"There be none of Beauty's daughters

With a magic like Thee;

And like music on the waters

Is thy sweet voice to me:

When, as if its sound were causing"

Lord Byron, "There Be None of Beauty's Daughters"

The next sign I can recognize as him came to me that following Monday, after classes had ended and choir practice was to start.

I was not looking for signs of him, mind you. I just noticed. That's all.

When my back began shivering and my palms started to slick with sweat beneath the gloves, I knew he was not far. In the past three months, I tried to rationalize my dalliance with him into merely the physical presence he carried himself with and the reaction that presence brought out of me. I never got that with anyone else, possibly why I could have convinced myself that I loved him.

I held the hem of my shirt to steady my hands, but as the girl in front of me opened the auditorium, that music filled my soul as water would fill a pitcher. I felt myself ready to spill over quickly, so I bit the inside of my cheek to wrench the tears back. Upon the stage he sat, playing with his entire body as he had done last week when I approached him in the concert hall. Quiet chatter accompanied this as the boys and girls all around me slowly recognized him.

"-Daae, that's Gustave Daae."

"-thought he dropped out."

"Pah, should have stayed gone."

"-hair's nice, though. Wonder what he uses?"

"Who cares? Are you listening to this?"

"Maybe he sold his soul to the devil and that's why he plays this good."

The director with her funny spectacles waved at us to sit and listen to him; all I wanted to do at that movement was to run from this until my lungs burned and my heart gave out. Anything to avoid having to face him once again. My ears, muddled through the chatter, registered the music at last when we were sitting down and mostly silent. I dared to look at him.

His hair may have been restrained at the base of his neck, but he seemed to still have shadows over his eyes like he had not slept in days. He wore black. A button-down only buttoned from his sternum down, showing that the slender boy of long ago had become a muscled young man; his fuller lower lip trembled when he opened his mouth but the note that poured from his vocal chords made my heart race. The music had been a body of pure sound that subjected us all to its beauty and will, but when Gustave added his powerful tenor voice to it in wordless notes I could almost absolve myself of calling him a monster last week. I realized that what he was playing and singing...was his feelings for me. The note that ripped at the seams and became something bigger, grander as he rose in his vocal range.

I felt a hand slide under mine and twine our fingers together. I looked to my left, and saw the small smile of Steven next to me, his curly hair was the color of wet wood and made his skin appear windburned. I tried to return his smile, but Gustave's eyes were on me, I knew it, and I refused both of them to stare at my knees. I brought my hand up to rub at my temple, trying to block both the warmth of Steven's hand and the persistence of Gustave's music in my ears. When I closed my eyes, he still remained with those brown eyes that knew my heart and my soul before I could deny it. His music permeated my ears so effortlessly that, to my horror, I could have sworn he sang inside my mind too.

Not a moment after, his music stopped. I opened my eyes again to find him rising from the bench to cheers and applause. He did not relish in it, did not smile as he was celebrated. He merely bent at the waist into a bow, a hand to his stomach and the other splayed at his side - a magician's bow. He lifted his eyes to level with mine. My breath hitched in my throat as he winked.

I started seeing him in the hallways after that. Rounding a corner out of sight, passing me without looking at me, and sometimes passing me looking at me with so much anger in his eyes that I rushed forward to be somewhere he couldn't find me. Somewhere his eyes wouldn't follow.

When I saw him, my heart felt like someone had ripped out my insides and stuffed lead inside. I felt unbearably heavy, and no way to alleviate it.

You know, before this whole mess started, I would be first in line to get a second devildine sandwich.

I used to love sardines as a kid, and I could eat hard-boiled eggs by the dozen but today...I just poked an edge of it with my gloved hand and my stomach clenched in.

"What's the matter, Pepper?"

Darcy has been my friend since I started school. We were not best friends, in the sense that we finished each other's sentences and spent every day after school together. But we understood each other to where, in a loud time, we could count on each other to lend an ear if there was a need. The three months while Gustave was gone, I leaned on Darcy and while I never told her the extent of my feelings for him...she understood enough. She knew what he meant to me.

Her light eyes, the way her blonde hair framed them and her kind smile, I could shake my head with sincerity. "I'm fine...just feeling under the weather."

"Nausea?" Her thin eyebrows came together.

"Nah, I think I just need to take a walk." I got up from the table bench, smoothed down my dress. "Watch my things, okay? I'll be right back."

"You got it."

On my way out, I caught Steven's eye from his table and shot him a half-hearted smile as I left The bathroom was just around the corner but there, as I held the door about to go in, I caught sight of Gustave taking his bagged lunch into the library. It would only take eight steps to follow him in... Pride forced me into the bathroom, to the mirror. I gripped the porcelain sink with shaking hands. I had to get a hold on myself. I stared at my heart-shaped face.

The freckled face looking back at me was full of questions. If I go to talk with him now...will he speak with cruelty like before? If he asks me to stay there, will I do so?

