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It starts, as these things so often do, with a glass of single malt scotch.
Or, more precisely, it starts with three glasses of scotch, but the third glass is the one that matters. Harvey is confident in this distribution of blame, despite Mike’s later assertion that the true catalyst had been the invitation to a fundraising dinner at the Metropolitan Opera House, received several weeks earlier, in combination with Harvey’s acceptance thereof and his subsequent request that Mike accompany him in the capacity of a ‘plus one.’
To wit: he says it’s Harvey’s own fault.
Mike has a case by dint of technicality, though they both know he only argues the point to get under Harvey’s skin. Mike is nothing if not infuriatingly pedantic. It’s one of his more endearing character flaws. Still, Harvey maintains his position of innocence.
Perhaps if he’d managed to successfully cap himself at a single glass, like he’d intended when the evening began, he would agree with Mike’s assessment. As it is, he’s knee deep in his third round - Laphroaig this time, rather than Glenfiddich - when he looks over at his associate through a haze of distant chatter, muted orchestral refrains, and butter-soft candlelight, and feels the carefully balanced bricks walling their relationship neatly within the realm of professionalism start to crumble en masse.
Mike is sipping absently at his own second helping of whisky, cutting a figure in his sleek dove grey suit and crisp white linen shirt that is very nearly fine enough to satisfy Harvey’s sartorial sensibilities, for once. He’s even willing to forgive the skinny tie on this occasion - lightly patterned silk in a muted shade just dusty enough to pass for mauve instead of pink. Mike’s tie-clip gleams starbright against his narrow chest, and his cheeks are faintly aglow with the ruddy flush of liquor. His hair is chaotic, as always, but Harvey has learned by now not to hold out for miracles. Besides, there’s something charming in the combination of the artlessly tousled locks and the wide, delighted blue of Mike’s eyes as he peers curiously around the room.
He’s already sung admirably for his supper - helping to secure a client worth easily six million a year in billables, and managing by some accident of his innate, hapless guile to foster further conversation with a handful of others in a similar financial bracket who can normally only barely be bothered to give Harvey the time of day.
It takes Harvey a second to realize that the fizzy warmth humming in his chest isn’t the afterburn of quality scotch but a bright, buzzing pride.
“You know, you’re not a complete disaster,” he observes, studying Mike casually with his head tilted to one side.
He’s roughly 80% certain that the gentle rocking of the room around him is a combined effect of the low, romantic lighting overhead and the flickering candles dotting the tables clustered in the atrium, rather than any actual, physical swaying on his part. He doesn’t usually get vertigo when he drinks, and certainly not until he’s well into his fifth glass, at least. Mike isn’t reaching out to steady him or making any oblique references to boating cinema, so it’s probably just the ambiance that’s making Harvey’s head spin.
“Well,” Harvey amends, thinking back on an ill-fitting suit, an expression of bewildered panic, and a briefcase full of vacuum-sealed marijuana, “not anymore.”
“That’s a ringing endorsement.” Mike doesn’t slur, but his eyes are bright and glassy, and his amused grin is curling in that soft, slightly lopsided way it only does when he’s wandered just a little too deep into his cups. “Quality mentor encouragement there, dude.”
“Don’t call me dude,” Harvey responds automatically, and takes another sip of scotch, reveling in the peaty burn. “I mean you did good tonight, rookie. I was right to bring you.”
‘As my date,’ Harvey doesn’t say, because he isn’t on his fourth glass of scotch, thank God.
Mike’s eyebrows twitch toward his hairline like he hears it anyway. He’s always had a knack for gleaning sensitive information from the silences Harvey shaves off his carefully crafted statements. The only other person who can read Harvey so well is Donna, and she never hesitates to air his unspoken grievances directly back to him whenever he’s foolish enough to try and shuffle them off by the wayside.
Mike, possessed of either slightly more tact or markedly less courage, elects only to comment on the sentiments that Harvey has explicitly expressed.
“It’s just dinner and drinks,” he replies pleasantly, still grinning. He cuts a glance to the opulent trappings of the room around them, the milling clusters of women in cascading gowns and men in trim suits, engaged in enthusiastic discussions about masterfully executed arpeggios and the appropriate embouchure for bassoon. He makes a face, and adds with a slight, grudging grimace, “And an opera revue, but questionable entertainment notwithstanding, how bad could it really go?”
Harvey smirks, tilting the lip of his glass in Mike’s direction, and summarizes more than a decade’s worth of almost unbelievably absurd anecdotes about grievous public missteps into a succinct, “You’d be surprised.”
“With you involved?” Mike makes a soft, sardonic clicking sound with his tongue. His eyes are fond and teasing. “Probably not that surprised.”
