“Christine…” My name was an adoration on his tongue and made me shiver and edge closer to his body. My God, this was mine. I wouldn’t ever lose it again…
My hand cupped the almost perfect half of his face; my lips on one side, my palm to the other, and it was practically an embrace for something that he called a horror. Let me claim it and make it mine, and his opinion couldn’t matter if I stamped the impression of my lips upon its distortions.
Ever gentle, I moved my mouth against his abused bones from the corner of his closed eyelid along a defined cheek’s contour and lingering against his temple. Kiss after kiss, one to the next in a seamless legato melody that bore no audible music, and as I followed my devised path again, I kept my lips soft and pliant and tasted him with the timid tip of my tongue, flicking licks across that un-encased bone. I tasted his bone because there was no flesh there to stop me, and it was such a blatant intimacy that his hands finally broke free of fists and clasped my waist as if he needed stability to bear it. His frame shook with tremors, and as tears escaped his closed eyes and spilled in my path, I caught them between my lips and let their salt coat my taste buds.
My eyes were open, studying that face and its telling reactions, and with the tinge of a smile I could not deny, I kissed a feather-light trail to the bloated arch of his upper lip. A kiss at his will had harsh tendencies; I was about to write him a new definition. With my heart in every gesture, I grazed my mouth to his and caught his overcome cry in my next breath.
He never took control, never too fierce; he let me kiss him, and I moved my mouth with utter delicacy against his misshapen lips. Dear God…I’d never known a kiss like the one I was creating for Erik. Kisses I’d granted Raoul were chaste and shallow, superficial, never delving within. This one felt embedded in my soul and stirred embers deep within like the ash in an eternal fireplace, every motion bringing a new flame to burst into existence and scorch my inner being.
I never gave too much pressure, never too much ferocity; I savored gentleness and spoke every devoted adoration in the movement of my mouth. He allowed, and when he shyly imitated my motion, I felt a jolt to my core and gave an unconscious cry that vibrated joined lips.
Oh God, to know he could do that much in a single, tender contact both terrified and excited me. Why had I wanted a heart behind cold walls when feeling this was so deliciously overwhelming?
I ached, and my only coherent thought was that I wanted more. Gentle still, I let my tongue part his lips, grazing the swollen shape of his upper one on a path within the cavern of his mouth. I shuddered from head to toe, and gentle faltered to hungry as I tasted him and felt the reverberation of his moan. His hands were tight on my waist, fingertips curled and sunken into my hipbones. Perhaps they’d make marks even through layers. …I hoped they’d mark.
My tongue teased the inner contours of his mouth, tingling with his flavor and craving more. I felt like I couldn’t plunge deep enough, taste enough, kiss enough to truly display the longing engraved on my bones. I wanted this, and I prayed to God that Erik believed it.
As I drew back to glide my tongue along the bloated swell of his upper lip, he shuddered violently and recoiled beyond my caress.
“Oh, Christine… What you’re doing to me! …You cannot realize!” The hands at my hips molded me to his hardened length and to feel it throb and pulse its desire made my knees tremble. “This must be a transgression, and sin is rewriting itself upon my soul! But you kiss me, and I ache. Such a perversion, isn’t it? To grow so aroused because I know you kiss something revolting and disgusting. It is practically taboo. The beautiful, innocent girl laying her perfect lips upon a monster’s. It’s wicked and vile, a deviance that will send me to hell all over again, and I don’t care! I will burn alive without regret, but…I am terrified to corrupt you with me. It’s less damning to desire a perfect man than a freak of nature.”
His self-abhorrence was so profound, like a bottomless schism in his center, and I was determined to be the reason it found a base and fill it with my love instead.
“If it is a sin, then let me burn alive with you,” I pleaded and ran rampant caresses along his scarred face, unable to cease touching him. “I’d choose condemnation without regret, but what sin can truly exist if I love you?”
