Unsticky

by Sarah Manning

  Vaughn kept his distance, probably because every time he glanced over at Grace, her eyes promised him a world of pain if he got too close. But eventually the last stragglers left, George kissing her cheek and murmuring in her ear, ‘Don’t be a stranger, dear one. Keep in touch,’ and it was just the two of them.

  ‘I thought that went rather well,’ Vaughn said casually, as Grace retrieved a stray glass from the foot of the stairs. ‘What did you think of Roo and Tabitha?’

  Grace turned on him. ‘What does it matter what I think?’ she hissed, putting the glass down again so she wouldn’t throw it at him. ‘How dare you pull that little farewell toast on me without any warning. It was absolutely fucking mortifying. Everyone knows!’

  Vaughn shook his head. ‘Grace, don’t be so silly. Surely it’s better that people find out from us . . .’

  ‘From you, you mean!’

  ‘As I was saying, better to hear it from us than for all sorts of rumours to start going round.’ He raised his eyebrows at Grace who had her hands on her hips and a scowl on her face. ‘Surely you’re not going to spend our last five days together in a snit. Now stop pouting and tell me where you’d like to go this weekend.’

  Grace wanted to stamp her foot in sheer frustration. ‘You don’t need to take me anywhere!’ she said hotly. ‘You can dress it up all you want, give your charming little speeches and toasts, but you’re sick to death of me so I’ll save you the bother of having to spend two whole days in a hotel suite with me.’

  ‘What happened to being civilised and acting like a grown-up?’ Vaughn demanded, his face tightening.

  ‘I decided it was overrated,’ Grace told him, one foot already on the stairs. ‘I’m going to sleep in my room. Your fidgeting is really disturbing.’

  They still weren’t speaking a day later. Grace hadn’t seen Vaughn at all the day before, as Madeleine had thoughtfully booked her first flat viewing at 7 a.m. She saw her last flat at 11 p.m. in Dartmouth Park and took it. It was on the top floor of a rambling Victorian house and had an actual turret. Besides, the estate agent had started to get tearful at the thought of looking at more flats over the weekend. When she finally got back to Hampstead it was to spend another fitful night in the guest room.

  The next day wasn’t much better. Grace had forgotten to set her alarm and arrived an hour late for a meeting with Kiki, who was due to brief her on the next issue’s High Street section. It had been ages since she’d had such a vicious bollocking.

  ‘You’re still on probation as a section editor,’ Kiki reminded Grace, once she’d reduced her to snivels that were almost sobs. ‘Don’t make me demote you, and don’t you ever, ever come in late because you overslept.’ She sniffed contemptuously. ‘At least have the intelligence to pretend you were out on appointments. What the hell is going on with you, Gracie?’

  Grace tried to give Kiki the edited highlights, but Kiki was having no truck with that. She wanted details: how generous was Vaughn being with his after-care service, where was she going to live, why was she still sticking around even though it was over? Kiki’s face was truly something to behold when she heard about Vaughn threatening to sue Grace for breaching her contract. She managed to contort her forehead into a frown only through sheer force of will.

  ‘I hope you’ve got a good lawyer,’ she snorted.

  ‘It was just a standard employment contract,’ Grace explained. ‘I don’t even know where my copy is.’

  ‘God, your stupidity never ceases to amaze me,’ Kiki said. ‘You don’t give your mistress a standard employment contract. I bet it wouldn’t stand up in a court of law. What you should have done was threaten to go to the papers. They’d have been all over the story. “London’s richest art dealer gives his mistress a month’s notice”.’

  ‘I would never do that.’ Grace winced. ‘I’d look like a twat and I couldn’t do that to Vaughn. I’m not his biggest fan right now, but he has been very good to me, and if he doesn’t want to be with me then dragging him through the courts and the gossip columns isn’t going to change that, is it? He’d just hate me.’

