Eyes looked up from a padd, and a single eyebrow raised. "You are quite welcome to share them, Lieutenant Torres. I fear that Mister Neelix has overestimated my appetite."

"Xenophobe," B’Elanna teased. "Just because they’re not from Vulcan doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with them." She looked over the bowl of fruit, filled to overflowing with apples, bananas, assorted berries and even two small honeydew melons. "Where did he get all this Earth fruit?" She picked up a peach and stroked at the soft down on its skin. "I haven’t seen so much at once since I left the Academy."

"I believe that he replicated them from some of Lieutenant Paris’ templates."

She tossed the peach back in the bowl, and glared at the pile of fruit. Suddenly her eyes lit up. "Oh my," she said, reaching towards the bowl again, and slowly pushing aside an apple. "Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve had a kiwifruit?"

Finding it miraculously unbruised, she held it cupped in her hands then brought it to her nose and inhaled deeply. Her eyes shut involuntarily. "I’ve always loved that smell," she said, then bit into it and sighed as she rolled the flesh around her mouth. "And that taste… and that skin. I’ve always loved the texture of its skin." She bit into it again, but only a nibble this time, barely enough to take both brown skin and green flesh in her mouth.

Usually Tuvok would have nodded, made some noncommittal remark, and turned back to the report he was reading. But now he put down his padd and clasped his hands on top of it, watching B’Elanna. "How does it taste?"

Newly-formed drops of green juice fell from her chin to the table as she finished the kiwifruit and sighed, opening her eyes again. "Every bit as delicious as I’d hoped," she said. "You should try some, Tuvok."

"While I appreciate the… enjoyment you seem to have derived, Lieutenant," he said, "I have already had sufficient nutritional intake for the day." But, despite his words, his hand drifted to the fruit bowl and hovered above, then rested on, the smooth almost-white skin of a honey-dew melon.

"I haven’t finished ‘deriving enjoyment’ yet," B’Elanna said, reaching to take a small handful of peanuts. She took one, then another, into her mouth and sucked them thoughtfully, occasionally letting the end of one or the other peep through her lips. Her eyes glinted then, and she threw a peanut at Tuvok, who ducked. In the noise of the crowded mess room, no-one noticed the peanut, nor the one that followed it, as they rolled together under a table.

Their eyes met and locked fast. Slowly Tuvok’s lips opened again and he said, "‘A piece of fruit is more than nourishment; it is a dish, a meal, and a replicator. It is this that makes it the most fulfilled, and fulfilling, of all foods.’"

His hand drifted over the melon and down into the fruit bowl, emerging a moment later with a cherry between his fingers. He brought it to his lips and touched the sleek skin once, lightly, with his tongue, still gazing at B’Elanna. As her smile widened Tuvok became bolder, until he was nibbling at the soft hard redness, and a slow trickle of juice was running down his chin.

For long moments B’Elanna watched as he slowly ate the fruit from the cherry stone, then licked that, and then his fingers, clean. The hum of the warp core grew louder as the voices of the people around them receded into the distance.

Reluctantly Tuvok put down the cherry stone and started to reach for his padd again, but a movement of B’Elanna stopped him. She reached for a banana, pulled it from the bunch and gently tore it open.

Unpeeling it, stripping it of every thread, she held it in one hand as a finger from the other ran slowly from its base to its tip. It was still a little green, and stood straight and hard in her hand, pointing towards her mouth. Without taking her eyes from Tuvok’s, B’Elanna bent her head a little to take the tip of the banana between her teeth. A corner of his lips twitched as the banana was drawn into her mouth, centimetre by centimetre. He swallowed with her when her lips surrounded the very base and that, too, disappeared. A smile was all that remained once she had licked every trace of the banana from her lips and fingers.

"It would be a pity to let the rest of these go to waste," she said, watching Tuvok pick up his padd again with carefully steady fingers. "Maybe we should finish them off tomorrow evening."

Tuvok nodded slightly. "That would be quite agreeable, Lieutenant," he said, and pretended to read the report on his padd as B’Elanna stood and walked, hips swaying, out of the room.