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Harvey wouldn’t consider himself a tortured soul, but the late nights and glasses of scotch and worsening sleeping problems are about to turn him into one. He might take care of himself in some regards – he exercises, tries to stay fit – but that does little to combat his chronic dehydration, neglect of well-rounded meals, and the crippling stress that he deals with around the clock.
Donna combats all of this pretty well for him. Unfortunately, his need for her is another check on the unhealthy behaviors list.
It’s the night after Gordon Specter’s funeral that he finds all of this catching up to him on the bathroom floor, knees bruising and gut wrenching. In the midst of his body feeling like it’s falling apart, he loses the ability to breathe–
Wonders if this is his time, too, if he’s really dying–
So he calls the only person he thinks he might really have, just a hair past midnight. Not because he can, but because he finds his heart gasping for somebody while his lungs gasp for air.
“Harvey?”
There’s laughter in the background, ringing in his ears, now. In the seconds of his silence, the laughs and cheers fade, like she’s excused herself to a quieter space. He’s interrupting.
“Harvey, are you there? Are you okay?”
But he can’t speak right now – not without air in his lungs. She sounds so concerned and it kills him that she should be, it kills him that something really is wrong and that he actually needs her. The laughter is still ringing in his ears and he imagines her laugh within the chorus, and it kills him that her night of freedom is now tainted with his bile.
He opens his mouth, chokes a gasp, and forces out the only clear thought in his mind: “ Donna.”
In ten minutes, she’s at his door.
She lets herself in, of course. He can hear the front door open and close, the sound of her heels clicking on his floors until they stop. Maybe she took her shoes off. Maybe, she’ll stay a while.
“Harvey?” No laughter swallows her voice and she’s not screaming over speakers. He can hear her through the walls and it’s the most tangible sense he’s experienced in nearly an hour. “Harvey, where are you?”
The door to the bedroom slides open. “Harvey?”
She’s so close that he has to throw up. This is humiliating – degrading, almost – Harvey, sickened and covered in snot on the ground, and begging for Donna to abandon everything but him. It’s such an awfully aware understanding that he is at his lowest and that she’s about to see him like this, consequently inciting a new wave of anxious nausea and continuing to worsen the state he’s already in.
It’s the sound of his retching that calls her to the bathroom. She has the courtesy to knock, bless her, but more of his lunch comes up and she’s pushing the door open instantly.
“Oh, my God,” Harvey hears behind him, her voice hitting his ears in technicolor. There’s firm hands wrapping around his shoulders not a second later. One of those hands travels to his back and starts to rub in circles and if Harvey feels more tears spill from his eyes that he will later credit as a side effect of the chronic vomiting, but it is by far from the relief of having somebody. “Harvey, take a deep breath. Please. I’m here.”
Deep breaths. He’s trying.
It’s hard.
One hand is traveling up his spine to land, cold, on his neck; rippling into goosebumps and a chill that shakes him beyond just the shock of being cold. He feels her skin. Suddenly, he hasn’t been really touched in years, and now his tendons are being cradled like they can finally stop putting up a fight. Another hand is pressing into his chest, combatting the vigorous gasps with a pressure that he needs.
Her palm is pushed into his ribs in a rhythm that he desperately tries to make his lungs follow. “Harvey, it’ll be okay. I’m right here. Just try to breathe.”
He has to clasp his fingers against hers against his chest, he has to take her touch inside of himself and reassure that she’s right there. She’s here for him.
Her deep red nails are messily twisting through his shaking fingers and he opens his mouth and inhales, gasping, as more bile rises up his throat. Their hands remain even as he’s bent over the toilet, he barely even feels it because one of them is squeezing the other so tight that blood flow has stopped. He doesn’t know if he’s the one crushing her fingers or if it’s her, instead. Trying to force okay-ness into his body.
After his vomiting has concluded, his shoulders sink and her left hand is returned to his back. There’s a towel on the floor next to him, streaked with remains of the acid that’s been coming out of him, and he uses it to wipe his mouth for what he hopes is the last time.
