Chapter Text
They always put the cheapest candy on the highest shelf.
Christine Daaé, elementary school music teacher and somewhat reluctant participant in Garnier’s annual Student Trick-or-Treat Night, rubbed her eyes, trying to get them to focus on anything through the thick yellow glare of fluorescent lights. She compared price labels again. Pretended for a few seconds that she could just grab a bag of name brand candy on the shelf right in front of her — grab it and pay for it and not shoot her already tight budget for this month to hell. Even if the school had been reimbursing her, she wouldn’t receive the payment in anything resembling a timely fashion. She let out a sigh that was also half grumble.
Her grocery store was especially dead today, and even after peeking around several of the surrounding aisles, Christine couldn’t find a worker to help her. She returned to her post before the mountainous shelves of plastic-wrapped candies, still practically overflowing even so close to Halloween. She considered climbing the bags, scaling the shelves to get at the one she wanted. Unless she learned to fly in the next few minutes, that was her best option. Fifteen dollars for a two hundred count bag that sat at least a foot above her arm’s reach, vs thirty for one-fifty right at eye level. Whoever had designed the aisle to be stocked this way was a devious bastard. A very smart, devious bastard.
But Christine was her own kind of devious, and stubborn, to boot, and if she was being made to purchase candy for the school out of her own ever-shrinking pocket, she’d be damned if she paid top dollar. No one was around, anyway. She checked to make sure her headband was still corralling her mass of bushy brown hair, pushed the sleeves of her blouse up to her elbows with no shortage of determined vehemence, and hiked one sneakered sole up onto perforated metal—
Argghruehazfhvhhjjjj
Somewhere nearby, an animal was dying a particularly anguished death. Christine let out a yelp and just barely avoided falling flat on her back onto the cracked linoleum floor. When she’d regained her footing, she looked around, wildly, for the source of that ungodly noise.
Something sizable was huddled at the end of the aisle. Christine blinked fluorescent out of her eyes again, pushing her glasses up the bridge of her nose and cursing her astigmatism. Cursing doubly her healthcare plan, that expensive mess that wouldn’t even cover the cost of an anti-glare treatment for her lenses. Not like she needed them to see or anything.
“Are you okay?” she called. Her voice was more tentative than she’d like, but, again, the mass of black fabric at the end of the aisle could have belonged to a person or a creature from the depths of hell, who knew. Her eyes certainly didn’t.
A hand shot out of the thing, a hand pale and painfully thin, and waved itself around once, twice, three times, as if warning her away. Well, then.
“Don’t worry, I’m not coming over,” Christine said. As if she would. She possessed some sense of self-preservation, after all. “But holler if you need anything.” That seemed like the conscientious thing to do: offer help to the vague shape with a hand like death warmed over. With any luck, she wouldn’t have to follow through, and thus she could stay thoroughly and incandescently not-murdered. At least for today.
Christine looked up at the collection of candy, the bag she wanted still so far out of reach. It didn’t feel like an especially smart thing to scale grocery store property with a cryptid hunched over only feet away from you. She should probably go wander through the frozen section for a bit, give them both time and space and hope the aisle was clear when she returned. Instead, Christine closed her eyes and threw her head back, grumbling her biggest sigh yet.
It wasn’t that she didn’t want to help facilitate the Trick-or-Treat Night; she’d put her name up for it weeks ago. But she hadn’t made the original cut. She was too young or too new, or only a music teacher, or something. No one had bothered coming up with a satisfactory answer, and she’d figured out by this point she wasn’t going to get one. It was only this morning that Principal Giudicelli, in all her infuriating, gorgeous glory, swayed into her path and informed Christine that her presence was needed that very night. A fifth grade teacher was ill and they needed another pair of hands, desperately. These things did happen, you know, and wouldn’t Christine be her usual flexible self and drop everything to pitch in and help her Garnier School Family in its time of need? And their supply of candy to give out to the kids really was lacking, unfortunately, so wouldn’t she be a dear and pick up a bag or two on her way? Thanks so much!
If her any and every shot at the barest possibility of tenure didn’t depend on kissing ass til kingdom come, Christine would have told Carlotta to shove it. Shove it back up into her mass of beautiful red curls that always sat perfectly atop her head. Christine wanted to take each carefully-placed pin out of those curls and run her fingers through them until they looked like a damn bird’s nest.
Hate and love danced a weird and fraught razor’s edge in her mind, she was finding.
