Edge Play X (33 page)

“Whatever I wanted,” she laughed.

“Tell me,” he said, the man smiling as
he opened up her legs and put his head between them, licking her.

“I like to taste you in the morning.”

X closed her eyes and moaned softly
from the pleasure of his tongue and fingers.

When she did not answer, he said,
“You’re going to tell me, or else.”

This made X laugh.

“Or else what?”

“Or else you’re
gonna
get fucked.”

“And if I do tell you?”

“You’re
gonna
get fucked.”

This made them both laugh and then the
man went back to what he had been doing. X stretched her arms above her head, barely
able to concentrate anymore.

“It wasn’t all sexual. Sometimes I’d
make them clean my apartment. I made one man go out and beg on the street
because he was always insulting the homeless.”

Michael concentrated on using his
fingers.

“What would he say to them?”

“He’d tell them to go get a job, tell
them to stop sucking off society.”

Michael pushed himself up to his
knees, lifted up her right foot, and began to suck on her toes.

“Did you make them do this?”

“Yes,” she said, a nascent ache
present in her voice.

“What was Terry Compton into? What did
the rich guy like?”

X pulled her foot away from him and
sat up on her arms. X didn’t like where this conversation was going, didn’t
want to answer his questions about Terry Compton, didn’t want to think about the
man when she and Michael were in bed together.

“It’s private,” she said. “They even
made me sign a confidentiality agreement.”

Michael stroked his hand over her
thigh until his fingers had found her warm wetness again. He continued to
caress her and then laid his body next to hers. He was prodding X, his strong
body next to her own, weakening her with the kisses he planted on her neck, her
shoulder and cheek, the way his hardness pressed against her hip.

“Did he like being violated?”

“Not him,” X said.

“But other men.”

“Other men, yes.”

“You’re a dirty little girl,” he said
as he slid on top of her and between her legs.

She wanted him. It was more than
sexual. X wanted to give herself to him, yield beyond the flesh. She thought
about the connection between them, the fine crystal filaments of it. The wrong
breath could break it forever. She reflected on her feelings. She liked the
infinitesimal theorizing, the subliminal flow percolating to the surface. It
was something about his gravity, a negligible force but enough, something as
wide as the space between his teeth, the gap in his smile, which pulled her to
him.

Michael pushed himself into her and X
moaned in delight at the pleasure, imperious and rapt, the feeling of having
him deep within her.

“Maybe I’ll do it slow,” he said, “or
fast.” He changed the tempo of his movements in synch with his words. “We have
all day.”

X surrendered herself to the
subharmonic
frequency of his lovemaking. He stroked her
face, leaned down to kiss her. He grasped each of her wrists, pressed them onto
the bed next to her head.

“Having a woman do what I want, I like
that idea.”

X looked up at him, made a
split-second imprint of the landscape of his face. He kissed her again. His
movements accelerated, deepened. She wanted him to bring her to orgasm, make
her graze the face of God for an instant.

“Then make me do what you want,” she
said, and the man did as she commanded.

She felt the pain and the pleasure of
it and then a particular transubstantiation until sleep arrived.

6.

X dreamed.

In it, she was in
Compton
’s dungeon, but instead of
Compton
being the one bound and leashed, it was her.
Naked, her hands bound in front of her, X sat on the floor by the bondage
cross. She reached up and tugged at the collar around her neck, one so tight as
to make breathing a little difficult, but it had no give. Her mouth was gagged
with a thick bit, horse-like. Her teeth clenched down on it momentarily,
imprinting themselves into the latex that wrapped around the metal. She tried
to find the clasps for the gag and the collar but was unable to locate either.

She stood but was unable to go more
than a few steps because her collar was attached to a thick chain that went to
the wall. With all her might, she yanked on the chain, feeling pain in her
hands and shoulders as she did this, and then she saw that the chain had been
welded directly to a metal plate on the wall. She pulled at it until her
frustration caused tears to well up in her eyes. Finally, X let go of the
chain, exhausted.

Her eyes wandered to the back of the
room and she saw
Compton
there. The man was sitting on his simple wooden
chair, fully dressed, watching her.

“Help me!” she said to him, but the
words barely came out because of the bit in her mouth. A slim line of drool ran
over her chin, slick and humiliating.
Compton
didn’t reply or even acknowledge her, just
continued to stare. After a few more moments, X started pulling at her chain
again.

“I don’t belong here!” she screamed to
Compton
, the words just a mash of sounds. “I’m the
Domme
, not the sub!”

X looked past
Compton
. Behind him was the same pegboard wall of bondage
gear. But instead of the words that had been stenciled on the wall before,
there was another phrase, this one also in Latin, written in long, flowing
letters.

Veritas
Vos
Liberabit
, it
read. X looked again, and this time the words were in English:
The Truth Will Set You Free
.

She noticed music playing softly in
the background,
Sexy Sadie
by the
Beatles.

“Your song is playing,”
Compton
said.

X scanned the room again. Now, instead
of
Compton
in the chair, her mother sat. The woman was young
and beautiful, the way she had looked in those years when she had modeled. The
woman wore a long taffeta gown, its material spilling onto the floor. She had
the eyes of a Renaissance painting, the luminosity.

X cried out to her to help.

