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He should not have been watching her. It was a mad, foolish thing to do, and moreover it was wrong, because he had not told her he intended to do it, but…
But Raoul had not slept easily since that night beneath the opera. He’d nearly died for god’s sake, could he really be expected to rest?
He had not slept easily for a great number of reasons. Nightmares plagued him, as did dreams which were a drenched, dark mix of fear and pleasure. His throat wrapped in rope, hands on his burning flesh, Christine crying out beside him, and golden eyes, watching, controlling it all.
Chrstine. He had not slept because of her. Because she was only rooms away, separated by propriety and his own attempts to be chivalrous, to not take advantage. She’d saved him in that nightmarish affair, so it wasn’t as though he’d earned her in any meaningful way, if any such thing was possible.
Still, she’d agreed to marry him, and in the light of day they did a grand job of pretending all was well. But night made them honest; Raoul was haunted, and Christine…
His wedding is tomorrow. He ought to sleep, or take his brother up on the offer for carousing before he gets married, not that he has much interest in revelry. Instead he crouches outside of Christine’s room, watching, waiting.
He watches her lights flicker and extinguish. He watches her pace in front of the window, just a shadow, a shadow in a floating white nightgown, until he sees her change, the luminous, moonlit fabric dropping away, replaced with something dark, wrapping her in shadow.
He watches her climb from the window, into a sturdy tree, and down to the gardens where she lands on soft feet.
She’s only a few yards from him, but he’s well hidden in the shadows, and she doesn’t seem to be paying attention, even in the dim light, he can see the way her eyes shine, see the determined set of her pretty jaw.
Is she leaving him? Does he blame her if she is?
Unable to answer these questions, he follows her. He knows it’s foolish, knows that he’s not likely to like whatever he learns, but not knowing would be worse. Living his life wondering what she’d chosen, and why, would be an agony he cannot bear.
So he follows her, and he is not surprised when they end up by the opera, and not surprised when she slips through the Rue Scribe gate.
He follows at a safe distance, glad that she hadn’t locked the gate behind her, and wondering if it had been locked when she arrived, or if this is something she had always known would happen, a plan they’d made on that stage, unspoken, sung between notes Erik had written.
In the passages, the hollow space echoes his footsteps; he must trail even further behind her. Still, the way is as clear in his memory as if he’d walked it a hundred times. Perhaps, in all those troubled dreams, he has.
Following her, he ends up at a different entrance than the one he’d chased her to on the night of the phantom’s opera, and it’s not exactly an entrance at all. It’s a window, likely hidden behind a mirror, into a bedroom.
Christine’s bedroom.
Bile rises in Raoul’s throat, and he almost turns away from the scene in front of him, but morbid, masochistic fascination pins him in place.
She has made her choice. Here is his proof. Tomorrow he will make up some lie about why they’d broken it off, something to protect her from the gossips who would spread some terrible approximation of what he’s witnessing now; that she’d run off the night before their wedding, into the bed of another man.
Though they aren’t yet in bed. They’re standing in front of it, in the dim, flickering light of a single candle, alternately kissing and staring at one another as if they cannot believe where they’ve found themselves.
“You should not be here,” the phantom says, his voice low and gentle, a caress that Raoul swears he can feel, even though it isn’t directed at him.
“I know,” she replies, and Raoul isn’t sure how to feel about the note of regret in her voice. Does she wish she had not come? Will she return?
Does he want her to?
“Your wedding?” The phantom asks.
A question to which Raoul also wants an answer. He waits, holding his breath.
“I… I had to try to see you.”
“You didn’t have to kiss me,” he replies, and though his voice is cold, Raoul can see the liquid misery in his eyes. He thinks she’s taunting him, and Raoul is offended on her behalf. She wouldn’t do such a painful thing.
If she is here, it’s because she wants to be. Because she wants him.
She kisses him again, though he doesn’t give into it. “I…we… it is not finished, between us.”
