The Devil in Silver

He knew he should only feel happy about this. Like hearing someone you care about has just had a long jail sentence commuted. But this also meant that in less than a week she’d be leaving him. When they’d only just begun. He understood that he was being selfish. He tried the same sentence again, trying to sound elated.

“You’re getting discharged!”

He would walk her to the secure door. He would watch her walk out. And he realized that, despite his own sadness, he would be so glad she was free.

“I’m getting deported,” Sue said.

He laughed at this. A big one. Up from the belly. Enough to make everyone else in the lounge shoosh him hatefully, as if he were a teenager texting in a movie theater. And their sound was so loud, so clearly hostile, that a member of the staff called out from the nurses’ station.

“Everything all right down there?” she shouted.

Not just a nurse, but Josephine. Back on the job. Working an overnight shift, but wary in a way she hadn’t been before. A little afraid to come down to the lounge on her own. (Especially with Pepper in there; don’t think she hadn’t tracked him passing by.) Then she felt resentful that this job had swiped some of her confidence, her ease. She was no longer Josephine; now she was Nurse Washburn. She’d already started telling patients to address her that way.

In the lounge, Sue cupped her hands and shouted, “One hundred percent all right down here!”

Nurse Washburn’s chair creaked as she sat back down. Then, very faintly, they all heard the clacking of computer keys.

“Come on,” Pepper said quietly. “Stop playing with me.”

He ran his hand down Sue’s thigh, toward her knee. She clasped his wrist. She pinched her lips and softened her eyes as if Pepper were the one in need of sympathy. “I’m not playing,” she whispered. “I have less than seven days.”

“I don’t get it,” he said. “Deport you for what? Deport you to where?”

“To China.”

This was the first time he really thought about the crispness of her English. “But you speak English so well,” he said.

Pepper said those words before he had time to think them through. But you speak English so well. Just a burp produced in a fetid little chamber of his mind. The wrong thing to say. He knew it. He knew it. But that didn’t mean shit to Sue.

She squinted her eyes into slits. She curled her upper lip until her teeth bucked out. “Oh, sank you velly much,” she said. “Missa GI Joe Amelican!”

Pepper kissed the side of her face. Their first kiss, and it came because of this. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean it like that. I’m sorry.”

She pulled away from him. She crossed her arms. A fight had begun. One Pepper couldn’t win with apologies. But then he noticed something new. He pointed at her mouth. “That’s the first time I’ve ever seen your teeth.”

Sue gasped as if her skirt had blown up over her head. She dropped her upper lip. She brought one hand up to her mouth and covered it.

Ah, yes, the one concern that might trump an unfortunate detour into flagrant ethnic stereotyping. Vanity! Or, more specifically, crippling insecurity. Sue kept her hand over her mouth and twisted away from Pepper.

“Come on,” Pepper said. “They look nice.”

Which was a lie. (Her teeth were jacked.)

“I like it when you smile,” he said.

Which was true. And she could hear that in his voice.

She turned back to him. Her hand still hadn’t moved. He reached out, pulled it down. He leaned toward her so he could whisper. “If you need me to say racist things to make you smile, I’ll do it,” Pepper said. “But only if you ask nice.”

Sue pulled her hand from his, raised it one more time, and plunked him on his forehead. He overplayed the pain. Rearing back and stretching his mouth open, he pantomimed a howl without breaking the room’s hush.

Sue grabbed Pepper’s hand and put it back on her thigh now. She watched him until he returned her intense gaze. She pulled his hand higher, to the top of her thigh. He leaned forward and kissed her lightly. Not the cheek, but the lips this time. When he pulled away, her shuttered eyes seemed to have grown brighter, as if she’d drawn the blinds.

She said, “I’ve been held in one kind of detention or another for almost a year now.”

Pepper wasn’t sure what to do with this. Here they were, getting warm, and she drops a bit of information sure to cool any room. When he frowned at her and remained still, Sue said, “I’m telling you I’m horny.”

He kissed her much harder the second time.

Then he slipped his hand between her thighs. He felt the mound of her pussy, warm through her nightdress. She put her hand over his and pressed him closer to her. Pepper rubbed through the fabric and she ground against his fingers. She breathed more quickly, tight and shallow little sounds. The television showed pictures of night skies from a weather forecast, showering the room in blue light.

Sue arched her back; Pepper kept rubbing.