Edge Play X (9 page)

As soon as
Sabrina was gone, X told Daniel to come inside with her. She got her purse and
removed a manila envelope which she handed to her brother.

“Open it.
There’s ten-thousand dollars in there,” X told him.

Daniel
opened the envelope, pulling the stack of cash out halfway before abruptly
shoving it back in and sealing it.

“Jesus. You
shouldn’t carry around that much cash. Especially around here. How did you get
this?” he asked.

“My
paintings have been selling,” she lied.

“I’m glad
to hear it,” he said, “but you should keep this for yourself. We’re getting by,
we’re doing alright.”

“I’m doing
well for myself, Danny. I just thought I’d share the wealth. I want you to use
it to get those home inspection courses you were talking about. Use it to move
up north if you want.”

He leaned
over and gave her a hug.

“I’m glad
your career is doing well. You deserve it,” he said.

Deserve. X
wasn’t sure what she deserved anymore.

“You just
have to promise me something,” X said. “Promise me that you’ll stay away from
the drugs.”

“You don’t
have to worry about that,” he answered. “That part of my life is over. But I
better put this somewhere safe,” he said, leaving her and going into his
bedroom.

As she
heard him rumbling around in his room, a thought kept replaying in her mind.
87
days
, it said,
87 more days
.

7.

X left the city three days later, her
brother taking her to the airport to fly back to the peninsula. Below her, the
city was a circuit board of lines and colors. She was glad to leave it behind.

Home was comforting, the safety of it,
the predictability of its routines. She wanted to find a true refuge but could
find only distractions—cooking, shopping, socializing, painting, cleaning. Life
was normal, except that it wasn’t anymore. She wondered if sex could unburden
her mind but she could not manage the initiative to find a partner.

Winter had come, bringing with it rain
and making each day shorter than the last. Christmas decorations multiplied by
the hour. X knew that she would hear from Simeon again and one day he
telephoned her to tell her that this was the weekend she would be seeing
Compton
again. He gave her a few reminders. Get the
photos. Plant the bug. Make sure he doesn’t lose interest.

X had spent part of her time
researching Terry Compton. She was able to find a few articles about him in the
financial and society sections of newspapers and a few profiles that had
appeared in men’s magazines. Most of them were about his financial dealings or
art purchases.

One of them, however, in an
international economic magazine, had a few sentences about how Compton and his
advisors were reevaluating some of his charity contributions in light of a
government report that showed that he was one of the largest American donors to
certain Middle Eastern charities which the US had marked as having possible
links to radical groups. When asked about this by the interviewer, that man had
responded that the goal of his contributions was to bring change to the area by
stimulating Western-style economic growth. He finished by stating that he had
no interest in religious wars; he was an atheist.

It certainly seemed that the man had
some economic interests in the region. He was on Boards and Steering Committees
of international oil conglomerates. He was a partial owner of a hotel in Dubai
and his partners were sheiks from Saudi Arabia. But X had no idea if he was
really funding the movement of arms or not. She thought that perhaps Simeon had
told her that because he didn’t want to admit that it was really Compton’s
charity contributions that they were concerned about. Or maybe they just wanted
to gather information on his Saudi Arabian business partners.

Simeon thought that having sex with
Compton would hold his interest, but the agent had it all wrong, X knew. Not
fucking Compton would only make him want her more. The essence of desire was
not having what you wanted, something Simeon didn’t seem to understand. Give a
man everything and he’ll still want more; the desire, the propelling force
never subsides. And one thing that X felt certain about was that a man who
could have any material thing in the world had only one true want—to feel
desire for something, to know that something or someone was out of reach. A man
like that didn’t have trouble finding a woman who wanted him; a man like that
had trouble finding a woman who
didn’t
want him. A man like that wanted a challenge.

X had spent time studying the list of
Compton’s fetishes that Simeon had given her. Many of the activities X had
engaged in, but a few select others she had never tried, ones deemed
unacceptable because they pushed the boundaries of
safe sane consensual
, the general rule of
bdsm
.
This practice of edge play had never interested her but lately she had thought
deeply of the psychological motivations behind them. The activities of the
people who ventured into edge play all involved an element of risk. There were
practitioners who played with guns, simulated rape, drew blood, or choked their
partner until consciousness was lost.
 
She knew that Compton wanted his
Domme
to draw
blood, wanted her to restrict his breath. It had all been on the list.

She wondered if maybe the man had a
death wish. Maybe everyone had a death wish. But what better way to remind a
person that they were alive than to glance death, to feel the surge of
adrenaline, to see one’s own blood and feel the raw panic of it?

Some of the men she had been with had
enjoyed delayed gratification. Others had liked humiliation. Every man was a
little different and that is what kept her in the game. She was like a man in
this way and she accepted it.

It was a puzzle to figure out what a
man really wanted sexually. An unsolvable formula, though she had gotten close
to the answer. It was simple enough to identify what got a man’s response and
from there it was all methods and techniques and more experimentation.

The best X had been able to come up
with was that men wanted to feel desire and women wanted to be desired. But of
course that was too easy a reduction. It didn’t apply everywhere. Too many
unknown variables with people in the S&M scene.

