After he had checked the answering machine and locked the door and kicked the front hall rug back into place (it bunched when you walked on it) and all those other little just-getting-home things that are three-quarters instinctive, we cracked open a bottle of cheap Italian red — real Italian red, brought back from his trip to visit his mother over New Year’s — and settled down in a room I hadn’t seen until then to cuddle up on the couch and watch silly movies.

For the first time since the bedroom debacle, I really felt as though I were home. Unlike the rest of the house, the room wasn’t a decaying example of late Victorian arts and crafts movement; it featured a squashy, comfy couch with a plaid afghan tossed over one side. There were still dog hairs clinging to the side of the couch, relics, Colin admitted, of an elderly family dog who had gone to his reward that past October.

“Right before I met you,” he said, gazing soulfully at me over his wine.

I clinked my glass with his. “I hope you’re not considering me as a replacement.”

He picked a strand of red hair off his shoulder. “You are shedding,” he said, handing it back to me.

“Um, thanks. But don’t expect me to play dead.”

In one corner of the room, an open cabinet — IKEA or the equivalent, at a guess — housed a large collection of videos, in battered cardboard holders. From the looks of it, they were a composite selection. I assumed Fiorile, the Italian art film, was Colin’s mother. The Godfather movies were definitely Colin. And Four Weddings and a Funeral, Pretty Woman, and everything ever done by Errol Flynn were undoubtedly the property of his sister, Serena. I wondered if she imagined herself as Maid Marian defending herself against Prince John’s tribunal in that amazing courtroom scene. It’s so much easier to live the lives we’d like for ourselves when they’re printed on celluloid in two-hour-long packages.

I did get Colin to agree to the movie of my choice but, try as I might, I couldn’t quite get him to see the finer points of the Errol Flynn Robin Hood.

As Robin flung open the doors of the Great Hall of Nottingham Castle, Colin made a snorting noise. “If I came home with a whole deer slung over my shoulders like that, what would you say?”

I didn’t even have to think about it. “Get that unhygienic thing out of the house!” I snuggled deeper into the couch cushions. “But when Errol Flynn does it, it’s different.”

“He’s dead, you know,” said Colin darkly.

“He was also gay. But who cares? He still looks splendid in tights.”

Colin made a grumbling noise that came out sounding somewhat like, “Yes, if you like effeminate men.”

I supposed I should have been relieved that he didn’t. I knew far too many men in college who liked Madonna, Errol Flynn, and Platonic aesthetics (not necessarily in that order). Let’s just say that they all came tumbling out of the closet sometime around junior year.

“I took fencing, too,” he said, watching critically as Errol Flynn — looking particularly dishy in his green tights, I might add — cut Prince John’s men to ribbons at triple normal speed.

“Have some popcorn,” I said, shoving the bowl at him.

“Can I throw it at the screen?”

“It’s your carpet.”

“Hmm,” said Colin, and put it in his mouth instead, by which I gathered that he enjoyed vacuuming about as much as I do.

All in all, it was a perfectly lovely evening. We fell asleep in a happy haze of red wine and extra-connubial canoodling, curled up against the cold beneath Colin’s utilitarian blue duvet. It may have been ugly, but it did know its business. For the first time since I’d come to England, I wasn’t cold. Having a boy in the bed is better than having one’s own space heater.

I was dreaming quite happily of Colin striding into the Great Hall of Nottingham Castle with a large pig thrown over his shoulders — “Back to the sties with you!” shouted Prince John, banging his fist on the trestle board with rage — when the Sheriff set off the castle alarm, the portcullis came crashing down, and I was jolted brutally and finally out of sleep.

Half strangling myself in the covers as I flailed into wakefulness, I realized blearily that it wasn’t the castle alarm system after all, but the double ring peculiar to English phones. Someone was phoning.

I would have loved to have dropped whoever it was down the nearest oubliette, but since I’d been so nastily jarred out of my castle fantasy, there was no oubliette to be had. Just the phone, which kept ringing and ringing, pausing after each double ring as though gathering its breath. It showed no signs of stopping.