It was fine. It was all fine. All Christine had to do was wait a bit longer, hike herself up private property to grab a bag of candy she didn’t really have the money to buy, bring said bag to an event she hadn’t had time to prepare for, and get through the night from there. Maybe it’d be a good idea to go through the grocery store’s paltry Halloween accessory section before she checked out. She didn’t have a costume ready, but when in doubt: cat ears. She might even have a half-dead eyeliner pencil kicking around her free-with-purchase tote bag she could use to draw whiskers. Okay. Yes. Not ideal, but it was at least fine. It would all work out, one way or another.
Her eyes still closed, Christine didn’t realize the cryptid had moved until plastic crackled its distinct, crunchy crackle above her.
“Was this the bag you wanted?”
If she’d been any other person, and it had been any other voice posing the question, Christine would have shrieked in surprise, in terror at being snuck up on. But she’d always been a sucker for a voice like velvet, a voice that caressed the soft flesh of her cheek and wrapped its long fingers around the column of her spine, vertebrae by vertebrae. A voice that broke her body apart and held more than a hint of the possibility of dangerous, licentious, unspeakable things to come.
She was a bit of a freak, okay?
But she put aside the thought of taking that voice and doing her own unspeakable things to it as she opened her eyes and met its owner.
Ah. Interesting.
She’d thought “cryptid” was a mite hyperbolic, but no, she’d been correct. The voice belonged to a man so tall he reached the top shelf with ease; indeed, he’d already taken one of her coveted candy bags down from its resting place and held it before her. Like a peace offering. Like he was apologizing for darkening her doorway. His shoulders hunched inward, as if he wished to minimize himself, blot his great height away like a smudge under her thumb, and when she craned her neck to look him in the eye, he flinched.
She didn’t want that voice to flinch. Without a lick of thought, Christine reached for the candy, the tips of her fingers brushing the back of the man’s blue-veined hand. His breath hitched, violent and alarming.
And also, to Christine’s mounting self-consciousness, sexy as hell.
Had she mentioned he was wearing a mask?
“You’re very in the spirit of things,” Christine blurted out. And then, when the strange man, thin as a rail and twice as tall, listed his head in obvious confusion: “Your mask, I mean.” She gestured to her own face, as if that would help clarify. “And your cloak. And all the black. Very spooky.” As if watching in horror from someplace outside her body, Christine used her free hand, the one not holding the giant bag of candy — “200 pieces for only $15!!!” — to perform the saddest imitation of half-hearted jazz hands she’d ever seen. “Happy Halloween, right?”
Christine had never wished so deeply for the Earth to open up and swallow her whole.
Behind his black mask, the man’s eyes had widened to the size of saucers. “Happy Halloween,” he repeated, slowly, as if in a daze. And as he did so, he leaned down, looming over Christine in a manner that made her feel small and vulnerable and strangely even more ready to jump this weird man’s bones. “You’re odd,” he murmured. Was that . . . admiration in his tone? “Would you like to get coffee sometime?”
The two sentences seemed so totally incongruent, so absolutely incompatible, that Christine’s brain did a funny sort of short-circuiting, and so it took several moments after the fact for her to register her almost instantaneous agreement. The man looked as surprised at her acceptance of his offer as she did.
“Ah, well,” he said. He straightened, skeletal hands fidgeting at his sides as if he hadn’t the foggiest idea of what to do with them. “That never works.”
“You do this regularly? Proposition people in grocery stores?”
“‘Proposition’ is not the word I would use, exactly.” Christine felt her cheeks heat at the way he emphasized that one little word, the way his lips, peeking out from the bottom edge of his mask, shaped each syllable. She wanted to look away, but found she could not. He continued. “But no. You’re the first. But I’d assume it wouldn’t work often.” A long, languid gesture to his person. “I look like this every day of the year.”
“Ah.”
“Would coffee still suit you?”
Christine licked her lips, swallowed the rising lump in her throat, noted the way he watched her every minuscule movement with rapt attention, with near preternatural focus, as if her answer was a matter of life and death. Well, what the hell.
“Sure.”
Why did it feel like she’d signed some pact with the devil? But she thought it might be worth it, just to have caused this peculiar person to smile as he did now, a toothy grin that was endearing in its awkwardness. It looked out of place, like the muscles of his face she could spot hadn’t had much practice with such a happy expression.
