Chapter Text
If there’s one thing Alex Williams knows about office politics, it’s that they’re pretty much the same everywhere he goes.
Sure, there are different veneers for different cultures; “a long lunch” as a Bratton Gould senior partner meant two hours instead of one, whereas during his years as an associate, it meant fifteen minutes instead of ten, and “casual Fridays” for the District Attorney meant being seen in public without a suit jacket whereas his assistants wouldn’t be sent home to swap out flats for heels and button-downs for button-fronts, but there are certain tenants that the world of law offices seems inclined to keep intact across the board.
“No interoffice relationships” is one. “Keep your private life private” is another.
Pearson Specter Litt seems pretty keen on breaking both.
To put a more personal spin on it: Yeah, sure, he and Harvey haven’t done a great job keeping in touch since Harvey went back to Pearson whatever back in 2002, but it would’ve been nice for him to mention, when he solicited Alex to leave a pretty comfortable senior partnership for a firm that, quite frankly, has seen better days, that he and his protégé, who also happens to be the firm’s prize junior partner, are romantically involved.
Just as a professional courtesy.
Considering how blasé the rest of the staff is about Harvey and Mike being attached at the hip, they’ve probably been together awhile; maybe it just didn’t occur to Harvey to bring it up.
Speaking of, Harvey is on his way out of Mike’s office—which Alex is given to understand was Harvey’s office before his latest promotion, not that that necessarily has anything to do with anything—and it’s…fine Harvey didn’t tell him about them, really, but Alex can’t let him go without a little bit of teasing.
“It’s cute,” he says, stopping Harvey in his tracks as he walks past.
“What’s cute?” Harvey asks, smiling as though he’s already in on the joke, and Alex nods at Mike.
“Your puppy.”
Harvey’s face falls immediately. “Alex—”
“It is!”
“Shut up,” Harvey mutters, ducking his head and continuing on back to his own office.
What a weird response. Are they actually under the impression that their relationship is somehow a secret? For crying out loud, Alex already knows and he’s only been working here for a week.
Whatever. Alex is here to work, to prove himself worthy of the title of senior partner. Worthy enough that Harvey will reconsider his offer of name partnership, when the time comes.
He doesn’t have time for this.
---
Seriously, though, how have those two never been brought up on liability charges?
Alex isn’t keeping a running log or anything, but he’s pretty sure that in the three weeks he’s been working at PSL, he’s seen Harvey in Mike’s office more than he’s seen him in his own. Either they’re working every single one of their cases together, which is a ridiculously inefficient use of manpower, or they’re slacking off on their work to spend time together, which is not only a waste of manpower but a blatant violation of company policy.
And if trying to figure out what’s going on between the two of them wasn’t eating up so much of his time, Alex wouldn’t be spending his lunch hour pretending he has a legitimate reason to pay Donna a surprise visit.
“Mister Williams,” she says sweetly, looking up from her desk as he knocks on her door and leans in. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
That’s fair; they haven’t had much reason to associate and he’s still sort of coasting on Harvey’s recommendation. Hoping for the best, he puts on his friendliest smile and takes a step forward.
“Alex, please,” he replies. “Miss Paulsen…you’ve been here awhile.”
“Harvey and I have worked together for seventeen years,” she says, “and I assure you, he has a healthy respect for my value to this firm.”
Nodding once, he ventures a few more steps into the office. “I’m sure you’re irreplaceable,” he agrees. “But that’s not what I was getting at.”
“Oh?” Folding her hands in front of her face, she rests her chin on them and glances up at him coyly. “Whatever do you mean?”
She looks like she’s waiting for the first opportunity to shut him down as hard as she possibly can. He’d better not drag this out any longer, if that’s where her head is at.
“I just mean that someone as observant as you are has probably picked up on a few things,” he cajoles. “Some…happenings around the office.”
It’s impressive how quickly her manner changes from coquettish to grave as she lowers her arms, pulling her laptop closer with one hand and a legal pad with the other.
“Have you seen someone being harassed?” she asks, reaching around for a pen. “Don’t you have the phone number for Human Resources?”
“No, no,” he assures her. “Nothing like that.”
She narrows her eyes. “Then…”
Alex glances over his shoulder, double checking that Harvey isn’t about to swoop in and interrupt.
“What’s the deal with Harvey and Mike?”
She still looks suspicious, but surely it isn’t possible that he’s the only one who’s noticed. Surely it isn’t. It can’t be.