Like most men, Colin could probably have slept through the charge of the Light Brigade as they thundered right over his pillow. Since I was on the side with the phone, I groped sleepily for the receiver, picked it up upside down, and had to reverse it, getting slightly tangled in the cord in the process.

“Hello?” I murmured sleepily, before I had time to wonder whether I should really be picking up Colin’s phone in the middle of the night. What if it was a family emergency? I wouldn’t want his mother to think I was a loose woman.

Instead of saying “hello” back — or “cheers” or whatever — the person on the other end of the phone muttered something in a foreign language and the connection clicked off. I couldn’t recognize the language, but it definitely wasn’t a Romance language or one of the Nordic ones. Whatever it was, it involved a lot of slurring sounds.

In other words, it was clearly a wrong number.

Oh, well. At least it wasn’t Colin’s mother. Or his sister.

“All righty, then.” I put the phone back in its cradle, tugged some quilt away from Colin (Ha! He did hog the blankets), pulled my pillow over my head, and prepared to go back to sleep.

The phone instantly started ringing again.

This time it was I who muttered something uncomplimentary.

“Hello?” I snapped, picking up the phone. Didn’t he realize it was three in the morning?

It must not have been three in the morning wherever he was. I could hear the sound of traffic, horns blaring, people chattering, taxi drivers cursing. I might not have been able to identify the language, but taxi drivers cursing sounds the same the world over. Trust me, it’s true.

But the person on the other end of the phone didn’t say a word.

“Hello?” I repeated.

Click went the phone.

“Well, same to you,” I said, and thrust the receiver down. I missed the cradle, of course. Not that the crazy mis-dialer on the other end could hear it. Now I was awake, awake and annoyed. Colin, of course, was still fast asleep. To add insult to injury, in those crucial two minutes he had managed to wrap himself mummy-like in those few feet of blanket I had so painstakingly extracted from him.

I resisted the ignoble urge to poke him in the ribs. I couldn’t find his ribs, anyway. They were too thickly wrapped in my side of the blanket.

Grumbling to myself, I half climbed, half rolled out of the bed, sliding until my feet touched the floor. Screw seductive, I was putting on my flannel-est flannel. Colin had lost the right to skimpy nightwear when he had stolen my half of the blanket.

I stomped barefoot across the prickly old carpet towards the chest of drawers, my eyes by now having adjusted enough to the darkness to at least make out the shape of large pieces of furniture.

As I was passing Colin’s side of the bed, his night table began to shriek at me.

After I jumped half out of my skin, I realized that I hadn’t set off some sort of outré girlfriend alarm, it was just his cell phone, which he had forgotten to switch to silent when he went to bed. Admittedly, we both had our minds on other things at the time.

Being a meat-and-potatoes sort of bloke, Colin had never bothered to install one of the music ringtones; instead, it was just your basic ring, shrill and insistent. If Colin’s phone had been one of those flip-top kinds, I would never have looked. It would have been tantamount to opening his mail. But there it was, just lying there, screen side up, all lit up by the call. It was practically thrusting itself in my face. What was I supposed to do, shut my eyes?

On the glowing screen, the country code read “971.” I’ve always been more than a bit baffled by international dialing, but I knew enough to know that that was not the U.K. It wasn’t America, either, or anywhere in Europe. Where in the hell was 971? Someplace where people might still be out on the street and taxis might still be driving, perhaps?

The ringing stopped abruptly. A few moments later, the phone gave a double beep, like an electronic belch, to signify that a message had been left.

I didn’t check the message, of course. The fact that I didn’t have Colin’s voice mail access code was entirely immaterial. Good relationships, as we all know, are based on trust.

Blah, blah, blah.

Trust and, in my case, a hearty dose of curiosity.

It couldn’t hurt to just find out what the country code was. After all, I was wide awake now (I hurled an accusatory glance at the lump on the bed happily wrapped in all the blankets and sleeping away), and scrolling through directory numbers could have a soporific effect. It would be like counting sheep without the sheep.

Colin had told me there was Internet access in his study. I could look it up there. And while I was at it, I could check my email. Yes, that was what I was doing, checking my email. Nobody was saying anything about snooping. If I were home and wide awake in the middle of the night, of course I would go check email. It was immaterial that the email happened to be in Colin’s study.