Title: Flirtatious
By: Bob J Montonelli
Pairing: Mac/Danny
Rating: PG-13
Archive: Please do
Summary: Danny flirted. Mac could drown in it, if he wanted.

***

Danny flirted.

With everyone, which wasn't so much a bad thing really, just sometimes complicated and if the planets were aligned in the right way excruciatingly awkward, like when Mack caught him making those sultry, hungry eyes at Flack in the locker room, licking his lip and managing, at the same time, to be so miraculously obedient and innocent and pliant. Which he was not, which everyone knew anyway, and for the most part ignored.

Life (for those who had one) did not mix with Work, unless it was something glaringly obvious and important and very much in the way of work, things like broken bones and hospital visits and dead family. Danny, Mac was dead certain, had an extensive life outside of work, and most Mondays you could smell it hovering on him like fog on the harbor, casting him in bewilderingly enigmatic light. There was a Danny in clean white shirts and nice suits and, if Mac impressed the necessity upon him a tie, glasses with slender silver frames and stubble that made him look more amusingly rumpled than lazy or unprofessional, and then there was Danny some mornings in the locker room with hickeys peppering his torso shoulder to belt and more than once long, long scratches that Mac had absently suggested he have Hawkes put something on. And Danny had snapped his head up at that with eyes wide, and then back down staring at the tiles as if hiding some shame and pulling on a clean t-shirt with tight, cautious, quick movements.

Danny flirted less then, or maybe just arranged things differently, which was just fine with Mac on the days he could hardly stand Danny's ceaseless brazen charm, but hurt in a small, strange, sprained way when Mack bothered to listen to himself, and his self told him that he should do something (monumentally stupid) like corner Danny in the locker room and teach him what his stupid, self-assured grin would get him into, if only so he could see Danny look up at him murky with lust and dead heavy with subservience.

Mac was not like that, or so he told himself, it would not do, it would not be...well.

It wouldn't be good.

Danny would touch him, though, from time to time, so much the comrade-in-arms, brusquely gregarious, hand on shoulder, or forearm, ghosting against his back. It was not an accident not with the smile flickering like a snake-tongue at the corner of his eye. Danny flirted with everyone, he told himself. That was Danny. Getting into trouble. Like always. Ignore him. Except that Danny's fingers would linger and he would start to wonder how they would feel on his skin, because if he sat down and had a long talk with the wall of his apartment about what he really wanted it ended up being Danny, against his skin, under his skin, swallowed, devoured, monstrous temptation and looming desire that belied the guilt glinting from the gold band on his finger. The small, angry, vicious part of him showed torturous teeth of hungry, barren, long-deserted lust, some shadow snarling to be uncaged, uncaptured, set loose to render tender affection null and void. He could not simply sidestep the part of him that wanted Danny deep, beyond the streetlight's sullen glow down in the damp alleys of his mind. He could go there, if he wanted. He could go there, at the black lake's lapping shore and the wide, silent, rippling expanse. He could drown in it, if he wanted. If.