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The light came in wrong, too bright and too flat, the kind of light that meant Harvey had forgotten to close the blackout curtains the night before, which meant he had been distracted, which meant something had happened that he was going to have to think about in a minute, once his head stopped feeling like it belonged to somebody else.
He lay there for a second doing the inventory. Mouth dry. Temple throbbing in a slow, insistent rhythm like someone was tapping a spoon against a wine glass just to see how long it would take before it cracked. Scotch, then. A lot of scotch. He remembered the case, at least—someone's idiot subsidiary, the deposition that had gone sideways beautifully in their favor—and he remembered being pleased, expansively pleased, the kind of pleased that made him generous with a bottle of Macallan he usually didn't share with anyone in the office who hadn't earned it.
And then there was the weight next to him. A specific, warm, breathing weight, shifting slightly under the sheet, and Harvey's stomach did something unpleasant that had nothing to do with the alcohol.
He opened his eyes.
It took his brain a second longer than it should have to process what it was looking at, mostly because what it was looking at made so little sense that some merciful, self-preserving part of him tried to reject the data outright. But there was no rejecting it.
There was Louis Litt, in his bed, on his side, mouth slightly open, one arm flung out over the pillow like he owned real estate there.
Harvey stared at the ceiling for a long moment. He did the math. He did it twice, because the first time it came out the same and he assumed he'd made an error.
"Huh," he said, out loud, to no one, very quietly, because some instinct told him that whatever happened next should not happen loudly.
The flashes came back in pieces, unhelpfully, the way memory did when you'd had that much scotch—not a film reel so much as a slideshow somebody had shuffled. Louis in his doorway, tie loosened, saying something insufferable about chain of custody that had somehow turned into an argument about golf, of all things, and then the argument sharpening into something with an edge to it, Louis leaning in like he did when he wanted the last word, and Harvey—Harvey had said something, he couldn't remember what, something needling, and Louis had gotten right up into his space to fire back, and then neither of them had backed off the way they usually did.
And then, apparently, there had been kissing. And then, apparently, a great deal more than kissing.
Harvey exhaled slowly through his nose. He was, on principle, a man who did not panic. Panic was for people who hadn't thought ahead, and Harvey Specter always thought ahead, except, evidently, last night, when thinking ahead had lost out to a fifth of good scotch and whatever chemical reaction had been quietly humming under a decade of him and Louis needling each other in hallways.
He allowed himself exactly one more second of staring at the ceiling processing the sheer indignity of it—not the had-sex-with-a-man part, he wasn't going to pretend that was the part bothering him, he'd never had a complicated relationship with that—no, what was bothering him, what was actually, genuinely irritating him, was that somewhere in the fog of the night before, some small treacherous corner of his brain had filed the whole thing under surprisingly good, and that was going to be a problem, because Harvey did not want to know that. He did not want that information. He would have paid money not to have that information.
He got up carefully, easing himself off the mattress with the stealth of a man defusing something, and padded out to the kitchen in pants he found on the floor that may or may not have technically been Louis's, and started the coffee maker, because coffee was a thing you could control, coffee had rules, and right now Harvey wanted very badly to be standing in front of something with rules.
He'd gotten two mugs down and was midway through convincing himself this was fine, this was a thing that happened between consenting adults and had no bearing whatsoever on Monday morning, when he heard the unmistakable sound of Louis Litt having a complete nervous collapse from the bedroom.
"Oh my God," Louis said, to the ceiling presumably, in the exact strangled tone of a man watching his own life flash before his eyes. "Oh my God. Oh my God!"
"You're gonna want to keep it down," Harvey called out, not unkindly, pouring the coffee.
Louis appeared in the doorway approximately eleven seconds later, wrapped in the sheet like a toga, hair even more of a crisis standing up than it had been lying down, and his face doing something Harvey hadn't previously believed a human face could do—somewhere between abject horror and the specific mortification of a man who has just remembered, in vivid and complete detail, exactly what he did the night before and to whom.
"Harvey," Louis said. His voice cracked slightly on the second syllable. "Harvey, this—this did not happen. This is not a thing that happened."
"It happened," Harvey said, handing him a mug he did not ask for. "I've got the sheets to prove it."
"Do not," Louis said, holding up a finger, "do not make this into a joke. This is not joke material. This is the single worst thing that has ever happened to me, and I once got food poisoning at my own bar mitzvah reception."
