Bound to You (6 page)

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 physical 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.

The next morning we set off for the resort. We took the Lexus, not the Mercedes, which wasn’t practical for a long drive along the cliff tops.

I was still thinking about what Giagia had called Christos as we left her house the other morning.
Leventi
mou
. He was indeed my
leventi
, and surely there was nothing that could get in the way of our love, not even this stupid business of him moving out. I had never believed in the One but if if there was such a thing, Christos was it. Everything would work itself out.

Christos turned on the radio. ‘
Louloudaki mou
’ was playing. We started to sing along. It was harder to fondle one another in this car but I could still stroke my hand up and down his thigh.

‘Nichi
mou
, you’re going to have to do the gears if you’re going to distract me like that, you know!’

‘Ha ha. I can probably just about manage that. Just as long as it doesn’t involve roundabouts.’

‘One day you’ll learn to drive, Nichi
mou
, when the time is right.’

‘No.’ I shook my head. ‘I’ve decided I don’t want to. I think I’m one of those women that is destined to be driven.’

Christos laughed. ‘To be driven, eh? See, you with your shoe fetish and taste in luxury perfumes. I’ve always known you were high maintenance. Born to be served.’

My hand was still stroking up along his thigh. I let it stray further up to his crotch.

‘Mmmm, Nichi, be careful!’

‘You’re a good driver,’ I teased. ‘You can concentrate. Besides,’ I continued, ‘if a police car catches up with us they’ll let us off. Remember that time when you and Stavros got pulled over sharing a bottle of whisky and the officer just told you to make sure you were on your way home to bed?’

‘That was because Stavros knew the officer, Nichi
mou
!’

‘Chances are you chat to anyone in Greece for five minutes and you’ll find a friend in common.’

‘You and your cultural stereotypes of my people!’

‘Well, Christos, you shouldn’t do such a good impersonation of an Olympian now, should you? An exceedingly priapic Olympian . . .’

Even through his jeans, his erection was blatant.

I flickered my fingers along his fly then slid them up under his belt buckle, teasing open the stiff top button.

Christos kept his eyes fixed on the road.

‘Christos,’ I wheedled. ‘You’re not trying to resist me, are you?’

He shook his head, smiling. ‘I don’t need to.’

‘What, you mean you’re not the slightest bit aroused right now, Christos
mou
?’

Suddenly, he smacked down the indicator, biceps bracing as he yanked the steering wheel towards me and pulled off the highway.

‘Where are we going?’

‘To an underground car park I know. I drop off cars for customers who live at the coast there sometimes. It’ll be empty. And if it’s not, there are pillars we can park behind.’

I loved Christos’s decisiveness. It turned me on.

It was stupendously hot and the heat rippled up off the asphalt in waves. I flicked my right leg up on to the dashboard, touching my scarlet-manicured toes to the toasted leather then jerked my foot upwards. ‘Fuck! It’s burning!’

Without looking at me, Christos wrapped his hand around my toes, then traced up along the arch of my instep with his fingers, before closing them around my ankle. I lifted my other leg up on to the dashboard, allowing my denim miniskirt to crease right up around the top of my thighs. My skirt had ridden so high that I was now exposing my lacy, lilac crotch.

He looked down at me and gripped a fist around my leg.

‘We’re here,’ he said, easing his foot off the accelerator and turning to the left again. Then, in a rare act of recklessness, he pressed his foot to the floor and plunged us down into the darkness.

‘Jesus, Christos!’

‘You know you’re safe, Nichi.’

Christos eased the car into a bay at the top of the garage, our headlights casting the only light on our surroundings. I could just about make out the bodies of two other vehicles, but it was essentially as he had promised, a dark, discreet space. It was perfect for daytime sex.

He barely had a chance to slam on the handbrake before I lunged at him. We kissed so hard my mouth ached from the off. Christos grappled with his belt, freeing the buckle, and I pulled at the corner of his fly, rapidly releasing the other three buttons. His cock sprang at my fingers and I started to masturbate him over the fabric of his boxer shorts. Christos, meanwhile, clamped his right hand over the lilac knickers, running the thumb of his left under the lacy rim. My knickers were askew, partly exposing my already swollen pussy. He prised away the fabric, sliding the tip of his index finger up in between my lips and towards my clitoris.

I took a sharp intake of breath and stopped my own hand for a few seconds, unable to concentrate on touching him at the same time. Then I slid my fingers behind the fabric of his boxer shorts and began to masturbate him again.

