Finis
"Do you take this woman to be your lawfully wedded wife?"
"I do."
She could see him silhouetted before her, distant and yet close enough to smell, to feel the very vibrations of his vocal chords against her skin.
"And do you take this man to be your lawfully wedded husband?"
Silence.
Damn it, where is that little wretch? Christine tried to edge a little closer without moving into the candlelight.
"Well, Christine?"
He was standing right next to her. She didn't know how he had done it, but somehow he had completely cut away the distance between them. Or did I bring us so close? And now I can hear him breathing…
"Christine?"
"I do," she whispered. She was not exactly sure to whom she was whispering, whether this was for real, whether she wasn't about to wake up with a damp face and smeared make-up, or if she had hanged herself in the lavatory at the Opera House, but she knew that the answer would always be yes.
Erik didn't wait for the priest to finish the service. He was suddenly before Christine, and, tilting her face towards his—his true face, unpolished by mask or makeup—and kissed her gently on the lips. His lips were whispering to her apologies, serenades, love poems, desires, hopes—she listened to them all, never even pausing to breath as they kissed there in the darkness.
"Erik… I love you."
Raoul never found them. No one asked the two new singers at the Theater in Rome of their past, or their interesting circumstances. They kept little company apart from themselves.
They were past the point of no return, and they never looked back.