"I just knew I wasn't going to let them hurt you."

Justin's words hung in the air between them. In that instant her heart was in her throat. He was attracted to her, cared about her. To think about all of the bullshit over the last six months—

"How…how long?" she blurted out, and instantly regretted it. Dammit, why do I always have to understand why? Kathryn thought.

"How long have I been attracted to you?" he asked her, expression still cool, calm and collected.

She nodded. The sound of her own heartbeat hammered in her ears.

"Since the first day we worked together," he said simply. The admission seemed to come easily, and yet she noticed he didn't move closer to her. He stayed frozen in place like he wasn't sure how she was going to react.

It dawned on her that he wasn't sure she felt the same way he did.

Those piercing blue eyes stayed fixed on her as he continued. "You knew what you wanted and weren't going to stop until you got it. Nothing scared you. Not even me." An expression she'd never seen from him settled on his face, and it took her a moment to recognize it. After months of seeing nothing but anger, annoyance and condemnation, she now saw awe.

Her fingertips began to tingle that old, familiar, dangerous tingle. And yet, it suddenly didn't seem so dangerous anymore.

Snap out of it, Kathryn!, a small voice inside her cried. Those eyes of his were hypnotic, goddammit, and there was more she needed to know, something that just didn't make sense. If he admired her so much… "So every time you chastised me for an inconsequential mistake in the lab, gave me an assignment with an impossible deadline, handed me busywork…?"

Justin rested his arms on his thighs and stared at the floor. An audible sigh escaped his lips. If she wasn't mistaken, he sounded...disappointed?

After a moment, his head snapped up and he spoke again. "I was waiting for you to fail. Honestly, I was hoping for it. I wanted some reason, any reason to dislike you. But you never gave me one. Every problem I gave you, you solved. Every challenge I laid down, you rose to it. And each time it just…made me more attracted to you. I…" he paused, and swallowed hard before continuing. "I needed some distance between us if I was going to get through the year, working that closely with you."

She was instantly all-too-conscious of her own body. Righteous indignation mixed intoxicatingly with pure, carnal attraction. He couldn't admit his attraction to me and so my career paid the price?, She thought angrily. Do I scream at him or grab him and kiss him?

Tighe continued his explanation. "Demanding perfection from you was the only way I could see to keep you at arm's length and still help you make the most of our work together. I'm sorry I wasn't able to be the mentor you wanted."

Oh, she thought meekly.

"Lieutennant—"

"Justin," he corrected.

"Justin," she responded, sobering slightly. "I didn't want a mentor, Justin. I wanted an equal. To be treated as an equal," she quickly added.

A look of confusion flashed across his face. "You were."

Her indignation reared its head again. "No I wasn't. You hardly let me do anything."

The disappointment was showing clearly on his face now, self-reflected, cold and critical. "I'm sorry. Please know that I never thought you were incapable or beneath me. Quite the opposite, in fact. As to how I treated you…like I said, I'm used to doing everything on my own. Everything, Ensign."

"Kathryn," she breathed.

He nodded this time, appreciative that the walls were coming down between them, even if they were still quibbling. "Kathryn," he corrected. "For what it's worth...I know what you're capable of, Kathryn. I know that you're more than capable; I happen to think you're brilliant. But everything I got in life, I got the hard way. And it worked. It's the only way I know how to learn. It's also the only way I know how to teach. I will try to do better."

And so it was simple, she realized. He had been trying, as best he could, in his own way. A familiar look of determination settled on his face. He seemed genuinely remorseful for the way he'd treated her. Knowing how walled off and guarded he was, this was probably as much of an apology and a promise to change as she figured she would get for the moment. There would be time for more.

Until then, there was something else she needed to know. Something he had mentioned at the beginning. "Justin, you…did you really think I would be scared of you?"

He shrugged. "I'm a lot to handle for most people. Life made me rough around the edges in a way most people in Starfleet aren't used to. And you…" he hesitated.

"Yes?"

"You're Starfleet royalty. Daughter of an Admiral? Prized mentee of another?"

