His way with the whole dance of it—picking up and hooking up—it's less based on arrogance, maybe, than a kind of persuasion in his nature that he couldn't drop if he tried to. It's just the way it's always been: He starts going through the motions like somebody's interested and they'll start to realize that they are. Like one look at those intuitive eyes and they realize they're the ones that didn't read the script.

Nyota would like to think she sees the ropes as they pull, that that's why she's always been able to resist them. And then she wonders after the first time he kisses her if that was all part of the plan up to this point, her mind mumbling something about fatalism versus determinism and how this has nothing to do with Jim Kirk, all cut off by the rising of a gasp as his hand makes its way over her skin like her clothes themselves invited him in.

Fact is, he has that smile and the words from him are real and it feels really good and she should own up, maybe; but she's not like this and it doesn't fit her, the heated asides in semi-public dark places, not even on shore leave, not even when she was a teenager did she do these things. She tells him so between kisses, and between more kisses.

And still, when he has her on a soft bed in a classy hotel room and he's slowly slipping off her tights in the middle of the night, her stomach gnaws itself with nerves. She says, "I don't do this." She's talking to the ceiling, almost whispering. His face appears above her, kissing her once as his hands effortlessly position her body.

"So don't do anything," he mutters, sweet and quiet. "Don't move."

And she tries not to, but his mouth brushes at every one of her ribs and her hip and then her hip again and lower, and he so slowly tastes her till her voice buckles out like it's been tied down, her limbs weak like a doll just cut from the strings.

"I don't either," he admits later when he's falling asleep, his head nuzzling close into her neck. He almost sounds the way she feels, lost and winded and warm all at once. "Not like this."