The issue at hand, now, is that Sheila called Louis about sudden and paralyzing back pain that struck her, and Harvey has been staring at a stack of papers with Faye's entire background printed on them that he cannot even begin to process. Namely, because his mind is instead thinking about vanilla apricot perfume and the trail of gold earrings that normally lead him right down to Donna's sweet spot on her neck.

God, his head hurts.

They weren't supposed to have a sleepover tonight but he gives Ray the address to her apartment and gets the hell out of that office. Out of courtesy, he sends her a simple text, but he expects her to be tied up enough with Rachel that she doesn't see it: Coming over. Missed you.

Using his key to get in, he is greeted with the echo of her laugh ringing through the entryway and instantly relaxing his shoulders. His game plan was loosely to just sneak in and change into some comfier clothes before laying in her bed and waiting for her to join - he didn't want to disrupt the one night that they had explicitly set aside for themselves, especially her time with Rachel. He didn't want to push too hard to be fitting into her life; push her too hard into their relationship if she wasn't ready for it.

But his plan utterly fails when the voices in the living room fall silent.

"Harvey?"

He stands still and stays quiet, as though it'll make him invisible.

"Hang on, Rach, I think we have a surprise guest joining the party..."

Footsteps pad across her floors and Donna appears, peeking around the corner to the entryway and seeing him wince a smile at her. Suddenly, he feels caught and embarrassed and young, of all things, young and fumbling for the right thing to do.

But Donna doesn't care about any of that.

In fact, she smiles, so wide that it hurts his face to even look at, and runs across the short distance to throw her arms around his neck and kiss him square on the lips, no hesitation about it. Through the throbbing pain between his eyes, his fingers grasp at her silk pants to hold her close.

He's so happy that she's so happy to see him that the I love you racing through his head makes his headache worse.

"Trying to eavesdrop on my girls night, are you?"

"I'm sorry," Harvey says, instead of going along with the joke. The guilt in his voice etches a frown on her lips. "Louis had to bail, and I've got a headache coming on... I just thought I could go to bed. I didn't want to interrupt."

Her head is shaking no before he can even finish his final thought. "You have a headache?"

"Yeah, 's no big deal, though-"

But she's lifting to her tiptoes and pressing her lips into his forehead, a gentle pressure that scares away the pain he's been in for the last two hours. Her hand laces through his and starts to lead him down the hallway-

"Come on. Change into something comfy and then come lay on the couch with me."

"What about Rachel?"

"What about her?"

"... You're still on the call, aren't you?"

She nods. "Why?"

"Shouldn't I, like... Give you some privacy to talk?"

A cotton shirt hits him in the chest, thrown at him from one of her dresser drawers. Donna moves over to him to start taking off his tie, unbuttoning his shirt... He finds his breathing feels heavier when they're this close, that he has to force himself to focus on what she's saying and not the way her lips are moving as she says it.

"We can keep talking even if you're in the room, Harvey. It's not like all we talk about is you and Mike. We're just catching up, and we've been at it for three hours already."

She's tugging the new shirt over his head by the time he can ask: "You sure?"

"Of course I'm sure. Now, get your cute ass in those sweatpants while I get you some Advil, and then come say hi."

Stagnant, Harvey is left alone in the room wondering how he got so lucky to have someone else who is able to take charge and take care of things when he isn't able to. Not one to disobey Donna, he finishes changing his clothes, and emerges from the bedroom to find her on the couch with her laptop open on the table in front of her. Next to the computer is a glass of water and two blue pills, ready for him to take.

Donna is talking as he takes a seat next to her - wraps an arm around her waist and squeezes her hip as he nuzzles his nose into her hair and kisses her temple in thanks.

"Alright, Rachel, Harvey's here now, and he's just gonna be a silent partner for the evening. Anything you can say to me alone, you can say with him here, too."

Rachel is smiling through the screen at the newfound display of affection from Harvey, and she gives him a little wave that reminds him of how much he misses her bright presence in the halls of the firm. "Hi, Harvey! Welcome to girls night!"

