Unsticky

by Sarah Manning

  Grace nodded frantically. ‘Are we talking about the high-waisted bootcut jeans with the orange ballet flats? Oh, poor Beth, she tries so hard but she never gets it right.’ She scraped her chair around the corner so, just this once, she could give Lily a totally spontaneous hug. ‘Can’t we put all this shit behind us and be friends again?’

  Lily wasn’t drinking even the prescribed one glass of wine because it made her feel sick, but on the way to Hampstead she insisted they bought a bottle of wine, which Grace would drink while Lily got a vicarious thrill out of watching her.

  But first she wanted the guided tour. Grace kept her out of the places that she thought of as Vaughn’s: the basement gym, his office and his bedroom, but Lily had more than enough square footage to keep her happy.

  ‘Is that a poured resin floor?’ she asked, as they started in the kitchen because interiors shows were her TV crack. ‘You have a La Cornue range!’

  Grace hadn’t seen Lily this excited since the Luella Bartley sample sale. Swigging out of the bottle of Pinot Grigio as she showed Lily around, Grace was secretly thrilled that she could finally show off - just a little bit. The last stop was her bedroom, though she didn’t sleep in it so much lately. Lily made a beeline straight for the walk-in wardrobe and reverently stroked the garment bags, murmuring the names of designers under her breath.

  She looked at Grace with an awed expression. ‘You’re dating so well, Gracie,’ she breathed, and there wasn’t a hint of censure in her voice now she saw the material benefits of sleeping with a really rich man. And just like that her gaze flickered to the huge bed, though actually Grace and Vaughn had only had sex in here the once. ‘What’s it like?’

  ‘What’s what like?’ Graced asked archly, though she knew exactly what Lily meant.

  ‘The doing it! What’s he like in bed?’

  Grace contemplated inventing a story about some weird fetish or telling Lily to mind her own business but the truth was that she’d been dying to tell someone. ‘He’s amazing. Seriously. We’ve done two things that I actually thought were illegal and Vaughn always makes sure I get off. Every single time.’

  Lily’s eyes were enormous circles of wonder. ‘Really? Because you once said that you couldn’t come unless you got on top and really, really wriggled.’

  ‘Well, now I do,’ Grace sighed, as she helped Lily to curl up beside her on the bed. ‘I know you think it’s a little weird but we went on a date in New York before all that other stuff and I was dying to sleep with him then, just because of the way he kissed me.’

  ‘He wasn’t what I expected,’ Lily mused. ‘He’s sort of handsome in a suity way.’

  ‘I love his suits.’ The combination of lack of sleep and half a bottle of wine was proving fatal. Any second now she’d start telling Lily about how Vaughn always said, ‘Hello, gorgeous,’ to her in the morning. Or how he’d lie on the sofa with his head in her lap and complain if she stopped stroking his hair. Or even how Vaughn would coax an orgasm out of her, when she was sure she couldn’t come, by murmuring absolute filth in her ear. Well, maybe she wouldn’t tell Lily that.

  ‘You’ve gone bright red,’ Lily noted. She brushed her hands over the covers and Grace could tell she was choosing her words carefully. ‘When I saw you with him, it was odd. You looked like a proper couple.’

  Sometimes Grace thought that she and Vaughn did have a proper relationship but it only existed in the space between things said and unsaid. ‘I really like him, Lils,’ Grace whispered because she didn’t have the guts to say it any louder. ‘He’s funny and he looks out for me and no one’s really done that before. And he’s moody as fuck, but I am too so that works out. I never thought I’d be so into him.’

  ‘Well, he must be into you too, ’cause otherwise he could have just set you up in your own place, instead of letting you move in here,’ Lily said. ‘I mean, you’re really annoying to live with, Gracie. You have that whole clean freak thing going on.’

