Bound to You Read online

  Christos couldn’t wait for me to file out after the other passengers and instead bounded towards me, lifted me up in his arms and swirled me about. In England, witnesses to such a nauseating romantic display would have scowled and tutted, but in Greece, people smiled and nodded in approval. There was something about Christos that could make clichéd romantic gestures seem as though he had invented them.

  Christos took my case in one hand and steered me protectively out of the arrivals lounge into the breath-binding heat. Greece was infernal in high summer, but meeting that temperature for the first time again made my skin prickle with delight.

  ‘Ah, Thee mou, Thee mou!’ Christos cursed. He sweated like an Englishman. ‘Why isn’t it raining like lovely, grim London?’

  ‘Because Egg needs a hot holiday!’

  ‘Egg’s going to get a hot holiday, don’t you worry!’ He smirked at the double entendre. ‘Now, Nichi mou, we have two options. Either we head towards home, calling at Giagia’s first to get fed, or we go to Paradisos beach. Which is it to be?’

  ‘Beach, please! I need to feel the sea!’

  Christos led me to the impractical vintage red Mercedes. I loved it so because its bench-like front seats meant I could sneakily unfasten my belt and slide across right next to Christos.

  We took first the motorway and then a coastal path. The beach was craggy, a sepia wilderness that felt as though it was in South Africa rather than Greece. It was nearly always deserted. I wondered if Christos had in mind the same thing I did.

  He pulled up under the shade of some olive trees. I was still in my travelling clothes. ‘Christos, will you open the boot? Can I get a little sundress and my bikini out of my suitcase please?’

  ‘No, no, you don’t need them, Nichi.’

  I turned to him. He gave a knowing smile from behind his sunglasses, teeth gleaming against his tanned face.

  We were still in sync.

  I smiled slyly. ‘But what if I get sunburned?’ Christos was always poised to douse me in suncream as soon as I stepped into the Greek sun.

  ‘We’ll be quick. And you can hide in the sea afterwards. I won’t let you get burned, kali mou.’

  The beach was indeed empty, apart from a lone frappé seller who sat further up the bank, totally absorbed in a newspaper. We wandered across the sugar-soft sand, down towards the water. It was far windier than I remembered it being in past years.

  ‘Kemathothis!’ I shouted above the wind, pointing at the waves.

  ‘Bravo, Nichi mou, you remembered the word for choppy! Isn’t it?’

  He pulled me in towards him and placed his hands around my face, locking us into an infatuated kiss. I felt a surge of lust swell up from the pit of my stomach. In haste we peeled off our clothes, which Christos weighted down with a rock, and ran to the denser, wetter sand.

  I fixed my gaze on the provocative, upward swell of his top lip for a moment, sliding my hands over his body. Then my eyes followed my fingers along the helix of dark hair that ran down his chest, between his nipples and past his stomach to the top of his now swollen cock. He reminded me of the perfectly proportioned illustrations of ancient Olympians I had marvelled over in Classics lessons. I wanted him. I would always want this exquisite man.

  I dropped down to the sand and pulled him on to me. For a minute, he kissed me very deliberately. He touched my cheek, then traced a long path down my neck to my collar bone, out along the curve of my shoulder, down the outside of my arm, before resting his hand on the swell of my hip. There, he gripped me, and as he gripped me, I felt a throbbing between my legs. I was already wet.

  He placed his hands on my breasts, using first his palms and then his fingers to slowly tease my nipples round in feathery circles. I moaned appreciatively and rose up to kiss him. He pushed back with his mouth, and placed lingering, light kisses down along my throat, before dragging his mouth, then his hands, more roughly down the front of my body. Involuntarily I thrust my groin up to meet first his chest, then his face, then kicked my left leg over his shoulder. Grabbing my thigh with his right hand and sliding his left underneath to grip my bottom, he held me there for a moment, then looked up at me, his face serious with desire.

  Christos’s skill as a lover came from knowing intuitively when and how to ravish me. Right now, he knew I wanted it hard and fast. He rose up on to his knees, guided my leg from around him and back onto the sand, then parted my thighs. As he slid his cock into me we both moaned and I gripped onto his taut backside, urging him in deeper.

