Hey, thanks for reading! If you're one of my previous readers, and if you're expecting some action in this chapter, then you're wrong! There will, however, be some coming… R&R please! This is my first truly plot oriented fanfic!
"Christine, I love you."
I awoke with a start. After a quick scan of the room, I got up, slid into my slippers, and went to the sitting room beyond the bedchamber. I was careful not to wake Raoul, who was snoring in the exact same position he had collapsed in after he was through with me, the coverlets only just covering his bare body.
I grunted in disgust.
This wasn't what I wanted. This wasn't at all what I had imagined.
Raoul is a child. A spoiled, needy child. He raged at me, he pouted at me, he demanded things from me.
Those first few months had been wonderful. Living in a veritable palace, with servants at my beck and call, with a man who doted on me. He used to bring me flowers. Used to.
I've figured it out by now, that he thought it was all such a grand adventure. That it was something just like the books that he reads over and over again. I was the damsel in distress, and he was the knight in shining armor. It's funny that they never describe what happens after the couple gets married. After the prince gets bored with the princess, when he realizes marriage isn't nearly as exciting as bachelorhood, after my knight in shining armor started spending more time in whorehouses than he does with his previously distressed damsel. And when he is with me, I can't stand him.
Every time he whispers "Little Lottie" in my ear, I cringe. The days of my being his Little Lottie are long, long gone. I've been Christine ever since that name was first whispered to me in the darkness, from a source I didn't yet know. That's who I was now, but Raoul didn't know that. He could never know that.
"Christine."
I started again, but it was unnecessary. I recognized immediately that it wasn't the voice that I had been secretly yearning for. The voice I heard was only an echo, a memory. It lacked the deep, resonate tone of the one I – the one I…
The one I desperately wanted to hear.
It was sad, that I was getting closer to full on hallucinations every day now. I was conjuring him in my mind's eye. His voice, his eyes – him.
I remember the first day I pretended Raoul was him. My dear husband had been drunk when he came home from his escapades. He had slapped me, and thrown me down on the bed, and was having his way with me. And as he was twitching above me, he flickered in my view, and suddenly he was there. His dark hair framing his face, his mask shining in the candlelight just the way I remember it doing, his blue eyes burning into mine. The muscles of his chest and arms taught with effort. I remember being more aroused than I ever had been before – with the exception of that first night I had been taken beneath the Operahouse.
It was the best sex Raoul and I had ever had. Luckily, he wasn't suspicious of my change in performance. He didn't remember a thing the next day.
As I sat in the cold, dark sitting room, looking out the window onto the vast grounds and forest beyond, I couldn't help but feel – unsatisfied. Yes, that's the perfect word. Unsatisfied.
I couldn't have this life anymore. I thought I would be able to adjust, be able to forget what happened at the Operahouse. It's impossible, I see that now. I should've been able to see it before.
This life was shallow. I can't be the person who smiles and turns her head when her husband is an idiot. I can't be happy with just a nice house and nice clothes and wealth. Not when I've felt things so much deeper, so much better. I've felt my soul fly on the wings of music, I've seen deep, desperate passion burning in the eyes of a man who loves me. Passion, not just lust. And that's an important distinction, though there was certainly a considerable measure of both.
Those eyes.
I know it's cliché to say it, but I melt every time I picture them. They held so much sadness, so much love, so much passion, so much darkness, so much light.
So much emotion.
That's the difference, I think. That he felt things more powerfully than Raoul does or ever will. And he made me feel those things, too. I need to feel those things again, truly feel them.
I need to find him.
Tell me what you think!!