“I wasn’t aware that you’d given up your very lucrative position at a prestigious law firm to pursue a career in comedy,” Harvey drawls. He doesn’t laugh, because Mike is going to have to work harder than that if he wants Harvey to conspire to humor at his own expense.
Mike ducks his head, shadows picking out the sweet lines of his dimples as his grin curves even higher.
“I’ll be sure to get you front row seats when I make it big,” he promises, taking a healthy sip of his remaining scotch. His smile is sly and sharp. “If you flash a little leg, I might even be able to swing a backstage pass.”
Harvey snorts and then pretends he didn’t, pointedly ignoring the victorious perk of Mike’s shoulders and the gleeful sheen of his eyes. He’s having fun, much as it pains him to admit it.
He always enjoys networking events - inasmuch as he enjoys winning, and the sheer volume of prospective big ticket clients makes for a tremendous opportunity to do so - but he can’t summon a time in recent memory when he felt quite so at ease on the job. He knows it’s all Mike’s doing, the effusive gravity of his good humor trapping Harvey in its pull, keeping him poised at the precipice of laughter and longing to loosen his tie, kick off his shoes, even though they’re surrounded by a swarm of circling sharks who would eagerly take a bite out of them both the instant an opportunity presented itself.
Only a few short months ago, the greatest joy Harvey might expect from a night like this would be in biting first, and biting harder. He refuses to ever consciously acknowledge that he likes this quiet, relaxed intimacy better.
He suspects that having Mike around is good for him, by some measure, not that Harvey will ever admit that aloud. Not that he needs to. He and Mike both know that Harvey abandoned any credible claim he had to indifference the moment Mike spilled enough weed to warrant a felony charge into his lap, and Harvey offered him a job instead of sending him straight to jail.
It helps that Mike is quick enough not only to keep up with the breakneck pace of Harvey’s mind, but to lap him when he wants to - in certain arenas, at least. Harvey will probably always have a superior capacity to assess character, because Mike can’t be bothered to make any demonstrable efforts to curb the goodwill that so often blinds him, but that’s a deficiency that Harvey doesn’t mind accommodating. He finds it almost as admirable as he does irritating, particularly when Mike stubbornly attempts to scrub the tarnish off of Harvey’s much battered and long abused sense of integrity in the process.
God, whisky makes him maudlin.
“Still with me, big guy?” Mike knocks their feet together under the table, likely reading into the extended silence every soft, sincere sentiment that Harvey will deny ever entertaining. He taps the toe of his oxford against Harvey’s instep, peering up from under his tawny lashes in a way that sends a flare of heat cascading up the back of Harvey’s neck. “Lost you for a second there.”
“I was thinking,” Harvey explains. Mike cuts Harvey a glance that conveys that he had deduced that much himself. Harvey arches an imperious brow and sips at his scotch, hoping that the burn might cool the flush in his throat.
Not to be deterred, Mike presses, “What about?”
“I should make you my plus one more often.” It’s a thought that Harvey doesn’t intend to share, but he must say it aloud because Mike goes faintly pink in the face the way he always does under the heat of Harvey’s praise.
“I’ve been on worse dates,” he agrees, gaze sparkling with mirth. He wags his eyebrows. “You know how to show a girl a good time, I’ll give you that.”
His voice is steady but the stilted drum of his fingers against the tabletop belies his nerves.
This is one of the many things they don’t talk about, the familiar tension that swells in time with the off-tempo tattoo of Mike’s fingers, saturating the air between them with the shivering pulse of promise. His gaze hooks onto Harvey’s for a beat too long to be innocent, that clever mouth falling open in the soft, slack way that means he probably doesn’t even notice.
Harvey should just ignore it. If he were anyone else he probably would, but Harvey has spent the past couple of decades cultivating a fluency in body language so nuanced it’s evolved beyond simple skill into the realm of artistry. When he finds a splinter in someone’s behavior, he can’t help but push against it, waiting eagerly to see what treasures might spill forth when the weak point finally gives. When it gives, because for Harvey it always, always does.
It should be different this time, because it’s Mike who’s fracturing before him and, despite his routine insistence to the contrary, Harvey does actually care about the kid. But for all his efforts, lackluster as they may be, Harvey has never quite managed to bring his hubris to heel, particularly where Mike is concerned. In the grand and gluttonous tradition of mortally curious men, he leans in closer and lets his better angels burn.
“Is that all you’re gonna give me?” Mike blinks at him, a tiny, confused divot furrowing his brow, and Harvey clarifies, “In exchange for this good time I’m apparently treating you to.”
Mike hesitates for a long moment, muscle in his jaw tensing and then relaxing in a flutter of motion that means he’s chewing on his tongue the way he sometimes does when confronted with a problem he can’t immediately solve. The easy, unimpressed confidence he usually sports scales back to something meeker and less certain, his eyes gone curious and hooded as he asks, “What else do you want?”