And then he looks at her. For the first time since she’s stumbled into his bathroom, he lets himself look at her.
Donna’s hazel eyes are wide and sparkling, and he knows it’s because she’s trying not to cry, but she looks so beautiful. He loves her eyes. There’s mascara smudged under them and a tear teasing the corner of one, and he loves her eyes, so much. He loves when she looks at him so he can stare at them while she talks, he loves when she looks up at him after he teases her about something and he sees a glimmer of affection that he wants for himself.
The clothes she’s wearing are clothes he’s never seen, mostly because he hasn’t seen her much in casual settings, and some days he resents that. As much as he loves her dresses, the denim she’s got on now hugs her thighs and calls to him to rest his head in her lap.
“Hey,” she says, and his eyes flick back to her face. The hand that he isn’t still clutching for dear life drags a finger across his brow, tracking sweat in its wake. “Better now?”
It takes too much energy, but he nods his head. Grunts out: “I’m sorry.” Because he ruined her night, because he’s a mess, because his father is dead and he has no one except for her and he’s sorry that she’s stuck with him, now.
But she shakes her head. The tears in her eyes shake with the movement. “No. No, you have nothing to be sorry for, Harvey. I’m sorry.” She’s sorry about his dad, but he doesn’t need her to be.
There’s still an alcohol haze over his thoughts, and he doesn’t quite know what to say next. He’s exhausted. His throat, head, stomach – everything hurts. Even his knees, bruising on the tile. He can’t imagine how uncomfortable Donna is. Another thing to be sorry for.
Caught up in the silence, Donna starts to pull her hand away from his and shifts her legs to get up. “I’m gonna go get you some water, okay?”
But his fingers follow hers like they’re magnetized, and they fumble to clasp around her wrist again.
“Hey, it’s okay, I’m just getting water.” She’s so gentle with him. He believes her but he’s not ready to let go.
“Please,” he finds himself saying.
“Harvey…” Her gaze rests softly on him, but it is tainted with the amusement that he’s being a little ridiculous.
“I need you.”
It’s a lot for him to say. It’s an attempt to tell her that she’s the only person he thinks he really has, that she’s the only person he wants, that she’s the only person he hopes he actually has. With his father gone, his relationship with Marcus fraying, and his relationship with his mother non-existent…
The only person in his life that he finds himself holding onto, a little too tightly, is Donna.
But none of this could be articulated in any significant or poetic way. Not right now. He hopes that since Donna is always so intuitive about his feelings, that she can feel the weight of all of that in his three words.
Maybe he tugs her back down to him, and maybe she comes on her own volition, but she appears back in front of him. Closer, with her knees against his. His thumb skates her knuckles.
“You need water, too,” she says to him, “and if you give me thirty seconds, you’ll have both.” Her eyes are so close, now, staring into his. He feels dizzy again. “Okay?”
And maybe it’s because she’s so close, or because he stupidly trusts her so much, but he nods his head.
Between her absence and his impatience, he lays himself down on the bathroom floor and rests his eyes. The dizziness eases up, his nausea fades, and he can kind of smell Donna’s perfume in the air – he smiles. Maybe he’s safe, now.
When he wakes up, he doesn’t know what time it is. The bathroom light is still on and it damn near makes his head explode, but when he averts his eyes from the brightness, they land on Donna.
She’s still here. And she’s sitting up against his bathroom cabinets, holding a cup of coffee and yawning between sips. It dawns on him that it's the smell of coffee that woke him up.
“Morning,” he hears her say, and a cup of water lands in his eyeline. “Please finish this before I give you your coffee.”
He wants to ask–
You made me coffee?
What time is it?
Why did you stay?
But he doesn’t, because regardless of the answers, he’s stricken with relief. With fear, too – fear that she’s seeing him in such a weakened state, fear that he’s a mess she can’t clean up – but she stayed, and that’s a start. That’s what he needed.
He just didn’t realize that when he needed her to stay, she really would.
