Bound to You Page 7

  The three of us laughed together, and dinner carried on in this way, punctuated with our shared memories.

  As soon as the bill had been paid Alistair had to make a move. ‘Don’t study too hard, Mog,’ I warned him. Mog was our mutual nickname for one another.

  ‘I won’t, Mog, don’t worry.

  ‘Good luck with the PhD, Christos,’ he said.

  I gave Alistair an affectionate kiss on the cheek, and they patted one another on the back, before he slipped off back to his university halls.

  Christos and I sat facing each other. I was happy and relaxed. This was the right way to spend a birthday, with two people I liked as much as I loved. ‘What do you want to do, Christos mou? Shall we stay at mine tonight? Or I can stay at yours? I don’t have any clean clothes but I think you have that dress at yours, don’t you, the one I left in Greece that Mimi sent over with you?’

  Christos gave me a troubled smile then leaned across the table to stroke my head. ‘Nichi mou, I need to go home tonight.’

  ‘Well, like I said, I can come to you.’

  ‘No, Nichi mou. I mean I need to go home alone. I just have so much reading for tomorrow. I need to be up early in the morning. Need to be ready to study.’

  I stared at him. Not tonight, Christos. Not on my birthday. ‘But Christos, I need to be up too. I’m still at the hospital this week, remember?’

  ‘Well then, all the more reason for us both to stay at our places tonight. I’ll come across at the weekend. Sunday, perhaps. I’ll make you a nice dinner.’

  ‘But Christos, it’s my birthday!’

  ‘But Nichi mou, I’m here! We’ve had a nice dinner with your brother and now we can just go home and prepare for our busy days tomorrow.’ I started to put on my jacket. ‘Come on, Nichi, you know how difficult this is for me. You saw how Alistair had to rush off there to get back to his books.’

  ‘Christos, it’s just one night. My birthday night. Jesus, when are we ever going to have sex any more? We might as well be bloody married!’ The waitress looked over at me nervously. I clearly looked as though I were about to make a scene.

  ‘Let’s go,’ Christos said, and ushered me out of the restaurant.

  We walked to the tube together in silence.

  ‘So do I need to make an appointment to sleep with my boyfriend these days or what?’

  ‘Nichi mou, things are going to be a little trickier from now on. But come on, this is just one night.’

  If he didn’t understand why this night wasn’t just like every other night then I couldn’t explain it to him.

  ‘See you on Sunday, yes, little Egg? Golden Birthday Egg?’ He took my face in his hands and kissed me.

  I was beginning to lose patience with this.

  As the weeks passed it become apparent that my birthday blue-balling, for want of a better expression, was not an exception. I couldn’t remember exactly how many times Christos and I had seen each other since that night, but I could probably count them on two, maybe just one hand. Even at the weekends he was holed up studying. I, meanwhile, had started at the magazine, a happy and laid-back assignment, which left me restless for even more stimulation come the weekend.

  Late one Wednesday night, Gina texted me. We hadn’t been in touch since the night just before my birthday when her inquisition over Christos had cut just a little too close to the bone. ‘Lady, I am so sorry I missed your birthday, I’m a terrible, terrible friend. Why don’t we arrange a dance night one Saturday soon and I’ll make it up to you xxx’.

  A dance was just what I needed.

  I texted Gina back and asked whether her friends Clara and Jane, who I’d met at her last birthday party, were also free. I needed to get to know more people in London, didn’t I? And I needed some fun. ‘How about this Saturday?’ ‘The sooner the better!’ ‘What are the chances, my lovely! We are all free!’ came the reply.

  Saturday arrived. At about 6 p.m. I retrieved my outfit from my wardrobe. With Christos’s encouragement, I’d bought a black and turquoise body-con dress from a beachfront boutique back in Pefkos. It was far more figure-hugging than I would usually have opted for but it was cleverly moulded and clung in a flattering way. Tonight would be its first outing, and a long overdue one for me.

  The plan was to meet in Soho for drinks and then dancing. No fuss, just a bit of cocktail-lubricated fun. ‘And nowhere full of sleazy guys please!’ I had pre-warned Gina, who was organising our night out. ‘Er, Nichi, you’re talking to me!’ Gina had replied. ‘Queen of Anti-Sleaze!’