“‘The deal’?” she repeats.
“You know.” He tilts his head back a little as though she might be able to see what he’s talking about if she looks over his shoulder. “How long have they been together.”
Her answering expression is difficult to parse, but he’s beginning to fear he’s stepping into the middle of something ridiculously complicated with his eyes only half open.
“Harvey hired Mike as his associate when he was promoted to senior partner,” she says, and he shakes his head, trying not to show his growing frustration.
“That’s…not exactly what I meant,” he tries, and she narrows her eyes again.
“Mike is engaged,” she says slowly, and Alex raises his eyebrows.
“And I don’t know the details, but I do know that Harvey is seeing someone.”
Uh.
Okay then.
“Well,” he says, widening his grin excessively and taking a step backwards, hoping against hope that she’ll cut him some slack, “my apologies; I’ve clearly made a pretty careless error, and I’d appreciate it if you would avoid bringing this up to Harvey.”
Turning toward the door, he walks as quickly as he can without making it too obvious that he’s dying to run like hell.
“Wait.”
Shit…
Pasting the grin back on, he turns to face her, clasping his hands behind his back. For her part, Donna looks like she’s contemplating performing a craniotomy to see what’s going on up there.
She seems to figure it out without the need for major surgery.
“You and Harvey have been friends for a long time,” she says.
This is a trap. Somehow.
“Fifteen years,” he agrees.
“Mm-hm,” she brushes him off, and he decides not to speak again until directed. “As his friend,” she carries on, “you want him to be happy. And as his employee, you want him to be…capable. Sound of mind.”
She cocks her eyebrow, and he nods.
When she’s through scrutinizing him, she leans back in her chair, tenting her fingers before her like some sort of devious mob boss.
“Mister Williams, I think we may be of some use to one another.”
---
“Compile a manifesto on Harvey Specter’s love life” isn’t exactly the sort of task Alex expected to be assigned when he accepted Harvey’s offer to work at PSL, but he’s a good lawyer and he’s fabricated justifications for stupider shit in his day. This one isn’t even that hard to weave; if Harvey, the firm’s lead managing partner, is happy, and Mike, his unofficial second in command, is happy, then they’ll do better work, and the firm will benefit. If the firm does well, all the firm’s employees will do well, and if they’re doing well, they’ll work harder, more effectively and more efficiently, and the firm will do even better, which will make Harvey happy, which will make Mike happy, which will make Harvey happy, et cetera, et cetera.
Sure, that’ll work.
The task of actually gathering information to fill out the report is a little more daunting.
Or maybe not so daunting. People like celebrations, and lasting a month at a new company easily qualifies for such a thing. And dinner with work friends is a completely appropriate way to commemorate a work anniversary.
Harvey will have no reason to be suspicious. He’s sure of it.
He knocks on Harvey’s office door.
“Alex,” Harvey says, looking up from the files sprawled in front of him. “What can I do for you?”
Alex grins. “I was on my way out for the night, and I was just hoping I could persuade my old pal Harvey Specter to accompany me for a celebratory dinner.”
Harvey smiles back and taps the barrel of his pen against his desk. “What are we celebrating?” he asks carefully.
“My one month anniversary, of course,” Alex says. “And I’m positive you can think of a great place around here to grab a bite worthy of such an auspicious occasion.”
As his smile becomes plasticine and flat, Harvey clasps his hands together and lowers his gaze to somewhere around Alex’s chest.
“Alex,” he hedges, “I’m glad you’ve stuck with us this long, and I hope you stick around a lot longer, but I also hope you’re not under the impression that we’re going to go back to the way things were when I left the DA’s office.”
When he left…
No fucking way.
Harvey seriously thinks Alex is hitting on him?
Interesting, though, that he didn’t try to fend him off by explaining that he’s already seeing someone, or that it would be inappropriate for them as coworkers to go back to their old…creative stress relief techniques. There’s one point against the stability of his current relationship, and one in favor of his willingness to pursue a relationship with an underling; all told, it’s a promising start.
“As much fun as that was back in the day,” Alex assures him, “when I said ‘dinner,’ what I actually meant was dinner. It’s been great working with you again, but we haven’t had much of a chance to catch up.”
His trepidation easily dispelled, Harvey smiles widely and lays his pen down, pushing the files into an embarrassingly messy stack and standing.
“I like the sound of that,” he says. “Felidia, my treat.”