  Hard and hot, our bodies jarred against each other over and over. I was so focused on the sensation of Christos thrusting up into me that I could no longer tell what was grit or sand or the wind whipping us with foam from the sea, or Christos’s fingers bracing my hips so that he could drive up deeper inside me. This was barely going to last another minute, we were so desperate for one another. Christos wove his hands into my sand-whipped hair and guided my mouth up to his. Three weeks without a kiss and here we were, craving one another like it was the first time. Then with rapid intensity I began to climax and so did he, his orgasm chasing mine, until I, and then Christos ‘Ohhhd’ with pleasure, his fiercer cries carrying further across the sand.

  Afterwards we lay there a while, stuck together with sand and a sense of deep peace. Christos untangled my hair from his fingers, touched them to my lips. It felt so good to remember the raw passion that had drawn us together in the first place.

  Suddenly, Christos looked askance. ‘Nichi mou,’ he said, jerking his head towards the frappé seller, ‘he was watching us.’

  I threw my head back into the sand, and laughed with glee. ‘Our first public show! Or was it private?’

  ‘Poor guy. Bet it’s the closest he’s come to a shag in years!’

  ‘But Christos, everyone knows Greeks get loads of sex.’

  ‘Not when they have stomachs and beards like that! You know that’s what I’m going to become one day, don’t you?’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I can’t wait. Then you’ll stop going on about it!’

  Christos got up, and looked out at the sea.

  ‘Ela, Nichi mou, let’s wash ourselves off and make our way to Giagia’s. She’s going to be waiting there with her infamous feast.’

  I skipped after him into the water. ‘It’s so choppy!’ I shouted again. I’d never seen waves like this in the usually tranquil Mediterranean.

  Christos dived into the waves. ‘Come on little fokia mou, come on, seal!’ he called to me.

  I tumbled up into the foam, exhilarated to feel the surf on my skin where just moments before Christos had caressed me. I floated on my back for few seconds, revelling in the sensation of air and water gliding over me, and succumbed to a sensation of post-coital bliss.

  Suddenly, a violent wave engulfed me and as I swallowed two lungfuls of seawater, the wave swallowed me, dragging me twenty feet away from the shore. I didn’t struggle against it, I couldn’t. All I remember thinking was, ‘Oh, this is it; I came and now I’m going.’ La petite mort was what the poets I had studied called orgasm. Surely it was only poetic justice to drown in the sea we’d just made love next to.

  To be honest, I’d probably have surfaced in another five seconds or so, but Christos was already there, heaving me out of the current and swimming back to the shore with me clutching and spluttering about his neck, vaguely laughing with relief.

  ‘Egg, please do not drown at the beginning of the holiday! At least not before Giagia has got to feed you, OK?’

  ‘OK!’ I agreed. Now safe, I felt suddenly panicked. Christos stroked my head and took me by the hand. ‘Come on. Clothes then food.’

  We made our way back up the sandbank. I stood there, naked, for a moment, fastening the straps of my cork-soled sandals. The frappé seller tipped his sunhat at Christos.

  About an hour or so later, we pulled up under Giagia’s vine-draped porch. As we got out of the car, Giagia appeared at the door to greet us.

  Christos’s grandmo
ther had very light darting eyes, cropped white hair and had only worn black or occasionally navy blue since his grandfather died a few years before. She looked for the most part, nervous, but I had learnt that her skittish gestures were a sign of her eagerness to care.

  ‘Nichi mou,kopiase!’ I knew that meant for me to come in. Giagia placed her hands gingerly on my shoulders and kissed me primly on either cheek. There was a glimmer of a smile about her lips.

  Christos draped one arm about her small, stooped frame and kissed her warmly, knocking her ever so slightly off balance.

  The conversation now switched to full-on Greek. ‘Christos mou, now what will you have to eat? It’s late, you must be famished, you shouldn’t leave it so long to have lunch, you know. Poor Nichi must be starving! How was her flight?’ Giagia directed such questions at Christos, in part because she was never sure how much Greek I could now speak, in part because it was a show of politeness.

