Edge Play X (15 page)

“You are shooting all wrong,” he said.
“Try again.”

She walked around the table and
started to aim at the cue. The man came behind her and leaned over her, putting
his hands over her own and helping X to position the cue stick.

“You want to have the cue hit the edge
of that ball to send it into the pocket. Simple geometry.”

He guided her shot and the ball went
in.

“See,” he said. “Simple.”

“Simple to you, maybe.”

He watched as X set up her next shot.
This one went in.

“So,” he said, “what do you do for a
living?”

“I’m a painter,” she answered, pausing
to take a drink from her beer.

“A painter,” he echoed. “Do you paint
pictures or walls?”

“Pictures, mostly,” she laughed. “And
you?” she asked to make him laugh as well, “a professional pool player? A
hustler?”

X missed her next shot and he lifted
his eyebrows. He chalked the end of his cue, spreading the blue color over the
felt.
 

“You’re winning,” X said.

“Well, how about winner takes all.”

He bent over and started to clear the
table.

She took another sip of her beer.

“Tell me, what is the ‘all’?”

The man cleared the table and then
gingerly grabbed the cue ball and slid it into a pocket.
 

He came over to X, wrapped his hands
around the curvature of her ass, and lifted her up to the side of the table.
The man stood between her legs, the limbs open and inviting.

X motioned over to a sign that sat
above the cue rack that said
No Drinks or
Sitting on Tables.

 
“What
will the owner say?” and then the man leaned down to kiss her. She wrapped her
arms around his neck and gave into his kisses.
 

His kisses moved down her neck and
then he pulled her shirt over her head, continuing his journey down to the
smooth tops of her breasts, reaching behind her back to unfasten her bra before
letting it drop onto the floor next to his feet. Rough stubble brushed against
areola and breast, the man gently biting their tips between his teeth.

X wrapped her legs around him and
moved her hands under his shirt, over his flanks and up his back. He took his
shirt off, too, and then threw it onto the floor.
 

And then: hands rolled over arms,
chests, shoulders, clavicles, ribs, abdominals, butts, thighs, and genitals;
mouths met and then migrated; neurotransmitters bonded to receptors; organs
expanded in width, depth, and size; clothing was removed and flung aside; rates
of respiration increased.

“Have you ever fucked on a pool
table?” he asked. X noticed that there was the tiniest of crevices between his
front teeth.

“No,” she said as she reclined back
onto the green felt of the table.

“Neither have I,” he said, laughing.
He leaned forward and started to kiss her belly.

X tried not to think of Compton or
Simeon but an occasional image of them would pass through her mind before she
would quickly push it away. X, quite simply, wanted to escape from them in body
and in mind; she would fuck her brains out. She thought that this interlude
would just be a one-time thing, a bewitching distraction, unaware that this man
would play a part in her life for years to come.

Naked now and intoxicated, X stretched
her arms out over her head and arched her back, giving herself to the man who
groaned in pleasure as he buried his face between her legs.

There was the ceiling, an old painted
tin ceiling, the paint stained from when people still smoked inside the bars,
and there was the feel of the smooth felt on her back, of the rail under her
ass as he ran his tongue over her flesh, relishing the taste of it, the unique
and pungent nectar, hovering above her delicately and almost weightlessly like
a bee above its flower. X’s legs were wrapped around his head, petal like, her
ankles touching the nape of his neck as she allowed him to lick her, to swirl,
flick, and poke his tongue over the hill of nerves until she had nearly reached
its climax, and then she pushed his head away.

He stood, wiping off her juices onto
his thick forearm. X sat up and they were kissing again, X tasting her own
lingering flavor as she worked her hands down to his giant of a penis and
wrapped her hand around its girth, the veined stalk nearly twice the length of
Mr. Compton’s.
 

“Not bad,” X said, giving him her
assessment in conjunction with a squeeze.

He laughed. He knew he had a big dick.

His tongue ran over her earlobe and
then she reclined back onto the table, taking him with her. The man, then, so
slowly, ever so slowly, pushed himself through the gates, warm and pliant under
his movements, the helmet of the
glans
followed by
the long juggernaut of shaft, a battering ram making its way into the
sovereignty (descriptions which would have made the man proud), and once
inside, he lingered, still for a moment, as was his habit when first entering
the kingdom.

X reached up to his face, running her
hand over the stubble on his cheeks and then over the cleft of his chin. When
she ran her fingers over his lips, he opened his mouth and took them inside,
sucking them.
 

There was a look of concentrated
ecstasy on his face as X felt his hands running up the underside of her legs,
making their way up to her ankles, and as he grasped them, he fucked her as if
performing a musical composition, an opus: slow (
adagietto
)
and then fast (allegro), hard
(forte), gently (
sanft
) and playfully (
scherzoso
)
,
the tightening
stringendo
accelerating to a
stretto
, every movement executed passionately (
passionato
) as he wrapped his arms around her thighs and
pushed himself deeper into her.

The man reached down and used his
thumb to create a tremolo, as if playing the same note over and over, knowing
that she would orgasm soon, feeling it in her body and sensing it in the
abandoned sound of her moans becoming a crescendo, their soprano mixing in harmony
with the bass of his own, so he allowed himself to succumb to her being
entirely, he stroking the little pea of nerves until X convulsed with pleasure.
Seeing her orgasm brought him over the precipice as well, and right before he
came he pulled his cock out of her and shot his ejaculate onto her belly,
stroking his big penis to get out all of its juices (coda).