Kathryn guffawed. "What did you think, I'd walk on board with a silver spoon hanging out of my mouth?"

He smiled at the image and crossed his arms, leaning back casually on the couch. "So you do have a sense of humor."

She couldn't help but smirk. "Occasionally I let it out of its cage."

He smirked in return and her heart swelled. In the last fifteen minutes she'd seen a wider range of facial expressions and emotions from him than she recalled seeing in the entire previous six months combined. Her whole body was singing.

"I didn't get to work under Admiral Paris by pulling strings, Justin," she explained, her tone turning serious, trying to keep the bite out of her voice. "I had to work twice as hard as anyone else simply because of whose daughter I am. Everyone always assumed that what I had in life had been handed to me. I was determined to show them they were wrong."

"Who?" he asked.

This question left her stumped for a moment, and she reached for the obvious but cliche'd response. "Well, the world, I suppose."

He smiled appreciatively. "I understand that feeling." They had reached a détente, and the conversation had come to a lull. Kathryn noticed that her body's earlier commentary on Justin's revelation had quieted down. She wondered how he was feeling and reacting in that moment with the two of them sitting so close. The armchair and the couch seemed just centimeters apart, and yet there still seemed so much space between them-in every way possible.

"Anyways," he continued, "to answer your question, I knew you were smart. Very smart, according to your service record. But I also expected you to be a very spoiled little girl, with a gorgeous and brainless guy on each arm. Someone like that wasn't going to deal well with how intense I can be." Her eyebrows went up. Intense was certainly the word for it, she realized as he continued. "People don't stand their ground with me, Kathryn," he explained. "They run. It's a trait that happens to make me very good at my job. But you didn't run. That was intoxicating. I wanted more. So I kept raising the bar."

This comment stung. She suddenly felt used in a way that was hard to describe and yet surprisingly familiar. "You baited me?" It wasn't a question, but an accusation.

He opened both hands in reluctant acknowledgement. "I wanted to see when you'd give up with me, yes. I expected you to run to Admiral Paris, demanding a transfer to another department or a different lab partner. At the least I figured you would shut down and stop interacting with me. I didn't expect you to be so…"

This fill-in-the-blank was obvious, as the word had been applied to her all her life. "Stubborn?"

He smiled. "I was thinking tough." The smile stayed on his face for a moment, then disappeared. "And as I learned yesterday, tougher than I am. " Hesitantly, he reached out for her hand, and she let him take it. "You saved my life, Kathryn."

Her mouth had gone dry, and the words seemed to have evaporated with her saliva. Desperately, she reached for a response. "I was just doing my job…" she whispered, failing to find the right words, and so echoing the ones he'd spoken to her just minutes earlier. He smiled again, a smile that just made her want to melt into a puddle on the deck.

"Admiral Paris seemed to think it was more than that," he responded.

Amusement rose in her this time, hearing her own words parroted back. "Are you mocking me, Lieutenant?" she asked.

His face became quite serious again. "Not at all. He's been encouraging me to pursue you for months." Now this came as a surprise, and she couldn't hide the shock on her face. Justin's expression hadn't changed and she knew that he meant what he'd said.

"Admiral Paris. Admiral Paris encouraged you to pursue me?" Suddenly it made sense why the Admiral had been trying to put Justin's more challenging behaviors over the last six months in a positive light.

Justin's eyes darted up to the corner of the ceiling as he recalled the conversation. "I believe the Admiral's words were, 'I think you would appreciate Ensign Janeway's company, Lieutenant.'" Justin's eyes twinkled as they met hers.

"Well, I'll be damned." From the Admiral, 'appreciating one's company' was a bloody endorsement.

"If this is what we choose, as long as we're discreet, I don't think we need to be concerned about protocol. We have our XO's approval," he said. A long pause filled the air. "Is it…what you'd choose?"

She wanted to say yes. Yet their relationship had been so contentious and she wasn't sure she could see that changing. "But we fight like cats and dogs," she countered.

