Unsticky

by Sarra Manning

  Vaughn grunted in agreement and lowered himself so he was lying next to her. ‘Tomorrow, you should unpack,’ he said casually. ‘You might as well stay here. I have all these empty rooms and I can’t bear the thought of you finding another fetid pit and immediately starting to skip the rent payments.’

  There was no point in Grace trying to deny it. Well, the first part anyway. ‘I’m not going to skip any type of payment ever again,’ she said fiercely. ‘But my intern says she might have a spare room in her house soon, and—’

  ‘It’s easier for you to stay here where I can keep an eye on you,’ Vaughn said, rolling on to his side so he could rest his arm on Grace’s belly, as if he was going to anchor her to the spot in case she planned to leave there and then. ‘Really, we’re going to be so busy in the next few months, and it’s silly for you to come back here for an hour or so, then get a car home.’

  It was silly and again, everything Vaughn was saying made sense, except now that Grace wasn’t quite so overwhelmed by gratitude and the threat of tears, she was beginning to feel as if she’d been taken over by a conquering army. ‘But this time last week, I was on the outs and now you want me to move in.’ She hoisted herself up on her elbows so she could see the discomfited look on Vaughn’s face.

  ‘Well, that was last week,’ he said obliquely. ‘Everything’s changed now.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Absolutely positive,’ Vaughn stated firmly. ‘I think as long as I don’t get drunk again and bare my soul, we should be fine.’

  Grace lay back down on the bed. She wished she could take Vaughn at his word, but he seemed to come with so many disclaimers. ‘But you like your own space,’ she reminded him. ‘And I’ve never lived with a boyfriend before.’

  ‘Well, you’ll have to stay in one of the guest rooms because you’re the most impossible person to sleep with, you fidget so much,’ Vaughn complained, brushing Grace’s fringe back so he could catch her rolling her eyes.

  ‘I don’t fidget that much - you’re a very light sleeper.’ Just the mention of the word was enough to make Grace yawn. It had been the most intense, emotionally draining two hours of her life.

  ‘We’ve hit the highlights, shall we save the small print for the morning?’ Vaughn suggested as he peeled back the duvet. ‘You’re tired, you should get into bed.’

  Grace crawled under the quilt, pleased when Vaughn spooned against her back. ‘Nobody’s ever been this good to me,’ she whispered, when he’d snapped off the light on the nightstand. ‘Or had this much faith in me. I don’t want to let you down.’

  ‘You won’t. Now shut up and go to sleep.’

  Although she’d insisted she never fidgeted, Grace couldn’t help but wriggle uncomfortably as Vaughn hissed in annoyance, which actually was strangely comforting. ‘I hate going to sleep with my clothes on. When I wake up I feel really grungy.’

  Grace could have sworn she heard his jaw clench. ‘Well, take them off then.’

  But once Grace had pulled off her clothes, there was something charged about Vaughn holding her, and she could feel his cock hardening. There was something even more charged about turning over so she could kiss him, when the credit card was still lying on the floor where it had fallen. She knew that, but she still couldn’t hide her hurt when Vaughn pushed her away.

  ‘It wouldn’t be appropriate tonight,’ he said, and it would have sounded more convincing if he hadn’t bitten his lip as Grace closed the gap he’d made between them so she could coil herself around him.

  ‘So, it would be appropriate tomorrow?’ she pouted. ‘It’s been a week. Over a week and I just want us to be close.’

  ‘I don’t want you to think that I’m taking advantage of you.’

  ‘And I don’t want you to think this is me showing you my gratitude. It’s just me wanting to have sex with you and I know you want to have sex with me. We’d never have started any of this if we hadn’t wanted to have sex with each other.’

  Vaughn tried to squirm out of the reach of her marauding hands and Grace discovered that she got a kick out of being the seducer and not the seducee for once.

  ‘I thought you were tired,’ Vaughn complained, but Grace could tell that he was just one more bitten-off groan from giving in. ‘You said you were tired.’

