As another few weeks passed, Erik spent less and less time in the opera house during the day, opting instead to let Josephine believe that he was there while he engaged in more productive endeavors. His plan of departure was at the forefront, in theory...but he had essentially nothing accomplished. He had considered other equally cultured locales where one could easily lurk in the shadows—London, Rome, Berlin, even America—but it hardly made a difference. Regardless of geography, he would be alone again, and he had no sense of purpose.
He had even given up on cracking Josephine for the time being. If he tried hard enough, he could almost forget how she had nearly surrendered herself to him in both body and mind. And he needed to forget, because otherwise every day would have been agony in such close quarters, and it was best to just enjoy her company in what limited time they had together.
And then she fell ill. He had suspected that her body would succumb to the cold and damp eventually; he was, all things considered, impressed by how long it had taken. The worst of it, thankfully, struck on one of her days off. He brewed her hot tea with lemon and honey, supplied her with an ongoing stack of freshly laundered handkerchiefs, and ensured that she was warm at all times. Otherwise, he was—to her mild annoyance—keeping a safe distance. The Phantom of the Opera did not get sick.
That evening, swaddled like a newborn in a thick blanket of brown wool, Josephine lay with a book on the sofa, which he had pulled closer to the fire. He suspected that she was fighting sleep more than she was reading, but he remained quiet as he perused his own book in one of the high-backed chairs.
"Are you ever going to compose again?" she asked suddenly.
His head snapped up. "Pardon?"
With some effort, she pulled herself to a sitting position, still clutching the blanket tightly around her torso. "I had heard that you are a genius composer, but I never see you writing music."
He returned his gaze to his book as he replied, "I think we can both agree that my last attempt was an unmitigated disaster."
"Obviously that was a product of the context, not the work itself." A pause. "Well, perhaps both."
At that, he could not help himself; he set his book on the table and turned to face her. Knowing that his stiff posture must have already given away his defensiveness, he clasped his hands expectantly and said, "Ah, the renowned music expert has a critique! I am all ears, mademoiselle."
"Do not patronize me," she said, glowering. "One does not need to master a skill in order to provide constructive criticism. At least, I imagine you gave credence to that theory last week when you informed me that my watercolor roses were 'joylessly pedestrian.'"
He nodded. "Still true. Touché, then. Please, tell me what you thought of my opera."
"Honestly? It felt like the operatic fantasy of an adolescent boy. It lacked something...poignant. I suspect that you are capable of more."
Erik stared at her, his mouth set in a firm line while he considered her statement, and as seconds elapsed, he watched anxiety and doubt begin to creep into her facial expression. He could not help but take some pleasure in her discomfort, relishing the rare opportunity to remind her that an unchecked tongue could bring about unwanted consequences.
In what came as a surprise to perhaps both of them, he found himself chuckling. "You are probably not wrong," he admitted. "I have become more acquainted with the ways of the world since."
Her eyebrows rose. "Is that so? And what, pray tell, did this education involve?"
"Certainly nothing befitting a lady's ears," he replied more throatily than intended.
Her cheeks flushed as her lips parted to form a small "O," and he could have sworn that he saw a dangerous glint in her eyes. "Well," she said, "we both know that I am hardly a model of propriety." Was that the faintest hint of flirtation that he detected? It was hard to tell how much of the huskiness of her voice was due to something other than illness, if any.
Still, in his mind's eye, he saw himself lunging across the room to claim her.
"Why not start a new opera?" she asked. "Or even a single piece?"
"Ah," he said, extending his long fingers to fidget with the brass clock on the tea table. "I am afraid that I have been separated from my muse rather permanently."
She let out what sounded like a small snort of derision, and something inside of him snapped. "And what have I said or done now to earn your scorn, Josephine?"
She looked up, surprised, as though she had not been cognizant of emitting a reaction. "Nothing," she said, shaking her head. "I apologize. In fact, I really ought to get to bed." She stood and made for the door, draping the blanket over her arm, but as she skirted along the wall of the room, he strode over and slapped his palm against the stone in front of her.
"Tell me," he ordered. "That is not a request."
Her black-brown eyes darted from his face to the barricade formed by his arm. "Fine," she sighed. "I was thinking that a muse only inspires one to work, but it is in doing the work itself that the genius comes out. You cannot expect to create something if you do not even try."
