Chapter Ten: Uncertain Touch

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Eric

The young woman had laid her head to rest only inches from my aching fingers.

How had she gotten so close?

Did I truly care?

The deep brown of her soft hair blushed faintly in the dim lights of the stage. The gentle rippling of the soft tresses mimicked the ocean's waves. How I longed to touch it, to touch her! It would be so easy! There was a small opening in the dark recesses of the statues draped clothing; my lean wrist could slip through it with room to spare. Merely considering such an action triggered my body's reflexes, for my abdomen clenched violently, and a fire steadily grew behind my eyes, threatening to set my sockets ablaze. The very thought of a whispered caress brought a thousand longings and fears back to life within me.

All my days, it had been a shining aspiration, an inextinguishable aim that I could neither achieve nor let go of, a double edged sword of desire and terror. My cursed flesh had never been blessed with the divine sensation of another's skin upon my own, save for in the brief moments of death. No one had ever willingly given me such a gift, to be sure!

My mother was the first of many to shy away from me and my touch, and it was it at her hand that I grew to fear the touch of another. I had prayed and labored ceaselessly to somehow attain a gesture of love from her hands. As a small boy, I had done everything in my power to wrench the act from her, but none of my efforts ever came to fruition. It took nearly eleven torturous years before I was forced to admit that my dream was impossible, and to escape from that house that concealed a pale foreshadowing of hell.

I should have known that the rest of the world would be no better, but I was a naive little fool, and took my chances with the gypsies only to find myself sold in Asia to the famous De Tham. Still, I kept that dream of love, of touch, alive on a breath and a half hearted prayer through my difficult initiation into another life, even through the heartbreaking encounter with Mitra.

I had loved her the instant that I saw her, but I should have known that a monster such as I would never deserve such beauty. Despite the fear of contact that my mother had so adamantly instilled in me in my youth, Mitra's loveliness had made me want to hope again, to try again. And try I did, yet in the end I found only another heartache.

The memories, the pain that all my labors had brought me forced me to hesitate in my desire to touch this girl. I longed to with every fiber of my being. I could not bring myself to be open to so much potential agony. I was trapped in a terrible spectrum of fear and want.

Yet need and hope still fluttered within.

"She is in your Opera House. You can do what ever you want." A small, sly voice whispered to me. "She is yours."

I could no longer contain myself.

Slowly, ever so slowly, I reached an imploring hand towards her. The heat in my skull pulsated, displaying all the erotic fantasies I had ever dared to dream of.

As I touched her, she would sigh quietly in pleasure. Then she would gently stir at my caress, wondering with delight as I emerged from the shadows. I would silently beckon her to draw near to me, and she would willingly…

A brusque bang of the box door interrupted our invented interlude, halting my fingers just centimeters from her sweet mane. She groggily lifted her head, just barely missing the brush of my glove.

Who would DARE?

This audacious intruder would pay a high price for ruining my plans. The clammy warmth in my stomach promptly rose to the cavern of my chest, fueling my anger.

Until I recognized the figure in the door.

At any other time I would have found the sight highly amusing. Her disheveled state was a definite first in my days at the Populaire. She prided herself on her well kempt appearance, taking silent strength in her impassable façade of dignity. Her hair was a tangle, pulled into a hasty braid of bronze and a peppering of gray. Her high necked woolen shift was primly covered by a serviceable robe. No wonder she was in her night things, I thought as I glanced at my pocket watch. It was nearly one in the morning.

Now I could only bite my lip and restrain my lunging anger on a chokehold leash.

Giry's wife darted in to gather my young guest with a few muted words of mild reproach for breaking curfew unaware that only her name had saved her from a painful demise.

"Child, why aren't you in bed with the rest of the girls?"

The girl sleepily blinked, trying to focus on the stern woman next to her.

"Oh, Madame!" She exclaimed guiltily. "I couldn't sleep, so I was listening to the rehe…"

"Never mind that now. Come with me to the dormitories. I need you to do something." Antoinette replied in an unusually supplicational tone that was wrought with tension and weariness.

"So she is a dancer then." I mused as I attempted once again to put a name to her face. I slowly admitted to myself that it was for the best that I had been stopped, though I hated to do so. I wanted so badly to touch, to hold, to be loved, yet I knew that I was a fool for continuing my hope. It was better this way.

Absorbed by the mystery of her retreating form and saddened by the truth, I slipped into the narrow passage that would take me near to the dormitories. While stalking my unsuspicious prey, I silently thanked the man who had made these tunnels possible. Not only had he given me the means to travel unseen in my domain, he had also saved me from making a kill tonight. Most of my thoughts, however, were focused on the back of my quarry. It seemed that ages passed during their journey to the dormitories.

At last, Antoinette stopped outside one of the bedroom doors, ending the suspense.

Leah

My sleepy bearings were gone in a twinkling once Madame's puzzling request had snagged the threads of my curiosity.

As we made the winding trek to the dormitory hall, I half expected her to lecture me on curfew or inform me that I had earned myself extra hours of exercise. Instead, she mutely led me to the unused room next to ours. My interest spiked, she refrained from opening the door. Turning to me, she spoke in no more than a whisper.

"Child," she began, "I have decided to place you in a new room."

A tide of questions roared inside my skull. Why? Have I done something wrong? Have I displeased her? Are Beth and Meg sick of…

They were interrupted and cut short as my instructor continued.

"A new student has been accepted to the academy tonight, and I wish for you to room with the girl."