  ‘I’m not that tired,’ Grace insisted, and this time when she wrapped her arms and legs around him and threw in a little shimmy for good measure, he stopped pulling away.

  It was different to all the other times they’d had sex. Slow, silent, pausing for these long, devastating kisses that made Grace feel as if Vaughn was sucking the heart right out of her and she did cry a little when she came, as if she’d needed the release to wash away the last few dirty smears on her soul.

  Later, much later when she was finally drifting off to sleep, wrapped round Vaughn like a quilt, he was the one who shifted restlessly. ‘We still have an arrangement, Grace. No matter how close we’ve become, this isn’t a relationship.’

  Vaughn’s timing was terrible, Grace thought sleepily, but she knew he was right. ‘It can be a friendship. I want us to be friends.’

  ‘Friends?’ Vaughn echoed like it was a concept that he wasn’t familiar with. Friends probably wasn’t the right word but it would do for now.

  ‘You did something amazing for me and I’m beyond grateful, but you don’t have to worry that it’s going to make me fall in love with you. I’m not a falling-in-love kind of girl.’

  ‘Aren’t you a little too young to have given up on love?’ Vaughn wanted to know as Grace burrowed against his side because she’d found the perfect place in the crook of his arm to rest her head.

  ‘Nothing to do with being young,’ she mumbled. ‘Never believed in love anyway, so how could I give up on it?’

  ‘Then we’ll be friends.’ Vaughn dislodged Grace, making her whimper in protest, as he retrieved the duvet from the floor so he could tuck it around them. ‘We’re a good team, though neither of us is particularly house-trained, are we?’

  She knew exactly what he meant. Despite their differences, because of their differences, they were a perfect mismatched set. Two sides of the same tarnished penny. An out-of-step Fred and Ginger. Vaughn was just as fucked up as she was - he was just so much better at hiding it.

  chapter twenty-seven

  It used to be that when Grace woke up in the morning, she’d have a few scant seconds of contentment, before her brain kicked into gear and she remembered exactly who she was and what she was doing in the world. She knew that when she got out of bed, feet dancing on cold lino, there would be bills on the doormat. There would be a boyfriend who was on the verge of dumping her, who’d never called the night before. There’d be clothes that smelled of damp when she went to get dressed, and a colony of ants marching across the kitchen floor as she put the kettle on. So when Grace woke fully and took stock of her life, she always wanted to close her eyes and go back to sleep again.

  Now when she opened her eyes, she still thought those exact same things but as her eyes adjusted to the new day, she’d see that she was waking up in a different room. One painted in a soft shade of blue, with three Bridget Riley stripe paintings hanging on the wall: Vaughn had let her pick them out when he’d taken her to his temperature-controlled storage facility in King’s Cross. They reminded Grace of the stripy bags from Paul Smith and were a perfect foil for the bookshelves, where she’d arranged her nicest shoes, including her black velvet Christian Louboutins, which were her new favourite things in the world.

  Her clothes were hanging neatly in the huge walk-in closet, not hermetically sealed in plastic bags. Vaughn’s house was never cold, hot water never ran out, and as soon as her clothes hit the laundry basket, they were whisked away and reappeared neatly pressed and folded on her bed, which was turned down every day by Vaughn’s housekeeper. As Grace’s feet sank into plush white carpet as she wandered into her en suite bathroom, it felt like she was living in a dream.

  It wasn’t
just the outer trappings of her life that had changed, swapping a squalid bedsit in Archway for a three-storey mansion in Hampstead, it was the whole rhythm of her life. Her old routines and habits had had to shift and coalesce with Vaughn’s. On the days that he was working from home, that meant he’d come and wake her up after he’d pounded the footpaths of the Heath with Gustav, his trainer, even though she could have an extra half-hour in bed and still be at work almost on time. On the nights when they weren’t out, he was unswerving in his belief that Grace needed eight hours’ sleep a night, which was as sweet as it was annoying. Ever since she’d left her grandparents’ house, there hadn’t been anyone to give a toss about how much sleep she had or if she was bothering to eat a proper breakfast.