Christos rolled up my top with the palm of his hand, arranged it so that it rested across the swell of my cleavage. Then he inched up the bra, pushing at the underwiring to expose the bottom half of my breasts, and licked along the freed white skin. My nipples prickled against the fabric, desperate for him to flick his tongue over them. But he knew what denying me would do. Christos eased one, then two, then three fingers into my wetness.

When he kissed up along my neck, sinking his mouth into me, I threw my head hard back against the seat. More deliberately now, he worked his fingers in and out of me and I squeezed myself around his hand, clasping my own fingers about his cock.

The tip of it moistened my fingers, and I massaged them along his full length, increasing the speed of my strokes. ‘Yes,’ he said, leaning in to me. ‘Keep going, I’m so close.’

‘Me too,’ I whispered, and started to moan, the pitch of my utterances climbing higher and higher the closer I got to climax. Christos swelled one final time under my grip. With my free hand I grabbed at his wrist and thrust his fingers full up into me. We shuddered into an electric orgasm, lips caught between broken
s’agapos
and clawing kisses, our heads pressed together.

Afterwards, I lay my head on Christos’s shoulder and we stayed there for a moment, looking at one another. In the darkness only the whites of his eyes and the ivory glow of my breasts were visible. Suddenly one of the other cars ground to life, headlights flashing at us accusingly through our rear window.

‘Hang on, did we have an audience again? This is getting to be a habit.’ Christos grinned at me.

‘Time to go, I think, Christos
mou
.’

He was still wearing his seatbelt.

As soon as we arrived at the resort, the receptionist ushered us over to a downy, dove-grey couch, where champagne cocktails had been left for us on a low-level granite table. After a perfectly calculated amount of time, a porter appeared to show us to our room.

‘Not bad for a freebie, eh, Nichi
mou
?’

Christos and I admired the room. It was more like a suite, complete with bureau, sofa, mini kitchen, a walk-in wardrobe and separate dressing room. On the bedside tables were finger bowls filled with tiny, blooming jasmine flowers. Despite the room’s size, the bed dominated. The sheets were a rich cream, as were the pillowcases and the whisper of valance sheet, which exposed itself from underneath the coverlet.

The bathroom was ginormous. Along the left-hand wall was a whirlpool bath that looked as though it had risen up from a hot spring. Above the sink stood luxury toiletries in oversized bottles. At the far end of the bathroom was a double shower with glass doors. Even if one partner decided to take a bath rather than a shower it meant you were still situated within clear erotic sight of one another. No obstructions.

I went out to the balcony. It was incredible how the infinity pool morphed into the Aegean sea, a sublime aqueous illusion.

‘Christos,’ I called out. ‘Let’s swim.’

‘Do you like my new bikini?’ After some deliberation, I had opted for turquoise plunging cups held together with a bow that would not actually come undone, and skimpy briefs.

‘
Very
much! The Master approves! Positively neo-classical.’

Christos was arranging our towels over the choicest poolside chairs. We had the entire place to ourselves.

A waiter appeared and offered us drinks. ‘Mmm, I want a cocktail!’ The entrée in reception had given me a taste for it. ‘Can I have a bellini please?’

‘That’s so trashy, isn’t it,’ I giggled at Christos.

Christos laughed back and stroked my hair. ‘You can have whatever you want, high-maintenance Egg.’

‘I’ll have a mojito, please,’ he replied to the waiter.

Two minutes later and the drinks arrived. Christos laid back and sighed. For some reason, he had brought down to the pool a mammoth engineering textbook, preparatory reading for the PhD.

‘Christos
mou
, no, not that book, not today.’

‘
Signomi
, Nichi, I’m sorry,
kali
mou
, but I have to. There’s so little time now until I start. And once you go back I’ll be working in the garage again, then three weeks after that I’m back in London to begin my course.’

I turned my head towards the impassive sun, closed my eyes then reached down for my drink. This was such a treat, to be here with Christos. Nothing else mattered.

After fifteen minutes or so, Christos touched a hand on my thigh. ‘Nichi
mou
, you’re burning. Do you want me to put some more cream on you?’

‘No. Not yet. I’m going to swim.’

I got up and went towards the pool, keeping my sunglasses on. It was early afternoon and the sun was pouring scornful blaze on my white skin. I lowered myself into the water, quickly ducked under. I didn’t usually enjoy swimming in pool water in Greece, not when the Mediterranean sea itself was so idyllic. But this was special. Right up until you bumped into the infinity pool’s brim, the illusion of being able to float straight out from pool to sea persisted. I wished I could skim out over the sand and glide into it.

Suddenly something shivered up along it. I let out a scream. It was Christos, shimmying his hands up along it.