If I look into his eyes, what is my head to do when my heart reaches out to him again?

The girl in the mirror's jaw tightened as I felt my own grow tense. Look at yourself, Pepper. You're acting like someone with an apple that alternates between sweet and sour with each bite, so scared you'll get sour again that you forgot that it was sweet just as often. I rolled my eyes at myself. Sweet or sour, I loved apples.

The voice of the man who called himself the Phantom came to me. Find new bottles...So the world can see you are still human, but only you carry the burden.

A corner of my mouth turned upwards. He may be a murderer, but he was onto something there. I straightened, my hands falling from the sink to close themselves. I took a deep breath and counted to ten. I left the bathroom, counting each of the eight steps required to get into the library. The librarian, Mr. Grayson, to my right glanced up from his paperwork to nod to me. I used to retreat here often as a child, when I was the new student with the funny accent I soon learned to conceal and the blood-red birthmarked hands I found gloves for quickly.

I moved to search in the aisles but Mr. Grayson's croaking voice caught me. "Ms. Logan."

I looked back at him and he beckoned me with a finger to his desk. "Sir?"

He rose a hand to cover his mouth as he whispered with a knowing expression. "He's in the poetry and fiction section, between Keats and Kipling."

I grinned and mouthed a quick 'thank you'. I tiptoed through the aisles, until I reached the back corner - the furthest point in the library from the door - and found Gustave. He was sitting with his back to the joining of the two walls, piles of books all around him. In one hand he held a half-eaten apple he was working on, and in the other, his nose so close he nearly brushed the pages, was a book. As I neared him, I saw that it was, in fact, a poetry anthology.

Startling me, he spoke with his eyes trained on the book as if he were reciting something I didn't recognize, "Here, where men sit and hear each other groan; Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs…"

His eyes, dark and almost feline, locked onto mine as he ate from his apple. I stopped dead in my tracks, as he peered at me over his food. "Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies; Where but to think is to be full of sorrow…" He swallowed, and I watched his Adam's apple move. "And leaden-eyed despairs…"

"Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes," His voice lowered, and a shiver, against all my attempts to block the way he makes my body react, ran down my spine. His eyes softened, and tore from mine. "Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow."

He shut the book with a single hand, setting it down on one of the piles. He wore the same dark shirt and trousers as yesterday, but now a chain glittered at his throat, the pendant concealed beneath his collar. "Hello Melody."

"What was that?" I asked him, dragging a stool from the aisle next to me and perching myself on it, crossing my legs.

"Keats. 'Ode to a Nightingale'."

I kept my inner frown out of my face as best I could. "Why were you playing? Before, in the auditorium."

There were only two possibilities I could think of. Either he wanted to play and work his way into my heart through my ears with his music. Or...he wanted to remind me of what I'd pushed away. A musician, a magician, a friend…a lover.

His answer was none of the above. "Bored."

"Hmm, I did not think you got bored," I said, fidgeting with my fingers on my lap. "With all that you do outside of education."

He made a noise low in his throat. His hand dove into his lunch bag and rummaged around. "Funny, that you have not yet grasped the fact that I am not a common man. Common men are burdened by taking up several tasks at once. I am challenged by it, but not ever do I find it challenging." From the bag he produced a knife and cut a wedge of his apple, offering it to me. "Apple?"

I shook my head and he gave a small laugh. "Well, this isn't what literature and poetry told me you would do. Typically, the fair damsel eats the apple and it leads her down a path of doom."

I tried to ignore the irony, I really did, but a giggle bubbled up my throat. My attempts to stifle it failed only slightly, a snort escaping me. "And yet, you have eaten half of that forbidden fruit already…" I paused, almost thinking better of what I was about to ask. My voice was quiet, tiny. "Begs the question: do you really wish me a path of doom?"

Gustave did not answer right away, looking at me with an expressionless face. It was not an uncomfortable silence, or one so long that it may annoy me...It was just a silence. We stared at each other. I realized that although he wore no mask, his face in itself was his greatest mask. He could seem cheerful and truly be miserable. The only telltale sign was his eyes that I had learned to read...The lighter cinnamon colors in his eyes smoldered into the dark parts, like the dying tinders of a fire. Gustave was burning inside, but not painfully. He burned bright, brighter than the sun and with twice as much passion. This I knew, and could not ignore. I understood what his eyes said now. He would not give up on me.

Some time after the lunch bell had already rung, I stood up from my stool - certain that I would not receive an answer.

"Never mind." I whispered, but even as I said that, I could hear the soft sliding of his clothes as he got up behind me and his hands were on my shoulders.

His voice came at my ear, not seductive but sincere. I could feel his body heat radiating from him, his inner burning warming me as well.

"I wish you the utmost happiness with all of my heart." He sighed. "Even though you love another...I love you enough to wish that."

With that notion, I stepped forward out of his arms. My teeth grit in my mouth, speaking quickly before I ran out of his presence and his influence on me.

"I never said I loved him."