Bound to You (32 page)

She was quiet a moment, taking in all I had said. I could tell that even she was struggling with a response. ‘Look, Nichi, there is a huge communication issue here. Not just in the way he texts, the fact he’s never phoned you, but because you have no idea what he wants or how he feels about you. And you really, genuinely shouldn’t have this much insecurity about someone so significant to you. Look, I know it might be painful, but the only way to do this is be straight with him. “Where do you see this going?” Just ask him that. You’ll have your answer in all of about five seconds.’

I knew Gina was right. I just couldn’t imagine how I was going to set about doing this.

At around two in the morning I finally managed to settle myself to sleep. I lay in bed in a flimsy yellow vest and blue knickers. The last time I had worn these, Sebastian was here. Returning from the kitchen with fruit juice one morning, I had leaned out of the open window, the cheap, diaphanous fabric of the top enhancing the swell of my chilled nipples. Then I handed the juice to a just roused Sebastian.

‘Did you make this?’ he asked, with a smile.

I giggled back at him and shook my head. ‘No. I’m not that servile yet.’

He drank and put the glass on the bedside table. He smiled at me darkly, beckoning me to him with his finger. Just that gesture made my heart race. I clambered back into bed beside him and through the fabric of my top, he gently bit my nipples. ‘That’s a provocative little garment you’re wearing there, Nichi.’

Now, thinking about the image of Sebastian beckoning me over to him aroused me. I stroked my hand over my breasts, felt my nipples stiffen. Then I slipped my fingers between my legs and imagined Sebastian caressing me there, with his slow, deliberate tease. Soon, I could feel myself quickening. I imagined Sebastian kissing me at first tenderly and then passionately along my neck, touching my willing mouth with his fingers and then his lips, holding me up to him, laying me down again, wrapping my legs around his waist and lavishing me with kisses. And then burying his head into my breasts and then my neck, and then taking my face in his hands and telling me . . . telling me that he loved me. As I orgasmed, my body shook. But not with pleasure. I had burst into tears.

The next morning, before I did anything else, I reached for my phone and texted Sebastian.

‘Hey. I really need to talk to you about something. Would you meet me somewhere? I’m free after 5.30 p.m. today, or much of tomorrow. Nichi x’

I made it brief and to the point. I hoped it conveyed some sense of urgency.

Sebastian was an early riser. He had replied within an hour.

‘Hey, I’m free tomorrow (Friday) morning until about three or so. Could we meet near my studio? Otherwise, Sunday . . .? S x’

Damn it. I couldn’t leave work to go and have this chat with him. I was going to have wait a few more days. Well, what did it really matter? I’d waited this long.

‘OK, well Sunday then. Not sure where yet. I’ll text you on the morning. X’

‘Sure, Sunday early afternoon is good. Everything OK? S x’

‘It will be,’ I replied.

Later I called Gina.

‘Hello chicken. I’m so sorry I forgot you were in Cardiff last week. You were an absolute gem for listening to all that in between family duties. How are you doing? Did you have a good time? You were there for your cousin’s wedding, right?’

‘Oh my God, Nichi, what a protracted affair. We didn’t get to eat for six hours! But she did look gorgeous and they had an amazing band at the reception.

‘So you got to dance?’

‘So I got to dance. I’m happy. Now. How are you? Not so happy . . .’

‘I need to go shopping for a break-up outfit on Saturday, Gina. Are you free? I’m going to need your advice.’

I had tried to sound resolute on the phone to Gina, but my mind was shot to pieces. I knew I must first speak to Sebastian, though, and tried to focus on that. I became fixated on the question of what to wear. I kept returning to the idea of wearing white. I thought back to the way Sebastian had looked up at me as I removed the scissors from around his cock, the way he had jumped when I’d tenderly gone to touch his thigh the next morning. The scissors had toxified us. It had sullied all that was honest and pleasurable about our deviant sexual relationship. And I wanted to wear something that would help to purify it again, help to soothe the emotional chaos.

I rummaged through the clothes on the rails. A sliver of white caught my eye. It was the dress I’d worn that night at the hotel with Christos, the night we hadn’t had sex. I had not worn it since because it reminded me too much of the tragedy of that episode in our relationship. And yet, staring at it now, it was infused with the very real love of those days, of the love that had nourished and sustained us. I pulled it out of the wardrobe.