  We met at nine o’clock. Gina’s chosen venue was just as she had promised: buoyant with cocktails and the right kind of filthy house music, and free of irritating men. After two pretentious pomegranate martinis, I began to unwind. Clara and Jane, both law trainees, were making me laugh with tales of the unctuous solicitors they had to work for.

  ‘Nichi’s going to laugh herself out of the dress, Clara, if you carry on like this!’

  Gina tugged up the neckline of my dress playfully and as I turned to face her something skimmed into my peripheral vision. A man with dark, tousled hair, very pale skin and eyes like seascape marbles was staring at me. Those eyes. They were like lasers.

  I looked away.

  ‘Do we want more drinks?’ Clara asked. Jane and Gina both nodded vigorously.

  ‘Nichi?’

  ‘Yes, please. Although just a V&T this time.’

  ‘I’m helping,’ said Jane. ‘Double?’

  ‘Sure! I’m well on my way! Might as well carry on!’ I was already pretty tipsy but I couldn’t remember the last time I’d got so pleasantly drunk with friends.

  ‘I’m going for a fag,’ stated Gina. ‘Will you be OK with the bags, Nichi?’

  ‘Of course!’

  I waited for them to shuffle off then glanced around the room again. The man with the marble eyes was gone.

  I thought about texting Christos and then decided against it. I was still irritated with him over his decision to leave me to sleep alone on the night of my birthday. Plus, I didn’t text when I was drunk. For a start I made typos that irritated the hell out of me the next day when I read them back. And I really needed to let go of this. I needed to have some fun and forget about it.

  I looked over at the bar. Clara and Jane were being ineptly chatted up by two guys who looked barely out of sixth-form. Jane, I could see, was even getting her ID out to show them her age in a bid to put them off.

  I wanted to dance, but in these shoes and this dress with this much alcohol inside of me it was probably a bad idea. Where was Gina?

  Suddenly I had a sense that I was being watched again. I spun round.

  ‘Hi.’ It was him. The man with the marble eyes. He had snuck up behind me.

  ‘Lovely earrings you’re wearing there.’ He was close enough to admire Christos’s birthday present. ‘Where are they from?’

  I opened my mouth to say, ‘I don’t know, they were a birthday present from my boyfriend,’ then changed my mind.

  ‘Greece,’ I replied.

  ‘Ah, akrivos, I’m half-Greek!

  Oh, God. How is that once you know one Greek you seem to attract a dozen others?

  ‘Are you Greek?’ he asked me.

  ‘Oki, alla milo ligo,’ I replied. No, I just speak it a little.

  I could tell he was impressed. His smiled. He had tight little dimples beneath those tantalising eyes. I was running out of safe places to gaze.

  ‘Would you like to dance?’ he asked me.

  ‘Can you?’ I asked back. I don’t know why. Why did it matter if he could dance? I wasn’t entirely sure if a dance was what he was really asking for.

  Then I got a grip, gave myself permission. ‘It’s your belated birthday night out, I told myself. You like dancing. You can have an innocuous dance with an attractive half-Greek man without it meaning anything.

  ‘Sure.’ I said and got up and followed him.

  A minute later and it was clear I should have trusted my instinc
ts. Wasting no time, he put his hands on my backside and pulled me in towards him. I should have said something. But I didn’t. He smelled good. Some kind of musk aftershave but I didn’t recognise it. I looked at his eyes again. His seascape irises had all but receded and been replaced with two black buttons.

  ‘What’s your name?’ he asked me. Was he slurring? He was drunker than I was. Which, right now, took some doing.

  ‘What’s yours?’ I threw it back at him.

  He smiled. He didn’t reply. No names, then. Instead, he slid his hand up my back, underneath my hair. He tugged at it clumsily. I shook my hair out of his grip.

  ‘Don’t pull my hair,’ I said. ‘That’s not nice.’

  ‘Oh, sorry,’ he smiled. ‘You’re vanilla, then.’

  What did that mean?