“And your vicomte? Is it finished between you two?”
She closes her eyes, and even now, even burning with betrayal, Raoul wants to go to her, to comfort her. His jealousy is cold as iron, but his love for her burns even hotter, melting it to weakness, if not out of existence.
“He… I cannot. He is too good. For me, for what I want–”
“And I am not good at all, am I?” The phantom grasps Christine’s waist, pulling her closer and fitting his ruined mouth over her perfect lips. The kiss is wild, unrestrained.
Raoul had never kissed her like that. Hadn’t dared to all the many times he’d wanted to.
Jealousy flares again, but now it’s twisted with something else, something dark but not at all unpleasant, like the warmth of fortified wine.
What would it be like to kiss her so unrestrained? What would it be like to kiss a mouth like–
“Erik,” the name leaves Christine’s lips on a gasp as they break apart. Raoul had wondered if he had one, and now he knows what to call the object of his every envy, the object of this strange, blade-sharp desire.
“Stop me, Christine,” Erik says. “Stop me now, and leave me to my agony, if that is what you are going to do.”
Her eyes flick once to where Raoul is watching, though she cannot know it. She is looking at the door, at the way she’d come in. Will she turn away?
Come back to me, my Lotte, he wills her silently.
A moment later, she turns back to Erik. “I will not leave.” She pauses, her fingers worrying the cuff of her sleeve. “Unless you wish me to?”
He seizes her again, pulling her against him in a fierce hold. “Never.”
With that, they kiss again, and Raoul watches, unable to tear his eyes away. It is macabre and beautiful. Death kissing his maiden.
He can see the ruin of Erik’s cheek, the places where the skin seems not to have grown in, clinging to bone and torn away like old scars. Next to Christine’s flawlessness there is a beauty to them. Not that of fields of flowers, but of rocks jutting out of a stormy sea, broken and dangerous.
Theirs is not quiet passion, not anything gentle. Their hands run over each other, gripping, pulling as if they will die unless they can find a way to be closer, to burrow under each other’s skin and live there forever.
Yet Erik pauses often, pulling back just enough to watch Christine with eyes so awestruck it weakens Raoul where he stands.
If he is defeated, if he is to lose Christine forever, he can at least be glad that it is to a man who loves her so wildly, who would seemingly give his very life if she asked for it.
Is she safe with him? The question haunts him. If a man would burn the world for her, will she be scalded in the blaze?
At this moment, however, it is hard to imagine that Erik would ever harm her in any way, hard for Raoul to believe his own memories. Certainly not as he guides her to sit on the bed and goes to his knees before her, like a hiereus before his goddess.
Erik lifts her skirts, and Christine watches as he kisses up her legs, her perfect thighs.
Caught in all this, Raoul is certain she doesn’t notice the knife that falls into his hand from his sleeve, and he almost shouts, almost warns her, but even before he can draw breath, Erik has cut away Christine’s drawers and tossed the knife aside.
Exposed, Christine’s breaths come quickly, pressing her breasts against her bodice. She stares down at Erik, and Raoul is torn between watching her face and watching his .
It’s a beautiful sight when Erik finally presses his mouth against Christine. He wants to hate it, wants to run through the mirror and tear them apart, but he can only watch her pleasure and be glad to see it.
It is wrong to watch them, wrong to hear Christine gasp, and watch her pretty fingers dig into the back of Erik’s head, disturbing the few hairs there.
He does not look away as Erik runs his tongue along her slit and she cries out, canting her hips closer to him.
The motion seems to break something in Erik, who grabs Christine’s hips and pulls her closer, burying his hideous face in her and consuming her pleasure like a man starved.
Against his will, Raoul’s hand drifts to his trousers. He means only to adust the discomfort, but a moment later he is stroking himself as he watches the display before him.
Death and the maiden break apart as he coaxes moans and cries of pleasure from her, as she seems confused and desperate, her body writhing in demand of something she likely doesn’t know how to seek.
