And it is done. The letter sealed with the crimson Death's head has been received by Madame Giry and she has obeyed my terse instructions to leave it on the armoire in the girl's dressing room. I cannot go back now. There is both relief and terror as I pace, behind the walls, creep along the catwalks, listening, yearning, and waiting for her to discover my missive and to learn how she will respond to it.

There is no greater agony than waiting for the words and actions of a would-be lover, surely.

It has been two weeks since I sent her away. Sent her away, because I could not understand that she could love me of her own choosing. I could not grasp the memory of her sweet hands touching my horrid face and the scars that slash in ugly criss-crossing along the skin of my back. She has traced those scars on my back like a child exploring the map of a country she wishes to one day explore. No judgement, no revulsion, just the tense and careful alighting of her fingertips on the hard, mottled ridges of my flesh She had been finding me with each touch. And with her discoveries, each slight grazing of those magical fingertips, I have been undone.

The hands that have caressed the lack of hair on my horrid head, kissed the unevenness of my lips with an eagerness I will never begin to fathom. . .

I touch my face to recall the feeling of her lips on my flesh. In my madness, all I see, touch, and feel are the remembrances of those beautiful fingers and her mouth tracing over the dark and rosy hollowings that pave a terrible path from my right cheek to the back of the right side of my skull, with a love and abandon I dare not name.

All of it has undone me. These memories from a time not long past.

Is this what love must feel like? This sweet surrender of body and soul? The lack of judgement and revulsion? The acceptance from another that one cannot question, despite all flaws revealed so unconsciously?

If I were to define the love she has shown me, it very well will disappear before my eyes.

I sent her away, because I was too much of a coward to accept REAL and unblemished love when it was given to me in RAW, STUNNING touches and soft mumblings against my ears. I have been a true fool. In every step along our path, since she was a child sitting in that damned chapel, scrawny orphan that she was,crying for her Papa, who would never again play that damned violin for her.

I had not the heart,those many years ago, to leave her abandoned, without a voice to comfort her. And I have not the heart now, to turn her away..

Two long weeks of silence from me, the coward, the recluse, hiding in the dark,waiting for one kind word or caress, but too afraid to make a single promise to her. I have been allowing that little Vicomte from her childhood to fill the vacancy of companionship I have left behind

Because of my shame. She has no idea of the past I have left in my wake to find her.

I cower behind the mirror now,awaiting her arrival and discovery of my missive. I am accompanied by my very special and well-honed sense of self-loathing. Tonight,I will tell her everything. Every lucid and macabre detail.

I am sure that she will run from me, once she hears all the malicious details of my life. She will even scrub and wash her body of me and the love we've shared, once she knows the truth of me. Christine will be frightened. And then she will be gone. When she opens that letter on the armoire.

One last talk, one last loving. I FEEL her here with me now I have not much left to lose.

I hear the soft footfalls of her feet now. The most beautiful sound I will ever hear.