Author's Note: The dialogue herein is from the episode by Gary Perconte and Michael Piller.
"Beverly. May I take the uniform off for a moment?"
I wish you would. The thought flickered through her mind before she could suppress it.
Beverly sighed internally. The spark of attraction – of desire – she felt for Jean-Luc was never entirely absent, only repressed. Most of the time, anyway.
Even now, as they sat in her quarters decorously arranged across the table from one another with several meters of clear distance between them, she could sense it deep within her, smoldering within her core. And Jean-Luc seems entirely oblivious to it.
Beyond their early encounter with that damned virus, he'd never given her any indication that he was remotely interested in her as a woman. Despite her teasing and her subtle hints, which somehow only seemed to discomfit him.
The only other time she'd been presented with an opening – that wonderful, terrible dinner and dance in his quarters – she'd turned him down, somehow sensing without knowing how that something was amiss. His interest had come so suddenly, so out of the blue. It had felt too good to be true – which, of course, it had been. Yet even then she'd been sorely tempted to allow their relationship to move to a more intimate level, and the revelation that 'her' Jean-Luc had been an imposter wounded her more deeply than she let on.
In fact, if it wasn't for the virus, and those few timeless, precious moments in the imposter Jean-Luc's arms, she might have wondered if the chemistry that she'd sensed between them from the moment they'd first met really existed at all.
But it was there. It was definitely there.
She couldn't be the only one who felt it, could she?
Her thumb rubbed nervously along the handle of her teacup. To cover her momentary disquietude she quirked her eyebrows and replied in a mock-shocked voice, "Captain…"
He had the grace to acknowledge his unintentional double entendre, offering a self-deprecating smile. "I need to talk to a friend," he clarified.
A friend.
Yes, she reminded herself, that was what they were to each other. And she truly did cherish the unique position, the unique place, she held in his life because of it. Besides Guinan she was the only person on the ship who knew him not just as Captain Picard, Starfleet legend, but as Jean-Luc Picard, the man. That had an intimacy all its own. And the thought of trying to reach for anything more was too risky, too fraught with potential heartbreak, to seriously contemplate at present. But there were certain times when she had to remind herself of that. Times like right now.
"Of course."
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