This takes place at the end of the flashback in 1870, when Christine is still young and very much alive. However, in this version she is not exactly herself, she is a darker woman.
The phantom sat there, in his dark thoughts. He was facing the rest of his life alone, but I was about to sweep away that cloud as I put a hand on his shoulder. He looked up, not really believing his eyes.
"Hey," I said.
"Get out of here, where's Raoul?" he asked me, spiting the words. "Aren't you going to him?"
I laughed.
"He's a sucker. You think I'm going out with him?" I asked, sitting in his lap.
We blew the opera, left it in the dust. All he could see was me, and I was leading him onward to a new life.
So we went out the door and hopped in a carriage, which would take us out of London to Paris for some fun.
His face looks like a skull head, except for half which looks like Gerard Butler...um, well it is darkly handsome. As we leave in the carriage being drawn by some deep black horses, he's wearing a mask that gives the appearance he has a nose under there, but there's nothing but a hole. I've seen it before, only briefly, horrors of a human skeleton head that sometimes haunt me late at night, making me shocked and nauseated. But at the moment, that part is covered with white plastic, and I only see his left eye and his cheek, which look perfectly lovely. We sit next to each other in the carriage, and I feel uneasy energy spewing from him in lightening bolts. I leaned against him, and he put his arm around me. He relaxed a little bit, looking at me steadily.
"Does this mean you're mine?" he asked me.
"Yeah," I said. It did. Then he grabbed my face and started kissing me, pulling on my lips hard and pressing his face against mine. It made me mad, because I felt like he was doing it because he could, so I pushed his face away with my palm cupping his disfigured mouth.
"Cut that out, you horny dog," I said. I sunk down in the seat and rested my head under his arm, using his hard chest for a pillow. It was going to be a long ride to Paris, and I thought maybe I'd sleep a little bit on the way. We talked on the way there, not really about anything and certainly not about ourselves. We talked about London and Paris and then we talked about plays. One thing we both love is theater and music, and sometimes he starts talking about plays he wants to write like he's talking about some alternate reality he lives in. He'll just start talking about some random thing, and then he'll be telling me a scene, and then he'll just go on and on until he's finished telling me the whole story. It's fascinating, but sometimes I drift in and out.
We arrived at the hotel pretty late, but not late enough for me to just crawl under the sheets and die.
"Let's go to a bar, I want to enjoy myself," I said. "I've been rehearsing for that damn play for months, I haven't had any time to relax."
We were standing in the hotel, one of the only times we've been alone together. Besides the conversations we've had through the mirror, when I believed he was an angel of music. I'm an idiot, dur. I still I believe the world is haunted by angels and demons, I always will. The celestial voice that this ugly man has, and the fact that his voice was in my head as though I were an insane person, it is easy to see why I kept him a secret in my life.
He approached me, and I see the conflict going on within him. He's nervous as hell. He's an egomaniac, and the evil child in him wants to just take me now. Why can't he just take my clothes off like I'm his Barbie doll to play with? But I've brought sweet light into his life, and for the first time he has hope. That is, unless he screws up, and I leave. He will treat me gingerly, circling me like a fencer looking for a good place to attack.
He is a perfect gentleman because he's lived in the opera house his whole life. He learned to act by observation alone. He can mimic them completely, even though he's practically never had a conversation in his life.
"I feel like I still don't know you at all," I said. I knew the question going through his mind, which was how long would he have to wait?
He was standing in front of me, inches from me. I'm in heels so we're face to face. I got closer and embraced him in a tight squeeze. It feels nice, and he nearly crushes me with his arms.
"Why do you want to go anywhere? I don't want to go out there," he said.
"Please, hun, just for a little bit. Come with me," I said, and he nodded.
We went out the door in the humid night air, hot and heavy against our skin. There's a bar down the street, our destination is a reward of french fries and alcoholic drinks. It's about midnight, and there's still drunks in the filthy streets hanging out with whores on their arms. It's a mine field of humanity that he and I have to cross.
"Hey baby, what the hell is that you're with?" Some scruffy beard with bloodshot eyes asks me. He's handsome with manly muttonchops on the sides of a hard face. "Come back with me tonight, darling, ditch the weirdo."
The phantom punched the guy in the face, knocking him on the ground. When he's on the ground he started crushing his neck with the heel of his shoe, trying to kill him as quickly as possible. Of course it's never that easy, and they guy is wheezing with his tongue sticking out struggling to suck air through his flattened windpipe.
