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Mike woke up first, which almost never happened, and for a long moment he just lay there staring at the ceiling of Harvey's bedroom—their bedroom, he corrected himself, still not quite used to it even after all this time—and listened to Harvey breathe.
There was a weight on his chest that had nothing to do with the arm slung across him. It had been building for weeks now, quiet and insistent, something that he kept turning over in his head during depositions when he should have been listening to witnesses lie badly about timesheets. He turned his head and looked at Harvey's face, slack with sleep, mouth slightly open in a way Harvey would have denied to his grave, and Mike smiled before he could stop himself.
Mike stretched, arms over his head, the ring on his finger catching the early light. He twisted it once, an old habit by now, comforting in its smallness. Harvey stirred at the movement, because of course he did—the man had the sleep patterns of someone perpetually expecting a 2 a.m. phone call from a client in crisis.
"You're staring," Harvey mumbled, eyes still closed.
"I'm admiring."
"Admiring me while I sleep is a Bond villain move, Mike."
"I've been called worse."
Harvey cracked one eye open, found Mike's face close to his, and instead of pulling back he leaned in and kissed him, slow and unhurried, morning breath and all, because six years of pretending not to want this had apparently used up his entire lifetime allotment of restraint. When he pulled away he pressed his forehead against Mike's for a second, just breathing him in.
"A hundred and sixty-eight days," Harvey said, voice still rough with sleep, "until you marry me."
There it was. That warm, stupid, full-body flush that Mike had never once managed to suppress, not in a month of Harvey doing this, dropping the countdown into conversations like loose change, like it cost him nothing to say and everything to mean.
A hundred and sixty-eight days.
Mike buried his face against Harvey's neck so Harvey wouldn't see exactly how gone he was over a sentence he'd now heard probably thirty times, the number changing but never the weight behind it.
"You're insufferable," Mike said into his skin.
"You're the one who agreed to marry an insufferable person. Buyer's remorse this early is a bad sign."
"No remorse." Mike lifted his head. "Just recalibrating my tolerance for smugness. Long engagement, lots of runway."
"Should've done that recalibrating before the ring."
"Should've," Mike agreed, and kissed him again because he could, because it was allowed now, because some nights he still couldn't quite believe it was allowed, that this thing that used to live entirely in the space between them, unspoken and vibrating with everything they weren't saying, now got to just exist out loud, over coffee, in elevators, in the back of town cars where Ray very studiously watched the road.
They got up eventually. Harvey made coffee, badly, because he insisted on some complicated ritual with a scale and a timer that Mike was fairly sure existed only so Harvey could stand in the kitchen looking competent at something other than litigation. Mike sat on the counter in his boxers, eating cereal directly out of the box, watching him.
"You know," Mike said around a mouthful of cereal, "for a man who bills four figures an hour, your coffee process is deeply inefficient."
"For a man who bills four figures an hour, I have excellent priorities."
"Priorities being burnt coffee."
"Priorities being not letting some pod-based garbage machine touch my kitchen." Harvey glanced over. "Get off the counter."
"Make me."
Harvey crossed the kitchen, took the cereal box out of Mike's hands, set it down, and kissed him instead, one hand braced on the counter beside his hip, the other cupping his jaw like Mike was something worth being careful with.
Mike wrapped his legs loosely around Harvey's waist and let himself sink into it, into the specific, particular miracle of being wanted like this by a man who used to communicate affection almost exclusively through pop culture references and expensive scotch.
The weeks went by strangely. Slow in the way that anticipation always stretched things thin, and impossibly fast in the way that life with Harvey had always moved—cases stacking up, closing arguments, Louis threatening to quit twice and meaning it neither time, Donna orchestrating the entire wedding from her desk like it was one more litigation she intended to win. Mike watched the number shrink in Harvey's mouth over weeks, and each drop felt enormous, felt like proof that something real and finite was finally coming.
A hundred and forty-five days, murmured against Mike's temple in a cab after a firm dinner, Harvey's hand resting possessively on his knee the entire ride while Louis pointedly did not look at them from the other side of the car.
