Chapter Text
It was October. Edith Ross had been dead for two months already, and would be dead for many months yet to come. Mike was already dreading the so-called holiday season. As modest as his holidays had always been, they were going to be particularly modest if they involved a party of one. Mike had no idea what he was going to do.
Except work. Work was something that filled his time and wore out his brain and smoothed out his ragged moods. Work was something to rely on, even when Harvey wasn't. The rollercoaster of dealing with Daniel Hardman had been bad enough; once that was over everything was supposed to go back to normal (a few existential threats notwithstanding), and it hadn't.
Mike developed the idea that something was up after the third time Harvey interrupted a meeting for a cell phone call. He would turn stony and shoo Mike out of the room to talk, and afterwards no new work would show up on Mike's desk. So they weren't client calls, or they were clients that Harvey pawned off on someone else. Mike decided consciously not to be jealous; usually he was the one onto whom clients were pawned off, but he really didn't need any more work than he already had.
Three inexplicable phone calls in a single week were intriguing, but not intriguing enough for any detective work. Harvey was picky, defensive, and strange. It was possible he was demanding precise updates on the laundering of his shirts.
Then one gloomy Wednesday right after Halloween, Mike's phone rang. It scared the hell out of him, because the phone on his desk never rang. Nobody ever called for Mike, or if they did, they called his cell. He picked up the receiver and hoped like hell he didn't have to press any buttons to get on the line. "Hello?"
"You're not Donna," said a male voice.
"Really not," said Mike. "Sorry. Did the receptionist transfer you?"
"Maybe you can help me. You work for Harvey?"
"Yeah, I'm his associate, Mike Ross. Are you a client?"
The man on the other end of the line chuckled. "No, I'm his brother. He's not right there, is he?"
"No?" Mike paused. Mike had guessed that Harvey's mother wasn't dead, just dead to him. A brother, though -- Mike hadn't heard word one about a brother. "I sit in a cube downstairs from his office. Do you need to talk to him?"
"I tried that," said the brother with a sigh. "He's been stonewalling me for a week. Do you know what's up with him?"
There were a lot of mean jokes Mike could tell at a moment like this, but maybe not to the man's own kin. "Generally speaking, no, I do not know what is up with him. Is there something --?"
"My name's Ken, by the way. I called him on Saturday and he was in the hospital."
"He what?"
"I heard announcements in the background. Unless he was watching that one Three Stooges episode on top volume --"
Doctor Howard, Doctor Fine, Doctor Howard. An ambulance-chaser Harvey was not. "And he lied about it?"
"He wouldn't say," said Ken, "but I can't think of many scenarios that have him in a hospital on a Saturday afternoon that are good news."
Mike immediately ran through non-work scenarios likely and unlikely: boxing slip-up, cat-fight with that Amanda woman he hated so thoroughly, embarrassing accident involving sex toys. It would be possible for Harvey to be visiting a sick friend, except why would he stonewall his own brother about that? What if they were estranged too? As Mike thought through the possibilities, Ken asked, "Does he look okay?"
"I guess so? I mean, he looks like he's going to kill someone with the laser weapons in his eyes, but --"
Ken gave a small hard laugh like a rock skipped into a pond. "But that's not atypical. I meant is he losing weight? Or like, arm in a sling, can't get out of a chair by himself, anything like that?"
Was Harvey hurt in a way that Mike would notice, should notice? That stony face, was that the face he made when he heard bad news? If Harvey were dying, would he tell anyone? Mike said quietly, "No. I -- no."
"Damn." Ken's thinking was practically audible over telephone wires. "If you find anything out will you tell me?"
If Mike found out anything, it would mean Harvey was in trouble, sick or hurt or worse. If Mike found out anything, there was a good chance he would lose the one stable thing in his life, and really be left alone. If Mike found out anything, Harvey would never forgive him for telling the world. "Yes," said Mike. "Absolutely."
