She had been thinking about it since the shuttlebay.

Not the conversation with Cormus specifically, though that had been part of it. More the accumulation of things that the conversation had brought into focus, the relay readings and the captain's mess and the shuttlebay evening and every charged moment in between, and the question she had been not quite asking herself for several days which was whether what was developing between her and Zedd was something that actually fit where she was and what she was trying to build here or whether it was something she had let happen because it felt good to have it happening and those were not the same thing.

Seven days.

She had been on this ship for seven days. She had a warp core running clean for the first time since the ship launched, a computer core that read her personal maintenance logs, a crew she was still figuring out, and a captain she had told she liked him over cold tea in the captain's mess on day five. She had meant it when she said it. She still meant it. That was not the issue.

The issue was that she had come here to rebuild something and she knew from experience what happened when you let the personal outpace the professional before the foundation was solid. She had done it once before and the foundation had not been solid and she had spent three years putting herself back together afterward. She was not going to do it again.

She stood outside Zedd's quarters and knocked before she could spend any more time running the probability on it.

He answered quickly and the door opened and he was in the plain dark shirt and the cargo pants and the easy expression that shifted when he registered something in her face that told him this was not a casual visit.

"Come in," he said.

She came in and sat in the chair across from the desk and he sat on the edge of it and looked at her and waited. That was one of the things about him that she had catalogued early and kept cataloguing, he did not manage silences with noise. He just let them be what they were.

She looked at him directly.

"I need to say something and I want to say it clearly," she said. "Because I think you deserve clarity and because I am not good at leaving things ambiguous when I know what I actually think."

"Okay," he said.

"I like you," she said. "That is real and I am not here to take it back or pretend it is not there." She kept her eyes on his. "And I want to keep things professional between us."

He held her gaze. His expression did not collapse into anything and did not perform composure either. He just took it in the way he took most things, directly and without flinching.

"Okay," he said again, and this time the word had a different weight to it, not hurt but careful, the particular care of someone making sure they understood something before they responded to it.

"I am seven days on this ship," she said. "I came here to build a career after something that took a long time to recover from. I want to do good work. I want to be someone this crew can rely on completely and without complication." She looked at her hands for a moment. "I cannot be both things at once right now. The engineer and whatever else. I have tried that before and I know how it ends and I am not willing to risk what I am building here for something that is moving faster than I can trust."

He was quiet for a moment. "You are not saying it is not there," he said.

"No," she said. "I am saying it is not something I can act on right now. Maybe not for a long time." She looked at him. "That is the honest version."

He nodded slowly. Not the nod of someone who had been managed or deflected but the nod of someone who had received something real and was sitting with it. "I appreciate the honesty," he said. "Genuinely."

"I know you do," she said. "That is partly why I am telling you directly instead of just pulling back and hoping you did not notice."

Something moved in his expression that was not quite a smile but was adjacent to one. "I would have noticed," he said.

"I know," she said.

They sat with that for a moment and the room was quiet and the ship hummed around them in its new frequency, the core they had installed together that morning running clean and present and aware.