Edge Play X (6 page)

 
“This is how it will be,” X said, establishing
the rules straight away, “do not speak unless you are spoken to. If you feel
you must speak, you may ask for permission. You will not look me in the eye
unless I tell you to do so. Do you understand?”
 

Compton diverted his eyes to the floor
before answering. “Yes, I understand.”

“Lie prostrate on the ground.”

Compton got off his chair, dropped
down to his knees, and then slowly lowered the rest of his body to the dark
hardwood floor, the muscles of his arms and back flexing collectively.

X lifted up her right foot and put the
tip of her boot against the nape of his neck, digging it in just enough to make
him squirm.

“You and I are going to have an
understanding,” she began. “I know who you are and I know that you are a
wealthy man. But one thing that you must understand is that I am not doing this
for the money.” X reached down and pulled her riding crop from her bag and ran
the end of it slowly down his spinal cord. “You see, I want to hurt you. I want
to cause you pain. I take pleasure in the thought of it and even more from the
realization of it.”

Immediately, X whacked Compton as hard
as she could across his lower back. He felt pain. He was grateful for it.

She moved her heel down his back a few
inches so that it rested above the bone of his spine, then she put a good deal
more of her weight onto her foot. Any more pressure and she’d probably make one
of his discs explode.

“In the outside world, you are a
respected man, but you and I both know that you don’t deserve this admiration.
To me, you are a worthless human being.”

While X was saying these things to
Compton, it occurred to her that she was being perfectly honest. It was not a
game, or play, or script, only the truth. X hit him again with her crop, this
time on his shoulder blade.

Now, she kneeled down next to him and
leaned over to whisper in his ear.

“I want you to know something, Mr.
Compton. You mean less to me than a bug that I might crush on the sidewalk
while I’m walking. Even an ant that I squash I might have pity for. But you,
you are nothing to me. Remember that—you are worth less to me than an insect.
You are a parasite of humanity who profits from the work of others, and that is
why I will call you
Worm
. So tell me,
Worm, what is your safe word?” It would have been fine to X to deny Compton
this ticket out, but tradition demanded it.

Compton lifted his head slightly off
the hardwood floor.

“Laissez-faire,” he answered.

She laughed out loud as she stood up.

“That is too perfect,” X said. “Now,
Worm, go over to that wall and get on your knees.

Compton got up quickly and went over
to the wall as X followed him. He dropped down to his knees and the woman lifted
up each of his arms and attached the D-rings on his leather wrist bands to
clips that were built into the wall for this purpose.

X took her flogger from her bag and
pulled its supple leather tails through her palm before striking him as hard as
she was able, making the leather bite into the skin of his back. X hit him
again and continued until she had found a rhythm, a cadence.

“Are you a religious worm?”

“No, I’m afraid not.”

“Tell me, then, have you heard the
story about the rich man and the eye of the needle?”

“Of course,” he said. X hated his
smugness and hit him across the top of his quadriceps and then several times on
the bare soles of his feet for punishment.

“Then tell me what it says,” she
nagged.

 
Decades before, Compton’s parents had dragged
him to church, taking him each Sunday until he had been exempted at age 16 so
that he could work bussing tables. His father had decided that a good work
ethic was ultimately more valuable than a saved soul, though his mother hadn’t
agreed. The man lifted his head up as if searching for the quote from the
heavens.

“It is
easier for a camel to go through the
eye
of a needle
than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.”

X put her
flogger into her bag and pulled out her four-foot braided whip and released it
onto his back. Compton’s back, red already from the flogging, now began to show
the crisscrosses of welted-up lines.

“It would
seem then, wouldn’t it, that you are quite damned,” X said, “but there is a
piece of knowledge that is often overlooked in regards to that saying.” With
the next lash, Compton flinched with the pain, and she enjoyed witnessing his
discomfort. “You see, there was a gate in Jerusalem called the Needle’s Eye.
The gate was only a few feet high.” She let loose another lash. “In order for a
camel to pass through the gate, it had to go through on its knees.”

“I see,” he
said.

“I didn’t
tell you to speak.”

From her
bag, X fished out a metal clothespin and placed it on Compton’s left nipple. He
was breathing heavily by now and running his tongue over his lips
intermittently. X picked her whip up again and directed it to the bare flesh of
his ass, skin left open to abuse by means of the skimpy leather straps that
held on his codpiece.
 
           

“You can
still go to heaven,” the woman said, “but you’ve got to get there on your
knees.”

Beyond
them, people died and others were born. Goods were bought and sold.
 
They were in the dungeon, connected by the
pain. It made the world outside dissolve.

X wrapped
her whip up into a small circle and put it on the floor. A large cage was
nearby, and she spotted an interesting implement hanging from the top of the
cage, a device that she had heard about but had never used. She unclipped his
wrists from the wall and X told him to crawl into the cage, following him in as
he entered.
 

“Faster!”
she demanded, laughing at how ridiculous he looked skittering along the floor
like an animal.

Compton
entered the cage and stayed on his hands and knees, silently awaiting her
command.

“Stand up,”
she said. Compton predicted what X intended to do to him, and he salivated at
the thought.

A steel
sphere hung from the top of the cage from heavy links of chain, giving the cage
the appearance of being a shrunken, strange discothèque. The ball was slightly
larger than a basketball and made of brushed metal. A few small air slots
dotted the front. X reached up, opening the globe into two separate
hemispheres. It swung apart smoothly, its halves connected by hinges on the
back.

