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They’ve ended up in Steve’s bed together a few times – four plus that one when they didn’t make it up the stairs, but who’s counting? – when Danny starts acting weird.
They’re at the scene of a probable homicide, on the lanai of a home that costs several million, interviewing the maid who called the police after she couldn’t get into the property for two days in a row. Steve is taking point, and Danny started out as usual, throwing in a question of his own here or there, but he’s been very uncharacteristically quiet for several minutes by the time Steve thanks the girl, looks back for Danny, and nods his head.
Danny, leaning against the bright white lanai railing with a dark expression and his arms crossed, refuses to move for a few seconds, confirming Steve’s suspicions that it’s not the case that’s getting to him. Why would it, when it’s just another middle aged man, dying a politely bloodless death from what appears to be poison?
“Let’s go,” Steve tries, and goes. When he crosses through the large sliding doors into the living room abuzz with HPD crime scene technicians, Danny thankfully does deign to follow him.
Danny even has something to say about it, so the world is still spinning. “Really? Are you sure?” He glances back over his shoulder, and they’re only just out of earshot when he adds, “You don’t want to give her your number first?”
Steve pauses at the foot of the stairs for a second just to shoot Danny a look. “What’s up with you?”
“Up?” Danny asks, throwing his hands that direction. “Nothing’s up. Why would anything be up?”
Steve goes up, up, up the stairs, but because Danny continues to follow, together with his dark cloud aura, their conversation also continues. The thing is, apart from alerting authorities that something was off, the maid wasn’t able to tell them anything specific. She’s young and pretty but by her own account hadn’t been working here long and only had a few polite interactions with her employer in total, who mostly holed up in his study after letting her in.
Danny was there while she said all of this, so he knows that. “HPD will take her info,” Steve reminds him, dropping the matter of the up and downness of things. He grabs a box of disposable gloves from an investigation kit in the hallway and offers it to Danny before taking a pair for himself.
“Oh, thank God,” Danny intones, snapping on the gloves in a way that sounds like it would hurt. “HPD will take her info.”
They’ve arrived in the study, a relatively small room with as its main features a large desk and walls lined with bookcases. The downstairs has priority, being where the body was found, so it’s quiet up here.
Steve stops again, turns, and studies Danny. That’s what a room like this is for, after all.
Danny still looks like someone peed in his malasadas, and even though Steve would usually pride himself on his ability to read Danny Williams, it takes another embarrassingly long moment for him to finally figure out what’s going on.
In his defense, it’s almost impossibly stupid. “Oh,” he says, out loud, when the penny drops. He’s rarely felt this excited about change.
“What, oh?” Danny’s eyes skitter over to him, and then shoot away. “No,” he says firmly, like he’s getting ahead by pre-denying whatever Steve is going to accuse him of.
Obviously Steve accuses him of it anyway. “You’re jealous.” It’s like when Danny went all weird about Bullfrog coming to the island, but better. This time there’s a more than good chance Danny isn’t just feeling displaced as best friend.
The one definite thing the maid was able to tell them was that Steve works out. Steve didn’t try to encourage her, but he also didn’t shut her down - one of the things he’s learned from Danny over the years is that it helps if a witness likes you.
Danny closes the door to the study behind them, and Steve could pretend he’s surprised by that and make a whole thing out of it, but it would distract from the matter at hand. Which is Danny, whirling back around to him to teach him lesson 2 – the cons of Danny’s own interrogation tactics – by saying, “I’m not jealous. How could I be jealous? I have no right to be jealous.”
Steve takes a step closer. “No right?”
“No reason.” Danny takes a step away, towards the closest bookcase, and crouches down. It’s like he’s expecting to find a vital clue wedged in between Trask’s Historical Linguistics and Chomsky’s Universal Grammar.
“That’s not what you said.”
“It’s what I should have said,” Danny shoots back, which in no way means the same thing as it’s what I meant to say. Danny is a man of many words, most of them avoidant, and Steve is always trying to pin down the actual point.
