Who: Marina & Russ. What: A scene out of the past. Making out and mild bickering. Where: Bar parking lot. When: 6+ years ago. Warnings: Language, mainly.
On these nights, she burned like Pele beneath the island. Marina came from stolen money, and she snatched up bought time in her knuckled leash. It'd been four months at this point, four months of love affair and laughter. More than a season of fantasy and whispers in the dark. She wasn't so young anymore, and that's where the worry came from. Mid-twenties felt like grown when she'd practically raised herself, and although she'd never quite asked, she knew that Russ was the same. People their age didn't behave the way they did(tight-lipped at times, groceries bought wisely, paycheck stubs saved) unless they'd been doing the all-alone thing for awhile.
Lightning flared in her voice as her heels bit into the curbside of asphalt, and her eyes could have melted villages when she turned on him. "So why the hell aren't you ever the one to change the sheets?" Hiss and burn, her stare flared wide with hands that went into the air with a give-up shrug. Because she'd known that he would follow her outside, she'd known he'd be right there behind her.. despite the girl he'd been chatting up at the bar. There was only so much glass that could be thrown indoors before the cops were called, and that was usually relegated to two drinks, no more. Outside was a more comfortable venue for her to bitch. She didn't know where the sheets thing had come from, but it was true. It was a reason to be pissed off that didn't have anything to do with the blond in the bar, so she clung to the sheets story like she was dangling out a twenty floor window.
The bar was hustling, easy money made from women who wanted to drink the way they wanted to fuck, to obliterate service-jobs, the kind of food-service stink that clung beneath the perfume and there wasn’t a ring on his finger to tell them no. On these kind of nights, you cleaned up a little and you made out good; there was paper shoved in his pocket he found when Russ dug his hands deep like rooting himself solid would keep the tsunami wave from knocking him over. He figured digits, he figured lipliner or some kind of cheap biro, a name singing out above them like an easy kind of time. The air outside was swamp-thick, warm and clinging like a morning-after, the rattle and song of too many people out for the night for a good time.
His boots were scuffed, heel and toe. He stood heavy in them, oil streak chasing up his shin to his knee because Marina was glisten-gold fierce, liquor poured into one glass and the next and a phone-call to the garage that came as he was elbow-deep in a Mazarati’s guts, a paint-change on the operation list like a surgeon’s line-up. Four months in and he came when he was called but there was no damn leash to come. Two AM shadow crawled the line of his jaw, golden-blond in the lights from a hotel across the way, lit up casino-pretty, like Christmas. He shrugged, domesticity fitting like a bad coat.
“You want ‘em changed, you know where the fucking washer is,” slow, lazy, the curl-flick of amusement in the back of his throat like good whiskey. She’d seen the blond, he figured. The blond with a painted dress and spiked heels, a blond with perfume that smelled like bubble-gum and fruit. “You get back here.”
She twisted incredulous and reptilian, heels gone dead quiet on pavement that always seemed just a little gritty, no matter what shiny side of town she catwalked over her past to get to. Her mouth was painted havoc and twisted into a considering purse that was more scheme than sizzle. It seemed like a good way to fight a smile because she still hadn't quite worked out the degree of punishment that was most befitting of his crime. Of course, she'd only seen him talking to the blond, if she'd caught hold of any evidence of a phone number napkin exchange, looks would have been enough to kill him and burn the evidence in the blink of an eye.
Get back here, and the smirk hitched decidedly, "No." She took a lazy step in reverse, moving like smoke over water. Twitch and sway, jaguar muscles and high heels always seemed to leave her half dancing. The swarthy, her hair feathered a dark halo, with eyes peeking from behind a wind swept curl. Gold like a first place trophy winking just out of reach. Uncertain starlight watching on, deciphering the puzzle of her mood through the inkspill of the universe. She liked how the desert got so dark at night, she always seemed to be in a better mood at night. Although that could have been attributed to alcohol or witchcraft. Marina smiled like she'd leave his ass stranded here if he didn't catch up and try to change her mind.