  ‘Just because I objected to you leaving plates on the floor for three days in a row doesn’t make me a clean freak,’ Grace snapped automatically, before she took one deep breath and made a vow that she wasn’t going to lose her cool with Lily. Not when they were almost made up. ‘Vaughn has a housekeeper so dirty plates never become an issue. We just rub along really well.’ It was all sounding a little too good to be true but Lily had missed the first few chapters. ‘In the beginning though, not so much. I was really scared of him and the whole thing was so overwhelming, but we had this big thing blow up at the beginning of the year and since then Vaughn’s been a sweetheart. Most of the time.’

  Lily prodded Grace with her foot. ‘You’re sounding all kinds of smitten, Gracie. You sure you’re not the tiniest bit in love?’

  The l-word made Grace flinch. ‘No,’ she said immediately. ‘I’ve told you before, I think love is a load of bollocks. People say they’re in love just because they like shagging each other or they laugh at the same stuff or so they can use it as an excuse to fuck you over.’

  ‘That is the most depressing thing I’ve ever heard,’ Lily protested, sitting up, which took a lot of effort. ‘And it’s crap, Grace! I love Dan. I do. Even though I’m mad with him right now, all I can think about is that moment when he walks through the front door and he sees me and he gets this smile on his face, like - like I’m there and that’s all he needs. He’s my family as much as my mum and dad are. So, what you’re saying - no. Love is real and it’s the whole point of everything.’

  Lily put up a good argument but Grace wasn’t convinced at all. Love had been invented so there’d be something to write books and pop songs about. Or it was for people like Lily, but not for people like her.

  ‘Well, put it this way,’ she said. ‘I’m not the kind of person who’s capable of being in love. There’s something missing from my hard wiring. So, this thing with Vaughn, it makes sense because he’s like that too. It’s the perfect arrangement for people like us.’

  ‘You wouldn’t know love if it was walking down the Prada runway in a really killer pair of heels.’ Lily stopped rubbing her belly long enough to do air quotes. ‘I just thought there was something “off” about Vaughn.’

  ‘What do you mean by “off”?’

  ‘Not sure.’ Lily began rubbing her bump in an anti-clockwise fashion. ‘He was all suave and stuff, but it was like he was trying to play me in this subtle way that I didn’t get, but I still knew I was being played. I can’t really explain it better than that. Did you know that the brain shrinks between three to five per cent during pregnancy?’

  Grace seized upon the chance not to have to process or comment on what Lily had just said about Vaughn. He never made a good first impression. Besides, she had the perfect retort oven-ready. ‘Your brain’s shrinking? But how can you tell?’

  Too much had happened for Grace and Lily to slot right back to where they’d been before the months of not talking, and maybe their friendship wouldn’t be quite the same again, but Grace knew they were going to be all right because Lily tried to look offended for about a second, before she giggled and whapped Grace over the head with a pillow. Then, because she wanted to be a better friend, Grace persuaded Lily to give Dan a call to come and pick her up.

  Which left Grace kicking it solo on a Saturday evening. It was only 8 p.m. and the whole of London was hers for the taking. Grace tapped in the security code so she wasn’t murdered in the night by homicidal burglars and went to bed.

  chapter thirty-three

  When Grace had first started at Skirt, she thought ‘appointments’ was just fancy fashion speak for spending the morning in bed or going home early, which simply wasn’t true. Or nine times out of ten, it wasn’t true. On Monday morning, she spent a happy few hours visiting fashion PRs to look at their new summer accessories. It was hard to think about shooting pages for their summer issues when it was the middle of a very rainy March, Grace thought as she headed back to the office, her head full of the new wooden heels and jewellery a
dorned with anchors.

  The first person she saw as she stepped out of the lift was Lily. Grace smiled because now Lily could smile back and even ask how the rest of Grace’s weekend had been, but Lily was too busy squeaking. Then the two beauty-bots she was with joined in, emitting a pitch that was only audible to dogs.

  ‘Where were you yesterday?’ Lily finally said in a lower tone. ‘I tried calling.’

