Unsticky

by Sarra Manning

  ‘We need to talk, Grace. Come and sit down.’ Grace had to give him credit for not dragging this unbearable arrangement out any longer. She pulled out a chair and sat down opposite him.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, because it was as good a place as any to start. ‘That you got dragged into all this and I whined on about how it was hard to manage on thousands of pounds every month. I want you to know that I am grateful for all of it and I shouldn’t have thrown it back in your face the way I did.’

  Vaughn had looked startled when Grace first began to speak, but now he was steepling his fingers and staring at her over the top of them. ‘Did you agree to this arrangement because you needed the money?’

  He wasn’t biting his words out like he usually did when he was mad at her, but Grace still cringed because she knew the truth would make him angry.

  ‘I just want us to talk,’ Vaughn said, as if he could read her mind. ‘You’ve stuffed me full of carbs so I doubt I could find the strength to start shouting, not that I’m going to. We need to do this, yes?’

  Grace nodded slowly and bit her lip until she’d worked out what she wanted to say instead of blurting out the first thing that came into her head. ‘I wouldn’t have become your mistress if I hadn’t been so broke, but you were the one who wanted an agreement. It wasn’t my idea. If you’d just asked me to be your girlfriend with no contract, no allowances, I’d have said yes, because I fancied you. You know I’d have slept with you in New York.’

  ‘Those allowances were just pin money,’ he said. ‘A little sweetener. It wasn’t meant to be a lifeline.’

  ‘Pin money? You were giving me more in two months than I make all year!’ Grace exclaimed and once again, there was a table and several worlds between them.

  ‘I had no idea you were barely earning minimum wage. I assumed you were making at least ten times that, and that you walked out of work every day with armfuls of clothes foisted on you by grateful fashion houses,’ Vaughn protested.

  ‘Well, they kind of make us give the clothes back once we’ve shot them,’ Grace said wistfully. ‘I have a New Look discount card, but that’s about it.’

  ‘You should have come to me if you needed more money. You know I’d have given it to you without question.’ He’d promised he wouldn’t get angry, but he was starting to sound a little peeved and Grace realised Vaughn was offended at the implication that he was tight - and of course he wasn’t. He’d been unstintingly generous - but he wielded his generosity like a weapon sometimes. ‘You should have told me about this, confided in me. Why didn’t you?’

  There were so many reasons that Grace didn’t know where to begin. She started with the obvious. ‘Because I don’t want to think about it, even though it’s all I think about. It’s why everything was tucked away in boxes under my bed. If I talk about it, then it’s real and I have to start dealing with it, and I didn’t want to. And I hardly know you . . .’

  ‘What do you mean, you hardly know me? You’ve been sleeping with me for the last four months.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean I know you,’ Grace said. ‘Just like you didn’t really know me until all this exploded in your face on Monday.’

  Vaughn’s face tightened and Grace suspected that his promise that this wouldn’t turn into another fight was a case of hope over experience. ‘I told you things in Buenos Aires that I haven’t told anyone,’ he said stiffly.

  ‘Then you were furious with me because I’d seen you let your guard down. But, God, Vaughn, you’ve seen me make a total idiot of myself so many times. The first day we met, and when you caught me masturbating . . .’ Grace covered her cheeks with her hands, though that memory managed to raise a smile from Vaughn. ‘You’ve seen me dripping with snot, and then last Monday . . . I was so ashamed and you just wouldn’t stop making me look at those pieces of paper and trying to make me tell you things, my dirtiest secrets . . . and you got so angry with me.’

  ‘Do I frighten you?’ Vaughn asked, and Grace looked at his clenched jaw, his white-knuckled fingers tapping on the table-top, and . . .

  ‘A little bit,’ she admitted. ‘Not frightened, exactly, but you’re kind of scary sometimes.’

  Vaughn stretched out his hands and tried to relax his posture, like a marionette suddenly coming to awkward, jerky life. ‘Surely you know my bark is much worse than my bite.’