*
"And I'm going to be out on Friday," Harvey said on Monday morning. He slipped that little fact in after a complex description of whom to call and when in a contract matter, as if Mike would just note it down without placing it in context. He went on, "So I'll want the next draft of the Sarnow agreement by Thursday close of business."
"Ah." Mike looked up from the stack of drafts in his lap. Behind Harvey's head, the beautiful view, a little less beautiful on such a gray morning. "So by out you mean unreachable?"
Indifferent to his associate's attention, Harvey closed a file on his desk. "More or less till Monday."
Things that could cause Harvey Specter to be unreachable for three days included: running off to Vegas to get married (maybe), a secret ops mission to Afghanistan, a horrible sensory-deprivation tank accident, or open-heart surgery.
"Oh my god, you are dying," Mike blurted.
He wilted under Harvey's quizzical stare. Someone who was dying probably would not react with quite that level of calm when confronted so, unless that someone was hell-bent on proving his aloofness even on his deathbed. Harvey leveled his brows and asked, in something approaching a reasonable tone, "What the hell are you talking about."
"I, I -- " Mike took a breath and made the decision. You do not lie to your own kin about whether or not you're dying. Mike had strong feelings on this issue. "You've been fielding weird phone calls and you've been preoccupied and you were in a hospital on Saturday and now you're -- "
"Who told you --?" Harvey had been leaning back in his chair, but he thunked forward abruptly in his outrage. His cheeks turned red with it.
It occurred to Mike suddenly that Harvey was a man who carried grudges. He was good at it, practiced. Perhaps it was a bad idea to mention Ken by name, especially if they were estranged. "Jessica said --"
"You're talking to Jessica about me behind my back?" Harvey mouth went cruel, that way he did when he meant to make an example of someone. Someone being Mike.
"She called me into her office!" Mike raised his hands, palms out, please-don't-shoot-me. "What, was I going to say no?"
"Did you tell her anything?" Harvey growled. His hands gripped the edge of his desk as if he might decide to vault neatly over it and stomp Mike into little pieces. Although that might be construed as assault.
Mike cleared his throat and glanced over his shoulder. Donna had not even turned around, so obviously she didn't think Mike was in danger. Or any more danger than he deserved. "No, how could I? I didn't know anything." He watched Harvey's hands relax, saw the relieved twitch at the corner of his mouth. "I still don't know anything. You seem to enjoy keeping me out of the loop."
Pushing back his office chair, Harvey pinched the bridge of his nose. Mike watched him, unmoving, alert for a cue how this was going to go. Sometimes a direct bonk over the head was the only way to get anything out of the man, and sometimes he just bonked you back ten times harder. Harvey ground his teeth and said, "Fuck. Okay. So here's what you're going to tell her."
So Mike was going to be asked to lie about a terminal disease. Great.
Harvey turned on the earnest charm, that head-down eyes-up look he'd probably learned from George Clooney on ER. Mike knew exactly how it worked and still fell for it anyway. Harvey said slowly, "You're going to say I'm at a hospital on Long Island, donating bone marrow."
"But you're actually..."
"At a hospital on Long Island," Harvey repeated, deadpan, "donating bone marrow."
Harvey was pretty smooth, but he did not often tell lies. Half-lies, omissions, allowances of wrongheaded supposition -- but not outright falsehood. Then again, asking Mike to pass the word around rather than saying it himself might be a way of avoiding the small number of people most likely to call him on his bullshit.
On the off chance Donna was still listening in (depended on how entertaining she found Mike's constant humiliation), it seemed like a good idea to get Harvey on the record. "You're not sick."
"No I am not. You might need to get your head examined, though." Harvey made eye-contact as he said it, cool, all traces of anger gone. If he was lying, he was frighteningly good at it. Mike decided consciously to trust him. After all, if he were sick, Mike would find out eventually, right?
"You're really donating bone marrow."