Raoul wishes he could hold her. Wishes she could be sprawled on his lap and cradled in his arms while Erik works her, so he could catch all these beautiful sounds as they fall from her.
“I–more–” she pants, thrusting her hips closer to Erik’s mouth. He holds her down, pinning her to the spot so he can give her what she desires.
Although his eyes are heavy with his own, slow pleasure, Raoul does not allow them to close for a single second. If this is the last time he shall see Christine, he will watch this happen. He will see her lose herself in ecstasy, and leave knowing she will live the rest of her life in comfort.
She releases a low, guttural moan, and Raoul forgets himself for a moment, a single instant, and gasps.
Erik hears, pulling away from Christine, his eyes searching the space and landing on the mirror in panic and fury.
There must be some hidden button, lever, or catch, because it swings open only a moment later, and Raoul is standing in the room, watching Christine’s eyes clear and widen, the signs of her interrupted pleasure still clear in their glassy shine, in the flush of her cheeks.
She stares at him, her mouth dropping open as she struggles for words. Slowly, she takes in his appearance: hair wild, pupils blown, cock pressed uncomfortably against his trousers. She must know what he’d been doing. She must realise.
Her eyes, shining in the candlelight, flick between him and Erik who stands between them, watching, looking ready for murder, and none too unhappy with the thought.
Raoul knows that any movement he makes towards Christine will likely be his last, but he doesn’t look in Erik’s direction at all.
He is, as he has always been, watching Christine, and offering himself to her.
She looks once more at Erik before, at last, her eyes settle on Raoul. “Join us.”
Her words are not a request. She is not asking either of them for acquiescence. Not that she needs to. Raoul knows either of them would grant her every wish, no matter how trivial.
And this is hardly trivial.
Without sparing another glance towards Erik, Raoul goes to where he’d been imagining himself only moments before, pulling Christine onto his lap, spreading her legs with his knees and facing her over the side of the bed, where she’d been sprawled only moments before.
Erik remains frozen, still standing a step from the bed, Raoul locks eyes with him as he unhooks the front of Christine’s bodice, touching as much of her as he can while he does. He skims his lips over her neck, and pushes the straps of her tattered combinations out of the way so he can touch her breasts. All the while, daring Erik to object, or–better yet–to join them.
Christine arches up into his hands, further emboldening him. This is all madness, but he understands now, the vacant, dreamy look she sometimes got when speaking of Erik. He feels it now, as if he’s sunk into a dream and none of his actions are real.
If it isn’t real, he is free to gesture for Erik to join them, and so he does. And–as if in a trance himself–the man goes, falling back to his knees before Christine, where she is spread and ready for him. .
This is a far better angle than the one he’d had from the mirror. From here he can watch each flick of Erik’s tongue, each time his skeletal fingers dig into Christine’s soft flesh or sink inside her to curl against her inner walls in a way that makes her cry out.
The envy still burns beneath the surface. Raoul wishes those were his hands, wishes that was his mouth, but there’s much to enjoy from where he’s sitting. He has Christine’s breasts in his hands, her delicate throat under his lips. He can hear and feel each gasp, moan, mewl, and sigh as it shudders out of her body.
“She liked that,” he tells Erik after a particularly sharp breath. “Do it again.”
He wonders if at some point he will cross some invisible line and Erik will toss that rope around his neck again. He thrusts up into Christine, grinding against her, shocked at how much he enjoys that idea. As if making this madness just slightly more dangerous will equally heighten the pleasure.
Erik obliges his instruction, and they begin to develop a rhythm as they play Christine’s body, alternating between demanding and gentle, forceful and so light Raoul thinks it might be a kind of agony.
Christine is senseless beneath them, gone are the light sighs and delicate gasps. She’s all motion, all sound. Her hair is a mad tangle, and Raoul seizes a handful of it, tugging just enough to make her arch further into Erik’s mouth.