  ‘I was in bed - my phone was in another room,’ Grace said, because Vaughn had got back at midday, just in time for a Sunday lunch of roast beef and all the trimmings. After the digestive process had been complete, Vaughn’s plans for the rest of the day had mostly involved Grace naked in positions that had made her wish she still went to yoga classes.

  ‘It’s been the most exciting morning ever,’ one of the beauty girls breathed. ‘Posy resigned because she’s got a job at Vogue and Kiki had George from Security escort her out of the building.’

  ‘You’re kidding,’ Grace gasped, because George escorting people from the premises was meant to be a Skirt urban myth. ‘Oh shit! I bet Kiki’s going to be in a filthy mood.’

  ‘Don’t you get what this means? They’re going to have a vacancy for Posy’s job and I think Courtney’s pregnant too,’ Lily whispered fiercely. ‘She had a bag of crisps for breakfast. What more proof do you need?’

  They lingered by the big swing doors that led to the Skirt office. ‘There’s no way Kiki would give me Posy’s job,’ Grace said morosely. ‘I mean, she’s been OK lately but she’ll probably poach someone from Vogue just to pay them back. And she’s always telling me how the fashion assistant on ELLE is wonderful and talented and everything that I’m not.’

  Lily gave Grace a quick squeeze. ‘You might get to do some of Posy’s shoots while they’re trying to find a replacement. Except, Kiki is mad at you,’ she added with a guilty start. ‘Sorry, I forgot to tell you. You really need to be in the same room as your phone.’

  ‘Why? Why is she mad at me? I haven’t done anything.’ Grace racked her brains for anything she could have done lately to piss Kiki off, apart from simply existing. ‘Was it the Barcelona shoot? She hated it - I knew it! Except I thought it was exactly what she wanted. And it was meant to be Lucie’s shoot, though she spent 24/7 on the phone, and—’

  ‘No, it’s because you’re all over the papers,’ Lily said obliquely. ‘It was all anyone could talk about until Posy came out of Kiki’s office in tears.’

  ‘But I’m not! I would know if I was all over the papers. What papers am I all over?’

  ‘It might have been the Sunday Express or the Mail On Sunday. That was why Kiki was so mad. She said it wouldn’t have been so bad if it had been the Observer or The Sunday Times. But it was a nice picture.’

  ‘There was a picture?’ Grace gave a shudder of revulsion. When she and Vaughn had first been outed, Jake on the picture desk had had hours of fun sending jpegs round the office of Grace at various art happenings, which he got sent from the picture agencies every morning, along with photos of actual, genuine celebrities. Grace had threatened to do something with her giant stapler, a couple of bulldog clips and his dick until he’d promised to never do it again. It had been a salient reminder of just how unphotogenic Grace was, as Kiki had been at great pains to point out. ‘Why would anyone want to put a picture of me in their paper?’

  ‘It was one picture of you, lots of pictures of Vaughn,’ Lily supplied helpfully. ‘You never said he’d been married.’

  ‘I’m going. Now. Can’t talk.’

  Back in the office, Grace tore through the Sunday paper until she found the piece in the Mail On Sunday, the paper of choice of her grandparents. It was part of a series of articles on businessmen who were weathering the current credit crisis and making hay while the rest of the country had to shop at Lidl. Grace’s eye immediately went to the picture of her and Vaughn in Miami. She was wearing her Marc Jacobs dress and her face was half in profile as she leaned in to hear what Vaughn was saying in her ear. If memory served her right, it had been something disparaging about her purple tights. It could have been worse, Grace decided, as she began to skim through the copy. There wasn’t much to skim through, as according to the reporter, James Vaughn is notoriously reclusive and has never given an interview or even gone on record about any of his acquisitions or clients. There was a reference to ‘Vaughn’s lost weekend’ which, according to someone who’d been at Oxford with him, had lasted three years - but nothing about the ex-wife, just a list of Vaughn’s past companions, whom Grace made a mental note to Google later.