Alex smirks. “I like the sound of that.”
The walk over is quick and painless, the chatter banal and mildly amusing; at the restaurant, the hostess seats them with professional efficiency and practiced politeness and the wait staff tends to them with the speed of a well-oiled machine, the end of the work day clearly in their sights.
Over branzino and prime beef, Alex contemplates the most effective avenue to take in presenting his case.
There’s really no way to do this subtly. Then again, why bother?
“I was talking to Donna yesterday,” he says. “She tells me you’re seeing someone?”
Harvey’s lips curve into possibly the smallest smile Alex has ever seen, and his eyes dart furtively away. “We’ve been seeing each other for a couple of weeks,” he admits.
It’s helpful that he isn’t reluctant to talk about it, but it seems that in doing so, he’s no longer the cocky, authoritative guy Alex has known all these years, putting on airs more suitable to an embarrassed teenager with a crush than a grown man engaged in a serious relationship. Something’s definitely fishy about the situation.
“And I haven’t heard a thing about…her,” he guesses, which makes Harvey shrug as he leans back in his chair.
“It’s not the sort of thing that comes up a lot in the workplace,” he says. Fair enough. “Anyway, you don’t know her.”
More avoidance, huh? So the relationship is either incredibly serious or incredibly inappropriate.
“Who is she?”
Harvey smirks. “Her name is Paula. She’s…really great, we understand each other better than anyone I’ve ever been in a relationship with before.”
“She must be something else,” Alex says as he spears a bite of fish on his fork. “She a lawyer?”
“Psychiatrist,” Harvey corrects. Alex raises his eyebrows curiously; they sure didn’t meet at a business conference.
“How’d you manage that?”
“She was my therapist,” Harvey brushes off as though it’s no big deal.
Hold the fucking phone.
His therapist. Harvey is dating his therapist.
Once he’s done gawping, Alex lays his fork down on his plate and folds his hands together at the edge of the table, thinning his lips.
“Harvey.”
Harvey arches his eyebrows and hums inquisitively as he takes a sip of wine; Alex waits for him to put his glass down and clears his throat.
“You’re dating your therapist.”
“Ex,” Harvey corrects, waving his hand. “We didn’t start dating until the mandatory waiting period had expired.”
“‘Mandatory waiting period’?” Alex parrots. “Harvey, you are dating your therapist. Why were you even in therapy in the first place, did something happen that you aren’t telling me about?”
Harvey frowns, and yeah, it was an indelicate question, but if they’re gonna start weighing inappropriate actions versus inappropriate actions, Alex thinks he’s still coming out ahead.
“I was having panic attacks,” Harvey says tersely. “A lot was going on.”
Fine, he’ll leave it at that. But still.
“Alright,” Alex says, “but Harvey, tell me you know how fucked up this is. I’m not saying it was a bad idea to go to her in the first place, when all of whatever that was was going on and you needed help; good for you for taking the initiative, but there’s a reason doctors aren’t supposed to date their patients. There’s about a hundred of them.”
“I’m not her patient anymore,” Harvey retaliates, “and like I said, we waited two years. It’s perfectly legal.”
“I’m not saying it’s illegal,” Alex argues, “I’m saying it’s unethical. What kind of treatment could she have been giving you if she was falling for you while she was doing it? How were you hearing her advice if you thought you were falling for her? And now you’re trying to be a couple; Harvey, for crying out loud, the foundation of your relationship is you paying her to let you talk about your problems.” Shaking his head, Alex can’t help but sneer. “It’s totally inappropriate, and you know what, it’s damn creepy.”
Folding his arms across his chest and crossing his legs, Harvey leans back and rolls his eyes. If he’s going to start acting like a damn child about all this, then Alex isn’t going to get anywhere by pushing the issue further, but he’s gotten plenty of useful information for his “Harvey’s Love Life” file, and maybe, if he’s lucky, Harvey will give some actual thought to what a colossal mistake he’s making now that someone’s pointed it out to him.
It might not seem like one right now, but it’s a step in the right direction.
He’ll update Donna tomorrow.
---
“Donna, do you have the transcripts from the Schiff trial?” Alex asks as he walks briskly into her office, holding an empty file folder under his arm, mostly for the symbolism.
“Right here,” she offers without looking up, holding out a thick stack of papers. “You free for lunch?”
“For you? Anytime.”
“Great,” Donna mumbles as she paws through her desk drawer, pulling out a few stray pages. “Rachel’s coming too, by the way.”
