It only takes about two minutes after he's finished leaving a message for Mike that he's lost in daydreaming about her again.

She hasn't called him back, and that's not unusual as of late, because she's been distant the last few weeks, and that gnaws low in his gut, because something is different. People talk a lot about how well she knows him, has an instinct for him, seems to have some kind of invisible connection to his heart and his brain, and that's true. But people don't talk about how he knows her the same way. He knows her so well that he can instinctively feel when something changes in her world, and there's change that's happened somewhere. There's a shift in her words and her look and her touch, a gentle wall she's put up, and not enough for anyone else to notice, but it's screaming at him and he isn't sure why she hasn't talked to him about it.

It's not worry, not exactly.

He just misses her.

Harvey's been telling himself, for a while now, that something needs to shift with her and him. They've been caught in a dance for what is starting to feel like eternity, long enough that almost everyone he knows has spoken to him about it, and it's gotten more and more explicit over the years. A year ago Mike had straight up told him she was the one, and he brushed it off, because Mike's an idiot, and Harvey didn't want more, he'd genuinely believed at the time.

He's not so sure anymore.

Maybe, he thinks, that it's not her changing so much as it is him. He's different, now, since his mom came back into the picture and Jessica's left, and Mike and Rachel as well, and he's not jealous, not really. But it also feels like Mike and Rachel and Jessica have all figured out something he's just starting to skirt around the edges of, that life isn't just this case or that deposition or this subpoena. Maybe there's more to life than the firm and the job.

Even a year ago he would have called to tell Scottie, and she would have knocked him back to his senses and into the real world by calling him a pussy or a wuss. He'd thought about reaching out to her several times. But he hadn't, and he's starting to think maybe that's on purpose. Maybe he wanted things to change, he figured. But he's still too terrified to change anything. He's been sitting on a fence for so long, refusing to choose between work and … not work, and he's so goddamn tired of it.

Being tired and being terrified, he thinks, is as unhappy a place as he could probably have wedged himself into.

So, maybe the way she's doing it for him is right, putting up that wall. It's kind and gentle, but it's still a wall, and it is, at least, change. She's climbing down off the fence, finally, he realises, and it's good, and it's for the best. He should climb down too, and slip into the space she's building for him, slip into a place of definition, where she is just a friend and just a colleague and where she doesn't saturate every conscious moment, and most of his unconscious moments, with her smile and beauty and the way she holds herself.

She wants him around, and he wants her around. They've just never really talked about how dangerous it is that they've never picked a space for each other. Compartmentalisation is an ugly, clinical way of saying she just can't afford to have him everywhere for her if she isn't everywhere for him, and he has been everywhere for a long time.

She wants him around. Just not everywhere. It's not healthy, especially because of the way he's proven to her so many times he's compartmentalised her into friendship and into the office and, as far as she thinks, nowhere else. She's not doing anything he hasn't already, she probably thinks.

The issue is, despite his best efforts, she's everywhere, and she has been for a while. And he's tried, and failed, to do to her what she's doing to him now - the kindness of boundaries have never come easy for him.

None of it - none of the other relationships he's pursued, none of the presents she's given to him over the years that he's purposely kept at work, none of the gifts she's brought straight to his apartment and that he's stared at too long before tucking away in a drawer, none of the phone calls he's missed and texts he hasn't responded to because he knew, he knew if he'd picked up his phone in that moment he would have said fuck it and blown everything to hell - none of that has changed a thing. He's hidden her in drawers and on high shelves and in boxes tucked into the back of cupboards and none of it has made a damn bit of difference.

She's still everywhere.

She's in the lingering memory of visits, in the way his apartment always seems to smell just a little of her perfume. Glasses he hands her with generous doubles of whisky look like they physically rearrange their own atoms to burn the memory of her hands into the glass, and he can't see that they look different, but he swears he can feel the ridges of her fingerprints against the glass when he slots them back into kitchen cupboards. It's in the way she'd once picked up his leather copy of an ancient Harvard text, the one Jessica had given him as a graduation gift, and passed her fingers lightly over the embossed title, and he can't cast his eyes across his bookshelf anymore without it stopping his gaze for a long moment.

