Edge Play X

by Wilson, M. Jarrett

  “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.

  Simeon told the man who was with him to wait in the car and then he escorted X up to her apartment. She opened the heavy door and entered her dark apartment with him following behind. X turned on the lights and recoiled at their intensity.

  The apartment smelled of bergamot and rose, of teas, of perfumes and incense, and the subtle aromas were evident for an instant to X until she became used to them again, this scent of her home. Simeon, on the other hand, lingered longer in his awareness of the fragrances and connected them to X in the part of the mind that connects scent to memory. The synapses fired away, imprinting the smell to his image of her, to his perceptions of her, his idealizations, and then to the indecent desire he was developing.

  X’s apartment was clean and comfortable. Antiques shared space with contemporary pieces, a combination which often didn’t work, but X had managed to create a living area that was both modern and eclectic, artistic and cohesive. It felt good to be back home, and yet, X was unable to shake off her fatigue, unable to relax after what had just happened to her.

  He carried with him some papers and a large canvas zippered tote full of money for X, and he placed these things onto the granite counter that separated her kitchen and living room.

  “Also, here,” he said, handing her a sheet from the top of the pile, “is a list of what he likes. Our previous agent made it for us before she was killed. I’ll assume that you are familiar with most of these activities.”

  X picked up the sheet and scanned the list. Over a million dollars sat on her counter and she was reviewing a sheet specifying a man’s particular fetishes. She took the sheet with her to the couch and sank into it, exhausted.

  “What do you think?” Simeon asked.

  “I would say he is an advanced practitioner. He likes edge play.”

  “What do you think of that?”

  “Well,” X sighed, “when you play on the edge, eventually you either fall off or you get cut, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “I want you to review the list,” Simeon said. “A private car will come to get you on Saturday at 7 o’clock. Compton will be paying you $5,000 each session. And on Saturday,” the man continued, “be ready and dressed for the occasion.”

  “Agent Simeon, how are you getting me in?”

  “We will make arrangements with Terry Compton’s assistant, David Steinberg. He makes all of Compton’s ideas into reality, including his bondage fantasies. As far as Compton is concerned, you are just another dominatrix that Steinberg has found for him. He won’t ask any questions. Trust me.”

  X nodded her head in understanding as Simeon handed her a business card, telling her that she could contact him at that number any time.

  When Simeon left, X thought about Compton and his money. The man was a billionaire. How much is a billion dollars? A thousand million. It was almost too much for the mind to comprehend. And that man possessed many billions of dollars, Simeon had told her.

  Then, after shutting all the curtains, X removed 1,000 hundred dollar bills and laid them next to each other on top of her counter. The bills blanketed the smooth granite entirely, the currency wrapping the whole way over the other side of the kitchen by the refrigerator until she had to start papering the top of the stove and filling the sink with them. She had never seen so much money in her life, that $100,000 dollars on the counter, and on the floor in a zippered tote, even more remained.

  Lastly, X imagined that each of those $100 bills was actually a million dollars, that suddenly via splitting and doubling like bacterium that each $100 dollar bill had below it 9,999 additional $100 dollar bills, and with this image in her mind she scanned the mass of money on her counter. That would be a billion.

  Act II

  1.

  Saturday came as X knew it would, brought forth by the inescapable progression of time.

  When dusk came, X stood by her window and peered out at the buildings and ridgelines. The day was shrinking into itself, collapsing into night. Somewhere beyond the darkening rooftops, a man waited. Soon enough, a private car would arrive to take her to Terry Compton and she would hurt him even though she knew this was what he desired.

  There was a possibility that the man she was about to meet was a murderer. He might have taken another person’s life. The thought of it was clogged and ruinous,
sulfurous and the color of smoke.

  And then there was his wealth: unfathomable, vulgar, contemptible.

  It was a Catch 22—Compton deserved to be punished, but the treatment would give him pleasure, so it wasn’t really a punishment at all. The best way to really punish a man like that was to ignore him, X knew. But Simeon was expecting her to treat him a particular way, as was Terry Compton. All the other times she had dominated a man, she had done it to ultimately give pleasure to the man and to herself. But now, her motivations had shifted. As she waited, the woman could concentrate on only one thing—that she wanted to injure this man, Terry Compton, make him atone for his sins.

