Unsticky

by Sarah Manning

  The first time they’d made love slowly, bodies moving gently against each other as if every second were precious, but each time after that became more frantic and greedy, because the last time was getting nearer.

  The very last time, Grace kept her eyes open and felt as if she was drowning in Vaughn; carving her nails into his back, her nostrils full of his scent, mouth biting into his shoulder.

  Then he stopped, hands gripping her hips tightly as he dipped his head to kiss her neck. ‘I wanted to make you happy, Grace,’ he whispered in her ear. ‘Whatever else I did or didn’t do, that much is true.’

  It pulled Grace out of her long, hard climb to orgasm so she was struggling in Vaughn’s grasp, not to free herself but so she could use her hands to soothe away the strain she saw in his face as he frowned down at her. She wanted to tell Vaughn that she had been happy sometimes, but then he was kissing her so fiercely that her words got lost.

  Afterwards he spooned against her, pressing hundreds of tiny kisses on her skin. ‘You’re leaving.’ Finally it was a statement, not a question.

  ‘I’m leaving.’

  ‘If you stay, I’ll give you ten thousand in cash every month, let you redecorate, anything you want. Just tell me and it’s yours,’ Vaughn murmured against her skin.

  One month ago, Grace would have signed her soul away without a second thought. But it had been one hell of a month and all she wanted was to be the girl who’d finally managed to stick. ‘I don’t want those kinds of sweeteners. If you want me that badly, then the contract shouldn’t matter. I’ll stay because I want to stay, because I want to make this work. Honestly, Vaughn, that should mean more than signing my name on a contract.’

  Vaughn didn’t say anything at first then he sighed, his breath stirring up the baby hairs at the nape of her neck. ‘I wish I could say yes, but that’s not good enough.’

  ‘Why isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s just not. What else do you want me to say, Grace?’

  She rolled over because she couldn’t think straight with Vaughn’s arms around her and she wanted to come up with a solution that would make both of them happy without feeling manipulated. Grace suddenly realised that one of them could break this impasse with those three little words, eight letters, but she could feel them sticking in her throat. Because if love was everything that people said it was, then Grace would be sure. She’d know in this absolutely certain, irrevocable way and as it was, she still didn’t have a fucking clue what love felt like.

  ‘But not that,’ Vaughn said, because her face must have given her away. ‘I don’t think either of us even knows what love is.’

  She wound her fingers through Vaughn’s hair, so she could kiss the deep furrow that had appeared between his eyebrows. ‘That’s OK,’ she said. ‘I can’t say it either.’

  ‘Grace, it doesn’t have to be this way,’ Vaughn said heavily, tracing her jaw with the tips of his fingers.

  ‘Yeah, it really does.’ He had to stop touching her because it was making this impossible. ‘Honestly, I’ll be fine. I’ll go and stay at Lil’s until I sort something else out.’

  ‘What about the place I was going to make an offer on? I thought you liked it.’

  ‘I did,’ Grace murmured. ‘It had a turret, but God, if ever two people needed a clean break, it’s us.’

  ‘Grace, don’t be so stupid. I’ll buy a flat for you, put your name on the deed. No, let me finish.’ Vaughn held her chin in an uncompromising grip. ‘I need to know you’ll be all right, that you’re taken care of.’

  Grace gently prised his hands off her. ‘I started this because of the money, but I don’t want it to end with that,’ she insisted, stroking her thumbs along the high plane of his cheekbones. ‘I can’t believe I just said that. See what you’ve done to me?’

  ‘Why don’t you think about it?’ Vaughn pressed a kiss to her forehead.

  ‘I don’t need to.’ Grace pulled Vaughn in for one more kiss that was so final it almost made her cry, though she’d have sworn she didn’t have any more tears left.

  Vaughn didn’t stop her when she pulled the covers back and got out of bed. She was sore and aching, from too much crying, too much fucking, not nearly enough sleep. Even a scalding hot shower didn’t help - it just felt as if every last trace of Vaughn was being washed down the drain.