She’d definitely seen the blond. The heavy line of his eyebrows drew together, his momma’s fingerprint deepened in his cheek as his smile see-sawed toward tip-tilted laughter. He heard her heels in his goddamn sleep, flipped them off the bed at the wall until he dented the plaster behind all that primrose colored paint she’d decided some morning she wanted layered up over paper left behind. His mouth was a flattened, unyielding stop-sign, the dimple winked like stars behind clouds. Russ dug his hands so far down in his pockets he found where the worn cotton of the pocket tore clear beneath his fingernails, wiggled his index through whilst thinking it over. A car zig-zagged by, slow and lazy like a curb-crawler, someone lay on the horn, appreciation for the liquid curve of the small of her back as it rose upward, the dip of whatever dress she’d hauled on baring the cumbersome climb of her vertebrae.
Russ shrugged like the world gave him second prize every time and his fingers didn’t clamor for more than silver-second-place. Expansive-wide, a smile that glinted certainty he’d pick up a ride home. “Suit yourself. You gonna stand out here like that all fuckin’ night?” Syllables strung themselves together, syrup-sweet, persuasive. “Come on back here.” The voice dipped, low, whiskey-warm and a burn on the way back up. The skitter of passing headlights made him helter-skelter gold, burnished his head and chin like second prize came with something extra in the cereal box. “Come on.”
Times like this, Russ' voice seemed to wear a smile. The knowledge of a blindfolded man who'd walked this particular highwire enough times before to find a winsome pleasure in the danger of it. They were so fucking deep in their self-dug grave built for two that she couldn't even see it beyond the darkness. Besides, it was familiar. There was something strangely comforting about oscillating between highs and lows, love and spite. Even in the thick of it, she never quite knew where she stood with him. He was always teetering recklessly between love bite and black eye with a wheel of (mis)fortune spin. It wasn't necessarily healthy, and it shouldn't have been as intoxicating as the shots of agave that they knocked back on Friday nights.. but it was. God, it was.
They both knew that she wasn't going stand out here all night. That dress and those heels weren't made for wandering parking lots unless the woman wearing them was looking for work. Marina lifted her chin with eyes lit up like firewhiskey, and her smile was a slow bend in the river Styx. The kind meant to lead men down into water deep enough to drown, because it was warm, and it was utterly her, and what a way to go.
"Make me," she murmured with no hands on the hips. The fringe of fingers low at her sides, playing with the hem of a skirt cropped short enough that it seemed as if it must have unraveled at one point. Hypodermic heels were pinned to the pavement and still as darts in a board while headlights poured more gold into their molotov mix. The moon, above them, placed bets.
He burned through paychecks on the turn of a card, chased down oblivion too many times in the smoke-burn slide of a feel-so-bad-feel-so-good glassy gulp of something that took the knife-edge off the dark bloom of her laughter elsewhere, the snake-coil glimpse of her fingers wrapped around the hapless shoulder of some guy who didn’t know a djinn to wish on, who couldn’t hold water poured into his hands. Russ liked luck when she slapped his face with an open palm, he liked her with her lip bitten and her hair well-mussed; they were all fucked in the end. Warm molasses melted on the road to hell, “You want me to come over there?” Could have been a promise, could have been a fuck you.
They talked women over the bones of engines, copper-dark taste of motor oil and burned rubber in the air, Russ kept her to himself, admiration for a flame burned nuclear-bright, joyride without brakes. Her smile under moonlight was poison, cobra-sway of her hip beneath that dress - tossed in a puddle of molten fabric careless on a floor, the pinion of her heel skewering it butterfly-bright. Who the hell drowned if you could burn? A headlight stroked along poor intentions and the smooth line of her thigh; someone hollered out a window like the show was something other than a private performance.
He won. He lost. She won; his hands were on her hips, fingers generous playing up the xylophone of her rib-cage, stairway to hell (heaven was good intentions and a bad hangover). “You’re not pissed about the sheets.” His smile was warm breath along her throat, a bad bet placed on red with the wheel still spinning.