  But I don’t, Grace thought, and she shrugged helplessly. ‘Look, it was horrible but I’m glad because I couldn’t keep ignoring it. I’ve spent all week trying to straighten it out. Like, I’m going to sell some of my stuff and see a debt specialist because he thinks he could get the loan companies to forget the interest. And I might even move back to Worthing and commute in to save some money, and I’ve left a ton of messages for my bank manager but I think he’s breaking up with me too, but I need my papers back . . .’

  ‘Just stop. Slow down,’ Vaughn demanded. He scraped his chair back and stood up and walked over to where Grace’s handbag was perched on the worktop. ‘Give me your credit cards.’

  Grace looked at him warily. ‘But didn’t you hear what I said? I’m sorting it out and I’m not going to do that any more.’

  ‘So give me your cards then,’ Vaughn replied imperturbably.

  Giving Vaughn her cards for safekeeping made perfect sense. That way she wouldn’t be tempted, no matter how low she got, but . . . ‘I need one card, in case I—’

  ‘All the cards,’ Vaughn repeated, and it worked out really well that she was a little scared of him because Grace took the bag he was holding out to her and started rummaging through it, pulling cards out of her purse and side pockets.

  ‘My TopShop card has actually got credit on it,’ she protested, almost wincing as she heard her voice getting shriller, but she slapped the cards into Vaughn’s outstretched hand and watched him sift through them.

  ‘Grace, I said we wouldn’t have an argument, but there are two cards missing,’ he said. ‘You have twelve in all - there’s only ten here.’

  With shaking fingers, Grace unzipped an inner pocket and sifted through receipts until she closed her hand around an all too familiar plastic rectangle. Once she gave it to Vaughn, she could feel terror rising in her like bile. Losing the cards was like suddenly being thrown from a plane without a parachute, so she had the sensation that she was freefalling with nothing to cling on to. She could actually feel herself fighting for each breath while Vaughn stood and watched her. He waited until she’d managed to pull herself back from the brink, then said gently, ‘Where’s the last card?’

  It took Grace fifteen minutes to sort through the crates, looking for a big cake tin while Vaughn sat on the bed in the guest room. Then she knelt on the floor with the cake tin on her lap and with her nails started slicing through the tape that was sticking down the lid. Inside was another tin, also taped down, and another, and another, and another . . . until she finally got to the last tin - a pretty little Art Deco-inspired box that had once contained some caramel pastilles - and prised it open. ‘It’s my emergency card,’ she told Vaughn defensively as she handed it over, even though everything in her was screaming to snatch it back.

  Vaughn fanned the cards out and looked at them. ‘Just pieces of plastic and computer chips,’ he remarked, before he tucked them away in his shirt pocket. ‘You’re practically vibrating - come and sit down.’

  Grace guessed they’d reached the stage in their discussion where Vaughn was going to break up with her, very gently, very nicely and with her pieces of plastic and computer chips in his custody. She kept a good metre of bed between them as she sat down and looked at him from under her lashes expectantly.

  ‘I’m paying off your debts,’ he said evenly, and it was the last thing Grace expected him to say. ‘My accountant is contacting all your creditors and he expects to have all the loose ends tied up by the end of next week. And I got you this.’

  He pulled something out of his trouser pocket and placed it on the bed between them.

  Grace did
n’t dare touch it because this had to be some bizarre game and she wasn’t sure of the rules. Or if there even were rules. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It’s a credit card, Grace - one of those Black Amex numbers that you’ve always been so taken with. I thought you’d have recognised it immediately.’

  ‘I mean, why does it have my name on it?’ Grace pushed it away from her with the tippy tip of one finger, because she didn’t trust herself not to grab it and run off into the night to the nearest place where she could exchange it for goods and services. The restraint was fucking killing her.

