Who: Russ & Rina What: Yelling. Broken glass. (Part 1 of 2) Where: Russ' kitchen. When: Recently works for all things. Warnings: Violence. Language.
It was the advent of a season of horror, when the envelope showed up in her mailbox. even asking for the mournful stoicism of those police officers that came to the front door to let you know that a loved one had died. The state of Nevada gave her nothing like that, just a freshly printed birth certificate tri-folded in a bone white envelope. She doubted a lonely secretary had even licked the strip of glue, because again, no fucking intimacy or humanity was left in this godforsaken state. They must have used damp sponges on a monopolized factory line of bored faces mailing one modified birth certificate after another. Marina paced the small kitchen in her apartment as she thought about it, and the entire melodrama pitched her into an anxiety so severe that she smoked her way through a half pack of cigarettes before she decided to pick up her car keys.
The morning brought sunlight like glitter through the windows of the living room as she trampled through, navigating her way over a landmine of legos and toy cars. Out the door, trinket windchimes rustled, an impatient orchestra of seashells and carved glass. She ambulated with uncertainty from the front door to the car(and then back again) at least twice before - with fangs and feathers rustled - she jerked the driver's side door open and cursed the poorly oiled engine into starting. Marina wasn't worried about losing her nerve, she was entirely unfamiliar with that kind of thing.. but it seemed as if she should act now while the fire was hot. In actuality, so many of her life decisions could have been bettered if she'd learned how to take a few deep yoga breaths or pace herself, but she'd been like this for too fucking long to find a change now.
It was early, that morning talk radio with the traffic updates was still buzzing out the speakers. They announced it was nine o'clock just when she was parking on his street. With the paint still spread like a warning across his front door, Russ' place managed to stand out like a sore thumb even on this street. It amused her a little, but not enough to actually change anything. Her hands were tight little fists when she moved forward, the pads of her thumbs ran a marathon across the red painted beds of nails before she folded her palms together, fingers laced like church sundays that she never attended until foster parents demanded it. She hadn't had a fucking clue how to proceed then, communion wafers bitter and strange on the tongue, and she didn't know how to now either. So she just knocked.
Distantly, she knew she was angry at him. But hell, she'd been angry at him almost the entire time she'd known him, that kind of thing was so old that no amount of scrubbing was going to make it feel new again. She was afraid, and fear made her craft herself carefully blank because acknowledging that felt like the worst thing she could do. Marina couldn't even really remember driving over here, she now realized. It was a weird, emotional blur. The wind whipped the long, cerulean fabric of her skirt around her ankles, sudden and tangible enough to reel her back into the moment when she heard movement on the other side of the door.
Russ rose when the dawn stole away sleep; he slept like old bones cradled in graves, leaning teeth of stone above, the heavy obliterated dreams of the drunk. When he came to, he was belly-down on unwashed sheets that twined around his waist lover-tight, and the plane of the bed was bare of midnight conquests and bad decisions. A glass was half-empty on the nightstand, sunlight struck the amber dregs and sparkled them across the floor in skipping rainbows. Bare feet on carpet and the mail was a sheaf across the carpet, forgotten bills shuffled in with circulars, envelopes addressed to ‘the Occupier’ (Russ preferred mail that came with no name, no demands, nothing but pictures of better offers, of planning permission two doors over as the neighborhood heaved at its roots to improve, disentangle itself from its heritage and struggled to better itself). On the mat, a single envelope snubbed by the rest, type-written. He ignored it amongst the others, looked for coffee black and embittered, strong enough to ring against his teeth and waited for the water to hiss, sleep still clinging like someone spurned.
