Bound to You Read online

  At eleven, I went to a prim, studious girls’ school where, when not concerned with getting into dinner on the first sitting or endlessly redecorating my hymn book, I was mostly obsessed with becoming a Shakespearean actress, and ploughed all my extracurricular energies into school plays and musical ensembles. Later, I was ferociously independent and hadn’t lived at home since I was eighteen years old and went off to university. I felt close to both my parents and Alistair, my brother, but now that my mum lived in Australia, although we spoke often on the phone, meeting up was a once-a-year event.

  Despite being based for the most part in Athens, Christos’s family were more present in his daily life than mine were. They knew what friends he saw, where we went at weekends, and always what we had for dinner. But I appreciated their involvement for what it was – absolute care. They had welcomed me into their fold, more formally than warmly at first, but they always asked after me. I knew they were touched that I had made the attempt to learn Greek. I would be visiting them for the third time at the end of the summer, just before Christos began his PhD. I was already looking forward to it.

  As if on cue, Christos’s mother called.

  ‘Giasou, Mama!’

  I cleared the plates away and went into our shabby kitchen as they chatted about Christos’s day. The more Greek I knew, the more invasive it seemed to listen to their conversations. But I couldn’t fail to hear ‘Melitzanes, Mama!’, which made me smile.

  I noticed that Christos had tried to prettify the windowsill with a pot plant he knew would die at my hands within the next few weeks. He had also bought me a pink elephant watering can as an encouragement to care for it.

  Suddenly Christos’s voice broke into my thoughts. Was he arguing with his mother? I paused, holding the knife I had been drying, and tried to decode the frantic Greek. I could pick out the odd thing. References to the garage. Work. Helping your father. Christos had spent most of his childhood and teenage years helping with his father’s garage. All that tinkering with filthy engines was part of the reason he’d decided to study engineering. I carried on filling up the cutlery drawer. Soon, he said goodbye to her and I wandered back into the room.

  ‘What was all that about?’

  ‘Just Mama being Mama,’ he shrugged, smiling and cracked his shoulders. ‘OK, I’m going to take a shower. How am I still wearing these clothes?’

  Christos was interning at a shipping company before he went back to studying, and was dressed in office smarts, white shirt, charcoal trousers. There was little he looked better in. He started to unbutton the shirt. Underneath was a white T-shirt. I’d never figured out why he needed that too.

  ‘It would be shameful not to wear a T-shirt underneath!’

  ‘What, because we could see your nipples?’

  ‘Nichi!’ That chastising growl again. ‘No, because it would bring shame on my family. Are you going to have a shower with me too, Nichi mou?’ he asked, advancing to where I stood watching him undress, and sliding his hands over my hips. He pretended to be sleazy again.

  ‘No, I already had one before you came home.’ I replied. ‘But I might take all my clothes off and get into bed and wait for you.’

  Quickly, coyly, I pulled off my jersey dress.

  ‘Yes. That is how I like my woman!’

  I rolled my eyes at him once again, and kneeling on the bed in my diaphanous blue underwear, underwear that Christos had bought me, I reached up to plump the pillows. Suddenly, something struck me across my backside.

  ‘Hey! What’s going on?’ I cried, startled, clutching my stinging right cheek.

  Christos stood there in his candy-striped boxers, brandishing the black leather belt. He was laughing uncontrollably. ‘Sorry Nichi mou, sorry, I guess I just whipped it off too quickly.’ He had accidentally caught me with the tail end of it as pulled it out of the loop on his trousers.

  ‘Well, do you want to watch what you’re whipping next time, please!’

  ‘Ha ha. I WHIPPED you. Hilarious!’

  When Christos came back he had a question for me. ‘So, Nichi, what do you think about people that like being whipped?’

  ‘Doesn’t do it for me,’ I replied. ‘And I suppose you have to wonder why people enjoy it in the first place. Especially women.’

  ‘I don’t trust it either,’ Christos agreed. ‘But what do you think, is it a kind of self-harm for women, Nichi mou?’

  ‘Probably,’ I said. ‘There’s just something about that makes me feel uncomfortable. And anyway, why would you need it if you were having perfectly hot sex in the first place?’

