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“What are you doing here?” she asks bluntly as she opens the door, the swoosh from the movement tickling her hair, her tone dry and uninviting. She’s wearing her robe tied tight around her waist, her arms crossed firmly over her chest, a clear “no trespassing” in every aspect of her.
He likes her like this, likes the challenge in it.
“You know what I’m doing here,” Harvey drawls out, shirt unkempt, tie lost somewhere back at the bar. He’s leaning against her doorjamb, as much for balance as for nonchalance.
“I told you this couldn’t happen anymore,” Donna replies, unimpressed.
“Yeah, that’s what you said the last two times too,” he smirks at her, defiant, and feels triumphant when her nostrils flare.
“Excuse me,” she protests, aggravated.
“Come on, Donna,” he tilts his head knowingly, charmingly, “No use in pretending you don’t enjoy this just as much as I do.”
He knows he’s pushing it, showing up like this at her place at 2am, probably smelling like every single drink he had at that bar. He knows it’s unfair to her, probably to both of them, and he should just quit the whole thing, the booze, the nights out, the coming here. But he’s stuck in a rut, like a current that pulls him in every time, inescapable.
“You’re drunk,” she replies disdainfully after finally taking a proper look at him and taking in his dishevelled appearance.
“So?”
“So, you’re clearly out of your fucking mind,” she hardens, eyes slitting.
“You and I both know that if I weren’t out of my fucking mind, I wouldn’t be here right now,” he replies dryly, but there’s no snark, just fact.
He could have been a man who opened up about his feelings; a man who could figure out how to love, how to care, a man who did the right things and put in the work, a man who found a way to have meaningful relationships with meaningful people. He just never became that man.
Donna doesn’t let up an inch. “Yeah, maybe that should tell you something.”
“It tells me we’re fucking toxic, Donna,” he snaps a little, losing hold of his façade for the first time since he got here. “I don’t know how to stay away from you. But you don’t know how to stay away from me either. Last three times I was here like this are evidence enough.”
Her jaw works visibly as she tries to maintain a dignified silence. He knows she’s pleading the fifth, just like he’s done so many times before. It feels a little insane to be in this situation now, the roles almost reversed with him being the one more willing to poke at their carefully built illusion until it cracks.
He doesn’t know exactly what did it, what made him decide to just stop turning a blind eye to the whole thing. But he also doesn’t know why he can’t just get the fuck over himself and talk to her like a normal human being. He thinks it was losing her that caused both things, that now leaves him in this state of limbo where he can’t break free from her, but can’t make himself bury his poisonous pride, stuck in this awful middle path that leads to her, but only ever paved with resentment and codependency.
“I’m not an idiot,” he tells her matter-of-factly, “I know just as well as you do that this is not a good idea. But it seems like this is the only way I get to see you anymore.” It feels pathetic to admit out loud, but he knows she already knows that so there’s no use pretending otherwise.
Donna practically scowls at him, not in the least emaciated by his unusual openness. “I wonder why that is.”
Her dry tone and difficultness grate on him, and he’s starting to grow tired of the punches. “Because you shut me down when I asked you to come back,” he fires back, voice a fraction louder than before.
“Yeah, because you fucking fired me to make your girlfriend happy!” she snaps too, her composure slipping and her voice matching his volume, and there it goes again, the same old story.
“And I’ve apologized for that more times than I can count,” he retorts readily, “But you don’t want my apologies, Donna, you just want me crawling at your feet, so here I am!” He throws his arms open, then lets them fall uselessly at his sides.
Because at the end of the day, this is what he’s doing, what he’s been doing after every late night ending here at her door. Crawling, kneeling, begging. Asking for crumbs, hoping the magnanimous Donna will dole them out in her infinite mercy.
She scoffs audibly, her arms dropping from their stance too as irritation courses visibly through her. “You have some nerve telling me this after everything you’ve put me through, all the years you kept me crawling at your feet.”
They’ve had this conversation before, in one of their dozens of horrible, vicious fights after he broke up with Paula and asked her to come back and she said no. The fights started about Paula but ended up being about something else, everything else - some days it felt like they were fighting about their entire relationship, which honestly broke his heart a little but what can you do.
