Belonging (Suits, Harvey/Mike)

The crowd at Veronica’s was different that night. There weren’t that many people out, not like most nights. He recognized most of the regulars, gave a quick polite nod to the few he had frequent dealings with. A steady bass beat filtered through the sound system, not quite fast enough to dance to but enough to get the blood moving from the suggestive rhythm. He found a perch by the bar and leaned back, letting his body relax loose and lithe across a stool. A few eyes lingered on him but it took a while before anyone approached.

He flirted. People came and went. Men brought him drinks, not enough to get him plastered but enough that his perch got a little more unstable.

Mike realized something was wrong when the guy he was talking to – propositioning, really, but he had a small part of his brain that tried to pretend he wasn’t here to get paid for kinky sex – suddenly paled, stammered an excuse, and ran away. There wasn’t any other way to describe it. The guy actually fled. Like there was a tiger chasing him kind of fled. For a second Mike thought it’d been something he’d said, but their conversation had actually been going pretty good. They’d gotten through the initial flatteries and the guy had moved on to the detail – where, what, how much. They’d been seconds from closing the deal, which was the part Mike hated the most because it was the part where he always debated totally not doing this, giving it up and never coming back.

Then Mike realized there was someone standing behind him. He could feel the man’s presence, like a cold wall at his back. He turned slowly, not sure what to expect but he certainly hadn’t expected to find Harvey Specter standing behind him with a scowl on his face. It wasn’t one of his good scowls either, the kind that said ‘I don’t think I like what you’re saying but I can be convinced otherwise’. No, this was a bad scowl, a scowl that meant he might not have a job in the morning.