"They did the preliminary testing last Saturday. I go under the knife Friday morning." Only Harvey could make an appointment for minor surgery sound like a Caribbean getaway. It was the latest thing, very exclusive. Mike was not invited.
"No offense," Mike told him, "but you don't seem like the type."
"That's why they have a donor registry. In point of fact," Harvey said, straightening his shirt cuffs, "I am very much the type, a nine out of ten match."
"Oh. So do you want to tell Jessica," and your brother, Mike managed not to say, "or do you want me to do it?"
Harvey rolled his eyes. "Get out of my office."
*
Listening to a man laugh at you over the phone has the potential to be incredibly aggravating, but Ken Specter's laugh was the infectious kind. He whooped till he ran out of breath, and then did that high little ih-ih-ih on the last puffs of air in his lungs, and then sucked in another huge breath and laughed all over again. "Oh, you didn't," he cried, and Mike could hear him wiping away tears.
"I don't officially know you exist, by the way," Mike told him, but he was smiling as he said it.
"Bone marrow, huh? I guess it's less of a commitment than giving a kidney."
"Well, your bone marrow grows back."
Ken made a little noise in his throat. He was standing somewhere with an echo, and his noise reverberated in the space. "Is it dangerous?"
"No, I mean not more than getting a tooth pulled." Mike decided not to mention the icepick-looking needle they used to harvest marrow from the pelvic crest. He told Ken, "People sometimes react badly to anaesthesia, so that's probably why he's banking on being out of reach all weekend."
"He's going to turn his cell off," Ken said slowly. "He's going to be alone in a hospital bored and in pain, and me 1500 miles away."
Mike struggled to imagine Harvey Specter in a standard hospital gown. The humiliation would be epic, which of course was why nobody would ever see him that way. "I'm not sure he wants visitors," Mike said at last.
Ken sighed. "He even tell you which hospital?"
"No. I asked Donna and she didn't know either."
"Said she didn't know, you mean." Clearly Ken was familiar with the Donna Experience. Maybe she would visit, would bring him flowers and crappy romance novels and sugar-free candy. Mike only had experience with his Gram being hospitalized, and didn't know what you would bring Harvey. Gold-plated matchbox cars, maybe. Or armfuls of work. He didn't seem like a video-game kind of guy.
Mike spun a little in his office chair and tried to imagine Ken's face: whether it was still and calculating like Harvey's or open and mobile as his voice seemed to imply. What he looked like, even. Mike had thought he knew Harvey, but clearly not. "So, are you going to be seeing him for Thanksgiving?"
"Not this year," said Ken, as if he were rethinking that decision. "This damn project is so far behind I'm about to start commuting between here and the next gig in Orlando."
"Here?"
"Dallas. The ballsy thing to do would be to parachute into New York on Thanksgiving morning, give him the shakedown, and fly out again that night to be onsite in the morning." Ken's voice was thin and reedy, exhaustion in every word. "It's what he would do."
It was what Harvey would do, probably. Exciting, unexpected, impressive. Unwise, but impressive. "He does boldly go where no one has gone before."
"Oh my god, he pulled the Captain Kirk thing on you too?"
"Of course he did," Mike told him, smiling. "But you know what, he isn't game like Kirk. You know, dorky plot you have to act out in front of cardboard and sell it as if it were real: he just tears up the cardboard and builds anew from scratch. He's more like -- he's like --"
"Don't say Captain Picard, I can't bear it."
Captain Picard was way too straight an arrow for Harvey, way too earnest. "No, you know who he is? He's like the original Khan. Ricardo Montalban with a ponytail and a Nehru jacket."
It was nice to hear Ken laugh. He sounded like he needed it, or maybe a really long nap. "Wait, my brother is a megalomaniacal, Corinthian-leather-fetishizing member of the genetically-engineered master race? ...Actually, that's not bad. Okay, go on."