“Put your
head in there,” X said.

Compton
backed into the open ball, still careful not to make eye contact with X. The
ball had been suspended at the perfect height for the man, the bottom of it
hovering just above his shoulders. The woman closed the hemispheres around his
head, securing them together with a small brass lock that she fished out from
her bag. X handcuffed Compton behind his back, then after unclipping the
clothespin from his left nipple, X snapped it over the right.

A small
metal hinged door sat at the front above the air slots. X opened the tiny door
so that she could be sure Compton could hear what she was about to say.

“You are a
very trusting man, or a very stupid one, because you have allowed me to place
you into that ball with no idea of my intent or how long you will remain within
it. I could just leave you there until your lap-dog of an assistant comes and
finds you, but of course, he wouldn’t have the key to the padlock, and then
what?”

“Mistress,”
he said, “may I speak?”

“Do not
call me Mistress,” she said. “Refer to me as either
Domina
or X. But you may speak.”

Compton, an
aficionado of dead languages (though Compton had argued many times that a
language is never really dead if its roots live on), paused to relish the
title—
Domina
—the Latin word for Mistress, a word he
also knew that in German meant a dark-skinned grape used to make red wines.
Intoxicating.

The ball
muffled the sound of his voice. “
Inquam
,
Domina
,
inservio
(
I say,
Mistress, I serve you
). Leave me here for as long as you like.”

And with
those words, X shut the little door and left him there. The man was still as a
statue, his breathing the only movement of his body. With his head encased in
the metal ball, he looked like he was an underwater explorer in an early
version of scuba equipment, or, likewise, as if the heavens that Atlas carried
on his back had suddenly rolled up and encased his head, and these images made
X laugh.

She
remembered the bar at the side of the room, walked over to it, and put some ice
from a small refrigerator into a highball glass before mixing herself a vodka
and tonic. This was easy enough. She’d pass the time babysitting the bastard
and drinking his liquor.

As X sipped
her drink, she walked to the back of the room where all Compton’s own equipment
was neatly hung onto a brushed stainless steel pegboard. He had gags, hoods,
clamps, cuffs, spreaders, whips, electro-stimulators, anal plugs, feathers,
ticklers, paddles, mitts,
armbinders
, and even a
leather straight-jacket. These sat alongside leashes, collars, pinwheels, penis
plugs, chastity belts, and simple leather floggers. He was as equipped as a
bondage store.

Above the
pegboard were three neatly stenciled Latin words:
Sua
cuique
voluptas
.
X went to her bag and
took out her phone, connected to the internet, and typed in the phrase. It
quickly returned the answer to her.
Everyone has his own pleasures.

Sitting on
the table were a variety of origami figures: dogs, cranes, swans, rabbits, and
frogs sat next to tiny paper boxes, perfect lilies, and delicate paper chains.
X looked over at Compton, perplexed, realizing then that these figurines had
been made by him.
A submissive into origami.
What a
strange man.

At the side
of the pegboard was a glass-fronted case filled with books. X went over to it,
opened it, and pulled out a volume. It was an early translation of
Venus in
Furs,
its pages yellowed and crumbling. She put it back on the shelf after
opening it and reading a paragraph, returning it to its place next to the first
edition of
Lolita
. There were several editions of the
Kama
Sutra
which sat next to one she had seen
before,
Psychopathia
Sexualis
.
She found
Notes from the Underground
by Dostoyevsky. There was an
original French version of
Story of O
. Compton had first or early
editions of the writings of the Marquis de
Sade
,
Pierre
Klossowski
, and Sartre. And the one by Sartre,
seemingly out of place, X took out and tucked under her arm, holding it tight
to her body and then hiding it in her bag of gear. It felt good to steal from
someone who usually stole from everybody else.

A bathroom
sat at the back corner of the room and she peeked inside. It was a simple
enough bathroom, mostly marble, the areas above the sink and in the shower
tiled with golden mother-of-pearl. X sipped at her drink, finished it, and then
returned to the bar where she poured herself another.

A few
minutes later, X made her way back to Compton.
 

The dimmed
recessed lights above them cast peculiar arrays of shadows through the room,
and these dark distorted outlines of the furnishings and chains that hung here
and there increased the gothic feel of the space while adding to it a sense of
something looming. Whether sadness, emptiness, or absurdity, X was unsure.
Maybe it was all the aforementioned.

X removed
the nipple clamp and let it drop to the floor. From her glass, she removed an
ice cube and ran it first over Compton’s freshly unclasped nipple before
repeating the act to the opposite one. Compton’s small pink nipples reddened
from the ice, the little hairs around them folding over, saturated from the
water. As X rubbed them and teased them, rivulets ran down Compton’s abdomen
before dripping in fat drops onto the floor.

Compton’s
codpiece was held together with simple snaps which X undid before letting it
fall between his legs to the floor. From her bag, she retrieved a wooden ruler
which she took with her back into the cage. By the time X had returned,
Compton’s penis was erect, and the little organ stood straight out in front of
him. After opening the little door at the front of his head cage, X popped in
one of the ice cubes from her glass. The cube would sit at the bottom of the
head cage next to his neck, she knew, and gradually melt. In just a few
moments, little streams of water began to make their way out from underneath
the bottom of the globe and trickle down his torso. She popped in another cube
and let the door remain slightly ajar.