“Like I said, Donna, toxic!” he replies, sarcasm dripping from his voice. “Doesn’t mean I don’t want you.”
Donna shakes her head, indignant. “You don’t want me, Harvey, you just want an easy fuck at the end of a drunken night.”
The fact that she’s playing dumb, playing this down, annoys him.
“If that were true, I wouldn’t keep turning down woman after woman at every bar I go to,” he takes a step towards her, voice lowering darkly, “Any of them would sure be much fucking easier than this, believe me. And yet I always end up here.”
He’s closer to her now, after taking a couple more steps, and he can see more details, the way her chest heaves a little as her breathing quickens, the corners of her mouth twitching as she struggles with some kind of urge or emotion, the slight bedhead that frames her face and betrays her previous activity before he got here. She’s still the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen.
“You only being able to come here when you’re fucked up isn’t the grand gesture you think it is,” she says, practically spitting out the words, though he can hear the slight breathiness to her tone. She’s putting up every last defense she can but he can see he’s almost getting through to her.
“Me getting fucked up isn’t what makes me want to come here, Donna,” he replies more honestly this time, laying down his own arms to show her that, as insane as this whole thing is, he’s not here to punish her. “It’s what makes me stop being able to force myself not to come here.”
She exhales, her eyes half-blinking as she processes his words, and he’s so tired, so tired of all the resentment and the heaviness and the unspoken. For the millionth time, he wonders why they can’t just get their shit together and try this for real, but they’ve dug themselves so deep into this hole that he doesn’t even know how to make his way back out of it.
And, if he’s being honest, there’s a part of him that worries that they’ve broken things beyond repair, that this is the only way Donna might take him now, and it makes him feel pathetic for wanting to submit himself to that, mean for keeping Donna in this mess with him.
He should want better for himself, and for her, but it took losing her and getting his whole world blown apart to realize that, even if he does want better, what he wants most is her, and if this is how he can have her, then he’ll keep coming back again and again until they’ve fucked all the mess out of their systems and maybe, just maybe, he’ll become a better person and start treating her like she deserves, and maybe she’ll let him.
The problem is that, until then, this will have to keep happening. Because he knows her too well for her own good, and he knows that a dark part of her wants this as much as he does.
Proof of that is that he only needs to see the way her stare darkens and her breath falters to know she’s gonna close the gap between them. They lunge forward at the same time, lips crashing and limbs tangling in a mess. In no time her robe is on the floor and she’s pressed up against the wall, hands hot and heavy as they run down his body.
There’s no feeling like doing this with Donna, even the anger and the alcohol can’t erase that, and he wonders if the fucked up element to this whole thing makes it hotter or not. It doesn’t matter, because he’s not gonna get to taste the alternative anytime soon, maybe ever, so he doubles down, kissing her neck, scraping it with his teeth as she untucks his shirt and slips her balms beneath his waistband, squeezing his ass.
Their heavy pants form a symphony in her empty hallway, their kisses turn sloppy, and he wants to be in her bedroom when they actually fuck but he can’t wait that long, so he jams a hand down her pajama bottoms, finding his way into her panties, and she’s so wet he can’t help but moan into her mouth.
He teases her with practiced ease, a familiarity in his movements that makes it seem like they’ve been doing this forever and not just a handful of times, but it probably feels familiar to her too because it doesn’t take her long to become a trembling mess in his arms, biting down on her bottom lip to try to stifle her moans as she comes for the first time that night.
When she’s done, she grabs her wrist and practically jams his sticky fingers into his own mouth, and he sucks them completely clean, watching her the whole time. He kisses her again, letting her taste herself, and the way she laps at his tongue, greedy for the taste, makes his dick twitch considerably in his pants.
Without letting up the kisses, they stumble their way into her bedroom, shedding clothes along the way and falling unceremoniously into bed. She rakes her nails carelessly down his arms, surely leaving a mark, while he ravages her breasts, doing every little thing he knows she likes in a futile attempt to justify this, to make her want him to come back.
