the weather’s getting better for it. Everything at work feels sharp and emphatic during that four day stretch, and Mike feels hyperaware and restless and like everything’s tinged with clarity. But there’s nothing different he notices between him and Harvey at work, no electric spark or frisson suddenly there if their hands should touch when one passes papers to the other. It’s familiarity that passes between them, only a more knowing sense of each other.

Mike finally feels something change the fourth month. It’s a familiar scene of Harvey surrounded by briefs and case files, what he’s pushing over onto Mike, but in Harvey’s apartment. It’s the weekend, the middle of the afternoon, and Harvey’s on his couch looking over what Mike’s done so far while Mike gets up to stretch his legs by walking to the bedroom and back. Harvey’s not wearing his usual ensemble, instead some worn Harvard sweatshirt, still with dress pants but bare feet. Mike’s staring at his toes and the tendons in them.

Harvey murmurs without looking up, “You should get back to this instead of what you’re thinking.”

Mike almost snorts at Harvey’s assumption, but then he considers it. Harvey keeps the condoms in the bedroom drawer, next to his bed. He feels transfixed by the sight of this Harvey, casual and domestic and still focused, even though he’s seen versions before. Mike draws closer anyway. “I’m still on my break.”

He settles his palms on Harvey’s shoulders after he shucks off his pants, and lowers himself on Harvey’s lap. Harvey puts up a dissatisfied front for all of two seconds, and then he puts his hand on Mike’s back and presses him closer to keep him balanced, as he leans forward and tips Mike back along with him to slide the papers in his hand back onto the edge of the table. He pulls them both back, resettling.

“Lift your hips,” Mike murmurs, and Harvey does slowly, placing his weight on his heels and lifting Mike with him. Mike works the buttons loose at Harvey’s fly and tugs down his pants by his belt loops, and brings his underwear with them. Harvey works his fingers into Mike. When he slips them out, sliding along the inside of Mike’s thigh, Mike kneels and rolls down the condom and then lowers himself, slowly, until Harvey’s cock fills him. He breathes when he’s fully seated again, like the air’s pushed out of him. He curls his fingers one at a time into Harvey’s shoulder and then releases them.

His wide-eyed stare flits up and meets Harvey’s. Harvey’s staring back at him, like he can’t keep his eyes off Mike’s face. Harvey’s fingers grip almost painfully on Mike’s thighs. Mike moves, watching the twinges of Harvey’s expressions on his face, until Harvey’s eyes squeeze shut and he chokes out, “Christ, Mike,” and Mike whines barely audibly as Harvey tugs once, twice, on Mike’s dick.

He trembles when he finally comes down. He braces a hand absently on the middle of Harvey’s chest, and pants.

Mike lifts himself and winces, and Harvey numbly reaches over for the nearest thing and pulls tissues from a box, and hands them to Mike when Mike reaches out for them to wipe them both off. Mike steps back into his pants with his back to Harvey, and Harvey sits there a moment longer. Harvey’s pants slid down to his ankles, pooled over his feet. His hair stands up in the back where it rubbed against the couch.

He asks, almost in wonder, “What the hell was that?” Mike turns and shrugs and smiles, and Harvey lets his head fall back and lets out all of his breath in one rush.

That same week Mike spreads bruises across Harvey’s thighs and the lower part of his back, the shape of his fingertips lifting to Harvey’s skin, and Mike traces them delicately, idly, afterward, until he falls back and closes his eyes from the residual sensation rolling through him still, almost the effect of aftershocks. Harvey is still staring at him like he can’t believe what just happened. Mike almost laughs at him for it, at himself, and this. He feels his shoulders shaking trying to contain it anyway, and Harvey bends over him and runs a hand forward through his hair, his fingertips prodding Mike’s forehead clumsily.

There’s a stretch where the workload’s laid heavier than usual on the associates, and Mike doesn’t see as much of Harvey during the day. They have a few quick fucks in the evenings, Harvey’s voice in Mike’s ear saying things like, “God, you feel so good,” that Mike’s not going to let Harvey live down, ever.

