Are they done here? - Keltham asks himself. He didn't - get a chance to talk about, well, what's actually going to happen to Carissa. Which Keltham apparently needs to treat as an infohazard for probably like at least a month or something.
Unfortunately Keltham came into this conversation with a clear goal, get his brain into a position to decide whether it was comfortable renting Carissa to the Queen, but no real idea of how to accomplish that goal.
...internal interrogation suggests that, on the one hand, their overt interactions have not been very - sexy, doesn't really create any relationship where Keltham rents Carissa to her... oh. In retrospect, maybe that's what the Complicated Flirting was about; it was just that Keltham was much more worried when that happened, about the Queen possibly trying to open her eroLARP route at him, so he shut it down. He was probably not supposed to do that.
Still, that the Queen flirted (hopefully just pseudo-flirted) at him, at all, is an acknowledgement of Keltham as a sexual-romantic-relationship-having-thing, and that is... possibly enough for whatever weird thing is inside him, Keltham does not understand the rules at all. Well, it's enough provided that the Queen is in fact incredibly hot, which she is.
But maybe add safety margin? Why do something your brain just barely approves of, when you could do not that.
"I think the dath ilani thing to do in this situation, if it could manage to come up in dath ilan, is that we both tell each other a mildly embarrassing naughty story from our early sexual experiences, in a way meant to acknowledge that the other person's story is sexy and funny, and then we have a relationship that is not just about project management or 'trope' avoidance and my brain is more confident that I can rent Carissa to you."