Unsticky

by Sarah Manning

  She rolled on to her side so she could curve herself against Vaughn and haul one heavy arm around her waist. ‘It was probably just a fluke,’ she murmured. ‘A Miami-sponsored fluke.’

  ‘Well, why don’t we check again in the morning, just to be on the safe side?’

  ‘Usually I can’t come more than once in a twenty-four-hour period,’ she shared, and felt Vaughn’s chest rumbling against her back. She reached around so she could dig him in his shaking ribs. ‘Don’t laugh at me! I’m being serious.’

  ‘It can all wait until tomorrow,’ Vaughn decided, as Grace yawned and rested her head on his shoulder.

  By 5 p.m. the following afternoon, Grace was forced to admit that the whims and workings of her own body were a complete mystery to her. Vaughn had coaxed another two orgasms from her: the first before breakfast, and later as he fucked her over the distressed white table in the corner of their suite, his palm grinding against her clit, number three hit. Grace vowed that she was going to try out a cartwheel when she got home. She’d never been able to get the hang of them either, but maybe with the right kind of application, she’d soon be a cartwheeling pro.

  ‘What are you thinking about?’ Vaughn asked, as he cupped Grace’s breasts with soapy hands because showering together now seemed entirely innocent after the positions Vaughn had had her in.

  Grace shook wet strands of hair out of her face. ‘Nothing.’ She turned herself round in the circle of Vaughn’s arms so she could look up at him. ‘You’re, like, my favourite person in the world right now.’

  Vaughn tried not to look smug but failed. ‘I’ve got a few years on you and I don’t think your past boyfriends knew what they were doing.’

  Grace thought of all those guys who had never gone down on her in return for lengthy blowjobs that had given her lockjaw. Boyfriends who’d been more interested in trying to persuade her to forego a condom, than get her off. ‘Well, they didn’t pay as much attention to detail as you do,’ she sniffed, coiling herself sinuously around Vaughn, because, hell, right now, she was his biggest fan.

  But Vaughn was holding her firmly at arm’s length. ‘Do you realise that I’ve blown out at least three meetings and two exhibitions today? I’m not cancelling dinner too. I’m a mere shell of the man I used to be.’

  Art Basel, Miami was the most important event in the American art calendar. Over 200 galleries exhibited work from their best artists, put on shows and introduced new talent to the industry. That was Vaughn’s official line, but as far as Grace could tell, Art Basel was like an end-of-term school disco with art installations.

  It seemed like the art world had converged on Miami for a weekend of drinking, partying and getting off with each other. Grace found that she wasn’t propping up the wall any longer and trying to look animated at parties when Vaughn disappeared in the direction of museum directors or stinking rich hedge fund managers. At Art Basel it was easy to talk to people - or maybe it was because she was giving off a post-sex glow and was so chilled out that she was beaming at anyone who strayed into her field of vision.

  Mostly she talked to gallery assistants and other girlfriends, but Vaughn was delighted when he came to find her on the Saturday night and she’d palled up with a rock-star daughter who styled herself as a DJ and was looking to invest in some ‘really whacked-out light features’ for a club she was opening in Las Vegas. But then, Grace was starting to feel as if everything she did that weekend delighted Vaughn because they had been back at the Delano by eleven the last two nights so he could show her just how delighted he was, which involved stripping her clothes off as soon as the door shut behind them and coming up with new ways to make her lose her mind.

  Although they were three months and then some into their partnership, Grace felt like this was a honeymoon. Vaughn’s face was creased into a permanent smile and he didn’t feel the need to snark about anything. They’d even found a way to sleep together, curled round each other at first before moving to their separate sides of the bed, but that could have been because they were both too exhausted to worry about who was fidgeting. Vaughn wasn’t and never would be her boyfriend, but Grace decided when she woke up on Sunday morning to find him trailing kisses down her stomach that she liked him a lot better than she’d liked most of her old boyfriends.

