He knocks hard enough to crack a knuckle open but he'll only notice it in two days.

The only thing going through his head is her, a scroll of images, impressions, and memories that hurry him from Samantha's office, through the lobby and into a cab, pushing him to her apartment building and to her door.

In all of the last 15 years, there were very few times he remembers her not being there. She always just was, hovering in the atmosphere like oxygen. Just around the corner, poking and prodding on the intercom, writing dissertations on how much she thought he was screwing up just in the arc of an eyebrow. Even when she wasn't there, she was, in texts and calls, in the way she'd send Mike or Rachel or Gretchen to check on him and report back. She wasn't subtle about it, but then, she wasn't trying to be. She wanted him to know that despite everything, she was there. Despite their arguments, their flirting and friendship, the times where they wouldn't or couldn't talk, and despite the snap back and forth between we're nothing and maybe we could be something - despite all of that, she's there.

And then, at the trial, he'd looked around, and she wasn't.

She wasn't sitting there, and the empty chair behind him felt like nothing and everything all at once. Mike wasn't there, hovering, and neither was Rachel, or Gretchen. There was nobody trying too hard to look like they weren't spying, nobody looking overtly innocent while they pulled Donna's number up on her phone and texted her updates.

She wasn't there, and he'd just found out about Thomas.

It had sat, heavy, in his chest, and he hadn't been able to quite put his finger on why it was all so goddamn horrible.

And then Samantha had said the most obvious thing, and it had all clicked into place.

Donna opens the door, and he looks at her, and there's some mix of relief and - something else - sitting right in his throat, and he feels his own shoulders slack at the sight of her. He hadn't quite realised how that one day of Donna not being right there in the oxygen had wrapped him up in fear and tension.

She steps back, and it's clear as anything.

- Are you finally here? -

He tries to say something, and nothing comes, so he just steps forward and kisses her. He has some vague idea that maybe he can say with his body what he can't with his words but that plan stutters to a halt as well when all conscious thought blinks away from him for a few long moments.

There's a flurry of instinct in her hallway and up against the table at the back wall. It's fifteen years of every time he's held back, every time his hand automatically tried to reach out and he's stuffed it in his pocket instead, every time he's wanted to kiss her and hid it behind a joke or the offer of a drink, all released at once.

It feels like waking up to dark outside his window every day for fifteen years, and then suddenly, sunrise.

It's completely overwhelming and he's not sure what to do or think, not sure where to put his hands, and he's just acting out pure instinct, pure need, pure touch. His hands fall down her body and along her sides, he feels her fingers tangle with his briefly, they settle on her waist, low on her hip bone. His pinky finger drifts to her pelvis, and that jolts electricity through him, because it's everything he tried so hard to pretend he didn't want punching straight from his ignored dreams into reality.

Fuck, he thinks.

"Fuck," he grunts, into the ditch of her neck.

He snaps back into his body when the tug of her hand pulls him to the entrance of her bedroom. She's all lithe sensuality, pooling love and need in her eyes, spinning her body back into him and she pulls his hand back and steps into him at the same time, pressing her body up along his, lengthening along his side.

He opens his mouth, still searching for the words that have eluded him since she opened his door and since he locked gazes with her across a bar a lifetime ago. His mouth is inexplicably dry. He has a distant realisation as to why it's always been easy to joke that he wants to marry her and why it's always been difficult to say anything genuine. Because Harvey hates change, and after all, how do you say I love you without changing everything?

"Donna," he says instead, and it comes out mostly breath.

She sees his jaw working as he tries to tack something else, anything, on to her name, and he's smart, he knows so many words and none of them fit. Donna palms the side of his face, stills him. He blinks, because he can feel tears stinging, and he swallows them back.

"I know," she says, and her voice is watery. "I know. Me too."

He wants to cry, and kiss her, he wants to hold her on the sofa till morning and he wants to tear her clothes off and take her in every room of her apartment. He wants to find the right words, he wants to tell her without saying anything. Mostly he wants to try and find a way to tell her that the way she's looking at him makes him feel like he's too much for his own body.

"I-" he says, and falters.

He feels like he's trying to write down the first time someone saw the stars.

"It's okay," she says. "We have time."

She edges his jaw forward with her finger tips, kisses him, slowly, slowly. She closes her mouth over his lips, skating the edge between love and lust. There's a tension in his belly, maybe she feels it too because she steps flush into him as he stands, numb and feeling awkward and like he doesn't quite fit inside himself anymore.

She skates her other hand up over his chest and around the back of his neck, scratching through the light hairs at the base of his skull and tickling a line of goosebumps in her wake. His hands lift at his sides, artless and confused, before dropping automatically to her hips. He has so much he wants to show her, but his brain and his hands aren't connecting, and fuck, has he ever even kissed anyone before?