Rachel Zane, the associate? Alex didn’t know she and Donna were close enough to be lunching buddies.
“She’s having a rough week,” she says, even though Alex didn’t ask.
Rachel stops by Donna’s office about two minutes later and they all walk out together, heading for some bistro called The National in a hotel Alex always thought was just an upscale apartment building. Donna and Rachel stick close to one another, maybe because Rachel is having a rough week, and Alex hopes they’ll all find something in common to talk about when they sit down.
Donna orders a salmon salad, and Alex orders the branzino.
“Tuscan kale salad with chicken, please,” Rachel says to the waiter, and then the moment he’s gone, to the table at large: “Men are idiots.”
That’s a little harsh. But at least it explains her rough week, more or less.
“They are,” Donna soothes, unfolding her napkin on her lap.
Rachel dunks a soft piece of bread into a dish of olive oil, and that seems to be all either of them has to say about that. Alex blames the awkwardness of the silence for the fact that the first thing that comes to his mind to say is so incredibly stupid:
“Harvey sure is.”
Her eyes widening dramatically, Donna makes a throttled noise, drawing her hand across her neck, kill it, and Alex frowns. Rachel’s rough week is obviously because of some personal issue, and Harvey’s dating his therapist (ex-therapist), so then…
“I know!” Rachel exclaims, and Donna’s head whips around to her so quickly that Alex is surprised she doesn’t hurt herself. She continues to goggle until Rachel takes pity on her in the form of a condescending stare.
“Come on, Donna, I might be in love with Mike, but I’m not an idiot. I see how they look at each other.”
In love with Mike?
Mike is engaged.
Oh lord. This is worse than a cheesy prime time high school soap opera; the office politics at this firm are a fucking joke.
Alex clears his throat. “Your rough week,” he prompts.
“Was because I broke up with my fiancé,” she clarifies before turning to Donna. “Which I did because I didn’t exactly want to spend the rest of my life married to a guy who spends ninety percent of his time lusting after someone else. And yes,” she informs them both, “it hurts, and it sucks, but I’m a grown woman, it was my decision, and they’re both dumb as a sack of doorknobs but this has been going on for years and it’s about time they opened their goddamn eyes already.”
So this is an interesting turn of events.
Apparently, Donna feels the same. Drumming her fingers against the table, she looks off to the side to gather her thoughts and then back to her companions with a salacious grin.
“So can we count on you to join our merry cavalcade?” she asks Rachel, who furrows her brow minutely.
“What’s the mission?” she asks. Donna quirks her brow and Rachel’s lips part as the realization hits her, her understanding quickly segueing into amusement. “You guys are trying to get them together.”
“It’s in everyone’s best interest,” Alex puts in, just to cover his bases, but Rachel shakes him off, her smile growing wider.
“You don’t need to justify it to me,” she says. “Besides, this sounds like a way better extracurricular than sitting at home alone in the dark watching old SVU marathons, and if I don’t have something besides work to spend my time on, I’ll go insane. Now.” She crosses her arms and lays them on the table, leaning forward conspiratorially. “What’ve you got so far?”
Donna leans forward as well and begins to fill her in, barely pausing to thank the waiter when he brings their lunches out, and it’s not as though he’d admit it out loud to anyone, but honestly, Alex wishes high school had been this much fun.
“You’ve been busy,” Rachel compliments them when Donna’s finished. “So what’s next?”
Donna glances at Alex, and he offers a shallow shrug. It’s obvious to all of them what needs to happen next; the difficult part is figuring out how to make it so.
Alex picks at his fish.
Rachel takes a bite of her salad.
“Mike seriously has no idea?” Donna asks, and Alex idly wonders how long she’s been pushing them at each other.
“No idea Harvey feels the same,” Rachel confirms. “Although I don’t know how.”
Pursing his lips, Alex takes a moment to weigh his options. Well, he’s already this deep; might as well lean into it.
“It might have something to do with the fact that Harvey’s new girlfriend is his former therapist.”
Donna’s stare turns blank as Rachel opens her mouth to speak, then closes it and draws back; taking another stab at it, she raises her hand for emphasis but still can’t quite find the words, narrowing her eyes and wrinkling her nose disdainfully.
“His therapist,” Donna says as she finally regains her footing. “His new girlfriend is his old therapist.”
“Does Mike know?” Alex asks Rachel, hoping to get the conversation back on track.