  Later, after Vaughn had gone down on her for half an hour and she’d reciprocated with probably the best blowjob of her life, they went to a brunch buffet at the Biltmore, courtesy of some bigass, environment-damaging, art-sponsoring oil company. The crowd was older and stiffer than the other Basel parties and Grace soon found that she was hugging the walls again.

  Finally braving the crowd to get a refill of guava juice, she suddenly found herself surrounded by Alex, who was always popping up like tie-dye as a trend prediction, and a gaggle of beautiful but vicious-looking boys.

  ‘This is Grace, Vaughn’s new girl. She looked far more fresh-faced a few weeks ago,’ Alex informed the cheap seats, then had the nerve to lean in for an air kiss.

  ‘Alex,’ Grace said thinly. ‘Don’t brunches interfere with your creature-of-the-night lifestyle?’

  There was a collective snigger because Alex’s pallor was truly vampiric and he always wore black, which Grace considered to be the sign of someone who had no true fashion nous.

  ‘Nice dress. How much did Vaughn pay for it?’ Alex sniped back, with a pointed look at the Marc Jacobs dress Vaughn had bought her in Paris.

  ‘About the same amount it cost you for that last batch of dodgy Botox,’ Grace sniffed because she’d worked with Kiki long enough to spot the telltale signs of an immovable forehead. She saw Vaughn across the room, and as if she was sending out a distress signal, he immediately turned his head and stared directly at her.

  Grace tried to telegraph an urgent ‘Rescue me, right the hell now!’ message, and it was a miracle on the same level as turning water into wine because Vaughn was moving towards her.

  ‘. . . and I ask every time we bump into each other, but Grace still won’t have lunch with me. Not even early evening drinks.’

  ‘Are you sure you’re gay, Alex?’ she asked sweetly. ‘Because you’re awfully fixated on being alone with me.’

  Vaughn had now arrived at her side. He was wearing the cream-coloured suit from that first encounter in Liberty’s and he’d brought reinforcements.

  ‘Am I interrupting something?’ he asked, barely even acknowledging Alex’s presence.

  ‘Nope, absolutely nothing,’ Grace said. ‘Oh hi, Nadja. Love your shoes.’

  Vaughn was flanked by Sergei and Nadja, who’d become Grace’s text buddy, though Grace was still a little scared by her: not just her daunting beauty but the way she said the most outrageous things in such a deadpan manner that Grace could never tell if she was joking or being serious.

  ‘From Cavalli,’ Nadja said, tucking her arm through Grace’s and pouting furiously as the A-gays melted away. ‘Grace, I need fur.’

  It was currently a very agreeable seventy degrees in the shade. A touch too warm even for the purple opaque tights Grace was wearing. ‘You sure about that?’ she asked.

  ‘This afternoon, we get me fur,’ Nadja insisted. ‘But where?’

  ‘Sergei and Nadja are heading back to Moscow tomorrow, where it’s currently snowing,’ Vaughn translated. ‘Would you mind going shopping with Nadja?’

  Grace could shop with the best of them, even Russian almostsupermodels. ‘We could try Fendi or Gucci?’

  ‘Anything Nadja wants,’ Sergei grunted. All he ever did was grunt and run his eyes over people, like he could tell exactly how much they had invested in stocks and bonds.

  ‘Cool,’ Nadja opined. ‘But first you change your tights, Grace. Is too edgy for South Beach.’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ Grace assured Vaughn later, as she removed the offensive hosiery and changed out of Marc Jacobs and into American Apparel. ‘I mean, I don’t approve of wearing fur . . .’

  ‘Do you actually own anything made of fur?’
Vaughn asked lazily, as he peered at his laptop screen.

  ‘Well, no, but I work for a magazine that shoots fur and advertises dead animal pelts, so shopping with Nadja isn’t that much of a problem.’ Not for the first time, Grace marvelled at just how wonky her moral compass was.