No, she wasn't pissed about the sheets. Not judging by the way her fingernails(unfashionably hot pink) snagged on his shirt when he flew close and sent her sighing over moons and stars. Meanwhile, her heels backpeddled, ass bumping against the fender of a red honda that was too old to bother with an alarm. She arched, and fingers dug like they wanted to salvage scrap metal out of his spine. Yet when she spoke, it was soft against the cusp of his ear."I am pissed about the sheets." Which was a truth and a lie, really.
There wasn't any point wondering how two things could be simultaneous. There wasn't any point in wondering a whole lot of things when she was with Russ. Russ was hot and fast and burning rubber on interstates, he was drunk nights and squinting mornings. He wasn't anything special. Logically, she knew that. She knew he was a fuck up and a loser, and that he had mommy issues enough to write a fucking book(because her parents had given her some semblance of gift for character assessment).. although, to be fair, most womanizing fuck-ups have mommy issues, so it didn't take any real talent or any fucking leap.
If she had girlfriends, her girlfriends would have criticized her for fooling around with Russ. But she didn't. Maybe she needed girlfriends. Logically, she knew. She knew that Russ wasn't the kind of man that she was supposed to be seeing.. but she didn't care. Maybe she didn't need to follow the Sex and the City decree, maybe she she didn't need a reason.. maybe she didn't need to talk to a guy just because he seemed to have money. Being sober would have made her worry about that, but in the moment she didn't worry at all.
In the moment, she bit his lip. "You prefer blond?" She asked it baiting, as if it was actually safe to answer yes or no.
He didn’t have a friend to spit on, no one to tell him danger was the tiger-slant of her smile, Lady Luck manifesting a real bad day. Red rattled around and black skipped on; she’d seen the blond. She was pissed. Her breath ghosted warm and sweet as knocking glasses back hip to hip with a bartender who looked a little too long at the dip between her breasts not to want his nose broken, bled away into desert air. His step forward (they didn’t dance, her incessant persuasion amusement to bad jukebox tunes and watching her prance like a high-stepping pony, trickle across the floor like a bad dream and a poor choice and a real good day) knocked his hipbones up against hers like a game of knucklebones, chance played out in the dust, his shins got intimate with some fucker’s fender.
“You never gave a shit about the sheets,” his fingers skipped the metric of her spine, skin like spilled honey. Russ didn’t bring home women to talk thread-count, they’d fucked through the rooms in the house like rounding a Monopoly board, do not pass Go as glass shattered against magnolia paint and all that hot pink scored a warning line against his shoulder-blades. She was a headfuck. She was his toothbrush dangling between her fingers and his shirt skimming her knees, and laughter soup-thick and crystalline as champagne, a temper-tantrum in a lightning storm. He didn’t have a single fucker to tell him he was fucked; Russ knew it the way he knew his own bones.
His thumb crossed the crest of her hip, skidded over the stretch of tight, bright fabric and dipped along the line of parted thigh, someone’s headlight obliterated by the back of her knee. “I like ‘em all,” he crooned like it was loving, the trickle of his own blood salt along his tongue. His hips rocked forward, pinioned between the angry jut of her own bones and the car behind. “You don’t give a shit about the sheets. Admit it,” his voice was a madman’s laugh warm over whiskey.
Russ must have known better than that. The boy had as good a chance of spinning straw into gold as Marina did of ever admitting anything. Cards were meant to kept close to the chest, wasn't that the first rule of a gambling shark city like this one? Even the petty little argument cards that had nothing to do with nothing. Or everything to do with what was better left unsaid. Vixen amusement looked best on a woman who supposedly had nothing to hide. He'd already seen every inch of her in late night television glow and mid afternoon sunlight alike. A fact she reminded him of as her fingers assuaged the rising curiosity of her dress' hemline. Admit it? Come now, little boy.
"Never," and the word was low hanging voodoo moss tied around her tongue, sweet as a cherry stem trick done bar-side. She was smiling, effulgent with come hither venom. The noise from the bar seemed way off, muffled by dark windows lined in neon, cartoonish serving suggestions. The glowing beer bottle winked and sizzled, its blue Rocky Mountains cast half of her face in neon winter freckles. Dappled blinking blue. The car's hood was warm against the back of Marina's thighs, lingering heat that radiated up from an engine that must have been turned off only minutes ago. She doubted the driver would be back out of the bar any time soon.
