Disclaimer: Don't own it. Wish I did. If I did all the guys would not wear shirts. (And I'm really hoping the writer's strike ends soon because the writers have promised Danny & Flack shirtless.)
Danny Messer had waited for her. That was a first. Danny Messer hadn't waited for any woman before her. If it hadn't come easy, he let it go. That was only until her. With her he waited. He let it develop. He backed off when she asked. When she said she couldn't be in a relationship with him. He was almost so pathetic that he was willing to settle for what few scraps of her attention she threw his way. A single smile over a piece of evidence would keep him going for a week.
He bought a new mattress for her. Of course he never told her. During the miserable period of his life when she had gone to Montana, he thought about the number of women whom he'd had over before he met her. Granted the number was nowhere near the number people imagined and gave him credit for. But still he lay in bed on night shortly after she left and thought of the DNA that would be on his mattress that he'd had close to 10 years. Most guys would not think of such a thing, but he tested other people's mattresses for semen and vaginal fluids for a living. And she did too. So therefore he saved all his overtime while she was back in Bozeman and bought a new mattress.
Not that they had ended up using it the first time. Granted he wouldn't have planned it that way. The bed would have been much softer. But he wasn't saying no when she initiated things. Granted he had suggested playing pool at his house. He had hoped for something to happen, but he was letting Lindsay set the pace of their relationship. Just because she was too important to him to screw it up.
It was also important that she was the only woman who had slept with him on this mattress. But he never told her that. If he screwed this up in the end he didn't want her to know that. That he associated this mattress with her curled up next to him. Granted they didn't need the entire huge mattress the way they slept. They could have fit onto a twin bed they way they slept enmeshed together, but they made full use of it when they were awake. There were nights when she had to leave him or he had to leave her to go stand over a cold body. Or one of them was late coming in. But he slept better because in his mind it was their mattress.