‘But why are you going home with me?’ he asked in his nasal Greek accent. ‘You don’t know me. You don’t know if maybe I am going to kill you?’
‘Yeah, well. You probably won’t.’
The morning was cold, clear and white. We’d left the club and walked to the Old Street roundabout. He kept asking me questions. I was taciturn, blissed-out and exhausted. Numb, no, dazed is the word. I still felt things. I stopped to kiss him again. Not really horny, but wanting to touch and taste and feel. Someone else, alive and warm. A homeless woman accosted us. I gave her a pound that had been rattling loose in the pocket of my sports shorts.
We caught the bus to Bow. We asked each other what we’d been on. Both MDMA. We asked each other what we were doing in London. He said ‘research.’ Maybe he really is a serial killer, I thought.
In the kitchen he wrote a note for his flatmates. ‘I have a friend staying tonight. Wild party!’ It made me smile.
He gave me a onesie pyjamas to sleep in. Black with a skeleton on it. This also made me smile. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever gone home with a guy who’s – given me a pyjamas to sleep in.’ He just smiled. He had big, curious eyes.
We slept on and off. I tried kissing him, moving on top of him in my skeleton onesie. I got hard, but he didn’t seem horny, wouldn’t take off his pants. He stared and smiled. He was very stare-y. I told him so. He was straddling me now. ‘And now you are going to kill me,’ I joked. He kissed me, unamused.
‘And your name is… Panos,’ I said.
‘Yes.’
‘Like Pan the god?’
‘No. It means in honour of the Virgin Mary.’
‘Oh. Right. Not at all to do with Pan.’
‘No.’
‘I wish I had a name that meant something.’
‘You do. Everyone does.’
‘Oh, yeah.’
‘Mal means bad.’ He smiled. ‘Are you bad?’
‘I don’t… think so.’
I smiled back, thinking this would be the moment things turned sexual, but still they didn’t.
Sporadic conversation, returning to the same questions. ‘Are you horny?’ ‘Are you sleepy? No?’ Finally an outcome; we got up, around noon, for breakfast. Breakfast was Choco Pops. I stood there in the skeleton onesie, eating from my bowl. ‘I feel like we should be watching cartoons.’
He stared at me while we ate, stood there in the claustrophobic kitchen.
I asked for coffee. He heated water on the hob and made me a cup of instant. I suggested we sit on the sofa in the living room. The starey-ness in the kitchen was getting to be too much.
On the sofa I leant back between his legs, cradling my cup, my head under his chin. ‘This is a huge cup of coffee.’
‘Your heart is beating too fast,” he said. His hand was on my chest. ‘It’s twice as fast as it should be. For a sitting person.’
‘Huh.’ I didn’t know what to say to that. I coughed. I’d had a bad cough for almost two weeks now. I should see a GP.
As if in response to my thoughts, he said: ‘You have to take care of yourself.’
‘Mh. Yeah.’ I drank the coffee. We heard voices and clattering metal from Roman Road through the open window. Practical, cheerful shouts. It felt relaxing. A drizzle fell from grey skies.
‘I want to see you again sometime,’ he said.
‘Yeah. We can do that.’ I was going to add a dubious ‘I guess’, but the words never made it out of my mind and past my lips, so we were left with just the plain confirmation.
I asked him what the nearest Tube was.