  ‘Because it’s yours,’ Vaughn said with just a hint of gritted teeth, like he couldn’t believe she was being so obtuse. ‘I’m only going to give you £200 a month in cash for incidentals from now on. Everything else you put on the card. If you have to buy a dress or a birthday card or knitting needles, you put it on the card. I’m not going to pore over the statements but please run any big purchases past me first. Speedboats, tiaras and such.’ Vaughn took Grace’s shell shock as permission to carry on. ‘You’re not to touch your wages: they go into the bank and stay there earning interest.’ He picked up the card and pushed it into Grace’s hand. ‘Think of this as a set of training wheels.’

  Grace looked up at him. ‘But why . . . I mean, why would you . . .’ Vaughn seemed very soft-focus and was getting blurrier by the second, and as Grace blinked her eyes, she realised that tears were streaming down her face. She tried to scrub them away with an impatient hand, but more appeared to take their place.

  ‘Don’t cry,’ Vaughn warned but it was too late.

  Grace bent forward so her forehead was almost touching her knees and started to cry. Not like the crying Vaughn had seen before, when she was trying to hold back her sobs; this time she could feel her body shuddering and shaking as it birthed out each howl. At the periphery of her senses, she was vaguely aware of Vaughn shifting, but then his arm was around her shoulder and he was scooping her on to his lap and holding her while she cried, softly murmuring words as he stroked her hair but didn’t try to stop her until finally the sobs began to diminish in ferocity and volume.

  Slowly Grace felt herself begin to emerge from the dark place she’d disappeared to, back to the here and now where she was clinging to Vaughn, her face buried in the warm hollow where his shoulder met his neck, shirt soaked with tears and . . . God, she couldn’t even cry properly. Her nose was running as she sat up and wiped it with the back of her hand because she was disgusting. Vaughn wasn’t recoiling with horror but still smoothing her hair with steady, even strokes.

  ‘I’ve never met anyone who cries as much as you do,’ he said, brushing his fingers over the last few tears trickling down her hot cheeks. ‘I wasn’t trying to upset you. I thought I was doing something nice.’

  ‘You were,’ Grace hiccuped, and she thought about wriggling off his lap, trying to regain some tiny semblance of dignity, but it was so comforting to just be held without any kind of expectation. ‘But I don’t deserve it. It’s my own fault that I got into such a mess, that I owe so much money.’

  ‘We’ve been over that. I told you there was no way you could live on what you earned, especially when you had to fund yourself for—’

  ‘No, not that.’ Grace scrunched up her face as she tried to summon up the courage that she always had in very short supply. ‘Those credit cards . . . when you asked me why I bought all that expensive shit and I got angry, it wasn’t at you, it was at myself. I just feel like, like . . . I’m just not good enough, not ever. I’m not worth anything. And sometimes I feel it so much, like there’s this big hole inside me and I don’t know how to fix it so I go and buy all this stuff because if I have these pretty, expensive things then it must mean that I’m worth something. But when I get them home, I realise it’s not going to work and I can’t bring myself to look at them and then I feel even worse and it’s just this never-ending loop that I can’t break. Do you know what I mean?’

  It was a garbled explanation and Grace wasn’t even sure if it was particularly coherent as she was still crying a little bit. Vaughn didn’t say a word because why should he? It was a lame excuse for something that Grace was only just starting to figure out, but then he kissed her on the cheek. ‘Yes, I know exactly what you mean,’ he said softly. ‘But I’m giving you the chance for a do-over. Because I also know how rarely those come along. Don’t fuck it up.’

  ‘I won’t,’ Grace assured him. ‘And I’ll pay you back. We can sort out a schedule and it will take me a while, a long while, but . . .’

  ‘You don’t have to do that,’ Vaughn said quickly, and Grace could feel his muscles tensing.

  ‘But I want to - I should. It’s the right thing to do,’ Grace insisted, and she thought that now it probably was time to slide off his lap, but Vaughn’s arms tightened around her as soon as she tried to move. ‘It’s so much money.’

