Marina Savain (neeevans) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-10-30 16:53:00 |
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Entry tags: | lily evans, pepper potts |
Who: Russ & Marina
What: Angry demands, lots of cursing.
Where: The garage.
When: Backdated like I do.
Warnings: Hurtful words.
Marina told herself that she liked to think things through, but that wasn't quite true. She was a woman of quiet, analytical musings at the drawing board by genetic decree. Her parents, while they'd been active in their field, truly put the art in con artist. The backstories were meticulously detailed, and it wasn't uncommon for Marina's parents to plan a job for the better part of a year before taking a single step into action. Now that she was old enough, Marina could see the intelligence that went into every scam and subsequent escape. That's why they'd moved around so much without ever doubling back over any territory with old marks in the area. Her parents had been thinkers, and even Marina liked quiet nights with composition notebooks. She didn't scam people, that'd never held any interest for Marina, but she did like to plan things. She liked to make lists and consider scenarios in her own life. Now that Lily was a presence, the pair often collaborated on solving problems in one another's lives. It was pleasant when Lily wasn't in one of her pontificating moods where that self-righteousness turned annoying. Marina had no formal education outside of the eleventh grade, but she was smart in a way that required nothing of books. She was good at thinking.. when she wasn't pissed.
Her parents had both been level headed, peaceful people, but Marina's anger burned like a fever that could last for days without being quenched. Russ had managed to stir her fury a couple of days ago, and she'd tried all of the traditional methods for making it go away. She'd broken dishes in the sink, and she'd gone for a long drive through the city at night with Nathan asleep in the back, and it had helped some, but not enough to make her rational. A rational woman would have set up an appointment for a lawyer that specialized in collected backdated child support, but Marina curled her hair instead. A rational woman would have gathered all of the necessary paperwork and official-looking documents, but Marina poured her body into a little black dress. A rational woman would have scheduled some DNA testing through the court system, but Marina drove up to Russ' place of work when the sun was still in the process of effacing the night.
Carlos told her that Russ would be in eventually, and she was welcome to wait in the office where there was air conditioning and coffee. Marina wasn't completely sure what the dark brew in the pot was, but her tastes ran too naturally European for her to believe that it was coffee. The men never really asked why she was there, and Miguel kept her company in the office, regaling her with a story about how Russ and some new employee named Joey had gotten into it recently with their fists. It didn't really surprise her to hear that Russ apparently hadn't changed over the last five years.
If Russ changed at all in the two decades between shaking off the dust of the trailer park and walking into the garage that morning, it was incremental. It was creeping, thin vines of attempted growth ruthlessly burned down to nothing in the broader light of day. There was no squeal of rubber this morning, the bike that pulled in past the deserted pumps was almost sedate, which meant Russ had slept for shit or had slept not at all and when the kickstand went down and the man swung himself off with a bruised kind of care, it was probably the latter rather than the former. Russ didn’t plan a damn thing. He thought short-term and he thought with temper first and lazy good humor second and the two tangled often and pulled apart whatever plans he might have made. In the thin-washed dawn light, he was the dirty gold hair and broad shoulders of five years making no difference at all, and the beaten leather jacket was the same, scarred at the elbows from too many times going down at the side of the road when he was young enough to feel flush with cash to buy things, and stupid enough to go too fast around corners.
Carlos didn’t give him a damn warning. He was whistling, something too fucking cheerful for early, and the paint misted out from the gun between his hands, licking over the sides of a car that had been blue the day before and was now cherry-pie red in parts. Carlos didn’t say ‘she’s in the office’, and he didn’t say who, and he wouldn’t have asked why because Carlos like the rest of them had seen too many women ‘drop by’. Carlos had not been around five years ago, when there were joy-rides in other people’s souped-up cars, too fast for the Vegas sunshine to catch up, when he’d worked briefly and in between games instead of day in, day fucking out. Carlos didn’t know that the woman sharing coffee with Miguel (traitorous little fucker) was the damn antiChrist walking, and Russ headed for the office with the same dull-eyed determination to shove caffeine down his throat and into his veins as fast as possible.