  Then it got to the good bit: In recent months, Vaughn, 41, has been seen with Grace Reeves, 23, a London-based fashion editor on Skirt magazine. Although much younger than Vaughn’s past girlfriends, Ms Reeves appears to be just as comfortable at a gala ball in New York as a warehouse party in East London. ‘Gracie’s a lovely girl but not the sharpest tool in the box. She’s far more into fashion than art,’ says gallery assistant, Alex Clark-Jones. ‘I once asked her what she thought of Tracey Emin and the only thing she knew about her was that she was friends with Kate Moss.’

  Grace wanted to howl in outrage. She knew lots of dry art facts about Tracey Emin and could probably recite the names of at least ten of her works off the top of her head if she wanted to. She was in the middle of firing off a furious email to Alex telling him that, when her inbox pinged with a message from Kiki demanding her presence.

  ‘Ah, it’s our newly minted fashion editor,’ Kiki said as Grace appeared in her doorway. ‘It’s funny, but I don’t remember promoting you.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I didn’t know anything about that until I read it just now. And it was full of inaccuracies because I don’t even—’

  ‘So you’ve heard about Posy too, I take it?’ Kiki looked as if she was plotting a world of pain for her former junior fashion editor. ‘She couldn’t even pronounce Givenchy properly when she first got here.’

  Grace’s pronunciation skills had always been first rate, but she wasn’t sure if this was the right time to point that out. Or whether she should enquire politely if Kiki was going to put an ad for a junior fashion editor in Monday’s Guardian, unless she had a strong internal candidate in mind. ‘Did you see the Barcelona pictures?’ she asked eventually, inwardly bracing herself for the inevitable invective.

  ‘They were all right.’ Kiki was really off her game to turn down the opportunity Grace had just given her. ‘Neither Nadja nor Alessandro can take a bad picture but Lucie said you were very helpful. Put out a lot of fires. Just like a proper fashion editor.’

  It was the single nicest thing Kiki had ever said, and even though the situation was far from ideal, Grace had to seize the next five minutes and hope she survived them without bodily harm. ‘Actually, Kiki, I know Posy’s only just gone but I’d really like to be considered for her job. I’d love the opportunity to—’

  ‘You know, I had Kia from ELLE on the phone not even an hour ago saying exactly the same thing,’ Kiki said brightly. ‘We had a really good chat; she had some very interesting ideas about our High Street coverage.’ She turned her attention back to Grace who was trying very hard not to look too pissed off. ‘I expect you to pick up the slack with Posy gone.’

  ‘I will, I will.’

  ‘I need you to set up interviews back-to-back on Thursday at the Soho Hotel.’ Kiki’s smile had never been so malicious. ‘And before you ask, we are putting an ad in the Guardian because we’re legally required to advertise the job, but I already have a candidate in mind so there’s not much point in applying. I’d really hate for you to waste your time when you have so much on already, Gracie.’

  ‘Fine,’ Grace said, although she didn’t sound at all fine, but she wasn’t getting paid for her acting skills.

  ‘And I want ten ideas for new regular pages on my desk first thing tomorrow.’ Kiki could never just quit while she was ahead, she had to stick around and twist the knife in a different direction. ‘With some of those darling little illust
rations you do.’

  So she could show them to Posy’s successor and they could have a good laugh before the new Posy completely ripped them off and pretended that they’d been her ideas all along, which was what the old Posy had done too.

  It was a point of pride to produce ten ideas, complete with illustrations and tear sheets, and have them on Kiki’s desk the next morning.

  Vaughn was meant to be watching some turgid documentary on emerging Japanese underground artists, but it was in Japanese so he was more interested in watching Grace pull out her fibre-tip pens and start drawing a picture of a snooty girl walking an even snootier dog.

  ‘Have you been holding out on me all this time, Grace?’ he drawled, leaning over her shoulder to watch, which was distracting and very, very annoying. ‘What would you say your influence is?’

  Grace’s influence was the stylised drawings on vintage sewing patterns, but she wasn’t telling him that. ‘Don’t make fun of me,’ she said shortly.