"Hey, Rach," he smiles back, and he means it. "Happy to be here. Thanks for letting me crash."

"No such thing. I was just about to start complaining about Mike and his new associate."

"Then I joined at the perfect time."

Rachel doesn't waste another second before starting her story, and Donna is nodding along with rapt attention - but she gestures for Harvey to lay down, and pats the top of her thighs until he situates himself to be rested across her lap. The second he stops squirming to a comfortable position, her hands fall to his hair, letting her nails gently scratch against his scalp and relieving the tension that has built up within his skull.

He picks her up to go to work on most mornings, too. Sometimes he brings her breakfast, and sometimes lunch. Rachel, when she hears the daily Donna updates, has started to affirm that Harvey is courting her.

But that isn't a Harvey that she's familiar with, so she denies it.

"We agreed to be friends, Rachel. He's just making more of an effort. It's nice."

"Friends don't just casually mention an inside joke about their hookup from ten years ago."

"You never know," Donna says, sipping on her glass of wine and trying to think about anything else besides strawberries and whipped cream. "They could."

Because Donna isn't in the space to be getting her hopes up - not anymore. She's not going to start expecting something of Harvey that she's been waiting for for years, because at the end of the day, he's never given it to her. So she'll take what he's giving her right now - attention, flattery, charm - and she won't anticipate, or ask for, anything that would run the risk of scaring him off.

It's not hard, at first.

But God, does he make it harder.

Little touches get thrown into the mix of the acts of service he's already providing. As he's picking her up, opening the car door for her, a hand will brush her hair over her shoulder and land at the base of her neck, guiding her into the seat. When they run into each other in the file room, Harvey will squeeze past her in the aisle with his hand hooking right where her hip meets her waist.

Tonight, he's lounging on the couch in his office as Donna sits at his desk, typing away at her computer while he watches her under the pretense that he is reviewing case documents. His jacket and tie are discarded on the armrest, leaving him in his shirt with the cuffs rolled up his forearms and a couple of buttons undone at the top for extra comfort, and extra driving Donna crazy.

Most of the light from the room is from a singular lamp, and any other illumination is sourced from the skyscrapers outside. Squinting in the shadows, Donna rolls her neck back and forth; feeling the tight muscles stretch in desperation for greater relief.

"You okay?"

Just briefly, she looks up from his computer to meet his concerned eyes. "Hmm?"

"You've been hunched over the computer for hours. Your neck hurts, doesn't it?"

Well, yes, it does. But that isn't going to stop her. "It's fine, I just need a few more minutes."

There's a sound of rustling paper off in Harvey's direction, and before she knows it, the lamplight is shadowed in Harvey's frame as he approaches Donna on her left. Her attention is finally drawn away from the computer for more than just a few seconds: "Seriously, I'm almost done."

"You can keep working. I'm just going to try something."

His vagueness confuses her - she continues blinking up at him, waiting for more details, but he gestures back to her computer.

"Go on, finish up."

Against her better judgement, she decides to trust him, and turns back to her computer screen with her heart rate kicking faster and faster. There's a shakiness in her hands as she waits for Harvey to make his next move, because she has no idea what he's doing, and the thrill of the unknown both stirs her desire deep in her stomach and raises her anxiety for not being able to conceive of his next move.

She starts typing.

And then his fingers are ghosting over her neck, brushing her long tresses over her shoulder. The sensation of his fingertips catches her breath instantly - not quite a gasp, but the air is frozen in her chest and there is a bolt of desire shooting down her spine and into her stomach.

Once her hair is out of the way, the pads of his fingers are pushing into the base of her neck and rotating in circles, the pressure increasing with each loop and her muscles becoming lax under his hands. The words on the computer in front of her are soon blurry as her focus is completely stolen from the subject, instead rerouted to drink in the sensation of Harvey's hands against her skin.

She wants to ask: Harvey, what are you doing?

But as his thumbs knead a particularly tense spot just next to her shoulder, her eyes are fluttering shut an her mouth opens to moan instead of telling him to stop.