The door banged swiftly, bounced on squeaky hinges as Russ, worn-white undershirt beneath the loose flannel shirt and the jeans wearing unevenly at the knees and boots, strode straight on past the desk and the couch for the coffee pot, the smell of it, thick and burned, heavy in the air. Half a cup poured, and Miguel had left him the fucking dregs again; Russ swung around with the mug in his hand and a barrage of half-learned Spanish just blunt enough about what Miguel could do with his mother, ready on the lips. And then he stopped and white bled up from his cheekbones and turned the sun-tint in his cheeks sickly sallow. Russ looked a little older and a little more weather-beaten - like any end of summer, gilt had threaded through the blond and the blue eyes were bloodshot but still far too bright for any fucker who messed around with women the way Russ did. Marina - Marina looked the same, from the heart-stopping length of her legs to the warm husk of a laugh and for a moment, Russ clutched at the coffee as if he were dreaming, as if this were the kind of dream he’d dreamt four years and change ago, stared blankly at Marina-in-the-office and words died in his throat.
Even her mordant smiles were beautiful, composed of a feline curve and bright teeth with just the tip of that sneaky pink tongue making itself known between a seam of picket white. Like any woman burned too many times by the same man, Marina developed a taste for cruelty. She wasn't here to play nice(that dress was tight), and she wasn't bothering with kid gloves(her heels were high). Miguel liked her dress, so much so that he probably couldn't have picked Marina out of a lineup from the neck up if she robbed the place. Not that she was particularly curvaceous, certainly not in the way that most of the women who came around the shop were required to be.
When Russ walked in, they were speaking Spanish. Her Castilian accent was noticeably different from what was usually kicked around the shop, it was warm flamenco on Inquisition cobblestones. Flavorful and just a little lazy, like all good things out of antediluvian Europe. She'd seen him approaching, that dirty dishwater flop of his hair pricked the attention of her hawk eyes from a distance, and she took a strange pleasure out of witnessing how beat the fuck up he looked. She hoped he was hungover, that he hadn't gotten a wink of sleep, and that he was operating through a wrecking ball migraine. When Russ turned with an argumentative heft of his coffee mug toward Miguel, Marina smiled. The palpable curl of her mouth bloomed like a poisonous flower when the color drained from his face.
Sensing disaster, or some form of rising melee, Miguel glanced between the two of them. She subsequently said something to him in that same honeycomb Spanish that was faux-genial and prolix, and obviously at Russ' expense judging by the way Miguel got up and left the office laughing. In the wake of their solitude, she stared Russ down with eyes of lioness gold. She was glad that he looked so very much the same, it made it easier for her to hate him with the pent up passion that came with five years of vengeful lying in wait. She didn't say hello, and she'd dropped the pretty smile the moment that Miguel had left them. "You might want to sit down before you pass out," she said of how pale he'd become. As if she were the ghost of Christmas Past or the Devil. Actually, Russ would probably prefer the company of either one over her right now.
The dress was tight, and it clung, and Russ couldn’t stop the way his eyes drew along her lines any more than he could help himself for breathing, same way any man would when confronted with the poison-beauty that was Marina in full battle-dress. She was dressed for a club, for battle, heels high enough to put her eye-level, tiger-yellow matched up against bloodshot blue, and Russ could (in the dim, distant part of himself that wasn’t clutching his coffee like it was a lifebelt for a man set on drowning beneath his own past) respect that. Hell, he appreciated it, appreciated that she hadn’t come dressed the way he’d last seen her, jeans riding low on the slant of her hipbones, the intimacy of being dressed damn casual, where beauty didn’t need trussing up and shining up shoes. Marina cinched into a dress that she’d poured over all that leggy beauty, that meant distance, it meant war. Miguel got himself gone, bailed and Russ snarled in his direction as he saw the man’s shoulders were shaking, snickering along the way. Weren’t many women who came down looking for Russ, they knew better, but Russ would take the Devil, Christmas Past or his own mother over Marina right then, and every time he’d laughed himself sick over Spanish rising thick and fast from the office came right on back to strangle him soundless then.