  ‘Exactly!’ Christos grinned and pulled me into him.

  Early the next morning Christos’s phone rang. ‘Mama!’ he murmured, barely forming the word with his lips. As she spoke and he listened, I watched his forehead solidify into creases, until he looked like a pained classical statue.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘I’ve really got to go help at the garage this weekend. I’ll just fly over on Friday evening after work and come back Monday morning.’

  I felt a prickle of annoyance. It was already Wednesday. ‘Isn’t it a bit of a long way to go just for the weekend? Are they that desperate?’ Christos’s parents worked so hard and I knew that they struggled without him but something about this summoning of him and his readiness to go, set a faint alarm bell ringing.

  ‘They need me, Nichi mou. it’s not like it happens all the time.’ He pulled me to him and stroked my cheek. ‘I’ll miss you, Golden Egg, but you’ll be all right. It’ll only be a couple of nights.’

  “OK, well, if they need you,” I sighed.

  “But it means I can’t go to the wedding, Nichi mou.”

  Oh. The wedding.

  CHAPTER 3

  Later that day, following Christos’s announcement, I decided that I had to try and find a way to attend the wedding alone. I wasn’t looking forward to the inevitable ‘where’s your perfect Christos?’ remarks when I turned up without the Greek hero, but it mattered far more that I was there for Laura.

  Since I didn’t have a driving licence, I had been depending on Christos driving us up from London to rural Oxfordshire and back on the day to attend the wedding. I made a new travel plan which involved taking a train, a bus and then a cab to reach the venue. But it would also require me to stay over at a local hotel. I rang around some of them that afternoon, but with just two days’ notice, they were all fully booked.

  On Thursday, I had no choice but to call Laura and tell her I couldn’t make it. It was a slap in the face of our friendship to let Laura down at this stage, and it had sickened me to explain why I could no longer be there. But the fact of the matter was that without Christos, there was just no way that I could get to the wedding.

  That evening when I met Christos at our local pub for a drink, I told him that I’d phoned Laura to officially excuse us. Christos didn’t seem to understand the significance of what I’d just had to do and instead made blithe chat about Laura and her fiancé Craig.

  ‘So the happy couple have been together since they were sixteen, eh? Aww, that’s lovely!’

  Christos had a sentimental streak to rival a Latin soap opera. From time to time we listened to a late-night Greek radio show over the internet, which mainly consisted of septagenarian men and women ringing in to read poetry about their lost loves. The presenter, with her smoke-and-silk voice, would lament with them and Christos would wistfully imagine the day he too would join their ranks.

  ‘Yep, since sixteen. I remember when they first got it on. And where. It was in our friend’s nightclub in Leeds.’

  ‘Sixteen and you were clubbing, Nichi mou!’

  ‘Thirteen and I was clubbing, actually!’ I laughed, correcting him.

  ‘So – Nichi . . .’ Christos affected the sleazy Greek. ‘Does that mean they’ve only ever had sex with each other? Imagine! One person! How would you even know if you were doing it right?’

  ‘Erm, I think you’d know, Christos!’
>
  ‘Like the first time we tried to have sex and we failed, you mean?’

  This memory still made me wince. Apparently, the first time we ended up in bed together I was too anxious to make love and Christos had had to stop. I say ‘apparently’ because I have absolutely no recollection of this, and Christos had to tell me. I presume my amnesia related to my guilt, because the fact of the matter was that Christos and I had started out as an affair. Technically, when I met Christos, I was already boyfriended, to a beautiful serious man who had very admirably gone off to do aid work in South America while I completed my final year.

  I remember the first time Christos knocked on my bedroom door in the college accommodation block we shared. When I saw who it was, I discreetly dropped the picture of my boyfriend and me into a drawer. A few weeks later, when Christos found his way into my bed, my guilt acted as a kind of chastity device and clamped me shut to Christos’s cock. ‘Only until the next night though, heh heh!’ Christos would always point out.

