I don't know about Frost...
Frost composed himself, resolutely avoiding looking again at that autopsy table, the place where blood, guts, and innards were habitually exposed. "You're the only one who doesn't give me any jazz about that, Doc," he said with what might become a smile. Doc, he thought to himself with almost as much disgust as that with which he viewed those cold corpses. He just couldn't work up the stones to call her by her first name, not even when she did it first. But, patting the sink, that was an overture if ever he saw one. He scooted his hand closer to Isles's until their pinkie fingers were just touching. Her turn now. He was a hopeful man, Barry Frost, and he'd seen plenty of evidence when his partner, Jane Rizzoli, was around, that the Doc was a touchy feely person, so maybe he should just give it a try.
"Why would I do that?" wondered the medical examiner, genuinely puzzled. "You have nothing to be ashamed of. I think it's sweet that you never fail to acknowledge the humanity of our victims. In fact, anthropologically speaking, that impulse is an example of the very altruism which has dictated throughout human history that murder should be considered a crime. Admittedly, it could be less messy, but at least it shows your heart is in the right place. Metaphorically."
His heart! His heart! She talked about his heart! Barry became a little more courageous, sidling just a little bit nearer. No nearer than his partner had ever stood, of course. No nearer than the platonic friendship that Maura had already established as being within her comfort zone. "You really think so? Well, you know," he smiled, bolstered by the support, "I try to stay open to those things. I mean, they were people before they became bodies."
Doctor Isles did not move away. Her synapses were firing on all pistons, cataloguing her prior experiences with friendship (of which there were admittedly very few) against the friends she had observed together. Women often stood near one another. Men did not typically do so, unless they were dating or flirting. Men and women as friends, she didn't really know. Her parents had been very close friends, not just marriage partners, and so she could rely on her memories of them, whispering together, You are my best friend, then hugging, draping arms across one another's shoulders, kissing cheeks. All those things that she did with Jane, the one real friend she could claim ever to have had. Ding ding ding, she had a winner: this contact was within normal parameters for platonic friendship. Contact initiated, distance closed to within eighteen inches. She took a half-step closer, making the distance exactly twelve inches, as custom apparently dictated. Physical contact approaches, she understood it well enough to make it into her thirties. She could simply do what the other person did, and no more until or unless they moved forward, and she couldn't go wrong. She murmured some comforting response, noncommittal, neither encouraging nor discouraging.
Frost moved a little closer, hand enclosing Maura's with protectiveness, but not quite possessiveness. "Maura," he tried out the taste of her name, heart pounding up in his throat. Neither noticed the ding and swish of the elevator landing on their floor and opening just outside the morgue.