  He was dressed and waiting for her when she came out of the bathroom, her jacket over his arm. ‘I booked you the last seat on the Eurostar,’ he said. ‘I thought you’d prefer to go straight back to London.’

  ‘Yeah, I do. Thanks.’ The thought of spending the night just a cab ride away had been daunting. Grace had half-wondered if she wouldn’t lose all her resolve and come crawling back to him before morning. This made it easier.

  She let Vaughn help her into her jacket, then turn her around so he could do up the buttons, before handing her the suitcase. ‘Be happy, Grace.’

  ‘You too.’ She ran the back of her hand over his cheek, catching her knuckles on his stubble. ‘Don’t let Gustav boss you about.’

  ‘I’ll try not to. What are you doing, you silly girl?’

  Grace held her Amex card out. ‘Giving this back to you.’

  Vaughn held his hands up. ‘Keep it. Honestly, Grace, I appreciate the big, dramatic gesture, but you really can’t manage without it.’

  ‘Well, I’m just going to have to learn, aren’t I?’ Grace said, tucking the card into Vaughn’s shirt-pocket and letting her hand rest there for a second to feel the thud of his heart. ‘I’ll be fine.’

  ‘If you need anything - anything - you’re to come to me. Is that understood?’

  Grace nodded and this would take for ever if she let it, both of them standing there with awkward smiles, hands still on each other. She wanted to think of some poignant but snappy last line that would commemorate the solemnity of the occasion, but all she could come up with was a heartfelt, ‘God, this really sucks,’ before she opened the door.

  chapter forty-one

  This time wasn’t like the other times. Normally when Grace got to the end of another doomed relationship, there was only ever anger. Anger directed at whichever tousle-haired wanker had dumped her, and anger at herself for being stupid enough to get involved with yet another tousle-haired wanker.

  But this time there was no anger. Just a bone-deep sadness that seeped into all the cracks and crevices so Grace felt weighed down with it. She hadn’t cried since Paris, and actually she was kind of proud about that because it spoke of a quiet dignity. But still she woke up each morning gritty-eyed and aching, and sleepwalked through the day as if she really had spent the entire night sobbing.

  And this time was also different to the other times, because Grace actually had options. In the past, being dumped was just one extra bad thing to put on the pile of all the other bad things that made up her life. Post-Vaughn, she had no debt and absolutely no where-withal or credit cards to heal the hurt by shopping. She had a bulging contacts book she could hit up for freelance jobs, because now she totally got what people meant about throwing themselves into their work. And she had Lily’s sofa until the end of the month, when Lily went on maternity leave and her mum came to stay. Nadja had been as good as her word and had offered Grace her flat, which was too far from Harvey Nicks, as long as Grace paid the truly astronomical service charges.

  ‘Honestly, you can stay as long as you like,’ Lily had said, when Grace had turned up late on that Sunday evening with her suitcase in her hand and a shell-shocked look on her face. But every spare inch of Lily and Dan’s flat was filled up with baby paraphernalia, and when Dan got home from work each night, he’d smile bravely and say, ‘You still here then, Gracie?’

  Grace couldn’t blame either of them, not really. As it was, Lily looked like she was gestating an elephant, and every time she carefully levered herself out of her chair at work, everyone held their breath in case her waters broke. They had just had the floor sanded, after all.

  So Grace went out a lot
. But getting dressed up to go to parties felt like an exercise in futility. Parties made people happy and she had to spend hours watching their stupid smiles and fending off the advances of men who didn’t stand a chance because they weren’t Vaughn. The cinema didn’t help either. Rom-coms made her gag, anything with subtitles reminded her of Vaughn, so all that was left were smash ’em up action movies and the hero still got his girl and his happy ending. Her life had turned into a fucking Dusty Springfield song.