She always sits at the same spot on his sofa, and he's unconsciously started avoiding that spot, because it's her side, and if he didn't avoid thinking about her so much he'd think about how enough concentration lets him imagine her there when he's making coffee in the morning or tea in the evening.

She's in his wardrobe, in every shirt and suit jacket, in the memory of the weight of her hands on his chest, smoothing lapels and tweaking buttons. She's in every tie, and he swears he can physically feel the indents of her fingertips in the spaces where the double windsors sit when he puts them on in the morning, hanging just to the left so she'll have something to fix. She's in the grey suits, and in the navy, and the black, because he'd worn brown a few times, until she'd looked sideways at him just long enough for him to ask, what, and then she'd said, brown hides your eyes.

He'd gotten rid of the brown the next day.

She's in the wireless charger on his bedside table, because he kept waking with his phone flat after forgetting to plug it in, falling asleep as he texted her in the late of the evening.

She's in the lights hovering over his kitchen counter, which he'd replaced years ago, because they used to sit much closer to the counter and she would would knock into them when she perched, cross legged and barefoot, on the edge of the counter, pilfering slices of sharp cheddar and provolone from the chopping board as his back was turned to flip the grilled cheese he would make when the thai place was closed. The studied innocence she'd embody whenever he caught her visits him in his daydreams and makes him smile so wide that people ask him what he's thinking about and he has to lie about Zoe or Paula or whoever he's meeting that night for dinner.

And she's in his bed.

She's there in the way he's started making his bed every day, and doesn't let himself acknowledge it's just in case she comes over, because of the one time she did when he hadn't made it and had joked about not dating men who already had messy sheets because it's much more fun to mess up a tidy bed.

She's in the way he's stopped spreading out across the bed every night like he has his whole life. Now he wakes up solidly on one side, his arm thrown out across the expanse of the other half of the mattress, which he carefully doesn't think of as her side. He doesn't think about that or the bare half of his bathroom cabinet and how the side table on the other side of the bed is now empty.

He tries not to think about how he's been making space for her and how he occasionally fills that space with other women and other relationships. He tries not to think about how they don't last because they don't fit in spaces he's carefully built for her even as he has tried not to think about her.

She's in everything, in every single thing he owns, and in everything he doesn't, in the things that take up space and in the shape of all the gaps he's opened up.

She's in the goddamn air.

He finishes his whisky and breathes in oxygen that's full of her, and thinks, tomorrow. Tomorrow I'll shake her off, and he goes to bed with her name in his breath and her hair and skin in his imagination.

.

.

He dreams.

He dreams of her, because of course he does, of course his brain short circuits any attempt to purge her from his heart and his brain. It's like every fresh decision to cut her out of him is as preposterous as a decision to hold his breath and declare he doesn't need oxygen anymore, and his own body and brain mutiny against him and flood his fantasies with her.

He decides to cut her out of him far more often than he'd ever admit, it's almost weekly now, every Friday when he sits down after spending far too many office hours in the week seeking reasons to visit her office and far too many evenings thinking of things he needs to call her about. He thinks that's it and this is ridiculous and decides to move on.

And so he also dreams about her far more than he'd ever admit. He usually dreams about her around him and underneath him, dreams about her stomach flexed against his as her back arches off his bed, dreams about his hand hitching her knee up so he can angle into her just right, where each thrust drags a low moan from both of them, dreams of her fingers scratching up his spine to his hair and her lip pulling slow against his ear while she murmurs that she's so close and Harvey and there and god don't stop.

He dreams of alabaster skin, of memorised patterns of freckles traced under his thumb as he pushes in and over her, of red hair through his fingers and of his loose sweat-slicked body finding all of his last decade of need in her in that moment. And he wakes up in the morning or at 2am with his sweat pants uncomfortable and tight, and he wrestles with the residual embarrassment of feeling like an oversexed teenager in the same moment that he presses his hand over himself and swallows her name back and doesn't allow himself to consider that it only takes a few short strokes before he releases his orgasm against his own grip.

It's hard to think of her as just a colleague and friend when it happens so regularly, but he does his best.

But tonight he doesn't dream of her, damp and gasping underneath him.

