Unsticky

by Sarah Manning

  ‘Come on, Gracie, get your jeans off and let’s do this,’ Noah urged her, squatting back on his haunches as he wanked himself off with slow strokes.

  She’d already mentally listed all the reasons why Noah was the right boy for her, but she hadn’t bothered to start on the reasons why he wasn’t. Actually there was only one reason: he wasn’t Vaughn and God help her, Vaughn was the only man she wanted. Even though having sex with Noah would be a spectacular ‘fuck you’ to Vaughn,

  Grace knew she couldn’t go through with it, couldn’t sully what she had - what she’d had - with Vaughn even though it had meant so little to him that he could throw it all away.

  Pulling her knees up, she groped for her sweater, turning her head so she wouldn’t have to look at Noah, at his dick.

  ‘I have to go now,’ she said in a tiny, tiny voice, which really showed that she could never go back to who she used to be. The old Grace, for all her fun-loving, dorky ways, wouldn’t have been able to say that much - would have just taken off her jeans and got on with it because she didn’t want to make a scene and get accused of being . . .

  ‘Don’t be a prick-tease. Come on, Gracie, do you want me to beg?’ Noah was smiling, like he thought that Grace had had a last-minute attack of the playing-hard-to-gets.

  ‘I’m sorry, I know I kissed you and everything, but I just can’t.’ Grace twisted away from Noah, and decided that it would be too awkward to get herself back into her bra. She pulled her sweater on and groped out a hand for her bra, which was lying on the coffee-table. ‘Don’t get me wrong - I think you’re really cool and cute, and you’ve been so nice to me - but I just can’t do this.’

  ‘You can’t start something and then back out,’ Noah insisted, and he was starting to sound rather belligerent. A little bit like he wasn’t used to being knocked back, though he probably wouldn’t appreciate being told that disappointment was good for the soul.

  ‘Look, I had too much to drink and I’m still with . . . technically I’m still with someone and maybe if I was single, things would be different, but I am and they’re not.’ The trick was to just keep talking. It didn’t matter that it was word salad. If stuff kept pouring out of Grace’s mouth then Noah would get the message.

  But he sure wasn’t getting it now.

  ‘Gracie! Come on, I’ll go down on you for a bit and get you back in the mood.’

  ‘I don’t think I ever was in the mood,’ Grace sighed. ‘I just wanted to be.’

  ‘I thought you were cool and maybe you used to be, before you spent months with a supercilious wanker who probably can’t even get it up.’ Noah couldn’t have been more wrong, but Grace realised that he was properly angry now, all ready to lash out so she quickly stuffed her feet into her Converses and breathed a sigh of relief as she heard the rasp of Noah’s zip.

  Grace stood up. She wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible, but she also felt the need to justify her behaviour. ‘I’m sorry, Noah. It’s just so complicated with me and Vaughn, and you just ended up in the middle of it and—’

  Noah was walking away from her and Grace couldn’t blame him. It was a really lame apology. ‘Why the fuck did you kiss me then?’ he threw over his shoulder as he walked back into the studio.

  ‘I was looking for a way out and I thought you were it, so I’m sorry for that,’ Grace said, following him.

  Noah turned around with such a determined look on his face that Grace really hoped he wasn’t going to smack her, or worse, try to kiss her again. But he just shoved her handbag at her. ‘Get out.’

  ‘Look, let’s just put this down to a communication breakdown. It’s not worth falling out over.’

  ‘Is that your way of asking me not to tell Vaughn what a dirty little slapper you are?’

  It struck Grace that she’d been so busy trying to force Noah into her perfect boyfriend mould, she’d forgotten what an arsehole he could be. ‘Who do you think he’d believe, you or me?’ she asked haughtily, though it felt like someone had her heart in a strangle-hold.

  ‘I don’t know, Gracie. What do you think?’

