No Agenda - Part 3

The captain's mess was quiet in the way small rooms were quiet when the ship's hum was the only thing filling the space that the conversation had just vacated.

Zedd looked at her for a long moment and she held it and did not add anything to what she had said because she had said what she meant and adding to it would only dilute it.

She was aware that her heart was doing something slightly inconvenient and she was managing it.

"Yeah," he said finally. The word was simple and direct and came without any of the roguish deflection she had half expected and the absence of it was more significant than the word itself. "I'd like that."

Something in her chest settled that had apparently been waiting to settle since approximately the scanner incident the previous night. "Okay," she said.

"Okay," he said back. He picked up his mug and then set it back down and looked at her with the quiet expression that she was beginning to understand was the version of him that was not performing anything for anyone. "For what it's worth I like you too, Mei-Lin. I thought that was reasonably clear from the relay readings but apparently I needed to say it out loud."

She laughed at that, genuinely and without meaning to, and he grinned at the sound of it and the room felt smaller in the way rooms did when they stopped being rooms and started being somewhere two specific people were having a specific moment that neither of them had entirely planned for.

"The relay," she said, shaking her head. "You came back specifically to tell me about the relay."

"I came back because I wasn't ready to go," he said, simply and without embellishment, and that landed considerably harder than she had prepared for.

She looked at him for a moment and he looked back and there was something in the air between them that was new and neither of them moved to do anything about it and that felt right somehow, like the right pace for something that was worth doing at the right pace.

"I wasn't ready for you to go either," she said quietly. "In case that wasn't clear from the fact that I pulled up the starboard relay readings the second the door closed."

He held her gaze and the corner of his mouth moved in the way she had been cataloguing without meaning to since she came aboard. "I know," he said. "I checked."

She stared at him. "You checked whether I pulled the readings."

"Old habit," he said, with entirely too much innocence.

She shook her head and picked up her cool tea and drank it anyway and he refilled both their mugs from the pot on the table without asking and she let him and they sat there for a while longer with no agenda between them and the planet turning slowly below and neither of them in any hurry to be anywhere else.

The conversation drifted into things that had nothing to do with the ship at all. Where they had come from and what had brought them here and the particular kind of freedom that came from building something that answered to nobody. She talked about Mars and the shipyards and the gap between who she had been before Starfleet and who she had become after and he listened in the way he listened to everything, like it was worth his full attention, and she found herself saying more than she had planned to and not minding.

He talked about Epsilon Prime and what it had taken to get from there to here and she listened and asked the questions that felt right and left alone the ones that did not and he talked more than she had expected him to and she had the impression that was not something he did often.

When she finally stood up to go it was late enough that the ship's chrono had moved into the small hours and she gathered her PADD and he walked her to the door of the captain's mess and leaned against the frame with his arms crossed and looked at her with that quiet expression.

"Goodnight Mei-Lin," he said.

"Goodnight," she said and got two steps down the corridor and turned back because she could not help it.

He was still in the doorway. "Yeah."

"Thank you," she said. "For tonight. The working part and the other part."

He looked at her for a moment. "Anytime," he said, and meant it in a way that covered considerably more ground than the word usually did.

She turned back down the corridor and did not let herself smile until she was around the corner where he could not see it and then she smiled for long enough that it was a good thing the corridor was empty.

She was going to have to get a handle on this at some point.

Not tonight though.