"Stop, you need to stop this!" I said. "They're all going to talk like that, you can't kill everyone."
He kicked the guy hard across the face, and I know he hoped to cracked the guy's neck. The guy survived, cursing through torn vocal chords. I grabbed the phantoms arm and led him through the minefield, the bar in my sights.
We pushed through the bar, swimming in a harsh current of laughs, stares, and sneers. We sat down and I got some potatoes and drinks. He drank some hard liquor in a glass with ice, something he's not to familiar with but he puts it down without a word. I thought it couldn't hurt to loosen him up, as long as he didn't start killing again.
I put my hands on his, and I held them. At just that little touch he grabbed my face and started making out with me. He picked me up off my seat and tossed me onto him, straddling his lap. That kind of behavior is not appropriate in this day in age, not even close.
"Hey, take that outside, this isn't a brothel," the bartender said to us. "Get out, both of you."
I tossed my drink down my throat and went outside, rejected into the steamy hot fish tank that was the humid night street.
The phantom tossed his arm around me and grabbed me, laughing. He could care less, the people around him were as good as mechanical dolls in a puppet show. I am the only one he sees as human, and he is a god. He's got a lot to learn about being in the big crazy world.
"I want to be outside!" I said. I like being outside.
"We've got a balcony, lets go back." And so we trekked back to the hotel, weaving through the party that was going on in the streets. People were hopping and shouting, but we were not a part of any of it. We went through the door and went inside, wordless on our way back to our room.
We stood on the balcony, next to each other staring out at the street.
"What's your name?" I asked him. "Am I supposed to call you phantom?"
"My mother didn't give me a name, so I have none. She left me like an unnecessary organ she had pushed out of her wretched body. Why don't you give me a name?" He took my elbows in his hands and held me closer to him. He was excited, energetic and unstable, and he shook me a little too violently. Giddy happiness was wracking him, making him shaky and high in the clouds.
"Please, give me a name," he said. He may as well as finished the sentence by calling me mommy.
"No, give yourself one," I said. "You gotta be your own soul, man."
He decided to call himself Erik. Whatever, that was good enough.
"Hey Erik, he he he," I said, pushing him playfully.
I went inside and started getting ready for bed. I stripped my clothes off, and Erik watched. He came over to where I stood, moving fast but controlled, and he clutched my naked body. He grabbed my tits and my butt, and licked my chest. When his hand moved between my legs, I stopped him. He looked up at me, surprised and deflated.
"I thought you said you were mine... can't I?"
"No, stop it," I said.
"But why wait?" he asked me, with an intense furrowed brow. His stare is hypnotic in intensity. His emotions are raw, and nearly transmitted telepathically with the force of their overwhelming surges. He clutches my body with squeezing hands that knead my soft fatty tissue.
I pushed away from him, with effort. I wanted to wait, I wanted to be more comfortable with him when we screwed. I picked my nightgown out of my luggage and draped it over my body.
We both got in the bed, coming together with our squishy bodies pressed together under a squishy blanket. I realized he was fully clothed and I laughed.
"I didn't want to offend you," he said.
"Yeah, it's alright," I said, taking off his pants. I slid them off over his boner and down skinny legs. He's a pale skeleton, from living in the depths of the opera dungeon, a cave creature from a dark dripping hell. I peeled his mask off and there's his skull face. I cupped his disfigured cheek in my hand, and his skin is warm like bones heated by the sun. I kiss his warm skin, and feel the hardness of his bony upper lip, because there is nothing between his skin and his maxilla with it's small square teeth attached to it.
I press my face against his chest and hold him, and I feel him shaking with laughter. His delicate sanity is hanging on a thread, and here I am poking the thread like a kid messing with a spider. I reach up to touch his cheek and wipe tears that I knew were there, I had a sense, because his electric feelings are passing from his heart right through his chest to electrocute me.
"Babe..." I said.
He pulled up the skirt of my nightgown and pulled down my underwear. I started telling him to stop but the words caught in my mouth when he pressed his face against mine in a hard kiss.
"Christine, you know I love you," he said, touching me. Well, maybe I would change my mind, I thought, as a furnace of a thousand suns started burning in my crotch. Yeah, sure.
He felt my delicate lips, and then stuck a finger between them. He gasped, feeling the ribbed inside of my body. It would be a fun night, taking his virginity.