From then on it’s fast and messy. He starts touching her again, teasing her and bringing her to the brink until she comes again, and one more time right after that, and he’s so fucking turned on it feels like he’ll explode.
She doesn’t offer to suck him off, and he doesn’t ask, figures it’s his penance for having knocked on her door like this again, but it doesn’t matter a single thing because when he’s finally inside her again he can’t think, feel, remember a single thing other than this right here, their bodies joined, their breathing in sync.
It feels almost cruel how good they are together here, like this, when they’re so at odds the rest of the time, so he just focuses on savoring it as much as he can. He takes in her smell, her taste, the sight of her pale skin blooming with exertion, her fiery red hair splayed on the sheets, her freckles, every last detail.
They fuck he doesn’t even know how many times and ways - her on top, him on top, from behind, the bed frame pulsing along with their movements, her knuckles white as she grips it, or the sheets, or his hair. It’s an explosion of so many things he can’t even name, so many jumbled up feelings that have ceased to be just one thing and have become, each and every one of them, an amalgamation of everything they’ve ever felt for each other, every last drop of love, bitterness, companionship, regret.
It’s hours later when they’re finally done, sweaty and spent, and he feels all sobered up. In truth, despite his probably terrible looks when he reaches her door, he is never actually that drunk; on these nights, he only ever drinks enough to be able to cross that one limit out of his head and into her door. Everything else he wants to remember, and savor, and he doesn’t want the alcohol to get in the way of that.
Just a bit of liquid courage, as they call it, which almost makes him feel ashamed because he’s never needed any help in the courage department, much less with women. But maybe this is what he is now, a completely different person. Maybe losing Donna in the only way he had her, the only way he allowed himself to have her because it was the only way he never thought he’d lose her, changed him in a way that is so fundamental that he is now a cowardly man, a man who hides behind bad habits and uses booze as a crutch.
Donna gets up quietly and goes to the bathroom to clean herself up - this part is always bad, and he’s sure that even if he ever were that drunk, this would sober him up in a second. The feeling of gearing up to lose her again will never not sting.
He allows himself a few more minutes, as he hears her tinkering in the bathroom, probably fixing all the ways he messed her up, and then he sits up and reaches for some tissues, starting his own ritual. It’s odd being in here without her and he wants her to come back, wants her to say something, but he can’t picture her saying a single thing that’s good, so it’s probably better that she’s not there.
He gets up and starts collecting his clothes, slipping them back on, and the wrinkles and creases feel even more undignified than before. She comes back out while he’s buttoning his shirt, draped in a different robe, hair tied into a ponytail, and he secretly muses that she probably wouldn’t tie it up like that if she knew how much he loves it.
They finish dressing up in silence, and he gives her a hand resetting the mayhem they created in her bedroom. He remembers the first time he was here, and how chaotic it was then, too, although for a completely different reason. He wonders if there will ever come a time between them when her bedroom will spell out something peaceful and light, instead of the earthquake that hits their lives every time they do this.
The mood between them is still somber, but not as angry as before, and she finds it in herself to offer him some water, which he accepts out of actual need and out of desire to spend more time with her. Soon the glass is empty, though, and he’s back to not being able to find the right combination of words that will let him stay, will make her look at him differently, and the ever-present nagging feeling that she should be searching for those words too starts showing itself, so he decides it’s time to go before the whole thing gets ruined.
She walks him to the door, but, for all that their greeting was a well-rehearsed dance fuelled by fire, their goodbye is muted and stilted. It’s hard to say goodbye when you don’t know when the next “hello” will be, and it’s even harder to do it when you don’t even know how you’re supposed to be feeling about that.
They settle for quiet ones, torn between holding on to their stubborn self-righteousness and giving in to their desire to be together for a little longer. The door clicking shut behind him is mildly depressing, the early dawn peeking through the window in her building hallway even more so, and he can already tell he’ll have a massive headache when he wakes up.
He wishes like hell this could be the last time, that he could break free from this prison he got himself into, but he knows it probably won’t be, and a part of him welcomes that. With a heavy exhale, he fishes his phone from his pocket, requesting a car, and hopes maybe someday he’ll be able to break out of this terrible habit, one way or another.