He dreams of her, waking him up from a light doze in his living room as he lies stretched out on the sofa, on some nameless winter evening, the fire licking in the hearth and warming the side of his face. He dreams of her, leaning over the back of the sofa with a glass of wine and a light collection of kisses against his forehead and temple, and she still murmurs his name in his ear, but to tell him to wake up so he doesn't spill.

He dreams of her, sitting down in her spot next to him, patting his shins to get him to lift his legs for a moment so she can settle into the cushions and he can let his legs fall into her lap. He dreams about chatting, and laughing, and bumping his shoulders up against the armrest on his sofa so he can sip his wine and quietly study her smiling profile. He dreams about the heat of the fire and the warmth of the slow stroke of her palm over his shin as she touches him lightly and easily, because they're together and so not every touch is life or death anymore.

He dreams about her recounting her day, and telling him about some show she wants to go to, some revival, and she tells him about the underlying metaphors of the rewrite and the significance of that one actress and that one actor working together finally. He dreams about her picking up his phone to program the date in because he'll forget, he always forgets, and he complains happily that there's a baseball game on that day, and she tells him as happily back that it's baseball or her, and he mentions baseball's always been good to him so it's a big decision, and just as she tucks her head into her chest to laugh and call him an idiot, he wakes up.

He wakes up, and he thinks,

Oh.

Donna.

It's the first time he's dreamed of her and hasn't dreamed about kissing, about nakedness and sex and her falling apart under him or him falling apart as she presses him back into the mattress and sinks her weight over him.

It's the first time he's dreamed of her and the way he imagines she'd love him if he let her, all open and light and made of ease. He's lived a lifetime of suffering, all twisted and fucked up, and he's made her do the same, and he's dreamed with the reality of the suffering buried under the fantasy, of sex borne of desperation and inevitable heartbreak. But he's never dreamed of them whole and normal, and he's never dreamed of the way she'd be with him and make him unfucked up, make him healthy and sane, and he thinks that's probably selfish, needing her to make him better, if not for the fact that he's realising he desperately wants to make her world perfect for her as well.

It's the first time he's dreamed of her, months or years in, and solid, and in love.

And it's that dream that does it.

He didn't ever think that dreaming about her sitting on his couch with her palm against his ankle would be the thing that broke down the last wall. It's not that Harvey doesn't want her. He thinks about how he wants her almost constantly these days. He thinks about making love to her and he thinks about fucking her and everything in between.

But he's never dreamed about her just… being. And him being with her.

He'd thought, for the thousandth time last night, tomorrow I'll get off the fence, and he finds with a start, that he has. He's just on the completely opposite side to the one he expected.

He realises, with a dawning mix of horror and relief, that he's spent more than a decade spinning away from her like there was some path he could take that didn't have her at the end of it, and that he's wasted his time. He's wasted her time, and her heart along with it, and he can't anymore.

"Donna."

He says it out at his ceiling, and it's like it snaps everything into place.

He looks at the clock on his bedside table.

It's 6am, and if he hurries, he can get to her apartment before she leaves for work.

Harvey hadn't meant to run. He just found himself doing it.

He hadn't meant to flag a cab down either. He'd meant to call Ray. But Ray would have taken that extra half hour because he'd probably have woken him up, and the irrational part of him feels like half an hour is an eternity. He's darkly aware of the irony of the twelve years before that half hour staring him in the face. Maybe that's why he runs, and why he flags a cab, and why he just throws a hundred dollar bill at the driver to cover a fifteen dollar fee.

It's definitely why he swears at the elevator while punching the call button like he's trying to diffuse a bomb.

Her hallway feels longer than it ever has before.

He knocks, and he hadn't meant to knock as hard and as long as he did either. He's not out of control, exactly. It's just that his body has made a decision and is outworking it with his brain playing a desperate game of catch up. He's been at her door a dozen times over the years, showing up to her apartment with his heart and his emotions clashing between fear, fury, desire, and a level of protectiveness that he'd known deep down was much more than just the healthy worry you have for a friend.