“I ain’t sitting anywhere,” he could have done, the couch, saggy with broken springs was damn comfortable but Marina had suggested it and Russ was recalcitrantly set upon refusing anything Marina said just then. The coffee burned itself against his palm, bled warm through the callouses along his fingers, and he stood solidly on scuffed boots, with the stubborn set of his chin all dare and spit as his own private nightmare made herself comfortable in the office. In the same way his eyes had been tugged along the lean lines of so much sinew, acknowledged that five years hadn’t done her so much damage as it had kept her the way she had always looked when she was mad, lit up from the inside like Dios De Los Muertos, poison-sweet and dangerous to know, he felt the treacherous lurch southward of his stomach as his heart pinioned itself against his rib-cage, beat itself bloody trying to be free. Marina wasn’t disaster so much as she was bloody trouble along with that feline slink of a smile.
“He ain’t gonna give you anything,” Russ indicated the escapee Miguel with a jerk of his thumb, “What do you want?” Memory was as easily wooed by a woman in heels and spun-sugar fire as the rest of the man; he remembered smeared-tears, the snap of Spanish as she cursed his ancestors along with the progeny he hoped he’d never fucking have, he remembered the shatter-glass argument that had smashed up the interior of the place he’d called his back then. This Marina was pristine, like she’d been shaken out of the box fresh that morning. She didn’t look like his and that helped, that slowed the thud-thud-thud of animal fear knotted around old sentiment rising like gorge.
"Suit yourself," she said of his adamant determination to remain standing. Ever insouciant, her stare was a bright and unforgiving high noon. Apropos, since this reunion had all the gaiety of gunslinging at the OK Corral. There were no stockings, and her bare legs glowed(from coconut oil and sandalwood that she flooded her bath water with) when she crossed their endless, molasses stretch at the knee. The top leg flexed in a rhythmic bounce, publicizing her irritation while a hypodermic sandal dangled from the tips of her toes and she searched through an oversized bag that was beaded like a tropical bird. It wasn't fancy, but rather spoke of Haiti's impecunious street art. The pilfering was brief, but provided a good opportunity to ignore him as she busied herself with pulling out a pack of cigarettes. She stamped one onto her smile from between conspiring fingers, and the polyglot watched him with a mirthless, sedulous stare before spitting out smoke. "I'm not here to get anything from him, imbécile."
Not that she thought Miguel's cooperation was that impossible of a stretch. It would be a headache for the whole fucking garage if the Department of Health and Human Services started digging around here to discover just who was making what. Not that she was terribly eager about having the government involved any deeper in her own life either. There was enough risky juju going on without having to worry about another head of the hydra getting into her business, and Marina was banking on the assumption that such was the case for Russ as well. "But if you don't want your pay getting sliced in half before you even get to see a dime of it, you're going to start cooperating with me."
The years might not have taken much out of her skin, but they sure as hell hadn't given Marina much of a sweet side either. She was a predatory business woman of back alleys, and she wasn't above twisting a few arms to get what was owed to her. Her eyes sparkled autumn through the haze of smoke, and her smile wasn't even in the same hemisphere as friendly when she spoke. "You're going to get me two hundred dollars every Friday, starting tomorrow... or your life is going to become a living hell, also starting tomorrow."
Cigarette smoke curled upward to the lazy-slung ceiling and filled the air with scent-memory. He watched her there from beneath heavily blond brows and he scowled his way through the familiar-smoky scent of late nights laughing at the ceiling and arguments started by the glass-sharp snap in her voice. Oh yeah, Marina was real familiar right down to the seditious cut of her smile, and he thought maybe Miguel had had the right idea, beating tracks quick as a rabbit scenting a tigress gone on the fucking prowl. Marina had the right of it, the men that worked sweat against metal, loyalty fell right out when it came down to official fuckers sniffing around, looking at paystubs and checks and money that slid beneath the table, envelopes of green bills and taxes taken out with an eye for keeping the men sweet enough to stay on.
Russ’s chin sprang up like snapping at the mention of money, the blue eyes flashed flinty-fury, “Like hell I will,” and there wasn’t a drop of warm-dulce-de-lece smoothness, not a bit of the man who’d talked a waitress as persistently and confidently toward a bar and then drinks and then bed right off as if he’d had it planned. The rib-cage cracked-smashed, heartbeat went wild in a tattoo of trapped fear and anger and all that old sentiment winged itself away like freed hummingbird, leaving only the cage behind. “You want money, you prove it.” Because he hadn’t - he didn’t. Russ’s jaw set, his shoulders were granite, obsidian beneath the soft-worn flannel. There’d been enough cards on the table, enough players passing through. Old lies, the sweet ones you told yourself, they came on back to tell themselves again, beguiling. There was doubt enough to fill a wide-deep ditch, doubt enough to call it home and claim it friend. It wasn’t his kid; this Marina who didn’t look a day older, she wasn’t a fucking mother.