“No, he can’t,” she says immediately. “He can’t, he would’ve told me. He would’ve, he would’ve vented to me.”
Alex nods; makes sense. Harvey would go for an emotional guy like that, someone free to express himself and what he really thinks of the shit going on around him; from everything he’s learned about Mike since coming to PSL, it’s obvious they’ll be good together.
“His therapist,” Donna repeats. “Holy…shit, I had no idea things had gotten that bad.”
In an effort to be comforting for some hardship or slight Alex isn’t privy to, Rachel lays her hand over Donna’s and rubs her thumb along her knuckles; Donna nods slowly, still staring off into space.
“I’ve gotta talk to him.”
Rachel nods back.
“You got this.”
---
Around five, which Alex is given to understand is the time that normal people end their normal workdays, Rachel knocks demurely on his door and peeks her head into his office.
“Donna said you had the files for the Lewin case?”
Rifling through the filing cabinet under his desk, Alex finds them with relative ease, holding them up without making any sort of effort to give them to her.
“Rachel,” he says thoughtfully as she steps closer, “why is Donna so interested in Harvey and Mike? Being together?”
Rachel bites her lip and looks down at her wringing hands.
“It can’t just be because she’s his assistant,” he prompts, and she shakes her head.
“She… She thought, for a long time, that there was something there,” she admits. “Something between them.” She shrugs as though this isn’t something she should be talking to him about, which, to be fair, it probably isn’t, but he appreciates it all the same.
“She thought he was the guy for her,” she goes on a little wistfully, “and every other man she was seeing was just a placeholder. But,” she looks up and locks her eyes with his, “eventually she figured out that he was never going to see her that way, the way she wanted him to, the way she deserves to have a man see her, and…she just wants what’s best for him.” Her smile turns sort of sad, and she shrugs. “I know it might be kind of hard to understand, but it’s the truth.”
It’s the stuff of fairy tales, really. “If you love them let them go” and all that; “I just want him to be happy even if it’s not with me” and other assorted clichés. Evidently Rachel and Donna have that in common, although Rachel seems to be less interested in making herself a martyr over it. Maybe something to do with her youth, maybe she’s a little less tired.
“It’s okay,” Alex says. “I get it.”
They assess one another for a minute or so, and he hands her the Lewin files, which she takes with a murmur of thanks.
“Let me know if you need anything else.”
---
Two weeks and exactly thirteen varyingly heavy-handed efforts at pushing them together after Rachel joins the conspiracy, Harvey and Mike are no closer to figuring out that they’re head over heels for each other than they were when Alex started at PSL, and everyone’s nerves have stretched to the point of breaking.
“What if we just locked them in a closet and threw away the key?” Rachel proposes desperately, dropping her head into her hands and very nearly falling into her tuna salad. Donna shakes her head.
“They already spend enough time alone together,” she says, stirring her iced tea. “All they’d do is bitch and moan about us, and then I bet Mike would just pick the lock.”
Alex nods. “That does seem like the sort of thing he’d know how to do.”
“It is,” Rachel informs them.
Donna looks awkwardly at the ceiling, and Alex clears his throat.
Rachel rolls her eyes.
“He says he taught himself when he moved in with Trevor in case he ever got locked out of the apartment,” she says. “It was a ‘safety thing.’”
“Bullshit,” Donna coughs.
“Well, yeah, but don’t tell him that, he thinks he’s clever.”
Donna snickers, and Alex smirks, but neither of them can think of a fitting thing to say.
A weird sort of tension settles in the air as they all shut up and finish their lunches, the unnatural halt in conversation whispering in their ears that they’re playing a game that always seems to turn out for the best in movies and on TV but people need special training and lots of practice to do reliably in real life, and even then it’s kind of a crap shoot. Rachel and Mike made a classic couple on paper, but that didn’t work out as everyone expected, and Donna and Harvey are certainly compatible from the outside looking in, but there are plenty of reasons that’s never gone anywhere, and what do the three of them have? A feeling? A sense? An assumption is what it is, an educated guess.
Donna pays the bill because it’s her turn, and they walk back to PSL with their spines held extra straight and their steps a little too measured; at least they get an elevator car all to themselves.
Around the thirty-sixth floor, Alex, as the newest team member and the one with the least to lose, makes a bold proposition:
“We should just ask them.”
Flabbergasted for all of five floors, Donna eventually manages to recover enough to ask:
“Are you insane?”
