Continuity Note: Set early in the second season, after "Zoo York." Additional notes after the work.

A Friendly Tease

Her attention conbsumed by the medical examiner's report, Lindsay felt blindly for the door handle. Rather than cooled metal, or the door's glossy expanse of glass, her fingers grazed linen and, beneath the distinctive give of a lab coat, the even more distinctive rasp of denim; beneath that, the hard jut of hip. Startled, Lindsay snapped her head up and her fingers back. Danny — dark eyebrow crooked, the corners of his pale eyes scrunched — met her stare with a lean smile.

"You need help with something, Montana?" he drawled. His shoulder propped the door to the lab open; his hips tipped to settle in the frame, parting his coat to show her a glimpse of tight blue jeans, cut to cling to the thighs. A sharkish look came over Danny; that lean smile leaned dangerously leftwards. Another round of teasing loomed before Lindsay.

She swept past him, grimly refocusing on the medical examiner's findings. Intramuscular lacerations to the upper back and shoulders consistent with— The sentence abbreviated before her. The doorway was narrow; as she passed Danny, he pressing flat to the door with his chest a warm and compact swell, her hip brushed against his thigh. His leg stretched out to the lab. He'd looked, insouciant, out to the hall as she passed, so that when she, unmeaning, darted a look at him, her eyes were even with his ears. The legs of his glasses glinted. A knot weighted her chest; she pushed it relentlessly away. All this, in but a moment: she stepped into the lab, and Danny was behind her.

"Thanks for getting the door," she said, turning it round on him as she, too, turned round, just enough to smile over her shoulder.

"Hey, no problem." The door swung shut, loosed as Danny pushed off it and trailed her. "We got our manners here in the big apple."

Lindsay slid onto a stool at the second left lab station; her lab station, she thought with some lingering mixture of bafflement and wonderment. Then, as Danny leaned against the smooth table, she remembered: their lab station. She flipped to the next page in the report and, straightening — shaking her hair back (an old girding tactic, like pulling her hair back before throwing her leg over a particularly cagey stallion) — squaring her shoulders, she drew a casual breath in deep.

"Weren't you heading out, Detective Messer?" She clicked the right desk lamp on over the computer monitor and angled the light toward the report.

Beside her, Danny shifted. He folded his arms over the table, his shoulders rising sweetly beneath his coat. The biting fragrance of his aftershave bloomed. A coat separated them; two coats: his coat and her coat. The distance between their stools, too, and another, less tangible chasm, that cautious space that accompanied any burgeoning acquaintance: she catalogued all these. Still, the tumbling of his muscles played out, hidden, but known, beside her.

"Naw." He shrugged one shoulder. "I mean, I was, but not anymore. Just heading out looking for you, country girl. I was wondering what was taking you so long with that report."

"Ask the M.E." She pulled up her evidence report on the computer, but she spared him a sharpened glance as she did so. "And it's Monroe."

He took up the other stool. Catching the collar of his lab coat, he slicked the lapels down in a practiced move he probably thought was impressive. Personally, she thought it made him look like Danny Zuko from Grease.

"I thought it was Lindsay," he said.

"I thought it was Montana," she said.

Danny grinned at her, a first. He'd a slight overbite and the flash of his teeth startled. "What do you know. Country girl's got some, what would you call it? Spit?"

Lindsay sighed and turned back to her computer. "You got those DNA results back yet, city boy?"

"Might have 'em right here," Danny allowed. He tipped his head, eyes flicking behind his sleek specs. "That the M.E.'s report?"

"Might be," said Lindsay, tossing the pages back over so the plain typed cover showed.

"Hit me with it."

"You could ask nicely," she said.

"Hit me with it, please," said Danny, rolling his eyes, all: look what he had to deal with here. Impatiently, he held his hand out to her and wiggled his fingers, demanding.

A reckless thing squirmed in her throat. Playing nice wasn't doing all that much where Danny Messer was concerned. Sometimes, when you were making friends with a particularly cagey stallion, you just had to grab him by the nose and get him good and introduced to your scent. She didn't much think hooking her fingers behind Danny's ears — palms settling firm and flat along his stubbled jaw, his glasses set at odd angles by her thumbs — and then dragging his nose down to her crotch would do else but set all the wrong tones for their working relationship. Didn't mean she couldn't find something in that thought she could use.

So Lindsay tapped her (practically short but stylishly even) fingernails on the report's cover, smiled at Danny, and said, "Show you mine if you show me yours."

Danny, reaching for his own desk light, looked quickly at her over his stretching arm; his blue eyes rounded. Pleased, Lindsay's lips turned in. She turned back to the screen and busied herself pulling up the relevant passages. Danny was quiet yet, another first. She dared a sidelong glance. He'd tipped his head again, the better to study her over the thin, black frame of his glasses. Simple and practical, but stylish, too. Same with that fitted shirt with the rumpled collar and the popped buttons, peeking out from his parting lab coat.