It was black coffee on the table and jeans jangling, belt loose at his hips as Russ slit the one envelope out from the rest, tore open government-issue paper and a birth certificate spat out onto the formica, one Nevada-printed umbilical cord tying him to a kid he wouldn’t see if Marina ran, knotted his bank account tight to a little boy all tousled hair and baby French. He let it go, tumble from fingers in a flit of paperwork that told him where to piss and how to live, what money was now in Marina’s hands, conditions for insurance, for back-payments, for all the myriad necessities that typed his name in a box beside the word he’d never said. He’d done fine without a father, without a name in a blank box, ‘unknown’ his keeper and insurance against the world. Unknown meant making your own way; bruised like beaten meat, Russ wasn’t so damn sure unknown didn’t give you a clean sweep to start from, your own snow to piss on.
The door thudded, he curled his fingers around his coffee mug, heat blossomed against his palm as the war of attrition fought on between want and not-want, Ford’s blue eyes lined up against lines of blase query about a child he knew less well than he remembered the argument that had sparked his existence. When the door opened, Russ was half-a-night’s unshaven gold crawling up his jaw and the cocked-hip calm of an only half drunk cup of coffee in his hand. The scowl immediately blunted it.
“What are you doing here?” it was poison poured cold.
There was mania in gladiator games, and Marina felt like she only had five seconds to figure out how to fight the lion before the den opened up and her past came crawling out of the shadows with its bloody teeth bared, yet unsated. She didn't know what she was doing here, honestly. But not knowing was worse than knowing the wrong damn thing, so she grasped at straws until something felt like a weapon to be fished out of the dark. She held it tight and close, it kept her cool and unflinching when he looked at her like this was the worst way to start a morning. Still, he didn't shut the door in her face. She'd known he wouldn't.
Russ was the same, she told herself. Even if she wasn't completely convinced because something had definitely fucking changed and she didn't know if it had to do with having some little brother around or if it just had to do with five years worth of growing up, but it was something alright. Marina was pretty sure that five years ago, he'd have slammed the door on her if he didn't feel like talking to her. Unless maybe she'd worn the kind of dress that nobody shut a door on if they had blood still pumping through their veins. She'd thought that the dress and the hair and the lipstick had been a kind of insurance once, and she'd cashed out that fucking policy enough times that it'd felt a bit flawless in the end.
But now she didn't care. Now, she was a cotton skirt and converses. She wasn't here to win him over, she'd tried that on the day that she'd walked into the shop. Perfume and pumps and Precisely addressed with government-issued typeface on dull paper that lacked any of the intimacy Marina felt should have been attributed to situations like these. She wasn't asking for a posthaste telegram expedited from the President (or Satan, more likely). She wasn't pretty fucking please. She wasn't playing a goddamn game anymore, and it only seemed to occur to her now - with her toes dangling off the edge of the plank, sharks snapping down below - that everything before this had been playing. The paint job she'd given his front door had been petty. And hell, honestly, for them it practically qualified as flirting. Between then and now, she'd had a lot of time to think about her next move, but it wasn't until this exact moment that everything kind of snapped into place and she got it.
She'd been going about everything all wrong, because the right motivation for Russ to back off wasn't pushing his buttons. The man wouldn't know how to walk away from a fight if he was on his death bed with both arms tied behind him, and she must have always known that telling him he couldn't do something was just enough to make him want to. She must have known that, Marina tried desperately to remember why she would have forgotten something so simple. He didn't care about anything back then, sure as hell not her, but she supposed that he must have always cared about himself. Its why he left, right?
"Coffee smells good," she said. They both knew her tastes ran too exotic to think that anything he kept stocked was worth drinking. Gold lined up with his blue, daring him to blink first. "You should invite me in," it was a suggestion with no threat in it. Just words. Just a fact. That's what he should do, and not because either one of them actually wanted her to be here, but because it needed to be done. This needed to be sanded down and paved over. She wanted this finished, and she was done with waiting for tomorrows.