"I'm disturbed that you can imagine Harvey in a ponytail and a Nehru jacket, but okay. So. He's constantly frustrated that the world doesn't just automatically do what he says, but he's also constantly, smirkily sure that what he says is the right way to do things, and the rest of the world will come around."
"Khan was a great big baby, though," Ken interjected, eager now. "Didn't he basically kill Mister Spock in a hissy fit?"
"No, no, no, that was the movie, and anyway Spock sacrificed himself to restart the warp drive --"
"Oh my god, you're just like Harvey."
"I've never even seen half the show, I just read a book about it when I was 12." Mike decided not to say anything about whether he was just like Harvey, and whether that was a good or a bad thing. "So anyway, in the show, Khan was charming and ambitious and tricky, and great with the ladies, basically like Kirk dialed up to eleven. His big flaw is that he doesn't have the patience to listen to people like Spock and Bones."
Ken was clearly not that interested in characterological analysis. "Khaaaaan!!" he bellowed, and an echo bellowed it back to him.
"God, where are you?"
"I'm in the wings of a symphony hall with a defective ceiling," Ken told him. "Long story. I'll tell it someday if we ever meet."
"Harvey's gonna be mad," Mike said slowly. "That we're talking about him without him knowing it."
"He doesn't need to worry. I'm too tired to think of any embarrassing stories about him right now."
Mike hesitated. "You and he -- you're like, you're close?"
"As close," Ken answered, clearly able to interpret Mike's real question, "as he lets anybody."
"Okay. So you do think it's weird that I'm goofing off with my boss's brother, is it? I mean --"
"We should have a talk some time about your bush-league definition of weird. Tell you what, I finish up this job, catch up on the Orlando job, I get to stop working 20-hour days. I always buy the tickets last minute, but I'll come up for Christmas. Maybe you can talk the man into taking a day off for his only brother."
"What, me convince him? Did I not just say the part about not listening to Spock and Bones?"
"So which one are you? Spock or Bones?"
Mike laughed and laughed. "Unfortunately I do not get to wear themed jammies to work, so I'm going to say I'm neither."
*
On the Monday after the procedure, strangers from Britain were in the office, and Harvey wore navy. It was a three-piece suit, severe atop a stark white shirt, waistcoat like a corset. It was sunny out, bracingly cold, and the dark color he wore made him seem more blond. Its close fit made him look not thin but sharp, crisp edges and a don't-fucking-touch-me manner. He looked like a knife.
It was reasonable to assume that Harvey was all bristling nastiness because Jessica was meeting with strangers (and not inviting Harvey to the meeting). So it took Mike till afternoon to realize that the knife in question grimaced every time he stood up or sat down. And that having somebody cut open your back and stick a gigantic needle into your pelvic crest probably hurts, even three days later.
"You need any painkillers?" Mike asked during their 2 o'clock meeting. He asked at a moment that Harvey wasn't moving, so it would sound like general conscientiousness rather than an observation of weakness.
"I'm fine," Harvey said. His eyes roamed the hall, wary. So maybe his back wasn't the only reason he was in a terrible mood.
So Mike kept his mouth shut and they got to work. Sarnow was a particularly bothersome adversary, constantly changing the fine details of the settlement contract as if hoping something would be overlooked. Mike took a bit of punitive pleasure in pointing out, in every endless draft, the same omissions and additions that had been wrangled five drafts ago.
"Why does he keep doing it?" Mike grumped to himself. "And what authority on this planet can make him stop?"
It was generally a bad sign when Harvey took complaints literally as questions. "You can write an estoppel clause into the contract this time, but it doesn't take effect till he signs it." Now that he knew to watch for it, Mike could see the stiffness in Harvey's posture. It was absurd that they weren't allowed to talk about it. Mike knew a little bit about absurd by now.