  The table was heaving with homemade food. A dozen kinds of salad, fresh bread, hummus, cheese, rice, potatoes, olives, almonds and apples from the family orchard and grapes from Giagia’s own vines. Out of the oven came a whole chicken for Christos and vegetarian dolmades for me. Periodically Giagia would disappear into her huge fridge and fetch something else.

  The anxious eater in me always balked the first time I was reacquainted with a real Greek meal. But I had learned over time to eat slowly and state politely but firmly, ‘No, I have plenty, thank you.’ Saying it five times meant I might only be given two more helpings, if I was lucky.

  ‘So you know your cousin Eleni is getting married, Christos?’

  Christos nodded. Contrary to cultural stereotype, Giagia was actually too polite to urge us to marry. But she could hint at what she hoped for us by mentioning other people’s forthcoming nuptials.

  ‘Eleni and Matthaios won’t be getting married in church. It’s their choice, of course. So I went to St Giorgos’s anyway, prayed that God will bless their marriage, make them as happy as I was with your grandfather.’

  Christos patted Giagia’s hand.

  I had often asked Christos what a Greek Orthodox wedding entailed, and lingered on the details in my mind as he described it. Christos would have taken some persuading, but my inclination towards flamboyant displays of affection meant I loved to fantasise about a church wedding; how the family priest would join our hands in front of the iconostasis, how Christos and I would be crowned with stefana and walked three times around the altar, how Christos would throw back the heavy veil from my radiant face once we were husband and wife.

  Christos interrupted my reverie. ‘Nichi nearly drowned today, Giagia.’

  Giagia coughed in alarm.

  ‘Christos!’ I scolded. What the hell was he telling Giagia that for?

  ‘So she’s not feeling like eating too much.’

  He gave me a solemn smile. I made a mental note to kiss him extra hard when we got home.

  Giagia nodded sympathetically. ‘Well, Nichi can eat as much or as little as she likes. Do you want some more chicken, Christos? Have some more rice.’

  ‘No, no, Giagia.’ Christos stood up, patted his muscular stomach. ‘I’m creaking I’m so full. We’d better be on our way. We’ll call in again soon.’

  As we stepped out on to the driveway, Giagia shouted after Christos, ‘Look after her, leventi mou, eh?’

  Leventi. It was impossible to translate. All I knew was that it was what you called an upstanding man.

  As we parked up outside Christos’s family house, the familiar fragrances overwhelmed me: first, the sweet basil and almond scents, then the hypnotic night-flowering jasmine. Spontaneously, I started to cry a little. Christos was alarmed. ‘Don’t worry,’ I laughed to reassure him, ‘I’m just so happy to be back!’

  Christos’s parents were not at home. They were at the family beach house; we would be seeing them later in the week. I was glad. Although I could be nothing but gracious to their faces, I was unsure how I would react emotionally to seeing them again, what with my feelings about the PhD still so raw. I entered the kitchen. Everything was as it always was: the biscuit barrel filled with Giagia’s delicacies, the cupboard covered in family snap shots, the strawberry napkin ring on the table, reserved for the little English girl.

  Also pinned to the cupboard was a card I had made for Christos’s parents last year to thank them for having me. It featured a cut-out cat, meant to be Tolkien, shaded in charcoal pencil. Amazing what you could pull off when you wanted to win the affections of someone’s family. Tolkien himself languished in the shade by the sink in a bid to keep cool, and refused to come and greet me.

  ‘So Mimi made your bed up, Nichi mou.’

  Christos and I slept in separate beds in Greece. It wasn’t like his parents didn’t know we shared a bed back in London, nor even that they were particularly conservative; but old-fashioned house rules still applied. Christos’s dad had once told him it that it was fine to sleep with me upstairs, just as long as he came back down to his own room before Mimi, their housekeeper, arrived. He didn’t want her to feel awkward, he said.

  I wandered into Christos’s bedroom, ran my fingers over the national youth sports trophies stacked on the bookcase, across Christos’s face at six, eight, ten years in the school photos stuck above the bed. I went over to his fragrance collection. Among the glass bottles was a rosary box with a cartoon Virgin Mary painted on the lid. Oh God, I knew what this was! I screwed off the top, and smiled effusively.

  Christos came into the room. He took the box from me. ‘Our wedding rings – ha ha!’

