Tuneup
It’s a couple weeks after the whole mess with the Allspark blows over, when she asks him.
“You want to take me for a ride?” Mikaela says. “I’ve gone out with most of the other guys by now.”
Ironhide rumbles. “What do you want to take me out for, when you got a hotshot like Bee revving his engine any time you so much as look at him?”
Mikaela lays a hand on his front fender and strokes real slow. “Oh, come on. I bet you’ve got a lot of power under that hood, don’t you?”
His pistons churn about twice more, and then he pops open his passenger side door.
He takes it nice and easy until they get out of town — Prime’s right, they need to try to not draw too much attention to themselves — and then she sends him up some twisting back roads where the pavement gives out and the road’s bare dirt. It’s the kind of thing he is good at, and maybe he’s going to be a mess, but it feels good. Mikaela rolls down the window and turns his radio on — she asks first — and she even picks the rock station he likes. When they splash through puddles and his shocks creak, she hangs onto him and laughs. It almost seems too easy, but Ironhide realizes as he takes a tight curve down toward the main road that he’s having fun.
Then they get back down to the main road, turn onto the highway and pick up speed. Mikaela sits up a little straighter, shifting in his seat. She turns down the radio. “Hide?” she says. “You feeling okay?”
“Sure,” he says. “It’s nothing.”
“Hmm,” Mikaela says. She reaches over and puts a hand on his steering wheel — not trying to turn him, nowhere near as pushy as Bee lets that kid get, just the palm of her hand laid flat. He’d bet she can feel the shimmy in his suspension like this, the way the wheel pulls right if doesn’t hold it. “When was the last time you got an alignment, Hide?”
He’s not even sure how many digits are in the number, if he has to count in Earth years. “It’s been a while,” he says. “Not much of a chance to relax and get tuned up when you’re searching the whole damn galaxy, right?”
Mikaela lets his steering wheel go, rests her hand on his gear shift instead. “When we get back to town, we’re going straight to my place,” she says. “And you’re going to let me get under you and fix that up.”
“That’s pretty serious for a first date, isn’t it?” Ironhide says, and Mikaela laughs.
“Maybe,” she says. “You turning me down?”
How long has it been since anyone made his pistons skip a stroke like she does? “Don’t think so,” he says. If she’s as good as Bee says she is, then next time they go out, maybe he’ll ask if she wants to drive.
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