Five years back, Russ had been piss-poor decisions and anger welling up, curdled with fear thick enough to choke. Five years ago, he’d closed the door behind him on the listing, fragile house of cards that were the good times, damn certain that the noxious bile of all the bad would come crashing in along with responsibility to fuck up someone else (‘unknown’ looked real good in hindsight). There hadn’t been a brother he’d left to raise himself, resentment spread out in full view, the foundation-stone of a relationship built on that and quicksand. Five years back, Marina knocking on his door was an invitation to adrenaline hot enough to pulverize any thought of not opening it up wide and inviting trouble in - now he rolled his weight over his hip and stood in the door like a blockade, trouble weighted and weighed obviously in the solid blue stare.
Spray painting shit on his door in the middle of the night? It could have been a come-on, but hell, Marina was midnight trips to play the slot machines because it felt lucky, or an argument that broke glass. He knew where the hell she was - where he was when the pieces broke the same jagged way, when the haze of rage and anger welled warm as love. But she wasn’t the same, wild oscillation between the woman who’d walked into the garage like she held a winning hand of cards and a feathered smile from a feline (charm mistrusted when it came poisoned and five years after the last time) and the woman standing now like the warpaint had washed away, resentment so far faded in her voice that he struggled to make it out.
The coffee steamed a little, made inroads on the fog of sleep and the dregs in the glass beside his bed, Russ folded his arm across the wasteland of his chest, the knots of black ink peering behind his arm and examined her with the steely suspicion of something unknown and thus dangerous. He remembered Marina making coffee, small cups, thin as paper, the liquid in them thick and sweet and shocking. His own cup was generic instant, the difficulty of preparation limited to the boiling of a kettle; they both knew she didn’t want coffee. What the hell did she want? Inclination to know warred with self-preservation and preservation lost bloodily. Russ stepped back. The doorframe emptied.
Melliferous eyes widened under the wordless interrogation of his stare. Marina didn't blink, but rather bloomed like the least deceitful flower in the garden. She had nothing to hide, although that was mostly because she had yet to formulate a complete plan of attack. Right now all that she wanted was to go inside and get some shitty coffee, and that was written easily in her face. The lack of lipstick would have made her nonthreatening to less familiar men, but she doubted that it mattered very much to him. The pale curse of her mouth twitched into the beginnings of a smile when he stepped back without a word of welcome. She hadn't expected anything less.
She'd been here before, and the residuum of her anger clung to the walls, thick enough to feel out if she let herself go there. Ectoplasmic screaming and shoves echoed through the stairwells of her blood as Marina eased through the doorway on rubber soles that hadn't seen white since the last presidential administration. She tucked both arms at her midsection, comfortable over the dark blue ribbed cotton as she let the door fall closed behind her. She'd gotten a decent enough glimpse of his place the last time she'd been here, but the environment didn't really matter. It had never mattered. They were forces of energy whether indoors or out, night or day, with onlookers or all alone. The surroundings had always been circumstantial. Times like this, when the ground seemed unsteady under her feet, her attention was always only for him. Whether she expected him to save her or just push her off the fucking cliff, she was never quite sure. Equal chances of red and black there.
Marina said nothing immediately, just watched him in that growing silence, expecting something. Probably that coffee.
She’d been a face across a crammed and smoky room, the back-alleys where no one gave a shit if you struck up, so long as you passed a light along to the next person. The first thing he had noticed was the riptide of her smile, painted like a lie. Bare lipped, thin-hipped, he watched the wash of cotton skirt snake across his doorstep and looked away quickly, the cavalcade of memory crashed into drowsy-weak defenses. Marina in cracked rubber soles and dark hair ahead was Sunday mid-afternoons, the trailing link of fingers snapped under sparked interest, shit no one wanted in their houses put out with price tags upped for antiquity. She smiled; he stepped back, turned his back like his skin didn’t prickle up with warning.
Russ’s feet were bare as they slapped over linoleum, the kitchen an abandonment of plates and dirty china, glasses bare of all but the dregs of midnights without companionship. The coffee sat out on the side, its place in the cupboard lost; Russ reached for it so often he didn’t bother putting it back and no one else was there to give a shit. He looked at her, the wordlessness of suspicion, of early morning wariness, and tossed enough instant into a chipped mug that the spoon would stand up alone. He hadn’t forgotten how she liked it; deliberately, a fuck-you to memory, he altered it just enough to make her a stranger.