With one final cry, the highest and loudest yet, Christine goes boneless in his arms, and Erik stands, wiping his mouth and then licking the back of his hand, gloating.
Raoul is achingly hard, so mad with it that he almost grabs Erik’s hand to lick it himself. Holding Christine, watching her, watching Erik has left him more desperate and unfulfilled than he’s ever been in his life. Each time Christine moves on his lap, he wants to grip her hips and drive into her until the pressure alone is enough to finish him.
By the grace of god and his own unwillingness to be so unmanned in front of the phantom, he resists, but it’s a near thing.
As Christine comes down from her high, Raoul locks eyes with Erik again, and wonders if this is the end. They’ve done the only thing that might ever have united them. Christine is relaxed and sated between them.
He ought to leave. Ought to stand and wish them both well so he can finish himself and lick his wounds in solitude, but he can’t bear to do it.
Just a few more moments, he prays, to God or to Erik. Just give me a few more moments with her.
She had chosen Erik. Raoul is not so much a fool not to realise it. For heaven’s sake, she had come here on the night before their wedding. He loves her too much to deny her anything she wants, even if the idea of losing her kills him.
Recovered, Christine sits up and looks between them. He almost says something, even opens his mouth so that he might speak, offer some forgiveness, some apology or excuse so that he can leave and begin a long mourning.
But she kisses him, pulling herself closer to him by his shoulders and wrapping her legs around his waist.
This might very well be the thing that breaks Erik. Raoul–insensible though he is as he loses himself in Christine, just one last time–swears he can hear teeth grinding from somewhere around where Erik had been standing.
She pulls away from him, and tears are welling in her eyes. Raoul wipes them away with his thumb. “I’m sorry,” she whispers.
He shakes his head. “I didn’t know, should have realised–”
She stops him with a hand on his chin. “I didn’t think you would—”
“You could have told me.”
She nods. The advantage of having known each other for so long is that their minds and hearts are connected in such a way that he understands her, even in these fragmented sentences. She had thought she needed to choose. She’d been forced into a choice she hadn’t wanted.
He looks to Erik, daring the man to force her back into it, to make some other demand of her.
Can you? He asks with his eyes over Christine’s bare shoulder. Can you give her what she wants, even if it means sharing her with me?
Erik watches where they’re tangled up together, and then slowly sinks back into a chair, going for the waistband of his trousers. Christine looks over her shoulder to watch him, worrying her lip between her teeth.
“Go on,” Erik instructs, his voice rough with some emotion Raoul would not attempt to name.
It should feel strange, finally peeling back the layers of his wife’s—almost anyway—dress, knowing another man is watching them, and yet…
In the strange, dreamlike quality of this place it seems perfectly natural to undress her, to allow her to undress him, while those golden eyes watch them. That appraising look follows them, silent and inscrutable as Christine pulls his shirt away, as she drags her short fingernails down his chest.
There is no doubt what her intentions are, and Raoul wishes he were a better man. Good enough to have waited for tomorrow night, to have treated her the way she deserved.
But then, he’d made many mistakes in assuming he knew what she wanted, sometimes even when she was telling him otherwise. She clearly doesn’t intend to wait, and he’s not strong enough in his convictions to stop her. Not when her hands feel so good, not when the heavy weight of Erik’s eyes adds a new, unspeakable sensation.
She rolls them so that he’s on his back and she’s straddled across him. She leans in and her hair falls around them, curtaining them so, for a moment, it’s just the two of them.
Raoul leans up to kiss her, still not sure if this will be his last chance, still desperate to keep some, most, any of her, if he can.
“I love you,” she whispers. “I don’t… I didn’t–”
He kisses her again, cutting her off. “I don’t care.” It’s not entirely true, and she likely knows it. “I have always known I would need to share you, with the stage, with your crowds of admirers, even with him.” He realises as he says it that it’s true. That some part of him hates it, but that doesn’t make it a lie.