  ‘It’s just money, and money only matters when you don’t have any. I have lots of it and it’s up to me what I spend it on,’ Vaughn said. ‘Besides, I didn’t pay back the full amount, I negotiated. I made them take off all the interest and the penalty fees, and really what I was giving you in allowances wasn’t enough. In the past - well, let’s say I had different arrangements. Let this be a lesson to you to never accept the price on the ticket.’

  ‘What do you mean, in the past?’ Grace asked, curiosity triumphing. ‘What did you do for your other . . . ?’

  ‘We don’t talk about our others,’ Vaughn snapped, before he softened his voice again. ‘We’re talking about you. Really, Grace, what you’ve earned me in commissions on Christmas Eve completely cancels out what I’ve just paid several loan-clearing companies, so I don’t want you to feel that you’re beholden in any way.’

  ‘But it can’t be that simple,’ Grace protested. ‘Nothing is ever that simple. It shouldn’t be.’ But it was if she remembered back to Christmas Eve and why Vaughn had gone to such lengths to get her to that lunch. ‘But I thought . . . when you said we needed to talk, I thought you were going to end things. God, I can’t believe you’d still want me around.’

  ‘You do love to jump to conclusions. Your bank manager didn’t break up with you - he was under strict instructions that he was only to deal with me - and I’m not breaking up with you either. Despite all evidence to the contrary, I’ve grown very . . . fond of you.’

  ‘You have?’ Grace knew she sounded sceptical but she didn’t really think she’d done very much to warrant any fondness on Vaughn’s part.

  ‘Well, when you’re not driving me to the very end of my tether. Though you seem rather less fond of me,’ he pointed out, even though Grace was on his lap and resting her head on his soggy shoulder. ‘You said you hated me.’

  ‘You were vile to me that day,’ Grace reminded him, sitting up so she could look him in the eye. ‘But most of the time I like you. When you’re nice to me, I like you. It’s that simple.’

  ‘So you like me right now because I’m being nice to you?’ Vaughn clarified.

  ‘Super-super nice, but I don’t know why because I don’t deserve it. I spent money that wasn’t mine when I knew I couldn’t pay it back, and there should be consequences. My grandparents are always going on about consequences. You have to let me pay you back somehow because I can’t—’

  ‘Grace, all the reasons why we started this are still there. I need a hostess and God knows, I need your help with Noah. You’re about the only person he bothers to be civil to. And after your quite miraculous shepherd’s pie, I expect you to make me dinner one night a week.’

  ‘It was just a shepherd’s pie.’

  ‘It was the first home-cooked meal I’ve had in years,’ Vaughn said, jiggling Grace to make his point. ‘And I want you to promise not to mention the money again. I think you’ve been torturing yourself enough over it the last few years and I really don’t see what purpose it would serve to keep bringing it up. It’s over, Grace. Clean slate.’

  For a moment Grace thoug
ht she might start crying again, out of sheer relief, because no matter how much Vaughn might protest, she knew she’d got off lightly. Too lightly. Not just because she didn’t have to pay him back but because he knew all her grubby little secrets, but his arms were still around her and he was looking at her with concern, not condemnation or judgement like she expected.

  Grace cupped his face in her hands so she could kiss him softly on the lips. ‘Thank you,’ she said. And she wanted to dress it up, make it sound more fervent, but she didn’t know how. ‘Thank you so much. I know you say it doesn’t mean anything, the money, but what you’ve done, it means the world to me.’

  ‘I can’t cope with any more tears tonight, Grace. You’ve already ruined one shirt,’ Vaughn sniffed, but Grace could tell he was faking.

  ‘I think I’m all cried out for the rest of the month,’ she said, finally tipping herself out of his lap so she could flop back on the bed, her hand reaching out to touch his back because she didn’t want to lose this lovely connection they had tonight. ‘God, I’m exhausted.’