"I love those sheets," she swore solemn. Mock umbrage dropped tenebrous hoods, swarthy glitter shadow in the shade of bitch magic, over her eyes. "Did you get her name?" Vivid fingers spread over the front of his shirt, because he wasn't allowed closer until some things were cleared up. Those nails were always tacky bright and distinctive in the way Marina left flecks of blazing polish embedded in his bed frame. They were her own notches of conquer, some even glowed in the dark. Late at night, while Russ slept, she could wish on them like stars.
Someone else’s chrome buffered his knees, Russ cared less for cheap cars still half-dead warm in an empty parking lot than he did when they were bare bones rattling against his fingers, blackened grease gritty under the nails. The dark forgave the streak of motor oil along one thigh, dirty fingernails, the lupine smile streetlight bright. The dice-roll rattled, fifty-fifty chance she’d claw his eyes out in all that luminescence left in scarred wood, like perfume on the fucking sheets, on an answer that was shoved in his back pocket, digits looped like pouting ‘o’s. His thumb ran the crescent line of no-man’s-land, thigh to knee as she smiled and swore him no like it was a promise to place a bet on, machine jackpot certainty.
His smile licked along her throat, the volcanic dip of her collarbone marbled neon yellow and Rockies blue. His palms kissed down on cooling metal hood, she smelled like warm skin and expensive liquor, like a storm knotting itself into dark clouds, bleeding metal in the back of his mouth. He bit; he spoke to the fingernails spread stop-sign wide on his chest. He’d rinsed effervescent sparkles down the plug-hole more than once, wearing red stripes like an alley cat. “Marina,” he said and the coppery heat of warning was in his throat, cold front rising tempest-fast. A pause. A smile, tickle of overgrown whiskers across the hollow of her throat. The streetlight found him, loved him orange. “I don’t give a shit about those sheets.”
He watched her, a curl felix-tight beneath those sheets, the vortex of her hip, her shoulder, the tannin of her hair a warm haze to breathe through. She built her barriers with the palms of her hand, his sheets, a glass of wine flung at the wall. She laughed after, sucked cheap Merlot off his fingers until the sharp look of surprise had burned itself away like dew. “No,” he said. Concession; betting on the river. The napkin was buried deep beneath his wallet, his hand slid beneath cheap fabric, right up to the apex of her thighs. Bet the whole fucking lot. “No.” It wasn’t a lie. He wouldn’t know it until he read it off the thin paper.
"Mhm," her murmur wasn't convinced. Believing Russ was inconsequential when she was already nailing him to a cross for imagined slights. If anything, Marina could be assured that while the woman had likely given Russ her name, he'd apparently been too invested in ordering his next shot to remember her doing so. All of twenty seconds later, or however long it had actually taken Marina to notice the exchange, and she'd been stalking her way out of the bar with a tab left up to Russ to pay while she started digging him a grave to crawl into. That is why she missed the napkin lovenote slipped into a pocket, and that's why she took him at his word. Besides, if her touchy mood was built around bedsheets and not blondes, it wasn't worth interrogating him over.
A bent knee fell aside, and lissome thigh wishboned at the brazen touch of his hand. She only surrendered under unspoken conditions. When there was a long day stretched between one night and the next, between her alleycat screaming at a closed door and the boozed up quiet that came when both of them resigned to pretend like it hadn't happened. Between scratching deep enough to bleed him out and assaulting hands caught in wrists, shaken to see the stars. A bite that slipped through the noose and into a kiss so severe its sole purpose seemed to be to shut the other person up. And then the next morning in those sheets and sunlight. Coffee from the chipped french press she insisted on, tiptoeing past broken glass in the kitchen like she didn't remember how it got there. That was her only kind of surrender.