"Stop thinking," she murmurs against his mouth. "It's okay."

And then he can't think anyway, because her spare hand is on his chest and her tongue is in his mouth, the flat of her palm pressing over his collar bone. She's barefoot and shorter than he remembers, but she's edging up on her toes to make up the difference between them and she's at just the right angle to edge her mouth and teeth along his jawline in the same breath she hooks a finger into the placket of his shirt, just where his rib cage dovetails into his chest, and she tugs him after her as she walks backwards into her room.

"Shoes," she says, and he toes them off automatically. She's tugging at the gap on his shirt and undoing buttons at the same time. She slips her pants off her hips, lets them fall from her legs while she steps backwards, somehow graceful, and he wonders distantly if she's some kind of magician that she's able to do anything but stare dumbly at him like he's staring at her. She's not wearing underwear, but that only registers dimly because she's radiant and beautiful and her eyes. Her eyes are everything. He's got his gaze fixed on her, just her, and she's smiling at him somewhere in the realm of devotion and hunger mixed, and her crooked finger against his sternum nudges, edges, steers him and turns him around. He's just gone, skin crying for hers and the world's blinked out of existence he thinks, but he doesn't care.

She backs him up until his calves edge up on the end of her bed. She pushes, and it's not hard, but there's some force of suggestion under her palm that doesn't take no for an answer, slow and sure of itself, and he sits back on the bed, staring up at her. She keeps on, edging him to shuffle his hips back, and she presses her body against his, kneeling either side of his hips, and when she settles her weight on his lap at the same moment she catches his mouth with hers, he hears himself punch a deep, guttural sigh against her lips.

God.

He's dreamt of her weight, slight but steady, over him. There's memories scattered in the distant past of the last time, the only other time they'd been together, and he remembers impressions of her body against hers. He doesn't remember the physicality of it so much that he remembers it just feeling right, like puzzle pieces, like she's gravity.

She says, "Harvey," against his mouth, and he would say her name back but words are beyond him so he just slides his hands up her back, under the silk of her camisole, and hopes that says enough instead. Her skin is warm under his hands, the dip of her spine is perfect, and he feels like if he concentrates enough he can remember the pattern of the freckles many summers have kissed into her back. He tried to memorise them, years ago, but time has a way of taking the things he's tried to keep in sharp relief and blurring them into watercolour. He loses himself for a moment in the way her skin gives under the press of his thumbs, and he redraws her in his mind again.

Donna lifts her arms, and he catches the edge of the silk, draws her shirt off her shoulders and drops it. He barely gets his hands back, landing his palms on her shoulder blades, before she has her hands at his chest, popping buttons with a self-assurance he wishes he felt. He sighs, his head falling to the side when she presses her mouth up into his neck, and then along the line of his collar bone, following her lips with the edge of her tongue. Cool air spikes over his skin as his shirt falls open and he shivers when her palm presses over his belly. She hums lightly against his shoulder, and he thinks he feels her smile before she nips against his skin and pulls his shirt out of his waistband.

Donna leans into him, into his chest, presses him back until he has to sit back and brace himself on his hands, and she finds his mouth with hers. She kisses him, loose and languid, which shuts off what little brain function he's hanging on to. She's devastating, all his dreams of her over so many years wrapped up in one moment, and it's all he can do to respond, press his tongue against hers and brace his elbows so he doesn't cave in on himself.

Donna shifts her hips back, reaches between them, pops the button on his pants with a confident snap of her fingers, drags the zip down, and presses her palm along the line of his cock through his briefs. Even through fabric she feels so good he doesn't think there's a word for it, and it's only a moment before she hooks two fingers through the waistband and pulls, freeing him.

"Donna," is all he can manage, lifting one hand to card his fingers through her hair at her temple. He hugs her to him, overwhelmed, because it's happening, they're happening, and it's so far beyond his wildest imaginings that he's not sure if he's even capable of processing it all.

"I'm here," she says, turning her head to kiss his cheek, slicking her hand along his cock at the same time, thumbing the tip and landing a hand on his chest. "I'm here."

He sighs into her hair, kissing her wherever his mouth finds skin, his hand slipping from her temple and down her jaw, neck, to her collarbone, and finally he palms her breast, cupping her in his palm and pressing in. She murmurs his name as he finds her nipple under his thumb, teases it into a tight peak, and she unconsciously kicks her hips closer to his, shuffling up as she strokes him. She's got sensitive nipples, he feels like he should have remembered, but it's all new somehow, and he relearns her from the shadows he's kept of her in his memory.