  Inside the box were two cheap silver rings that we had bought for a trip to Morocco we had made just before my finals. Somebody had told us that finding places to stay as an unmarried couple could prove tricky, so Christos had the idea of buying the rings. When we’d got there, it was clear nobody could have cared less. But we’d kept the rings on for the duration of the trip all the same.

  ‘So, Nichi mou, I’ve got a surprise for you, an early birthday present.’ I was still looking at the rings as Christos leant his chin on my shoulder, repeatedly kissing my cheek.

  ‘Oh?’ I turned around.

  ‘I won a competition last week on the radio – yes, that radio programme with the nostalgic old people. It’s a room at the Fengari resort. It’s only for a night but there’s a spa, an infinity pool, jacuzzi, a luxurious bed . . .’

  His hands came around my waist, strayed up over my ribs to cup my breasts. I turned my head back to kiss him. ‘That sounds glorious!’

  Out of the corner of my eye I noticed his guitar. ‘Oh! Christos, since there’s no one else in the house, let’s sing!’

  Christos frowned for a moment. Then he kissed me again. ‘Excellent idea.’

  All the way through my childhood and teens, I had sung – in choirs, musical productions, solo to raise money for charity, at karaoke. I loved singing like nothing else, and, right up until becoming anorexic, took it as a matter of course that I would apply to drama school and see if I could make a living out of performing. But once I was ill, I lost my nerve. Along with a lot of other things.

  Anorexia felt like the solution, at the time, to the terrifying chaos of my life. When I became ill I was preparing for four A levels, had the lead part in the school production of Kiss Me Kate and was absolutely obsessed with the idea that I had to get to Oxford where I could study and act, and make a success of myself. The pressure was inordinate. At first, starving myself gave me an intoxicating sense of being super-human, as if I didn’t need food to survive. Soon, I was ill beyond sense.

  Halfway though my final school year, I weighed just five and a half stone and was wearing clothes for ten-year-olds. I knew I needed help. And so began the Sisyphean task of learning to eat again. My desire to be a professional performer had gone. That particular brazen courage had left me. But I made it to university, to study literature, and within weeks I had acquired wonderful new friends. It took longer to regain a sense of my own physic
al strength and attractiveness, but I managed it. That paralysing fear of food, and the obsessive need for control of my body were, I was certain, gone for good.

  So it felt almost like a healing when in my last year at university, after years of being mute, musical Christos coaxed the voice out of me, persuading me to sing along to deeply unfashionable Greek love songs with him, as he played guitar. Tonight I wanted to sing with him again.

  ‘Ela, Nichi mou, you choose.’ He handed me his sheet music file. We ran through a few of my favourites. ‘Matia Palatia’. Palace eyes. ‘Louloudakia Mou’. My little jasmine flower.

  ‘I’m feeling sentimental. I’m going to sing this one to you, Nichi mou,’ Christos said suddenly.

  ‘Kokkinaxelli Mou’. The title translated as ‘my red lips’. It was one of Christos’s favourites because my lips, he always said, had given him the excuse he needed to attempt the come-on that got us together.

  One night, barely a week after we had first met, he knocked on my door. ‘Come in!’ I called.

  I was in bed reading a Renaissance seduction manual for men. I was wearing a tiny mint nightie. When he put his head round my door, Christos was embarrassed.

  ‘No, it’s fine, enter!’ Inappropriate, I thought to myself.

  My heart raced. Christos had been working out and his curls dampened about his tanned forehead. As he shut the door, I stole a lustful look at his gym-pumped body, admired how taut his chest was underneath his close-fitting black T-shirt, then flickered my eyes back to the page.

  ‘I just wondered if you were planning on going to salsa class next week,’ he said, ‘and if so, might you like to practise beforehand?’

  ‘Oh. Well, sure!’

  ‘OK. Great. Well, I’ll leave you to it.’ He backed out, but for a foot, which remained firmly planted across the threshold, propping open the door.

  ‘You have very red lips.’

  It hung between us like a sin. I remembered it now. I had loved it.

  I looked up at his handsome face, Christos concentrating on the chord sequences. This hotel trip was going to be just what we needed.