As if Marina didn't fucking wish that Nathan was another man's son. She'd tried to figure out a way to make it so, too. Adding and subtracting months from the pregnancy in every feasible way, trying to come up with a way that she could drag somebody else into this, anybody but him. When Russ had left her down and out, belly swollen and feet aching -- after the anger dissipated, and after the tears dried -- she'd stopped praying for a solution and would have just traded her soul with the Devil himself if it meant giving her somebody that she could rely on for even a fraction of the time. It wasn't even about going through the pregnancy by herself because Marina had always been too damn stubborn to shy away from doing things on her own. It was about her son not having a father. Her own parents hadn't been around for the later part of her childhood, although that was out of their control, and when they had been around, they'd been good parents. They'd been exciting, and loving, and very warm. And while Marina wasn't that frightened about being a single mom, she knew that a boy needed a father. It just wasn't right for him not to, it wasn't fair. That was the guilt that chewed her up inside, so much so that it got to the point where she couldn't tell if it was guilt or pregnancy hormones that were making her sick every day.
That guilt managed to fade bit by bit after Nathan was born. When he came into the world healthy, it seemed like there was just a little something to be grateful for. It became gradually apparent that parenthood was something that Marina could do on her own, and not only that, but it was something that she could do well. But children are observant and intelligent enough to be annoying even on the best days, and it seemed like it didn't take Nathan very long at all to ask about where his daddy was. Marina blew the question off in every way she could figure out to do, and now she was simply reduced to ignoring it entirely.. because what was she supposed to say? Should she tell him his father was dead? That he just wanted nothing to do with them? Hell, was Nathan even Russ' only child? Marina could only fucking imagine how many other ignorant women he'd managed to do this to. Still, even if he had a hundred other bastards running around the city, Marina wasn't going to let him coast along on his ideal bachelor lifestyle like all of his other little girlfriends had. Whether he wanted to be a father or not, he was one, and she intended to make him pay for it.
You prove it; the look she gave him was deadpan. Tired, unamused mouth and a vague tilt of the head. Marina knew that proving paternity was a facile task, if she was asking anybody but Russ Campbell. The chance of him showing up to a doctor's office for a blood test that wasn't mandated by a court judge was rather non existent. Not to mention the fact that Marina wasn't entirely sure she even wanted his name legally attached to Nathan's. She'd done this alone for over four years, and giving the boy a father now somehow felt like giving up some of her power. Nathan didn't need a father, Marina was long past those early day worries and misconceptions that made her mistakenly believe that little boys needed dads.
"Don't bullshit me, Russ. You don't want any part of his life anymore than I want you to be a part of it. I'm not asking you to get involved, I'm not asking you to go to a soccer game. You can keep on with whatever-the-fuck kind of life you've built for yourself here. I just want twenty grand for his school.. and since I'm pretty sure you don't have that kind of cash lying around, I'm giving you two years to come up with it. And then your name's not on anything, and you don't ever have to hear from me again." Marina twisted at the middle to stamp her cigarette out in the watery grave that a coffee cup afforded her. The fact that she hadn't broken the mug on him in order to draw blood and prove it like he'd asked, well.. that was about as generous as Marina got.
When Russ was little, he didn’t give a damn what mothers thought about kids needing fathers. He hadn’t had one to kick the crap out of the kids that knew with unnerving certainty that he lacked some invisible protection that came when you had one at home. The protection that was given to you in a home with a mother and father who talked over one another late at night, when you listened to them sounding like they loved each other, instead of screaming arguments, breaking glass or (worse) the late night sounds of a mom who’d forgotten she was a mom at all. He’d known, resentful certainty and wiry scrap-jawed resilience at dodging all the shit. There’d been no soccer games (hell, when had he ever played? He didn’t know how; never learned, soon as he figured the playing cost money). When Russ was little there’d been no doubt without a father you were fucked, unless your mom knew enough. Russ’s mom had found her answer in all the men drifting through and whatever she could throw down her throat or in her veins and none of what she found was his goddamn dad. He’d asked (a memory far off enough to be hazy, like fog in early morning clouding over the sky) once, young enough to be belligerent and old enough to know he was missing something. Lou had laughed, hard like nothing in the world was funnier, and she’d told him, ‘who the hell would want to be your dad?’ in the same breadth as she’d cussed out the day she’d had him at all.