  The invisible fingers let go of her heart so it could start beating in a fast and frantic rhythm. ‘Vaughn trusts me,’ Grace blustered, but even to her own ears, it sounded unconvincing. These last few weeks, she’d realised that she didn’t have a clue how Vaughn really felt about her. Though he definitely knew about her propensity for lying when she was in a tight spot.

  Noah was walking towards the door, Grace at his heels because the sooner he showed her the door, the sooner she could go and scour her brain free of the events of the last hour. Noah was already sliding back the bolt and Grace thought she was home and dry . . . when he turned round so she could get the full benefit of his spiteful smirk.

  ‘Were you always this screwed up,’ he said, ‘or is it just since Vaughn’s had his hands all over you?’

  ‘I was fucked up in a completely different way,’ Grace hurled at him venomously.

  ‘Yeah well, remind me to cry into my beer for you.’ Noah opened the door and with a mocking flourish showed Grace out. ‘You sleep with dogs, you wake up with fleas.’

  Grace ducked under his outstretched arm, which was holding the big metal door open, and once she was safely on the other side, she decided it was worth one last shot to see if Noah had a little piece of his heart that wasn’t shrivelled up like his collection of dead flowers. ‘Six months ago, if I’d come here, things would have worked out differently,’ she said with this awful note of pleading that just made Noah’s smile broaden. ‘I didn’t even realise how much I’ve changed but I have, and if you could just understand that and realise that I wasn’t trying to lead you on. I was just really confused . . .’

  There was a ringing in Grace’s ears as the heavy metal door slammed with such force that the reverb felt like it had perforated her eardrum. Nope, Noah’s heart was as black as last season’s nail varnish.

  She couldn’t go home, because Vaughn would take one look at her and know something was horribly and terribly wrong, so Grace took a cab to Hampstead and holed up in a bar nursing an orange juice for an hour. A succession of chancers, losers and the hopelessly looks-challenged paraded over and tried to chat her up. Sometimes Grace wondered if she emitted a pheromone that only men with severe emotional problems could pick up. Eventually the landlord rang the bell for last orders and she couldn’t put off the long walk up the hill any longer.

  It was raining torrentially, the kind of rain that you only got in pop videos, and Grace decided getting soaked to the bone was a suitable penance. She spat sodden rats’ tails out of her mouth as the damp penetrated the soles of her sneakers with every step that she took.

  Vaughn had left the upstairs landing light on, but the rest of the house was submerged in darkness. Grace quietly squelched up the stairs and slipped into her room. Tonight, there was a slideshow of images flickering behind her eyelids: the faces she’d put on Vaughn’s faceless other women, the slug-like trail of pre-cum oozing out of Noah’s dick, and Vaughn. Not the way he looked when he was really furious with her, but his softer faces. The sleepy smile when he first woke up, how he’d bliss out in rapture when he was eating something that Gustav had declared verboten and the way all the worry and stress was erased from his face when he came, and in that split second before he closed his eyes and let the rush overtake him, he’d look at Grace like maybe, just maybe, she was some kind of goddess.

  Grace lay there for a long time on pillows that felt like rocks, every crease and wrinkle in the sheet underneath like razor blades, until she realised that she couldn’t sleep on her own any more. That was how bad it had got. It was meant to be an arrangement - a simple, uncomplicated arrangement - and now she couldn’t get to sleep unless she was lying next to a man who spent most of the night tossing and turning and annexing every inch of quilt that he could.

  Vaughn was fast asleep when Grace crept into his room. He was sprawled across the bed so there wasn’t much space for her
as she carefully slid under the duvet and curled up against him. Vaughn stirred and muttered something that she couldn’t make out, but his body knew she was there on some deeper level, because he turned over, made room for her and his arm slipped around her waist, drawing her closer and closer until he sighed and stopped moving.

  She was so very, very screwed.

  chapter thirty-nine

  As Grace moved through her last week with an incipient dread of what would come next, the rainy weather suited her mood: dark, stormy, cold, lather, rinse, repeat. Also, there was guilt chewing up her insides, then spitting them back out, which was silly really, when she was almost back to being carefree and single. Well, the single part anyway.

