Chapter Text
The first time Harvey lets Mike do it, he keeps his eyes closed the entire time. Not because he wants to savor it, but because he wants to pretend it’s anyone else.
Someone faceless. Someone nameless. Someone with lipstick and long hair and a body that wouldn’t dismantle him just by existing.
Because if he looks down and sees Mike Ross on his knees in his office at 12:48 a.m., he’ll have to admit what he’s doing.
Who he’s doing it with.
So he doesn’t look. He tips his head back, grips the edge of his desk, and keeps his voice even when he says, low and demanding, “Hands behind your back.”
Mike freezes for a second. Harvey hears the hesitation in the breath Mike swallows before he obeys.
Good. Obedience makes this easier.
It’s not gentle. Harvey isn’t guiding or touching or praising.
He’s just using Mike’s mouth because it’s a mouth, and he’s hard and tired and already hates himself for letting this happen.
Mike tries to say something against him, muffled, questioning, and Harvey’s hand shoots down like a reflex, tangling painfully in Mike’s hair.
“Don’t talk,” Harvey snaps, eyes still shut. “Just do it.”
Mike makes a sound that isn’t entirely consent and isn’t entirely not, and for a second Harvey hears it, the confusion, the hurt, and nearly stops.
But stopping would mean thinking. And thinking would mean acknowledging. And acknowledging would mean collapse.
So he doesn’t stop.
He fucks Mike’s mouth with a constant, brutal rhythm that keeps Mike from saying anything else, that keeps Harvey from hearing anything except wet sounds and breathing.
And it works.
Almost.
He’s seconds away from finishing when Mike tries again, voice strained, “Do you like it? I just want to know if you--”
Harvey cuts him off with a harsh yank and a growled warning: “Shut the fuck up and keep going. Don’t make this a thing.”
Mike shuts up.
Harvey comes, jaw clenched, breathing heavy. His first instinct is to push Mike away without looking at him.
He does.
“Get up,” he says, curt, cold, like he didn’t just use him in the shadow of his own desk.
Mike stands, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, waiting for something Harvey doesn’t have the language for. Gratitude. Softness. Maybe just eye contact.
Harvey keeps his gaze somewhere over Mike’s shoulder, adjusting his tie like this was a transaction, not a breakdown.
“Don’t make this weird,” Harvey says, taking a step back, giving Mike space only so he’ll fill it by leaving. “And don’t tell anyone.”
Mike swallows.
Nods.
“Yeah. Sure. Um. I’ll go.”
Harvey doesn’t watch him leave. Doesn’t say goodbye. Doesn’t thank him.
He just flicks a hand toward the exit, a gesture of dismissal, not departure, like Mike’s an intern who dropped off paperwork, not someone who had his mouth on him minutes ago.
The door shuts quietly behind him.
Harvey exhales, steady, controlled, victorious for about three seconds.
Then the nausea hits.
Because he can’t pretend it was just a mouth. He can’t pretend it was just anyone. He can’t pretend he’s straight and fine and untouched.
Because Mike Ross is never just a mouth. Never just a body.
Harvey’s entire life would’ve been easier if Mike Ross hadn’t crashed into that hotel room with a briefcase full of lies and changed everything without even trying.
-
Mike leaves Harvey’s office with shaky legs and a mouth that tastes like scotch and humiliation.
He pulls the door shut quietly because it feels like it should be quiet. As if anything louder would make the whole firm turn around and see him, see what he just did, see what they’re doing, see what he’s letting Harvey do to him.
Not that Harvey would ever admit there’s a “they” to see.
Mike walks toward the elevators, heart racing, and realizes halfway down the hall that he hasn’t actually taken a breath since Harvey said “Don’t make this weird.”
Weird.
Right.
Because having your boss shove your head down and tell you not to speak is perfectly normal.
Totally average. Not weird at all.
He presses the elevator button and glances around, paranoid. No one’s there. No one saw. No one knows.
His knees ache from the floor.
His hair hurts from Harvey’s grip.
His chest hurts from everything else.
He tries to remember every detail of Harvey’s face, but he can’t.
Harvey didn’t look at him. Not once.
The elevator doors open. Mike steps inside, leaning back against the cool metal wall, eyes closing for a second like he could calm himself down if he just stood still enough.
He keeps replaying it. Not the blowjob. Not the actual mechanics of it.
But the parts in between.
The way Harvey’s voice sounded; tight, controlled, clinical. Like Mike was a problem he needed to solve.
The way Harvey pushed him back without hesitation the second he finished, like Mike had become irrelevant the moment he’d served a purpose.
The way Harvey said “Don’t tell anyone” even though the idea of Mike telling anyone makes Mike’s stomach twist in a way that feels like fear and heartbreak stitched into one.
Mike thought it would feel different. Not romantic. He’s not that delusional. But maybe… connected.
Like eye contact. Or a hand in his hair that wasn’t just a handle. Or a word that wasn’t meant to shut him up.
He shouldn’t have said anything. He shouldn’t have asked him if he liked it. He knows that now.
Harvey made it very clear what happens when Mike tries to make this anything other than physical.
He stares at his reflection in the elevator doors. His lips are swollen. His pupils are blown. He looks fucked out in a way that should be hot, should be exhilarating, should be liberating.
