Bound to You Read Online Free PDF Page A

things done. ‘I can only work at night. Otherwise I feel like I’m wasting my life, sitting in the library all day and reading some poor man’s thesis, who probably lost his penis to underuse, he spent so many hours studying.’
    I ignored his half-attempt at humour. ‘What, so you mean you wouldn’t even
try
to study in the day so that we could spend time together in the evening?’
    ‘It’s going to be very hard, this PhD, Nichi. I need to feel that I can study whenever suits me.’
    So this wasn’t just about his parents. This was about Christos’s life with me and the fact that somehow he saw me as a distraction or a burden, possibly both.
    And then another thing dawned on me. ‘But what am I going to do? Where will I live if you move out?’ How was I ever going to be able to afford to live in London without cohabiting with Christos?
    ‘My sister says someone at her work place has a room going spare from September. We can call for you.’
    What?! So this had already been thoroughly discussed among his entire family? Any other time I would have been livid. But right now, I was just too upset that Christos was effectively abandoning me.
    ‘OK,’ I replied, tears blurring my vision. ‘I just can’t believe you told me, rather than asking me about it.’
    ‘Look, it’s going to be fine. There’s ages yet until we have to sort things out. Anyway, I might not even do the PhD. Let’s just wait and see.’

CHAPTER 4
    The next few weeks dragged as though June were on loop. I started my job at the hospital and Christos continued at the shipping company, all the while making provisional arrangements for the autumn. The early summer sun seemed to shine just to spite me. We tried not to talk about the housing situation and distracted ourselves with games of badminton, cinema trips and weekend excursions to the coast and picturesque towns and villages; basically anywhere we could play at being blithe tourists in our own increasingly strained lives.
    ‘Christos,’ I asked one afternoon, as we were reading the Sunday papers at a pub on the South Bank, ‘do you want to go and see the Frida Kahlo exhibition this week? It’s our last chance before the show closes.’
    Christos frowned over the top of the family section. ‘I don’t think I can this week, Nichi
mou
. I’ve got to help Frankie and his girlfriend move into their new flat tomorrow. I’ll be working late on Tuesday. And then Layla is coming to town on Wednesday until the weekend.’
    Layla was Christos’s ex-girlfriend, one of the sweetest-natured people I had ever met and naturally beautiful in a very Mediterranean way, with delectable curves and a dense cloud of dark, waving hair. We had become friends on my last trip to Greece. Christos and Layla had known each other for years and had had a very brief relationship when he was in the army. But it felt like dating a cousin, he told me, and they had reverted to being friends again soon after.
    I was so preoccupied by the PhD debacle that I had forgotten that she was due in town but I cheered up at the thought of it. Layla was something of a confidante. We messaged via Facebook, me in stilted Greek, her in fluent chatty English. I would occasionally relate trivial disagreements I’d had with Christos, while she sympathised. Finally I could get a second opinion on Christos’s announcement that he was moving out, maybe even get her to have a word with him for me. Gina or Rachel would always listen, but the fact that Layla was both Greek and an old friend of Christos made her better placed to offer some real insight on what I still considered to be his completely out-of-character decision.
    ‘Why don’t you ask someone from your new job to go with you to the exhibition, Nichi
mou
?’
    Now I frowned. ‘Because I don’t know anyone well enough to ask yet, Christos. And it’s not very English to ask your workmates to art galleries. Only to the pub.’
    ‘There’s really nobody? What about the