  It helped to be busy, organising the very last supper and being shown around flats, none of which were exactly right. They were either too far away from the tube or too close to Vaughn. Not enough closet space. Too dark. Too light. Too noisy. No roof terrace or . . .

  ‘I just didn’t get that feeling,’ Grace said to Madeleine on the phone as she left work early to brief the caterers. ‘You know when you walk in somewhere and you can tell right away if it feels like home?’

  ‘Grace, you’ve seen twenty places in the last fortnight,’ Madeleine reminded her tetchily.

  ‘I know. I have the blisters to prove it,’ Grace said. ‘The flat in Tufnell Park was really nice but it’s in the next street to my friend Lily, and when the baby arrives, she’ll expect me round every time it burps.’

  ‘Well, I’m going to organise a hotel for you until you find somewhere,’ Madeleine said, and although Grace had known that Vaughn would want her out as soon as her notice period was up, Madeleine’s confirmation made her breath hitch in her throat.

  ‘I’m sorry that you’re having to go to all this trouble,’ Grace said as she slid into the back of the car that was waiting for her. ‘I slummed it for two years in a bedsit in Archway so I don’t know why I’m being so picky, but I just can’t find the right place.’

  Madeleine sighed. ‘Can I give you some advice, Grace, strictly off the record?’

  Over the last few months, Grace had started to think of Madeleine as another surrogate mother. If Kiki was her fashion mother, dispensing hemline diktats, then Madeleine was more of her social mother, issuing decrees about cheese plates and seating arrangements, but unsolicited, off-the-record advice sounded ominous. ‘Well, yeah, I guess,’ Grace replied doubtfully.

  ‘I think that you’re not going to find the perfect flat in your current state of mind,’ Madeleine said slowly. Grace could tell she was picking her words with great delicacy. ‘I’m sure you feel very upset at the moment, but you will get through this.’

  ‘I’m fine, honestly.’ As ever, the words tripped off her tongue with the greatest of ease and absolute zero sincerity.

  ‘You’re a very sweet girl, Grace, and you deserve much better than what Vaughn could give you. Much better. He had no right to . . . I’ve said too much,’ Madeleine finished quickly.

  ‘I’m not that sweet,’ Grace disagreed. ‘And Vaughn’s been really generous. I’ll always be grateful to him, even if I wish—’

  ‘Well, let’s not dwell on what-might-have-beens.’ Madeleine was back to sounding brisk and efficient and Grace was left with the feeling that the other woman regretted everything she’d just said. ‘I’ll set up some more viewings for tomorrow. It’s going to be an early start, I’m afraid.’

  ‘OK,’ Grace said without much enthusiasm.

  ‘Also, where would you like to go this weekend?’ Madeleine asked.

  ‘I told you already, Tufnell Park, Dartmouth Park and the non-scuzzy bit of Kentish Town.’

  ‘Vaughn wants to take you away,’ Madeleine sounded exasperated, as if she wanted to get off the phone as soon as was humanly possible. ‘Now where would you like to go?’

  So he was sending her off in style? That was big of him. Since that evening with Noah, she’d barely seen Vaughn. He’d been working late, and Grace had been flat-hunting so there was only time for cursory enquiries before they had sex, every night. Then sex again in the morning, as Gustav buzzed Vaughn every five minutes. And in between, Vaughn slept and Grace stayed awake far longer than she should to watch him sleep.

  ‘Really, I don’t want to go anywhere,’ Grace said imploringly. ‘I have a ton of stuff to do and there’s just no way to get it all done.’

  It was pointless to spend the whole weekend on a romantic break in a foreign city, and pretend that it meant something, when it was just Vaughn having a last-minute pang of conscience.

