T'Vara was reading when Mei-Lin came through the door.

She looked up when she heard it open and registered the time on the chrono above her desk and then registered Mei-Lin standing in the doorway still in the black dress with her hair up and the loose strands around her face and the particular quality of someone who had been somewhere that had gone better than expected and had not quite finished processing that yet.

T'Vara set her book down and waited.

Mei-Lin stood in the doorway for a moment and then came in and sat on her bunk and looked at the ceiling. She had not brought a jacket and she had not needed one and she was still in the dress and she reached up and pulled the hair clip loose and her hair came down around her shoulders and she set the clip on the desk beside her.

"Cormus asked me to dinner" she said.

"I know" T'Vara said. "I saw him going to engineering at 1700."

Mei-Lin looked at her. "How did you know it was that?"

"He was walking with purpose" T'Vara said simply. "How was it?"

Mei-Lin looked at the ceiling again. "Good" she said. "He got the table by the viewport. He put a candle on it. He replicated champagne glasses." She paused. "Not in a performed way. Just in the way of someone who had thought about it."

"That is a considered effort" T'Vara said.

"It was" Mei-Lin agreed. "We talked for two hours without noticing the time." She sat up and looked at T'Vara directly. "He is more than I had accounted for. He paid attention in a way that was specific rather than general. He had a picture of me by the end of the first hour that most people do not arrive at."

"What did he say?" T'Vara said.

Mei-Lin told her, the part about opinions and the part about her father and the part about calculating risks differently, and T'Vara listened without interrupting and when Mei-Lin finished she was quiet for a moment.

"He paid attention and he said so directly" T'Vara said. "That is not common."

"No" Mei-Lin agreed. "It is not." She looked at her hands in her lap. "It is also not long since I talked to Zedd. And now I am sitting here in this dress thinking about champagne glasses and I am not sure what to do with the fact that the two things are happening in the same week."

T'Vara looked at her with the direct quality she brought to most things. "They are not the same thing" she said. "What happened with Zedd was real and you handled it honestly. What happened tonight is also real and it is not a contradiction of the first thing. It is simply a different thing happening to a person who is available for it now in a way she was not two weeks ago."

Mei-Lin looked at her. "That is a very clean way to frame it."

"It is accurate" T'Vara said. "You made a decision about Zedd that was right for you. Cormus asked you to dinner and you said yes and it was good. Those two things can both be true without one of them being a problem."

Mei-Lin was quiet for a moment. "Zedd was the safe version" she said, and then stopped as if she had not planned to say that out loud.

T'Vara waited.

"Not safe in a bad way" Mei-Lin said. "Safe in the way that felt real and significant and like it was going somewhere. And I stepped back from it because I was not ready and that was the right call." She looked at the dress again. "Cormus is not the safe version. He is the version where I do not know what comes next and I said yes to dinner anyway and I did not think about it very carefully before I did."

"And how does that feel?" T'Vara said.

Mei-Lin thought about it honestly. "Good" she said. "Unexpectedly good." She looked at T'Vara. "Which is either a very good sign or a very inconvenient one given that we leave orbit soon."

"It can be both" T'Vara said.

"It is both" Mei-Lin agreed.

They sat with that for a moment and the quarters were quiet and the ship hummed around them and outside the viewport the planet kept its slow turn.

"He earned the smile" Mei-Lin said finally, which was not something she had planned to say and which T'Vara registered without making a thing of it.

"Then it was a good dinner" T'Vara said simply, and picked up her book.

Mei-Lin looked at her for a moment and then something that was not quite a smile moved through her own expression and she stood and crossed to her bunk and changed out of the dress in the efficient way she did most things and lay back and looked at the ceiling in the dark and thought about champagne glasses and two hours passing without either of them noticing and the particular quality of someone who paid attention in a way that was not strategic and was simply genuine.

T'Vara turned her page.

The ship hummed.

Tomorrow was tomorrow.

Tonight was enough.