He's still knocking, and now the only thing churning inside him is a clumsy confession, but the churning of it is only the question of if it might come out as words or if it will just be him pushing her back against the wall and kissing her the way he's only ever done in his dreams. He's not torn between fear or fury anymore. His body is panicking but his brain and his heart are as steady as they've ever been and he knows what this feeling is though he's never really felt it before.

Love.

All consuming, powerful, ridiculous, hyperbolic, soulmate love. Love that has the clarity of cut glass, that says it's you, it's always been you, love that doesn't live in panic and indecision. He loves her.

I love you.

It's the first time he's let himself think it, and it's like everything finally slots into place. He thinks bizarrely about if he should apologise for how early it is first, but his throat is so dry and his heart is beating so fast that he doesn't think he could force the words out if he tried. He'll either say he loves her, or he'll pin her against the wall, and either could happen but it's only one of those choices. There's nothing else for it.

I love you. I'm ready. I need you.

At the end of it, at the end of a decade and a half of smiles and coded conversations and words left unsaid, it's all there is left to say, the only question to answer whether he says it with his mouth or his body or both.

The door opens, and Harvey blinks, back to himself and away from the internal future with Donna he's constructed in the seconds he's been knocking, and his words die in his throat at the same time that his tense physicality expels itself in the tight twitch of his thumbs against his palms.

"Thomas," he manages.

Thomas has the good grace to try and hide his surprise. "Harvey," he says. "Is everything okay? Do you need to talk to Donna?"

As he asks, Donna appears behind Thomas, and the mix of surprise and guilt in her eyes doesn't hurt as much as the fact she's tying the sash on her robe and combing her fingers through her hair. She's clearly just gotten out of bed, and Harvey knows intellectually that the only reason Thomas Kessler would be answering Donna's door at 7am is because they're involved, and they're involved enough that it's physical, but it cracks his chest open to see Donna confirming it with the way she's covering up the fact she woke up naked and with the way her hair looks exactly the way he's imagined after he's dreamed of sinking inside of her for long perfect hours.

Donna isn't his, he reminds himself. Betrayal is a ridiculous emotion to have punching through his veins.

And yet.

"I…" Harvey starts, and he only hopes that he's managed to swallow back whatever was written on his face, because she'll know.

"Harvey, are you okay?" Donna asks.

"I. Yes."

The worst is how easy it is for him to throw off revelation and put on whatever it is him and Donna are. It's so automatic that he almost doesn't feel his soul bottom out as he does it. "Samantha backed off from Scottie," he says. "Samantha needs your okay on the deal before it closes off. I just… wanted to let you know before their office in London closes for the night."

It's a feeble excuse and does nothing to explain why he's shown up at her door this early, and they all know it. Thomas narrows his eyes a little, but he forgoes any questions, which is good because a single question would pull his excuse down around his ears. Thomas probably knows that. It's probably why he doesn't ask.

Fucker, Harvey thinks unfairly.

Donna looks at him with something deep and foreign in her eyes, and it's like something has suddenly snapped loose in her that she's trying not to let bubble to the surface. Maybe she's seen the shift in him as well, because she tips her head to the side in the way she does when she's trying not to let their hearts touch too closely.

"Thanks, Harvey," she says. "I'll call them now."

Harvey nods, his lips pressed together in a thin line, swallowing around suddenly dry vocal chords. He nods again when Donna says she'll see him in the office, because he thinks if he tries to talk, the only thing that will come out as a wobbled confession, and what would they all do then?

She's made her choice, and anything he could say would just drag her down with him.

Thomas nods at him, and tells him to have a good day, and edges the door shut in his face.

Harvey isn't one for metaphors. Metaphors are shit. Metaphors are for dropout literature undergraduates who over analyze books instead of getting real jobs. And yet, as Thomas closes the door, it feels so much like Donna closing it on him that it takes him a couple of minutes to find the strength to turn and walk to the elevator on legs shaking in a way he's never experienced before.

Later, in his office, Donna will talk to him about Thomas, and he will say he's happy for her, and then he will go home that night after the whole world explodes around him and think,

fuck.

A/N: Thanks to Aditi ( mayxpaulsen) for both the prompt and the proof read. Thank you for reading, and as always any comments/reviews/criticism is gratefully received!