He can bear it. He can live with hating it until he doesn’t anymore, as long as he has her. Even if it’s only sometimes. Even if he has her in the light of day, and she’s Erik’s in the dark of night.
However she chooses to have him, he’ll accept, so long as he doesn’t lose her.
“Don’t leave,” he asks quietly, just for the two of them. “Please.”
She kisses him, deep and wild, burning, reassuring and yet not. Rolling her hips so he can feel where she’s soft and wet against where he’s hard and aching for her.
He loses track of his thoughts, now far too focused on her, on this exact moment, to think on whatever veiled future they might have.
Enjoy it , he tells himself. Enjoy it enough to have it with you later. Just in case.
Slowly, Christine sinks down on him, gasping at the sharp intrusion and pulling back, her eyes wide.
With careful hands on her hips, he lowers her back down, letting her take her time, though he bites his cheek to bleeding as he does.
It takes several moments, but she sets a pace for herself after a while, and he can simply enjoy her, enjoy the quiet sounds Erik releases as he pleasures himself watching them.
Raoul loses himself entirely in it. Forgetting all the history between the three of them, all the reasons this could end with him dead before the sun rises. Or perhaps he doesn’t let himself forget. Perhaps that’s part of why he enjoys it so much.
He likes having Erik here. Likes the feel of those striking, strange eyes as they trail over him with a potent mix of admiration and envy, not unlike what Raoul feels for him. He likes the sounds of his pleasure, likes the way Christine performs for him, seeking her pleasure with Raoul, but offering it up to Erik like a benefaction.
Raoul is damn near losing himself by the time Erik climbs onto the bed and takes hold of Christine, slowing her pace and plying the bud between her legs with his long fingers.
He can feel where Erik is touching her and not quite touching him. Those fingers are breaths away from the most vulnerable skin on Raoul’s body, and it feels like a static charge, dangerous and addicting.
He drives up into Christine, watching her eyes flutter closed as her hips roll erratically.
“Please,” she whispers, shuddering. “Please, I–”
“Give her more,” Erik orders him, and Raoul easily obliges, but he can tell her peak is still out of reach, and with a swift motion, he rolls Christine underneath him, snatching her away from Erik to push deeper.
It steals her breath for a moment, but hardly breaks the motion. He can feel her muscles ticking and fluttering around him.
And then Erik grips his neck.
Raoul doesn’t know if it’s meant as an attack, some vengeance for taking Christine out of his reach, but it only makes him groan, the sound barely escaping on what little air he has left.
Vision blackening, pleasure mounting, Raoul reaches clumsily for Christine to stroke her pussy, finding her bud and running his thumb over and around it, pressing as hard as dares.
She gasps and falls apart in the exact moment Erik releases him, and Raoul comes inside her, losing himself as his vision whites out.
The next seconds are mindless and heady, all breath and sweat and sensation as he falls next to Christine, gasping in tandem with her.
Erik takes hold of her wrists, drawing them over her head and leaning in to kiss her, hard and demanding. Raoul can feel the intensity of it, the bed seems to burn with it.
He also feels Christine’s languid form go taut as she leans up, canting her hips for more, though Erik holds her in place, releasing her lips and pulling her closer with an arm wrapped around her lower back, lifting her hips so he can thrust into her easily.
Raoul watches, spent and starved for more, as Erik takes her, motions rough and desperate, as if, in her body, he will find every joy, every kindness he has ever been denied.
He doesn’t seem to realise the moment it becomes too much for Christine, but Raoul is watching. Raoul is so close he can see the crease of pain between her brows, the way she tugs at her hands where they’re trapped in his.
He knows he should say something, or push Erik off, demand that he be gentle–for all he knows this is Christine’s first time, and she’s already taken him!–but he doesn’t. Instead he gives Erik another outlet.