The paperwork lay on the table, barren witness to violence forever forthcoming. In crumpled thirds, it called him names Marina denied, was the harrying impetus for her to run. Did he give a shit? Russ was half-awake, his own coffee left to one side just long enough to make another, accompanying cup. He could have told her to make it herself; it induced familiarity. He preferred the distance this denial of her own knowing produced.
“What the fuck are you here for?” Opening gambit. There were too few cards in his hand for anything else.
Down to brass tacks, yeah? Marina moved into the kitchen after him, the sweet threat of rain in the air all around. She didn't seem like she'd brought a storm, maybe just a refreshing shower to wash away the dust that accumulated after five long years. She reached for the mug he made her, swirling the soot with eyes all for the shapes that grew out of instant's tawny foam in that moment before it melted down completely. She dipped the point of her pinky in and sampled that small taste before blinking up, caught. "Well, we've got some shit to talk about, wi?"
The counter's edge shouldn't have been that comfortable, but she leaned back like it was a velvet-lined chaise lounge. Elbow propped, mug kept lazy in her fingers, like she'd drop it just as soon as she'd drink it. If only to watch him have to clean it up. Because this was not a friendly meeting, even if her veneer pretended to play well with others. She'd been trying to figure him out ever since she'd gotten that first alert in the mail. Because Russ didn't give a shit about family, she wasn't even entirely convinced that he cared all that much about his own. Ford was sweet, and therefore, Marina couldn't envision Russ being around as any form of influence. Nobody would defend Russ like that if they actually knew him for long, of that Marina was sure.
He didn't want any part of this shit five years ago, and if anything had changed in the sonofabitch standing across from her, she refused to see it. She adamantly, furiously denied the possibility of change. Which meant that the only reason he was doing any of this was to scare her off. Make her ease up, maybe. Cancel the child support and deny any connection, that's what he'd wanted from the start. He was trying to scare her by getting in close, but hey, two could play that game. "So you can have him on weekends, and maybe you should take him to soccer on Thursdays at 4. The other moms and I do not get along." She sipped her coffee at last, and popped an eyebrow from over the chipped rim. Your move, bitch.
Ford was blue eyes and a kid’s smile, all soft and fuzzy despite growing up somewhere soft and fuzzy didn’t survive for shit. Russ didn’t expect defense from the kid, hell, he expected the first line of bristling attack to come square out of Ford’s corner, all teenage resentment wrapped around one hell of a good reason. He watched that performance with the coffee cup, one elbow nudged back against the countertop and an eye for where the arc of thrown liquid would fly - a half-step back, the whistling of phantom wind overhead, the eye of a freak storm drawing in. Marina wasn’t fucking chatty. If she showed, he expected the caterwauling of his own personal Ghost of Christmas Fucking Past, not this lacquered-over pretense of good behavior, polished up pretty first thing in the morning. Sluggish poor self-preservation competed with the coffee; Russ slugged back the remains in his cup like a man trying desperately to fish out the end of the web before the trap sprung.
Trapped. Pinned down to the scratched up tile (hadn’t glass shattered here? Hadn’t he picked it out of bare skin, roared as her laughter shattered like cheap wine glasses pitched at his head) by a game of ante-up and poker faces. They’d played chicken like it was going out of fucking style, I dare you across a wall of cold war, the rattling of the dice. Did he feel lucky? Russ clutched his coffee cup like a drowning man offered the only flotsam bobbing on the waves, like he’d go down hard. Doubt, disbelief, anger collided hard, coalesced together in the long, hard stare leveled over coffee. He’d seen the kid for two seconds, French and curls and smeared blue; he remembered fucking commercials’ kids better than he did that one. She wanted to offer up the kid - Nathan, the name bobbed up helpfully from the back of his butterfly-starved brain - like ritual sacrifice, bones to pick over, an ace in the hand. He’d asked for a meeting, figured over-salted fries and pieces of cheap plastic were how you did it - hell, didn’t they show that shit on TV? Russ didn’t think of balls, of soccer played by little boys in too-big uniforms, his childhood was fucking around in the dirt that sprawled extravagantly beyond the wasted space of looming silver bulks.
