Unsticky

by Sarra Manning

  ‘I’m starting to think that I should buy you plastic tiaras every week and that we should have all our conversations over the phone. You can be very reticent.’

  ‘And you’re not?’ Grace all but gasped in outrage.

  ‘I am not. I’m enigmatic,’ Vaughn insisted with that hint of a chuckle back in his voice. ‘Often verging on mysterious. Occasionally inscrutable.’

  ‘Did you eat a thesaurus for lunch?’ Grace asked sweetly. ‘With a dictionary for dessert?’

  ‘I didn’t, but as you’re in such a forthcoming mood, I’d like to ask you something. Can you talk for a little while?’

  ‘Yeah, sure.’ Grace shut the door of the cupboard and steeled herself for news of another party she needed to organise. Maybe a ball for 500 guests, with an international pop star flown in to provide the entertainment. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Well, I’d like to know what gets you off,’ Vaughn said smoothly, like it was a perfectly normal question to ask someone over the telephone on a Thursday afternoon.

  ‘Excuse me?’ Grace asked weakly as her face went from white to crimson in a split second.

  ‘You heard me perfectly well the first time. Obviously, the sex isn’t as good for you as it is for me. I’d like to know how I can rectify that situation.’

  ‘I’m at work! I’m in the fashion cupboard!’

  ‘I’m sure the frocks won’t tell anyone.’

  They probably wouldn’t, though Grace had often suspected that Kiki had planted a bug in the cupboard so she could find out what the rest of the fashion department said about her. Posy always came in exactly ten minutes before six each day so she could vent. ‘Please, Vaughn, can we just not?’ Grace begged and she thought it was maybe the first time that she’d called him by his name because it sounded really weird coming out of her mouth.

  ‘I thought you’d prefer to do it over the phone but we can do it face-to-face, if you like,’ Vaughn offered graciously, and she could hear the laughter lightening his voice, though Grace was failing to see anything funny about her orgasms or lack thereof.

  ‘I enjoy it,’ she whispered fiercely, because it seemed very important that Vaughn knew that. ‘Not saying it to spin you a line. I like it even if I don’t come. It’s really not that big a deal. Like, I bet there’s loads of women who don’t.’

  ‘Why don’t you think of it as harnessing some of that potential we talked about?’ Vaughn said smoothly. ‘I always tell you what I like in bed, but you never do, so now’s your opportunity. I’ll be making notes.’

  Vaughn always told her what he liked and what he didn’t, in bed and out, but it had still been something of a shock to discover how vocal he was when he got naked and would rasp filthy little nothings in her ear. That seemed as good a place as any to start.

  ‘Well, I like it when you say stuff to me,’ Grace muttered, sinking to the floor so she could sit under one of the rails of clothes and let the trailing hems hide her blushes. ‘You know, the dirty talk,’ she added.

  Thankfully, Vaughn didn’t ask her to enlarge on that topic. ‘OK, what else?’

  ‘Oh God, I don’t know!’

  ‘I always try to go down on you, but you wriggle away from me as if I’m trying to perform a depraved act on your poor, innocent flesh. You react in the same way when I try to touch your—’

  ‘I thought you were just trying to be nice,’ Grace interrupted lamely, because she had to get him to shut up.

  ‘Surely you’ve known me long enough to realise that I never do anything just to be nice. I like touching you. I’d like to taste you, and I’d particularly like to know you weren’t just lying back and thinking of England or what Marc Jacobs is doing for Autumn/Winter. So, once again, I’m going to ask you what gets you off?’

  He’d tried to make a Marc Jacobs joke, which Grace thought was kind of adorable, even if she was dying of shame. And it touched her that Vaughn was making such an effort to try to discover the workings of her pleasure centres. She rested her elbows on her knees. ‘I don’t know. And I’m not sure why I can’t come. I just thought it would happen eventually, like when I was learning to knit: one moment I was dropping stitches and getting my needles criss-crossed, the next I just got it. I thought sex would be like that.’