Russ had hated him as much as her, after that.
He had a vague notion (sitting in the one recliner, his sister on the floor between his knees and eating packet mac-and-cheese out of the pan like all eight year olds the world fucking over raised their siblings like they had no fucking parents at all, watching the kind of TV shows that slotted families in along with everything else, made it all candy-floss sweet and easy, like everyone had them) that they existed. That when you had kids, you were married and you had the kind of job where you wore a suit and brought a briefcase home to a laugh-track (and maybe your wife twitched her nose and made shit happen; Russ was uncertain on the details but he liked it fine) and maybe you said the kind of shit to them when you said goodnight that made his sister lean back against his scabbed knees like she was bending under the weight of what wasn’t there - and then he got good and mad with the TV for making it happen. You had kids when you were ready for them and when he was older, when he was old enough to know little enough of how drinking slid in and out of a family tree like poison in the roots, when he ran from his sister and a brother who wasn’t made yet, Russ decided in the same way the young Russ had done; no kids. Ever.
He was certain in the blood-across-his-tongue way that was his own teeth clamped down on the inside of his cheek that there were no others. No one out there who had a damn possibility of a claim on him because there wasn’t a one he’d spent more than a couple of weeks - outset a month - with since the woman who stood in front of him like memory poured into long legs and a head-fuck of a look on her face like she’d take out his teeth with her fingers if she could. Because he wasn’t a father; Russ heard the word and the sweat that bristled was cold beneath the flannel and the gray cast to his skin went a little paler. Because he wasn’t a damn father, he couldn’t be, because he wasn’t chasing down shadows in a trailer park even if you dragged him home kicking and screaming. The strip-light over their heads hummed and it flickered a little, he watched her twist and stub out the cigarette, easy as if she was comfortable in a place gone to shit, like something too bright in the dark.
Russ licked dry lips; his mouth tasted like fear. “He can’t be.” He. Little kid. Simple math; ‘Rina was five years and a fucking lifetime past, arguments that lit up a night like a storm in the middle of the desert. “What the fuck kind of school costs twenty grand?” He lit on whatever sounded least true, whatever sounded ridiculous over the sagging desk and the scuffed-in, ingrained oil stains on the carpet. “If he’d been mine you’d have made me take a fucking test or something, back then,” of this he was a little surer; careful didn’t mean there hadn’t been stories passed around card tables, cautionary tales for the assholes of America. “No, you prove it.”
"I'm not arguing with you about this." The words were carefully placed, like a razorblade between the teeth of a convict on escape night. Marina just shook her head with lips gone pale and tight, the urge not to get angry was like a basin of salt water in the desert. Tempting, fucked, she didn't know what. It was pointless arguing with a man so warped and self-involved, but knowing that didn't make it any easier to back away. If there was anything they'd done well together, it was fight. There was a pleasant energy to be found in the way Russ' upper lip could curl when he was pissed. She immediately tried to steer away from that, she'd always liked riling him up too much to even resemble healthy or copacetic.
Marina just didn't get him, and she almost said it, but that was too close to admitting defeat. So there was a long beat of silence as she stared at Russ and weighed her options in the quiet of their dust settling. She wasn't all that good at reading people like her parents had been. Which explained why she was poor as piss these days instead of high-rolling through the Alps like in her childhood. She could remember wanting to be a mother, distantly. She'd had those typical homemaking fantasies like all girls did when they learned they had to play with babydolls instead of toy trucks. She thought she'd get married to somebody handsome and have a couple of kids and tour the world at her leisure.. because that was how life was back then.