  I will hurt him even though it’s what he wants, X thought, even though…

  She had never dominated a stranger. Fear unraveled and then curled back into itself, serpentine and reptilian cold.

  What would Agent Simeon do, she wondered, if when the private car arrived that she was not dressed and ready, but instead was wallowing in her sheets, covers over her head as if she were a child hiding from Bogey men? Toss her brother back into prison with her following behind him on tax evasion? Or even worse, make her one of the “disappeared” as he had threatened?

  X had spent the last few days in contemplation, days that progressed into restless nights where she had tossed and turned in bed, mulling over her situation and unable to calm her mind. She had considered running, but where would she go? There were a million places and none at all. And there was her brother to think about.

  She knew that with all that money, it wouldn’t be too difficult to disappear for awhile, maybe an eternity, even. But it would take some planning. And she would need to wait at least until her brother was no longer on parole and was no longer being drug tested. Even then, she’d have to warn him somehow, tell him to lay low for awhile, keep his nose not just clean, but immaculate. How to do this without sounding like a paranoid nut, she wasn’t sure.

  Either way, at the moment, she didn’t have much of a choice except to do as she was told. The knowledge of this, that she had been forced into this situation, exposed a rage that the woman had before only abstractly even recognized the existence of. The feeling was rusty and festering and even worse, beginning to grow, rapid and malignant like a cancer. If she couldn’t get a hold of it, the woman knew, eventually it would overtake her completely, make her into the very thing she didn’t want to become, a true sadist.

  X looked down at her right bicep and noticed the fading, fingerprint sized bruises that Simeon had left on her. Each time she had looked at those bruises on her arms or at the two small dark circles on her temple that he had left when he had slapped her, X had thought about him. He had been right about that. And each time she had looked at the bruises and was reminded of her situation, reminded of how cruelly Simeon had treated her, her disdain for the agent shifted more and more into hate. The feeling neither plateaued nor paused, but only added onto itself more layers of contempt, expanding into itself like an avalanche. To men like him, X thought, there were not human beings, only animate containers of information or power, just pawns to play with.

  Agent Simeon had said that a private car would come for X and that it would arrive at 7 o’clock in the evening that Saturday. Simeon had told her to be dressed for the occasion as if she were going to a ball. When X had called him to ask if she should bring her own gear, he had responded that the subject has a fully equipped room but that it was her prerogative to take with her whatever she liked.

  That morning, X had readied her bag of gear and then chosen what she would wear for her first meeting with Terry Compton: a corset, shantung silk, one that accentuated her hourglass figure, claret red like the blood that had come from Simeon’s arm.

  X turned on the news and then promptly turned it off. It was the same old story replayed: floods, famines, wars, murders, corruption, suffering. She had a sense that suffering was not a random oddity of existence that made its appearance known here and there and then evaporated, but that instead it was the bedrock, the denominator and natural state of man that was occasionally visited and interjected by happiness. She remembered those times she had traveled with her mother through Asia, visiting Buddhist temples here and there. And what had the Buddha said? The whole world is suffering. Might as well replace the is with an equal sign, X had thought, another dismal mathematical expression.

  X dressed. The car was on its way.

  2.

  The car arrived. From her window, X watched as a dark blue Rolls Royce Phantom pulled to a slow stop in front of her apartment building. It idled with the silence of concrete.

  She opened her closet and selected a coat, a mahogany colored mink that had originally belonged to her mother, and she drew it close around her body. Fur—it was cruel and she knew this, and while she felt a decadent shame when she donned the garment, she had never been able to bring herself to get rid of it and had no intention of doing so. The animals were dead and they would stay dead. It was a coat, a beautiful one at that, a gift that her father had bought for her mother the year before he died, the year he had been made a partner in his firm.

  There were times when X would drape the coat on the floor or over her bed and lie naked on it, an acute guilt mixing with a primal pleasure. What did it matter? The only difference between the fur and the clothes in her closet or third-world made dishes in her cupboards was that the suffering in the fur was more obvious.