Her laughter was a shark bite, streaming scarlet billows of lipstick all along his bristled cheek when she leaned close. "You like the sheets though, admit it." Say it, say it. Back and forth like a fucked up game of badminton, one trying to scrounge together evidence against the other. Proof they cared like it wasn't dumb enough that neither of them would ever fucking do it, and that's why the game was a safe one to play. Admission of guilt or affection that rode deeper than bare skin was a loss for both sides, and fuck that. Besides, she knew he liked the sheets she'd picked out. He hadn't gotten rid of them yet.
The wheel spun slower, uncertain and rocky. The dice skipped, danced. Bets were up, but the players were clutching cards, red streaked his cheek, waxy-thick and black was nowhere to be seen. He’d scrubbed off the vestiges of her make-up before, washed away the scarlet venom of her outrage, weals scored deep as certainty it would happen again, it happened again, it would happen as long as she catwalked up to the table and sat down, hand loaded and her eyes a glitter, bright as the Strip. His thumb skidded higher, charted kisses bitten bruise-deep. The car had cooled, the metal kept its heat when the sun was high but nothing held fast in the dark. Marina slept with her fists clenched like a fighter, he woke in those fucking sheets with her dragged up tight to his chest, that hair wedged beneath his chin and his own hand tight around her rib-cage, like he’d hold her still or he’d break her, whichever came first. The first time, he’d pushed so far across the bed when he woke, she’d fallen - a tangle of sheets and a cat’s shriek.
“What do they matter?” protest rumbling over the sharpened battle-lines of her neck, “They’re just fucking sheets.” Russ said it dismissive, like all of it could be bundled up and tossed in the trash, striped cotton and shattered plates, broken glass swept up before his morning cigarette. A scar striped the sole of his foot from the first time, he hadn’t been quick enough to keep up but they both danced now. She’d taught him the fucking steps.
The minute she asked him to ‘fess up, hands held out for bracelets that didn’t glint in narrow light but were holding hands and picking up fucking china, was always the moment he fought. They both knew the fights were the aphrodisiac and the answers burned themselves up in the aftermath. “Maybe I need to see them again,” he turned his head into the calculated prowl of her smile, “To be sure.”
Marina laughed. Head back and jeweled crown fallen to gravedirt. She laughed with her throat exposed like a trusting cat turned up its belly, a certain belief in the lack of teeth. Even in the dark, she believed. Marina laughed for the sky and when challenge crawled up her neck with a gutted growl, she sucked in a breath that brought her voice up short like it'd met a rippers knife on the wrong side of victorian london. She actually sighed, as entertained as the queen that sat above the sacrificial tiger pit. She wanted him, and with the spiked end of her heel tucked into the back of his knee, she made no small show of it. Unladylike knee bent against her gunslinger's hip. Wanting somebody wasn't ever something to be ashamed of, it wanting to keep that she stamped out like stale cigarettes in an ashtray any time it rose up.
"Maybe," she agreed with one word. All murmur and contralto calculation when Russ turned his head up toward her. Marina was venom and spice, fire and wine.. but when she kissed him, she tasted like the golden tequila like they'd shot at the bar, and like the limes that she'd eaten from between his fingers. Maybe he needed to see the sheets again to remember if he liked them, but she didn't need sheets to know that he liked her. Marina could feel it in the crushing burn of his mouth when she bit into his lip. She didn't know if it was something to be celebrated or worried over, but it certainly wasn't something to acknowledge, definitely not to him. Then it'd be over. She didn't know how she knew that, but she did. Besides, maybe she was just drunk. Maybe it was just imagined. Marina decided not to think about it, and instead twisted a hand in the front of his shirt.
He knew that laugh, carried it like a conqueror into territories without a map, dragons bellying lazily through mornings drowning in sunshine and a shitty hangover, his fingers steepled together with hers, sleep-drugged. It was the mellow eye of an endless storm, rollicking overhead, a ceasefire for just long enough to pick up weapons again. Her stiletto knife pinioned his knee, his hip knocked hers, Russ let go the held-breath surety that tonight would burn down in flames, struck-match clarity in the glossy smile of a blond at the edge of a bar he knew he didn’t want. He wanted to win and he wanted the hellcat who sat on top of someone’s car in a deserted parking lot and he’d won fair and fucking square. Russ let that laugh lick over his skin like sunshine, and salt-blood sat on his tongue to meet her.
