Edge Play X

by Wilson, M. Jarrett

  And there on the ottoman, a slim young woman kneeled, her pink nipples pointing toward the snowy matelasse upholstery. X and Compton watched as she was entered from the back and front, her ponytail bouncing with each man’s thrust, her body lean and flawless in the dim light.

  X and Compton stood still for a few minutes as the middle-aged man connected to the woman’s rear finished with her, pounding his hips onto her rosy ass and throwing his head back as his orgasm arrived. When he finished, almost instantly, another man was ready to enter her, picking out a condom from a bowl on the floor and sliding it on before starting his turn. And a few minutes later when the man being fellated shot his load down her throat, it was not a man, but a woman, who took his place, the brunette opening her legs wide and leaning back in delight as she was licked and fingered.

  X thought about the woman on the ottoman. How many men would she be with tonight as the guests ran a train on her? How many partners in the course of her life? She was a pretty woman, porcelain-skinned. What did she think about when she was in the supermarket? Would she feel normal when she made herself breakfast the next morning?

  X appreciated that the woman was wearing a mask. The anonymity allowed X to view the woman on the ottoman as an idea, a merciful depersonalization, a ritual vessel. Once, X had been with two men in the span of 24 hours. She and a lover had broken up in the morning and that night she had called an old boyfriend and had ended up in his bed. The experience had made her feel shame mixed with a particular and peculiar sweetness. She hadn’t even showered in between.

  The woman on the ottoman seemed to have no self-consciousness, no shame. Surely she was aware that she was being watched. The voyeurism improved the experience for everyone. A thousand paths to enlightenment, and this was one of them, the ecstatic rapture of the body. There must be a certain freedom in that, X imagined, a certain euphoria and enlightenment in letting go of expectations, the ideals that society held of what a good woman should be, the superimposed person that others saw when they looked at you walking down the street.

  Compton and X shifted their attention. In a corner, a woman in a large powdered wig and billowing gown was kneeling before two men seated closely together, her attention alternating between them every few minutes, her head bouncing above each man’s crouch when their turn had arrived.

  Compton said to X, “They’re getting off with her head,” and X let out a loud laugh.

  X looked at Compton and assumed that his penis was hard and pressing against the chastity belt that he wore under his pants. She reached toward him and flicked his nipple rings. She reached up and tugged at his collar. She was aroused.

  It wasn’t an S and M party; X could see that much. It was an orgy and as simple as that. People either fucked or paused to talk, dance, smoke, eat or drink between fucks. Creamy white asses, (and even a few mocha ones) were spread open, revealing pink moist flesh, smooth and glistening like flowers covered with dew.

  S and M. X thought about the letters of the abbreviation, the curves of the S and the sharp lines and angles of the M. She liked the pronunciation of the letters, the way the esss and the emmm sounds rolled out of her mouth, the shapes that it made in their creation, her tongue nearly touching the area behind her teeth to make the ‘s’ sound, it escaping like the air out of the mouth of a balloon, and then, her lips pursing together to sound the ‘m,’ puckering as if to give a kiss. She liked the origins of the terms, even, the history of sadism and masochism linking them to the French Marquis de Sade and then to the Austrian Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. X appreciated that a whole subset of sexual gratification, what had once been considered a perversion and aberration, had been named for writers, a sad sorry bunch most of them were, prone to melancholy and delusions of grandeur, but artists nonetheless, artists of the arrangement of words.

  They continued through the room and entered the grand salon. A bar had been set up in the corner and people waited patiently in line to be served. X surveyed the room. It was similar to the one that they had just left but larger. The wood floor, bearing the patina of age, was covered in the center with a thick woven carpet. The walls, paneled at the bottom and wallpapered at the top, were connected to the high ceiling with an ornate molding. The tall windows in the room were covered with thick drapes.

  Men and women cast glances or slick smiles towards X and Compton. Determinations were made from the length of returned glances or whether or not a smile was echoed. Seduction was a delicate thing. It could be as easy as a come-hither smile or as forthright as a hand wrapped around an exposed penis. Invitations were sent and either accepted or denied.