  ‘I know his type and you’ve had a lucky escape,’ Kiki mused cryptically. ‘You’ve done very well out of him and he’s made you grow up a bit, which was long overdue, but men like that aren’t keepers.’

  ‘Yeah, but—’

  ‘Grace, I’m not your mother,’ Kiki snapped. ‘I don’t do hand-holding like I don’t do wedge heels. Now get out and redo those ideas so they don’t resemble anything I saw in last month’s ELLE.’

  Fridays weren’t meant to suck so much, Grace thought morosely as she sat at her desk after lunch ostensibly looking at location houses on the web, but really playing online Scrabble. The weekend loomed large, like major surgery with only a fifty per cent chance of survival. She made a mental note to Google ulcer symptoms once she’d figured out a word that would use up four i’s and two o’s. Even the Scrabble gods had forsaken her.

  As Grace looked up, hopeful of spotting Celia who could always be persuaded to go on a chocolate run, she saw Vaughn striding towards her. Except that was insane. Grace rubbed her tired eyes, took her hands away and yes, it was Vaughn! Or a Vaughn who had been abducted by aliens in the last twenty-four hours and had his memory wiped, because he was smiling.

  ‘Isn’t that your rich, older man, Gracie?’ Lucie chirped as Grace got to her feet and rushed over to head Vaughn off at the pass.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she hissed, grabbing Vaughn’s arm so they could do this, whatever this was, in the privacy of the cupboard. There were whispers all around the open-plan office, rising in volume as every pair of eyes turned and swept over Vaughn. It was hideously embarrassing, but at least he was wearing a Prada suit and had been to his barber’s since she last saw him so his hair wasn’t as tufty as usual.

  ‘This isn’t at all what I was expecting,’ Vaughn remarked, like he didn’t care that every single one of Grace’s colleagues had stopped what they were doing so they could gawp uninterrupted. ‘I’ve been in the Vanity Fair offices and they’re huge and—’

  ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’ Grace tried to drag Vaughn cupboardwards.

  ‘Oh, are we going to the famous cupboard?’ Vaughn peered through the open door. ‘Much smaller than I imagined.’ He turned back to Grace’s anguished face. ‘I was going to phone first, but we seem to be not speaking and anyway I wanted to surprise you.’

  ‘Mission accomplished,’ Grace said weakly, holding on to a clothes rail so she could stay upright. ‘Why are you here?’

  ‘I’m taking you to Paris for the weekend - the suite we stayed in at the Plaza Athenée that time. I even packed for you and cleared it with Kiki this morning. I don’t think she likes me very much. Have you been telling tales on me?’ Vaughn didn’t seem that bothered if she had, and simply smiled when Grace flushed guiltily. ‘She muttered something about you having to make the time up. Is she around?’

  That at least Grace was spared. ‘She always leaves early on Fridays.’ She tried to swallow past the lump in her throat because he wanted to end it in Paris, the city of lovers. He could be so incredibly dense sometimes.

  She raised her head, which had been drooping in dismay to see Vaughn watching her with that cool regard; making no bones about the fact that he was analysing her reaction and filing it away for later use.

  ‘Vaughn . . .’ Grace sighed. ‘I don’t want to go to Paris.’

  ‘I know you don’t, and we could stay in London and snarl at each other here,’ Vaughn agreed tartly. ‘But it’s booked now and they’ll clobber me with absolutely prohibitive cancellation fees. So, chop chop, get your coat . . . Oh Grace, don’t do this.’

  She was crying, or at least tears were streaming down her cheeks so she had to turn her back on Vaughn and try to wipe them on the sleeve of the first dress she could reach. ‘How can you expect me to just carry on as normal?’ she sobbed. ‘Why are you acting like you don’t even care?’

  Vaughn’s arms w
ere round her before she’d even choked out the last sentence, forcing her to lean back against his chest so he could kiss the top of her head. ‘We’ve been through this,’ he said, the jovial tone wiped from his voice. ‘You know I care, but it doesn’t change the fact that this needs to end.’