  He leaned into me. I could sense things were getting out of hand but I was so drunk I felt as though my body and mind had parted company hours ago, that nothing I thought had any bearing on what I did. I could taste the musk and alcohol on him, could feel the beat of his lust. He bore into me with his now-onyx eyes, came so close that I could feel his lashes graze my face, then stopped his lips a centimetre before mine. ‘Kiss me,’ he murmured.

  ‘I can’t,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, you can,’ he replied. He elongated the ‘can’ until it sounded like a yogic drone, and slid the hand that had been in my hair up to the nape of my neck, gently swaying the whole of me from side to side.

  How can you? I should have asked myself. But I didn’t. Right then, in that moment, I knew that I could.

  After what felt like two hours later, but must only have been thirty minutes, I came to on the cold, damp bathroom floor of the bar. Gina was leaning over me, scooping me up. ‘Come on, Nichi, we’re going home. We’ve been looking everywhere for you. What happened?’

  I shook my head, touched my fingers to my lips. They felt as though they’d been bitten.

  ‘Well, anyway, it doesn’t matter now. Just as long as you’re safe. I would not like to be waking up as you tomorrow!’

  On Sunday afternoon Christos texted. ‘OK if I call you now, Golden Egg?’

  ‘Yes,’ I replied. I couldn’t manage an X. A traitor’s kiss.

  The phone rang. My heart thumped in my chest like a drum ripping its skin. I paused before answering it.

  ‘Hi, Nichi mou.’

  ‘Hi,’ I replied faintly.

  ‘Nichi, are you OK?’

  ‘Christos, I need to tell you something. It’s very serious.’ I must tell him right now, I thought. I have to tell him right now. ‘I cheated on you last night.’

  Silence. For each year of our relationship a second passed. ‘Did you hear me?’ I quavered.

  ‘I heard you,’ he replied. His voice was darker and lower than I had ever known it.

  ‘Christos. Christos mou . . .’

  Down the line came a half-choking, half-wailing sound. Then Christos spoke again. ‘How?’

  ‘In a club. I met this random.’ I couldn’t even bring myself to say man. ‘We went somewhere. Christos, I was drunk. Far too drunk. Utterly wasted, in fact . . .’

  Christos knew I rarely drank; surely he’d understand that only if I were completely inebriated would I do something so out of character. I swore to him that I would never do anything as stupid ever again as long as he loved me.

  ‘Nichi,’ he interrupted. It came out as three vowels, the second one a sob that obliterated the c.

  ‘Christos, I was off my face. It was a mistake, a terrible mistake but it doesn’t mean anything, we can forget about it, you can forgive me. It can’t touch us.’ I gasped for breath, my own sobs sucking the air out of my excuses.

  ‘Nichi. Nichi . . .’ Christos released my name as if he were breaking open a bad spell. He was crying uncontrollably now. Why had I thought this was the right thing to do? My confession had crumpled his heart.

  ‘I’m going to go. I have to go,’ he sobbed.

  ‘Christos, please . . .’

  ‘I can’t. I can’t. I can’t,’ he repeated, as if trying to shake off the awful truth of my transgression. Then he managed to gather himself for a moment, stifling his own sobs. His silence stopped my heart for a second.

  Finally, he spoke.

  ‘Nichi mou – you’ve broken us.’

  CHAPTER 8

  At the end of October, I still ached. I was settled in my new flat, at least as settled as I could be anywhere without Christos, and although it had never been our joint home, in my wardrobe, my jewellery box, on my iPod and my bookshelves, he lingered. There wasn’t a single part of my daily existence he had not slightly rearranged. Life was on mute. I’d torn up then tossed back at him our gift of a relationship. But still, I lived. There were pressing, professional distractions that left with me with little choice.

  I had managed to turn my one-month internship into two, and had performed well enough for the magazine to ask me to stay on longer still. As much as I relished the opportunity, and still got a thrill out of knowing that I was working as an editorial assistant, with words and thoughts, and the kind of culture that enriched rather than eroded life, I simply couldn’t afford to work for free for a third month. The trouble was, now that I had had a taste of the kind of intellectual and creative stimulation I had prayed hard study would provide, I couldn’t bear to go back to the hospital. I had an interview for an entry-level position on a small travel magazine the following week, and I was crossing all possible digits in the hope I would get it. If I didn’t, I was going to have to find another way to earn money.

