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"What's this?"
It's Saturday afternoon and alright, they've eased into standard operating procedure on Saturday afternoons: TV, first some ridiculous romcom Mike introduced and can't stop breaking his heart over, albeit not with crying, then sports that don't make Harvey doubt his masculinity but listen, that doesn't make Mike's curiosity over everything any less surprising. Harvey expected his eye for back ends and loopholes. He didn't expect that when even Mike's brain fails, Mike still gets his answers by asking everyone down to the nobodies. He didn't expect Mike to show up again at his apartment, sober, in the daytime, and say, "Wow! Can I see what you have inside, Harvey?"
From letting him in, because some piece of Harvey's hungover heart was a quisling, two months later they're sprawling languid on the sofa. The girl on screen's breaking up with her fourth boyfriend and Mike doesn't swing for that. So he should expect Mike to put his hand over Harvey's cardigan, preventing it from covering the half-inch "C" inked there.
Mike has a sense of personal space, but it wasn't designed to normal human standards.
"Objection, none of your business," he says. With this voice he shuts up murderers and pizza boys fishing for tips.
Mike does not care that his continued speaking ruins Harvey's honor. "I'll exchange stories?" He tries to scramble upright, hits the back cushion and flops back down. "Here." His hand comes off Harvey's stomach and before Harvey can mention that by the way, this touches unprofessional territory, Mike pulls his shirt up and fiddles with his trousers and ah, that's a crafty move. Harvey approves.
Mike's ink is more than two inches tall. The cobweb of blue and brown lines rides low on his ribs. The intention could be an angel, or as Harvey tilts his head, a postmodern interpretation of a fruit fly. "Tattoos are against Pearson Hardman's regulations." He does the flick of his eyes that Mike knows means Harvey sees what you're doing and doesn't like it, but the time the kid doesn't fall for that.
"Well, I won't mention yours if you won't mine," Mike counters. Reminding Harvey that they are often in the same boat, as much as the comparison galls a man of as much taste and deviousness as Harvey, is his favorite tactic. "It's a good story."
"You perceive that, yes."
Mike leans close enough to tickle Harvey's earlobe with his breath, an action Harvey would describe as both cheating on the argument and strangely adorable. Harvey is already wondering whether his failure to sit up was intentional. When Mike is prim and controlled, Harvey's brain sees him as an associate attorney and reacts appropriately; when Mike has his hair mussed and one purple sock barely clinging to his foot, he looks like a, a, maybe something to pet. The puppy says, "I can read people too now, your interest is so piqued already."
He allows, "I'll consider it."
"Before Trevor and I— this was before I interviewed with you, I swear," Mike adds hastily, as Harvey jerks his chin up. "Trevor and I met when we were kids. He was the jock with all the illicit substances, Jolly Ranchers and white chocolate before the Adderall, before the low proof alcohol and the pot, and I was the dork who could do the math for profits. So he spent time watching over me and I followed him around, yeah?"
"Yeah, yeah, get on with it," Harvey says, even though he's enjoying the view of Mike with his eyes closed, taking up far more than his half of the sofa. No one has any attention on the television, although out of the corner of his eye Harvey notes the girl is sobbing something about pot. He grins while Mike can't see it.
"We were young and we might have drunk too much. Don't look at me like that, I was eighteen. All the graffiti outside Swallow It Down— Harvey, if I were older I would have gone to a nicer bar— was ugly, and I thought, why don't the gangs ever pick something pretty for their emblems? Trevor knew somewhere, we had a couple more shots..." He opens his eyes and curls up so that mesmerizing mess of lines is visible again. "I had more than he did. He convinced me this was the best one in the artist's available designs. Please Harvey don't look at me like that I think he picked the most complicated one because he wanted to see me sweat ink okay it's still artistic," he says, watching Harvey with increasing alarm. "He said it was supposed to be a representation of power and sensuality."
Harvey lets Mike hang for several seconds before he laughs. "I like the nest of intersecting lines, here." Mike settling his feet between the table's takeout boxes, the protection of which Harvey takes very seriously, seems a grant of permission to touch.
"You do?"
"Sometimes I say what I mean."
Mike smiles and what he does next could be called snuggling if Harvey ever used words like that. "So what about this one?"
"I said what I meant, rookie. I considered, and the answer is no."
"Never?" Give Mike no room at all and he will steal an inch somehow.
"Not now," Harvey says. "You wanted to watch this girl break up with some dickhead—" (and when did that become part of his vocabulary?) "you watch that first."
"I wanted to watch you watch it," Mike says from somewhere near Harvey's shoulder, "but I know when you're changing the subject," and correct, there might be another free Saturday coming up. He's loose and his alertness is dipping right now; he doesn't want to push Mike away at all.