  X wrapped the skins around her, caressing their softness while she did so. It was the dichotomy of it that she appreciated, the way the suffering and softness mixed together, unable to be separated. The fur smelled of Chanel Number Five, and the scent carried with it the memory of her mother and a sense of a time that had past, a distant image of an era gone forever.

  Then, she picked up her bag of gear and went down to meet the car.

  The driver, a wrinkled pug of a man, opened the door for her, and as he did so, his gaze lingered. While X’s coat concealed the immodesty of what was beneath, what was visible were her boots, black patent leather ones that extended over her knees and ended just a few inches below the hem of the fur.

  “Take your eyes off of me,” X ordered the man, and he quickly cast his eyes away.

  Indifferently, she got in the car, put her bag beside her on the seat, and lit a cigarette.

  Perhaps the driver thought she was a prostitute, she knew, but she didn’t care what the man thought. Judging by her appearance, it wouldn’t be such a leap to make that assumption. X had pulled her hair into a high ponytail that sat nearly at the top of her scalp, and around the lower couple inches of the ponytail she had placed a silver cylinder which made her hair extend straight up and jut out in wild strands. Her eyes were rimmed with kohl liner, her lids brushed with vibrant red and purple. Her lips, highly glossed, were fire red with a strip of deep purple down the middle, a stripe that sat directly under her philtrum, that slide of flesh between the nose and lips.

  X rolled her window down a few inches to let out the smoke, thinking of the period that lay ahead. She had not planned what she would do to Mr. Terry Compton. Only one thing was certain—X wanted to hurt him, to take out her frustrations on him, to punish him for her situation and for his wealth. That was good enough.

  The driver pulled up to a large gate and entered a code into a bright keypad, and the gate, a weave of curving and curling wrought iron, cold and black, opened in a smooth symmetry and allowed the car to enter before shutting behind them in the same smooth sweep. The car, floating almost on the asphalt of the drive, made its way toward the building that was Terry Compton’s primary home.

  The building rose, hyper-real, overflowing and accomplished. It was patrician and classical. It spoke in stone, glass, and wrought iron, suggested villas and manors. Lights all around the periphery of the structure highlighted its three floors and two wings, illuminating the meticulously landscaped yard, the windows and friezes, and the columns that X identified as Corinthian at the mammoth front entrance.
<
br />   The driver pulled to the side of the house, turned off the engine, and opened the door, careful to not make any eye contact as X exited.

  A man was waiting for X at the side door. This was David Steinberg, the man with whom Simeon had, through whatever channels he used, arranged to get X in. From what Simeon had told X, Steinberg made all of Compton’s ideas into reality, whether business or pleasure. Simeon had told her that Steinberg and no one else in the house had any knowledge of the real reason she was there. As far as they were concerned, it was all about money. Everything was about money.

  Steinberg was well-dressed, prim, and polite. A dark leather folder was tucked under his arm. He was the kind of man who only ever said rubbish and never trash or garbage. The word that came to X’s mind when she looked at him was tailored, a meaning that extended beyond his impeccable clothing and bled over into his whole personality and demeanor. He was a man who had been tailored to do another man’s bidding, a man fitted to obtain another man’s needs and wants. X thought that this was pathetic.

  He gave her a gentle looking smile that X guessed was entirely fake. And she was right—David Steinberg had refined this smile over the past 17 years of working with Terry Compton. Now, with that smile, he could make even the most arrogant business associates and Botox-zombie gold-diggers feel like he might actually care about them. But his politeness made X even more uncomfortable. A man with fake smiles was dangerous and manipulative, a man who was hiding something.

  X didn’t return his smile. Why pretend? They both knew the reason she was there.

  Steinberg told X to follow him and he led her down a flight of highly polished marble steps and into a long hallway before finally stopping in front of a heavy Spanish-style wooden door. The man took out the folder from under his arm and removed a paper from it, placing it gently on top of the folder and handing it to X along with a pen.

  “I’m certain that you can understand that you will need to sign a confidentiality agreement.”