  ‘And what is it like?’ Vaughn’s tone was light and impersonal and it made it easier to say stuff that she never thought she’d say to anyone.

  ‘I just feel too much like me,’ she confessed. ‘Like, I can never get carried away or swept up in the moment. I’m worried that I’ll look fat from the wrong angle or that I’m doing something stupid and it just kills the mood.’ She sighed. ‘If it makes you feel any better, there were a couple of times that you got me really close - but then I got distracted.’

  ‘Well, you do have the attention span of a fruit fly,’ Vaughn countered, and it was the honest truth so Grace couldn’t get offended. In fact, she was even smiling. ‘You don’t have to worry. I don’t have some elaborate seduction in mind with props and a ten-point action plan.’

  ‘Glad to hear it,’ Grace said fervently, and although there was a mountain of returns to get through, for some reason she was in no rush to start on them. She’d much rather talk to Vaughn, especially since he was in such a freakishly good mood. ‘So, when am I going to see you again then?’

  ‘Not until we go to Miami for Art Basel. It’s the first weekend in December. You’ll have to take the Thursday and Monday off work.’

  ‘We’re going to Miami? No way!’ Grace tried to lower her voice because she was squealing so loud that they could probably hear her downstairs on the teen titles. ‘I’ve always wanted to go there.’ It was all she could do not to drop the phone and start clapping her hands in joy. ‘And it will be really sunny and hot.’

  ‘But you’ll be too busy looking at mediocre art installations to take advantage of that,’ Vaughn reminded her, but she could hear him smile. He was right. They really should just do all their talking on the phone. ‘I’ll see if Madeleine can pencil in half an hour’s sunbathing every day. Now I have to go.’

  And Vaughn went, not even bothering to say goodbye, but Grace was starting to get used to that.

  Winter was coming on fast now. Every morning as Grace crunched through a carpet of crisp leaves on her way to the office, she felt that the colder weather should be all the impetus she needed to move to a new flat; a new flat with central heating and absolutely no damp spores. Because the old flat really didn’t suit the new Grace.

  The new Grace who was greeted with open arms and welcoming smiles by the Spa. The Grace who was on first-name terms with a Russian almost-supermodel and the most frightening sales assistant at Miu Miu. The Grace who was beginning to feel like she wasn’t just playing a part, but was starting to become the confident girl she pretended to be when she was with Vaughn.

  Kiki had major issues with the new, confident Grace who no longer dyed her hair ridiculous colours or wore homespun ensembles from charity shops. If ever Grace felt she was getting a little too full of herself by preening in front of the fashion cupboard mirror or leafing through the Time Out Guide to Miami to bookmark restaurants when she should have been working, she could always rely on Kiki to throw some finely honed vitriol her way - almost as if her boss was determined to rid Grace of her new-found perkiness with each barbed remark and insult. ‘Just because you’ve finally learned, after two years, to put together a passable outfit doesn’t mean you can wear horizontal stripes with your hips, Gracie,’ was practically motherly advice compared to her querulous demands as to why Grace was no longer working through her lunch-breaks. She also snorted derisively every time Grace invoked the part-time job that meant she couldn’t work later than six.

  Nor did she approve of Grace working smarter, rather than harder, so she could fit all her work into an eight-hour day, rather than the pre-Vaughn days that stretched to twelve hours, or even fourteen if the fashion team were going on a trip. Bunny was still around and getting paid for it, unlike the
other interns, so Grace decided to make the most of her. There was also a new intern, Celia, who’d been at American Vogue for a month until she got deported for overstaying her student visa, and she could actually be trusted to call PRs for prices and do returns as long as Grace bought her chocolate and let her try on new deliveries when they came in. It left Grace free to minister to Kiki’s every need and surreptitiously work on Lily’s wedding prep.

