The Devil in Silver

“I think spanking’s too risky,” he whispered.

They both took a moment to feel unhappy about that.

“Let’s get under the covers,” Sue said.

They clambered around on the two mattresses, trying not to make too much noise, and trying not to separate the makeshift double bed. It took a little work. Once they were under the sheets, they’d even worked up faint sweats. Each could see perspiration on the other’s forehead.

Pepper rubbed at his hairline and looked at his moist fingertips.

“This is just pathetic,” he said.

Sue couldn’t answer him because she was laughing. They were so ridiculous. But in the good kind of way she hadn’t enjoyed in too damn long. She covered her mouth, but that didn’t quite do it, so she rolled over and rested her face against a pillow and kept laughing.

Pepper touched her back firmly.

He rubbed between her shoulder blades, pressing against her spine, running his fingers down to her butt. But he didn’t grab her ass. He brought his hand up and down, kneading her spine.

Sue stopped laughing and relaxed. She breathed deeply. Her body seemed to fall deeper into the bed. She raised her feet slightly and dropped them again. She groaned. So Pepper slid closer to her, and he pressed his thumb into the muscles just below her neck. When he pressed there, her feet raised slightly again, and dropped. She shimmied on her stomach, rubbing side to side, letting the good feeling of his touch pass throughout her body.

Now Pepper slid his hands under the sheets and plucked at the band of her underwear. He lifted the band and let it snap back against her skin. He then slid her panties down and lifted the sheets so he could really appreciate her posterior. He liked seeing it so much. Sue sensed this so she swayed it, side to side, while he watched. People compare that kind of movement to a clock’s pendulum or a metronome, but really they must be fucking joking. To compare a woman’s butt with anything man-made is to denigrate the first and elevate the second.

Pepper finally slid her panties down as far as he could. Then she kicked them off.

He rolled on his back now and she lifted her head from the pillow. Her face looked a bit darker because she was flushed. She smiled, and showed her small teeth. They were kind of gray, not even. He was so happy to see them that he smiled, too.

Sue lifted the covers so she could pull down Pepper’s underwear, but right then her hand stopped moving. His underwear was already gone.

“When did you take them off?” Sue asked. “When did you have time?”

Pepper jutted out his chin and smirked as if he’d achieved some great scientific breakthrough and could not be cajoled into sharing the secret.

“Never mind,” Sue whispered. She wanted to kiss that goofy look right off Pepper’s face. She climbed on top of him and began.

“That was good,” Pepper said.

The sun hadn’t risen yet. It was only a little after four in the morning. They’d fucked, then dozed, and now woke together as couples all over the world like to do.

“You’re right,” Sue said. “You’re right.”

Pepper smiled at the ceiling. He looked out the window, where he could see only the tops of the trees, and a sky the color of cobwebs. It was going to be an overcast day.

“They’re not really deporting you, right?”

“No,” she admitted. “They’re trying to deport me. I have to stand before a judge one more time before it’s official.”

He rolled onto his side toward her. “Come on,” he said, sounding like a child whose older sibling is trying to scare him. “Stop playing. Tell me the truth.”

Sue said, “I went to Canada, from China, when I was four. Me and my older sister, together. We were inside a shipping container with another family. I don’t remember them. My sister said they weren’t very nice to us. We had buckets for the bathroom. A little generator inside so we had power. I don’t remember any of this. It’s all what my sister told me. She was fourteen.”

Sue lay on her back. She looked at the ceiling as if she could see this history playing up there, like a home movie.

“When we reached Vancouver, they took me and my sister out, and the same day they drove us into the U.S. I was so small they put me in a little suitcase.”

Sue raised both hands and held them apart. A piece of carry-on luggage, no larger than that.

“They got us through the border and drove us down to a city called Everett. They let us out right on the street. In front of a place called the Imagine Children’s Museum. Maybe they thought that was pretty funny. Our family had paid to get us to San Francisco, but we didn’t make it that far. What could we do? The driver told us to get out, so we got out. We didn’t know what San Francisco looked like. And we weren’t with that other family anymore. There were just two of us. Two girls. Four and fourteen.”

Sue pulled her covers down until her whole upper body was exposed. The small brown nipples hardened in the morning’s slight chill. Pepper put his hand on one breast and touched the nipple with the tip of his thumb.