“Love…” He murmured the word again in the minor gap between our mouths, and savoring its syllable in his voice, I brushed a kiss to his deformed lips and set my forehead to his, breathing his breaths, so close that I brushed my nose to the place his should have been. This was mine.
“But what will that mean?” he demanded even as he mimicked my gentle nuzzle and rubbed the empty gap from which he breathed against me. He might have considered it another perverse act, but I smiled and shivered as I edged closer to him. “You have a fiancé by your own vow. You speak of love, but does that mean I am the choice of your heart? And will you break his heart to be mine?”
“I’m already yours,” I insisted. “I’ve always been yours. Telling Raoul will be unpleasant, but it must be done.” Cringing as my mind rushed ahead and envisioned the scene and the Vicomte’s reaction, I clutched courage with both hands, desperate not to let it falter. “He won’t like it. He’ll want to protect me from the evil Opera Ghost. It will be inconceivable to him that I could want the Opera Ghost.”
“And…do you? Do you want me, Christine?” He asked it with fear thickly ingrained in every letter. “Even damaged and scarred? I can give you nothing better. I ache so much with a fire in my veins that has never been extinguished, but…I wear scars that tell a story of weakness and degradation. They mask my omnipotence and make me fallible; I went away to be deserving of you but came back worthless even to be a man.”
“That’s not what I see when I look at you,” I promised with lips so close to his that their surface felt charged with sensation. “I see an angel.”
“I’ve never been an angel.”
“Perhaps not in your perception, but in mine, you were an angel from the first moment we met in the cellar. Angels don’t need white wings and haloes to exist. Angels are those who put us upon our path, who guard and guide, a heavenly blessing. You’ve always been mine.”
He shook his head, but I caught hints of a wry grin as he posed, “Even as I lusted after you from the shadows? I doubt angels know such voracious, mortal desires…not to this extent.” His hands clasped my hips fitfully between them as he pressed against me. “Please tell me that you want this, Christine. I cannot burn alone any longer, not after feeling your lips upon mine, your tongue in my mouth…” A moan vibrated his chest and rippled through my torso with his. “Christine… Please tell me that you want more.”
I did, but I felt my cheeks flame red to admit it. “Yes, …of course.”
But he misinterpreted my hesitation and quickly assured, “The scars…are permanent, but I will make it so they never matter. Desire has no eyes. I will make you its victim and so overcome that you can consider nothing but an ecstasy so great that it steals senses. I will bury you in pleasure, make your body sing with its intensity.”
I felt so awkward and uncultured at that moment, closing my eyes to hide my abashment as I muttered, “How do you know such things?”
“I’ve been victim to pleasure, victim to pain, but I’ve never poured adoration upon another human being. Never a lover, never even a creature I’ve desired. Is that what you’re asking, Christine? You want to know that you are the only one, and how irrelevant! You have had a fiancé.” It was half an accusation when he spoke it this time, and I quickly shook my head. “No? But surely to know the nuances of a kiss, you also know the facets of desire. I was gone for so long…”
But I shook my head again, stumbling for words on a topic where I felt like an ignorant novice. “No, I couldn’t… I didn’t want… I wanted you. The long spans of empty minutes that I suffered without you, and all I had was one kiss to sustain my mind and convince me that you wanted me, too, when your absence spoke so differently. And Raoul…
I could never give him a heart already inscribed in another’s name. It was yours, and any kiss he gave could never touch it. Can you forgive the betrayal of chaste kisses if yours were the only lips I truly wanted upon mine?”
“My misshapen lips?” He added words I didn’t consider important and made them prevalent by leaning closer to brush said misshapen lips to mine. It made me shiver deliciously. “This is what you fantasized all the time I was away?”
“Yes, yes, God, yes,” I murmured and slid restless fingers along his nape and into the thin coating of hair lining his skull.
Perhaps any other girl would consider such details unsavory. My lover looked like a corpse with a corpse’s features and elements, but I loved him harder and fiercer because those were the things he couldn’t change and every other unsettling point he had changed for me. God works in mysterious ways… Well, He had created both of us and gave me the capacity to love and desire something anyone else might find repellent and obscene, and if I were wrong and sinning as Erik wanted to consider it, then God was unfair and I’d take this path anyway.