  It worked both ways, the taking care of someone else. Grace realised she was equally unwieldy on the subject of how a protein bar didn’t constitute a proper evening meal, even if Vaughn had had a big lunch. And though they never mentioned the money, Grace felt as if there was a debt that had to be repaid and cooking one meal a week didn’t begin to cover it. The way she felt about Vaughn now was so complicated. She wanted him, that was a given, but liking him, looking forward to seeing him when he’d been away for a few days, not being so scared of him, was new and confusing. But it was her gratitude and her frustration at not being allowed to express that gratitude which underpinned everything.

  Grace tried to say how she felt in the stroke of her fingertips along the back of Vaughn’s neck when she kissed him or when she smoothed down his jacket lapels and in a hundred tiny, inconsequential ways, from packing his suitcase when he went away to withdrawing money from her own bank account and not using his credit card, so she could buy him little presents. She remembered how touched he’d been by his Christmas presents and how she’d vowed she was going to get him small ‘just because’ gifts. Nothing very special - a book that had been reviewed in the Observer that weekend, which he’d mentioned. A bottle of Trumper’s Extract of Limes cologne because she’d noticed his was running low, and an Ealing Films DVD boxed set because she couldn’t be friends with anyone who didn’t love Kind Hearts and Coronets. Grace would leave each gift on Vaughn’s bed when he wasn’t at home, and when he tried to thank her she’d just shrug and say, ‘Really, it’s no big deal, I just saw it and thought you might like it.’

  There were times that Grace missed the chaos of her old life - little things like going to bed as soon as she got home from work because it was cold, and eating bowls of cereal as she watched TV and adjusted the position of her three hot water bottles. Or just slotting one of her favourite CDs into her battered old Discman and going for a long walk and finishing up in Little Venice, where she’d hole up in a café and knit. There wasn’t so much time for those kind of indulgences any more.

  Vaughn hadn’t been joking when he said they were going to be busy. There were dinners to organise and parties and exhibitions to attend, but even if the stomach-churning fear hadn’t completely disappeared, Grace was much better at faking it. It helped that Vaughn’s people weren’t strangers any more, waiting to laugh at Grace’s clothes and catch her out as she tried to remember the name of the artist whose exhibition she’d seen the night before. Now, some of Vaughn’s people were becoming her people: Nadja always wanted to go shopping when she was in town, Grace and Piers had a secret Facebook friendship, and her new best friend was an elderly curator at the V&A who’d sneaked her into the costume archives and let Grace try on a Vivienne Westwood Watteau-inspired evening gown.

  It seemed to Grace that her new world was about doors opening, rather than slamming shut in her face. Like, it wasn’t just enough to have shampoo-commercial shiny hair and the new season’s clothes to be admitted, you had to know the secret handshake and the password. No longer being the new girl but the girl who was living with Vaughn was all it took for the doors to slowly creak open so Grace could step through into a world she’d only half-glimpsed before.

  Grace understood now why the celebrities they shot for the front cover of Skirt generally acted like complete wankers. It was because they glided through that same world, so that when they rolled up for a shoot three hours late, they expected Grace to put on their earrings and shoes for them, because they were used to never having to do anything for themselves. It would be really easy to let the high life go to her head when she was being chauffeur-driven into work by Jimmy, who’d get out of the car and unfurl a huge umbrella because it was pissing down with rain and something terrible might happen if one single raindrop landed on Grace’s head.

  It was just as well she had her job to keep her humble. Not as humble as she used to be, because Lucie and Courtney were treating her with a new respect now that she brought her weekend case and garment bags into the office, instead of hiding them in the postroom. She didn’t have to do their filing any more, which suited Grace just fine, but they expected her to provide a blow-by-blow account of where she’d been that weekend or who was on the guest-list for the Tate Modern exhibition opening she was going to that evening. Grace made sure that she still went on chocolate runs and kept a tight rein on the cupboard comings and goings, because she wasn’t going to let anyone accuse her of getting too full of herself. Not that she could while Kiki was around.