  The partygoers wore a wide array of costume. Some women wore gowns while others wore barely anything at all. Likewise, some of the men were fully dressed in tuxedos while others simply wore codpieces or capes. It surprised X for a moment that people were not wearing garb typical to raves, attire that was wild and almost clownish, and then she reminded herself that this was supposed to be a ball.

  One thing everyone had in common was that each person wore a mask, though they varied in their size, shape, and theme. There were Venetian masks of every type: long-nosed ones, full face masculine and feminine ones, jesters, and simple eye masks which bore feathers that extended above in large, floating auroras. Other masks were more ominous: devils, demons, pigs, bulldogs, and leather executioner hoods. One woman wore a simple black nylon mask which bore holes only for her eyes and mouth.

  High-heeled women wearing the same kind of black thongs and rhinestone masks as the woman in the entranceway floated through the crowd carrying trays covered with drinks or hors d’oeuvres. Most of the women X saw were more than just attractive; even with their masks, they could be classified as beautiful—it shone through their disguise.

  X began to wonder about the identities of those hidden by the masks. The women outnumbered the men. For all X knew, some of the women were prostitutes or porn stars, and some if not all of the men, like Compton, were the elite upper crust of society, famous and recognizable behind their ornate disguises.

  Compton let her know that he needed to use the restroom, and X felt that she better do so as well. The drinks they had enjoyed in the limo were starting to catch up with them.

  X asked Compton if he knew where the bathrooms were, and he replied that he did, that they were upstairs. Compton followed X back through the salon, the leash which she held draped gently over her shoulder, and once they had reached the staircase, they made their way up its wide curving steps, each of them holding onto the wrought iron banister which ran up its side.

  Once at the upstairs hallway, X and Compton continued past several bedrooms. Sounds of lovemaking escaped into the hallway, the moans, gasps, and cries mixing with the rattle of bedsprings or the banging of headboards hitting the wall.

  They approached a bedroom, its door still ajar. Inside, at least a dozen people squirmed and writhed over one another, some on the bed and others on the floor. A woman at the center of the plush rug was being penetrated in every orifice, the warm fuck of other men still on her face, breasts, belly and back.

  The door had been left open as if to say, go ahead, come on in, you’re invited. X considered telling Compton to go into the room and stand in the corner, to stand there and watch the scene, observe the lesbians licking one another, observe the men ejaculating their loads. Just watch. He would be unable to participate because of his chastity belt, unable to join in because he had been told by him dominatrix to do nothing other than observe.

  Instead, she kept him with her and they continued a little farther until they reached the bathroom door. An intoxicated man wearing a cape stood in front of them. A large sign on the door said in French, English, and Italian, No Sex in the Bathrooms.

  X allowed Compton to go first. The chastity belt that he wore had holes at the end that would allow urine to pass through, so there was no need to unlock the contraption. X took her turn and then told Compton that she wanted to see the basement where the DJ and danc
e floor was.

  Down the steps they went, past the entranceway and then through the dining room (where X picked a couple of pieces of cheese off a tray and popped them into her mouth) then down another set of stairs that led to the basement. The room was dark and smoky and pulsing, the bass of the music throbbing through them as they entered the large room, the sound pushing each beat into their marrow as they moved closer to the giant speakers that throbbed as multi-colored lights pulsed, seemingly in synch to the music. The DJ spun his tunes, his arms fast and wide as a puppeteer.

  There were signs on each wall that said No Sex on the Dance Floor, and as X scanned the mass of gyrating bodies, it seemed that the revelers were obeying that rule while pushing it to the boundary of its definition. A few large bouncers wearing partial executioner’s hoods stood near the periphery of the large room, one big man leaning against the stone wall, the others with their thick arms crossed in front of them, the men on the lookout for fights or for people not abiding by the rules.

