Page 55 of Our Strange Duet

How could he sit there, cheerfully sipping wine and suggesting dessert and acting as though he’d not just stabbed me, wounding me to my core?

“I’ll get there on my own, thank you,” I said, and my iciness jolted him from his self-satisfied reverie.

He frowned, his eyebrows knitting together to form a worried line. “Oh, Christine, you misunderstand me! I…I know that you could. That you will. I only wanted to offer you my assistance. My…support. There’s not a single member of last night’s audience who was not blown away by your charms and the power of your voice. It was an inspired performance, to be sure, and I…I only meant that I’d do anything I could to help you achieve your dreams quickly. Christine, I…I would move heaven and earth if it would make you smile. I only wish to see you fulfilled, happy. Happily fulfilled.” He offered an apologetic smile. “I have every faith in you and never meant to imply otherwise.”

“Why?” I dared to ask, reveling in my impertinence, basking in the flaring flames of righteous indignation which licked up my spine. “Why would you do any of that? We haven’t seen each other in so many years, Raoul, and our situations…they’re so different than they were.”

“They are,” he agreed heartily.

I paused, feeling like a sailboat without wind. I’d expected a fight. My blood rushed with anticipation of the verbal sparring I’d been certain was to come. But there was no sign of friction or discord. He looked completely at ease.

“Well, yes,” I fumbled, unsure of how I’d so quickly won an argument that had never happened.

“Yes. Right. Everything is different now. I am no longer at my parents’ beck and call. I am not a slave to their whims. I don’t have to leave the pretty girl just because they say the holiday has ended.” He reached across the table and took my hand. From the periphery of my vision, I could sense other patrons glancing our way, curious at the man making such a public spectacle before them. “Christine, our holiday doesn’t have to end. Not now. Not ever.”

I tugged my fingers free, feeling like a skittish doe. “What are you saying?”

Raoul studied the awning above us as if he might find the proper words hidden along the lilac-covered beams. “I’m saying that…all those years ago, I wished our summer hadn’t come to an end. I’m saying that I’m overjoyed our paths have now crossed once more. I’m saying that…” His eyes fell on me, flashing with sudden inspiration. “It’s the twenty-eighth of June.”

I scrunched my face, trying to sort out what day it was and what that had anything to do with the conversation at hand. “It is…”

Raoul squeezed my hand. “Don’t you see? It’s summer! We can pick up exactly where we left everything back then. No more years of wayward letters and wondering. Just us and…”

“Summer,” I supplied.

He nodded excitedly, looking incandescent. “What do you say?”

I knew what I was supposed to say. I knew exactly what the Angel of Music would want and expect of me.

But the Angel of Music wasn’t here. He wasn’t sitting in front of a handsome man, listening as he pledged to me the sweetest, most earnest words. He didn’t feel the way my heart swelled, whole and complete for the first time since Father had passed away. He wasn’t basking in the sunlit, halcyon hues of Raoul de Chagny’s smile.

It was becoming increasingly clear to me that the Angel of Music—or the Opera Ghost, or the Phantom of the Opera, or whatever moniker Erik chose to give himself—was more mortal than I’d ever believed. He was a man of flesh and blood, not a divine presence of holy powers and heaven-blessed magnitude. He was a man, bound to the opera, a man who stayed in the shadows. And though he’d taught me to sing like an angel, I now had grave doubts that my father had ever sent him my way.

There were too many stories. Too many coincidences. It was all too much, and I didn’t know what to believe or who to trust.

Except…

Except for the wonderfully warm man sitting in front of me.

He had a way of making my heart and spirits rise whenever I was in his presence. With him, I experienced an ease I’d not felt in years. Was it so wrong to want that? Would it be so terrible to seek such peace again and again?

I didn’t believe so.

And so, I did something terrible, reasoning my treachery away by telling myself that I could have both my sunshine and my shadows and that never the two would know. Erik was not the omnipotent power he’d led me to believe, and Raoul didn’t traffic in ghosts.

I smiled up at Raoul now, beaming at him like the lovestruck schoolgirl he’d once made me, and set the wheels in motion, casting my die, and forging us all down an irrevocable path.

“All right,” I agreed, awash in the sweetest affection. “Let’s summer.”

Chapter 19

Our summer merriment didn’t last long.

Il Muto rehearsals began in earnest, and though Serafimo had no lines to be said or songs to be sung, he was in so much of the opera, sneaking in and out of armoires and hidden doors, I found myself putting in just as many hours at the theatre as I had when I was in the corps.

The days were long and hard. Carlotta made no attempt to rein in her disgust for me, even going as far as to loudly suggest the only reason I had this role at all was because Raoul de Chagny had taken me as his lover.

If my position hadn’t felt so precarious, I would have laughed right in her overly rouged face.