He blew hot air through his nostrils. So often he had let her preach this way, let her provoke him unanswered, but there was fire in his veins now. "And what would you know of genius?" he asked.
In her eyes he saw, with some remorse, that he had succeeded in wounding her. However, she rallied quickly to fire back. "I suppose I ought to ask the same question of you, for I have seen no proof of its existence."
"Tread lightly, Josephine," he warned quietly, "lest you forget that you are still indebted to me."
Those dark eyes blazed, and she crossed her arms, hugging the blanket in the process. "We both know that you do not intend to see that through anytime soon." Perhaps she did not intend it as such, but her reply had all the trappings of a challenge.
He grabbed her wrist and pulled her to him, wrapping his other arm around her waist, and he was vaguely aware of the blanket hitting the floor as he swiftly backed her into the wall. She let out a slight gasp as his thigh separated her legs. He put his lips to her left ear, so close that their cheeks touched. "Do not," he murmured, "underestimate what I might do when provoked."
He pulled his face back just enough to let his forehead rest on hers, closing his eyes as his warm breath fell onto her face. He let his hands trail gently down her sides to rest on her hips, where his fingertips curved into her skin. He liked the way that she felt under his palms: warm and supple and feminine. He liked the way that she smelled of soap and woodsmoke, with no cloud of odorous perfume. And his lips were so very, very close to reminding him of how she tasted. He had never intended to see through this aspect of their agreement, but the urge was now so ineffably, deliriously strong, and there was a flicker of something inside of him—suspicion? hope?—that suggested she might be amenable to it after all.
As he held her, grappling with whether to step off the precipice of chivalry and plummet into his lust, he became aware of her breathing: labored, shaky, with a slight rasp likely attributable to the illness in her lungs. Even more disconcerting, she was silent and still. Her discomfort grounded him, and he drew back, releasing her hips. "You are right," he said. "Not tonight." He looked down and ran his fingers through his hair, unable to meet her gaze. "Please, continue to your room. I will bring you something to help you sleep."
He exited ahead of her, slipping into the kitchen as quickly as possible. As he prepared another cup of tea, he replayed the previous scene in his mind. When had his emotions begun flowing so freely again? He could not allow it to happen. He must douse the flames of anger and passion that had once consumed him whole, lest he be devoured again and—worse—take her with him.
Unless. Unless.
What if he could repurpose that passion? Channel it, so that the sparks left his body to ignite something else: creation instead of destruction. His fingers began to twitch and ache for the pipe organ, and he knew—damn it all—that she had been right. He still had untapped power within him, lack of muse notwithstanding.
He quickly added a spoonful of honey and a squeeze of lemon to the tea, and then he topped it off with a generous splash of whiskey before placing the cup on a saucer to deliver to Josephine in her room.
When he pushed her door open, she stood with her bare backside facing him and was pulling her chemise up over her head. The mirror across the room displayed her full, naked torso, all the way to just below her navel, where the bed cut off his view. He was stunned by the assault of pale breasts and buttocks and hip bones on his senses, and almost as much by the thin, silvery-purple scar stretching across the base of her lower abdomen. He had not seen any of these things when he had spied her with the set designer so many months ago; that had been merely a flash of movement, a glimpse of her face, her body mostly clothed with the young man occupying the space where her skirts had been pushed up.
He absorbed all of this new information in the span of one second before she spotted him in the mirror and jumped to cover herself with the newly shucked chemise.
"I—I apologize," he sputtered, and he ducked out of the room, pulling the door shut with him. His cheeks burned with mortification, both on his behalf and hers.
He strode down the hall and into the sitting room, where he set the teacup on the table and proceeded to stalk the perimeter, nervously flexing his fingers as he went. He felt as though he had caught her at her most vulnerable, and the guilt from that alone unseated him. When he also took into account his desire, now flaring up again at the fresh reminder of how long it had been since he'd last laid hands on bare skin, he wanted to get as far away from her as possible and plunge his body into ice water, and never have to face her again. With any luck, she would remain holed up in her room for the night and they would never speak of this again.
Her eventual appearance in a cream-colored nightgown indicated that he was fresh out of luck this evening.