  I was also struggling to fit myself to single life again. I suppose it is one of those myths perpetuated as much by those in London as those outside it that metropolitan downtime consists of fusion cuisine dinners, taxidermy art shows and clothes-swapping parties in disused red telephone boxes. Truth is, it’s just as easy to stay in on a Saturday night with only a bottle of wine and the television for company if you don’t have many people to share your free time with. In the advert breaks between the X Factor I would toy with my phone and think about texting Christos. But I knew it was inappropriate, that it would only lead to more stress and confusion for the both of us. I could cope with making myself miserable but not him. What I wanted now, above anything, was to make a circle of dependable friends, people that would enrich my life.

  I wasn’t entirely alone. Besides Gina, Jane and Clara, I did have one or two older friends around. Bobby, for example. Bobby and I had met at a Freshers’ Week party and bonded over our mutual bafflement at finding his trousers nearly entirely upright in my bathroom sink the next morning, as if he’d just stepped out of them. We both loved the theatre and were similarly impecunious so would often go to Shakespeare’s Globe together on the £5 standing tickets. Three hours on our feet could be pretty tough-going even for a couple of Bard-batty English grads so we had constructed a two-part solution, which involved splashing out a tenner and going to the first half of a weekend matinee, then wandering off to browse the second-hand books in the stall further down the South Bank and then on to somewhere for a cheap dinner, before returning for the second half of the evening performance on another ticket.

  ‘So, when did you last see Christos?’ Bobby asked me gingerly as we wove in between the rows of books in the half-time break of a trip to see Romeo and Juliet.

  ‘He came to drop off a birthday cake his grandmother had sent to me about two weeks after he returned from Greece. We both started crying as soon as he laid it down on the counterpane.’

  ‘Oh, Boggle,’ Bobby sighed, using his university nickname for me. ‘I don’t think I really understand what’s wrong with you two.’

  ‘Me neither,’ I replied, my eyes filling.

  These theatre trips were good for me in some ways, but art as a substitute for love had its hazards. Exposing myself to the sonnets woven into Romeo and Juliet, for example, just made me pine all the more for Christos.

  Christos and I, meanwhile, were in only minimal contact
. It was all we could do to stop ourselves entering into tortured circular conversations.

  ‘Nichi mou?’

  ‘Christos!’ I would exclaim with relief when I answered the phone to him. Maybe this conversation would be the one. I lurched from one day to the next longing for these opportunities.

  ‘How are things?’

  That’s all it would take for me to start sobbing.

  ‘Christos . . . this is insane, we can’t carry on like this. We’ve got to try again.’

  At that point his voice would begin to quaver too.

  ‘Nichi mou, we’ve been through all this,’ he would wobble. ‘I’m like a wounded animal that has climbed too far into its shell.’

  ‘But Christos, we love each other. We shouldn’t be apart!’

  But as far as Christos was concerned, there was no other way. The ‘cracked vase’ of our relationship, as he had allegorised it, and which I had broken, could not be repaired.

  About a week after the outing with Bobby I was distracted from my professional, social and romantic conundrums when my mum phoned to tell me that my very elderly aunt had died. She had been 103, and the funeral was the following week. Would I go?

  When I was a little girl Auntie Lillian was a figure of baroque intrigue to me. Originally from my home town of Wakefield, she had moved to the twee seaside resort of Minehead in Somerset with her invalid husband Albert, after he suffered a heart attack in his forties. There she ran a bed and breakfast at a time when working-class women didn’t officially run much of anything. Growing up, I had spent childhood summers camping in the West Country, and we always spent an afternoon or two at her house, a stuffy bungalow covered in lace soft furnishings that smelled like boiled fish. It had been the ‘show home’ when she had first acquired it, and there, among Auntie Lillian’s clocks and costume jewellery, I admired her wartime women’s fitness medals and listened as she regaled me with tales of the ‘men friends’ that would take her out dancing while Albert rested up at home. She always wore coloured shift dresses with a cardigan draped elegantly over her shoulders, a tissue tucked up the sleeve, and pale pink lipstick, even well into her nineties.