  Not that anyone had much sympathy. The general consensus in the Skirt office was that it was a miracle it had lasted as long as it had. Grace was pretty sure they’d been running a book on it, though Lily swore that wasn’t true. ‘Really, you’re well shot of him. He was a total wanker,’ Lily proclaimed, as she supervised Grace’s careful painting of the skirting board in the former spare room. ‘But, God, Grace, would it have killed you to keep the credit card? I just don’t get you sometimes.’

  ‘It was a point of principle,’ Grace insisted weakly. ‘I couldn’t keep living off him if I wasn’t living with him.’

  ‘I think you’re bonkers,’ Lily said. She rested her hands on her bump and gave Grace a thoughtful look. ‘You know Liam’s not seeing anyone right now? He’s always asking how you are. I think he’s still sweet on you.’

  ‘Oh God, just kill me now,’ Grace snapped, slapping white paint on the polka-dot wallpaper in her irritation and hoping that Lily wouldn’t notice. ‘I was with Vaughn for seven months and I’m allowed to feel like shit for a while before I get screwed over by someone else - who definitely and never will be Liam. OK?’

  Grace didn’t point out that dating guys like Liam would be like shopping in Primark after getting used to Marc Jacobs. Actually she was shopping in Primark again because she had no credit cards and no overdraft, and seeing her bank account in credit was something that Grace had started to savour every month. Vaughn would be so proud of her.

  ‘Grace!’ Lily’s peevish cry brought Grace back to reality where there was no Vaughn but an annoyed best friend who’d just noticed all the streaks of white emulsion liberally smeared on the wallpaper.

  Generally Grace tried to avoid Liam when he popped over to take Dan to the pub, but on the Saturday, thirteen days since she last saw Vaughn, not that she was counting or anything, she was waiting for the minicab she’d ordered, sitting having a cigarette on the steps, when he was suddenly standing right in front of her.

  ‘Hey,’ he said, coming to a halt at the bottom of the steps. ‘You all right?’

  It was a warm day, they were well into May now, and the sunlight glinted off Liam’s dirty-blond hair. As he lifted an arm to shield his eyes from the glare, his bicep bulged. Which was freaky because the only exercise Liam got was lifting pints and lugging crates of bootleg DVDs around.

  ‘I’m fine,’ Grace said, breathing smoke out through her nostrils, because she was only allowed cigarettes outside as Lily and Dan had got really paranoid about second-hand smoke.

  ‘So is this moving day?’

  Lily’s mum had arrived the night before to take up residence in the nursery and to berate Grace for once again ruining Lily’s special day. But then she’d given Grace a hug and said, ‘Lily told me about that bloke you were with. His loss, Gracie.’ It had been the first time since Paris that Grace thought she might cry. Generally she didn’t miss having a mother, and wouldn’t know what to do with hers if she suddenly turned up, but having Lily’s mum around and fussing over Lily made her feel her own motherlessness very acutely. It didn’t mean anything significant, Grace had decided. She felt everything very acutely these days.

  ‘Yeah, just waiting for my cab.’ It used to be that Grace and Liam could talk for hours without pause. This time, it was stilted and awkward, and though Grace thought she had a perfect photocopy of Liam in her head, now he seemed completely different. Though maybe it was the admiring look he was giving her, which was a new development.

  ‘You look good,’ he said. ‘Shiny. I like your hair.’

  Grace didn’t look good. OK, she hadn’t been crying herself to sleep every night, but that was because she hadn’t been doing much in the way of sleeping, simply lying there wide-eyed, hands clawed into fists to stop herself picking up her phone to call Vaughn or to stop her from touching herself because her body was missing Vaughn too.

  ‘Um, thanks,’ she mumbled, and tried to smile. ‘You look good too. You been working out?’

  ‘As if. I’ve got a part-time delivery job at a printer’s. I never knew paper was so heavy.’ Liam gestured at Grace’s weekend suitcase and laundry bags. ‘Do you want me to help you with the rest of your stuff?’

