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Mike Ross was confounding. Chatty, familiar, gawky and unsmooth, ignorant of the concept of hairbrushes, emotional, obsessed with ethics, enviably and annoyingly exuberant. Sometimes Harvey wanted nothing more than to frog-march him down the hall and give him a swirly. Being about 30 years too old to consider swirlies a worthy tactic of social control was a great tragedy in Harvey's life.
Mike Ross was sitting on Harvey's couch, confoundingly, in tears. Not big, dramatic, boo-hoo tears, just wet cheeks and reddened eyes and a complete absence of shame at those facts. Harvey was not the sort to cede his own home territory on account of embarrassing displays of emotion; but he also was not the sort who could make people stop crying. (Rather the opposite, generally.) Donna had already gone home, of course, so this was a problem he was going to have to solve himself. He paused in the doorway assessing the situation, and then came in.
"Hi," said Mike, and wiped his face with his long, skinny fingers. He'd turned on the desk lamp, so the room was not in complete dramatic darkness. The city lights outside punctuated the evening.
Harvey turned on a second lamp and sat down on the other end of the couch, out of reach on the off-chance a virulent case of hugging broke out.
Mike gave an apologetic shrug. "Seemed like a better idea to do it here than down Associate Alley."
"Does this mean," Harvey said with mock-gravity, "that you've uncovered some terrible mistake in the Trumbull estate paperwork?"
"No." Mike sniffled, and widened his blinking eyes as if to spread out the last of the moisture in them. He leaned forward, confessional. "But Henry Trumbull called me a pencil-necked twerp on the phone this afternoon. So. Maybe you don't want me at the meeting tomorrow."
Henry Trumbull was an old-school WASP, born in the forties but with manners from about 1898. He wore thrice-resoled shoes and shunned the society pages, and Harvey had never heard him speak an ill word to anyone. Mike, who routinely got called a pencil-necked twerp and worse (often by Harvey himself), could not be driven to tears by such a bizarrely gentle epithet.
"He was very close to his sister," said Harvey. He opened his mouth to say that grief makes people do weird things, and realized at once how unnecessary it was to say that to Mike Ross. And voila, explanation for the water-stains on his couch. Harvey closed his mouth.
"Sometimes it just hits me," said Mike, unable as always to leave the subtext subtextual. "It'll pass."
They sat facing the same way and stared in tandem at the sparkling night skyline. The air-conditioning was the only sound in the room, a dull background hum that could crawl into your consciousness like a phantom. It was ten weeks since Mike's grandmother had died, ten weeks since Jessica had lost and retaken control of the firm. The rebranding was done so quickly it was almost possible to convince yourself that the name Hardman had never been on that letterhead, those doors. Jessica did like a smooth transition. What Harvey liked most of all was to be openly identified as Jessica's right hand.
Mike was now the right hand to the right hand, and remained irritatingly humble despite the panoply of opportunities to crow about it. Harvey had started lobbing him verbal softballs, just to watch in frustrated amazement as Mike didn't even swing at them, much less knock them out of the park. It was obvious why. Harvey was prepared to wait (in what he considered uncharacteristic patience) for Mike to come back to himself. He was prepared to wait a lot more than ten weeks.
"When he gets here tomorrow," Harvey said mildly, "Henry will probably want to apologize to you. He's that kind of man."
"He doesn't need to," said Mike, and stood up. Away from the light sources, over toward the windows, he put a hand down on the windowsill like someone who needed steadying.
Harvey sat still. "He's that kind of man," he repeated. "Adele Trumbull was the brains of that family, but Henry's the cruise director. He tried to set me up with secretary once."
"Ha," said Mike to the city outside.
"You would have liked Adele. Most old-money families hand off their asset-management to an advisor, but she did it herself from the day her parents died. She had to type up her letters to her lawyer in Henry's name and get him to sign them, since he was 22. She was the younger of the two of them."
"21 was still the age of majority then," Mike supplied. And then, "Their parents died young?"
