It was three days later when Kara finally got her first moment of downtime and realized they hadn't talked about it. Something had shifted in her relationship with Lee, and they had avoided acknowledging it for seventy-four hours and thirty-nine minutes.

"Does anyone know where the CAG is?" Kara yelled over the noise of the break room.

No one answered, but then she didn't expect them to. Things were getting better with the pilots accepting Lee as one of their own, yet they still weren't there yet.

Sighing, Kara stubbed out the end of her cigar and gave those at her table a curt nod as a goodbye. She needed to stop by her bunkroom to pick up the old issue of Caprican Life she had promised Cally, and then she would begin her search for Lee in the hangar bay.

The bunkroom was empty when she entered, but that changed before she had even shut her locker.

"Excuse me. Can you tell me where I can find Starbuck?"

Kara closed her locker door and took in the rather out of place woman standing in the open hatchway. She was dressed way too nicely to be from the Galactica, and Kara had never seen her in the President's entourage. It wasn't until the woman met her eyes that Kara even realized she had seen her before.

"What do you need with Starbuck?"

"I'm looking for Lee Adama, and all anyone can tell me about his whereabouts is where Starbuck goes, so goes Apollo. I was hoping this Starbuck person could help me make sense of that so I don't have to traipse all over this ship."

Kara flung the magazine in her hand onto the bed and walked over to the woman. "I'm Starbuck, and frankly, I'm looking for Apollo, too."

The woman narrowed her eyes. "Do I know you?"

"We met a few times on the Rising Star."

"I didn't know you were a pilot."

"I didn't know you were a… what are you?"

"I'm the XO's wife." The woman threw her shoulders back in pride. "Ellen Tigh."

Kara's eyes went wide. The woman she had seen go home with at least half the men on the Rising Star was the wife of Galactica's resident alcoholic. That was ironically poetic.

"So, you have no clue where Lee is?"

Kara shrugged her shoulders. She had a feeling that even if she knew where Lee was, she wouldn't tell Ellen Tigh. There was no way this man-eater was going to get within ten feet of Lee. "You might want to try the briefing rooms. He likes to do his paperwork in there sometimes." Kara was glad she had such a good triad face. Sending Ellen to interrupt the weekly meeting on the food reserves of the Fleet was too priceless. The civilian farming ship captains would probably love to have the input of the wife of the XO. They would keep her busy for at least an hour. Kara would have time to find Lee and keep him hidden away until the danger had passed.

"Starbuck, I thought we had a fraking date in the gym!" Lee yelled. He skidded in his tracks as soon as he entered the bunkroom.

"Lee!" Ellen said, her face spreading in a wide smile. "Just the man I was looking for."

"What are you doing here, Ellen?"

"She was looking for you," Kara said. "Everyone told her they thought you'd be with me."

"Well, if you had kept our appointment, I would have been."

Kara wanted to laugh at the annoyance in Lee's voice. He was right. If she had remembered, he wouldn't have run into Ellen Tigh.

"So, Lee, I was thinking you could give me a tour of this ship I'm going to be calling my home. Saul showed me a lot, but I have to admit it went in one ear and out the other. These battlestars are so confusing." Ellen laid her hand on Lee's arms and smiled at him expectantly.

Lee's eyes met Kara's, and he watched her fight back the urge to laugh. Bearing witness to Ellen's dumb blonde routine must be pretty funny if you weren't the recipient. "I wish I could, Ellen, but I'm rather busy right now."

"You were going to go to the gym with this girl before she stood you up, weren't you?"

Lee flinched. He had said that, hadn't he? Ellen's hand slid down his arm, and her fingers began to trace circles around where his dog tags lay on his chest. "I'm sure she won't mind if you spend a little time with me, Lee. You've grown so much since I last saw you. I really want to catch up."

Kara decided that this was too much for even her to bear. "I'm sorry, Mrs. Tigh, but Lee was the one who got his appointments mixed up. We weren't supposed to work out together. You were supposed to show me those maneuvers I keep screwing up. Remember? I had you rearrange your schedule so we could both work our maintenance shifts together and you can explain it to me."

"Right." Lee didn't know what Kara was playing at. All he knew was she was giving him an opportunity to escape. "Ensign Thrace went to a lot of trouble to coordinate this. I'm going to have to put off giving you a tour until later."