“Pretty girls are a dime a dozen,” her
mother replied.

Then X remembered how her mother had
said that to her anytime X had expressed amazement when she had looked at the
photos of her mother in her prime.

What her mother had left out was a
simple two word command that she had always added in after she had said
pretty girls are a dime a dozen
. Why had
she left it out?

X reached up to her collar again and
tried to get her fingers between it and her neck but was unable. She was crying
now, deeply sobbing, her lips trembling as tears streamed down her cheeks.

“Help me, Mama,” she whimpered. “Help
me get free.”

Her mother made eye contact with her.

“Those collars slip right off, honey,”
she replied.

This time when X yanked at the collar
it stretched out easily, pliant like a rubber band, and X pulled it over her
head.

Free now, X rushed over to her mother,
but before she could get there, the woman was disappearing like an apparition.

“Be smart,” the woman said before she
dissolved.

7.

It was a vintage motorcycle, heavy-
engined
, a 1979 Harley
Sportster
,
white.

When he returned that afternoon with
the tuned-up bike, Michael asked X if she would like to go for a ride, and she
eagerly accepted.

Michael showed her around the area,
taking her to The Palace of the Governors (where he bought her silver bracelets
and earrings from the Native American vendors), the Plaza, and the churches and
museums. He was a good man. He didn’t want to control her and he didn’t want
her to control him.

They stopped at a restaurant, a little
Mexican place where Michael’s parents used to take him. They ate chips and
salsa as they talked about how the house was coming along, discussed other
repairs that would need done before it could go on the market.

X scanned the restaurant, making sure
that Simeon wasn’t in some corner booth watching her, fearful that she might
see the man’s face among the patrons, but she did not. Their meals arrived, an
enchilada special. They ate a few minutes in silence.

“I want you to know,” Michael said,
“that you are welcome to stay at the house as long as you want. Even once it’s
for sale. In this economy, I’ll be lucky if it sells at all.”

X looked up from her meal, smiled at
him. X noticed the other patrons again, the couples immersed in conversation,
the seniors in their quiet staid. What were they discussing? Important matters,
sideline trivia. She could feel the slipstream that their conversations left.

“I’ll pay you rent, take care of the
utilities, finish up the painting.”

“I’m not concerned about that. It will
be good for the house to have someone there, put some life back into it.” He
continued. “I know you have a lot on your mind. I have a lot on my mind, too.
But I want you to start thinking about if you are going to come back to
California
at all.”

Michael noticed the pained look on X’s
face, the subtle tightening of the muscles of her cheeks and brow.

“I haven’t decided what I’m going to
do yet,” X said.

“I want you to come back eventually,”
he said, “for my own selfish reasons. I’ll help you in whatever way I can. But
you’re the one who really knows Compton, the one who understands what he’s
capable of.”

“I don’t, really.”

“And that’s the danger. I want you to
think about whether it’s safe for you to return, and if it isn’t, don’t come
back. The world is a big place. Whatever threats he made to you…a man can do
terrible things to a woman when he thinks he owns her, when he thinks he’s
entitled to her.”

X and Michael looked at each other,
oblivious to the milieu of the restaurant. She knew then that he understood
more than he usually let on. She quietly admired that about him.

X and Michael finished their meals and
got back onto the bike.

They traveled the mountain roads near
town. The temperature was just warm enough to ride, had a cold bite to it, but
Michael had put on his leather jacket and gloves, and X had dressed in layers,
having covered a thick sweater with a denim jacket. She held onto him tightly
as they sped along.

The
Sportster
,
old as it was, hugged the curves. Their speed turned the trees and brush at the
side of the road into a blur. Even when Michael seemed to push the bike to the
limit of its controllable speed, X felt no fear, only a wild exhilaration. She
knew that just one error could be the end of them both, but she reminded
herself that every activity was a calculated risk. And being with Michael,
whatever they were doing, made her feel safe, gave her a sense of security.

So when Michael slowed the bike down
and turned onto a dirt road, X didn’t question him, just held on to him tighter
as they went over the bumps. He stopped the bike near an outcropping of rocks,
turned off the engine, and dismounted. X followed, getting off of the bike and
removing her helmet, giving it to Michael who put it on the ground next to his
own.

He kissed her long and deep, ran his
fingers through the hair at the nape of her neck, giving it a thrilling yank
that made X’s loins, still throbbing from the vibration of the engine, pulse
with pleasure. She liked his rugged nature, the taste of his lips, the
abandoned kisses that he gave her, the smoldering residue of his tongue in her
mouth. She wondered if maybe she could love a man like him, a man who would
never allow her to dominate him. Maybe it was the only kind of man she could
ever really love.

And when he turned her around and bent
her over so that her elbows were on the low seat of the motorcycle, she allowed
him to do this, allowed him to unbutton her jeans and push them down to her ankles.
His fingers found their way into her, the digits cool inside her warmth. And
when he opened his own pants and entered her, X surrendered to the feel of him
inside her, to the winnowing current of his movement, to the sensation of his
flesh so hot against her cold skin.

He pulled at her ponytail, bent her
neck back until she could see only the horizon where the ridge met the
darkening sky. A thought arrived, a needled summation, simple, that the success
of the human race was because people were generally more interested in fucking
than killing.