  ‘This is it,’ Grace said. ‘The rest of it is . . . it’s at his place and I just haven’t got round to collecting it yet. I’ve been busy,’ she added vaguely.

  ‘If you like, I could borrow my boss’s van and get it for you,’ Liam offered. ‘We could go for a drink after.’

  Grace tried to think of a tactful way to turn Liam down but was saved by the tooting of a horn. She struggled to her feet. ‘I have to go,’ she yelped, almost knocking Liam over in her haste to reach the car.

  Shoving her bags on the back seat, she clambered in after them. Really it was all Liam’s fault, she thought. If he hadn’t dumped her in Liberty’s, on her birthday, then she’d never have met Vaughn and she wouldn’t feel like fifty different shades of hell right now. But as Grace looked at Liam, who’d raced up the steps to retrieve a bag she’d forgotten, she knew that she needed to let her old resentments go. It was an unpleasant truth to suddenly confront, but Liam had been right to dump her when he did for the reasons that he did. She hadn’t tried to make their relationship work. In fact, she’d gone into it with her mind already made up that it would combust within three months and so she’d just coasted along, marking time and putting in zero effort. Liam hadn’t been a great boyfriend but she’d been a less than stellar girlfriend, Grace realised now, and so she smiled at Liam as he handed her the last bag.

  ‘Look, I’m crappy company at the moment,’ she said. ‘Not fit for public consumption, y’know?’

  ‘How about I ask you again in a month’s time?’ Liam asked, one hand on the door so Grace couldn’t close it.

  ‘Three months,’ she countered. ‘At least.’

  Grace didn’t know what Nadja’s problem was because when the taxi got to Knightsbridge and stopped outside a redbrick mansion block on a tree-lined avenue, Harvey Nicks was near enough to be her new corner shop. Not that she wanted to start thinking of it like that; Sainsbury’s Central would have to do.

  Although Nadja’s booker had couriered over a set of keys and a tenancy agreement, that wasn’t good enough for the porter, who seemed to think that his peaked cap and clipboard automatically made him God. Grace was red-faced and flustered by the time she’d dug out her passport and her driving licence as proof of ID and had her laundry bags sneered at as she was finally ushered into the lift.

  Arriving at the fifth floor, Grace found the right flat at the end of a corridor that smelled of beeswax and a faint lingering scent of industrial-strength disinfectant. She wrestled with the keys, then stepped through the door and gazed flatly into the large sunny living room. Normally she’d have been delighted with the fireplace’s original Art Deco tiling and the huge picture windows, especially as Nadja had never met a glitter-encrusted piece of clothing that she didn’t like. She’d obviously never even moved in once she realised that she’d have to walk a whole two minutes to get to the shops, otherwise the flat would have been redecorated to resemble the inside of a disco ball.

  Grace slowly turned round and blinked a couple of times. Just to be sure, she ran to the kitchen and started pulling open drawers and cupboard doors. There wasn’t a stick of furniture or utensil in the place, not even a teaspoon or a dishcloth.

  It meant that on the Monday morning, Grace finally had to steel herself to call Madeleine Jones and arrange to have her stuff sent over. She’d been ignoring
Madeleine’s increasingly fractious phone messages and had decided to abandon all her goods and chattels, but beggars couldn’t be choosers and Grace had a set of Le Creuset saucepans and some Tiki shot glasses that she really needed. Besides, she’d been wearing the same weekend’s worth of clothes for the last fortnight.

  Grace knew that she and Vaughn were broken, with no hope of repair, but phoning Madeleine to organise the removal of all traces of herself from Vaughn’s world seemed so . . . final.

  ‘Grace! I was on the verge of sending your belongings to the Skirt offices,’ Madeleine said when Grace rang, as if she no longer had to pretend to be friendly. ‘Give me your address, and I’ll get everything sent over by the end of tomorrow.’

  Grace strained her ears in case she’d be able to hear Vaughn barking at someone in the background but there was nothing except an impatient sigh from Madeleine.