  Now that night I definitely remembered, and the rest. My friend Lizzie renamed Christos ‘the Greek dildo’. We had so much sex in that first term that I actually ripped his frenum, that piece of skin that joins the foreskin to the penis, and he had to go to the campus nurse for a special salve. I think we managed to hold off all of about another week. Then we had a desperate, silent shag in a reading cubicle in the library.

  ‘Hey, we have to get you home, Christos. You’ve got a bag to pack if you’re going to make that flight tomorrow evening. You won’t have time in the morning.’

  Christos hated packing, and tonight was no exception. ‘First, let’s have a hug,’ he said, when we got back to our flat. He said hug like I did, with a pronounced northern vowel.

  We clambered on to the bed. Christos was wearing Kenzo Pour Homme. I nuzzled his neck, appreciating how delicious he always smelled. He loved fragrances, to the extent that he had even done a parfumerie course in his spare time. At airport duty free shops he knew immediately what scent would suit me and birthdays always brought a new bottle of something unique-smelling. ‘Because you are secretly high maintenance, Nichi,’ he told me now. But don’t worry. Your little secret is safe with your Master.’

  ‘All Right, Master, don’t you have a bag to pack?’

  ‘I do, I do.’

  I got up to go to the bathroom and brush my teeth. Christos followed. He kissed the crown of my head with soft deliberation, met my gaze in the mirror and smiled. ‘Such a beautiful woman.’

  I scrunched up my nose, and shook my head, toothpaste dribbling down my chin. ‘Even when you are brushing your tushy pegs!’ It was another Yorkshire phrase he’d appropriated, and it sounded even more ridiculous with a Greek twang.

  He reached for his own toothbrush and we jostled one another for space until we were both gummy with toothpaste and giggling conspiratorially into the sink.

  Back in our bedroom, Christos frowned at the open suitcase.

  ‘What do you want bringing back from home, Nichi mou?’

  ‘Some fruit off the tree, please!’ I replied. ‘And some of Giagia’s biscuits.’ Giagia meant grandmother.

  ‘Mmmm,’ Christos nodded. ‘Home! Food! I’m going to eat so well.’ Christos ate for five back in Greece. How he managed to retain his featherweight boxer’s body was a mystery known only to the Sibyl. ‘It’s going to be great when you come with me in August.’

  I nodded. I could already smell the hot red leather of the seats in his beaten up Mercedes, and the fragrant basil bushes by the front door of his parents’ house. I remembered how their incense hit you as the car pulled up the drive. Suddenly, I was the sentimental one.

  ‘Christos? If we ever did get married, could we get married in Greece?’

  He stopped packing for a moment and looked right at me. ‘Of course.’

  On Saturday morning, as I wandered through an overcast Hyde Park, there was a text from Christos, delayed from the previous evening. It said that he’d arrived safely, that he had already been fed four pork chops plus rice plus salad plus potatoes plus cake and apricots and coffee by Giagia and was now enjoying a cigarette under the jasmine trees that shaded the porch. I could see and smell it more vividly than the ashen water sloshing about the Serpentine.

  I thought again about Laura’s wedding. At least I’d sent her a decent present. I’d stretched to more than I could afford in guilty compensation but it didn’t really make me feel better. I hoped this wasn’t going to damage our friendship in the long-term. Suddenly it started to rain. I decided that I had better head back and get on with my job application. It was for the one position in recent weeks I thought I might actually have a chance of getting, working as a medical PA to a team of surgeons at a London hospital. Despite my journalistic ambitions, I’d temped before for the NHS and always found it far more stimulating than typing up reports for some two-bit ad agency. Besides, it was the best training for life in a harried newsroom. There were few things more stressful than having to arrange a bed transfer for a patient with surgical complications. Whatever an editor might tell you, getting copy to print is never a matter of life or death.

  That evening, Christos called me. ‘Ela Nichi mou, how’s my golden egg?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m fine. I went for a walk but came back to do a job application when it rained and I’d got sodden. Now I’m reading. How’s the garage?’

  ‘Busy. They really did need me. I got wet, too.’

  ‘Got wet? What kind of wet?’

  ‘I jumped into a swimming pool with my clothes on.’