But then reality set in, and it was a hard pill to swallow after all of that lofty dreaming. Her life today was nothing like it had been in her childhood, but it was at least hers. She wasn't going to lose it, not to the mob, or the cops, or the sonofabitch standing across from her. Marina didn't want Russ back in her life, but she needed the money. When Russ continued to deny the realm of possibility that he was a father, she went so stiff that it looked like she might fracture if her heart beat any harder. She stood up slowly, shoving her bag onto the table beside the hissing coffee maker, looky-loo mechanics watching from across the garage when she slid in close. She still smelled like sandalwood, smoke and sweet. "He's yours," she whispered. "And whether you like it or not, I'm coming back for that money."
There was blood in the inside of his mouth and his cheek was fucking ragged but that was Marina, sloe-eyed and mean, tigress-tall and sweet as poison poured down your throat in your sleep. First time he’d seen the knife-slice of her eyes, the way she laughed like a weapon, he’d thought her bright, shiny like one of the cars that rolled in a little too beat-up to go for much but hell under the hood. Marina was coffee poured like she wanted to dowse you in the shit, screaming kisses and nails scraping over skin like she could knife you while you stood. There wasn’t a damn thing about her that said dreams of family and motherhood, nothing but stories close-to-dreaming in the thin gray of the very early morning in voices too tired to be anything but lies. He had a poverty of family, the she-bitch who lived somewhere in a tin-can at the lip of the desert and a kid-brother who was a fuck-up filled with potential and the ambiguity of innocence that made Russ’s head pound and his fists curl in on themselves until he could fight off the detritus of an adolescence without the specter of a male presence.
Undone by the hiss of blood through veins, the pounding of valves opening and closing like a treacherous engine continuing to rumble on. He didn’t want her a damn inch into the closed door, slammed and bolted behind her when Marina had sauntered out, sharp hipbones and the high-headed pride that tasted sweet as honey but he didn’t want to give her nothing either. Twenty grand was stark, lined up in shifts it was hours bent over broken machines coaxing them back into life for a ghoul who’d walked back in from the past, put her feet up on Boss’s desk and said ‘hi honey, I’m home’, all without the good grace to suck him off before she sucked him dry. He didn’t want to give her a damn penny, didn’t have a hundred bucks in his back pocket until pay-day (and the game booked in the week before but a stake wasn’t money to burn).
“Blood test,” Russ said flat as if the point was proven, the dice thrown and the card turned - game lost, Marina, right up until she leaned in, honey twisted around the soft dust of whatever scent carried it along with her skin and he held his breath right up until he couldn’t, damn certain what would come along with the air. Until it heaved in, along with the dry shimmer of the air-conditioning that set the papers on the desk hurrying and the acrid hiss of burned coffee. He turned his head. He resisted. She was close enough to reach out a hand and fit his palm across her hip. He remembered the echo of it. He remembered how fights like this, animal-deep, finished.
“Ain’t going to work, Rina,” he was certain, didn’t touch her. Wasn’t undone. “Blood-test or we ain’t talking this shit no more.”
He didn't succumb to the fresh bait of her warrior body battering his front gates and slaying the dragons of any hope he'd ever had that she'd just vanish into thin air like every other dumb gash he'd laid beside. No, her old flame was resilient and closed eyed, even the anger seemed to melt off Russ with deteriorating profanity and the reluctant inhale of a man who just wanted her ass good and gone. It hurt. She didn't know why it hurt, because she was nine-tenths certain that she'd have clawed Russ' eyes right out of his shipwrecked trailor trashed skull if he'd even so much as breathed in her direction.. but still.
She knew why she hated him, that was easy to remember. So much so that she couldn't ever remember loving him. There'd been passion, sure. Hot and fast in the backseats of borrowed cars, all teeth and whiteknuckles. There'd been more after that, when the nights melted into sleepovers and cold coffee afternoons, when she'd tried to teach him to tango, when she'd watched him clench through dreams beside her. None of which accounted for anything now. No memories were worth twenty grand in her back pocket, that was for damn sure.
That was why she stuck to remembering how much she hated him. Those late nights in the week he left, hanging by the phone, still thinking he'd come back. The hormonal madness that came later when she just wanted to torch the place and drink herself into a miscarriage. The labor when she'd cursed his name and wept sorrow over the bastard in her arms. The moment she'd realized he was back in town and not dead at all. All of it. She held onto that. She wrapped it tight as a shawl, and the heat radiated inside of her to the point of meltdown.
