Christine pouted to herself as she stalked out of the Opera House. He wanted her to go to dinner with Raoul? Very well then, so be it. She ordered a telegram sent to the address on the card Raoul had given her and informed him that she would accept his invitation to dinner the following night after all. By the time she had sent it and completed her other errands out and finally found herself in her room again, her haughty pouting had turned to mournful moping.
She didn't want to go through with this sham of a dinner date, but she didn't know what else she could do. She had turned down suitor after suitor for over a year, but still no real sign of interest from Erik. It's because she was being terribly silly, she scolded herself. Why, she was behaving like a schoolgirl over this! She had let her silly crush on her tutor go on long enough. He didn't think of her in that way and that was that. It was surely better to come to terms with that now than to continue on for who knows how many years, turning down every offer simply because they were not her Angel of Music. She sniffed against the handful of tears that insisted on rolling down her cheeks as she brushed her hair and prepared for bed.
She had spent a year - a whole year! - pining over that man once she had realized what her feelings were. It had been such a gradual realization, even that had taken her months to understand that her feelings towards him had shifted. It had snuck up her unannounced somewhere along the lines, for it certainly hadn't been there at the beginning.
Christine had always pictured love to be like in the fairy stories her papa had told to her, you would know, and you would know that you knew - when you saw them, it would be love at first sight and there would no questions about that or second guessing if it was meant to be.
But when she had first seen Erik, there was no heavenly chorus, no haze of infatuation nor Cupid's arrows piercing her heart. There was simply curiosity over the strange, reclusive young man that was rumored to live in the basements of the Opera House, who was a musical genius but surely couldn't be over the age of thirty - curiosity over the form that supplied the voice that had been teaching her voice lessons for several months at that point.
When finally he consented to appear before her, she had found him rather shy and while this was endearing, she most certainly did not have those kinds of feelings for him. They both got along quite well - certainly he would not agreed to spend so much time around her face-to-face (as it were) if they did not share a kind of rapport with each other. She would like to think that over the two years that followed they had become friends of sorts - he was professional as her tutor and very respectful as her friend.
In truth, she did not fully know when exactly her feelings grew from kind friendship to secret love, but she thought it must have been sometime during that third year. Even then she had tried to rationalize it - she enjoyed his company, yes, he was an enjoyable person to be around once he was no longer shy! She found her thoughts would wander to him during the days she didn't have lessons - but of course one wonders what their friends are up to every now and then! But there was no accounting for those few times when out with another boy the unbidden thought would arrive that really, wouldn't this outing be so much more fun with Erik instead? And there was not any other explanation for those tingles she would feel when on rare occasions he found her lesson necessitated him to touch her - a hand on her shoulder to tell her not to tense, a brush of fingers across her ribs to remind her to keep her muscles there engaged - and there most certainly was no other possible explanation for the fact that she would, on occasion, purposely let her posture go in the hopes of such a correction.
Yes, it had taken her a while to realize her feelings, but even more inscrutable were his own feelings. She had a number of reasons to think that he cared for her in a way that went beyond just their lessons, but she wavered between calling those things proof or just wishful thinking. He called her 'my dear', for one, but in truth she had never heard him to talk to anyone else to be able to judge what if anything she should read into that. Perhaps he was just a gentleman - for all she knew, he called Madame Giry that too - perhaps he even called Andre and Firmin that, too! She didn't know anyone else who spent very much time around him to ask, either. And that was the second reason - he willingly spent so much time around her. The man was a recluse, after all, and yet he had no issue spending up to several hours a day nearly every day in the same room with her. He truly seemed to care for her, listening to her tell stories about her life or idle gossip after her lessons were over, following up on things she had mentioned worrying over days ago and so on, but perhaps that was merely entertainment for a lonely man - no different than how she'd read the newspaper and then toss it away.
How many months had she longed to know the answer to how he felt about her? And now suddenly she had the most damning piece of evidence in the case against what she had hoped. He wouldn't have been pushing her towards Raoul if he loved her. That was that. It was over now, wasn't it? It was all over. She'd go to dinner with Raoul tomorrow night and start a new chapter in her life then.
She got in her bed and pulled her blanket up to her chin, tossing and turning miserably. She let her mind wander back to those early days, back when she first met him.