In the end, it was not enough for Skids to be merely Charlene’s car.
Nor, it seemed, was it enough for Charlene, who remarked to Skids harshly one day that she was “between boyfriends” during another one of their endless Q&A’s about Earth life and culture. Skids, sitting as close to Indian-style as he could manage (copying Charlene, whose limbs seemed to braid into each other, supple as copper wire) on Charlene’s slightly damp front lawn, had asked what a boyfriend was.
Charlene had told him, and the explanation seemed to lack the kind of warmth and empathy that Skids had been expecting from the sound of the word.
Then she told him what a boyfriend was supposed to be, and Skids was entranced.
Over the course of the next several days Skids lobbied to be shown more of this nebulous concept of “dating,” to play the role of a boyfriend at least once. Charlene, who was determined to show the world at large that she’d had it up to here with romance, rejected the idea outright at first, but by the middle of the following week her resistance had crumbled enough that Skids felt perfectly justified kidnapping her from work that afternoon. She’d protested, of course, but she was laughing, and that was all the reassurance Skids needed.
That reassurance faded once they were out on the highway and Skids realized he had no idea what to do next. He wracked his processor for ideas for five and a half miles while they chatted amiably, then finally couldn’t stand the suspense anymore and asked Charlene outright.
She fell silent, which frightened Skids more than anything he had ever faced during his millions of years as a soldier. The silence stretched so far that Skids said her name again just to make sure she was still there.
Then he realized that she was speaking, and seized on the phrase “dinner and a movie” as it fell from her lips. Full of new purpose, he veered onto the next exit, nearly causing a six-car pileup in the process.
For her part, Charlene didn’t tell Skids that the drive-thru at her favorite fast-food joint, while appreciated, definitely did not count as a romantic dinner. It was well enough, anyway - Skids opened his back door and Charlene sat across his bumper, bare unshorn legs swinging, watching the sun set behind trees and buildings as she slowly swallowed down her burger and Coke. Charlene hated french fries, no matter that they were seemingly the favorite food of humans everywhere according to every Autobot that had ever been in a position to know - Jazz, Bumblebee, Powerglide. Skids had envied them so for their ease with the natives, as before he’d met Charlene he’d always been clumsy and shy and painfully aware of how fragile they were by his standards.
Before Charlene.
The memories of before Charlene were full of holes, silent and colorless. Compared to the feel of Charlene’s rubber skin shifting on his back bumper and the wetness in her eyes as she watched the sun wink out, they held no power over him.
The drive-in movie - which the pair had to range almost into the next county to find - was much more conducive to the normal rituals of “going out” from both Skids’s and Charlene’s perspectives. Unfortunately, the movie itself was in French, which Skids didn’t understand, with subtitles, which Skids couldn’t read. Charlene read them out loud for him in between her own scathing commentary. When Skids worriedly pointed out the futility of them watching something that neither could enjoy, Charlene assured him that she was having fun just being with him.
“Besides, no one actually watches these artsy films. They just come here to make out.”
“Make out?”
After a moment of silence, Charlene launched into a long and involved explanation of the more physical aspects of boyfriendhood. The more Skids listened, the more worried he became. He didn’t understand a lot of Charlene’s explanations of human body parts and fluids and the social consequences thereof, but he was pretty sure he wasn’t capable of any of it - and that bit about ‘penetration’ sounded, well, painful.
“Charlene… I don’t think I can do that,” he confessed finally.
Charlene’s laugh reported sharply over the heads of the merely normal vehicles surrounding them, loud and surprised, sudden as a gunshot wound right in one of the vulnerable spots. Skids stammered disconsolately as she forced her giggles under control, then tried to explain again that he really didn’t think he could do it, wasn’t equipped for it, could kill her, and she laughed again and by the time he got her calmed down the movie was over.
Halfway home, Skids had mustered up enough courage to try and broach the subject again. “God, Skids,” she burst out, “don’t worry about it! I didn’t come out here expecting sex, for God’s sake.”