  At either side of the DJ were cages which contained topless dancing women wearing those same rhinestone masks. X’s whole body hummed, vibrating with the frenzy, the motion of the dancers, the penetrating shafts of light, the primal pulse of the digitized beats.

  X looked at the crowd, hypnotized. The people blended into one another, the mass of them coagulating and congealing, dissolving, evaporating, and then re-crystallizing in a phantasmagoria. The dance was exorcising demons and inviting deities. There was a wild, feral energy in the air, an atmosphere of intoxicated abandon. It was infectious and permeating. The mass of the group was greater than each separate individual; together, their density increased.

  A dancer came over to them and blew some glitter onto X’s body, the golden powder flying off the woman’s palm and onto X’s face, chest, belly, shoulders and dress, specks of glitter which caught the strobing light and reflected it in a thousand stars, a cosmos, a universe, making it appear not so much that she had been touched by Midas, but grazed.

  Compton was with her, still attached to his leash. A feeling was beginning to come over her, something foreign and in addition to the sensation that follows the consumption of alcohol. It was more peaceful, loving almost. Warm.

  “Come over here with me,” she said, although she didn’t need to command him so, he being on a leash and willing to follow her wherever. But he obeyed and went over with her to the wall. It seemed to him that she was seeking out its shadows. Compton wondered what she would do. He waited eagerly in anticipation of her next action.

  X looked at Compton and he looked at her. The whites of her eyes, usually so clear, had reddened and her pupils had dilated.

  She thought of Compton and his silly origami. As X looked at the man now, she felt that he, like the paper, might be creased and bent in whatever way she wished, into whatever she wished. Likewise, she felt as if something within her was unfolding, opening like a flower does in the morning after the sun has warmed it. Each part of her being was a room that she could enter and explore without fear. She wasn’t afraid of Compton, hadn’t been for some time now. She didn’t love him either, or maybe she did. What was love anyway but a bunch of chemicals streaming through the brain? Whatever it was that she felt for him, they were connected by more than the leash.

  “I’ve been drugged,” X said.

  Compton knew that the piece of candy that she had eaten contained a drug, and he had thought for a moment (just a moment) as he had watched her take the candy from the tray that perhaps he should inform her of the nature of the confection. It was the same tray every year, the same marking on the hands of those who had ingested the drug. Instead, he had allowed her to eat the candy, knowing fully that she was quite likely unaware that it was more than just a simple piece of chocolate.

  “It was the chocolate on the tray,” he said. “It’s Ecstasy. I thought you knew.”

  Ecstasy. She had never tried the drug before.

  It wasn’t that X was unfamiliar with drugs. She had tried her fair share of them, but had left behind everything except marijuana shortly after leaving college. Even that, she used intermittently at most. The drug that now affected her neurotransmitters was something that she had not previously tried simply because her cohort of friends had been just enough older than the age group with whom the substance became wildly popular that she had been excluded from its usage. The popularity of drugs came in and out of fashion; only addicts chased every popular substance.

  X leaned into Compton and whispered in his ear.

  “You are a terrible liar.”

  Compton did not try to defend himself, he only reached his hand up and caressed X’s bare ribcage, moving his touch down to the indent of her waist. She, too, wrapped her arm around Compton’s torso and pressed her body into his. She wanted to touch him and have him touch her.

  Against her lower belly, she could feel the hard plastic of the chastity belt that Compton wore. His penis, erect, filled the sheath entirely. Most other men would have been painfully constrained and their erection would have retreated from the discomfort. Compton, however, enjoyed the pressure. He thrived on pressure.

  X put her hand up to the stubble on his jaw and ran her fingertips over it.

  “I know who you are under your mask,” she said, “and I forgive you.”

  What was she forgiving him for, Compton wasn’t sure, perhaps the fact that he had allowed her to take the drug without warning her, or was she forgiving him for the person he was? He didn’t know. Maybe both.