  He turned Grace round, although she tried to resist, and rather than look at him she pressed her face to his shoulder. ‘I wish I wasn’t going to miss you,’ she mumbled against cashmere wool, and Vaughn’s hand tightened in her hair so she guessed he understood. ‘I absolutely hate you right now.’

  Vaughn held Grace at arm’s length. He didn’t look particularly annoyed at such a damning indictment. If anything, he looked a little hurt. ‘For the record, I’ll miss you too.’

  Grace squirmed in his grip, like a fish struggling on the end of a hook. ‘No, you won’t!’

  ‘I will,’ Vaughn said, so seriously that Grace’s heart thudded painfully. Then he cuffed her chin and gave her just the tiniest, teensiest arch of an eyebrow. ‘You’ve taught me at least seven new ways of saying “whatever”, and the difference between Marc Jacobs and Marc by Marc Jacobs, and when you let your walls down, which isn’t often, you’re very, very sweet. Too sweet, Grace, that’s the problem. There’s a difference between what makes me happy and what’s good for me.’

  It took a huge effort but Grace managed to break free, mostly so she could check the cupboard door was firmly shut because some of the staff were finding excuses to congregate at that end of the office.

  ‘All I ever get from you is riddles so I have to work hard to figure out what you’re really trying to say.’

  Vaughn’s eyes were fixed on a row of sandals ready for a shoot on Monday morning. ‘Believe me, you’re better off not knowing,’ he said in that same grave tone he’d used before. When he was like this, it made the prospect of Monday and being Vaughn-less seem too awful to contemplate. Then in the blink of an eye, Vaughn smiled like the confession Grace had forced out of him had never happened. ‘Is that everything, because we do have a train to catch?’

  Grace knew that she could tell him she wasn’t going, and this time there’d be no more talk of breaching contracts; Vaughn would let her go. But it was one weekend out of her entire life. Two more days with Vaughn and she’d chalk it down to just another stupid thing to add to the already gargantuan list of all the other stupid things she’d already done, because of the way Vaughn was looking at her. He looked hopeful, but not entirely sure of himself, and Grace thought that maybe it was the first time she’d seen him show so much vulnerability. It made it impossible to refuse him anything.

  ‘I’ll just go and get my bag,’ she told him.

  Vaughn had booked them into a huge Art Deco suite at the Plaza Athenée with a view of the Eiffel Tower, especially if you stood out on the balcony and had a Carrie Bradshaw moment. Except it was the wettest April since records began, and all Grace could see when she looked out of the window was rain streaming down the glass like tears.

  It wasn’t an auspicious start to their last weekend, but they went out to dinner at Le Cinq in the Hotel Four Seasons George V for what Vaughn insisted was ‘the best steak in Europe. Maybe even the world’. They made polite conversation about things that didn’t really matter because talking about the things that did matter would have brought an end to the fragile truce they’d called. They didn’t even talk when they had sex that night - not even the nonsensical words they’d usually murmur against each other’s skin.

  When Grace woke up on Saturday morning and all Vaughn had to say was that it was still raining and would she like breakfast in their suite or prefer to go down to the restaurant, she wanted to pull the covers over her head and stay there until it was time to check out on Sunday afternoon. It was a huge relief, after croissants and a half-hour conversation about whether it might or might not stop raining, that Vaughn suddenly discovered there was a work crisis that needed his immediate attention.

  Although the weekend was turning out to be on a par with having root-canal treatment, Grace felt a tiny throb of irritation. It was the last time they’d spend together - now down to approximately thirty-six hours - and he was going to spend at least three of them working.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Vaughn eyed her anxiously.

  She’d promised herself that she’d maintain a sunny disposition until Monday morning and she wasn’t going to renege. ‘I’m fine,’ she said brightly. Too brightly. ‘I think I’ll go and run a few errands.’

  ‘But it’s raining!’

