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The apartment was quiet in that particular way it only got after ten, when the city outside had settled into its low hum and the only light in the bedroom came from the muted television and the cold blue glow of his tablet.
Harvey had a glass of Scotch on the nightstand, two fingers, one ice cube already surrendering itself to the amber, and he was propped against the headboard in a t-shirt he'd never admit to owning because it was, technically, an old Harvard rowing shirt that had shrunk in the wash and now fit him like a second skin.
He liked evenings like this.
No Louis screaming about something down the hall, no Donna raising an eyebrow at him from across a desk, no case threatening to blow up in his face before the sun came up again. Just him, his Scotch, and the mildly narcissistic pleasure of seeing what the internet had to say about him today.
It had started, as these things always did, with an alert. Someone had tagged the firm's name, which meant Harvey's name, which meant Harvey clicked, because he was only human and humans liked to see their own name in lights, even digital ones on a gossip blog with questionable journalistic integrity.
The photo itself was nothing special. It was him and Mike, walking out of the courthouse earlier that afternoon, mid-stride, suits pressed, sunglasses on.
Harvey remembered the moment. They'd just won, decisively, the kind of win that made opposing counsel's face do that thing where it tried very hard not to look like a kicked dog and failed spectacularly.
He scrolled down, already composing the mental highlight reel of compliments he expected.
Harvey Specter, ice in his veins.
Harvey Specter, the man, the myth, the tailored legend.
He took a sip of his Scotch in anticipation.
Instead, the first comment read, not me being weak for Mike Ross's stupid pretty face, someone help.
Harvey blinked.
He scrolled further, sure it was a fluke, an aberration, some rogue commenter with poor taste who'd clearly had too much wine before opening their laptop. But no. The next one said something about Mike's hair looking criminally soft in the wind. The one after that was a full paragraph—an actual paragraph, with punctuation and everything—dedicated to the way Mike's smile reached his eyes, how rare that was to see in "corporate lawyer types," how it made him look approachable, warm, like someone you'd actually want defending you instead of just someone who was good at it.
"Huh," Harvey said, to no one.
He kept scrolling. It got worse. Or rather, it got more Mike. Someone had made a whole thread—an actual thread, with numbered points—about Mike Ross's underrated sense of humor, citing some quip he'd apparently made to a reporter on the courthouse steps that Harvey hadn't even been close enough to hear properly. Someone else had zeroed in on the way Mike's tie was slightly loosened, his top button undone, like he'd fought a war and won and hadn't bothered to look pristine doing it, and how that was somehow more attractive than Harvey's crisp, unbothered, magazine-cover composure.
Harvey frowned at the tablet like it had personally wronged him.
He was Harvey Specter. He'd built an entire personality, a brand, a reputation on being the best-looking, sharpest-dressed, most quietly terrifying lawyer in Manhattan. People didn't write paragraphs about Mike's hair. People wrote paragraphs about Harvey's hair. Harvey's hair had its own fan behavior, thank you very much, or at least it used to, back before—
Back before what, exactly? Before Mike showed up in his life with that ridiculous memory and that even more ridiculous conscience and started stealing all the good lines in every conversation they had? Before Mike figured out how to talk to a jury like he was just chatting with them over beers, no artifice, no polish, just this easy, disarming charm that made people trust him instantly in a way that took Harvey years of calculated effort to fake?
He took another sip of Scotch, larger this time.
Not that it mattered. Who cared about Mike Ross and his stupidly soft-looking hair that probably wasn't even that soft, it was probably just regular hair, regular brown hair. And the smile—please. Everyone had a smile. Mike's wasn't special. It wasn't like it did anything specific, like it didn't light up an entire room or make grown paralegals forget how to collate documents properly. It was just a smile. Teeth, lips, the usual configuration.
And the humor thing, honestly, overrated. Sure, Mike was quick, quicker than most people gave him credit for, with that photographic memory backing up every reference so he could pull some obscure pop culture parallel out of nowhere and somehow make it land perfectly in the middle of a deposition.
Sure, it was, objectively, impressive.
Sure, it made Harvey laugh sometimes when he didn't want to, when he was trying to maintain the appropriate gravitas of a name partner and Mike would lean over and murmur something under his breath that had Harvey biting the inside of his cheek to keep a straight face.
That didn't mean anything. That was just—that was just Mike being Mike. Objectively funny. Objectively good at his job. Objectively easy on the eyes, in a boyish, rumpled, golden-retriever-who-somehow-passed-the-bar kind of way.
Harvey set the tablet down on his lap and stared at the ceiling for a second, processing the fact that he had just, in the privacy of his own head, described his associate as easy on the eyes.
He picked the tablet back up like that would somehow erase the thought.
The comments kept going. Someone had found an older photo, some benefit gala from a few months back, and there was an entire debate happening in the replies about whether Mike looked better in the navy suit or the charcoal one, with several commenters agreeing that it didn't matter because he looked good in anything.
One truly unhinged individual insisting that Mike Ross had "collarbone privileges" that should be illegal. Harvey did not know what that meant. Harvey was faintly concerned that some small, treacherous part of his brain understood exactly what that meant.
He clicked his tongue and scrolled up, back to the original photo, and looked at it again, really looked at it this time instead of just skimming for his own name like some pathetic attention-starved has-been. And okay. Fine. He could admit, purely as a matter of clinical observation, that the lighting had done something flattering to Mike's face in that shot. The late afternoon sun catching at an angle that softened everything, made his eyes look brighter, his hair look—
Stupidly soft. There it was again. That phrase kept surfacing in Harvey's head like it had taken up residence there, unbidden, uninvited, and was now paying rent.
It wasn't a big deal. He was allowed to notice things. He was a trained observer, for God's sake, that was practically his entire job description—reading people, reading rooms, noticing every small detail that gave you leverage in a negotiation. It so happened that this particular skill set meant he'd also, somewhere along the way, catalogued the exact way Mike's hair curled slightly at the ends when it got too long and he hadn't bothered to get a haircut, or the fact that his laugh had two distinct registers depending on whether he found something genuinely funny or was just being polite, or that when Mike was nervous he had this habit of glancing sideways at Harvey first, like he was checking the temperature of the room through him.
None of that meant anything. It was just data. Harvey collected data on everyone. It was a professional habit. A skill. Not a—not a thing. Definitely not a thing.
He noticed, with mild alarm, that his thumb had stopped scrolling and he was just looking at the photo now, at Mike's easy stride and loosened tie and the corner of that smile caught mid-laugh at something Harvey himself had apparently said, if his own memory of the moment served, and his memory usually served just fine even without a freakish eidetic gift to back it up.
He closed the article. He closed it firmly, decisively, the way he closed a deposition when a witness was getting too comfortable.
"People have no taste," he muttered to the empty room, took a healthy sip of Scotch, and did not, for one single second, consider that if he genuinely believed that, he wouldn't still be thinking about it three minutes later while absolutely, definitely not googling old photos of Mike Ross smiling to see if the internet had a point.
He did not have a problem. He had opinions. There was a difference, and Harvey Specter knew the difference better than anyone, because differentiating between what was true and what merely felt inconveniently true was, after all, the entire foundation of his professional life, and he was not about to let one mildly obsessive comment section unravel that now, no matter how soft Mike's hair looked in natural lighting, which, again, was purely observational, and entirely, completely, one hundred percent beside the point.