  ‘I was considering buying you a fur jacket for Christmas but obviously I shall have to rethink that,’ Vaughn said, lifting his head so he could waggle an eyebrow at her, which meant he was still in playful mode. ‘Are you sure you won’t change your mind? Whistler can get very cold.’

  ‘We’re going to Whistler?’ Grace decided that jumping up and down would not be cool. She’d do it in the bathroom where Vaughn couldn’t see her. ‘I know you promised me foreign travel but you do realise that taking the bus into work on Tuesday morning is going to be a major comedown?’

  ‘Poor Grace,’ Vaughn murmured, his attention already back with his latest acquisitions. ‘I always go to Whistler for Christmas, but we left it off the itinerary until I got a few dates locked down.’ He tapped some keys. ‘We’ll fly out on the twenty-third, then go off to Buenos Aires on the twenty-eighth for the New Year.’

  It sounded wonderful. The answer to all her prodigal-Mum-sponsored Christmas nightmares. Except . . .

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Can’t ski? Really, Grace, everyone can ski. I’ll get Madeleine to book an instructor to take you out on the nursery slopes. And on Christmas Eve, we’ve been invited to—’

  ‘No, you don’t understand,’ Grace burst out. ‘I can’t go! There’s a lot of stuff happening around then.’

  She tried to explain in a matter-of-fact way because they’d been having such a great weekend and Vaughn really hated it when she whined. She couldn’t bring herself to mention her mother, but her grandmother wanted her home for Christmas and, short of Grace contracting the Ebola virus, no excuse was acceptable.

  Vaughn listened to it all, eyes so narrowed that Grace didn’t know how he could still see out of them. But he let her ramble on, becoming more and more disjointed, until she got to the Lily part of her set-in-stone Christmas plans. Then he got his scathe on.

  ‘No one gets married at Christmas - it’s so inconsiderate of other people’s plans.’

  Lily had been told exactly that countless times, by countless other people, but she refused to budge. ‘She’s severely hormonal and she wants the day to be special and romantic.’ Even though Grace had heard Lily use those exact adjectives at least three times every day for two weeks, they sounded equally lame coming out of her own mouth.

  ‘Either she’s mentally deficient or colossally self-involved,’ Vaughn shot back, standing up so he could loom. He did so love to loom.

  ‘Look, I can fly out on Boxing Day. I’ll fly out late on Christmas Day if there’s a flight but I can’t miss my best friend’s wedding.’ Grace wasn’t capable of unemotional any more. She got out of range of Vaughn’s looming so she could fling herself down on the bed in a fit of pique. ‘Please, Vaughn, I’m chief bridesmaid and I promised Lily that I’d—’

  ‘You’re not going. I have a lunch on Christmas Eve that could bring in millions of pounds. I think that takes precedence over a shotgun wedding for a girl who’s too stupid to use birth control.’

  ‘Please don’t talk about my best friend like that! Look, why can’t you meet me halfway? Why can’t you compromise just this once?’

  Vaughn had given up on looming, in favour of prowling towards her.

  ‘Because we have a contract and I made it perfectly and explicitly clear that our arrangement would take up all your free time, all your vacation allowance and any public holidays. You are flying out to Whistler on the twenty-third and that’s it. End of discussion.’

  It wasn’t the end of the discussion as far as Grace was concerned but she was too busy fuming to think of anything to say. So she picked up the nearest pillow and threw it at him. Of course it missed. She watched it sail through the air and land at Vaughn’s feet but her intention had been unmistakable.

  That was when he got really angry. ‘You are coming to Whistler when I say so. You will go where I tell you to go. You will do so with a smile on your face while wearing clothes that don’t include ridiculous pairs of tights that make you look as if you’ve escaped from the nearest clown school and I do not want to hear another bloody word about it.’ He hadn’t shouted once. Hadn’t even raised his voice but Grace still felt as if someone had tipped a bucket of ice down her back.