It’s probably deceptively simple: they haven’t talked about those four and a half times they’ve slept together. Sure, there’s been some that was really hot and you can keep a toothbrush here, it’s not in the way, but absolutely no what does this mean? or has anything changed between us? or so if you had to summarize the definition of the word partner that we’re working with at this point in 100 words, hey-why-are-you-kicking-me-out-of-bed-you-asshole. Steve has been waiting for all of them, on some level, and he’s been dreading it.
And Danny, who dreads almost everything almost always, is very good at picking up on that sort of thing in other people.
Steve watches the side of Danny’s face for a moment, until it’s been long enough that Danny takes a break from studying study books and looks up, suspicious. “Do you want to be jealous?” Steve asks him, point blank. His troubleshooting of Danny Williams isn’t over, it has just entered a new phase.
Danny stands up straight, only rubs his knee a little bit, and eyes Steve up and down. He’s still wary. “Do you want me to want that?”
Steve shrugs. He wants Danny to want a lot of things, him most of all. Any reluctance on his own part has never come from a lack of feeling, no matter what fictions Danny’s brain might be spinning. “You can be jealous.” In the interest of playing it casual while also riling Danny up, he adds, “If you want.”
Danny doesn’t get very riled up by that, but he does keep staring. “Oh yeah?”
Steve pretends this is a situation he can shrug at. “Sure.”
If anything, this leads Danny to look pacified. It’s an incredibly fascinating discovery. “And then what?”
Steve does not take the three steps he’d need to pin Danny against What is Meaning? Fundamentals of Formal Semantics, but there’s no denying the thought crosses his mind. “Then I’ll make it up to you.”
“Like how?”
“Come over tonight. I’ll show you.”
“Hey,” Danny says, with no heat. “I’m not that easy.”
“We can order in pizza.”
“I can order my own pizza.”
“I’ll pay,” Steve offers, and with that one, he’s found the secret phrase.
Danny’s whole body, eyebrows to hips, does an incredulous little dance. Nobody has ever made those sterile-looking thin blue gloves ping to Steve as seductive before, but Danny’s hands work magic. “Now that, I gotta see.”
Steve crosses his arms in part because he’s about to play offended, and in part as a safety precaution against doing anything stupid. They should have left the door open. “Money? That’s what it takes with you?”
Danny tosses his head left to right, unabashed. “A man’s gotta know what he’s worth.”
“A lot more than that,” Steve tells him, because he doesn’t even need to think about it – it’s the most basic truth imaginable.
Still, it gets Danny to look at him in a way that-
And then Danny jams his hands in the pockets of his slacks. “Keep that up, and I might have to rethink how easy I am.”
Steve is just thinking that nothing has happened yet and for sure nothing is going to happen, because they’re at a crime scene and he’d need to fire himself if he ever crossed that line, but even so, just to take away temptation, they really should have left that door open – or for lack of that, maybe it’s time to open a window, because it’s kind of hot in here – when there’s a knock.
On the door. Right before it cracks open just enough for Kono to lean against the door jamb and stick her head inside. “So are you done with your sweet talk yet, or do you need me to give you another five minutes?”
The temperature doesn’t exactly plummet, but she’s definitely letting in a breeze. Steve nods at her in the most professional way he can muster. “Come in, Kono.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Danny claims, which is the sort of thing you can only ever say that confidently in response to a statement as innocuous as Kono’s if you know exactly what she was talking about.
It makes Kono grin while she steps into the room. “Really? So it’s alright if the boss buys me pizza, too?”
Danny gives a loose shrug. It’s his turn to pretend that fits. “If he wants to sleep on the couch, that’s his choice.”
Kono laughs, and Steve huffs and in vain tries to look like he has any regrets or doubts at all about promising Danny the power to say something like that, because it’s frankly embarrassing how strongly he leans the opposite way. “What have you got for us?” he asks Kono, and she tells them Max is downstairs with the body, ready to share his preliminary findings.
As they follow her through the open door, Steve thinks it might be a good time to finally tell Danny about the wardrobe drawer he emptied out for him three weeks ago. It was the day after the first time they nearly broke their necks trying to climb the stairs while kissing, and while even that knowledge could never cancel out Danny’s dread entirely, it will definitely make him one hell of a smug bastard for a little while.
So maybe Steve will tell him over pizza – or better yet, after.