I arrived before Sebastian to our meeting point in the park near his house. I wanted to find an appropriate spot to settle myself and gather my thoughts. Another pristine summer’s day, hot enough for sunburn. This whole afternoon was going to be excruciating in every way.

Or perhaps it wasn’t. Perhaps I was worrying for no reason. Here was Sebastian now, bounding gracefully up the bank towards me, smiling so that his dimples flashed up beneath his stubble. For such a hot day he was wearing a lot of drab clothes. An olive-coloured jacket. Grey jeans. A grey Fair Isle sweater atop some kind of similarly coloured shirt. He came towards me as he always did, cobalt eyes iridescent in the light. He kissed me full on the mouth, tenderly.

‘Hey,’ he sat down next to me. He looked at my face in blank expectation. Perhaps he genuinely had no idea why I’d summoned him, though I didn’t think so. But it was clear that I was going to have to lead this discussion. There wasn’t another moment to waste.

I started with something tangible. ‘So, what’s going on Sebastian? I find it a bit odd that after all these months you only still text me when you want to hang out. We’ve never even spoken on the phone. It makes me feel as though you’re closed to contact with me in some way.’

Sebastian listened intently. He was tight-lipped, and his brow was slightly furrowed, but it was only the face he pulled when he was concentrating. He clearly didn’t think this was odd.

I carried on. ‘I mean, it’s not that I need to be in constant communication with someone. It’s actually quite nice not to have to be. But when we have a lovely time together, when we have the kind of sex we have together and then you just go home and never even say, “It was nice to see you,” it makes me feel, I don’t know, a bit used, and gets me to wondering whether you even care about me at all.’

‘I care about you,’ Sebastian replied, before I’d barely finished the sentence. But it didn’t sound like a pledge of affection. It sounded like a defence. ‘Of course I care about you. I don’t understand how you could feel used, that’s unfair. But there’s something you have to understand, Nichi. I’m not monogamous.’

Oh God. So there it was. The first body blow. I paused for a moment processing what that meant. ‘So are you sleeping with other people?’ was my next question.

‘No.’ He shook his head.

I scanned his face. What did I know of this man, really? How to catch him in a lie?

I believed him. ‘So what does that mean then? Does that mean you have one relationship and the occasional other encounters on the side? Or that you see several people at the same time?’

In theory, this was no longer necessarily a deal breaker. Since the domming I’d begun to genuinely appreciate how one might get different things from different people, and in a way that was safe emotionally for everybody involved, subject to explicitly clear boundaries, absolute love, absolute trust and absolute honesty.

The problem was, Sebastian certainly hadn’t been honest with me. And ‘caring’ for me was nothing like loving me. It wasn’t exactly the best place to start from. But I’d be willing to consider it. I’d always believed that open relationships were not for me, but maybe I could do it for Sebastian. Maybe sharing him with other women was better than not having him at all.

Sebastian, however, shook his head at both of the options I offered. ‘I can’t be in a fixed arrangement with any one person, let alone a bunch of them. Non-monogamy for me just means that when there’s an ex blowing through town, I usually hook up with them.’

I contemplated this for a moment. Why an ex? Why not a random girl you met at a party and wanted to dominate? There was a saying I’d once read on a gift shop postcard. ‘Old flames are spent matches.’ Why repeatedly return to someone who had once loved you?

‘I mean, I haven’t had a girlfriend since I was twenty-seven. I haven’t lived with someone since I was twenty-three. I’ve had more exes than I’ve had girlfriends, if that makes sense.’

It did, and yet it didn’t. I wondered how many of them would have considered themselves Sebastian’s girlfriends. He and I had been seeing each other for six months and I certainly didn’t count.

Sebastian paused and looked ahead. He seemed to be gazing right through me. ’I guess the question is, then, Nichi, how comfortable would you be with this kind of relationship?’

Hang on a minute. Was Sebastian actually trying to reframe this so that he was the one checking in with me?

Sebastian blinked, bowed his head for a moment, then lifted his eyes right up to meet mine again. That line from the Donne poem about the ‘eye beams twisted’ came to me again. Nobody else could look at me this way, with nobody else could I share this kind of connection. A part of me just wanted to find out whatever it was that Sebastian needed, and to offer it up to him.