  But just when Grace felt like she really was kicking arses and taking names, the old Grace would pop up to remind her that she was still dogged with debt and that the new Grace needed to pull her finger out if there was ever to be any hope of them becoming debt-free.

  If someone had told Grace a few months ago that £7,000 a month wasn’t enough to manage on when you were a rich man’s mistress, she’d have laughed hard enough to snort liquid out of her nostrils. But £7,000 a month had a completely different ring to it when you were moving through a world where people thought nothing of ordering £600 bottles of champagne or booking a suite at Claridge’s like Nadja did because she couldn’t be bothered to make the long drive from Mayfair to Kensington one night when she’d asked Grace to dinner. Grace had got the night bus home still reeling from the £100 tip Nadja had asked her to leave because she’d paid for the meal.

  Was it any wonder that the allowances, which she kept in an envelope in her handbag, seemed to dwindle at an alarming rate? Or that she spent most of her money on clothes? Not sensible, versatile outfits that would take her from desk to dinner either. These days she wasn’t popping out after work for a bottle of white wine in All Bar One with Lily but going to a ball or a gala or a museum reception, which were fancy words for a black-tie event where the women wore couture, and a dress from Zara just didn’t cut it.

  Vaughn didn’t really know anything about fashion. Grace was pretty sure he couldn’t tell Primark from Prada, but when she’d turned up in her Zac Posen dress for the third time, he’d given her a long, hard look and said, ‘Oh, you’re wearing that again.’

  Then there was the time he’d taken her to Paris for the weekend and Grace had worn a dress from the Kate Moss TopShop collection to meet some friends of his for lunch. It had been during the few first, fraught weeks of their arrangement, and she’d been horrified when Vaughn and his friends, two couples in their forties, had all started speaking French and she’d had to muddle through, though she’d remembered enough from her A-levels to understand perfectly when Guillaume, a heavy-set man sitting next to Vaughn, had tilted his head in her direction and shrugged expansively. ‘Elle est trop jeune pour toi, mon ami.’

  Vaughn hadn’t commented at first, he’d been too busy gazing at his dessert like it was the Eighth Wonder of the World. Then he’d smiled ruefully. ‘Mais elle est très jolie.’ Grace had still been reeling from that little bombshell when Guillaume’s wife, Solange, had taken her to one side in the powder room and said, ‘You’re a very sweet girl and I understand how new this all is, but darling, this really won’t do.’ Then she’d fingered the sleeve of Grace’s dress as if it was made from the nastiest of nylons. Grace suspected that she’d said something to Vaughn, or else his dessert had really sweetened him up because afterwards he’d taken her to Marc Jacobs and bought her the most expensive dress she’d ever owned.

  It was then that Grace had realised that you had to be creative to keep up with women who weren’t on first-name terms with the girl at Miu Miu, but with John Galliano and Karl Lagerfeld. The kind of women who’d sneered at Grace’s last season Diane Von Fürsternberg that she’d got on sale when she’d worn it to a gallery opening in New York.

  Vintage was always a safe bet and Grace had found a place that hired out evening gowns for £100 a day. She’d even forced herself to forage at the back of her wardrobe so she could do an inventory on the ill-gotten gains she’d acquired from her shopping binges. But as luck would have it, she’d never once purchased a formal dress. She tended to go for bags and shoes - and just unwrapping them from their plastic shrouds had been enough to make her start dry-heaving.

  The first week that Vaughn was away, Grace received her itinerary for December, which looked more daunting than she could have possibly imagined. There were a hell of a lot of parties hosted by ambassadors and Russians who owned Premier League football teams, and she needed to assemble twenty-five party outfits on £7,000. It was just as well that Grace loved solving fashion conundrums as much as her grandfather enjoyed playing Killer Sudoku. She’d even made a complicated flow-chart diagram in her Google documents when she realised that she’d pretty much worn every vintage dress that the hire place had in her size and they had nothing left in stock that hadn’t been booked months in advance for Christmas parties. Grace figured that she could double up at least five outfits if they were black dresses, three of which she could borrow from Celia, Lily and Posy as the four of them had made a pact to pool frocks to get them through the party season.