  ‘Thee mou!’ I cursed in Greek. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because while I was at lunch a little girl fell in so I jumped in after her.’

  Classic Christos. He wasn’t named after the Saviour for nothing.

  ‘Was she OK?’

  ‘Yes. She just cried a bit. Wanted her mum. Luckily my phone still works.’

  ‘You jumped in with that, too?’

  ‘Well, yes, with everything. Even my shoes. There was no time to think about it. And then I ate lunch with Maria, in my wet T-shirt, heh heh. And Nichi – there were women watching!’

  ‘I bet they wanted to jump you after seeing that,’ I laughed.

  ‘They did. The way they clapped their hands afterwards gave them away.’

  I’d seen this reaction many times. When women saw charming, delectable Christos cooing at a baby, their eyes would widen in desperate lust. Then they would look accusingly at me as if to say, ‘Why aren’t you fully utilising those fine Greek genes?’

  Sometimes I wished I felt the same, but ever since I was a tiny child I had been adamant that I would never be a mother. In recent years I had told my friends that I’d rather go to prison than have a child. They would laugh nervously and tell me it was only a matter of time before my biological clock rang its alarm, but I didn’t think so. I had terrible nightmares about giving birth in a Greek hospital in 40-degree heat, the sweat of my labour pains dripping off the walls. But even I had to admit that the thought of Christos saving a little girl from drowning was pretty enticing.

  ‘Oh, Christos. Forced to play hero when all you wanted was a nice lunch with an old friend!’

  ‘I practically ate half a pig after that. I had earned it. Anyway, Nichi mou, I need to go, Mama is calling me. I’ll see you on Monday afternoon, can’t wait! S’agapo! I love you!’

  On Monday, the agency called me about the hospital job. I could start that week if I liked. Finally, income! Christos’s family had lent us some money to help us set up in London. Without it, there was no way I could have afforded to move down with him and no way I could be trying to pursue my chosen career now. But I felt ashamed at having to borrow from them in the first place, what with the thousands of pounds of debt I had already accrued, including a loan, two creaking overdrafts and an unpaid credit card bill. Not that I had been frivolous with money as a student, but I had elected not to work while I studied to give myself the utmost chance of earning the best possible degr
ee. It had paid off.

  I thought back to the day I found out I’d got my First. I ran to the English department office but when I arrived there was still a whole twenty-seven minutes before it opened and I could get my result. I tried to practise my newly acquired yogic breathing techniques as I contemplated my future. I wanted to carry on using my mind, but I was drawn to journalism rather than more study. I had created a literary radio show in my second year at university and felt sure that was the kind of work that would really excite me. I loved learning, but now I wanted to work in a colourful, creative office and live in the capital.

  I was so absorbed in my plans that when Christos arrived, panting, having run from the other side of campus, he had to say my name three times before I noticed him.

  ‘Shall we get your result, Nichi mou?’

  ‘I’m scared!’ I wailed. But I was so relieved he was with me.

  ‘No! Nothing to be scared of, Golden Egg.’ He pulled me to him, kissing first one cheek and then the other.

  I sidled into the pokey department office, which was not too dissimilar to the desk at a police station.

  ‘Name?’ enquired the departmental secretary.

  ‘Nichi Hodgson. Nicola,’ I managed, in a whisper. I fully expected my heart to beat up and out of my mouth until it lay there quivering on the cheaply carpeted floor.

  ‘Very well done, Nicola. You’ve got a First.’

  I yelped. Christos squeezed my arms, squeezed my cheeks, squeezed me to him, and we laughed in each other’s faces over and over again. I owed so much of this to Christos and his absolute faith in me, his unbending support.

  I grinned at the memory. Christos had loved me not because of my achievements but in spite of my failures. And I wanted so much to offer that to him now as he undertook this PhD.

  The door rattled downstairs. ‘Ela, Nichi mou!’

  He was back. Thank God. I jumped up from the table and checked my lip gloss in the mirror, grabbed frantically at a perfume on the mantelpiece. I had changed into a skirt that Christos had bought for me, a black flippy thing with multi-coloured 3-D polka dots stitched around the hem, and a low-cut vest.