Damn it, Christine. She was also such a sucker for a pathetic man.
“Let’s exchange numbers,” she said. That seemed like the natural next step, right? She shifted the candy into the crook of her arm, trying to get at the cell phone that lay somewhere in the ruin that was the bottom of her tote bag. She’d just grasped it when the man waved his hand.
“No need,” he said. “I shall find you.”
“Excuse me?”
And then, in the middle of the grocery store aisle, in full view of anybody who might be walking by, he bowed. Bent low at the waist and swept his cloak out in a flourish and bowed to her.
“Until next we meet, my dear.”
And then he was gone. Just up and vanished in a literal blink of Christine’s eye. She whipped her head around, speed-walked to the end of the aisle. Beyond the checkout lanes, past the automated doors, and well into the faded asphalt parking lot, she saw a creature of lanky legs and dark black hair racing away on foot, cloak flowing behind it like the wings of a bat.
“You’re going to kill me.”
Christine flopped into the rolling chair tucked behind Meg’s desk, traveling a few unintentional inches as she did so. Her friend raised an eyebrow. Dressed as Mary Poppins for the night, frilly white dress and hat, parasol and all, Meg’s resemblance to Dame Julie was uncanny. And also a world away from Christine’s sad sequined cat ears and hastily-scribbled whiskers. What a difference actual time to prepare made.
“I agreed to go on a date with a weirdo.”
“Again?”
Christine slumped lower into the chair. She considered protesting that he’d seemed normal at first. But that would be a straight-up lie. And she wouldn’t lie to her oldest and best friend, the one who’d actually used her husband’s local influence for good, to help nudge the board toward hiring Christine for this job in the first place. She owed so much to Meg de Chagny. The love of her life, platonic or otherwise. Christine reached over and tapped the top of Meg’s Miss Frizzle bobblehead. The orange-haired figure’s smile wobbled in and out of focus, and Christine rubbed her eyes, forgetting the thick coat of mascara she’d applied only minutes ago.
“Shit.”
“Language, Miss Daaé,” said a voice from the open classroom doorway, and Christine shot up in her seat. Just her luck. Principal Giudicelli catching her an absolute mess. The smile plastered on the woman’s face didn’t falter, though her eyes flashed with an iciness that made Christine shiver for all the wrong reasons. “The students will be arriving any moment.”
Carlotta cast a far different, far more approving glance at Meg. “Mrs. de Chagny, you’ve outdone yourself this year.”
“Oh, it was nothing, really,” Meg laughed, twirling her parasol. The picture of perfection. Christine stifled the urge to roll her eyes. Meg, too, burned with the desire for tenure and full benefits. As Carlotta floated to the next classroom on her rounds, Christine lobbed an eraser — some barely-functional little thing in the shape of a flower, some prize meant for a student’s perfect quiz score — at her friend.
“Suck up.”
“I have absolutely no idea what you mean.”
The two women grinned at each other over the carefully-organized chaos of Meg’s desk.
When she’d returned to the school that night, it’d become even more obvious Christine had only been added at the last minute to bolster the event’s candy supply. The planning committee hadn’t so much as pretended to have assigned her a classroom to hand out treats; she didn’t merit one of her own, after all.
She, being a music teacher, found herself incredibly low in the despotic pecking order, and the school district, being a lethal combination of both cheap and deeply unappreciative of the arts, had deemed her only worthy of a cart. A multi-leveled cart, piled high with decade-old music textbooks and beat-up instruments — tambourines and rainmakers and other sorts of random objects kids from kindergarten to sixth grade could all make use of — and the keyboard she’d thrifted back in undergrad and dragged around with her ever since. Every day, Christine pushed the monstrosity from classroom to classroom, the muscles in her arms and back hating her all the while. And to add insult to incredibly possible burgeoning injury, the district had her working at three schools this year, up from the two she’d drudged between previously. So now she had three different carts, in varying states of wheel functionality, with three different sets of materials to juggle and keep track of. It was a system that knew no logic. She sighed and peered into her phone’s front-facing camera, trying to clean up what mascara damage she could.
“Here, let me help.”
And Meg, saint of saints and angel of angels, pulled a package of makeup wipes from the depths of her desk’s drawers. She knelt before Christine, still in her rolling chair, and gently removed Christine’s glasses to better see her face. She set the frames, the nose pads yellowed with old concealer, to the side.