"Disagreements between two strong-minded individuals," he explained. "We're talking now. We weren't before and that was my fault. You were trying. I wasn't."

He stood up and extended his hand. She looked up at him as he towered over her. Placing her hand in his, he pulled her up out of the chair and they were face-to-face for the first time since the woods on Urtea II. It seemed to her like the air between them was on fire, their bodies only inches apart. Her heart pounded and blood roared in her ears.

"Are you willing to keep trying?" he asked.

She'd spoken her reply before she even realized it.

"Yes."

Time seemed almost to stop as he leaned down, expression unchanged, and gently laid his lips on hers. His arms cradled her, and they kissed, one, two, three, times, and then so many times she lost count.

Finally, after several minutes had gone by, he came up to breathe. She joined him, flushed.

It was he who spoke first. "I want so much more, Kathryn. But it wouldn't be fair to you. I've laid a lot on you tonight. Maybe we should get to know each other a bit more first."

By now Kathryn was sure that he too felt the magnetic pull of the other room in his quarters. He was completely right and she knew it. Diving into bed could only lead to heartache. She nodded her agreement silently.

"Tomorrow?" he asked, hope abounding in his voice. "Since we've both been put on leave for the next few days, what would you say to spending part of the day together?"

Dragging her mind out of his bedroom, she asked, "What did you have in mind?"

He tilted his head slightly, eyes narrowed in consideration, then responded after a beat. "How does a nice relaxing hike sound to you? Followed by dinner?"

"That sounds lovely," she said. Lovely didn't seem the right word for it. Perfect seemed closer to the truth.

"Then I'll see you at 1300 hours tomorrow," he said. "I'll let you know which holodeck."

"How should I dress?"

"Hm," he thought, considering. "Layers. For Spring, Summer and Winter."

This piqued her interest. "All three?" He nodded.

"In one hike?" she asked. Now she was curious about where they were going.

He nodded again, that lovely smile lighting up his face again. "In one hike."

Normally she would've wanted to ask a dozen questions about their destination, but for the first time in a long time she felt content to be pleasantly surprised. Instead she answered, "I'll see you tomorrow, then."

A curt nod was all she received in acknowledgement, and she turned to head out the door. She stopped just before walking through the aperture.

"Good night, Justin."

"Good night, Kathryn." He tapped the wall keypad and the doors parted. She stepped out in the corridor. Before she could turn around, they hissed closed.

Walking down the corridor back to her quarters, it was as if her fingertips were being magnetically pulled to her lips. Each time—and it must've been a half dozen—she pulled her hand away, clasping the offending hand in another behind her back, trying to restrain herself. But each time, one of her hands returned to her lips, as if trying to feel him there again.

What a mind job. Two days ago I hated him, she mused. Now…? And yet it all made sense. Their attraction had been so intense, so immediate, that to have given into it without first truly understanding each other could've proved catastrophic. As much as her body was screaming Turn around now, don't walk, run back to his quarters and jump the man's bones!—she was grateful he'd asked to take it slow. Breaking out of their old familiar patterns was going to be hard. Rock hard, chewing on pearls hard. The vulnerability he'd shown tonight had been astonishing yet it wasn't something he had offered up to her. Kathryn had had to drag it out of him, to prove to him that he could trust her. She'd had to prove to him that she wouldn't hurt him.

The thought was achingly familiar. When you are used to having nothing to lose, it doesn't make you reckless, she thought, it makes you downright paranoid you could lose what little does fall into your lap.

She knew she could say the same about herself. Any other woman, she figured, would be thrilled to have just been told by a handsome, intelligent, courageous man that he was attracted to her and wanted a relationship. Feeling the bottom drop out from under her when he admitted his interest, yes, that seemed normal. But what what exactly was she so terrified of? That this would end in pain? That she wouldn't be good enough? That he wouldn't be around, or he'd pick his work over her, or he'd leave?

Check, check, check, check and check, she thought.

Back in her bed in her quarters, she drifted off to sleep, nagged by the thought that the answer was far more simple.