Except he feels… cheap.
Not used, he doesn’t feel used, and that’s the worst part.
He feels complicit.
He feels like he said yes to something he doesn’t understand, because he wanted Harvey enough to swallow his pride and shut his mouth and pretend this was what he wanted.
The elevator dings. Mike steps into the lobby. His hands shake. He shoves them in his pockets so the security guard doesn’t notice.
Harvey told him not to make it weird. Which means Mike can’t ask what this is. Or why it happened. Or if it’ll happen again.
He tells himself he doesn’t want anything more than this. He tells himself Harvey’s right, it doesn’t have to be complicated.
He tells himself that if Harvey does call him again, he won’t talk. He won’t ask questions. He won’t mess it up. He’ll just get on his knees and shut up and not expect anything else.
But walking out into the cold night air, Mike can’t stop hearing the difference between the way Harvey said “Shut the fuck up” and the way he said Mike’s name earlier in the evening.
One sounded like anger. The other sounded like fear.
And Mike can’t decide which one hurts more.
-----
Mike doesn’t sleep.
He lies awake on his mattress, staring at the ceiling, replaying every second of the night on an endless loop. He wonders what Harvey will say, what Harvey will do, if Harvey will even look at him when he walks in. He wonders if he should get there early, or late, or not at all. He wonders if Harvey regrets it. He wonders if Harvey is angry. He wonders if Harvey is terrified.
He wonders if Harvey is going to pretend it didn’t happen. He half hopes he will, he half hopes he won’t.
-
By the time he gets to work, his clothes feel wrong and his body feels borrowed. His stomach is knotted into something that feels suspiciously like anticipation, even though he keeps telling himself to stop expecting anything.
He walks into Harvey’s office with a file and a fake smile ready, prepared for awkwardness or tension or at least a shift in gravity.
Harvey doesn’t even look up when he says, “Morning.”
Not differently. Not pointedly. Just… morning.
Mike stands there for a second too long, waiting for something -- eye contact, tension, a flicker of recognition. Harvey doesn’t give it to him.
“What are you standing there for?” Harvey asks, finally glancing up. “Put it on the desk.”
Mike does. His hands shake just enough that he hopes Harvey doesn’t notice.
Harvey doesn’t notice. Or if he does, he doesn’t care.
He reads the first page, nods once, and says, “Good. Follow up with the client and get me the revised draft by the end of the day.”
Same tone. Same cadence. Same Harvey.
Like nothing ever happened.
Mike says “Sure” and leaves, and it’s only once the door shuts behind him and it's only then that he exhales slowly.
Relief hits first. Clean. Cold. Sterile.
This is better. They can go back to normal. No mess. No weirdness. No shame.
A clean slate.
Except it doesn’t feel clean. It feels erased.
It makes last night feel like a mistake.
Worse yet, it makes Mike feel like he was the mistake.
And he tells himself he’s fine with that. He tells himself it’s better this way. He tells himself he doesn’t need anything from Harvey but direction.
But the longer the day drags on, the harder it is to pretend.
Which is ironic, really. He’s spent most of his life pretending.
Pretending he was okay after his parents were stolen from him, smiling and nodding and acting like it wasn’t a big deal, like his world hadn’t ended, like he wasn’t waking up every morning with a hole where a family should be. He learned early that being honest about grief makes other people uncomfortable, so he learned to swallow it down and turn it into something palatable.
And then he spent years pretending he could be something other than what he was -- a genius with no direction, a screw-up with a good heart, a kid who didn’t know how to build a life without someone handing it to him.
And now he’s pretending to be a lawyer.
Every day. Every minute. Every second.
He stands in courtrooms and smiles at judges and shakes hands with clients and pretends he belongs there even though at any moment someone could pull one loose thread and watch everything unravel. Not just his life, but Harvey’s, Jessica’s, Rachel’s. The list is long. The fallout catastrophic.
But he can pretend he’s okay with those consequences because, truthfully, he doesn’t know what else to do with his life.
It’s this or nothing.
He didn’t exactly have prospects before Harvey took a chance on him. He still doesn’t understand why Harvey did. Why Harvey risked his career, his reputation, everything he’d built for a screw-up kid with a photographic memory and nothing to show for it.
Sometimes Mike thinks Harvey isn’t even sure why he hired him. Sometimes Mike thinks Harvey regrets it.
Sometimes Mike wonders if Harvey sees potential or sees a project or sees a reflection of something he’d rather avoid.
He can’t ask. He could, technically. But there’d be no honest answer waiting on the other side of it.
Harvey is too good at lying to others. And even better at lying to himself.
Mike spends the rest of the day at his desk, staring at motions and contracts and legal jargon, telling himself he can pretend just as well as Harvey can.
He used to be so good at it. He used to be effortless.
But the truth is, Mike Ross has never been good at pretending when the thing he wants is standing just a few doors away, acting like last night meant nothing.
And pretending nothing happened might be easier.
Safer.
But for the first time in a long time, Mike realizes he’s not sure he knows how to live with the version of himself who wants more than he’s allowed to ask for.
And Harvey? Harvey is pretending nothing happened at all.
Which is almost funny.
Because Harvey Specter is the reason Mike learned how dangerous wanting something can be, and just how costly it is to pretend otherwise