He licked his teeth. The curl of bitter black clung to his tongue, poison darker than the look in the back of Marina’s eye. He didn’t say what rose beyond the sea of indecision, I didn’t ask for that, denial of standing among so many fathers, fraudulent imposter who knew fuck all about how it went. Yeah, this was an old game with an expansive pack of cards; Russ was no new player sitting down to the table but she’d cut the fucking deck, laid down a bid she couldn’t fucking play.
“Yeah,” he said, “Why the fuck not?” The coffee cup clattered down on the side. Ante up.
Marina had him right where she wanted him. Caught between a rock and a hard place, between kitten claws and a hair trigger rat trap. There was nowhere to go and they both had to know it. She'd drawn a line in the sand that was a mile wide, there should have been no way to cross over it even if he wanted to. Should being the operative word here. Marina took another sip of coffee from the cup, recognizing the taste from half a decade back when she'd stood in kitchens barefoot and sheet-wrapped. Discount shelf instant brew, double strength. Every sense was made familiar with the past now. When her hand threatened to shake, she folded both sets of fingers on the cup. It steadied admirably just in time for him to call her bluff.
Yeah. A hundred points for Gryffindor, she didn't even flinch, and she didn't say anything right off. Rather, Marina set teeth into the side of her cheek. A drop of bitterness mixed with the coffee on her tongue like a spell. They were both kidding themselves if they thought that she came here for anything less than fresh blood. She watched him with dustbowl gold, and the kitchen couldn't have been any quieter if a bomb had gone off just prior. One kind of had. Finally, she swallowed the tension and licked coffee from her lip.
"You're not serious," she said. Voice low, gathering grave dirt and distrustful daisies. Thin eyebrows knotted over narrowing eyes and she straightened up, spine pulling away from a lean of luxury against the counter. She was still holding her coffee with both hands, but now the knuckles were pale.
He watched her, steady as a veteran looking for the white-knuckled tell of the new guy to the table, pocket change and ruin spread out over baze, allowing little room for noticing the way her hip notched into the counter like it was yesterday she’d stood there, barefoot and sleep still clinging like the bedsheets were still warm. It had been five years, an abscess of time in the absence, who the fuck missed a hurt? Bingo. He’d learned the giveaways along with the ways to make her hate him (to make her scream, to make her laugh, to reel her back when she went spinning off on her own fucking crazy course, whatever small irritation had blown itself big enough to take down a city), Russ saw the way her eyes tinged dark and satisfaction burgeoned up, fury fused itself under pinpoint precision, sharp as a scalpel. He’d won too many games by not giving a shit to not ante up on a bad hand.
He was awake now, the ache in his side thudding like his pulse skedaddling along, adrenaline awash better than a strong cup of coffee. The discount brew clung to the bottom of the mug, murky like a bitch’s bad day. Satisfaction curdled, Russ scowled back, the vituperate bad temper as familiar as the snap-whip of her spine straightening. The tattoo of his heartbeat squeezed along in a vice’s clamp on the broken ribs Shane had so-thoughtfully set apart, healing slow and steady. He wanted to shake her. He wanted to set the chips scattering, games like this no one fucking won, but the runaway train was rattling, screaming out from any stopping point. He regretted letting her over the fucking threshold, all that eery calm held in check.
“What the fuck do you think?” deadpan shaken out like knucklebones and fury sitting out cold on the side after the night before. “Fucking soccer? You’re not fucking sane.”