He felt a button snap, the drawn in fabric twist beneath the candy-colored nails; Marina held tighter than the warp had space for, her fingers knotted at the back of his neck or at his hip, dancing Cuban in his kitchen, the hopeless giggles and his own red-wine warmth keeping time - or curled tight-too-tight in his sheets. Russ figured there was fight enough for her to let go, there were enough numbers on napkins to collect before it meant anything. He kissed her, she kissed him, who could tell the fucking difference? “Maybe,” he said, amusement gold as tequila poured into glasses, the lazy agreement of affection. “If you’re so certain, maybe I need to see them right now.”
The wroth storm of her hair was springy disco curls tonight, sweet smelling honey and lotus beneath the gloom of cigarette smoke that hung thick from the bar. Through eyelids smeared by fingerprint in ceremonial graphite, her oeillade was bright enough to burn like phosphorous in the fresh dark. It was a familiar look, one specifically formulated for the dark. This was when her eyes got heavy, when her smile got crooked with teeth planting deep on one side of her bottom lip. It was the look she gave him when swaying down his hallway with a mostly-empty bottle of wine in one hand, a come hither index finger on the other. It was the look she gave him while the television glowed green with late night science fiction, when she would crawl across the carpet on hands and knees to meet him in a place where words were no longer needed. Yeah, by this point, it was a very familiar look.
When the button on his shirt popped free, Marina fished her fingers inside the gap. Her nails dug unseen lines into his skin, and she grinned up at Russ when he talked about going home to see the sheets. "Well, you know how much I love proving you wrong…" Perhaps she was getting impatient, because she began to unfasten the remaining buttons of his shirt, going down from the one she'd already destroyed. "Lets go."
The plink-plunk of the first button sang on the toe of his shoe and got shaken off onto humdrum gravel; Russ didn’t turn his head to see where it went, that river card had sailed straight on up and he was in gold, baby, that smile sang the way the slots went ching-ching-ching in the background, grandmas visiting from the outer-edges of the state and tacky statues in the lobby. Her lipstick was waxy on his thumb, his fingers caught in the heavy cloud of her hair and Russ laughed as neon tickled over his throat and painted her blue-red devious and kissed her to stay out of trouble (and dressed). His mouth was crooked, expectant smile to meet her and the warmth of tequila still blended on his tongue. He caught her trawling hand in his, folded diamond-tips into the palm of his hand and blunted cat’s claws with callouses.
“I’m driving nowhere without my fucking shirt,” but they’d done that too, pulled half-way off the road in someone else’s car, adrenaline like a fucking buzz anytime headlights flickered down along the road, roar of tires flapping over asphalt, too hot to wait for home. The elastic snap of her hemline drew attention same way as the half-lit neon signs, but Russ’s keys rattled in his hand, he took a back-step into the triton of her heel. “Come on,” the same entreaty, go this way, do it that way, admit, give in, let me win. This time a smile that held burnished heat, “Come on back and I’ll check out the sheets.”
Holding onto her buzz in the same way that both hands were kept tangletight in his shirt, Marina slid from the hood of the car when Russ took that step back. Hydraulics eased heels into the grit once again, and she peeled away from an import bumper to move around him, then past him without a word and just that smile drifting over her bare shoulder like a scrap of meat left out for the dogs at night. She remembered the way, and she set off in the direction of where he'd parked like it was the north star leading her to holy water. No more talk of bedsheets or blondes, she'd save that for in the morning when anxiety seemed to creep in on them best.
She already knew it was going to be one of those mornings, she could feel it in her blood. One of those mornings when the alcohol bit back and made her hiss like a kettle. One of those mornings when just the sight of her at home in his kitchen was enough to have him slamming mugs down in surly silence until the point that she got pissed off and fucking left with the door wide open and a curse in the air. And if it was going to be one of those kinds of mornings tomorrow, Marina didn't much care because tonight was tonight.