Such a production as this shamed his own light-hearted dramas. Sitting back in the seat in the back of the auditorium, Christian had felt a sickening delight in watching the opera unfold. The diva - the one he knew more intimately than he imagined anyone else here could claim - was brash and alive and daring, and he found himself even further drawn to the woman behind all the stage make up. Enigma. She was so hungry. Her desperation for love was the only match he'd ever found to his own.
But the crowds had separated them in the Grand Foyer. He'd wanted to surprise her. He hadn't been able to find her since that night when she took his loneliness and grief and tried to bundle it between her breasts, tried to suffocate it between her thighs. He'd hoped she would try to find him before now, but... No, that hadn't happened. He'd known she was a diva at the Opera House, and he knew it was difficult work preparing to star in a production - any production. Anything could be justified in Christian's head. Her absense, her utter lack of contact... anything.
But here tonight on gleaming marble, Christian couldn't make his mind justify how Enigma danced with that one dark-haired man. How she looked at him. How she eagerly pressed herself against him. And how he looked at her. Oh, Christian knew that look, had felt it on his own face before. Love drew one's soul out from its root and into the eyes. It was how love escaped into the world. It was how lovers recognized each other. And Enigma recognized the one she chose to dance with tonight.
Without setting himself in front of her, Christian left the Grand Foyer, then the Opera House, then the street where it sat. He did not stop until he had locked the night out behind his apartment door. He listened to the crackling shuffle of the hardened shards of heart rattling in its bone cage, and dreamed of Paris again.