log; marina & russ
The no made her smile deliberate, dangerous and polished. It was a knife aimed at Russ' head, one that told him to take a wild guess as to what the fuck she was doing here while she deposited Nathan to the ground. The little backpack became secured to his shoulder, as she sent him in one direction of the shop with the designation to go play. There were plenty of things for a kid to play with in here, none of them were clean of car muck or even necessarily safe.. but under his mother's guidance, Nathan sat down beside cluttered workbench and began to pull action figures out of the bag.
Freed, Marina straightened and rolled her shoulders back, alleviating the kink that came from hauling around a kid that was growing up too fast for her muscle tone to keep up. "Don't make the mistake of thinking I'm here because I want to be, Russ." She ashed her cigarette and gold eyes kept track of the child on the workbench against the distant wall with the occasional glance that was more of a flick or a blink. It was so fleeting, and at the same time so omnispective, that only a mother could do it.
"I need you to watch him for a couple of hours." She looked back to Russ, wetting the edge of her lip before she sucked some more smoke through a filter. Marina's expression tightened, observing him with speculation and a palpable level of uncertainty before she exhaled. "Can you do that?" She bothered asking, like there was a part of her that was begging for a reason to laugh like sour milk. It would be so fucking convenient if now was the time that Russ decided to prove her correct in thinking that she'd been right not to go looking for him some years ago. She knew she couldn't count on him, she knew it was a crime to need him for fucking anything, and there would be a level of sweetness in knowing that she hadn't missed out on anything, that Nathan hadn't missed out on anything in Russ not being in their lives earlier. If he couldn't help her, he might as well still not fucking be here.