My face must have given away my turmoil. As if by a way of explanation, Sebastian began, unprompted, to talk more about monogamy.

‘The thing is, I used to really love my girlfriends and would never have dreamed of sleeping with someone else.’ He looked over the park. ‘But when things went wrong, when the relationship inevitably ended, it would tear at me so deeply that I just got to thinking, what’s the point being monogamous? So I stopped.’

It was just so depressing that Sebastian retaliated against the pain by running away from love. There was something about the way he had said those last three words, ‘so I stopped’, that I found particularly disturbing. I hoped he meant the people he got involved with afterwards knew he wasn’t monogamous? But hang on, I hadn’t, had I? Sebastian continued.

‘I was seeing a girl a while ago, for about a year. She smashed my camera when she found out. That hurt me. I couldn’t believe she could do that.’

‘When she found out. . .?’

‘That I wasn’t faithful. That I slept with other people the whole time. When Zoe realised, she lost it.’

Oh my God. So the poor girl had been embroiled even deeper than I was with Sebastian before she found out. How the hell could he paint himself out to be the victim here?

We sat there for a few moments in silence. Then Sebastian grinned at me playfully. ‘Nice shoes. May I stroke them?’ I nodded without smiling.

I looked at him as he petted them. If only he wasn’t such a beautiful bastard. I thought about the concept of platonic beauty I’d learned about at university, Plato’s stupid idea that beauty and goodness were directly correlated. He’d clearly never met Sebastian. What had Sebastian ever done to deserve his looks? He just abused the power they afforded him.

He looked up at me as if to make some kind of joke about the shoes but I could tell he’d thought better of it. I was idly making a daisy chain, but the stalks were too short and I kept accidentally stabbing myself with my scarlet nails. I turned to lie on my front. Sebastian came to lie next to me. ‘Do you want anything at all by the way? A pretzel or something?’ Was that Sebastian’s way of trying to show care, I wondered. In spite of everything, a flicker of hope rose in me.

We lay there together watching two sausage dogs frolic in the flowerbeds. For the first time in a week, I laughed, and Sebastian gave a silly commentary on their misdeeds to entertain me. Then, quite suddenly he asked, ‘So what do you want to do? Shall we go get dinner?’

I didn’t know what to say. My instinctive reaction was to say no. I should go home now. I should walk away from Sebastian here. Gina would have told me to do that.

‘I’m not sure,’ I replied quietly.

‘I’m hungry,’ was Sebastian’s response. So the offer of the pretzel had been about his stomach not my heart. And it certainly hadn’t come from anywhere deep within his. Or maybe I was just being oversensitive. ‘Come on, Nichi. Have you eaten? I bet you haven’t eaten. It’s a beautiful evening. It would be a shame not to go on somewhere else.’

It was indeed far too beautiful an evening to be moping at home about the abortive end of a barely formed relationship. For the first time in about twenty minutes, I looked directly at Sebastian. His eyes were even larger than I remembered them, two blue pools of apology. Everything about his demeanour seemed sad. I didn’t want him to be sad, I didn’t want it to end this way. And so I agreed to dinner.

We walked through St James Park to Soho holding hands. We must have cut an odd couple, me in my white prom dress, leather jacket, zebra shoes and oversized sunglasses, he all in grey. I had spent a full half hour painting my make-up on with a rare precision, filling in my lips with red liner and lipstick, so that I was sure the colour would not shift. I caught my reflection in the odd taxi window as we walked up past Horse Guards Parade. I was perfected as if for a monumental first date.

A young fashionable couple passed us but I was too busy staring into the near distance to notice them. ‘Oh they were VERY interested in you, Nichi.’ Sebastian stressed as if intimating they found me attractive. It irritated me. Why did a compliment have to pass through the prism of someone else’s appreciation? Why bother saying anything at all?

When we reached Soho, we walked along Wardour Street aimlessly, until Sebastian made a snap decision about where to eat. It was a Vietnamese place, cavernous, and quiet; the right kind of place to try and share a conciliatory meal together.

The waitress smiled at us warmly. She must have thought we were a couple. I felt like saying, ‘Oh, don’t worry, it’s not nearly as romantic as it looks; he’s just reassured me that he intends on sleeping with other people.’