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She’s never let him touch her.
If Harvey were a poetic soul, he’d think of it like magnets, like positive-negative force-repel, like star-crossed lovers, wanting to be close and kept apart only by the cruel and indifferent law of the universe—but Harvey is not a poetic soul, thank God, he’s Harvey Specter, he’s a name partner at the biggest corporate law firm in New York City, and it’s all because of her. At the beginning he almost laughs at it: a man like him, at a firm like hers. Scamming rich fuckers out of their rich fucker money, he thinks. Out of all the stupid goddamn things to pin your heart on.
He still thinks it, now, every once in a while, but dutifully; looks around his apartment with its sleek leather couches and scotch his own father’d have to save up for a year to afford, looks at himself in the mirror, hardworking American boy made it all the way here, who made it to the top of this whole goddamn skyscraper because Jessica Pearson told him to.
There’s not a lot, actually, that he wouldn’t do, if Jessica Pearson told him to do it, and isn’t that the saddest fuckin’ thing you’ve ever heard.
(Strange, after all these years, to be in love with a woman you’ve never even touched.)
The first time they meet he’s working the mailroom and she’s a surgeon’s daughter with an asterisk next to her name: she’s always the first one to work in the morning, and once he holds open the door for her, getting a whiff of her perfume as she walks by. Just like in a movie.
For a long time he can’t tell if he wants to fuck her or be her. He settles on the former, because it’s easier, and starts coming in as late as he dares.
The year he finds the backdated postage files, it’s been a whole winter and half a spring and things aren’t getting any easier at home—Marcus just lost ten grand he didn’t have at Friday night poker and Harvey’s thinking seriously of the ease with which money gets lost, in big firms, big companies, trusting your incompetent mailroom staff to file the accounts payable, something’s bound to go missing someday, God help him—and at boxing, Tuesday after work, he cracks a guy’s jaw open, hits him so hard it fractures under the weight of his hand and the gym owner grabs him by the collar and says Come back again and I’ll call the cops myself. Assault and battery, Marcus asks him bleakly, that night in the kitchen, pouring himself a mug of their mother’s cheap wine she’s kept stashed under the sink for as long as either of them can remember, or is it just assault? Sports casualty, is that something you can sue for?
In the end nobody sues Harvey, but he can’t go back, and he can’t go home, so he moves in with some friends in another neighborhood and walks to work. Somehow the commute makes him restless, the flat, unrelenting routine of it, his fists stuffed in his pockets because there’s nowhere else for them to go, and it isn’t until here, until now that he realizes how well and how deeply the fight has been buried in him, and work doesn’t help either, not at all—if anything, the sleek glass-and-Valentino opulence of Pearson Hardman drives him a little crazy. The associates call him Harv and hey, kid and you in the skinny tie and the partners don’t even bother to acknowledge him when he brings them their mail, which is, obviously, expected, they’re corporate lawyers, they’re not exactly renowned for their compassionate, friendly natures, but that doesn’t stop him from fantasizing about punching their smug fucking faces in until they’ve got no choice but to look up and notice him.
He wants to hit something, constantly. There’s something of her in his stance these days, something burning, something breaking, just under the skin. Marcus tries to win back the lost money, and loses even more of it. He makes Harvey promise not to tell their father and Harvey says yes and he is very, very tired of making that promise.
This is how she finds him: young and vicious and sharp-eyed and lonely and trapped.
She offers him a way out. She offers him a way up. She offers him a way in. She tells him, in no uncertain terms, that he has talent, that he has potential. She offers him money. She offers him Harvard. She offers to make him a god.
“What do you want in return?” he asks her.
“I want,” says Jessica Pearson, smiling down at him, “the best damn closer this city’s ever seen.”
They see each other twice a month while he’s at Harvard, for lunch or drinks or charity galas with Gordon Schmidt’s prospective clients. Harvey, not being a complete fucking idiot, knows that these are not generosities but a series of makeshift entry exams: can you wine, dine, turn on the charm, screw them with contracts and loopholes and decimal points, flatter their egos without relinquishing control? Can you do it the way I do? Can you do it better?
She watches him, during these events, and he watches her back: still a little in awe of her, still fascinated by the stark, silent power she wields without saying a word. When she’s angry, her rage looks just like his used to—hers is quieter, though, fury running hot and fast just under the surface, her perfect, practiced dignity holding it all together like skin over blood. He wonders if she’s ever really lost control, and finds it difficult to imagine. He thinks she’d be a good boxer, but what he’s learning, more and more, is that the law, after all, is just a glorified form of fist-to-fist combat: they say there are rules, but there aren’t; there’s just what you can get away with and what you can’t. (This is one of the very first things he learns from her. It’s over drinks with a client named Dr. O’Connor and when Jessica tells her about the botched noncompete agreement she’s got this gleam in her eye and he’s never wanted anything more in his entire life.) And, well—Harvey Specter, if his history is any indication, can get away with a hell of a lot.
“One semester of law school and you’re referring to yourself in the third person,” says Jessica drily, when he says as much, after O’Connor leaves, and Harvey ducks his head in a way that he will absolutely be training himself out of before he graduates Harvard. He raises his glass in a toast.