"Estoppel. I love that word. Estop! In the name of love." Despite the shared surname, Mike did not have a lot in common with Diana Ross, and could be sure he looked ridiculous posing like a Motown singer while seated in the office of a Midtown law firm. With extreme effort he kept a straight face, since the whole point of such self-humiliation was to get Harvey to laugh. Or at least to give that you-are-a-hopeless-dweeb look. Mike kept on mugging: "Estop that train!"
Harvey glanced at him, still cool. "Estoppel means being required by law to shut the hell up."
"And as soon as you can trick me into agreeing to that, I'll estop. See what I did there? Estop?"
Harvey did not take up the opportunity for wordplay. He did stand up though (another grimace), and paced away from the windows with his hands behind his back. "Okay, contract whiz. Explain to me in your own words why you cannot sell yourself into slavery."
It had been months since the last time Harvey had pulled the Law Professor routine. Mike had been sure they were past that by now. But mostly he led off with the most smart-aleck answer he could think of: "My current employment circumstances notwithstanding, a contract to do something unlawful is invalid. If you want me to promise to do illegal things, you can't go crying to the law when I break my promise."
"Not because it's unconscionable?" Harvey's eyebrow twitched, as if fun were dawning on him slowly.
"The contract is void. Doesn't matter whether it's voidable."
"Exactly." Harvey put on his superior expression. He was almost himself again, and Mike delighted to see it.
"I like the fact that you agree my job is unconscionable."
"It's a good fit for you," Harvey quipped.
Quips. Quips were good. Mike chuckled more than the joke deserved, and got back to the points of the contract in front of them. He failed to comment on the fact that Harvey wrapped up this the umpteenth draft of the Sarnow agreement standing up. Mike got up too, and carried documents over to Harvey and then back to the table as if their daily meeting had become a game of tag.
On the other side of the glass door, Donna gave Mike a funny look, but she was Donna: she managed not to let Harvey see it.
At the end of the hour, Mike marshaled all his piles of paper from the table into one big pile to be transported back to his desk. He paused before going and watched Harvey rest his hand on one of his basketballs (the Larry Bird one). Being a senior partner, he could easily have called off sick, or could go home early without giving a reason. As far as Mike knew, he fully intended to work the rest of the day, and the rest of the week, and probably on Thanksgiving as well.
"Do you know who it is?" Mike asked diffidently. "That gets your bone marrow. I know they make heart transplants anonymous, but it's not like --"
Harvey turned away from the window. The afternoon sun haloed the back of his head and put the sharp lines of his face into shadow. His voice was low as he said, "I don't know who it is, no."
"Oh." Mike shifted his pile of papers from one arm to the other. "Will they at least tell you if it takes? I mean, I'd want to know, after all that effort, that it actually saved a life, you know?"
"I'll know," said Harvey, and turned back to the window.
Mike shut up and let himself out.
*
"Yeah, he seems okay," said Mike, and cradled the phone on his shoulder as he let himself into his apartment. It was Thanksgiving Eve, and all the grocery stores were closed. Which was a problem, because Mike was pretty sure there was no food at all in his apartment.
Ken grunted, a hard little thing like a muscle cramp. "Because he would ever tell you if he wasn't."
"He has not yet collapsed at my feet, true." Mike truthfully had no idea what he would do if Harvey collapsed at his feet. Catch him, hopefully. Try not to scream his fool head off. "He was cranky, which is like admitting he's in pain. But only to people who know him really well."
"Typical." Ken sighed. He didn't echo today; presumably whatever he was doing in Dallas was no longer in a concert hall. Mike hunted in his fridge for edibility while he waited for Ken to work through his thought process. "If you hadn't intervened, neither of us would have known about it at all."
"Hm," Mike said. This was not the conversation he'd been expecting to have. He gave up and closed the fridge.
"I mean," Ken lamented, "you wouldn't go in for minor surgery and then just not tell your family, would you?"
There were ways to avoid it, of course. Ken Specter was still functionally a stranger. Mike took a breath, and decided to tell him the blunt truth. "I don't have any family."
