Bound to You Read Free

different worlds, and yet it never caused a problem.
    I was born and brought up in Wakefield, a former mining town in West Yorkshire that before its brief coal-driven heyday, had last been truly significant during the Wars of the Roses. Still, I was happy growing up there with my younger brother and our various pets, running my parents ragged as they ferried me to my endless dancing and gymnastics classes, Brownies then Guides, and brass band practice, constantly in need of stimulation and a stage on which to perform.
    My parents divorced when I was nine and after the usual bout of awkwardness, they were genial enough to attend all our various birthdays or school plays or parents’ evenings together. With my dad only ten minutes up the road, life soon settled down into cheerful suburban normality again.
    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