Sails: how to properly join two tables?

Question

I have two models: Node and NodeMessage. They share a many-to-many relationship (There are messages in the nodes and a message can be in more than one node)

Node

module.exports = {
  attributes: {
    [...]

    // Messages within the node
    messages:  {
        collection: 'NodeMessage',
        via: 'nodes'
    },

    [...]
  }

NodeMessage

module.exports = {
  attributes: {
    [...]

    // Nodes where this message appear
    nodes: {
        collection: 'Node',
        via: 'messages'
    },

    // Users who liked this message
    likes: {
        collection: 'User',
        via: 'likes'
    }

    [...]
  }
}

It's a basic Many-to-Many sails relationship. Now I want to get all the messages contained in a group of Nodes. I mean, lets take 1 node and its 8 neighbors (9 in total): I want to get all the messages of these nodes.

I have been able to retrieve these messages by querying the nodes and using populate (messages), but I need to populate the likes attribute of these messages, which I can't.

The solution I am considering is to get all the IDs of these not populated messages and make another query so as to get them, but this would mean 2 queries and that wouldn't make me happy :(

Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance.