In Bed With Lord Byron

film producer; our tenth followed his
cousin’s wedding, where I met the rest of his family (well, everyone except for his mother, whom he refused to speak to). Our eleventh one-night stand was make-up sex, after a row where he
had said, ‘Lucy, you’re so contrary; whatever I say, you have to disagree with it.’ Our twelfth was to prove I was right and never contrary and our thirteenth to explore my
favourite position. Our fourteenth was a lovely surprise, for Anthony bought me a little white kitten, and after making love under the stars we decided to call her Lyra, after the constellation. On
our twenty-third one-night stand we made a pact during our postcoital chat that when we got to twenty-six that really would be the limit, but we got to twenty-six and thought, Why end a good thing?
and soon we reached our ninety-ninth one-night stand, and oh, that was the best.
    One-night stand number ninety-nine took place in Paris.
    The day had not begun well, as Anthony dragged me through the city in determined pursuit of the world’s best chocolate. I was tired and fed up, and by the time we entered Patisserie Marie
I felt close to tears. He picked up a truffle, a dark, succulent ball dusted with icing sugar, and gently slid it between my lips. I bit down. Beautiful, shocking, harsh flavours exploded into my
mouth. My taste buds were close to weeping. I was too euphoric to speak. He gently leaned in and brushed his lips against mine, picking up a chocolate smear. We stayed there for a beat, our noses
touching, breath mingling, and then he whispered, ‘I love you.’
    While I stood there, stunned, he smiled a funny smile and went to pay for the world’s best chocolate: a snip at seventy-five euros.
    For the rest of the day, I was convinced that I needed a hearing aid. I
must
have misheard him. All day I calculated different permutations: I like you. I lust you. I’ve heard a
dove coo. I’ve booed you. He started to sulk, and I felt even more confused. We ate dinner in silence and went back to our hotel. We made love, and for the first time he switched the light
off, so we couldn’t see each other’s faces. In the elderberry darkness, our one-night stand was frantic, a little desperate. As he clung to me, sweat-damp, I took the plunge. I
whispered, ‘I love you.’
    ‘What did you say?’
    ‘I said I heard a dove coo.’
    ‘You said
I love you
,’ he whispered. ‘Didn’t you?’
    ‘Maybe,’ I said in a small voice, burying my face in the pillow. And then I heard him laugh like a little boy and pull me up. He kissed my nose and said joyously, ‘I love
you,’ and I said it again, and so did he, and we decided to make love again – just to celebrate.
    That was the night he confessed everything to me about the roots of his commitment-phobia. He told me how his parents had got divorced when he was five and how his mother had walked out on him.
He told me that I was teaching him to trust again, that I had given him back his faith in women, in love, in life.
    After our two hundredth or so one-night stand, we realised that a year had passed and we began to discuss moving in together. For the first time I felt a kick of
commitment-phobia in my stomach. After all, Anthony had claimed, rather grandly, that he was a total cad. But he seemed to be turning into a rather nice and dependable boyfriend – which
really wasn’t what I’d been expecting.
    ‘Let’s not live together,’ I said. ‘It might spoil things. I mean, what we have is so good.’ I don’t know why, but I was beginning to perpetually fret that
things might go wrong. It was as though our relationship was like a precious statue, and one mistake would shatter it into a thousand tinkly smithereens. In irrational moments I feared that some
sort of bad karma from my previous relationships was about to come bouncing back at me; Anthony would move in and then get bored and meet another woman and desert me. Worse, we might move in
together and not feel bored; we might fall deeper in love, we might drown in it, and then what if it went wrong? I might spend the rest of my life feeling as though I was filled with salt water,
struggling to reach the surface, never able to swim happily and freely again.
    ‘I don’t think we should live together because, you know, we have different routines. You like going to bed early and I like going to bed late. I’m messy and you’re tidy.
You like watching sitcoms and I like nature programmes