Harvey grits out once, almost desperately like Mike will misinterpret what they’re doing right now with everything else they have, “I’m not doing this with you to just fuck around,” and Mike nods against the side of Harvey’s neck, says, “Good, ‘cause I’ve been pining after you for years.”


 
v.
It’s been almost four years since Mike was hired at Pearson Hardman.



Harvey wakes up before Mike, before the sun’s even up. The light in the room would be faint and blue if Mike was to open his eyes. They’re in Mike’s bed, the first night Harvey’s stayed at his place. Mike feels Harvey counting his ribs with his fingertips, the pads on his fingers dragging over the ridges. They still when Mike sighs and bends his arm over his face, and Harvey’s fingers resettle on the raised corners of Mike’s hipbones. Mike thinks he’s fallen back into sleep, but he hears Harvey ask, “You awake?”

“Never,” he mumbles. Mike’s sluggish and pliant while Harvey readjusts them so he lies between Mike’s legs, heavy on top of his chest and his dick. The sheets rustle when he moves, and then he’s still.

“You’ve got some drool there, kid.”

“Do not.” Mike scratches at the corner of his mouth anyway. He rolls his head to the side, feeling heavy and limp. “I’m not a kid.”

“Yeah,” Harvey says, “I know.” Harvey’s chin presses above Mike’s sternum, and Mike’s eyes are still closed.

“Mike, hey,” Harvey whispers, and Mike feels him reach and hears the drawer Mike keeps beside his own bed drag when he pulls on it, and then feels him shifting down, moving under the covers. “I want to try something.”

Mike murmurs still half-asleep, and noncommittal, “Yeah?”

His eyes open when he feels the tip of Harvey’s tongue probe, tentatively, between his legs. Mike realizes that neither of them has actually done this, and he groans and says, “Oh, fuck,” while Harvey tongues him open.

Mike thinks about the run-in he had with Rita and what she said about Harvey, and he thinks about Harvey’s bare feet and his Harvard sweats. He thinks about how everyone knows Harvey by his reputation, and how only a few and Mike know the real Harvey, just like how few know Mike.



“Mike? Mike Ross?”

Mike turns around while holding a box of cereal, and he puts it back on the shelf to hold out his hand, saying, “Oh hi, Ms. Ricci.”

“Rita, please. I thought it was you.” For being half-sisters, Mike thinks, they really look like they don’t share anything. Rita Ricci’s mostly a bundle of gaudy, eclectic jewelry that moves as she shakes his hand, and she wears a big smile too that shows the dimples in her cheeks. “How are you?”

“Good,” Mike says. He can’t help smiling back when he asks, “And how are you?”

“Oh Mike,” she grabs his arm and rocks it slightly, “That house was everything to her, to Maria. I can’t thank you enough for telling me what her daughter was up to.”

“As much as I’d like, I can’t really take credit.” He says, “I found the exception in the will, but it was actually Harvey who went the way he did with it. I wasn’t even there when it happened.”

She shakes her head, making her earrings swing back and forth. “No, no. He didn’t so much come out and say it, but I don’t think Mr. Specter would have done it if it wasn’t for you. He said he wasn’t the one to thank.”

“Well,” Mike says, bowing his head forward, “You’re welcome.”

“I was actually, very surprised he would do what he did,” Rita says. “I’d heard Mr. Specter’s reputation, you know, and when I found out he was Nicola’s lawyer I thought that was it. I thought I’d lost everything of my mother’s.”

“Harvey does have that kind of effect at first.”

“Then I figured out he had you as an influence, and it made more sense.”

Mike’s theory’s been that Harvey did it to actually try and give Mike good news about the state of the world after his gram died, as ridiculous as that theory sounds even to Mike. And try and get Harvey to come down from the actual fit of laughs it sends him into every time Mike mentions it.

She looks up into his face, and then her smile slowly spreads again.

“I think she’d like you. God, she hated lawyers. But I think she’d be proud of the lawyer you are, if she could see this.”