Unmasqued

She leaned forward and offered one to him, and he sucked on it like he was starving. It hurt and it sent a ripple of need down to her sex and she pulled away, causing a loud smacking sound from his lips.

"Guy." She said his name gently, and it took a moment for him to focus on her eyes instead of her breasts. He did not appear to have the energy to speak. "What do you want?"

He stared at her… dragged in his breath, exhaled the words, "Fuck… you…"

"Say it, say it louder," she coaxed, arching backward to place her hands on his thighs. Her breasts jutted out in front of her and he focused avidly on them.

"I want… to fuck… you…"

"Fuck me, then. Fuck me."

And then suddenly, she was on her back, and Guy was rearing over her, using his knee to keep her legs apart as he gripped her shoulders. He slammed inside of her, slammed into her quim, into the top of her vagina, harder and harder, faster and faster. Carlotta moaned as he hit that inner spot, ramming against it, until she quaked with an orgasm from the inside out.

She reached up behind and grabbed the iron scrollwork, felt her breasts jouncing and bouncing with his desperate rhythm. Her orgasm went on and on; she lifted her hips, met his, violently, with every thrust. It was hot and wet and they slid together, in and out, in and out… He groaned, cried out, jammed himself inside her one final time, and she felt him coursing inside the long hot tunnel of her, and she shuddered too.

He collapsed on her, his heavy, sweaty body deliciously hot, his chest ramming against her breasts.

Carlotta slapped him on the bare ass. "We will discuss your punishment tomorrow."

And, knees trembling, she rolled from the bed, grinning, determined to sing tonight… and to snare herself a comte. Ghost or no ghost.

Raoul crossed the stage rapidly, resisting the desire to duck when he heard a particularly loud crash behind him. Only hours before the evening's performance, it was a madhouse in here! However could they be ready in time?

The chaos was deafening. He tightened his fingers around the huge bunch of stems he carried. This was even worse than being on a ship's deck during a violent storm, trying to secure the lines and keep oneself from being washed overboard.

Someone was hammering nails onto a piece of scenery with great vigor; a backdrop was being lowered from its high rigging and had been caught on something, so it was now being shaken with a violence that caused Raoul no little concern. A piece of glass was being fitted into the hole in a wall of scenery; someone shouted to "Watch out!" and another person yelled, "Behind you!"

All in all, he wished he'd chosen a less direct route to the backstage dressing rooms than through the front doors of the Opera House, down among the stalls, up onto the stage, and behind it. Particularly during the day, when there were no performances, but instead this cacophony of preparation for the performance of Faust that night.

He stepped around a flat being carried from the seemingly depthless wings, and, adjusting his hat so that it sat straight on his crown, he hurried along between more flats, tables, costumiers, carpenters, wigmakers, and scenery docks, finding his way only by chance because, of course, he'd been to Christine's dressing room only one time.

But as it turned out, Raoul did not need to find his way to her private room, for as he passed along the hall, one of the dancers, whose name he had no reason to recall, attracted his attention. "Are you looking for Miss Daae?" she asked. But she gave him a look from under her lashes, complete with dimple and tucked chin, that suggested she would prefer he was not.

"I am indeed. Do you know where she is?"

"She is in the foyer de la danse," she replied.

Raoul picked up his pace. The dancers' lounge was the place where the performers met their admirers after performances, and at other convenient times. He did not wish to imagine Christine-for he could not think of her as Miss Daae, having known her as a young girl-meeting any other admirers but himself.

By the time he found his way to the lounge, after making two misturns, he had worked himself into a bit of a state. Why did his pulse race so when he thought of her? Why did the thought of another man even looking at her make his fingers tighten?

When he opened the door-flung it, really-he found a scene much worse than he'd feared.

There was Christine, seated on a lush pink velvet sofa, in a room that looked too much like the boudoir of a courtesan for his comfort. Everything was plush and stuffed and velvet: chairs, sofas, large cushions on the floor, even three large square fabric cubes topped with glass that acted as tables. The colors burned sensually: rosy pink, crimson, royal purple, and saffron.