fic: pro scientia (greg/mike, gen, 736 words)
ficlet for quodpersortem. fill for a prompt on suitsmeme: greg has a little crush on mike.
Greg had kind of always known that Mike was cute, the way he’d always known Louis had a bald spot the size of a grown man’s hand. The evidence was there, staring him in the face day in and day out. Mike was cute. It was a widely accepted fact that you didn’t question. Most people knew it. Even Harvey knew it.
Mike had the kind of face that made you trust him with your social security number, the kind of face that, when pinched in thought, made you think of what it would look like during sex.
The point was, Greg knew Mike was cute, but it didn’t hit him until the annual PH Halloween Party when Mike showed up dressed as a cowboy, slapped him on the back and said howdy, that he thought Mike was cute.
=
“Nice party, huh?” Mike said.
Greg raised an eyebrow. They weren’t friends or anything, him and Mike, so he wasn’t sure if this was Mike’s attempt at small talk or Mike just being his casual friendly self. He chalked it up to the latter. Mike wasn’t like Kyle whose every gesture hid an ulterior motive. Kyle was conniving and at times, kind of creepy, but Mike was just an all-around good guy. Affable. Gullible.
“Yeah,” Greg said carefully. “Sure.” He sipped his drink, eyeing Clara the temp who went dressed as Wonder Woman. All night he’d been scoping the place for amenable interns but none of them seemed interested in going out for drinks. Most of them arrived with dates and those who flew solo preferred to keep to themselves.
There were about half a dozen Cleopatras, a couple of sexy nurses, and a handful of blood-spattered zombies congregated around the punch table. Greg, who came in a matching black mask and cape, resembled Zorro as much as Louis resembled Caesar in a patterned toga Kyle dubbed as the Jesus robe and a pair of floppy sandals. So no, not much resemblance there.
Greg watched the festivities unfold from afar, wondering when it was that he’d sealed his own fate. He was feeling sorry for himself , he knew, but standing in a pathetic little corner of the room, nursing the same drink for the past half hour, he was suddenly inundated by flashbacks of all those school dances he had unwittingly attended. He used to believe, up to a certain point, that working hard in college and getting into Harvard Law, would land him, if not the girl, then a girl, but the truth was there was no breaking the barrier or rising above the status quo.
Greg wasn’t a looker but a regular guy who sometimes passed for okay under a certain lightning, which meant he was going to have to up his game if he wanted to score with the ladies.
Greg almost forgot that Mike was there until Mike chuffed at something he was reading on his phone. His smile was a little lopsided but maybe, Greg thought, it wasn’t his smile but his mouth that was. Mike’s cowboy hat swallowed most of his head, tipped forward so that it shielded his eyes. Greg wasn’t sure if the cowboy look was for him. There was something about the poncho that seemed a little comical to Greg, like Mike was a little kid playing dress-up.
“What?” Greg asked him, annoyed. “What’s so funny?”
Mike shrugged and pocketed his phone. Greg wondered how he still had any room left in his back pocket when his pants ensconced him so tightly they suctioned every crease and crevice. The chaps Mike wore over them were a little loose but the pants. Greg wondered if it were even possible to wear pants like those without injuring yourself.
Mike pushed himself off the wall, adjusting his hat so that it drooped a little more to the left.
“By the way,” he said, thumping Greg on the arm before slipping away. He flashed his teeth when he smiled and Greg blinked, raising both his eyebrows as Mike tipped his hat at him in salute.
“Nice Zorro costume,” Mike said, and then, still grinning, disappeared into the throng of costumed people, never to be seen again for the rest of the evening.
Greg blinked again before snorting. He tried hard not to smile behind the rim of his plastic cup but he found it was kind of hard not to.