"I can hear you" Lindsy said from the cooktop.

"I know" Mei-Lin said, and took a sip of her wine and looked at T'Vara. "Avery" she said. "How was dinner?"

T'Vara was quiet for a moment in the way that meant she was deciding how much of an accurate answer to give. "It was not what I expected it to be" she said.

Lindsy turned from the cooktop. She did not say anything but she was listening.

"The food was good" T'Vara said. "The first part of the conversation was worth having. He is not unintelligent and his interests are genuine rather than performed. He asked real questions and he listened to the answers. I went in thinking it would be a useful second interaction and for the first half of the evening I was right." She picked up her glass. "The second half was something else."

"What happened" Mei-Lin said.

Lindsy had stopped pretending to focus on the grain.

"I told him I would not be sharing off duty time with him again" T'Vara said. "I redirected him three times across the course of one evening. I was clear each time. He continued anyway. And then he took my hand without being offered it and told me to feel his pulse and explained that he was lonely and that he would be patient and that I could turn to him whenever I needed someone." She picked up her glass. "That is not a man who misread a situation. That is a man who decided that what he wanted mattered more than what I had already told him. I named that before I left. I also told him that if he intends to pursue a Romulan woman again he should do considerably more research first because what he attempted was inappropriate by any standard and by Romulan standards it was worse than that."

She set her glass down. "I will work alongside him without difficulty. I will be professional and I will be competent and I will not make it a problem for anyone else on this ship. But I will not be in a room with him outside of what the work requires. That is not a decision I am still thinking about."

The last part landed with a particular finality. Not angry. Just closed.

Lindsy had been in enough rooms to know the difference between a man who didn't know better and a man who had decided the rules didn't apply to him in this particular moment. The pulse comment sat in her chest in a way she didn't particularly like. "He framed it as you being the one with the problem" she said. "The difficult one."

"He said he understood it might be difficult or awkward for me" T'Vara confirmed. "Yes. He was also careful to tell me how patient he would be. As though patience were something he was offering rather than something I had already declined to ask for."

Mei-Lin set her glass down. She was quiet for a moment in the way that meant she was running through something rather than having nothing to say. "That's not —" she started, and then stopped. "That's not a misread. That's not him being awkward."

"No" T'Vara said. "It is not."

Mei-Lin picked her glass back up. She was quiet for longer than usual. "He's good in engineering" she said finally. "Genuinely good. We work well together." She looked at the table. "I haven't had any of that from him. Nothing that felt like —" she paused. "Nothing like that."

"I am not suggesting you would" T'Vara said.

"I know." Mei-Lin turned the glass in her hands. "I'm just trying to figure out what I'm working with now. Whether what I've seen of him down there is the whole picture or just the part he shows when it's useful." She looked up. "I don't think I'll stop working with him. I don't have that option and I'm not sure I'd want it. But I think I'll be paying closer attention."

Lindsy was watching her. "That's a reasonable place to land."

"It doesn't feel entirely reasonable" Mei-Lin said. "It feels like I'm deciding how much benefit of the doubt to extend to someone who already used up more than he had." She picked up her glass. "I'll manage it. I just needed to say that out loud first."