She was quite suddenly in his face. "You think I'm fucking stupid? You'd never show up to a doctor's office for the test."
Self-congratulation that his sleep and beer-soaked brain had not given in to treacherous old instinct (Marina was a bad habit, looked the same way she had as five years past walking out his door - not tearfully, but screaming obscenities at him. The best of times had always been laced with air filled with creativity of cursing) gave way to something of alarm. Russ’s chin came down, the shoulders flinched into tension. Self-congratulation, the old instinct (bastard mongrel snarling over too-close, too-close) kicked in and Marina was not just smoke on shabby air-conditioning or the hippy motion of a long-legged stride. She was close enough that when he took careful short sharp breath in, he yanked in the knowledge that her scent was the same, sandalwood and warm skin and that her shampoo was not, out of place note found amidst the usual cacophony.
He didn’t reach for her. He didn’t goddamn breathe. He listened to the music from the next room, the thin excuse for walls blocking out nothing of an argument picking up in pitch and listened to by the guys who would give him shit after endless shit - or worse, would not, solidarity for a man down on his fucking luck, someone to be pitied. Russ didn’t dare draw a damn lungful in, didn’t savor the familiarity. He stared balefully back, bloodshot eyes bright and sharply blue in the working-man’s tan and the shirt he wore pulled some at the shoulders as he folded his arms over his chest. Shut the doors, slam them, lock them behind. She wa close enough to see a handful of days of shitty sleep, the beginning of feathering at the corner of her eyes that said thirties rather than young enough to start a war. They had never been kissing close without profanity. Russ rocked back on his heels, uneasy as the eye of the storm and he took one step back and the desk hit his knees.
“You want to open up a goddamn vein?” he said, glaring at her, amped up on proximity and anger and the righteous sense at walls being knocked down that had no business being knocked down at all. He began busily hauling up one sleeve as if to show her all the ripe veins that ran along from wrist to elbow beneath sun-blunted skin, “You go right a-fucking-head if it fucking proves you got the wrong guy.” His voice had risen in pitch, certain now in the clarity of anger. She didn’t want a blood-test then the kid wasn’t his. “You get that kid we can go to the doctor right fucking now.”
It was a chink of sunlight in a solid, pitiless wall slammed up by her conviction; he wasn’t trapped. A blood test would prove him right.
"You're really something else." The hiss was the bitter venom of disbelief. She hadn't expected Russ to push on the issue of a blood test, and when he stood his ground on that matter, she floundered into rare, bejeweled uncertainty. Caught between a rock and a damn hard place, that was for sure. He wasn't going to relent, if he hadn't given up by this time, sheer stupid will was going to keep carrying Russ forward. Marina grit her teeth, feral mommy mode coursing through her shallow veins like battery acid and perfectly directed rage. "Still the same useless motherfucker."
She snatched up her purse and shoved his bared arm away when Russ turned it vein-side up for a sacrificial offering. She crammed that muscled limb back against his body in the form of a shove just vicious enough to send the backs of his knees against that desk again. The metal creaked and something rattled with the threat of falling off the ledge. She didn't stick around to see what it was or if it was going to break. Marina was on her way for the door of the office and the escape that it offered, scorned. But she twisted at the last minute, narrowing her eyes.
"You want to ruin my life? Go for it, but you are not going to compromise my little boy's future." There was an unspoken threat of cold-blooded murder in that, and Marina lifted her jaw, ensuring that it was a tight line that wouldn't crumble in the face of adversity. Because she felt something inside weakening, deteriorating. The moment that she acknowledged it, it took over and her bottom lip started to shake. She tried to stop it with a press from the back of her hand, and her goldenrod eyes hardened from over the slim line of her pinky when she looked at Russ. The worst part was recognizing all of the little likenesses between Nathan and the man across from her. She knew that if Russ smiled, it would look just the same as Nathan's.
"He's yours, Russ," she whispered, swallowing down the rough grit of whatever emotion that had just climbed up her throat. "Do something right for a change," and then she turned, pushing her way out of the office and into the relief of the garage where it smelled like diesel and regret.