She could feel the space between them like an ocean, shark infested and not worth crossing, not even for a Queen's pardon. She could remember making her way over the waves too many times, alternately rocky or still, rough or sweet. All of that had been back when she'd still thought there were lights on his riverbanks, though. A reason to reach out and grab for the fucking reassurance that something steady still existed. It hadn't been like that in a long time, though. Marina remembered the end best of all, that's what she kept coiled up in her fist like a saint's medal to pray on. That memory of the last time she'd tried to tread whatever dark poison flooded between them; five years ago she'd reached and he was fucking gone. A snap of the fingers and somebody's lost their watch, their nerve, or some notoriously fucked up melodrama that only vaguely resembled love when the lights were drawn low enough. That was Vegas at its finest, disappearing acts at noon, three, and five. The cost of admission had only been her pride.
She sucked in a breath when he challenged her on the soccer. Not sane? Like striking flint in a fireworks shop, her eyes lit up. Although finding evidence of the contrary was a whole hell of a lot more difficult than just proving him right. Which is why she went for option number two. "You know what, take your damn lousy coffee.." Supernova serious, Marina shoved the hot mug into his bare chest. The liquid sloshed up over her knuckles, still steaming, and she let the cup go in the wake of that wave so that it could shatter at their feet. Glass with instant grit sludged across the bottom. Made for a nice mosaic on the linoleum.
Russ remembered the end more than everything else. The end held all the disparate pieces together, copper-bright rivulet to put it all together by. He remembered the acid taste of his own fear backing up in his throat, of a lifetime of faking out TV-pretense when the cameras spun off, the lights blew out. Of the quagmire of an envelope of cash every month instead of a check and oil jammed under his nails like twenty years wasn’t enough to pretend things would change. He remembered the crackle of it breaking instead of everything else, the first night in a string that clattered together, a long time coming, of some woman whose name he didn’t even pretend to know who slept across the sparsity of the bed. He had no fucking pride to bite on, just the coiled-leather bitterness of something he’d looked at sideways, too bright to see headon until it blinked out.
He recognized the witch-flare in her eyes split-second too late to react, the jump-start of reaction familiar as sparking leads beneath the wheel to make things go. Hot coffee scalded up bare flesh, climbed the ladder-crawl of spider’s ink, a lexicon of years past marked out in tattoo parlour hours. “Fuck!” his hand knocking the cup aside with violence enough to send it scattering in shards large enough to scar, the wick of his own temper sparked alight.
“What the fuck is your problem?”
"You're my fucking problem!" She snapped, rubber band broke in damn two with no hope of becoming whole again. She didn't think not to. She didn't think of cool, kitsch laughter and denial tucked up her sleeve like the ace of spades in a game betting against the house. That was a trick she no longer had the manual for, she'd let it burn up the moment he started calling her bluff on things too precious to be betting with in the first fucking place. If she slowed down to think about it, she was mad at herself. Just like every time she started in with him lately, a deathmatch that couldn't be won because she wasn't even entirely sure of what she was fighting for these days. She really didn't want to be mad at herself, not yet. Not while that fresh birth certificate, ink still wet, was dredging up all things raw and frightening. Marina could be mad at herself tomorrow, when this fight accomplished fuck all, just like always. But right now she was gonna be mad at somebody else. She needed to.
"I'm sick of this bullshit, Russ!" She set her hands into his chest, fingers spread like purchasing an acre of him would help her make a dent in anything when she pushed. She remembered now that she'd always shoved better when they'd been drunk, when it was natural for him to bob and weave on unsteady feet. "You don't give a fuck!" Spiraling, Marina jerked back. It was like catching herself before she toppled out a high story window. That wasn't what she wanted to accuse him of, because she didn't give a fuck if he gave a fuck or not. "You did this shit to piss me off!" On steady ground again. "Congrat-u-fucking-lations. Was it everything you hoped for?" She kicked a piece of broken mug across the floor with the toe of her shoe.