They cleaned off excretions and
dressed then, giving each other happy looks as they did so.

The bartender drove her home as he
promised, telling X it was alright to smoke in his car, and right before she
exited his vehicle, he leaned over to kiss her.

 
“What’s your name, anyway?” she asked.

“Michael. And yours?”

And then X said her name, the
syllables of it sounding foreign on her tongue.

“I want to see you again,” he said.

X began to open the door. “We’ll see,”
she returned. “Thank you,” she said, “for the ride, I mean,” aware of the
double entendre.

He looked up at her, his eyes alight.
“My pleasure.”

14.

Alarm, consciousness, toilet, shower, shave,
suit, coffee, food, news, car, work:
  
that was Simeon’s typical morning. But this particular morning was
different, one in which he awoke with a special anticipation, one in which he
interjected masturbation before exiting his bed. And as he closed his eyes, his
hand moving piston-like under his sheet, the images in his mind were primarily
those of X—her hair, her breasts, her mouth, her ass (especially her ass), and
then the smooth pubic mound that he had glimpsed when he had pulled down her
pants in the fake hotel bathroom, followed by his remembrance of the photo of X
in her dominatrix costume and the fantasy of his own penis gripped not by his
hand but instead by the soft warmth of X’s vagina, and that was all that it
took.

Before X had come into his world,
before he had even been told about her, his life had lacked the sharp voltage
that X’s presence seemed to emanate, the piercing thrill that the simple
knowledge of her existence seemed to create.

There had been other women, of course,
many of them. He had liked the sweet ones and the
slutty
ones, had even tried to enjoy the uncomfortable mornings when he hadn’t snuck
out of a woman’s bed in time. But that carousel had ultimately bored him.

When he had heard of X, the impressive
mythos surrounding her, and then when
Compton
had wanted her, Simeon had known that he wouldn’t
be satisfied until he had conquered her. He had never wanted to conquer a woman
more.

Today he would follow her, get to
speak with her again. He knew that she detested him and resisted him, but those
reactions only made him desire her more. And those times that Simeon had
touched X came into his mind now: the way her body had fallen into his arms so
languid and pliant after he had placed the drugged rag over her face; the way she
had struggled under his weight after he had tackled her first onto the floor
after she had thrust the glass at him and then onto the bed after she had
smacked him and tried to kick him.

Simeon wanted X to submit to him, to obey
his commands, but her refusal had created a challenge for him. He would have to
threaten her, bribe her, and frighten her in order for her to do what he
wanted. As he waited in his vehicle in front of her apartment for her to exit
so that he could follow her, his desire was only to have X yield to him, to
give herself to him completely, to bend like a reed to his wind. It was not
simply that he wanted to have sex with her, (although he wanted that, too)—no,
he wanted to break her like a horse is broken; he wanted this woman, an equal
to himself, to defer to him, to concede to his dominance.

Finally, as he sipped the last of his
coffee from his travel mug, he spotted X exiting her apartment. He watched as
she entered her car and then he started his vehicle and followed her. He parked
as she ran into a coffee shop and emerged with a cup of coffee, and then he
continued trailing her until she eventually went to the parking area by the
beach.

He waited in his vehicle as she exited
her own, watched as the winter wind from the surf blew her dark hair wildly
until she secured it in a loose bun, watched as she pulled the sweater she was
wearing closer around her body and walked towards the surf, and once she was
near it and his erection had retreated, he went to talk to her.

When X spotted Simeon in the distance,
she turned around and began to walk as quickly as she could, but he caught up
to her.

“You again,” she said.

Up ahead, a middle-aged couple was
playing Frisbee with their dog, the animal jumping to catch the toy with a
weightless fluidity.

“Stop,” he said. “I need to talk with
you.”

“What is it?”

“
Compton
asked you to go to
Paris
, didn’t he?”

X looked out to the ocean horizon.
Seagulls circled around her and Simeon looking for food on the beach, making
fierce cries to each other.

“Yes, he did.”

Simeon looked irritated. “Have you
told him that you are going to accompany him?”

“Not yet,” she said.

“Why not?”

“I don’t have his phone number. Should
I send him a letter?”

“You should have told him when you saw
him last time that you would go.”

X sat onto the sand and listened to
the sound of the waves crashing onto the beach. She wanted to dissolve into the
primal movement of them, the trance of their repetition.

X said, “What do you want me to do
there, Agent Simeon? Let me guess…fuck him.”

Simeon, who was still standing,
crossed his arms and looked down at X, his dark sunglasses shielding his eyes.

“We want you to note who his business
partners are. We want you to keep track of where you are staying and when he
goes to meetings. He is starting to trust you. And we believe that one of his
associates, Eliot Ventura, will be there as well. He’s an Italian business man
and we may want you to help us recruit him.”

X stood up, brushed the sand off her
rump, and started to walk away. Simeon followed X, grabbing her arm and telling
her to stop. To the other people on the beach, it appeared that they were just
a couple having a spat.

“Get your hands off of me!” she said.
“You just keep pulling me in deeper and deeper, don’t you? First Compton and
now this other man? No. That wasn’t part of the deal. Plus, what would
Compton
think seeing me hit on one of his associates?”

“He wouldn’t care,” Simeon said. “He’s
excited by the idea of being a cuckold. Didn’t you see it on the list?”