“I fantasized you,” he admitted in a sigh, and he smiled as he brushed my lips again. “Every minute in that prison, I envisioned your face and your body, you wanting me, loving me, aching and begging me to take you. Oh God, Christine, my imagination was so torrid and provocative; maybe because I held a fear it would be all I’d have, that I’d die in that cell before ever seeing you again.”
Hearing such a horrific fate that wasn’t ours made me grip tighter as I cupped his nape in my palm and dug fingertips into his skin, desperate to steer us both from dark thoughts. “But now you have me, and it is real and yours. …And what will you now do to me, ange?”
He shuddered and arched his desire tellingly against my body as his gaze burned fervently into mine and insisted for him. One hand clung to my hip as the other teased with fingers that outlined an ascent along my spine and slid temptingly into my hair, fisting within the blanket of my curls.
It amazed me that every part of my being seemed to intrigue and intoxicate him further. I’d never concluded any of my features as special or exemplary, but he seemed overcome in their simplicity. His hand was in my hair, and that morning I’d pinned it with little consideration beyond the nuisance of curls dangling about my face. I never proclaimed it extraordinary, but he tangled his fingers within its mass as if they never wanted to emerge again and curls were astonishing.
With a soft moan that hovered the air surrounding our embrace, he held my stare one more second before dragging eager lips to my jaw. Slow and as gentle as I’d been with him, he laid kisses across its line and onward, lingering on the place below my ear before continuing down the column of my throat.
His moan was drowned out by my cry. It disentangled from my vocal cords and slid past my lips without my consent as fire engulfed my yielding body. I’d never known such consummation, and all inspired with delicacy as his chosen tactic. He brushed that disfigured mouth along my neck and formed more kisses, and I whimpered and shifted anxiously against his hard body. Nothing existed but the need pulsing my veins, and I suddenly understood his assertion that desire had no eyes. I wanted him; scars were never even a consideration.
His mouth rested in the crease of my throat, and I felt the smile he indulged, obviously pleased he could produce such an unbridled reaction. I arched closer to that tempting kiss and shuddered as he parted lips and licked my skin in languid undulations. Had anything ever felt so frightening and craved at the same time? I cried out my desperation and curled taut fingers against his crown, moving with him when he arched his hips and teased me with his wanting.
“Christine,” he breathed my name, and the letters breezed the cool wetness his mouth had left upon my skin and created goose bumps that spanned my entire body.
“Don’t stop,” I gasped without voice and delighted in the light chuckle he gave me back.
“I have to, or I might take you right here. Dear Lord, how I burn, ange!”
Words were as arousing as kisses and that voice! It had only sounded in my dreams for so long, and now I hung upon its timbre and heard music even when it didn’t exist. His mouth stole one more taste of my neck before he reluctantly drew back to find my hazy eyes.
“Erik,” I muttered the only letters I wanted upon my tongue and kneaded my fingers restlessly in his hair, eager for him to succumb when I could barely speak what I wanted.
“I ache to make love to you,” he insisted, and the hand in my curls emerged and outlined the features of my face. “But I will not put sins upon your soul. Rid yourself of your fiancé first, Christine. You are mine; you have always been mine as much as I am yours. But I will not play games for you to dally in breaking his heart. End this engagement because I refuse to kiss you in shadows any longer and watch you run to him.”
It was fair. I knew he was right…even though my hips writhed against his hardness and purposely tempted him. He shuddered so violently that I shook in the aftermath and then glared at me in a mix of blame and contempt.
“Don’t,” he commanded, stern and inarguable, the almighty Opera Ghost giving orders that I deliberately ignored, pressing to him and grazing more kisses to his lips. “Christine,” he muttered in warning and yet gave in long enough to slide his tongue deep and claiming before he collected strength and shrank free of my hold. Piercing me with the passion in his stare, he revealed, “Now your taste will be inside my mouth all night, your flavor on my tongue, reminding me this scene on the stage was real and not another fantasy.”