Before he allows himself to speak, he does what she asks – he sits himself up, with some help from her arms adjusting him as he leans his back against the edge of his bathtub, and chugs the cold water from the glass. It eases his cottonmouth and starts to erase the layer of filth that materialized over his teeth and tongue.
Her legs are then stretched out next to his across the floor, and she hands him a steaming cup of coffee. It occurs to him she might not have slept. The question of what time it is becomes more pressing.
He takes a sip of the coffee – the vanilla flavor renewing to his blood sugar – and it burns his tongue, but it feels good. “Thank you.”
“How are you feeling?”
Another sip of the coffee. His socked feet are right next to her hip – he gently bumps them into her jeans. It distracts him from the headache. Her hand lands on his ankle to still the action, but the touch feels even better.
“Harvey.”
The air is heavy – it’s stuffy in here, he doesn’t know how she can stand it. He feels the weight of his drunken stupor, his mom’s betrayal, his dad’s death, all burying them under the white light. He deserves to be left here. She should leave him here.
He puts his hand on her ankle, too. Feels her urge to pull away, but she keeps her legs next to his, so he focuses his senses on the denim under his palm. “I’ve been better,” Harvey tries to joke. A smile cracks on his lips as tears fill his eyes. “How long have you been here?”
“You called me around twelve thirty,” she murmurs, and checks her watch. “It’s six now.”
“Did you sleep?”
He’s flattened to the floor with her most withering Harvey stare. There’s pride in his gut that he’s earned that special look, even if it means she wants to slap him. “Did I sleep after you called me, wasted, throwing up on your bathroom floor and having some kind of anxiety attack before falling asleep, at which point you could have easily choked on your own vomit and died overnight if there was no one around to watch you?”
Well it sounds bad when you say it like that, Harvey wants to jest. But his throat is still a little rough and the fervor in Donna’s voice tells him that she is in no mood to hear his poor attempts at a joke. He drinks more coffee and suddenly doesn’t like being on the receiving end of the Harvey stare, because the guilt is sloshing in his guts again.
Even after her rambling, she proceeds to answer his question: “No, Harvey, I obviously didn’t sleep.”
“I’m sorry.”
Her hand lifts from his shin to wave in front of her face – dismissive. She shakes her head. “Don’t. I’m not scolding you, I just…”
Lips parting, she looks like she intends to say more, but tears well in her eyes instead. And out of nowhere, she’s crying.
Harvey hates when Donna’s crying. It’s only happened twice – the first, when they went to a screening of Titanic for its 10 year release anniversary in 2007, and the second was when she told him about Gordon just the week before. But both times scraped away at him, putting his mind in overdrive at the idea that she’s hurting and he has no capabilities to help her. He’s never handled crying people – crying women, specifically – well. Harvey himself was taught to stop crying a long time ago.
But when Donna cries, he knows he needs to fix whatever the hell happened and get away from her tears before they kill him. He nearly started looking through his contact list to figure out how many degrees of separation he was from James Cameron, just so he could call up the director and demand that Jack crawl onto that goddamn door.
Now, his mind isn’t in overdrive, but half-speed. He isn’t thinking clearly at all, he’s exhausted despite the scotch-induced nap, and he’s actively trying to grieve his father but now Donna is crying and he’s pretty sure that he has something to do with it.
How does he make it go away, though?
He starts small – moving his hand back and forth across her leg. “Donna.”
“I’m sorry,” she slurs, and as she avidly wipes her tears across her face it dawns on him that she really hasn’t slept. Not a wink, for the whole night. “I’m just tired, and– You scared me.”
He nods. He can’t even imagine the scene she walked in on last night. “Thank you for staying.”
“You called me, Harvey,” she tells him, and it isn’t something he needed to be reminded of but he loves the way she says it. “And you needed me. I wasn’t going anywhere.”
With some effort – a lot of effort – Harvey rests his mug down on the tile and shifts closer across the floor to Donna, so that he can wipe some of the tears. His shirtsleeves are rolled up, so it’s the pad of his thumb catching the drops and wiping them away. The placement of his hands is a little awkward – not quite cradling her jaw, but his hands are stiff as they hover over her cheekbone, contemplating what touch is crossing a line. Donna can’t even look at him while he does it.