He wasn’t drunk but oh, it felt like it, disorientation welling over his head like two glasses’ worth of slow burn in the back of his throat and the liquored snap of anger hissing home. He didn’t weave but a back-step stumble, his bare foot skidding over liquid molten enough to sting. His hand slung out for her shoulder; slipping on coffee shoved her harder than he’d intended but fuck intentions, they burned too high to piss them out. “You’re sick?” Incredulousness was coffee-bitter on his tongue, soured milk and spilled sugar; the grimace as her palm slammed in above newly re-knitting rib, “Jesus fucking christ!” His palm clapped home, over the purpling thud of blood slamming through swiftly-tightening channels. Russ forgot the fights that stacked up before, the cleaned-out cauterization of fighting Shane ‘til he was bloody and fucked. This was the only fight he’d been reeling for and from, familiarity kissing close enough to be disorientating, Lady Luck fucking off with a fluting laugh.
“You’re fucking full of it. You drag your kid in,” your kid, punched in through lowered-timbre temper, as if he’d not claimed possession, had it stamped on paper in government ink, “Like you want to put him in this? Fuck you,” narrowed eyes, the bitch-bite of pain at the back of it as he crammed into her space as much as she’d stormed through his door; did he care? Giving a fuck sauntered close to the line, peered over and thought fucking off was just fine, “You don’t get to tell me shit. Not everything’s about you.” A step forward, he was yelling loud enough to shake the neighbors from behind their plywood partitions.
She missed out on whatever strike left him seething with a curse for pain real enough to bubble up like temperature rising through a glass tube of metal and poison. Too busy recovering herself, knocked back into the kitchen counter by a shove of his own, one she'd forgotten to expect. One she'd been too fuming and cross-eyed through fury to navigate around. It didn't hurt, but it managed to give him the distance of victory once more. Not that it lasted long because he was cramming in close while she was still exhaling obsidian fluff out of her glare. Noxious enough to strike him through the fucking heart if she wished on the right star. He's lucky it was daylight.
Marina didn't care whatever he'd been cursing about, wherever he was hurt. It was old news that he'd gotten fucked up by running his stupid fucking mouth about who knew what this time. She'd been the goodluck charm for barfights in the past. Cute as a cursed rabbits foot; quick to start shit, but quicker to get him out of it before the cops came a'calling. He got in close, smelling of spilled coffee and nostalgia, the kind she'd wedged up tight against on the nights he was too tired to twist the other way and stop her. She raised a hand between them, planted it dead center on him like she'd shove again when she was good and ready.
"You're the one dragging him into this!" Disbelief widened her eyes and she seethed through grit teeth. "With your fucking lawyers and goddamn paperwork. Acting tough because that's what you do, right? Russ, fucking tough guy, doesn't give a fuck about anything but his fucking self." She widened her eyes briefly, as if expecting him to deny it. "Five years go by, and where were you?" Colored nails dug in and she shoved against his sternum with the heel of her hand, wanting space. "Tuning up your ugly bike and fucking whatever bitches were stupid enough to look past the shit that comes out of your mouth. And you wanna act like you're the one with rights now?"
She glared like it was the same fight dredged up from the eons past and Russ shook out memory, dusted it off with the flat of his arm and felt it sing familiar as expensive whiskey through his blood, the pinprick narrowing of wire-strung temper honing in on bullseye center. He’d never hit a woman, never wanted to since sixteen’s hot temper sent him catapulting out of metal walls, knocked around, bruises and bruised ego and hot humiliation leaving nothing behind but resentment. He’d never hit a woman but he saw her hit the counter and guilt figured it would come when it was good and ready.
The heel of her palm struck bruised breastbone; he remembered fights she’d hauled him out of as often as she’d tossed him into, ruthless in high heels and a glittered smile for all the misdeeds she’d imagined up (some of which he’d been guilty of). Familiarity fluttered, denial found a note on his tongue, twisted it up but Russ had never found a fight he wanted to win more, didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of change he’d not sought out, didn’t want, didn’t care to own with his own fucking coffee burning his skin. This wasn’t a conversation of convictions, this was war hauled in from the outhouse and welcomed in.