He didn't turn around to ask that question, just said it to the window with a hand on one of Harvey's basketballs.
"Yes," said Harvey. "Plane crash in '65."
Mike nodded, his fingertips tracing the seams of the basketball like lines on a map. It was Larry Bird's signed ball, and generally Harvey didn't allow anyone to touch it, but he decided not to mention that at the moment. As if this discussion needed to get any more morose, Mike asked, "The one on February 8? Just after takeoff from Idlewild?"
"I wouldn't know, not having been born for another seven years," Harvey told him, impatient. "They only became my clients after I met Henry at a charity function a decade ago."
Harvey's tone worked as intended, and Mike did not launch into a monologue about what makes planes (or specifically that one) fall out of the sky. He put down the basketball and stared out the windows. Midtown stared back at him in silence.
"In addition to the paperwork from Adele's probate, we're going to have to update Henry's will," warned Harvey in a low voice. "Go ahead and pull those files now. He intended to leave everything to her."
"And now he can't." Mike sniffled for the last time and wiped his nose on the back of his hand like the seven-year-old boy he still sometimes was. "She up and died on him and now he's alone."
And now he was alone, yes.
There was a joke to be made about how to seek out gorgeous and willing company, but Harvey had begun to guess that Mike pitied him for that, rather than admired him. Harvey Specter does not put himself into the position to be pitied. The right shift of topic still eluded him, some way to redirect this little conversation onto business or at least something less sodden, and he stood and stuffed his hands in his pockets while he thought it out.
His left hand closed over the keys in his pocket, and all the rest was impulse. Without a word he unlocked the file cabinet next to his bookcase and pulled out the half-empty bottle of the Macallan. He did not contemplate why he stored this one in secret, when he had a whole collection in plain sight. This bottle and its straw-colored contents were different, and he often hadn't finished it off before it was time again to buy a new one. He crossed the room to Mike's side to pick up a pair of tumblers.
"Move over."
Nonplussed, Mike moved over. Harvey set the tumblers on the windowsill and poured off a finger for each of them. Shallow in the glass, the Scotch was pale and clear and fine, like two streetlights plucked out of the array before them and captured in alcohol. Mike watched the whole operation in wary silence, as if he were being shown a desperate secret rather than being poured a dollop of liquid courage. Harvey set down the bottle and passed one glass to Mike and took the other for himself.
Mike knocked his glass back and swallowed the whole thing at once, the fool. He shuddered and made a face and Harvey reached out to smack him on the shoulder.
"That's not cheap tequila, you barbarian." Harvey lifted his own glass between them and swirled the liquor in a beam of light. "Single malt Scotch is for sipping."
He poured out another finger for Mike, and they sipped side by side. Mike breathed out hard through his nose as if it tickled -- a sign of an untrained palate. He was watching Harvey, not woeful now but curious. Harvey decided consciously not to wonder what he was giving away about himself.
"This is the good stuff, then?" Mike asked, quiet. He licked his lips as if still deciding whether he liked it. "If you keep it locked up."
"It's for a special occasion," Harvey said. He didn't volunteer what that special occasion was, and Mike didn't ask. His alert expression, the shift in his body language -- there was no way on earth he could know. No way. But the thing about Mike Ross was, he was such a good guesser he could figure out the shape of it without knowing an iota about the particulars. Harvey felt the warmth in his throat, the tightness, and lowered his head.
He tapped the edge of his tumbler against his teeth and inhaled the rosy, rich scent of the Scotch. Mike beside him did the same, hesitant.
"It's sweeter than I was expecting. I didn't have you pegged as someone who likes sweet liquor."
It slipped from Harvey's mouth without a conscious thought. "It was his favorite."
And because he was Mike, he just nodded and sipped again. And still made a face every time -- barbarian -- but he managed not to shudder.
They stood that way, shoulder to shoulder in the dark, and drank their Scotch, and said nothing.