Cormus had been thinking about it since the shuttlebay conversation when Mei-Lin had told him she was going to be telling Zedd she wanted to keep things professional. He had nodded and gone back to the thruster assembly and finished the job and put his tools away and somewhere between closing up the housing and walking back to his quarters he had realized that the information had done something to his thinking that he had not given it permission to do.

He had sat with that before he admitted to himself what it was. He liked her. Not in the vague background way that you liked people you worked well with but in the specific way that had been building since the first week aboard and that the shuttlebay conversation had brought into focus in a way he had not been prepared for. She was competent and direct and occasionally sharp in ways that surprised him and she did not perform anything for anyone and he had been paying more attention to her than he had been officially acknowledging to himself for at least a week.

He was twenty three and he was not going to pretend he did not know what that meant.

He decided to do something about it.

He found her in the engineering bay at 1700, which was the end of the day shift and which he had chosen deliberately because it was a natural stopping point and because showing up in the middle of something Mei-Lin was focused on was a good way to get a response that was more about the interruption than about what he had actually said. She was closing up the secondary power grid access panel with the particular efficiency of someone finishing a task properly rather than just finishing it and she looked up when he came in with the expression she used when she was deciding whether the interruption was welcome.

He had learned to read that expression over the past ten days. Today it landed somewhere in the middle which was better than the closed end and he took it as a reasonable starting position.

"You are done for the day?" he said.

She looked at the panel and then at the chrono on the wall. "In approximately four minutes" she said.

"Close enough" he said. He leaned against the workbench. "Have dinner with me."

She looked at him. Not the assessing look she used for technical problems but the other one, the one she used when she was reading a situation rather than a system. "Dinner?" she said.

"In the mess hall" he said. "Tonight. You and me. Not a working dinner, not a debrief, not a follow up on the EPS conduit segments." He paused. "Just dinner."

She held his gaze for a moment and he held hers back and did not look away or qualify what he had said because qualifying it would have made it into something smaller than he meant it to be and he did not want it to be smaller than he meant it.

"Okay" she said.

He had not entirely been prepared for her to say it that directly and without preamble and he registered that and did not let it show. "Good" he said. "1800. I will get a table."

She looked at him for a moment with the expression that was somewhere between amused and genuinely curious. "It is the mess hall Cormus. There are always tables."

"I will get a good one" he said, and went back to the shuttlebay before she could say anything else about it.

---

She arrived at 1802 which told him she had not rushed and had not been late, which was entirely consistent with who she was. She had changed out of her engineering clothes into something dark and simple and her hair was down which he had noticed she wore down more often lately and which he noted and did not say anything about.

He had gotten a table by the viewport which was the best table in the mess hall and which he had been sitting at for ten minutes making sure nobody else took it. She looked at it when she came in with the expression that was not quite a smile but was close.

"You got a good table" she said.

"I said I would" he said.

She sat down across from him and looked at the viewport and New Ferenginar turning below and then at him and her expression had settled into something more open than her usual register, the particular quality of someone who had decided to be present rather than careful.

They replicated food and the mess hall was quiet at this hour and they ate and talked in the way they had talked before but without the work between them and without the task to return to and the difference was immediate and significant. No tool in one hand, no diagnostic running on the console behind them, no reason for either of them to be anywhere else. Just two people at the best table in the mess hall with the planet in the viewport and the ship quiet around them.