He presses his lips against the thin, carved away slash of Erik’s mouth, pouring his envy, his anger, his pain into that kiss.
Take it, he demands. Take it from me and give it back to me , not her.
Erik dives into the kiss like a feral thing. Raoul tastes blood and he doesn’t know if it’s his, but it doesn’t stop him. It only brings him higher.
Beneath them, he can feel that Erik’s motions have slowed. His hips are still rolling into Christine, but she’s wrapped her legs around his hips and she’s grinding into his thrusts. The pain is wiped from her face and replaced with something like awe as she watches them. And Raoul obliges her exactly as she’d obliged Erik while riding him.
He puts on a show.
Not to be outdone, Erik releases Christine’s wrists to bury his hand in Raoul’s hair, pulling harshly and trying to control the kiss.
It’s tempting to fight back, but his release has left him too relaxed for such things, so he gives in, lets Erik take whatever he wants. Lets him twist his head and pull his hair and delve his mouth. He takes all the roughness Erik has to give as Christine groans beneath them, accepting and enjoying what remains.
It’s far from Raoul’s first time kissing a man, but Erik is not like any other man alive. His asymmetrical lips are strange, his fingers a little too long, and there’s so much heat coming off his skin, though he’s still wearing most of his clothing, having only removed what was most necessary.
Raoul reaches for his shirt, but his hands are slapped away, one arm is twisted and bent behind him just enough to be painful. Acquiescing to the unspoken request, Raoul brings his hands back to Erik’s jaw, the sparse hair on the back of his head.
He tastes the other man’s low groan, and feels the moment his body relaxes as he finishes inside Christine, and hears the way she shudders and moans with another release.
For a long, suspended moment, Raoul is lost entirely in them. It’s as though he’s left his own body behind and is caught between them, contained in the shadows of the dark room and the sound, feel and smell of their pleasure.
Erik falls, boneless on Christine’s other side as she whimpers wordlessly, still riding the aftershocks.
Tomorrow is a distant concept, but, in this hazy, indeterminate space, Raoul wonders if they could do this again. If, someday, when there’s more trust, or even simply more conversation about whatever has happened, he might have Erik inside him, might feel the man vent some of that endless passion onto him that way.
Would Christine watch that, as they had watched each other with her?
The mere thought has his cock stirring unexpectedly, and he rolls slightly to press himself along the side of Christine’s body. Seeking warmth and some confirmation that this isn’t all a very strange dream he’s having, and he’ll wake tomorrow in his own bed, to find her gone.
She turns to him to smile, half her face cast in shadow, the other half catching the candle’s glow like she’s some sort of ancient goddess of twilight and dawn, and all other mysterious in-betweens.
In his ear, just barely loud enough to be heard, she whispers. “Thank you.”
He expects some awkwardness now that the deed is done, but the rush of it all fades into a peaceful lull. When Erik drapes an arm across Christine’s body and brushes Raoul’s chest, neither of them even react, as if this is the hundredth time they’ve done this, and there’s no reason for it to be strange at all. He even rather likes the feel of those long fingers running over his skin in idle curiosity.
Raoul turns so Erik has more access, accepting the exploration without acknowledging it.
Perhaps he is as curious about Raoul as Raoul is about him. Even in this half-awake, shadow-shifting world, he wants to know everything. Wishes he could strip the other man bare to see each and every scar, every mark and disfiguration that had made him the way he is.
Christine understands him through music, through that tie between their souls to which Raoul has no access. Raoul can understand him through touch, through mapping his body and face until there are no more mysteries, and he will, given a single chance.
Erik is just a man, and Christine is a woman, and Raoul is tied to them both in flesh and secrets and whatever love they can find there.
Before he can ask, before he can try again to undress the other man, Raoul falls asleep, and dreams of the way sunrise splits the sea and sky into harsh lines between darkness and light.
He wakes right at dawn. Even so far below ground, he knows the sun is rising, and he will rise with it, as he always does.
