He laughed at that and she smiled at the sound of it and the mess hall was warm around them and the ship hummed in its evening quiet and New Ferenginar kept its slow turn in the viewport and neither of them was tracking the time.

They talked for another hour after the food was long finished. She told him about a posting she had taken six months after leaving Starfleet that had gone wrong in a way that had nothing to do with her competence and everything to do with the person running the operation and how she had gotten herself out of it. He told her about a support craft run he had done on a bet during his civilian privateer period that had been considerably more dangerous than the bet had implied and that he had won on a technicality he was still slightly proud of.

She shook her head. "You could have died?" she said.

"I could have" he agreed. "I did not."

"That is not a strategy" she said.

"It worked" he said.

"Once" she said.

"More than once" he said, and she shook her head again and the smile came back and he thought that getting that smile out of Mei-Lin felt like something you had to earn and that earning it was worth the effort.

"You take risks that other people would not take" she said, and her tone was not critical, just observational. "Not because you do not see them but because you calculate them differently than most people do."

"How do I calculate them?" he said.

She looked at him. "You factor in what you lose by not taking them" she said. "Most people only calculate what they lose if they do. You do both and you weight them differently." She paused. "That is either a very good quality or a very dangerous one depending on the situation."

"Probably both" he said.

"Probably" she agreed, and the way she said it suggested she had already decided which one it was in his case and had not found the answer worrying and he filed that alongside everything else he had been filing about Mei-Lin Zhao since he came aboard.

When they finally stood to go the mess hall had emptied around them without either of them noticing and the chrono said 2015 and she looked at it and then at him with the open version of her expression, the one without the guard up.

"That was a good table" she said.

"I told you" he said.

She looked at him directly in the way she looked at things she had already assessed and made a decision about. "I am glad you asked" she said, simply and without embellishment.

He held her gaze. "So am I" he said.

They walked out of the mess hall together and down the corridor toward the turbolift and the ship moved around them in its quiet departure eve hum and neither of them was in any hurry and the thing that had been sitting below the surface had found its way into the open and neither of them was pretending otherwise.

At the turbolift she stopped and looked at him. "Goodnight Cormus" she said.

"Goodnight Mei-Lin" he said.

The doors closed and he stood in the corridor for a moment and then walked back toward the shuttlebay because he had a pre-departure check to finish and because his hands needed something to do while his head worked through the next ten minutes on its own.

He had asked.

She had said she was glad he had.

He was going to need to think carefully about what came next and he was going to do that in the shuttlebay where the work was straightforward and the thinking could run underneath it without anyone watching.

That was how he handled most things and it had served him well so far.