Simultaneously, Rachel murmurs to herself, “Couldn’t hurt.”
Donna offers her a scandalized look, and she shrugs.
“I don’t mean shove them into a witness chair and put them under oath, just like, ‘Hey, guys, we were wondering if you’d noticed…’”
The elevator door opens and Alex hums contemplatively, drawing Donna’s ire away from Rachel.
“You are, you’re insane,” she hisses at him. “They’ll deny it, and then they’ll refuse to ever talk about it ever again! The whole point of this is for them to get together, not…break up before they have a chance!”
“I don’t know about that,” Alex muses as they walk down the hall. “I’m pretty sure I hit a nerve with Harvey when I told him his relationship with his therapist was a really terrible idea, and according to you, they’ve been fighting each other off for what, seven years? It sounds like they could use a shove in the right direction.”
“Yeah,” Donna says, “I’m pretty sure you did, and so did I, but—but still!”
“Oh my god,” Rachel mutters, stopping short and resting her hands on her hips.
It doesn’t take a moment to figure out why: A few yards away, in Mike’s office, Harvey sits on the couch, shoulders hunched as he tosses a baseball from hand to hand. Across the room, behind his desk, Mike lounges with his feet propped up next to his laptop, on top of a stack of papers; they’re talking, that much is obvious, and while it isn’t what one might call an “intimate” scene, their body language isn’t quite professional.
“Does Harvey’s office have a black mold infestation?” she seethes. Alex laughs until Rachel stalks off across the floor, because surely she isn’t doing the thing he thinks she’s about to be doing. Surely not.
Donna rushes after her and apparently yeah, that’s exactly what she’s doing.
“You!” Rachel snaps, flinging Mike’s door open and pointing at him. He looks up at her perplexedly, pausing in the middle of his sentence (“But if we—”) and looking past her to Donna and Alex.
“Me,” he agrees blandly, and Rachel’s mouth thins as she tightens her lips.
“Date him,” she commands, pointing back at Harvey without bothering to look in his direction. “Please, for the love of god, do us all a favor and just… Why are you smiling like that.”
Alex shifts his gaze from Harvey, who’s obviously biting down on a grin, to Mike, who’s not putting in quite as much of an effort, and gets the feeling they’re all the targets of a somewhat long-running practical joke.
“What,” Rachel presses. “What happened.”
“Oh, nothing,” Mike says smugly. “I just won fifty bucks, is all.”
“Hang on,” Harvey cautions. “Alex, you were in on this?”
Alex leans back a little. “I…guess?”
Harvey tosses the baseball into the air. “Thirty bucks.”
What the fuck…?
“Someone had better explain to me right now what’s going on,” Donna cuts in as Mike and Harvey continue smirking at each other. Not a moment later, she narrows her eyes and glares bitterly between them.
“How long?”
Rachel’s eyes widen and she clenches her hands into fists as Mike and Harvey exchange thoughtful gazes, a pretty obvious put-on, and Alex wonders which of the doors he’s walked through today diverted him into the Twilight Zone.
“Today’s Wednesday?” Mike postulates innocently, and Harvey nods.
“That’d make it four days?”
“Yeah, I guess it would.”
“Four days it is, then.”
“Wait a minute,” Rachel bites out. “Mike, why didn’t you tell me?”
“Harvey,” Donna adds, “why didn’t you tell me?”
“Isn’t this against the code of conduct?” Alex asks, mostly rhetorically.
Mike and Harvey just keep smiling those innocent little smiles.
“I think management is okay with it,” Mike says. Harvey nods.
“Filed the paperwork myself.”
Check, and mate.
A mix of satisfaction and confusion settles on Rachel’s face, coming out more like frustration than anything else, and she excuses herself, muttering something of which the only audible words are “time” and “fucking.” For her part, Donna glares between the two of them and jabs her finger at Harvey with a firm promise that they are going to be discussing this later, and don’t think you’re getting out of it, mister.
Alex shifts his weight awkwardly as Donna stalks past him.
Harvey tosses the baseball between his hands and looks up at him.
“Have you finished drafting the Olivet contract?” he asks.
Alex clears his throat. “Yeah; did you need it for something?”
“Have it on my desk in ten.”
Backing slowly out of the room, Alex nods.
“You got it.”
Mike lowers his feet to the floor and Harvey tosses him the baseball.
This place has the weirdest office politics in the whole goddamn world.