  ‘I don’t want your social life interfering with your work,’ she snapped each time Grace went into her office with another holiday form for her to sign. But instead of throwing random hoops at Grace so she could jump through them, Kiki now presented her with a list each Monday morning. It was a list that made the Treaty of Versailles look like light reading, but it meant that Grace could plan out the week’s work and even call in clothes for shoots while she was getting a pedicure.

  Kiki had also taken it upon herself to give Grace’s daily outfit critiques a shake-up. She’d suddenly appear in the cupboard, which was unheard of, and demand to know where Grace was going that night and what she was planning to wear. After Kiki’s savage condemnation of several of her outfits, it suddenly dawned on Grace that she could save a lot of time and having to return things unworn by asking Kiki for advice. The latter had feigned complete indignation the first time Grace had asked, ‘Do you think I need to wear a long dress for this thing at the US Ambassador’s place?’ but ten minutes later she’d emailed Grace a list of frocks from Net-a-Porter. She’d even given Grace the number of her own alterations woman because, ‘Everything you buy is too big on the bust and far too small on the hips.’ It was almost as if Kiki had become a surrogate mother, albeit in a dysfunctional Joan Crawford way. Grace didn’t doubt that Kiki would get medieval with a dress hanger if she persisted in buying dresses with asymetrical hems.

  The only problem left to worry about was Lily. The rest of the beauty department had stopped with the filthy looks and the stony silences the day after Grace got a ‘beige wash’, which Vogue called ‘the new blonde’, from Marc, her hairdresser. When Maggie, the Beauty Director, saw the caramel, champagne and honey highlights woven into Grace’s now shoulder-length hair, she couldn’t stop herself from cooing, ‘Love the beige wash, sweetie.’ But it had been exactly twelve weeks since Grace and Lily had fallen out, and her friend still showed no signs of softening.

  ‘I say hello to her every morning and I always compliment her on what she’s wearing or ask how the pregnancy is going and she looks at me like I’ve just stepped in dogshit,’ Grace complained bitterly to Vaughn one rainy evening at the end of February, as they stood in a draughty room that had once been a church hall when the residents of Bow were still God-fearing folk, and tried not to shiver.

  It wasn’t just the cold but a shudder of sheer revulsion as she tried not to look at any of the canvases. It was the opening night of Noah’s new exhibition, pretentiously titled The Killing Fields, and it consisted of painting after painting of what looked like blood-splattered poppies. Though when Grace got closer she realised that they were actually mutilated girl parts. At least that’s what they looked like to her, but it could just be that Noah was a
really rubbish artist who didn’t know how to draw either flowers or vaginas properly.

  ‘Maybe it’s time to cut your losses then,’ Vaughn said, but Grace could tell that she didn’t have his full attention. She never did when there were paintings in front of them. ‘A lot less aggravation that way.’

  ‘She can’t ignore me for ever,’ Grace mused, looking around the room. It was a very different scene to the parties they normally went to: acid wash jeans, limited-edition Japanese trainers and fitted caps had replaced dinner jackets and cocktail dresses. Grace waved at a guy who’d been two years above her at St Martin’s and had given her flatmate crabs. ‘Noah’s trying to get your attention,’ she added, nudging Vaughn so he looked up to see that Noah was at the makeshift bar in the corner of the room and aiming frantic hand signals at him.

  ‘He probably wants me to stick vast sums of money behind the bar,’ Vaughn noted sourly, but he gave Grace’s waist a quick squeeze before he strode off.

  Three months ago, Grace would have found the nearest wall to lean against and practise becoming inconspicuous, but now she surveyed the room, caught Lola’s eye and hurried over to where she was sitting with a bunch of people that Grace didn’t know, although they looked familiar. When you’d been out of circulation for a while, all Hoxtonites looked the same.