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Mike and Rachel got married on a Friday night. They said vows, and kissed, and looked like there was nothing in the world that could have brought either of them an ounce more happiness. There were dozens of people there, clapping and rejoicing, and it was beautiful - but they looked like it could have just been them alone and it wouldn’t have made a difference. Mike looked at Rachel and Rachel looked at Mike, and they might as well have been a million miles away from everyone else.
And Harvey had looked at her, just after Mike and Rachel said I do and slipped together to kiss, alone and joyous in the applause of all their guests.
He’d looked at her as if there was something about how Mike and Rachel kissed, or maybe it was about how they ignored the world around them, that made him think of Donna.
He’s looked at her a hundred different ways since she ambushed him with a kiss and knocked him sideways into a different reality, a few fragile weeks ago. He’s looked confused, devastated, questioning, furious.
Mostly furious, until just a few days ago when he finally started looking at her with something close to grace.
But here - maybe it was the lighting, or the people, or music, or the occasion, she’s not sure - he’s looking at her like he hasn’t recently, and also a little bit like he never has before. He’s looking at her like a friend, again, finally, but also.
He looks at her like maybe he’s imagined being in Mike’s place, and Donna in Rachel’s.
It’s not a new look, necessarily. She’s seen a version of it dozens, hundreds of times over the years, bundled up with jokes about getting married or when he looks at her, unblinking and steady, over the rim of a whisky glass as they drink to a win, or a loss.
It’s not new. But there’s something unfamiliar under it all the same.
She gets up the courage to talk to him about it at the bar, but it’s bad timing because Mike has just dropped the news that he’s leaving. When she finds him, he looks so lost and hurt by it all that she finds herself pausing until he asks her to dance, and instead of asking him what he meant by that look that’s the same as it ever was and also totally different, she helps him lose his threadbare worry in the way he rests his weight against her and holds a little too tight to the small of her back.
And then, like it always is, they’re the last ones. Last calls are so familiar to them that they never think about going home before anyone else, anymore. They get lost, always have, in laughing and drinks, in dancing, sometimes, or in silence. They don’t even notice the lengthening night, until there’s some sign around them they’ve come to recognise. In the office, it’s the hallway lighting flickering off when the power saving kicks in for the night. At Del Posto, it’s when the waiter stops bringing them refills and brings them the bill. At the dive bar, or the diner, it’s when the chairs start getting stacked upside down on tables around them.
Tonight, it’s the cleaning staff coming through and the DJ fading out the last of the music to pack up, and when he does that it lets the sound of the rain through.
It had started raining, at some point after Mike and Rachel had left. Harvey likes it when it rains, he’d told her once. He likes the way it softens the city. He told her about how the sound of rain on the roof was a lullaby to him as a kid, pattering on the eaves of a house that was too old to block the noise.
They’ve snuck out into the back garden, perched on the low stools from the bar they’ve scrounged along with a half drunk bottle of scotch, leaning back against the cool stone of the venue. It’s early autumn, a chill in the air, but not so cold that the suit jacket she’s pilfered off him doesn’t keep her warm enough. She’s got her heels off, stocking feet stretched out to the edge of the balcony above, flirting with the rain patter just ahead of them.
Harvey has his collar loose, tie half undone and looped loosely around his neck, the dewey humidity in the air fuzzing the hair at his temple. He looks tired - not just in the way his arms sit over his knees, scotch bottle dangling loosely from one hand, but in the way he sits back against the stone like the world’s got in one too many punches recently.
He doesn’t look like he has it in him to fight, or be defensive, and neither does she, so she thinks, why the hell not.
“Why were you looking at me like that?” she asks.
“Like what?”
“You know like what.” She looks at him and smiles, enough to reassure him, and maybe her, that she’s not trying to pick a fight. He glances at her, his gaze steady but his smile small and tired, and then looks away again, watching a rivulet of rainwater snake down the gutter pipe on the pillar in front of him.
“Weddings make you think,” he says by way of answer, and there’s enough of a shrug in it that she’s not entirely sure what he means.
“About Paula?”
He laughs, the sound replacing humour with resignation. “No.” He looks towards her, but not at her. “I guess I was thinking about when you kissed me,” he says, idly.