"I -- uh, really? Sorry --"
"Only child, parents died when I was young. My Gram was the last, and she died a few months ago. I'm kind of used to it now. Work's become kind of like, basically my whole life lately."
Ken didn't say anything to that. They both stayed still in their respective locations for a good long minute. Long enough for Mike to realize what he'd just said.
"That's really pathetic, isn't it," he laughed.
"Not really, no," said Ken.
Mike opened the cabinets one by one in hopes that a sandwich had materialized there since last he'd checked. No wonder first-year associates lived on takeout: they never had time for grocery shopping. "Thanks for that song, by the way. You were right, it's better acoustic."
"I won't say everything is better acoustic," Ken said, and then paused long enough that Mike could recite the punchline with him. "But everything is better acoustic."
"Yeah, yeah, yeah, I bet you say that about Jimi Hendrix too."
"So, about family --" Ken stopped and breathed into the phone.
Mike was developing a great deal of experience in how to josh various Specters out of their weird moods. "You offering to adopt me?"
"No?" Ken chuckled, and then in the middle of his next pause he blurted, "I'm getting married."
"Congratulations," said Mike automatically, and then realized that the way Ken had said it was not as an unmitigated good thing. Mike held onto a sad, battered box of Chex (not even frosted Chex or anything, plain ones), unwilling to open it up noisily while Ken was obviously working through something important. He settled on the couch and waited patiently. At last Ken added, "My girlfriend got down on one knee and proposed this afternoon."
Mike smiled to himself. "They do that? How come none of mine ever did that?"
"Yeah, I'm still kinda stumped. I mean, I knew we were headed in that direction, but I thought I was gonna do something sneaky, you know, put it on YouTube and humiliate her in front of all our friends. Damn woman beat me to it."
"I am sure you look beautiful in diamonds," Mike told him.
"Actually," said Ken, and his voice went far away, "it's made out of a zip-tie and some silver where the jewel's supposed to go." Mike could hear the little clicky noise of the phone's camera, and then a beep-boop-boop as Ken sent it along.
"Modern artist?" Mike asked, as he examined the picture. The zip-tie was red, and trimmed neatly, unlike Ken's nails. His fingers were grubby and banged-up, like a mechanic's hands, the improvised ring nestled neatly on the third finger of his left hand.
"Structural engineer," Ken corrected. "We met on the job, actually. Joint consult in Toronto about four years ago. Her name's Annie."
"You were hanging from one rafter and she was hanging from the other? Wait, was she actually making buildings out of zip-ties?"
Ken laughed, a scared sound. Mike didn't quite understand the emotion he was hearing, and wondered whether people who knew Ken better would get it. Whether Harvey would get it. He felt a little like he was intruding where he didn't belong, which was --
"I made her one too, out of a guitar string. Kind of a symbolic thing."
"That's cool," Mike encouraged carefully.
"I'm not going to fuck it up this time, you know? Done it once in my twenties, and I sucked at it. I want to do it right this time."
Mike did not know what it meant to do it right. He'd clearly done it wrong every time so far.
"Anyway, I haven't told Harvey yet, so don't say anything."
Mike frowned at the box of Chex in his lap. "No fear of that."
"We're getting past the hurdle of her parents first. If they don't completely flip their lids and kidnap her back to Korea, then telling Harvey's gonna be a cakewalk."
Why telling Harvey should or would be difficult in any way was not clear, and Mike did not have it in him to pry. Ken would volunteer that kind of information, or not, at the pace he chose.
"Anyway, I had to tell somebody," said Harvey's kid brother.
"Well," said Mike, and opened the Chex box, "I'm honored."
*
It's a thing people do. Ask each other if they're seeing family for the holiday (even if they don't do Christmas), just to fill up the space in a kitchenette or a conversational gap at a year-end gala. Mike got used to it pretty quickly, and used to the awkward pause as people asked everyone else in the room, and failed to ask Mike. They all knew he was not seeing family for the holiday.
