Her hand trembled as she lit the last candle, and she chided herself for her anxiety. This was, after all, only dinner with Chakotay. Everything was exactly as they'd been doing for several years now. The candles were nothing unusual, the soft jazz was not out of the ordinary, and red wine was what she normally served; so what could possibly distinguish this dinner from a romantic date night?

She froze as the full weight of those implications settled into her mind.

The door chime broke into her musings and she hurriedly straightened the table setting one more time before admitting her guest.

"I hope I'm not early," he said.

"No, I'm just waiting on the replicator. Hopefully it hasn't burnt anything this time."

"I can always replicate some peanut butter."

"Oh, I hope that won't be necessary!" she chuckled. She watched Chakotay gaze around the room and spot his medicine bundle on the coffee table, beside the loose satchel in which she had stowed her own items.

"Did you have any luck finding your spirit guide?" he asked, gesturing towards the bundle.

"Yes. Eventually."

"Do you think it helped?"

"I think so," she said softly. "It got me thinking, anyway."

"Any thoughts you'd like to share?"

"Maybe."

The replicator chimed then, and she turned away to retrieve their meal.

"If you don't mind my saying, you seem better now than you did earlier when I came by," Chakotay remarked.

"I've had time to think about things, re-evaluate some of my decisions."

"And what decisions would those be?"

She remained silent as she reached for the wine bottle and slowly poured a generous amount of the red liquid into his glass, and then her own. Grasping her glass with her free hand, she held it up towards him and said, "To… us. To you, for not giving up on me over the years. For always being by my side and shouldering my burdens, like you promised you would."

"To us," he repeated softly. Neither moved to sip the wine. Neither wanted to be the first to look away. "Does this mean," he asked, breaking the heavy silence, "that there is an 'us'?"

"What do you mean?"

"Well, for seven years you've been holding me at arm's length, you've been acting like you want more but pushing me away when I try to offer it. Frankly I don't know where we stand."

"You know we can't have a relationship while-"

"I don't know a damn thing, Kathryn, because you haven't told me anything. You just shut me out, like you do everyone who cares about you."

"I was trying to protect us, Commander. Both of us."

"Protect us from what?"

"What if we got home and Starfleet Command found that we were seeing each other? They'll probably already come down hard on you for being a Maquis, but if they can rely on my judgement to be sound and unbiased I might be able to convince them to drop the charges."

"But that's just it, Kathryn, you're already biased. And what makes you think they'd give you much credence in any case? Out here, you're the final word, but on Earth you'll just be another cog in the Starfleet machine. And quite honestly, I don't mind taking the chance that they won't listen to you if it means I can spend our time until then close to you."

He had moved around the table as he spoke, until he was now standing beside her, close enough to touch. Kathryn stood silently, running her finger along the rim of the wine glass in her hands.

Eventually, she spoke. "I lost you. In my dream. It seemed so real. I lost you to… somebody else, and then you were dead and I couldn't do anything. I kept thinking about the things I had wanted to say to you, all the time we wasted because of me."

The silence filled the air again, until Chakotay asked so quietly that she almost didn't hear him, "What things?"

She looked up at him, searching his face for the courage to say what she had been denying for close to seven years. She hesitated. "I-"

*Red Alert. Captain Janeway to the Bridge.*

Chakotay grimaced. "I always said Tuvok had a bad sense of timing." He turned and began walking briskly towards the door, but stopped when he realized she hadn't moved. "Are you coming?"

"Seven years," she began in a tone he recognized as her 'The-Captain-Is-Pissed' mood. "Seven years I have suffered beside you, battling my own fear of intimacy in turn with my natural womanly urges, and now, now he calls a Red Alert."

Chakotay couldn't help laughing at her indignation, even as he grabbed her hand to encourage her to move. "Well, you can tell me all about these 'womanly urges' later on, but right now Tuvok will be pissed if you don't get to the Bridge." He snatched up her jacket on the way past and she shrugged into it as they hurried to the turbolift.

"Red Alert or no Red Alert, if I don't say something now, I may never get around to it again."

She paused to take a breath, but before she could say anything else, Kathryn suddenly found herself rendered mute as Chakotay pressed his lips firmly against hers in a breath-taking kiss. She heard in her periphery the sound of the turbo-life arriving, but was too focused on clinging tightly to the man before her and pouring seven years of pent-up passion into this one blissful moment.

Far too soon, they broke apart and held each other close as they caught their breath.

"I didn't even tell you what I was going to say," Kathryn laughingly protested.

"I already know," he assured her. They reluctantly separated once the sound of Red Alert Klaxons finally penetrated their minds, and hand-in-hand they stepped into the turbolift, ready to face their next challenge together.