CHAPTER RATING: PG13
Three weeks.
It had been three weeks of just sitting in her room. Her father didn't let her out for anything- not even Mass. Only about three times a day would he escort her to relieve herself. What would he do when she began having womanly troubles again? He brought her meals to her every day. It was as if he didn't trust her to be in the company of their servants. Or maybe it was because he hadn't told them he was keeping his daughter hostage in her room.
After the first week or so, Winifred had stopped getting dressed in the morning. All day she would simply sit on her bed with nothing to do but read her Bible that normally lay open on her bedside table. Some of the time she would lie on her back for hours, pretending to draw shapes on the ceiling with her eyes. Most of the time, however, she would think about the Phantom. What was he doing in his dark cave beneath the operahouse? Was he composing? Sculpting? Building? What did he think had happened to her?
Winifred liked to imagine that he figured it all out. "Ah, I know," he would say to himself. "Her tyrannical father has trapped her in her room, keeping her from me, torturing her with solitude." Then he would mount his valiant black horse, gallop to her front door, black cape swirling, and break it down with his bare hands. He would race up the stairs and, with her father shouting in anger, Erik would scoop Winifred into his arms and carry her away. Then they would both mount the horse and ride off into the sunset, down once more into the darkness of the Phantom's domain.
But he never came. No matter how many times Winifred planned out the whole scenario, Erik was never there for her, looking down at her through that white mask that hid his shame. She thought about his hands. Oh, those beautiful hands. She never realized how attractive a man's hands could be- or how attractive a man's anything could be, for that matter. Sure, she'd been attracted to some of the few men she'd had contact with before, but never with such intensity. Never so that she could feel his hands on her whenever she thought of him, feel his breath on her face, taste him in her mouth.
Sometimes she would remember what she'd been told by Miss Daae and La Carlotta: He's dangerous. He's killed. Before, Winifred barely gave these warnings a second thought. She fully believed that, if her life were ever in danger, she would be able to protect herself or escape. It wasn't until she believed that she was safe from him that she began to worry- that was when her fantasies took a turn for the worst. He would reach her room, take her in his arms and, together, they would descend the staircase. But when they reached the bottom, there would be no angry shouts from Winifred's father. Instead, she would see him sitting at his desk in his study, Bible in hand, and a bloody knife through his chest, staring back at her through empty eyes.
However, Winifred did not like these thoughts, so she pushed them from her mind.