“What the fuck does the kid have to do with paperwork, he a goddamn genius who can read it?” Papers to Russ were government formality, dotted lines and bank account direct debits. They weren’t trucks and sticky hands, questions and singsong TV. He caught her wrist in one hand, fuck if she was shoving at him again, “According to you, I got twenty grand to pay to send him to a fucking school but you’ll fucking run if I try seeing the kid. You’re so fucking eager to shove in the knife, you want to offer up the kid. Soccer games? Get fucking real.”
"Oh, please. We both know you wouldn't go to a soccer game if I poisoned you and the antidote was in the fucking juicebox cooler. You don't want to see Nathan, you want to piss me off. So stop acting like I made this about him. Its not about him!" She didn't immediately realize that admitting that negated the very reason she'd come over here. Fever ran her thoughts through a rough cycle, spit them out like gristle. When he caught her wrist in the bone vice of his fingers, she twisted. It was a familiar ache, redesigned. Hatred was a puzzle piece that she could cram into any spot she saw fit, and her glare said that she hated him very much right now. "It’s about us." Maybe she just hated him for making her say it.
As obvious as it was, she could have danced around the truth of the argument forever if she wanted to. But even she didn't want the fight built around Nathan. "Let go of my goddamn hand," she warned. Marina wrenched back, bracing her free arm against the front of his body like a fulcrum. She jerked back toward the counter, whiplash angry like a fox caught in a rusty trap. He was too smart to let go, she imagined. Smart enough to remember that kitchens had knives. The floor already spoke of her penchant for destruction, with glass peeking out from just beneath the fridge like starlight in the dark. So yeah, too smart to let her hand go, but not smart enough to take both of them. He must have been getting rusty as his old age.
There was hair in her face, dark, frenzy-whipped curls when she tossed her head back. The rubber sole of her sneaker squeaked against the floor and her left hand swung up. It was a five pointed death march straight out of the past. Quickdraw sharpshooting at its finest. She slapped him across the face hard enough that it left the kitchen echoing.
It was like the jagged pieces of a war they’d walked away from, old fights a ricochet in the walls, barely healed bullet-wounds. Russ’s chin snapped up like a prizefighter taking an upper-cut, there was no goddamn us, there was her cobra-coiled in her corner, each calculation set to weight the scales or simply tempest-wild tearing through his house. He would have said it - could have said it, even as he drew a breath scented with cheap coffee and anger familiar as the goddamn soap she used, the tattoo of her heartbeat beneath his thumb. Would have. Could have. Lady Luck laughed like a drunken bitch in her corner, the preserve of midnights full of drunken arguments, the broken glass on the floor said here again but her palm cracked out and caught him across the healing cheekbone. Russ swore. He swore blue, the leaping skitter of Spanish from the fucking garage, he cursed her fucking mother in the same tongue she’d taught him in worse fights than this.
“You’re still fucking loco, still think it’s all about fucking you,” his face stung like antiseptic at the doc’s, heat creeping up along his neck, his own rage tempered down to the same woman, the same goddamn dance. Russ grabbed for her free hand, squeezed both wrists pinion-tight until she could thrash all she wanted, fish on a fucking line and shoved instead of hitting her right back, the querulousness of goddamn wanting to teetering on a line. He kicked out against glass, shoved her until the counter-top bit into hip, no longer louche comfort in making life hell. “You want me to let you go to fucking hit me? You’re fucking crazy!” He tightened his fingers to punctuate the point. Temper inched closer to boiling point, mercury sweetened poison. All the good that getting good and beat by Shane was gone, but when the hell had it been about Shane anyway?
“You think it’s about you, sweetheart, you’re even more full of yourself than the last time we were here.”