Edge Play X (3 page)

 
“Look at me,” he said, and X complied. “This
man, Terry Compton, has a certain taste for being dominated. He also happens to
like art and artists. The man has a large art gallery in his house and a
collection worth over $200 million. He never goes to dungeons and he has
background checks done on all the women he sees. We need a woman he would like,
someone authentic, a woman who isn’t doing it because of the money but because
it is in her nature. He’d be able to sniff out a fake.”

“I don’t know what you don’t
understand,” X argued, “I’m not for sale. I’m not for hire. You’ll have to find
someone else.”

Simeon took a few steps toward her
until he was within arms reach. Again, she looked at the floor, diverting her eyes
from him, but he grabbed her chin and tilted it up, forcing her into his gaze.
“It’s this simple,” he said, “you are going to dominate him.”

X slapped his hand away from her face
and stood up from the bed. “Don’t touch me like that,” she ordered, not used to
men disobeying her. “Nobody touches me like that.”

“Turn around,” he commanded.

“No.”

They were in a game of wills, but X
had played that game before, and almost always, she came out on top, but the
men X played with didn’t usually carry guns.

Simeon put his hand on the gun in his
holster.

“Oh, you’re a big man now, eh? Got
your hand on your big gun. What are you going to do? Shoot me? What did the
Beatles say? Happiness is a warm gun? Do you think they were really talking
about a gun?”

Simeon slapped her across the face,
knocking her teeth together and making her head throb.

“I’m not fucking around!” he yelled.

X put her hand to her cheek. She
tasted blood in her mouth. Then, resolutely, X lifted up her hand and slapped
him back. He took her abuse unflinchingly. His only reaction was that he
furrowed his brow.

“I need assistance,” he said to the
mirror.

X lifted her knee towards his groin,
but he shifted his legs so that she was only able to hit his outer thigh.
Simeon tackled her onto the bed as the other man entered the fake hotel room.
With full force, Simeon grabbed her arm, twisted it around her back, and pushed
her face into the soft covers of the bed.

“Give me a pair of cuffs!” Simeon
shouted, and the man handed him a set. “You’re making me do this! I hope you
see that!” he said as he cuffed X’s hands behind her back again.
 

He grabbed her arms and turned her
around so that she was sitting on the edge of the bed again.

“You’re bruising me,” X said.

Simeon raised his hand as if he was
going to backhand her, and when X flinched, he laughed. Then the man leaned
down and whispered in her ear, “I like it when you flinch. It lets me know that
you understand who is in control. And the bruises, think of them as something
to remember me by. Every time you look at them, you can think of me.”

He pulled away from her then, peering
into her almond eyes, measuring her reaction to his comments, but before he
could stand, X spit in his face. Gingerly, he picked a tissue out of a box on
the bureau behind him and wiped off her sputum from his cheek and nose.

The other man stood next to Simeon,
waiting for his command. “You can go,” Simeon told him, and the man exited.

Simeon leaned on the dresser. “I told
you that I don’t want to hurt you. I want you to do as you are told. I want you
to stop fighting me. I’m going to reason with you.”

 
“Why don’t you open the curtains and we can
watch the stars,” X said. “I love to watch the stars.”

He pulled open the curtains, revealing
the plain wall behind it as if to spite her.

Simeon continued, “I want to tell you
about this man. There is a purpose to why we brought you here. We have reason
to believe that Terry Compton has been involved in arms deals. Specifically, he
has been funding the movement of artillery through the Middle East. There are
all sorts of shady monetary transfers and secretive meetings in foreign
countries.”

“What does a dominatrix have to do
with arms deals?”
 

“We need somebody to get inside,” he
said, “plant bugs, note who his business partners are. Make it so that we can
blackmail him if we need to.”

X shook her head and laughed at her
situation. “Listen. Just go find a pretty young
CIA
agent, I’ll teach her what to do, and that will
be the end of it. It isn’t that difficult once you know what a particular man
likes.” Absently, X stared at the flowers on the bedspread.

“You don’t understand,” he said. “We
had an agent inside.”

“And?”

“We found her dead.”

“What?”

“We found her dead body. You don’t
want to know what he did to her.”

But X did want to know what he did to
her.

“Then why don’t you prosecute him for
murder? Why don’t you bring him up on charges?”

“We only had circumstantial evidence,”
he said.

“Most cases go forward on circumstantial
evidence,” X responded, remembering how her long-dead father, a lawyer, had
said that once at the dinner table.

“That may be true,” he said, “but we
have our reasons.”

X guessed that the truth was that they
didn’t bring Compton up on charges because they wanted to find out who he was
dealing with, what kind of network he was involved in, and that arresting him
for murder would leave those questions unanswered.

“So you want me to dominate a man who
is a murderer? A man who killed his last
Domme
? You
must be kidding.”

Simeon walked over to the round table
and picked up the folder. “We aren’t sure if he killed her or if he had her
killed. There is a possibility that he had nothing to do with the agent’s
death. But do you realize that we have enough evidence to send you to jail?”

“What did he do to your agent?”

Simeon had a faraway look in his eyes
as if remembering the events. “We found her,” he started, “in an abandoned
building with a nail through the base of her skull.”

X thought about the savageness of such
a crime. She had heard about men in Eastern Europe occasionally doing the same
thing to prostitutes. “Then send me to jail,” she said. “Bring me up on
charges. I’ll get a good lawyer and either
get
off
your charges or plead down and just serve a little amount of time. Going to
jail sounds better than getting murdered.”
 

Simeon flipped through the folder he
held.

