Authors: M. Jarrett Wilson
Edge Play X (4 page)
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.