Even with the low lighting and the distance between them, he could make out the hollows under her eyes and the tired slump of her shoulders. When she crossed the room to sit on the sofa, he saw that the corners of her eyes were red from weeping. He felt like a monster.
"Josephine, I am so terribly sorry."
"No, I am sorry," she said. "I forgot that you would be coming."
"I should have knocked."
She shrugged, feigning nonchalance but only managing to exaggerate the misery etched into her face. "I suppose it is nothing that you will not see later."
He winced inwardly but, in a moment of selfishness, took advantage of the opening. "In that case," he said, "may I ask—the scar?"
She nodded with such easy acquiescence that it was plain why she had come back: to tell her story. The intimacy of the gesture robbed him of breath. In a rather uncharacteristic move, he sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the fire to listen.
She looked not at him but into the fire when she spoke. "An operation, two years ago. It was my surgery that bankrupted my family." He did not respond, only waited, and gradually the words began to fall from her lips.
What he learned was that she had begun experiencing pain during her time of the month, pain so excruciating that it would radiate from her abdomen to her back and even her legs. When there came a month when she could not even walk, the doctors were consulted. They found a mass. It was recommended that she undergo immediate surgery to remove the entire womb, regardless of the fact that she could very well die under the knife. She agreed, and her parents drained their savings for it.
"Well, you did not die, so it must have been successful. Certainly your parents could not begrudge you that."
She nodded, still gazing into the fire. By now she was hugging the bony knees that she had pulled up to her chest, a posture that he was coming to recognize as a physical barrier against a nonphysical threat. "Everyone told me how incredibly fortunate I was," she said, "but they were not the ones who had to inform my fiancé that there would be no children in our future."
He inhaled sharply, overcome with understanding. The Josephine he knew now—with her casual disregard for virtue and fidelity, her avoidance of other women, her hard outer shell—was not the Josephine of two years ago. Circumstance had made her an outcast just as it had him.
Yet, he recalled the tenacity with which she had fought for her freedom in the beginning of their relationship. Suddenly, he very much wanted to grab her and pull her close—not out of sympathy, but out of need, a longing to know her more intimately and somehow absorb the qualities that made her...her.
"He left you," Erik breathed. "That coward."
She shook her head. "He expected a family when he decided to marry me. Why should he be forced to carry out an agreement when I could not meet one of the most important terms?"
"There are other means—adopting an orphan, perhaps. Would he not even consider that option?"
"No," she said. "I am afraid that I have an affinity for proud men. It is ultimately what drives a wedge between us." She finally turned her gaze to him in order to confess, "I do not even like children all that much, to be honest." She laughed quietly, bitterly, before her tone softened. "I did very much want a family, though."
"Oh, Josephine." He could not form a response. Could not fix this for her.
"Not only have I lost that opportunity, but I am directly responsible for dissolving the family that I already had." A teardrop rolled down her cheek, and he offered her his last clean handkerchief. She put her hand up in refusal. "No, I will not lose myself over this. It would solve nothing."
He gazed at her incredulously and asked, "Do you mean to say that you have never grieved?" The stoic resolution on her face told him everything that he needed to know. "Josephine, you cannot continue to brush it aside, not when you have lost so much."
Her eyes pierced his so intensely that he repressed a shudder. "If I let myself grieve," she said, "I will drown. I will never come back up for air."
Not true, he wanted to say. Ask me how I know. But, presumably unlike her, he had been knocked down too many times to count, and he still continued to possess a resiliency unmatched in any other person he had encountered. It did nothing, really, to dissuade the illusion that he was something inhuman. Josephine, on the other hand…
No. She was strong, too. Certainly she had limits, but she had not met them yet. He wanted to reach out and grab her by the shoulders, shake some sense into her, tell her that she was being ridiculous just before he claimed her sweet mouth for his own and proceeded to physically enlighten her as to what a force of nature she could be.
But all it took was one look at her face to know that she had once again shut herself down to him, and all that remained was the shivering, sleep-addled body of a girl who just needed to be tucked in warmly for the night.
"Come, let's get you to bed," he entreated, offering her a hand as he got to his feet. "You have expended enough energy for the night." She accepted the offer graciously, and as he led her to her bedroom, she gave his hand an appreciative squeeze. In that moment, it was enough. It was everything.