She sits back as she shuffles her hips forward, finding more purchase in the press of her against him, and it's just the right angle for him to drop his mouth to her other breast. She arches, just a little, curving her back to sit against his lips so he can press over her nipple with his tongue before sucking it lightly into his mouth and letting his teeth scrape. Donna sighs then, hums his name, slips her hand from his chest to his neck to hold him solidly against her. She presses her hand over him, gripping firmly from base to tip, stroking him rigid, pressing her thumb along his slit and slicking the juices down his shaft.

She rolls her palm over his tip, making his breath catch in his throat, and he huffs his need against her skin, biting down harder than he intends to. Donna grunts, says, "fuck, Harvey," her voice guttural. She hitches her hips closer, grips him, edges his tip along her centre, up to her clit, finds a rhythm between her hand and hips. She takes several long moments to rub his cock against her clit. She's sleek and wet, and it feels like he could just push his hips and slip deep inside her. Harvey hears her breath hitch higher in her lungs and just tries not to die.

Donna presses at his chest then, pushing him to lay back, and he's still got his shirt on, his pants slung over his hips, but he doesn't care and neither does she. She pumps him several more times, sits up over him, guides him to her entrance. She sits down, slowly, until the tip of his cock edges just inside. She takes a moment to adjust, then lets her hips fall, sheathing him completely inside her, and god. He can feel her, tight and slick, and she pauses for a long moment, just to feel him he thinks, and he's silently thankful because he's already feeling the need coiling low in his belly and he has to concentrate hard on not embarrassing himself.

Maybe she's the same, because he can feel her muscles edging and fluttering around his tip, and she leans over him, hands sliding down his chest to his hips, and then up to cup his jaw, takes a moment to breathe in the same space as him.

Harvey runs his hands up her back, and she opens his eyes and catches his gaze and the same moment, and he thinks he might be crying, but it doesn't feel like it's bad. Donna's eyes are shining, maybe with love and maybe with tears. Maybe both.

He tries, again, to find words, but it's only her name that slips out in a breathless whisper.

"Harvey. Harvey, honey," she says in return, and holds him for a minute, thumb across his cheekbone, maybe she's wiping a tear away.

It's a long moment before she starts moving, and when she does, she finds some line to walk in between lust and a deep love that he doesn't think he's ever felt before, ever, and he thinks distantly that if he'd known it could be like this he wouldn't have waited fifteen years. She leans her hands on his chest for purchase, slides her hips over his and lifts, stroking up and then back down. He watches, seeing himself slide in and out of her, and he can feel himself settle deep, nudging up against her back wall, and she grunts and hitches down harder.

It's much, much too much, and he kicks his head back after only a few moments, because the visual is pushing him so close to the edge. He throws an arm over his eyes, grunts, and then grunts again when she leans over and murmurs in his ear that she wants him. She hunches, bumping her clit over his pubic bone, and it's back, the coil in his stomach.

"Donna, I -" he says. "I can't -" He tries to gather himself, to slide his hand between them and get his thumb over her, but there's no way for him to do anything other than to succumb to her and everything she is.

"It's okay," she says in his ear, her mouth lipping his earlobe. "I'm here. Let go." And a moment after that, his breath bottoms out against his diaphragm all together and he punches into an orgasm that has his hand blindly reaching for hers. She finds his palm, threads her fingers through his and squeezes, holding him to reality until he's empty, still pressed up inside her, sliding into a haze that might be dreaming or might be dopamine.

Donna curls her body against his, relaxing into him. She slips a hand up, pushing damp hair off his forehead and scratching her fingers through his scalp. His hand falls, landing at her back, her skin under his palm, he's finally allowed to touch her.

He drifts on the single thought that he's finally right where he's meant to be.

"Yellow."

"Yeah."

"Yellow."

"You can keep saying it," she says, voice muffled as she chews, "but it won't stop being true."

"...why?"

"They're sweeter."

"Why would you want a sweet pizza?"

"God, you're insufferable," she says, nudging him good-naturedly with her elbow while she balances her slice between her fingers. She's wrapped loosely in her sheet, the corners bunched and tangled so her leg can jut out, and it droops low over her chest.

Harvey folds his slice so he can take a bite, trying not to drop any on the throw that he has slung low on his hips. He shrugs and says, mouth full, "yeah, but you like that about me."

"I tolerate that about you. It's different." She considers her opinion for a moment. "Then again you do have a knack for knowing where to get good pizza at 2am."

"Only the finest for you."

"Shut up."

He laughs into his slice, and she nudges him in the side with her shoulder, turns to kiss the side of his face gently, and he has the distinct, clear thought of a single word.

Forever.

A/N: Thank you to Isa for begging on Twitter, Luisa for the obligatory meltdown support, Aditi for the adorable breakdown and beta.

Reviews/comments are loved and appreciated.