"Sir, I think Lieutenant Gaeta has a free shift in a few minutes," Kara pointed out. "He knows this ship better than anyone else."

Lee's face lit up. Kara was being particularly nice to him today, but he wasn't about to look a gift horse in the mouth. "You're right. I'll call down to the CIC and tell him you want a tour, Ellen. He'll do a much better job than I would."

"We need to be going," Kara said. She reached down to scoop the magazine off her bunk before grabbing Lee's arm and dragging him out of the bunkroom. The movement was so fast that Ellen Tigh didn't even have time to protest.

They rushed down three corridors before slowing their pace. "What the frak was that about?" Kara exclaimed.

Lee shook his head and laughed. "You wouldn't believe it if I told you."

"Try me."

"You know how I canceled our training session last night?"

"Fraking ruined my day, so yeah, I know how you canceled our training session," Kara grumbled.

Lee smiled to himself. It was good to know some things didn't change. "My father wanted me to join him for dinner. It seems he found Ellen Tigh wandering the Fleet like a little lost lamb and decided it was a smart idea to reunite her with the XO. She demanded she be given the proper reception including a dinner with the President. The Old Man wanted his sons to join in on the torture."

"I can relate," Kara said with a laugh.

"How?"

"She was on the Rising Star. You can say I ran into her a few times."

"She take away potential prospects for you?"

Kara shook her head. "Contrary to what you might believe, I wasn't fraking every guy who took a vacation on my ship."

"Just the flyboys?" Lee teased.

"Just one flyboy," she corrected. They walked in silence for a few feet before Kara kept talking. "So you were at the most fraked-up family dinner in the world?"

"It was going well. She didn't seem to know a few rather obvious things about our family, but all in all, it wasn't painful."

"What didn't she know?" Kara asked.

"She didn't know that Zak washed out and she had no clue that-" The words stuck in Lee's throat. "She didn't know I was no longer engaged."

"Oh."

"Yeah, oh is about right."

"Talk about awkward."

"It gets worse." Lee rubbed the sides of his head as the memory came back to him. "I told her about Gianne, so I guess she took that as a green light."

"A green light for what?"

"I don't think I want to be talking about this anymore."

"Come on! It can't be that bad."

"Well, let's just say it involved her kicking off her shoe and getting rather intimate with parts of me I would have preferred to stay untouched."

"Oh frak," Kara said, bringing her hand up to her mouth to keep the giggle in.

They walked past the hangar bay, stopping only so Lee could glance in and make sure there was no crisis currently happening. They continued on, shoulder to shoulder, and Lee wondered if maybe now was the time to mention what had gone on between them. He needed to address the issue so he could move on. At least, that was what the War College had taught him. A technique created to diffuse group tension might not be applicable to a CAG comforting one of his pilots by giving her the best damn kiss he had ever experienced.

"I'm sorry," Kara said out of the blue.

"For what?" Lee asked, wondering if maybe he had missed something.

"I didn't think this through when I told the XO's wife we were doing maintenance shifts together." Kara bit her lip. "You're kind of stuck with me for six hours now."

Lee stared at her before smiling. "So?"

"So it's your off-shift and I've pretty much ruined any chance you had at doing what you wanted."

"It's no big deal," Lee insisted. He wished that things were simple and he could just tell her that his plans for his off-shift were pretty damn simple. Find Kara, ask her if she wanted to get lunch, suggest they take an afternoon run, hit the rack, and catch up on sleep. It wasn't very exciting. "Want to get some lunch?"

Kara nodded, and they kept walking in silence. Every once in a while, she caught him staring at her. Not many things embarrassed her, but having a man like Lee Adama sneak glances her way was completely unnerving.

Something had shifted in their relationship, and it scared her. The way Lee had been looking at her lately, no man had ever looked at her like that. It was like he could see inside every inch of her, and somehow he wasn't disgusted at the person she was or the places she had come from.

She didn't know what to do with this new shift in the man walking by her side.

Lee made some random joke about never being able to walk the two feet from the head to his bunkroom if he was only wearing a towel, and Kara laughed. Whatever this change was in Lee, she had to admit she liked it.