  ‘I’m not going to dissolve.’ Grace was already pulling on the sneakers she’d been wearing the day before. Vaughn’s packing had been extremely light on practical items, and her first stop would be somewhere that sold anoraks. ‘I’ll be back for lunch,’ she told him, and he didn’t even look up when she kissed him goodbye. She suspected that he was beginning to regret his insistence on going away for the weekend. She also suspected that the art crisis could have waited until Monday.

  Once she was outside, she didn’t mind that it was raining. Anything was better than the fraught atmosphere in their suite. She stopped in what she guessed was the French version of New Look to buy a waterproof, then took a taxi to the little old-fashioned sweet shop on the Île St Louis. She had a feeling that on Monday, copious amounts of chocolate might be the only thing that would keep her sane.

  She’d even bought a box of pralines for Vaughn and was rehearsing the little speech that would accompany them as she opened the door of their suite. Grace expected to see Vaughn hunched over his Airbook but the living room was empty. His coat was still thrown over the sofa so he hadn’t gone out.

  Grace walked into the living room, then paused. The room had a preternatural stillness to it that made her shiver and take a deep breath; a heavy tension seemed to thicken the air. She was suddenly certain, could feel it right in her frozen heart, that something was horribly wrong.

  chapter forty

  Vaughn appeared in the bedroom doorway, a tumbler of whisky in his hand. ‘I wondered when you’d get back,’ he said, and if you didn’t know him, it would have sounded like a casual query. But Grace did know him, and she could hear the quiet rage underpinning each word. For the life of her, she didn’t know why.

  She steeled herself to walk towards Vaughn. He always got rumpled when he was fielding difficult work calls, but as she drew nearer Grace could see there was absolutely no colour to his face - just a grey pallor; the top button was missing from his shirt and his eyes . . . God, his eyes. It was like he’d forgotten how to focus - his gaze skittered everywhere but her.

  Then Vaughn pinned Grace in place and she wished he’d look away. She stopped moving and took a step back, as he said, ‘Noah phoned. For someone so drunk, he was surprisingly lucid.’

  Vaughn’s sarcasm, as ever, verged on the sublime and Grace winced. It was as if he had been waiting for any reaction from her to snap him out of his fugue state because he was at her side in three angry strides, or would have been if Grace wasn’t darting away in panic.

  She made sure that the sofa was between them before she said, ‘Vaughn, really, it’s no big deal. If it had happened next week instead of this week, I’d have been out of your hair, or free from contractual obligation, y’know? OK, I should have—’

  ‘Shut up!’ Vaughn was at her side so fast that Grace wasn’t sure how he’d managed it, his hands wrapping round her wrists in a bruising grip, so he could haul her closer in a parody of every time he’d done just that so he could kiss her. ‘It’s a bloody big deal, Grace, to kiss me and whisper all those breathy words as you wrapped yourself around me, then go to his bed and do the same tired, old routine. Or did you mean it when you told Noah that he was the best fuck you’d ever had? That no one had ever made you come so hard and so often?’

  Grace tried to wrench her hands free so she could clamp them over her ears, but Vaughn refused to let her go, pressing down harder so she cried out as he dragged her towards the sofa and forced her into
a sitting position. ‘I never fucked him. I swear!’

  ‘When did it start? After the party? Or was it going on before then?’ Vaughn finally released her wrists, but it was just a momentary respite, so he could sit down next to her and cup her face in his hands. Grace could feel the tremor in his fingers, as if Vaughn was just itching to snap her neck. She forced herself to stay very still and look him right in the eyes.

  That was when she started crying, because Vaughn’s eyes weren’t angry. She could see the hurt lodged there, and the way he cringed from her gaze, like a wounded animal. She’d been on the receiving end of that kind of agony often enough to know how wretched it felt. Like someone had taken out your heart, kicked it around for a few hours and then shoved it back in your chest.

  ‘I didn’t . . . I never have,’ she began. ‘Please, just listen to me and let me tell you what happened. Just be quiet and don’t say anything, OK?’