A/N: Written for an anonymous Tumblr prompt inspired by one of my own posts requesting bisexual E/C.

She cannot say that Erik is her first lover. There have been others before, naturally enough. Though whether or not those others would be counted as lovers by society at large is another issue, and one which frankly she doesn't much care about. She counts them as such, and so that is what they are.

Besides, these lovers have taught her a great many things, things which she has since taught Erik to their mutual satisfaction.

Meg Giry, for example, is impressively flexible thanks to her ballet experience. The way she can fold herself around a body must be surely supernatural. Never has Christine come across someone so well able to stimulate both herself and someone else at one and the same time.

(Erik, bless him, tried some of her techniques once. His back cracked, and he grumbled his joints loose again while Christine laughed and called him an old man. Then she gave him much satisfaction in compensation for his stress.)

Sorelli had a fantastic trick with her tongue that she regularly employed when bent over Christine's crotch. Just the memory of it is sufficient to make her sweat now, and left her squirming more than once.

(Erik's results from the time he attempted it were so impressive that he regularly calls it into play.)

There were Jammes and Jeanette and Philippa and more besides. Fumbles and gropes and furtive kisses in back of the flies, skilled fingers creating a chorus of moans. She has to wonder, sometimes, how much of the rumour of the opera ghost had nothing to do with Erik at all and everything to do with them.

Sometimes, she misses the softness of having a pair of breasts and the swell of thick hips pressed against her in the night. But she has him now, and he is more than worth the sacrifice.

Erik too, of course, had lovers before Christine. Men and women both who found his features exotic, to say the least. The kisses were purposeful, the touches a duty, the glances lacking much in the way of passion.

For a brief time in Persia, before he had to leave in a rush, there was something undefinable between the Daroga and he. There were heated gazes, the brush of fingers over bare arms and the night when the orchids hung heavy in the air. He'd moved in, and could feel the Daroga's breath hot against his cheek. His heart thudding, he'd opened his mouth, tilted his head and-

And then Darius had appeared and they'd sprung apart. Only two days later he had to escape, so he never did get to know how things might have been, and everything was so different when they met again in Paris, both so much older and broken in ways neither could tell. Friendship has truly been the best option since, though sometimes he does wonder…

But tonight, lying in Christine's arms, he would not change an ounce of what has brought them here. To do so would to risk losing this, and this is so infinitely precious.