I shivered with the power in his words and vowed, “I’m yours, Erik.”
“Make sure the Vicomte knows that. And I…” He cringed with a look of annoyance that creased vividly without the mask to stifle it. “I have a daroga to rid myself of. His nightly visits are about to become an aggravation, but hopefully, when he hears all is well and right, he will quit his guilt quest and return to his wife and child.”
“He’s worried about you. Don’t be angry with him for telling me about Persia,” I pleaded and reached out to caress his cheek and reinstate the good that had come from it.
“I can’t,” he decided in a sigh and captured my hand, holding it to his cheek as he turned to set a kiss to my palm. “But I intend to prolong informing him that his meddling worked. I can’t give him the satisfaction upfront, or he’ll claim he was right all along and I should have told you from the start.”
“You should have,” I agreed, and yet I could not stop smiling at the disfigured face of the man I loved.
“Yes, but he doesn’t need to know that.”
One last kiss shook my knees as he gave it, a subtle brush of lips to lips before he sought his mask, hastily reminding, “Get rid of your other suitor lest I grow jealous and do it for you.”
There was still a little voice in my mind that worried what his version of ‘getting rid’ of the Vicomte entailed. I couldn’t fully silence it, but I believed him when he’d said he’d atoned for me. I preferred to think that meant he’d keep morality on his side, but…well, only time would tell that.
“I love you,” he added, and I wondered if he suspected my doubts because it was abruptly given.
“And I love you,” I vowed back with a smile and watched him vanish into the shadows. The Opera Ghost had just kissed me and made me ache. The Opera Ghost wanted to make love to me… Those factual statements were the unsettling part because when Erik was there with me, I rarely considered his Opera Ghost reputation. Then he was just Erik, my love. I needed to make certain it was always that way.
Still moving upon wobbly knees, I rushed from the opera house with sunset tinting the sky in color. Faster, quicker with purpose to every step, and I never let myself think it through or second-guess as I wound up on the Vicomte’s doorstep.
I knocked frantically and spoke just as agitated to the maid to gain Raoul’s presence, determined not to let cowardice catch up.
The instant Raoul appeared in the doorway before he c
ould even speak a greeting or give a smile, I blurted out, “I’m in love with the Opera Ghost.”
Chapter Nineteen
Erik~
No matter what I’d told Christine, from the moment I left her presence, I was convinced every second had been a dream. Even as I gave scant details to the daroga, enough to insist I didn’t want him loitering about in my home anymore every night, I didn’t fully believe it. He even regarded me suspiciously, perhaps because of my lackluster telling of news that should have made me exuberant. But I was just so afraid to hope and then learn I was wrong and alone again.
But…dear God, I could still feel her pressed against me, her soft curves and warmth, her hair in my hand, her kisses branding my ugly mouth and making it worthy to be hers. I could taste her all over my lips and upon my tongue, and yet I doubted my senses and refused to put full credence. It felt gullible and ignorant when fantasies in the shah’s prison had been equally as lifelike, convincing me of her presence in my arms before I’d learn I was alone and disappointed again.
I loved her, and my God, if every detail of the previous night had been a masochistic fantasy, then my soul was now working against me, and suicide might be a viable option. How could one live as an enemy to oneself? That was insanity, and I was adamant that madness would not be my path. Death had more promise.
In a sudden need for control of a floundering existence, I chose to stay away as rehearsals started the next day. If it were a fantasy, it was better than reality, and if I saw the Vicomte in the back of the theatre, the fantasy would burst and show its fairytale makeup. Let me have the dream a little longer.
I caged myself in my office, trying to focus but faltering at every endeavor. All I could do was think of Christine: her body in my arms, her mouth atop mine, her little sounds of desire brandishing a path into my ear canals as sweetly devised as a melody line…
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