  ‘Grace, please. Vaughn was very insistent that he wanted to take you away, so where would you like to go?’ Madeleine repeated manically, like she was on the verge of losing it. ‘You know what he’s like when he has a mind to do something.’

  ‘I’ll talk to him,’ Grace offered. ‘And I will think about what you said. About the flats, I mean. But I have to go now, I have a hamachi crisis looming.’

  By the time the guests arrived, all crises had been averted, and in honour of the first truly warm night of the year, Grace opened the French windows so they could have champagne on the terrace. It was late April, so still a little chilly for al fresco drinking, but Vaughn had these huge outdoor burners emitting warm air and all sorts of carbon emissions, and Grace had bought armfuls of paper lanterns from Habitat so the overall effect was tropical. Almost.

  It should have been a perfect night. The guest-list comprised her favourite Vaughn’s people: George, the charming elderly curator from the V&A who’d let her try on the Vivienne Westwood, and his equally charming and elderly boyfriend who used to be a ballet dancer. Nadja and Sergei had flown in especially and, true to his word, Vaughn had also invited the creative director of a branding and trend-spotting agency who’d cornered Grace on her way to the kitchen and asked if they could do drinks next week.

  Even the new faces, Tabitha and Ruichi, hadn’t been what Grace had expected, which was variations on the Noah theme. Instead she got a straight-talking Amazon who looked like Lauren Hutton circa 1978 and an elfin, impish boy with a broad Liverpudlian accent. Even better, between the salad and the fish course, it had dawned on them that they were in an either/or situation and they’d tag-teamed Vaughn. He’d gone bright red when Tabitha had queried loudly, ‘So, which one is it gonna be - me or Roo? The suspense is killing us.’

  Grace had nearly snorted Sauvignon Blanc from her nostrils as Vaughn ran a finger between shirt collar and neck like he was slowly being strangled. Then he’d smiled wickedly. ‘Actually, you should probably leave now. I have another batch of impoverished artists arriving for pudding.’

  Everyone had laughed and the rest of the dinner had passed without a hitch. Grace was talking to Nadja about the new collections and waiting for Vaughn to give her the signal so she could start herding people into the drawing room for coffee and dessert, when he tapped his glass with the blade of his knife to get the table’s attention.

  Grace didn’t know why - maybe one of the Chapman Brothers had suddenly died and he wanted a minute’s silence.

  ‘I’d like to propose a toast to Grace, who possesses all the attributes that her name suggests,’ Vaughn said, smiling at her. ‘Thank you for hosting such an exquisite dinner - in fact, many exquisite dinners - and, well, for putting up with me for so long. I know we’ll all miss you. To Grace . . .’

  Nadja shot her a sympathetic look though Grace could have sworn that Nadja didn’t have a single sympathetic bone in her body, and George patted her hand, as Grace sat there with a frozen smile on her face as the guests echoed Vaughn’s toast. Except it wasn’t a toast, but a little goodbye speech, so that everyone apart from Roo, Tabitha and their plus ones, knew that Grace was being terminated. She was in a state of termination.

  They all looked at her expectantly and Grace guessed that she was meant to say something pretty and self-effacing, but she was no good at playing those kinds of games. Vaughn had all the rules memorised and a cheat sheet, a
nd Grace hadn’t even realised that she was in play. Her face ached with the effort of keeping her smile pinned on.

  ‘Shall we have coffee next door?’ she suggested, pushing back her chair. ‘There’s cake too.’

  She didn’t wait to see if anyone was following but marched out, Nadja close behind her. ‘What’s going on?’ she demanded.

  ‘We’re splitting up,’ Grace said heavily. ‘As of next Monday.’

  ‘But why?’

  Grace was sick of asking herself the same question. ‘It just wasn’t working out,’ she said woodenly.

  ‘I can’t believe that idiot would let you go!’ Nadja exclaimed, making absolutely no effort to lower her voice as the other guests began to file into the drawing room. ‘I have flat in Kensington if you need it. I never stay there. Is too far from Harvey Nicks.’