  He stormed out of the room after that and Grace barely had time to sag back on the bed, when he poked his head through the door again.

  ‘And if I want you to have lessons at a bloody dry-ski slope every night from now until the twenty-second of December, you’ll bloody well do it,’ he growled.

  chapter twenty

  Grace was used to the inexplicable but small events that led up to life-changing moments. There was the congealed cranberry sauce that had started the final row that had led to her parents’ divorce. Or the rainy Sunday afternoon when she’d first seen Breakfast At Tiffany’s, fallen in love with Audrey’s black Givenchy shift dress and decided that she wanted to work in fashion. There was the Marc Jacobs handbag that had led her to Vaughn and now, there was a pair of Fendi shearling boots altering the course of her destiny.

  Nadja had bought her the boots. Even though Grace had been wearing a huge pair of Chloé sunglasses, it was obvious that she’d been crying and could only splutter, ‘Me and Vaughn just had a little spat.’

  ‘When Sergei is a pig, I buy expensive things on his card,’ Nadja had said, tossing back her hair, though she bought expensive things on Sergei’s card even when he wasn’t being a pig.

  Grace didn’t have a Vaughn-sponsored credit card, just a monthly allowance that was mostly gone even though it was only 7 December, so Nadja had bought her the boots. Which hadn’t made Grace feel even the tiniest bit better.

  When Vaughn had finally shown up at one the next morning, Grace had been in bed but was still too upset to sleep. She’d kept her eyes shut and tried to make her breathing deep and slow, even when Vaughn sat down on the bed and stroked her hair.

  ‘The dry-ski slope was a bit much,’ he said softly. ‘I’ll make sure you get to see your grandparents on the twenty-third and then I’ll have a car take you from Worthing to Gatwick. Now, did you and Nadja have fun?’

  It wasn’t even a second-cousin to an apology but then Vaughn didn’t do apologies. What he had done was trail his hand down her spine so he could cup her arse.

  Grace had given up feigning sleep. ‘I have a headache,’ she hissed, and that had been the last they’d spoken. Vaughn had left again and hadn’t come back when the car arrived to take her to the airport.

  But the fact that Miami was now Grace’s least favourite place on earth hadn’t been the Fendi boots’ fault, so when she’d woken up on Tuesday morning, fuggy with jet lag and with a sick feeling of dread about the conversation she needed to have with Lily, she’d put them on to cheer herself up - in direct contravention of her rule that Vaughn clothes and work clothes were to be kept strictly separate.

  Which, in retrospect, hadn’t been big or clever. But Grace only realised that five minutes into a crisis meeting about Christmas deadlines. The production editor was droning on about the repro house and Grace was wondering if anyone would notice if she shut her eyes and had a doze, when Courtney sat up and stared at Grace’s legs in amazement.

  ‘Those are Fendi,’ she announced. ‘Where did you get them?’

  Grace looked down at the boots and then back at Courtney while her sluggish brain came up with and discarded several not-very-plausible lies. Bottom line was that fashion assistants without trust funds couldn’t afford Fendi shearling boots.

  ‘Don’t say you got them in Paris or Milan because they’re wait-listed there too,’ Lucie piped up, also staring at the boots. ‘I was going to fly to Berlin but they only had the size forty-ones.’

  There was a murmur of excited chatter
. Even Kiki was looking as Grace placed her legs as far under her chair as they would go. ‘They are so not Fendi,’ she protested, throwing in a little eyeroll. ‘They’re fakes I got on eBay. Like, seriously! How could I afford Fendi? Hello!’

  That crisis had been averted and Grace could get on with the real crisis, which was lunch with Lily. Grace had decided that the only solution was to tell the truth. Or as close as she could come to telling the truth without actually telling the whole truth.

  But the first thing Lily had said was, ‘Those are the Fendi boots that were in Vogue, aren’t they? I thought all your credit cards were maxed out?’