“Your dress will get dirty,” Christine said, but her protest was weak, and Meg smiled, wrapping the wipe around her index finger and reaching up to set to work.
“I’ll brush it off. And once all the lights are low, for maximum spookiness, no one will see, anyway.”
And so a few minutes passed in relative silence, the only noise the faint hum of the halloween playlist the event’s DJ had queued up in the lobby. If she took a shot every time Monster Mash shuffled on in the next few hours, Christine would be mighty drunk before she knew it.
“I don’t know if I can do this, Meg.”
“Go on another date with a weirdo? I think at this point we’ve established that’s your type.”
The black smudges around Christine’s eyes and cheeks removed as well as they could be for the moment, Meg brought her hand back. Christine caught her wrist. She held it, softly, and Meg waited.
“It’s so hard. I didn’t know how hard it would be.”
Christine could be speaking of many things: dating, teaching, bowing and scraping and sucking up to whoever mattered more, smiling with white knuckles to desperately hold on to what she could. She didn’t know exactly which she’d focused on, but probably all of it. Life was so much, and it never got easier, and she never felt ready for any of it.
She envied how resolutely she had decided, in a flash of the divine clarity known best to eight year olds, that when she grew up, she would be a music teacher. She’d brighten the days of her future students, laugh and sing with them, teach them how fun and fascinating the world of music could be. And that was great. She loved that part. She knew she was good at that part. But the rest of it: the politics of who got what teaching position and who was related to whom and all the pointed, awful gossip that flitted between fully grown adults who were supposed to have their students’ best interests in mind but so often did not. It was exhausting.
And Christine, only a few years into her career and with the paltry salary to match, barely had time to think of anything besides keeping herself afloat. She needed to be normal, to massage every ego she could in pursuit of some semblance of stability, but more and more she found herself incapable. How was it possible to have so much of what you always wanted, and yet feel so worn down and overwhelmed.
“I know what you mean,” Meg said, even as Christine knew she did not. Meg was situated nicely in an actual classroom, taught the same solitary set of fourth graders every day, was married to not only the kindest man in the entire county, but also the richest and most connected, more influential than even the Giudicellis. Meg possessed power and privilege and had Carlotta eating out of the palm of her hand. Christine should hate her, not only for having so much of what she did not, but for acting as if she did, truly, understand. But Christine could never hate her. Not in a million years. Their bond was too deep, forged as children on the playground and bound completely in that bed when Christine was sixteen, newly orphaned and wetting the soft cotton of Meg’s t-shirt with her tears.
“I love you, Meg,” she said. And she meant it. She always meant it. The two women clasped hands, tight as they could, as the sounds of elated, shrieking children began to fill the halls.
When Principal Giudicelli’s distinctive shriek reached Christine’s ears an hour or two later, it stemmed from an entirely different reason.
“He’s mad!” Carlotta said, emerald eyes nearly bugging out of her skull. Christine threw a helpless glance over at Meg, busy at her classroom door handing candy piece by piece to tiny fake-muscled Spider-Men and little Elsas unhappy that everyone else had thought to dress as one of the most popular Disney Princesses, too, and ushered the principal to the end of the hall. Where, hopefully, whatever crisis Carlotta was going through would be less likely to be noticed by nosy parents and whispering guardians. That’s all either of them needed: to give the “parents’ rights” idiots more ammo.
“Who’s mad?” Christine asked, voice low. She tried not to think about how this was the closest the two of them had ever been without Carlotta’s default look of sugary disdain etched on her face. In fact, the woman was now staring at Christine as if she were her only hope.
“You’ve got to fix it,” Carlotta said. “He won’t listen to me, I’m at my wit’s end, and you’re always so good at solving problems. So resourceful.” Christine wouldn’t bring up the fact that most of the “problems” in question were ones the district, in particular Carlotta’s husband, the superintendent, had bestowed upon her as if she could spin straw into gold. Or that she was “so resourceful” because the only other option was to deny her students a musical education at all. She thought about bringing it up. But she wouldn’t. She was tempted, oh so tempted. But, one clusterfuck at a time.
“It’s the magician,” Carlotta murmured, regaining control over herself as she realized Christine did, indeed, intend to handle it. “He was a last-minute replacement from the event company. Not entirely vetted for this sort of thing, but I didn’t know that, and now he’s gone and done this, and I don’t know what this means for our insurance, much less the safety of everyone here, and—” Christine squeezed the woman’s hands, just as Meg had squeezed hers, trying to impart some increased measure of calm.
