Bound to You Read Free Page B

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