A hundred and twenty-two days, said flatly across a conference table while they were both supposed to be reviewing a merger agreement, low enough that only Mike heard it, and Mike had to excuse himself to the bathroom to compose his face before opposing counsel noticed the associate was blushing like a teenager.
Ninety-one days, whispered right before Harvey fell asleep, voice already half gone, like it was the last thought he wanted in his head before the night took him.
Mike started keeping his own count without meaning to. He'd catch himself doing the math in the shower, at his desk, in the middle of cross-examining a witness, some background process running constantly now, counting down to the day he got to stand up in front of everyone who mattered and say it out loud, forever, official.
Except.
Except somewhere after the halfway mark, watching that number keep dropping and dropping, Mike realized he didn't actually want to wait for the rest of it.
It wasn't about the wedding hall, the flowers, the guest list Donna had color-coded within an inch of its life. He wanted all of that too, still wanted the whole absurd, beautiful production of it, wanted Harvey in a tux giving a speech that would probably make half the room cry and the other half suspicious that aliens had replaced Harvey Specter with a functioning human being.
But the piece of paper, the legal fact of it—that part felt suddenly, urgently unbearable to postpone for another month. Every time Harvey said a number out loud, some small, greedy part of Mike thought, why are we still counting, why not now.
So one ordinary afternoon, with thirty-one days left on Harvey's private ledger, Mike walked into Harvey's office without knocking, closed the door, and said, "Marry me."
Harvey looked up from his laptop with the particular expression of a man doing rapid mental inventory, checking whether he'd missed something. "We're already getting married, Mike. I believe there was a speech involved. I believe I've been personally handling a countdown for five months."
"I know."
"So this is either a redundant proposal or you're about to tell me something that requires a lawyer."
"Marry me this afternoon."
That got him. Harvey set the laptop aside slowly, leaned back in his chair, studied Mike like he was trying to read a witness who'd suddenly changed their story mid-testimony. "We have a venue in thirty-one days. We have your grandmother's seating preferences memorized because apparently she has opinions about who's allowed near the open bar."
"We're still doing all of that. The hall, the party, Grammy terrorizing the bartender, all of it, exactly as planned." Mike came around the desk, sat on the edge of it, close enough that his knee brushed Harvey's thigh. "I just don't want to wait one more month for the part that actually makes it real."
"It's already real."
"I know." Mike reached down, took Harvey's hand, thumb running over the ring already sitting there. "I'm saying every morning for five months you've told me how many days are left, and every morning I lie there doing that stupid gooey internal thing, and somewhere around month three I realized I didn't want to keep counting down to some finish line when the courthouse is four blocks away. We could be married by five o'clock."
Harvey didn't answer right away. Mike watched something shift behind his eyes, calculation giving way to something rawer, something that looked almost like the expression Harvey wore that first night after the proposal, when he'd thought Mike was asleep and had just sat there watching him for twenty minutes like he still couldn't believe his luck.
"You're serious," Harvey said finally.
"Dead serious. I will even skip the pun about objecting. Although, technically, I do object—to waiting another thirty-one days to marry you."
"That was genuinely terrible."
"You love my terrible jokes."
"I tolerate your terrible jokes the way I tolerate your taste in ties." But Harvey was already standing, already reaching for his jacket, and Mike felt that familiar lurch in his chest, the one that still hit him every time he got proof that Harvey wanted this exactly as much as he did,plain and unguarded. "Donna's going to kill us both."
"Donna's going to be furious for approximately six minutes, and then she'll be ridiculously happy for us."
"She's predictable," Harvey said fondly as he shrugged the jacket on, then paused, hand on the doorknob, and looked back at him with an expression Mike had learned, over years, to recognize as the closest Harvey ever got to defenseless. "You really don't want to wait a month."
"I really don't."
"Thirty-one days early, then."
Harvey crossed the office, cupped Mike's face in both hands, and kissed him. Mike kissed him back immediately, hands fisting in his lapels, and when they broke apart Harvey rested his forehead against Mike's.
"Zero days," Harvey murmured, "before you marry me."
Mike laughed, helpless and bright, and pulled him toward the door.