The mention of “insurance” and “safety” had caused Christine’s stomach to drop. Why was she supposed to handle this, and not one of the security guards — sorry, “school resource officers”? Probably to see if everything could be solved without having to alert any kind of proper authority. Probably so that if it couldn’t be solved, Christine would receive a good deal of the blame. She was going to throw up. Just blow straight chunks right here and now. She should refuse outright.
But Carlotta was looking at her as if she were sent from heaven above, and Christine, bless her soul, was also a sucker for a pathetic woman. She squeezed the principal’s hands again and asked, as gently, soothingly as she could, for her to fully explain.
A few minutes and several stifled anxiety attacks later, Christine entered the gymnasium. The scene of the crime.
All things considered, it appeared normal: metallic purple cobwebs decorated the walls and flameless plastic jack-o-lanterns peppered the space. But there was a noticeable lack of any children who, in a perfect world, would be completely engrossed in a kid-friendly magic show at this very moment.
Instead, sitting on the lip of the gymnasium stage — because of course the gym served as both gym and entertainment space (and even cafeteria seating overflow, when needed) — kicking his heels against the scuffed wood, was a man dressed in black. Entirely in black, from the tips of his shiny, polished dress shoes to the soft, curling ends of his cape. On his face rested a mask to match: black and satiny and extending from the thick edge of his hairline to the top of his thin upper lip. Christine let out a string of extremely colorful expletives.
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
At the sight of her, the stranger from the grocery store, the weirdo she’d agreed to go out with and still, at this extremely inopportune instant, wanted to climb like a tree, jumped up. He held out his arms.
“We meet again! It’s fate, my dear.”
“You disappeared a kid!”
The man lowered his arms, as if it had, at last, occurred to him that she would not be flying into them anytime soon. “He volunteered.”
“He’s seven.” Christine pressed the tips of her fingers into her temples until she felt her whole head would pop from the pressure. “Tell me where he is. Now.”
“A magician never reveals his secrets.”
It was then that Christine took several large, lurching steps over to the man, grabbed the lapels of his — god, was that a tailcoat?? — and tugged so violently the man had no choice but to bend to her level, their faces only inches away.
“If you do not tell me,” Christine said, boring her gaze into his until she was sure she’d done psychic damage, “tell me right this second, I will probably be fired. From this job. My only job. The only one I’ve ever wanted, that I’ve dreamed about since I was eight years old. And it’s difficult, and there’s too much extraneous shit involved, and I think I pulled a muscle pushing that damn cart around yesterday, but if I lose it, I won’t just not go on that coffee date with you. I will haunt you for the rest of my days.” And because she could see a slightly excited gleam starting to creep into his eye at the thought of such a promise, she shook him a few times for emphasis. “It will not be pleasant. It will not be the fun kind of haunting. No gothic romance here. So just tell me where the kid is so I can try to salvage the damage and we can go on that date, because Jesus fucking Christ I want to have very demented, possibly even psychotic sex with you at some point in the near future, do you hear me?”
“The second floor janitor closet,” the man said. Not a moment of hesitation. Christine let go of him and flexed her fingers.
“Great.” She took a deep breath. Reached out a hand and pointed at him with all the shaky authority she could muster. “Stay here. Don’t move. Don’t even think about it.”
Christine didn’t know quite what to expect when she’d gotten to the second floor and jimmied the closet door open — how the hell had he gotten the kid up here, anyway?? — but when she saw Max, her most precocious first grade student, safe and sound and playing on his Nintendo Switch on the dusty floor, she could have cried.
“You okay, Max?” Christine asked, crouching down. She was honestly proud of how solid her voice sounded. No hint of the fear that she’d find the kid freaked out, no relief so blatantly obvious it would set off even Max’s alarm bells.
“Yeah, Miss Christine!” He grinned, the baby tooth missing from his upper row causing air to whistle out with each excited breath. “I finally beat this level I’ve been on forever! That magic guy helped a lot.”
“I’m glad,” Christine said. “Now let’s go see if we can get you some extra candy to celebrate.” Max scrambled to his feet, wiping his sweaty, dusty little hands on his cargo pants before slipping one of them into hers. As they made their way back downstairs, Max chattered on about how much fun he’d had being a magician’s helper.
“Do they have schools for that? Like if I wanted to be one when I grow up?”