He pulls away too soon to keep himself from lingering too long.
He finds himself saying it again, a little more forcefully: “Thank you for staying.”
She nods, like she gets it this time. He doesn’t quite know what else to say to express how right now is the calmest he’s felt since finding out about his dad, that even though he knows his eyes are probably red and sunken and his pigment is probably sickly, he doesn’t care how unraveled he looks in front of her. The tears are sinking back into her lids, and the longer that he’s staring into her eyes the less his head hurts and the less his stomach calls to him in anger. He just needs to stay here, for a moment, with her.
Just with her and without any pain.
“I’m sorry it didn’t go well with your mom.” Of course, she could figure that one out. Harvey feels the burn of his anger building back up in his fists, but that also just might be him holding the hot mug too tightly. There’s nothing he needs to say to that – he knows now that she knows, and they can let that rest. “I’ll call us out for today. And I’ll tell Jessica you can’t come in tomorrow, either.”
“One day is fine.”
“To you, but I’m telling Jessica you won’t come in tomorrow.”
“What’s stopping me from coming in anyway?”
“Nothing.” A pause – a small smile. “But I’m telling you to recover today, and then worry about everything else tomorrow.”
“What are you gonna do?” If he’s got the day off, she should too. Hell, she deserves a week of vacation time and another bonus after this.
Her head tilts in confusion. “Tomorrow?”
“Yeah. I won’t be there.”
“I don’t know, I’ll field calls. Reschedule the meetings. I’ll take care of everything.”
It’s a sentiment that punches him. Harvey is the one that’s supposed to be taking care of things – he doesn’t have troubles, he helps others with their troubles. He’s the problem solver. The fixer. The best closer in goddamn Manhattan. And even though Donna’s always taken care of stuff in this way for him, it’s her job, after all – the way that she says it feels like more than just responsibility, but an act of service. An assurance that she cares.
It’s hard for him to say, but he relents. “Okay.”
“Okay.”
Should he thank her again? They’re probably both getting tired of that. He shifts gears. Nods his head towards the door, towards his bedroom. “Get some sleep. I’m gonna clean up.”
“I can–”
“ Donna .” His voice is stronger now, but he can never have too much of an edge when he says her name. “You’ve done more than enough. Grab something to change into and go to bed. I’m just going to shower.”
“... And order breakfast?”
Like it’s following its own script, her stomach gurgles like it was cued to do so. He’ll do anything she asks.
“And order breakfast.”
Later, he crawls into bed with her, once he doesn’t smell like sweat and stomach acid and there’s a plate of pancakes delivered from a diner down the street sitting on the nightstand next to her. She stirs at the smell, at the feeling of weight dipping next to her, and when her bleary eyes blink open Harvey distantly envisions that one day he’ll deserve this view, and maybe he’ll be able to have it every morning.
Right now, he’s just undeserving and selfish, and he rests his body closer than appropriate next to hers, finding comfort in the smell of her perfume on his sheets. He rests his eyes to the sound of a fork clinking against a plate, knowing that Donna is probably inhaling the pancakes that he ordered with extra whipped cream, and he hears a whispered “thank you” right before he goes under.
Sometime later, she follows him into sleep, drowsy and well-fed. They don’t wake up until it’s 3pm, and Donna is wrapped around Harvey from behind, but neither of them will ever speak about that again. Harvey will order them more food and they’ll watch St. Elmo’s Fire while Donna’s feet are propped up in his lap and he chokes down the Thai food from the restaurant that he hates and she loves, and he’ll drive her back to her apartment himself, sometime after dark with a lingering gaze and a final thank you.
She’ll kiss him on the cheek and crawl out of the passenger seat, knowing that this, too, will be another night buried between them that involves a bed and whipped cream and intimacy that they can’t talk about again.
They’ll never really speak about any of this again.