"What's the matter?" she asked, all sugar-soaked solicitation. She canted her brow: now, just how do you like it? "You're not all out of spit, are you?"

Another grin, this one slow, split his small, sharp face. "Just thinking?"

"About our vic?"

"About how you're holding up a lot better than I was expecting."

"So you aren't always this rude to people you meet," she said pointedly.

"Hey," said Danny. He spread his hands wide — head cocked to one side, brow the same, chest puffed out and the muscled length of his neck exposed. All hey, look at me. "I'm a regular Prince Charming. New York City class, through and through."

Lindsay laughed her counterpoint: "Well, you sure rolled out the welcome mat."

"You country girls are tough," he said, unapologetic. "If you don't think you're up to taking a little friendly hey, how you doing hazing—"

"That was friendly?"

"Sure," he said easily. "You probably just didn't understand it. Cultural differences."

"Beause I'm a country bumpkin, is what you mean," said Lindsay, still amused. City boys. She'd seen them before, passing through Montana in the summer, acting like John Wayne in a polo shirt then limping away when they got a little too handsy with a waitress at one of the local bar dives (or with a fussy horse at a summer ranch).

"You said it, not me." He nodded at the table. "Trade?"

She passed him the medical examiner's report, and Danny sketched a mocking tip of the hat.

"This country bumpkin's got two big brothers."

She pulled the DNA findings up; beside her, Danny was skimming the report.

"Don't worry," he said dryly, turning through the pages. "I got no intention of getting fresh with you."

Lindsay turned to him, setting her hand down on her tipping hip. At the movement, Danny glanced at her; then he stilled. Her arm, slung over the table, was near to his hand where it curled along the report. The distance between no longer seemed so great. There was a moment, then, in that sudden, fleeting closeness, when Danny's eyes, clear and blue and very bright behind his glasses, lingered not on the spots she'd grown wearily accustomed to men staring, neither breasts nor hips nor mouth, but rather squarely on her own eyes, as if he, too, had been struck by the smallness of their shared station and thus this enforced intimacy. Hands nearly touching. Some few inches between their feet, knees, hips. He didn't even like her, Lindsay thought.

Then he looked away, squinting at the screen, his thumb tapping restlessly on the table. His other hand flew up to adjust his glasses. Lindsay looked away herself. The lab was empty but for her and for Danny, and, as she looked out over the whole of the gleaming and humming lab, perspective was restored to her; it wasn't intimate, and they weren't suffocatingly close, boxed in with nowhere to go. The table was more than wide enough for two to work side by side. Room to spare, too. Lindsay breathed in around that knot tightening inside her.

"That isn't what I meant," she said up at her computer, staring at that screen.

"Huh?" Danny beat a pen down on the paper. "You meant about what?"

"My two big brothers," she said.

Danny frowned. "Out of ink. You mind?"

She filched a pen from her cup of such, set back from the monitor. As Danny reached for the pen, Lindsay held on to it and met him head-on.

"Anything you throw at me," she said, "I can take."

He accepted the pen from her. His cheek, kissed with cropped, glinting stubble, creased.

"That a fact?"

Lindsay, collecting another pen, smiled at Danny. "As a matter of fact, it is."

"Tough talk, country girl," said Danny. "Sure you're not shaking in your cowgirl boots?"

"I left them at home."

"Good idea. Not many cow pies in the lab."

"No," said Lindsay, "just tiger dung."

"Welcome to the big city," said Danny. "If you can make it here, congratulations, you made it here."

This came with a little self-deprecating grimace that was, despite himself, very nearly charming. She supposed if he ever got over this bull-headed posturing, he might even be halfway friendly. She thought maybe, if he did, she'd like that. Bull-headed posturing aside. Wasn't like she'd be seeing much of him outside the job anyway, Lindsay reasoned.

"Thanks," said Lindsay. "Now let's catch that killer."

"Sure thing, country girl," said Danny. "You got any tracking skills that might come in handy? 'Cause I never did Boy Scouts."

"Neither did I," said Lindsay, and Danny rubbed at his nose to hide a laugh.

Yeah. Maybe it could work.

it's over!

Other notes and junk: I watched CSI: NY for the first couple seasons then fell out of watching it (for no real reason other than it was too much trouble fitting it into my schedule, digging it up elsewhere, etc.). Imagine my delight when, years later, I discovered Danny and Lindsay actually got married! And had a baby! So, now I'm rewatching the series.

Danny gives Lindsay some grief when she first shows up, but I think it's interesting that by their second episode together, Lindsay's laughing at his cracks and giving him back as good as she gets. This fic is kind of meant to bridge the gap between "Zoo York" and that. But mostly it's just an excuse to write them being grossly attracted to each other and weirded out about it.

Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed this or, at the very least, that it did not cause you severe physical or emotional pain. What else can any writer ask?