There are no words adequate to describe what it is to make love to a woman. No music is comparable, and that language, the sounds of song, the greatest of all tongues, could describe the feelings running between our minds, our joined flesh that precious, singular evening. To recall every caress, every tightening of muscle, every ounce of pleasure would be to trivialize the experience. Christine was unlike any other woman, any other human being I had known. Yes, she had her own faults, but she was young. And as she had shown me in that one evening. . .to love someone was to love them as they were, to accept their faults. To know them as completely as you wished them to know your own mind and body. . .
But some images were more than worthy of recollection, not that I lacked the memory to replay every second of out lovemaking in my mind over and over, endlessly, as a means of delicious torture.
As I had gently placed my weight above her shaking frame, her hands had reached up for the lacings of my one remaining secret...the only armor to save me from derision and rejection...for surely, Christine would rethink her fateful decision when faced with my death's head.Perhaps, the girl was testing herself, gauging her own depths of courage as she lifted the mask from my features.
The expected scream of utter revulsion did not reverberate through the chamber. Instead, as soon as the cool dank air of room met my uncovered flesh, as I shut my eyes in preparation for her cries, Christine pulled me down with an almost violent force to lay my head to her sweet breast. I will never forget that meeting of bodies, her soft skin against my ravaged cheek, it was an abomination of the most desirable kind. How could I not love her? She was all that was kind and true in my world. We were meant for one another, I thought, my lips brushing the line of her delicate collarbones, for what other human being would treasure her so?
"You do not pull away from me," I muttered against her heartbeat, enjoying the rhythmic rise and fall of her chest as she sighed low. It was not the tone of a little girl, but the soothing warmth of a woman's voice.
"No, Erik," and then she added with the certainty that no other response was even possible, "why would I turn away from your touch?" Her tenderness ran through me as sweetly as her singing did when she rolled effortlessly through obligato and arpeggios in her flexible soprano. It was as if I had existed in the most violent of storms, tossed about by gales and pierced by lightning, all my life, and now I was safe and sheltered, the pounding rains had ceased to torment me. If Christine remained in my life, the rain would be as a soft metronome, a lullaby for a sunless, foggy afternoon.
As two curious lovers, which was undoubtably an apt description, our hands trailed and searched the contours and curves of one another. The inner complexities of the human body, from intricate veins to the blinking of an eye was nothing in comparison to the exquisite simplicity and straight-forward shape and line of its form. I was a connoisseur of inventions, of the well-written word, a fine wine, music, a man who appreciated the intricacies of everyday objects. I was a scientist, a creator of the images, that to most people, would always remain in the dream-scape of life. But the woman curling her sinewy dancer's legs around me, her fingertips lacing across my spine-she was that which I could not have even imagined. Christine Daae was the unknown paradise, for she was the creator of my perfect world; it rested solely in her kisses and embraces.