Donna hums noncommittally. He’s all worn out, vocal chords bottomed, and she can’t tell if he’s trying to have A Conversation or if he’s just folded that kiss in with all the other thousands of things they’ve done that aren’t what friends or colleagues do, that they don’t think too hard about, and that they refuse to assign meaning to.
Only they would be able to talk about a kiss that ended a relationship, and nearly her career, like they were casually discussing where to go for coffee, she thinks.
She glances over at him. “You kissed me back, you know,” she says.
He pauses thoughtfully, like he’s considering denial, then quirks his eyebrows into his hairline instead in concession. “I kissed you back.”
“And it wasn’t just a reflex.”
“...no. It wasn’t.”
She’s not really confronting him - there’s no point. She already knows. She’d felt the moment when his body caved into hers, abandoning any pretence of resistance. She’d felt when his mouth went from shocked and still to kissing, shifted, pressing against hers, and he changed enough that if he’d slipped his tongue against hers she wouldn’t have been surprised. She felt the shiver in his skin when his hands twitched up from his sides to graze her hips.
She sometimes wonders what might have happened if she hadn’t pulled away, and can’t decide if she’s an idiot for stopping or grateful for avoiding how much more fucking awful it would have been the next day if she hadn’t.
She doesn’t think he would have stopped her. She thinks he probably wouldn’t have been able to. Because deep down, she really could have sworn that in that last moment before she pulled away, she felt his soul tumble into hers.
That’s what had made the next couple of weeks so hard, she thinks. Not that he didn’t want her, but that he did, and he pushed her away anyway.
She wonders about the days and weeks since then, everything he said and did and how suddenly unreadable he’d been. She wants to ask, is it because you didn’t love Paula enough or because you love me too much, but the word love is too wide for this moment where they’re talking like friends and watching the rain fall, so she doesn’t.
She hums into the silence instead.
“You said you didn’t feel anything,” he says.
“You know Harvey, if you want to make it as a lawyer you’re going to need to get better at knowing when people are lying to you.”
He punches a breath out through his nose instead of laughing, then says, “so you did feel something.” It’s not a question, and his tone has shifted just enough to carry a low, tension-soaked pull under the way they’re talking like friends.
She doesn’t look at him. She doesn’t want to make eye contact, because she’s not sure what will happen if she does. She leans into the quiet peace of the way they’re just laying cards out, slowly, one after the other. So she looks up, contemplatively, her eyes towards the night sky, and then admits it all - all of everything over all the last however many years - to herself and to him with a slow nod.
And then, she nods her head to the side, towards him, still watching the sky, and repeats the observation back at him. “And you felt something.”
He wrinkles his mouth, a resigned not-quite-smile, and nods at the dark of the night sky as well. “Yeah,” he says.
“Something new?”
He considers that for a long moment. “No. Not new. Different.”
She lets her head loll towards him, the stone against her shoulders and scalp, but she still doesn’t catch his eye. She studies the way his jaw curves into his neck. “Good different?”
He holds his breath for a short moment while he thinks, then shrugs. “I don’t know. If you’d done it once we’d broken up…” he waves his hand.
“If I hadn’t done it, do you think you would have broken up at all?”
“I don’t know. Probably not.”
And that right there - that’s the Catch 22 of the whole fucking thing - the dark irony that she never should have kissed him, but if she hadn’t, he never would have known that kissing her was like stepping out of shadow and into the sun.
She’s sorry she hurt him. But she also thinks about what could have happened, an almost-future of having to go through something like tonight, watching Harvey meet someone else at the end of the aisle and watching him say I do and dance to the last call and chairs upside down on tables with someone that’s not her. And even just the imagining of that hurts her somewhere way down, so thoroughly that if she dwelled on it she might feel her throat close up.
She doesn’t want to hurt him, but even more than that, she doesn’t want to lose him. She’ll take a hurt, furious Harvey over an empty space where he used to be any day.
Still. “I am sorry, you know,” she says. “I didn’t mean to… put myself between you.”
He waves a hand, dismissive but not callous. “You were already there anyway. You just stopped letting me ignore it.” He shakes his head a little. “Sooner or later, this would have been… a complication.”
Well, she thinks. Being a complication is better than being whatever he’d been treating her like the last few weeks. “A complication,” she repeats, rolling the word like she’s trying it on for size.