  Luckily, Courtney and Lucie had a raft of discount cards between them and would let Grace borrow them ‘for Christmas presents and I totally need some statement dresses for all the parties coming up’ if she did their Christmas shopping while she was at it, which netted her a Luella dress, a ballerina skirt and a Burberry coat, which would draw people’s attention for long enough until she took it off to reveal a borrowed black frock.

  Then there were other put-upon assistants employed by various fashion companies dotted all over London who’d give Grace hefty discounts and occasionally even lend her dresses, especially when she started calling in favours. A whole year’s worth of favours, and she owed fashion credits up the wazoo, but Grace was pretty proud of herself for doing designer on a limited budget, even though Kiki often complained that Grace always brought her problems and never solutions. But if this was a problem, then it was one that Grace didn’t mind having.

  ‘It would be like Cinderella moaning about getting blisters from her glass slippers,’ she told herself as she hung her newly acquired, begged, borrowed and heavily discounted dresses on one of the rails in the fashion cupboard, then struck a pose in front of the mirror. ‘Oh Grace, you poor thing, having to make seven grand go a long way because you’ve got so many high-falutin places to go and people to meet. Sucks to be you.’

  She wondered how Vaughn’s other mistresses had coped and decided that they must have all been independently wealthy or that he’d had different arrangements with them; either way, Grace didn’t want to know.

  Even though December was panning out to be the cruellest month, Grace was still determined to earmark at least £1,000 to pay off some of her creditors. When she received her allowances on the first of every month, she used a scientific method to select which bills to pay: this involved opening a shoebox, shutting her eyes and rooting around until she had three pieces of paper in her hand. Then she’d toddle off to the Post Office. So far, she wasn’t even paying the actual amounts she owed, but trying to make a dent in the interest and penalty charges and late fees so it felt like she was throwing a glass of water at a forest fire but it was a start. More than that, it was the endgame, it was the reason why she’d got into bed with Vaughn in the first place. Though at this rate she’d have to stay in his bed for at least three years before she was out of the red and luxuriating in the novelty of being in the black.

  All in all, it had been a very fruitful fortnight. December’s outfits were half-assembled. She’d made major inroads into getting the fashion department on track to clear their Christmas deadlines, paid some bills, started getting her body bikini-ready and spent some quality time with Lily.

  ‘I’ve been given two weeks off before the Christmas rush,’ Grace told Lily when she’d asked why Grace wasn’t at her part-time job.

  It had sent a pang of guilt hurtling through Grace at how pathetically grateful Lily was that she had time after work to come round and write lists and insert magazine tears in her wedding folder. And it was that same guilt that made Grace agree to Sunday lunch in Godalming so Lily could fi
nally tell her parents she was up the duff and the May wedding that her mother thought she was getting caterers’ estimates for was going to be moved up. Way up.

  It wasn’t just guilt though. Grace had been lured by the promise of roast potatoes cooked in goose fat too and stayed to make sure that Lily’s dad didn’t get down the shotgun above the mantelpiece and use it on Dan, who was now in Grace’s eternal debt.

  ‘Gracie, I think if you hadn’t been there, her dad would have broken my legs,’ he kept saying all the way back to North London. ‘I never dreamed they’d react like that.’

  Lily had just smiled beatifically because the bad news was out of the way, the wedding was set for Christmas Eve and now Grace could get on with briefing the seamstress she’d found and a million other tasks she’d agreed to, because that pesky guilt made it impossible to say no. It was also why she’d spent two hours of her last free Saturday tasting cakes with Lily, not that it was a hardship, before rushing off to meet her grandparents outside John Lewis on Oxford Street.