Still mildly perturbed by my estrangement from my friends, I began to wonder just who this girl was. She must have been important to be admitted in the middle of the night. But what did that have to do with me?

"As you know, Leah, normally the entrance procedures take several days. This, however, was an unusual, and rather difficult, circumstance."

I narrowed my eyes and raised my eyebrows, trying to understand what she was telling me.

"She has just been through a very difficult loss, and I have high hopes that you will be able to comfort her and make her feel at home."

Comfort her? Make her feel at home? I had no idea how to even begin! I had never done anything like this before. Why had she chosen me? And what circumstances would push her to be so careful with this girl?

"What kind of lo…" I began without thinking.

Madame turned sharply to me, and spoke in a tone that was even more quiet.

"Her father died." She muttered. "She is an orphan now. Completely alone. She needs a shoulder to cry on."

"Oh God!" I half prayed. "What am I supposed to do? I don't even have a father. How could I possibly know what to say?"

I desperately searched for some way to avoid Madame's plan, but she had already cracked open the door.

"Child," Mme. murmured gently, "this is your roommate, Leah."

She was uncharacteristically calm and affectionate around the large bed's sole occupant. Had I not been fixated on the girl myself, I might have laughed out loud at how strange it was to see my ballet mistress being so very motherly. She gave the girl an encouraging rub on the back, and then stood up.

And with that, she was gone.

I stood motionless in the middle of the minuscule room, unable to move any part of my body for fear of upsetting the little girl any more than she already was. I could only look at her and sense the awkward tension in the room.

My tongue had melted fast to the roof of my mouth.

She was younger than I, perhaps no older than Meg. But I couldn't be sure. She was so tiny that pinpointing any age was difficult. She was so frail that it seemed she might float away with a puff of breath, like a wispy cloud slumped over on our dark brown quilt.

Her colorless face seemed to have been drained of life, like the victim of a fairytale vampire. Her untidy hair hung limply at the sides of her face, edging her features in a frame of dark blond. Her tears had long since dried into brittle tracts on her creamy cheeks, drawing my gaze to her shy, down cast lashes and sad, lost little blue eyes. She gave a minuscule hiccup as another tear dropped off the tip of her nose, joining a puddle in her lap.

I'll never know just why it happened. Maybe Beth's compassionate attitude had finally made an impression on me. Maybe it was the gradual weakening of all my defenses. Perhaps it was because I understood what it was like to feel the absence of a father. The answer could even have been as simple as a surge of hormones. Looking back, I can't be sure.

However it was managed, the fact of the matter was that the last wall I had built to protect my heart finally came crashing down, rousing my legs from their paralyzed condition. With each quiet step closer to the bed, I became more determined to get her to stop crying.

The bed groaned at the added weight as I shifted myself onto the bed. Still unused to comforting, I felt terribly ill at ease as we continued to stare at one another in silence.

"Ahm, hello… I'm Leah."

"My name is Christine." Said the little rumpled girl with a slightly broken accent as she began to sniffle again.

"Why are you crying?"

Her little red eyes began to pucker up again, but to my relief she didn't burst out in another fit. "My papa went to heaven, but I didn't want him to."

"Oh." Well, what on earth was I to say to that?

Unfortunately, little Christine took the newest awkward silence as a cue to begin crying again. She leaned into my shoulder, clutching my chest as though I were the last threshold separating her from oblivion. A fresh shower of tears fell on the pale pink lace of my blouse. Each little sob hit me like a knife in the side, filling me with empathy, and I did the only thing I could do.

I began to cry with her.

I cried for the sorry state of the world, that someone so needed could be so easily taken from it. I cried for a little girl who would never again know what it was to feel her papa's proud smile beaming down on her.

And for the little girl who never had.

It was some time before either of us could stop, but when we did, any self consciousness was gone between us. I slowly began to cheer her up with jokes, and read to her from my favorite book, a collection of fairytales that Abuelo had given me just the year before. We passed several hours that way, reading and telling each other about the families that we missed, before falling asleep.

Eric

I saw them fall asleep there.

I had been unable to pull myself away from the sight of that tiny crying girl. The look in her eyes tore into the harden scabs on my soul, divulging the secrets of my past without even a spoken word. Every scar that I had bandaged with the bitterness of my life laid bleeding and raw in the harsh light of another's sorrow. For the first time in nearly twenty years, my face felt the damp strokes of tears. The loneliness of this nameless nymph faintly echoed the hurt in my twisted excuse for a childhood.

I ached to soothe away her pain. To hold her as that Leah chit did now. My previous desires for the little ballerina were all but forgotten in the wake of the friendless heart in her arms. I wanted to save her from her misery. To scale the walls of the tower of her sadness and play the charming prince to her Rapunzel.

I decided that somehow I would ease her heartache.

If only I could figure out how.

Authoress's notes:

Ok, I'm not sure if hormones had been discovered yet. So sue me.

Yep, my Christine is not movie based when it comes to looks. I figured blond and blue eyed fit the whole Swedish immigrant idea a little better than the whole massive mop of brown curls thing. Not dissing the movie or the musical mind you, though both had their pros and cons, I always kind of thought of her as a blond. I always felt it made her a little more innocent, angelic, and/or childlike. But hey, whatever floats your boat!

Also, I know I ought to apologize for the really descriptive, short chapter when every one tends to tell me to get on with the plot. But I'm not going to! I like this chapter and I felt I needed it, so turnips to you! But don't take it to heart dears, next chapter will probably be another more plot focused affair.