X had known men similar to Compton
before, successful men with demanding careers who wanted to escape the stresses
of their lives. They were looking to be transported, to achieve an alternate,
sacred state. Much of it had been about catharsis for them, about breaking free
from their egos. And that’s where the
Domme
came in.
She assumed the role of the higher power. She became the object of adoration
for men who demanded respect.

Even so, X understood that fetishes
were a hard thing to figure out. The shrinks hadn’t even succeeded. Things that
some people considered normal, others considered unhealthy. What was fetish on
the surface was all psychology underneath. Another thing Simeon didn’t
understand was that a true
Domme
wasn’t a whore, but
a psychologist. She found out what a man really wanted and then pushed him
farther than he thought he could go. That was where the training came in. A man
wants to be humiliated? Insult him. Easy enough. Want him to really feel
humiliation? Make him clean your toilet with his tongue and then tell him how
pathetic he is for doing such a thing.

The uncertainty around Compton was the
scope of his capacity for violence. She knew that he mixed sex and death. That
was clear enough because the man had a thing for edge play. But if he had
really murdered his last
Domme
, Compton had gone over
the edge. If he had done that, there was no redemption for him and he would
probably do it again.

The last time she had asked Simeon
about it he had been dismissive. The agent had tried to calm her, probably so
she wouldn’t run, X knew. X thought that the man knew the truth about Compton
but she herself didn’t know what to believe.

If Compton was a murderer, it changed
the whole formula around. It meant that he wasn’t really a masochist. It meant
that he was a sadist. She knew that it was possible that he was a true
sado
-masochist. X believed that the two components couldn’t
be separated anyway, that one didn’t exist without the other, but one
disposition was always more dominant. She sensed that her interactions with him
would be about figuring out which of the two Compton really was.

This much she did know—Compton was a
man of extremes. Nothing about him was ordinary. Were it not for the
possibility that he was a murderer, she would have appreciated the eccentricity
of it. Artists were the same way, always pushing toward the edge. Maybe that
was why a
Domme
who was an artist had interested him.
Maybe he respected that someone had the power to take him to the farthest
boundaries and the courage to do it. He wanted someone to take him to the edge,
someone to look over the precipice with him, a woman who could make the
experience feel like an art.

And on that Saturday, the private car
came again.

8.

The private car arrived again as
Simeon said it would, this time a white Bentley
Mulliner
.
The driver, more careful this time, had not allowed his gaze to linger, barely
looking at X at all. Still, she pulled her mink close to her, trying to conceal
what was underneath: chaps, thong and bra made out of black
pvc
,
a glassy material which clung to X’s every curve.

Steinberg again led her to the dungeon
and unlocked the heavy door. She entered. How was it that the room was already
spotless and in order?
Hired help, of course, employees who
had also signed confidentiality agreements, assuring that
Compton
’s perversions never became
public.

When she entered, X did not
immediately see Compton. He was in the back again sitting on his simple wooden
chair. As she made her way back, she saw him there, waiting. The man was still,
perfectly calm. No twiddling of thumbs, no thumping of the feet.
The thinker.

Along with the jock-strap covering
over his penis, he again wore wrist and ankle cuffs, but this time he also wore
a leather buckle harness. Its thick black leather went over his shoulders and
under his arms where it met in the middle above his sternum, the material
connected with a thick metal ring that held all the straps together.

When Compton saw X, like Pavlov’s dog
salivating at the bell, venous blood began engorging his penis, hardening his
formerly limp organ into an erection, small but firm under his leather
jock-strap.

Compton looked up at X, a smirk on his
face.

 
“Don’t look me in the eyes without
permission,” X commanded him.

She knew that he would watch her,
understood the inevitability that their eyes would meet from time to time.
Compton was the kind of man who liked to observe. But why not remind the man of
his place, that it was a privilege to even look at her?

After dropping her bag onto the floor,
X opened her coat and let it fall as well, revealing her shiny chaps, thong,
and bra, garments that surreally and distortedly reflected both the equipment
in the room and the man who sat magnetized watching her every move, a man who
could not help to stare at her body because he had been told not to look her in
the face.
  

Simeon’s words came into her mind
then,
If you aren’t going to fuck him at
least torture him with desire
. And then she remembered the other thing
Simeon had said about Compton.
He is a
complex man. Don’t underestimate him
.

X turned her back toward Compton. She
bent over to reach into her bag, fully aware that he would be watching her,
scoping out her ass, the curvature of her body, the sublime mysteries hidden by
thin fabric. She knew he would probably be getting turned on.

There was humiliation in this, degradation,
from teasing a man whom she did not like and did not trust. It occurred to her
that whores must feel the same way until they disconnected themselves
effectively. Some people could do it for the money and others could not. Even
the obscene amount of money that Simeon had given her was not enough to buy
this part of her, to purchase her sexuality, her free will. If her brother
weren’t in danger, X would have run. She resented Compton and Simeon for the
shame she felt.

Regardless of what she felt, she was
right,
Compton
was aroused from watching her. As she was bent over, the man thought he noticed
a small tattoo on the woman’s back but was unable to make out what the image
was. He felt a sudden urge to study her body, to find its’ every marking.

X picked out a short red rubber
flogger, the pom-pom of the dominatrix, and a pair of clover nipple clamps that
connected to one another with a slim silver chain. X went and stood in front of
Compton, allowing the tips of her flogger to touch his belly and the top of his
leather jock strap.