Skids barely remembered to pull over to the side of the road before coming to a stop. Charlene’s eyes widened, and she spread her hands over his dashboard. “Skids - what’s wrong?”
“I’m wrong, for starters,” he burst out, angry and hating himself for being so. “I thought - I thought - “ He thought his airbags were going to explode if she kept caressing his dashboard like that. “I thought that you wanted me to be your boyfriend tonight. I was going to do things like you said - I mean, being courteous and opening doors and - and - “
“Oh, Skids.” Charlene put her head in her hands.
“ - And now I know I can’t, I’m just not - I’m not human, okay?” He was shouting loud enough that he was sure they could hear him in Cybertron’s catacombs. “I can’t be your boyfriend. I can’t do it. You’re human and I’m not and that’s that. I’m just a talking set of wheels - “
Charlene’s head came up. “Skids.”
“What?”
“Shut up and let me think.”
“Uh.” There really was no riposte to that, so Skids didn’t try to invent one. “Okay.”
Charlene sank back in her seat, and for a while all Skids could hear was her breathing and the lonely chirp of a solitary cricket.
“Skids,” she said after awhile, more quietly. “Do you - your people I mean - have anything like sex?”
“Charlene, I told you, we just aren’t equipped for that. We aren’t organic beings.”
She thumped the dashboard. “You felt that?”
“Yeah.”
“Then you can feel physical pleasure, too, can’t you?”
Oh, Primus, yes, we can. “Um… I suppose.”
“Can other people… I don’t know, reach in and play with whatever tells you that a sensation is pleasurable?”
Somewhere within him, a light bulb flashed. “Oh! I know what you’re talking about. We’ve got special circuitry that does that kind of thing.” He paused. “Actually, nobody really knows what it’s there for, but we use it that way until somebody figures it out.”
“Why would it be used for anything else?”
“Well… doesn’t it seem strange? A whole neural cluster just sitting there, very powerful, extremely sensitive, and all anyone can think to do with it is overload each other.”
Charlene smiled mistily. “Well, maybe your folk need something like that. Maybe your needs aren’t so different from ours.”
Surprised, relieved, Skids laughed out loud. “Maybe you’re right.”
They worked out the logistics on the way home. Charlene had in her possession something called a vibrator, which apparently did exactly what it sounded like, and as soon as Skids pulled into her driveway she practically leaped from her seat within him to fetch it from her bedroom. After a quick check to make sure no one was watching, Skids transformed and stepped over the fence into her backyard; then he settled himself in the grass quasi-Indian style and waited.
She emerged at her bedroom window, torpedo-shaped instrument in hand, hair brushed out and body clad in something that shone like black chrome and flowed around her body like oil. Skids reached up and plucked her from the window, then as she watched he opened the panel in his forehead where he kept his most sensitive circuitry. Blue sparks flurried around the filaments of his secondary neural net and she laughed and clapped her hands as if watching fireworks.
The actual rewiring was simple enough - Skids did the work while Charlene perched on his knee and watched, trusting the Autobot to know what he was doing. Crickets and frogs sang about sex in the distance as Skids wrapped the last of his insulation around a wire and offered the vibrator to Charlene, who took it wordlessly.
Skids sank down onto his back, cupping Charlene in both hands, and braced himself. Rather than diving right into matters as he expected, however, Charlene clambered over his neck to lay a light kiss on his lower lip. “You’re a wonderful boyfriend, Skids,” she whispered hoarsely.
“So… I did it right?”
“You did it exactly right.”
Words fled him. Skids watched, fascinated and terrified, as Charlene sank back against his palms and the vibrator disappeared between her thighs. The last niggling doubts that perhaps this wasn’t such a good idea died within him as Charlene activated the vibrator and completed the circuit.
Lightning lanced between them, and Charlene and Skids lay there underneath the stars and told each other their deepest darkest secrets until the overload took them both.