“You can be whatever you want to be, Max. There’s a whole world out there for you to explore.” She was trying to be as diplomatic as possible; she couldn’t exactly say to the kid, his face all lit up with excitement, that if he really did end up as a magician’s helper in fifteen years, his parents would probably hunt Christine down and take extraordinary pleasure in slashing her tires. They were a very intense, expectant duo.
And yet when she handed Max off to them in the lobby, the DJ yawning his way through one last bout of Monster Mash, his parents made no mention of how he’d been missing for the better part of an hour. They just exclaimed, in that overenthusiastic way even smart kids can trick themselves into believing if they yearn deeply enough for the love and affection withheld from them, at how much candy Max had managed to collect that night.
“We’ll have to ration it out carefully,” the father said with a wink in Christine’s direction. “Make it last longer.” Yeah, right. They just didn’t want to deal with a seven year old hyped to high heaven on sugar. Sensible, though. Christine smiled and waved and watched the little family leave.
Updating Carlotta on the situation was another experience, entirely. When Christine pulled her aside to let her know everything was fine, Max was fine, he’d just left with his parents, no worse for wear and them none the wiser, Principal Giudicelli looked almost disappointed.
“We’re so lucky, Miss Daaé,” she said, smile not reaching her eyes, “to have you with us.” She excused herself quickly after that, and Christine was left standing in the hallway, the last few costumed stragglers running to meet up with their guardians.
She sighed, way more of an actual sigh than a grumble this time — she was bone tired, adrenaline phasing out of her system bit by bit — and waved to Meg. They were going to have quite the exciting weekly wine night tomorrow; Christine got the sense that Meg had no idea what had unfolded beyond her classroom door. Some people really did just float above it all. Christine kind of envied her for it, but also loved her all the more profoundly.
The man was waiting exactly where she’d left him; literally frozen in place in the empty gym. He really hadn’t moved an inch. Just like she’d told him.
“What’s your name, anyway?” she asked, and when he didn’t respond, didn’t so much as blink, a certain kind of manic laughter overtook Christine, her body shaking with the force of it. “You can move now, you big weirdo.” She placed a hand to her chest, as if that would help her breathe normally again. “Don’t tell me I went through all this for, like, a Bob or something.”
“Not a ‘Bob,’” the man said, visibly appalled she would even suggest such a thing. “Never a Bob. My name, my dear girl, is Erik.” And then he was bowing, just as dramatically as he’d done in the grocery store, and Christine was repeating his name, tasting it on her tongue, and he was falling to pieces before her.
“I’ve never heard anything so beautiful,” he said. Erik said. He clutched her hands as if they were the last lifesaver on a sinking ship. “Never anything so beautiful as poor, unhappy Erik’s name on my dear girl's lips.”
“Christine’s lips,” she said. “My name is Christine. And if that’s all it takes, I don’t know if you’ll be able to handle what I want to come.” She grinned, something wicked and free released from her as the day crawled to a close. “You won’t be unhappy for long.”
Her life was still an overwhelming mess, nothing in it had been solved or smoothed away. She’d still be pushing around that stupid cart come Monday morning, smiling widely on six hours of sleep and working hard to endear herself enough not to be the first person let go during the next round of district budget cuts. But she loved her students, and she got to see Meg most days, and as she threw her arms around Erik’s bent neck, glad for the orange construction paper covering the window of the gym door, she thought she could get used to the solidness of this man pressed against her. Sure he was odd, but so was she. And it felt incredibly good to not be, for once, the most obvious clusterfuck in the room.
“Erik,” she said, enjoying his lips against the bare skin of her neck perhaps a bit too much. They were in a school, after all. “Not here.” She pulled away just far enough that she could rest her forehead against his. “How would you like to go back to my place?”
“I have never wanted anything more in my life.”
Christine hummed, the sound nearing a laugh. “Then just promise me one thing.”
“Anything. Literally anything. I would even rid the world of that red-haired woman, vanish her unpleasant, mocking, Giudicelli self into the night, if you asked it of me.”
There was too much to unpack there, possibly for a lifetime, and Christine was too tired and too into this guy to even try. She cupped his masked face, looked deep into his admittedly unsettling yellow eyes, let him see that she was serious and that if he listened to her, really took what she said to heart, there would be dangerous, licentious, unspeakable things waiting in the wings for them both.
“Never work a kid’s event again.”