"That tracks."
"Harvey." Louis's voice climbed another half octave, and he set the coffee down without drinking any of it, which for Louis was basically an act of self-harm. "If this gets out—if even one person at that firm finds out about this—I am done. I am finished. I will have to move to another state. Possibly another country. Jessica will never look at me the same way again, Donna will never stop looking at me the exact same way she's already looking at everyone, which is somehow worse, and Mike—Mike Ross will find a way to bring this up during a closing argument, I know he will, he's exactly that kind of person—"
"Louis."
"—and I will never, ever live it down, not if I litigate for a hundred years, not if I win every case from now until I die, they will put on my tombstone—"
"Louis," Harvey said again, sharper this time, the way you'd snap at a dog about to run into traffic, and Louis actually stopped, chest heaving slightly, staring at him with an expression that was almost pleading, which was a rare enough sight on Louis Litt that it landed somewhere Harvey wasn't entirely prepared for.
Harvey took a slow sip of his coffee, partly to buy himself half a second, mostly because he genuinely wanted the coffee. Then he set the mug down on the counter with a small, deliberate click.
"Nobody's gonna know," he said.
Louis blinked at him. "What?"
"I'm not telling anyone." Harvey said it plainly, no performance in it, no needle, which was itself unusual enough that Louis seemed to notice. "Not Donna. Not Jessica. Not Mike, God knows, especially not Mike. This stays in this kitchen and then it stays nowhere, because as far as I'm concerned it didn't happen, and if anyone asks I don't even remember last night past the second scotch."
"You expect me to believe that," Louis said, though some of the shrillness had drained out of his voice, replaced by something more like cautious, disbelieving hope, "you, Harvey Specter, are just going to sit on a piece of information like this. Forever. Out of the goodness of your heart."
"I expect you to believe it because it's true," Harvey said. "Look, I say a lot of things about you, Louis, most of them true, some of them cruel, and I'm not gonna pretend I've never thought about what you'd sound like crying in the associate bullpen. But I don't do this. I don't hand people something they can't take back, not even you. You want to know why? Because if I did it to you today I'd do it to somebody else tomorrow, and then what does my word mean. So no. Nobody's going to hear about this from me. Not as leverage, not as a joke at the annual associates' dinner, not as something I bring up when I want you to fold in a negotiation. It's done. It stays here."
Louis looked at him for a long moment, and something in his face shifted, the fear receding just enough to let a strange, wary gratitude through, the kind of expression a man wears when he's been braced for a hit that doesn't land. "Okay," he said slowly. "Okay. I—thank you. I mean it. Thank you."
"Don't thank me," Harvey said. "Drink your coffee before it gets cold, and get dressed, because I have things to do today that don't involve you standing in my kitchen in a bedsheet like some kind of very upsetting Roman senator."
That, at least, got something close to a real laugh out of Louis, short and involuntary, the tension breaking just enough for his shoulders to come down from around his ears. "You're an ass," he said, but there wasn't much heat in it.
"So I've been told." Harvey leaned back against the counter, arms crossed, and let a beat of quiet settle between them, the kind that under different circumstances would have been unbearable but right now felt oddly, almost companionably, fine. "For the record," he added, because he couldn't quite help himself, "this doesn't happen again."
"God, no," Louis said, with real feeling. "Absolutely not. This was—this was a one-time, never-speak-of-it-again, take-it-to-the-grave sort of thing."
"Good. Glad we agree on something."
"We agree on plenty of things," Louis said, with the faint, prickly defensiveness that was more familiar territory for both of them, and Harvey almost smiled, because there it was, the ordinary rhythm of it clicking back into place like a bone resetting.
"Name one."
"Ties should be silk, never polyester blend, that's a moral failing," Louis said immediately, and Harvey did smile then, just slightly, into his coffee.
"Fine. We agree on two things."
Louis gathered the sheet a little tighter around himself with as much dignity as a man could manage in that position, and headed back toward the bedroom to find his clothes, muttering something about how this was going to require significant, possibly professional-grade repression to get through the workday, and Harvey watched him go and thought, with the specific, aggrieved honesty of a hungover man too tired to lie to himself, that it really had been a surprisingly good time, and that this was, without question, going to be the single most annoying secret he'd ever kept.