“To winning,” he says, the same toast she gives him every night they’re out together, and that seems to please her.
They drink.
He loves the suits, and the cars, and the scotch, and the glossy new apartment, but what he loves most of all is her hand on the back of his chair, her face an inch from his, the look on the faces of the opposing counsel when he says her name, and, later, when he says his name, like he’s the biggest scariest wolf in the forest and it’s such a pity the only person who can call him off won’t, or, later, jerking off feverishly in a bathroom stall to the memory of her voice saying, You didn’t just want it, you begged me for it, so stay here, be humble and learn your goddamn place.
He hates failing her but gets sort of addicted to disobeying her, the same way some people get addicted to adrenaline or cocaine; the same way he once got addicted to Harvey Specter, to the suit and the hair and the catchphrase, to the thrill of ruining lives and being patted on the head for it, good boy, until he’s so drunk on her approval he forgets he’s supposed to want anything else.
He owes her a debt that runs deeper than money or blood and it only gets deeper with everything he costs her when he slips the leash. He owes her everything he is, and everything he’s ever cared to be (so far as he can remember—the Harvey he was before he became hers isn’t dead, just buried and thankful). Obedience gets old so fast; gambling doesn’t, but hers are always the only calls he’ll answer when he’s laying down the cards, her word still the only thing that could ever stay his hand, and if he loses—he never loses—he’s just going to owe her one more chip, one more year, one more life—
—and then it’s late May and you hired a fraud and they’re both on the wrong side of the table now and the judge is looking at them with vague impersonal disgust and you hired a fraud and she’s giving her defense but he can read exhaustion in every line of her body and there’s Donna up on the stand saying more than she ever agreed to say and you hired a fraud and Mike Ross runs through his perfect safehouse memory and gives those D.A. fuckers so many names and dates one of them pulls out a notepad and you hired a fraud and you ruined her life and the sun is coming in through the window and Mike’s wearing the same tie as him and you hired a fraud she’s still the best thing that’s ever happened to him even though she’ll never be able to say the same because you hired a fraud, Mr. Specter, is that correct? Mr. Specter? Do I have your attention?
You’ve really fucking done it now, Harvey thinks, with his hand on the Bible. You’re never, ever, ever going to live this down.
(“If this was any other case,” Harvey said, the night before, and she said, “If this was any other case, I’d have left us to the fucking dogs.”)
Of course, she’s never wrong. He tends to forget that, when he wants something badly enough. They get five years each for corporate fraud and when the gavel comes down he has to dig his fingernails into his palms to stop from glancing over at her. The look on her face, he thinks, isn’t something he’s going to be able to live with, not now, not ever. He doesn’t even look her direction all the way out of the courtroom, down the steps, into a cab. Reporters are everywhere; dimly he registers that she’s saying something, that her voice is smooth and cool as ever; he says nothing, puts his body on autopilot while she pulls him through the crowd, her hand steady on his arm, and he realizes she’s been prepared for this for a long, long time. (How long, he doesn’t want to know, like he doesn’t want to know what prison Mike’s going to, or whether Donna traded her testimony for a kinder verdict.) When they get out of the cab, they’re in front of her building, and he doesn’t really remember how he got there or why, but she’s next to him, she’s paying the driver, he’s following her inside, and he probably should have known a long fucking time ago this is how it would end, for the two of them, with the law they’d spent so many years bending to their own ends catching up to them at last. With her back braced against the edge of the couch and his head buried deep under her skirt, his fists clenched hard at his sides, her thighs locked tight around him, not moving—he doesn’t need to look up to know exactly the way she’s setting her jaw, the tautness of her neck, this is something new but at the same time utterly familiar, as familiar to him as water or air—until she breaks the silence to say, You’re going to fucking earn this, and just that’s enough to finish him.
It all comes crashing down like a house of cards and one by one, then firm by firm and scandal by scandal, the scum of New York’s one percent are funneled out of their skyscrapers and into private federal prisons. “Do you think,” he begins, over the phone one morning in June, July, August, one of those hot ugly sweltering New York days that make him half-wish he hadn’t started counting them down because they’re fucking endless, and he can hear her raised eyebrow from the other end.
“Who else would it be?” she says, her voice a little sharp, a little staticky, but the same as it ever was; these phone calls, short as they are by necessity, have begun to feel like a lifeline. Behind him, someone snaps at him to Hurry up. “Things like this don’t just come out on their own, Harvey. And he always had that bleeding heart.”
“Yeah,” he says, “but—they indicted Harold Gunderson for embezzlement. Anonymous source, they said.”
“But,” she says. “I don’t think he’d do that to you. Me, maybe, but not you.”
“I ruined his life.”
“You saved his life.”
“He isn’t me, Jessica,” he says. “He never was. And I’m not you.”
“You never learned.”
“I’ve learned,” he says waspishly, even though he knows it’s not what she meant. “At least now I know not to hire frauds.”
“Oh, please,” she says, and it’s the first time since the day of the trial that he’s heard that flash of anger in her voice, and his pulse jumps at sound of it, “you don’t regret a goddamn thing.”