A/N: Readers, because I am in such a good mood, you get two chapters tonight. This one may be subject to change. R&R, s'il vous plait.
A Dare
The next day, Charles and Jacques Varens came a-calling. I had no desire to see them just then, so I made myself extremely scarce. I didn't bother eavesdropping, because I knew what they would say. I also knew that if Adele had decided she would sing, she would sing one day. She had decided that, so she would sing, for better or worse. When the Varens pair left, I returned to the room. Adele was sitting against the headboard, looking thoughtful.
"Papa," she said when I entered, though I was quite sure she had not seen me, "what do you think of Mme. Giry?"
I looked sharply at her. I did not like the question. "Why do you want to know?"
"Just because," she said innocently.
"Well, then. You may consider yourself sworn to secrecy…or don't bother. I'm sure she knows." I sat on her table and steepled my fingers in the way that annoys Adele to the point that she thinks it should be a capital offense. "I taught her to sing and dance, at her mother's request. She was never good at singing. I called her Meglet, and I teased her all the time—I'm five years older than her, and infinitely more talented." Adele rolled her eyes. "She was always in love with me, no matter what I did." I paused, remembering one day when Meglet was thirteen and I had gotten annoyed with her batting her eyelashes. I had dared her to kiss me, and she had run from the room, sobbing. "I stopped teaching her when she was fourteen. A year later, I met Christine."
"That is a nice story, Papa, but it does not answer my question."
"I don't love her, Adele. There it is."
"Fine, have it your way." She looked unconvinced.
"I will, thank you." I picked up a piece of paper that sat on the table in a pile of papers like it. This one Adele had been composing on. I hummed it. It was pretty.
"Put that down. Now." I did. "It isn't finished, Papa. Until it is, nobody will read it." She coughed, then determinedly stopped. "I think, Papa, that you should find out what Meg thinks of you. I am quite convinced she still loves you."
"Accepted, but…." But I don't want her to remind me of Christine.
"You should think about it," she said firmly.
Later, I was below. Isabella had come to visit Adele, and I had left. I sat at my desk, slowly drawing notes on the piano score for the finished skeleton of an opera. Slowly because I was thinking of other things, namely Meg. Finally, the snail-pace of my progress annoyed me. I put down my pen.
"Should I go see Meg?" I asked the monkey I had on my desk. After a moment like a pause for thought, it began to play, its papier-mâché head bobbing up and down, up and down, its cymbals clinking in time to the music. The music slowed to a halt.
"A yes, I suppose." I put my pen on its sponge to keep it from messing all over the desk, put on my sword and most dramatic black cape, and poled across the lake to the passage that led to Meg's room. She was humming something, I heard, as I approached her room from the Heavens. I knew that tune—I had composed it for Christine. It was Angel of Music. Somebody had been listening in, it seemed.
Meg hummed one line, then I hummed the next. She stopped abruptly.
"Erik, what do you want?" she asked loudly.
I dropped through the ceiling, landing in a blue chair. Meg's room was brightly colored, fantastic, and badly lit, as it had always been and most opera girls' rooms were. I hadn't been in here in years. "I want," I said slowly, "to know what you think of me."
Meg blushed furiously, and her pen jerked—she had been writing a letter. "You don't need to ask me that, do you?"
"We haven't talked much in the last dozen years, Meglet. I rather do."
Slowly, she wrote a few letters in her letter. Her blush increased, and I waited patiently. "If you dared me to kiss you right now—" we were thinking along the same lines, there— "I would do it." She put her letter aside and looked at me with a sort of sheepish challenge in her eyes. "Would you?"
"I don't know." I was my turn to blush, and I looked down. Suddenly there was a hand on my chin, forcing me to look at the face that was six inches away from mine. I could feel the heat radiating from it.
Meg's eyes bored triumphantly into mine. I leaned back a little for breathing room. "I dare you," she hissed.
"You dare me." I was trying very hard not to laugh. It was not that I was laughing at her, but it was an immensely funny situation.
"I dare you."
I tried to look away, but it was impossible. "I suppose I don't have much choice in the matter, then."
"None whatsoever."
So I kissed her. What else could I have done? I found that I liked it. It was strangely different from Christine's kisses, and I think I know why. I had been Christine's Angel of Music; ineffable, mysterious, and melodramatic. I was Meg's childhood friend who had been asked to teach her things and had teased her as much as any schoolboy would have. They are, I think, very different things, and are kissed in different ways.
When I left, I was laughing hysterically. The laughter I had been suppressing had burst, Meg had caught it, and I had left. What would Adele think? Well, I had to tell her at any rate. I twitched my cloak (it had fallen off one shoulder) and straightened my mask, and set off to Adele's. I didn't notice until I was in the room that Isabella was still there. The two of them were playing chess. Adele saw me, giggled, and held out a hand to Isabella as if telling her to give something up. Isabella sighed. She took a jeweled hairpin out of her hair and gave it to Adele, who stuck it in her own hair.
"We had a bet, Papa," she explained briskly. "Bella bet her hairpin that you wouldn't go see Meg."
"I saw Meg," I grumbled.
"How did it go?" Isabella asked, moving a knight to H3 and taking out a pawn.
"Well…enough. Adele, take her knight. Put her in check."
Adele examined the board. "What? I don't see it. Oh, yes. Stupid." She took the knight off the contested square. "Check. Kissed her, did you?"
"I don't want to talk about it."
"Don't you, now?" Adele said slyly. "Girls are often more sensible about these things than boys—men—what you will."
"Really?" I thought back to Christine. She had fallen wildly in love with a masked composer who carried her off to a cold, dark island in the Paris sewers, and then with a fop she hadn't seen in ten years. So girls were sensible?
The sisters looked insulted. "Have it your way, then," Adele snapped. "Checkmate."
"Lita, stop it. That's the third time in an hour."
I left without a word. I had some thinking to do.