“I could tell you,” Harvey teases, letting his smirk sprawl sweet and dark like molasses, “but I’d rather show you. Presuming, of course, that a nice girl like you puts out on the first date.”
This is the fulcrum. It’s no less appropriate a remark than any of their banter, which frequently oversteps the boundaries of professional acceptability. Mike can always laugh it off, brush it aside as just another joke that too closely toes the line of flirtation. If this were any other night, any other moment than the one they’re in right now - both of them thoroughly pickled in top-shelf booze, tucked discreetly into a quiet corner table with their feet brushing beneath it - Harvey is certain that’s precisely what Mike would do.
Here, now, Mike’s entire body spasms, knees bumping the table so hard the silverware clatters before he goes statue rigid, blue eyes wide with surprise. Harvey takes a triumphant sip of his scotch - in the later debate about when, precisely, the evening spiralled out of their control, this sudden, silent stillness will be Harvey’s counter-argument to Mike’s submission that Harvey is to blame.
A distant crest of laughter rises over the muted aria piping in from an expertly camouflaged speaker system in stark, joyful counterpoint to the loaded quiet enshrouding their little corner. After a long moment, Mike’s fingers start to twitch, hand floating upward like he’s reaching for something an absent second before he notices and wrests it back down. The color in his face flares neon bright across the sharp ridges of his cheekbones, spilling down the graceful column of his throat and past his collar. He takes a sloppy, half-desperate slug of his scotch and Harvey catalogues with great pleasure the subtle tremor in his body as he moves.
“Keep joking like that and a guy could get the wrong idea,” Mike warns when he sets his glass back down. There’s a hoarse edge to his voice that makes Harvey’s spine tingle.
He licks his lip in a quick, darting stroke and only manages to refrain from preening at the way Mike’s gaze tracks the motion because he knows it’s too early to tilt his hand. This deal isn’t closed yet.
“You’re the comedian here, not me,” Harvey says, sprawling back in his seat and letting his legs tangle with Mike’s.
“I don’t know, I think you’re pretty funny,” Mike responds, and presses his mouth into a thin, thoughtful line.
His eyes are slate-dark around the hot, blown black of his pupils, and his fingers twitch against the tabletop like he can’t quite decide whether he wants to reach out and grab Harvey or reel back and slug him, which is hardly surprising. Their entire relationship seems to exists at the vertex of a pendulum arc between the furious need to fight and the desperate yearning to fuck. After a long moment spent studying Harvey’s face, Mike leans in on his elbows, the flat, static line of his mouth tilting cautiously up at the corners.
A frisson of anticipation skims swift up Harvey’s spine, but he doesn’t move. He trained himself out of fidgeting back in law school and he has better self-control than to stiffen up when his adrenaline starts humming.
“Punchline needs a little work, though,” Mike confides, voice low and rough and conspiratorial. “Because right now,” he hesitates, drums his fingers once, twice on the forest green tablecloth, making the candlelight shudder. “I could swear you’re asking me to go home with you.”
There are a lot of things that Harvey could say to that, many of them vulgar, most of them probably effective, but he’s very good with his mouth by a variety of metrics and he feels in his gut that actions, in this instance, will speak more eloquently than any closing argument he could possibly concoct. He raises his scotch and takes a slow, lingering sip, draining the glass to the dregs. This time he doesn’t lick the residue away, but brings his thumb up to drag in a long, lazy sweep across his mouth. He sucks shallowly at the pad of his finger, arguably to clean it off, though Harvey would be lying if he claimed that inspiring the sharp, stilted noise that Mike starts to make and then immediately strangles into submission hadn’t also been a consideration.
When Harvey looks over at him, Mike has his teeth buried viciously in the cushion of his lower lip, skin worried red under the pressure. He huffs a breath through his nose and implores, just this side of desperate, “Harvey, please tell me you’re not fucking with me.”
“Well,” Harvey grins, “not yet.”
Mike looks like he might start spontaneously disrobing right there. Harvey angles his head, lifting it in a short, subtle nod toward the doors, and hooks a foot around Mike’s ankle, letting their thighs brush and their knees press together. He’s supremely gratified by the way that Mike shivers, swaying toward Harvey like he can’t help himself. The wary smirk he was sporting just seconds before has blossomed into something sweet and stunned and wanting. Harvey can’t wait to taste it.
For the moment, he settles for plucking the remainder of Mike’s scotch up off the table and knocking it back in one quick, eager swallow. He sighs around the astringent sting and says breathlessly, “Let’s get out of here, kid.”
When they talk about it later, sprawled naked and sated and boneless across Harvey’s thoroughly ruined bedclothes, trading arguments between wet, hazy kisses, Harvey will absolve himself in the court of blame by submitting this to evidence: at his invitation, Mike stands up so fast he knocks the table over.