He shrugs, takes a sip of scotch from the bottle. “You know what I mean.”
She feels a shake in her fingers when he says it. It’s the closest they’ve got to anything resembling a ‘what are we’ discussion since that day after Liberty Rail, years ago now, and it feels like decades. And that discussion had ended in a fight, and then in her sitting at a different desk at the other end of the office hallway, with Harvey swallowing back panic attacks in her presence and Donna finding out about them only because of how insecure Louis is.
If Mike hadn’t been arrested, maybe that’s how it still would have been.
So she hears a catch in her lungs when she asks, “If I hadn't kissed you, and if you’d realised, and if you’d broken up with her, do you think, now I’m not at your desk, that….?”
“That’s a lot of ifs,” he says evenly. But there’s something under his words, a pull of residual anger and frustration - the same tension in his shoulders she saw when he turned up at her door and tore up her resignation letter. He’s still got a thread of anger, at himself as much as her, and she’s not sure why. Maybe at how she’s acted, maybe at how blind he’s been, maybe at just how fucking complicated everything seems to have gotten, she doesn’t know. Maybe he hates all the ifs as well.
And she thinks, you have no idea how many ifs I’ve waded through with you, Harvey.
It could have turned into an argument, in that moment, if she’d pressed in where it hurt. But there’s something in the night, in the way they’re talking, and in the way the rain is drawing everything around them like a veil. There’s a sacred, threadbare peace between them that stops frustration from being more than just what it is, from setting his shoulders into a curve instead of the straight-backed arrogance he shows other people.
So she says, “what if I asked you for a drink? Not like a normal drink. But. A drink. Sometime.”
He sips whisky again, contemplates the label on the bottle, and she can see him working up either courage, or the right words. And when he answers, it’s slow and deliberate. “I’d want to,” he says, and she feels something in her stomach shift when he does.
He’s never said anything like that before. It’s always been we have everything or it doesn’t mean I want more or a hundred other ways he tells her that he’s not ready.
I’d want to.
She takes a breath and wills herself not to hope much as he continues. “But… everything is changing.” Finally, he turns to look her way, fixing his gaze at her shoulder. “I don't know if I'm ready for us to change as well just yet.”
“Yet.”
“I know I seem like I don’t know what… this is. What we are. Aren’t.” He shrugs. “I’ve thought a lot about us the last few weeks. About what this could all be. But…” He reaches out and finds her hand, slides his palm over the top of her fingers. “I lost Paula. I lost Jessica. I just lost Rachel and Mike. And I just… I don’t want to fuck it all up like I did after Liberty and lose you as well. Not again. I’m just…” he sighs. “I just don’t have it in me right now.”
He looks at her, then, and they finally look at eachother squarely, and she can see in his eyes something deep, and sure, terrified and lost all at once. And she realises that he’s not ignorant at all. He knows that he wants something else with her than what they have. That’s not the problem.
The problem is that how he feels and what he has the courage for aren’t anywhere close to each other.
“I get it,” she says. “It’s okay.”
“But I want to,” he repeats. “I want to.” He looks at her, into her, unblinking, and she feels like something is shifting.
She holds her breath, tracing the circle of his knuckle with her thumb. “I’d want to, too.”
“And… I don't know what’s going to happen. But I’m trying. It might not look like it, but I’m trying to get where I need to be.”
She considers that. It’s hardly a declaration of love and commitment. But from him, it’s a lot.
“Okay,” she says. “If you try to get there, I’ll try to wait.”
He smiles. “Deal.”
“Deal.”
She sits back first, back against the stone, back to watching the rain and the way it breaks against the grass, runs down the gutters. He sits back too, after a minute, and she can feel the way he studies her profile for a long moment before taking a drink and settling back to watch the night lengthen in the distance with her.
He holds her hand, fingers loosely snagged through hers, and she hopes to a god she doesn’t really believe in that he’ll figure it all out in time. And she wishes there was some guarantee, some finish line, some way to measure the progress of him fighting for himself to get to her.
But there isn’t, and she isn’t entirely sure that he knows that she might not be patient enough to outwait his stubbornness.
He’ll be ready one day, and all she can do is hope that when he is, she’s not had someone else punch through into the sunlight and finally break that invisible hold he has on her.