Edge Play X (40 page)

“Do you have anything to say, Terry?”
X asked.

Compton
considered.
“
Derevaun
seraun
.”

“What?”

“The end of pleasure is pain.”

X kneeled down and put the gun into
the attaché case before zipping it up.

Compton
. All this time he had played the role of the
masochist, the submissive,
the
bottom. It didn’t fit
him; X knew that now. Everything that had happened between them all had been
orchestrated by
Compton
for his own selfish gratification. The control
had rested with him and his pleasure was derived, in part, from the personal
shifts he had caused in both her and Simeon.
Compton
was not primarily a masochist; he was a sadist,
one beyond compare. Even Simeon, who wanted to play the dominant, was just
another marionette on
Compton
’s
strings.

X’s eyes met
Compton
’s. As she prepared to leave she was unable to
speak, knowing that no final monologue was due to the men before her, men she
knew intimately, men she had tasted, communed with. There was only the present
silence, the cusp of the past and future.

X was struck by the absurdity of what
had occurred. What did it all mean? It meant nothing; she would have to find
her own meaning in it. A gnosis would come. With or without her, the future
would unfold and refold in its own origami, with tragedy or insight, who could
tell.

The present. It did not reveal to X
that in the future, after
Compton
’s
death, when X was an old stooped woman, a matron, that in his will, he would
leave her that Van Gogh. At that moment, she did not imagine that later, after
a good deal of time had passed, that she would feel that
Compton
had taught her everything that she knew about
submission and domination. She would acknowledge him as a master.

But now.
Now.
 
She
went to
Compton
, leaned down, and kissed him gently on the lips.
Then, X picked up her bags and walked to the door of the dungeon, not pausing
to look back.

Compton and Simeon watched her go. And
this part, the abandonment, so bitter and sweet, was an occurrence that
Compton
knew would one day come although he had been
unsure exactly how it would occur.

As X opened the door and it swung shut
behind her as she deserted them, another meaning of her name came to Compton’s
mind, and its beauty was all encompassing, a meaning that he saw everyday when
he closed an application on his computer after clicking on the upper right hand
corner, a symbol that had been ignored because of its commonness, so trivial
and prosaic, a meaning which can be described in several ways: X—the
conclusion, the end, finis.

X

Thank you for
reading my book. I worked on it for almost three years, and appreciate that you
are making time for it in your life. Please consider tagging my book or leaving
a review, which will help it perform better in searches.