  Compton, his mouth close to X’s ear, began to lick her earlobe. He pulled the flesh of it gently between his teeth, the sound of his deepening respiration moving through X’s ear canal and journeying down her spine before spreading out to her arms and making her fingers tingle.

  X pulled away from him slightly and looked into his eyes, their orbs framed by his mask. Maybe he was everything she wanted wrapped up in one body. He was successful, intelligent, handsome, submissive. Maybe she was meant to love someone whom she did not want to love. Maybe there was a lesson in it.

  She reflected on her feelings: it was the drug. No wonder people got addicted to drugs. They got addicted to the feeling the drug induced.

  X began to feel a connection to each person in the room, to the mass of them. Lights bounced off them and through them. They were all in this together, sharing this moment, breathing the same air. She moved towards them, the music overtaking her, leaving Compton there at the wall, watching. X danced, her body rubbing against man and woman, a storm of euphoria overtaking her.

  15.

  Thirst. By the time it arrives, the cells are already depleted. Lips crack like the desert, eyes redden, the mouth turns to cotton, and the body screams to the brain, get your ass in motion, what do you think makes up most of the weight in that sack of shit you’re toting around anyway.

  The movement of the crowd had gradually shifted her into its center, and when X looked for Compton at the wall where she had left him, he was nowhere to be found.

  X left the room, making her way up the narrow stairs and into the grand salon where the bar was. As she waited at it, watching the bare-chested man mixing drinks behind it, she remembered the bartender she had fucked back in California. Michael. That was his name, Michael, like the archangel. She wanted to see him again. He was an ocean away.

  X got a drink, some pineapple juice with a shot of vodka, then went into the dining room where trays of food had been set out, much of it gone by now. She picked up a mini-cucumber sandwich and took a bite. The dancing had made her stomach rumble.

  And then, from the periphery of her vision, she saw Simeon across the entranceway in the grand salon. X was unsure if she would be able to recognize him at this masquerade or if he would even show up at all. But there he was. She could tell that it was him by his height, his hair, but especially from the way he stood, all pompous and self-absorbed.

  X didn’t want him to recognize her, didn’t want to interact with him while the drug w
as still in her system. Something deep within her wanted to continue to despise him, and she didn’t want its crust to be broken, the protective layer of her abhorrence, so she fled.

  X slipped out of the dining room and went up the curved stairway, running almost, her feet sore by now from all the dancing. Fucking heels, good for nothing shoes. Behind her, Simeon followed, skipping every other step and catching up to her at the top.

  “Stop! Wait a minute.”

  X continued past a few bedrooms and entered a recreation room. People were playing pool, drinking, and smoking cigars in it. There was a bathroom at the edge of it, and she entered it, but before she could close the door, Simeon had joined her inside.

  “Leave me alone,” she said. “I don’t want to talk to you right now.”

  He was wearing a pair of black trousers and a tailored button down black shirt along with a simple black mask over his face.

  “On your way to a funeral?” she asked.

  Simeon picked up her hand and looked at it the black ‘X’ written on the back of it.

  He said, “You’re on ecstasy.”

  “Yes.”

  “Is Compton?”

  “No. I didn’t know the candy was drugged.”

  “Compton did. He didn’t tell you what it was?”

  X shook her head no and Simeon let out a disgusted sound.

  Simeon watched as X sat down onto the toilet and began to urinate. She didn’t care if he saw. The drug took away her embarrassment. And besides, he had already seen her take a piss once before.

  X asked him, “Why are you here? You don’t belong here.” She wiped herself off and stood up.

  “I am noting who the attendees are,” he answered. “It’s a virtual cabal. If I told you who some of the people are behind those masks, you probably wouldn’t believe me.”

  X peered at herself in the mirror over the long sink, then turned on the water and took a drink from the faucet. When she stood up again, she tapped at the corners of her mouth dry with her fingertips. She wanted to take her mask off but knew she could not. Simeon, behind her, watched her reflection as well, and X realized that when she had bent over that he had gotten a good look at the thong under her dress.