“You’ve had an interesting life. Went
to Catholic school until you were 11-years-old. Your mother had been a model in
Europe. She dated famous photographers. Father died when you were ten. You had
a partial scholarship to college, but in college, you attended meetings of a
subsidiary group of an international socialist organization. You have a
brother, Daniel. That’s a nice name.
Biblical.
Daniel, the dreamer.
Daniel, the junkie.”

“So what?
I have a brother. I have a past.” X thought then
that Daniel was all she had left now.

“He’s a drug addict, a junkie.”

She corrected him, “He was a junkie.
He went to rehab. He doesn’t use anymore.”

“It’s like being an alcoholic, though,
isn’t it, being a junkie? Once a junkie, always a junkie.”

She said, “I just talked to him. He’s
clean. He gets tested for drugs. They come up clean every time.”

X remembered how she and her mother
had once driven Daniel to rehab as he sat in the back of the van smoking heroin
off a sheet of aluminum foil, chasing the dragon as it is called. “I can’t
believe this is my last tray,” he had kept muttering.

“He’ll go to jail if he tests
positive, won’t he?” Simeon asked, taunting her.

“What are you implying? Just be a man
and spit it out,” she commanded.

Simeon kneeled down next to her, so
close that she could see his pores, could see the stray hairs of his eyebrows
and the subtle ring of amber around his pupils. X could see that he was
serious.

“You don’t want him to go to jail, do
you? One dirty test and he’s back in the slammer. Or,” he mused, “there is
always the possibility that you could just disappear. Lots of people just
disappear every year, a whole multitude of them. It’s this simple. You are
going to dominate Compton. You are going to do as you are told. You don’t have
a choice.” He noticed the disdain on her face and then continued, “Life is an
illusion of choice. The more boxes of cereals in the aisle, the less we feel we
are slaves.”

“What will you do with me after you
get your information or whatever it is you want me to do?”

He stood up and ran his hand over her
cheek that he had slapped. “We’ll give you immunity to any prosecution
regarding your finances.”

“And?”

“We’ll leave your brother alone. Of
course, there would be a certain amount of compensation involved.”

“How much?”

“Seven-hundred-and-fifty thousand
dollars.” X thought of the threat they had made to her and to her brother, of
how she would be dominating a man who could very well be a murderer.

“I want two-and-a-half million,” X
retorted, not believing she would get it.

“I thought you weren’t for sale,” he
said.

“I’m not for sale. Now we are just discussing
the restitution that I should be entitled to.”

“I’ll have to discuss it with my
superiors.”

“That amount of money is nothing to
the government and you know it. Billions of dollars just disappeared in Iraq.
Make some of that money reappear. Do you expect me to sleep with this man?”

“If I tell you to
have sex with him, yes.”

The cuffs were starting to get
uncomfortable behind her back and she squirmed a little. “There is something
you should know,” X told him, “
Dommes
don’t always
have sex with their subs.”

“If I tell you to have sex with him,
then you will have sex with him. Haven’t you been with many men?” he asked
cynically.

“Would you like to know how many?” X
replied. “Come here and I’ll whisper it in your ear.”

She could see that her offer had
tempted him.

X spoke, “Take my cuffs off, or at
least cuff me in the front so I can have another cigarette.”

He motioned for her to turn around,
which she did, and Simeon removed X’s cuffs.

“Fight with me again, and they’ll go
back on indefinitely,” he said.

X shook her hands around to get the
blood going.

“If you want me to fuck that man, risk
my life and dominate him, I want the two-and-a-half million,” X said, although
she had no intention of having sex with Terry Compton.

X picked out another cigarette and he
lit it for her. Her throat was starting to get sore from the smoke.

“I’ll be right back,” he said, and
left the room.

When he returned he simply reported,
“Your request has been accepted.”

“I want half up front, in cash.”

“Fine. That can be accomplished.”

2.

Simeon had blindfolded and cuffed her
before escorting X out of the fake hotel room. The man held onto her arm as if
leading a blind woman, him guiding her down long hallways and finally out into
the outdoors and back into the SUV. Even with the blindfold, she could sense
that nighttime had fully arrived. The air was cool and not even a sliver of
light entered through the perimeter of the thick blindfold that covered her
eyes. Once she was in the vehicle, Simeon pulled the seat belt over her and
latched it, her arms awkward and uncomfortable under the belt because of her
cuffs.

It seemed to take a long time to get
back to her apartment. At first, X tried to remember the order of the right and
left turns they were taking, as if it mattered, as if later she could recreate
the journey and return herself to the undisclosed location of the fake hotel
room, as if she would want to return. A fetus might as well try to track the
steps its mother takes on the way from the living room to the bathroom.

The men didn’t speak to one another,
didn’t even play the radio. She could tell that part of the journey had taken
place on the highway, sensed it from their speed. Fifty minutes later, the car
stopped at her apartment building. When Simeon opened the door of the vehicle,
X could hear the faint song of crickets outside. Beyond this was the sound of
traffic, of cars and trucks passing on the streets nearby, the sound of
vehicles cutting through the air. She thought that it was interesting how
taking away one sense enhanced all the others.

Simeon removed her blindfold and
tossed it onto the seat beside her. Even with the blindfold off, the
surrounding darkness seemed to envelop X. The street lights and the headlamps
of the cars and the key ring lights would not dispel it, only lessen it,
disguise it as day. Still, the bright bulbs that were wired into the grids
churned out their light, pushing back at the night, but their artificiality
brought her no comfort. Little bubbles of panic burst in her stomach; it was something
more than just the night that disturbed her, it was the remnants of the fear
she had felt that perhaps she would never feel the sun on her face again, that
she would go into the darkness forever.