His hands shift to pulse at the same spot on her other shoulder, pushing deeper this time, and Donna feels the exact moment that she decides fuck it and disregards any hope of questioning his actions. Instead, her head lulls back into his stomach, and she relaxes into the massage like its routine for them.

Minutes pass where neither of them say a word. The massage slows, and Donna knows its about to come to an end, but she's afraid to open her eyes now that she's spent the last ten minutes sighing and moaning with each press into her neck that she felt all the way between her thighs. She wouldn't be surprised if she was pink in her cheeks, if her pupils were dilated with lust.

"Feel better?" Harvey asks, hands still on her shoulders. She tilts her head up against his shirt - her hair is getting a little messed up, glowing orange against his white shirt, but she's past the point of caring - and blinks up at his soft smile.

"Starting to," she whispers. "Thank you."

"Anytime."

They hold each other's gaze for too long before Donna finds the strength to lift her head from his abdomen and closes her computer, the screen of which had already gone black from inactivity. Harvey is still hovering behind her. "Well, I'm not going to get anything else done tonight. You wanna get a nightcap?"

When she finally stands with the computer in her arms, he's adorably surprised by her offer. She got him off his game.

"Uh, yeah. Absolutely. Where were you thinking?"

And she hopes it isn't too presumptuous when she replies: "My place?"

She can feel, see, and hear the sigh that it elicits.

Neither of them say anything, they don't need to. Her nails start to make waves in his shirt, and her hands circle in patterns that she isn't really thinking of. It comes to her, abruptly, that Harvey probably hasn't allowed himself a moment to stop and breathe in nearly all the time she's known him. Probably longer - probably over half of his life has been spent in motion. Forcing his body to keep up with his fast-moving mind.

As her hands sweep down by his hips, then up his spine and down again, she wonders if it's all crashing down on him now. She feels like she's just accidentally pressed pause on their day, and they are frozen in the intimacy of her touch and his silence. The thought of stopping starts to scare her. He deserves a decade's worth of back scratches and catching his breath; not a meek five minutes.

But she feels it build up - tension, not in his back, but in the air. A natural conclusion racing towards them. The need to actually move with time.

Leaning into him, she presses a kiss into the back of his neck and wraps her arms around him from behind, allowing herself to hold him for just a moment longer. His hands come to rest over hers on his sides, so that his arms are partially wrapped around himself, too.

"I love you," he tells her. She marvels that she lives a life where those are the first three words out of his mouth in the morning, and they are meant for her.

She fires back: "I love you." And smiles against his back. "You okay?"

He turns his head, then; looks over his shoulder, and she leans forward to meet him, catching his lips in a brush of a kiss. Her own body relaxes. "Better now," he murmurs against her mouth. She hums in acknowledgement before finally opening her eyes to meet his, big and beautiful and tired.

"Do you need another minute?"

Sincerely, he seems to contemplate it. His eyes flicker to her mouth again; thumbs rubbing back and forth across her hands.

"That's okay." A pause, and then: "Same time tomorrow?"

And if that isn't one of her favorite things to hear, second only to "I love you," but Harvey actually vocalizing his needs and finding ways to ask for them to be met. She'd never be able to say no. She'd never want to.

Right now, she could tell him that he could have this whenever he wanted, he'd just have to ask. But that can be a discussion for when they're both more awake, maybe over dinner tonight or as they're in the car, on their way to the office. In this moment, they know they need to rise from bed and emerge as the professional weapons they've become, so her response is cheekier:

"Hmm, I'll have to check my calendar."

And he plays into it with ease. "You have other plans?"

"I'm a woman in high demand, Harvey."

"Don't I know it." Another gentle kiss; she's sighing when he pulls away. "I'm lucky you ever managed to fit me in."

Not like that was ever difficult. "You were always there," Donna's whispering between them, "you fit before there was ever a question of making room."

Harvey finds himself falling into a silent smile. Donna gives him one last kiss, her lips against the corner of his grin, before pulling away with renewed energy for the day ahead.