(He did get an unpleasant little charge out of volunteering his plans, each more outlandish than the last. He was a little sorry that Harold was no longer with the firm, because Harold was the only person on earth who really would have believed that Mike was planning to lead a military coup in Pishpek during his copious holiday free time.)
(It also turned out that a whole room full of Harvard Law's brightest did not know the name of the capital city of Kyrgyzstan. He might as well have claimed to be invading Mars.)
Somehow word had gotten all the way around to Edward Darby, who spoke delicately around the matter even as he and Harvey squared off in their insane testosterone contest. As arcane and weaponized as Darby's sense of etiquette could be, he had a talent for avoiding even the possibility of an awkward conversational pause.
Harvey, on the other hand, liked to rip band-aids clean off. It was not unexpected that he would ask, even in the middle of everything else that was going on. He waited till December 23rd, the day that a pair of ridiculously high heels arrived by messenger for Donna. She put them on immediately, left a lipstick mark on her boss's face, and pranced down the hallway in ecstasy.
Mike stood in front of her cube and watched her go, and watched Harvey miss the lipstick with his handkerchief, with a funny little pang. He decided not to mention the continuing presence of Sweet Vixen (Lancome 027) still marring Harvey's cheek: it was kind of nice to imagine that he wore the evidence of his popularity proudly. If it was unintentional, well, Mike was likely to be in earshot when Louis made hay out of that fact.
It was kind of an odd shape, like a greater-than sign or maybe kind of like a -- Mike ducked as a small white box flew at his head.
"You're off my fantasy football roster," Harvey called from his office.
Mike popped back up to his feet and retrieved the package from behind Donna's monitor. It was a square about the size of a grilled cheese sandwich, tied with burgundy ribbon. "You're supposed to warn a guy."
Harvey smirked the smirk of someone who had been throwing things at people's heads his whole life. "Your reflexes are shot."
Desperate times call for desperate measures. "You have lipstick on your face."
"And you don't," Harvey taunted. "Even the most pathetically dedicated associate isn't here on Christmas. So go ahead and sleep in day after tomorrow."
"So magnanimous," said Mike, who had no intention of obeying. The feud with Darby was too important to Harvey to let mere federal holidays get in the way. Out the window, the sky was heavy and gray, rain turning to sleet and back. Mike thought about having a brother, about flying out to see him when something important was happening in his life. He thought about Ken, who instead of coming here was with his future in-laws in California, nervous as a squirrel. He listened to the tap of droplets against the glass and asked, "And you? Going to be watching the college bowl games?"
He looked like he was thinking about it, the bastard. "Generally I stick to the bedroom. And I have yet to meet a woman who prefers my divided attention, although they're rumored to exist."
"Oh, of course," said Mike, and rolled his eyes. The only question was whether Harvey had met his Christmas Day sex kitten yet, or intended to pick up a stranger in the next 24 hours. Or whether he was making it all up and would be eating cereal in his underwear in front of the Yule Log broadcast like every other bachelor in the greater tri-state area.
Harvey chuckled. "You?"
"A quarter of my associate class is Jewish," he said, as offhand as he knew how. "Although a strong minority voted for bowling, the Michael Curtiz retrospective at the Cady uptown won out."
Harvey didn't pause, didn't call the lie obvious between them. "You came to Casablanca for the waters?" he asked, the lines bunching up around his eyes.
Mike raised his eyebrows gravely. "I was misinformed."
He got home that night and opened the little white box and discovered a pair of delicate, simple silver cufflinks. At the bottom of the box, a folded page of fine cream stationery (no initials or anything; Harvey would hate to be thought of as that fussy) that said: BUY YOURSELF SOME REAL SHIRTS and provided the phone numbers of three different custom tailors. One of them was starred: it would be open on Christmas.