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Leo and Reyna crouched on the kitchen floor of her villa, Argentum lying in front of them in sleep mode, his control panel disconnected and in Leo’s hand. Reyna kept one hand on the silver dog, the other on his gold brother, and both eyes on her favorite mechanic.
“You’ve got a pretty complex system here,” he was saying, tapping one finger on its center. “Q3R-ii, fourth generation. Hard to find replacements. No wonder the Vulcan kids don’t want you touching them.”
“Thank you for trying to make me feel better,” she said drily, giving him a small wry smile, “but I know it’s complex. What I don’t know is how to do anything with it. So maybe try moving on to that.”
“Yes, ma’am, mi reina.” He saluted, earning an eye roll, but he did at least move into less technical, more relevant territory. “So when they start doing the spitting-up-oil thing, you can put them in the kennel like normal—”
“Wow! Really?”
He gave her a mock dirty look for her wild sarcasm. “Students must raise their hands and be called on by Teacher if they have something to share with the class.”
“Students, plural? Who else are you giving lessons to, Leo?” She raised her eyebrows, cocked her head, and eyed him, a small smirk playing at her lips as the possible meanings of lessons registered visibly on his face. “I’m a little offended, to be honest. I thought I was your only student.”
He sighed dramatically. “Nobody appreciates Doctor Professor Valdez’s extensive knowledge base.” He shrugged, but a grin betrayed him. “And I have all this extra time, so whenever people ask—”
“Well, in that case, I’m going to need to schedule some private tutoring sessions with the doctor professor,” she decided, and the suggestive gleam in her eyes was enough to get him to set aside the control panel for a second and press his lips to hers, hot but not steaming. She couldn’t help but respond, returning the pressure, slipping one hand along his jaw, smiling a little against him. Three months of dating, and he’d finally stopped asking if she liked kissing him.
But too soon she forced herself to pull away. “I still want you to show me how to do the control panel thing,” she said.
Shaking his head a little like he had to remember where he was, he glanced down at the control panel and picked it back up. “Okay. I was saying…What was I saying?”
‘Before the extended metaphor, you were telling me I could do what I’ve done for the last five years. I sincerely hope there was an ‘or’ coming after that.”
“There was!” He summoned his focus—which wasn’t much—and held up the panel. “Sí, sí, sí. Vale—aquí. Back on subject. So you can stick them in a kennel to minimize casualties, or, if you know how, you can put them to sleep—hibernation mode—the way I do when I’m going to do maintenance. And you can leave them asleep, maybe do a quick check.”
She shifted closer, peering at the panel. “Okay, show me.” She learned by doing, not listening.
Luckily, Leo seemed to be the same way. “Hang on.” His fingers moved in a blur as he wired the control panel back into Argentum’s neck. Quick, as to be expected after months of being her dogs’ sole mechanic. When it was in place he did his best Vanna White impression, framing the mechanism with his hands. “This is what it should look like before and after.”
“Got it,” she said, even though she wanted to say gee that’s genius, it’s not like I look at them every day of the week. Leo was still working on the temperamental part of his insecurities, and she knew full well that if she offended him he might just refuse to show her what to do, and then she would be right back to square one since none of the Vulcan kids felt she knew enough to do any repairs herself. (Not that they dared to say it quite that bluntly, to her face, anyway.)
“Okay. Now here’s the thing. You have to put your hands here—” He situated, his fingers around the edge of the panel, pressing in and down. “—and keep them there while you unscrew the mechanized lock.” He let go for a moment to dig through his tool belt pockets, pulling out several containers of breath mints before he got the tool he needed. She leaned in close enough to smell aftershave, and he began to unscrew the panel, slowly enough that she could see.
“Now here’s the thing,” he said again.
She cocked an eyebrow. “The other thing.”
He wrinkled his nose at her. “Teacher doesn’t appreciate your attitude. Anyway, the thing is, your first instinct is to just go in and yank this out, right? But you can’t do that. Ever, ever. Bad things would happen, like the world would explode and pizza would cease to exist. You have to grip it tight around the corners, like this—” He demonstrated. “—and lift it up veeeeery slooooowly, just a quarter of an inch, so you can just start to see the wiring inside.”
“Okay…” She craned her neck trying to look at it from the same angle as he was. The barest hints of blue and red wire were visible in the slit between the neck and the panel. “I see it. Now what?”
“Now you need one of these, and one of these.” He pulled out unfamiliar tools from different pockets on his belt. One looked pokey, the other screwy, and Reyna was embarrassed to realize that was all she knew about them, but before she could ask what they were actually called, Leo said, “Now here, watch.”
Holding the panel up with his left hand, he took the pokey tool in his right, stuck it very carefully in the far corner, and twisted it so it hooked upward. “I find the lock-in button—it’s small and buttony—and I press it in until I hear it catch.”
Reyna strained to hear it, but she did, an almost inaudible click.
“And now what I usually do is I hold it open with one hand and use the wire stripper to get the tungsten stranded wire.”
“The what?”
“It’s the silvery-blue wire.”
“Oh.”
Five minutes and lots of repair-boy jargon later, Leo had fixed up Argentum and supervised as Reyna performed the same maintenance on Aurum. “You did pretty well,” he praised her as she wired the dog’s control panel back into place and turned off sleep mode. “I should have known you’d be a good student for Doctor Professor Valdez.”
“Doctor professor,” she snorted, more to herself than to him. “I’m fairly certain you couldn’t pay anyone to give you either of those degrees.”
“You learned something, didn’t you?” he countered, raising his eyebrows.
She considered this, shrugged, agreed, “I did learn my favorite part of fixing the dogs.”
“Which is?"
A smile played on Reyna’s lips. “Kissing the mechanic,” she admitted, and she ignored the wriggling dogs as she leaned in for another private lesson on this particular subject.