Christine is still asleep beside him, her hair a riot of curls on the pillow and her face soft and happy in sleep, more relaxed and sated than Raoul has ever seen her.
Erik is standing at the edge of the bed, fully dressed, mask back in place.
In his hand is a small, leather bag, barely large enough for a change of clothes, maybe some sheet music, hardly enough to start a new life, but Raoul still knows exactly what it means.
Still, he isn’t one to accept things without question. “Don’t leave. Please.”
Christine wouldn’t want him to, she’d be furious if he didn’t at least try to stop him. Certainly she wouldn’t want him to go without some explanation. She will be brokenhearted, hurt.
Erik must know this. He is watching her with a look of such tragedy it’s like staring into the sun. Raoul has to blink and look away, but the glow of that misery is stamped on his eyes, etched behind his lids.
“Take care of her.”
Raoul is ready to argue further, to reject the order because it is supposed to be both of them taking care of her, as they had last night. She had made the choice they’d demanded of her so many times in so many different ways, and had chosen not to choose.
Without ever speaking it, she had chosen–demanded–both.
Before he can try to explain this, before he can wake Christine and make her stop him, Erik blows some kind of powder in his face and he can’t fight, can’t speak, can only cough and sink back into the fog of sleep.
When he wakes again, the encounter feels like a strange dream, and Christine is weeping beside him.
“He’s gone,” she says.
Raoul holds her against his chest. “I’m sorry,” he says, and means it. He’s sorry she’s hurt. Sorry that Erik was too much of a coward to try and see what this was, sorry that he’d followed her down here and discovered what might have been for all of them.
Without knowing what else to do, they get dressed in cold, distant silence, and return to Raoul’s home, and their separate rooms, where they both will likely only pace or pretend to sleep until servants come to wake them.
He goes through the motions for the few hours until the wedding, and is almost surprised when he finds himself standing by the altar of his family chapel, with the burn of his brother’s disapproving glare on his back and his bright eyed sisters in front of him.
Exactly as they’d planned, and yet it feels more unnatural than letting Erik watch as he’d bedded Christine.
He’s even more surprised when she arrives, and walks down the aisle only minutes later. Tears slide from her eyes, and Raoul knows that there is sadness and joy in those tears, grief and victory.
He tries to assure her, with only expression, that he knows, that he understands and accepts her grief, her love for Erik and its place between and beside them.
They say their vows, exchange rings, laugh and pretend during their quiet reception until they can escape to Raoul’s room.
She cries through the rest of their wedding night, weeping and alternating between fury at Erik’s cowardice and pain at his abandonment.
Raoul holds her, stroking her hair and whispering as much comforting nonsense as he can think of, murmuring apologies he hopes she can’t hear. It’s his fault she’d known what they might have had. It might be his fault Erik had left. If he hadn’t followed her, if he hadn’t watched them, if he hadn’t joined them, would Erik have left? Or would he have still slipped away into the grey light of dawn, leaving her behind, this time all on her own?
Raoul thinks he can hate him for that, even that hypothetical. To love and then leave Christine is a crime he thinks he might never be able to forgive, worse even than the murders and the kidnapping, and his own attempted strangulation. Erik had let her believe she might have what she really wanted, and then stolen it from her only hours later.
The next day they leave for their honeymoon,, and weeks later they extend it, so they can travel further, leave Europe and explore Asia.
As people learn their itinerary, she’s invited to sing, for single evenings, in nearly every city with a theatre big enough to accommodate her admirers, and on a few notable occasions, she sings outdoors, the sky itself reverberating with her voice.
He sees her smile, basking in the glow of the lights, delighting in each performance, in each adventure as they wander foreign streets and admire new scenery.
And he sees her, and always follows her gaze, hoping and fearing, when she checks over her shoulder to search for a tall figure, a masked face.
They never see him, and Raoul eventually accepts, bitterly and happily, that they never will again.