Unsticky

by Sarra Manning

  ‘You totally played me and you can pretend that you’ve been honest with me from the start, but we both know that’s a lie.’ She shrugged, profoundly glad that she was dry-eyed for once and her voice was hardly shaking.

  ‘I’m sure I don’t need to tell you what happens to people who live in glass houses,’ Vaughn reminded her, and she didn’t know how he had the stones to look her in the eye and not wither from shame right where he sat. ‘You were economical with the truth too, as I recall. Now shall we stop the recriminations and go back to discussing this like grown-ups?’

  ‘If it’s over, then why do you want me to stick around for another month?’ Grace demanded. ‘If you don’t care about me, then you should be happy to get me out of your hair as quickly as possible, and God knows, I can’t take thirty more days of being with someone who doesn’t want to be with me.’

  ‘Of course I care about you,’ Vaughn said fiercely, and Grace wanted to believe him, but all evidence suggested just the opposite. ‘That’s why I insist that you see out the month so I have enough time to get your affairs in order,’ he added, because he was oh so kind and considerate. ‘We’ll have a couple more dinners and invite some creative directors, designers and such. I’ll even get Madeleine to set up a meeting with some agents who can rep you as a freelance stylist. There’s really no need to worry.’

  Grace gave a tiny bitten-off groan. ‘Don’t you see, you’re putting me in an impossible position? You’re offering me things - big, life-changing things - that I want to turn down, but I can’t and then I’m, like, beholden to you. I owe you and I end up doing whatever it is you want, even if everything inside me is telling me not to.’ She rested her elbows on the table so she could put her aching head in her hands. ‘Please don’t do this to me.’

  She looked across at Vaughn and the flickering candle on the table cast shadows over his face, and for a moment Grace was sure she could see him struggling as much as she was. That all the complicated things she was overdosing on, doubt and uncertainty and sadness, because she was in mourning for something that hadn’t even existed, was what he was feeling too. But it had to have been a trick of the light because Vaughn moved the candle so he could take her hand and his face was wearing that bland expression that made her want to scream.

  ‘In a few months’ time you’ll look back on this and realise it was absolutely the right thing to do at absolutely the right time,’ he said, trying to entwine Grace’s fingers with his, until she snatched her hand back. ‘That you’re better off for this.’

  ‘Better off because I’ve let myself be bought and sold?’ Grace asked bitterly, and now it was easy to read Vaughn’s face; he was suddenly and blisteringly angry.

  ‘Don’t say that,’ he demanded. ‘It’s simply not true and I’m not talking about the material benefits of our arrangement. I’m talking about us going our separate ways. It’s the best thing for you.’

  ‘You have no right to decide what’s best for me,’ Grace argued, but she’d given him that right, when she’d signed a contract which contained the clause Other duties: as required. ‘You should have discussed it with me first.’

  ‘I’m discussing it with you now.’ Vaughn leaned back and Grace saw him take a deep breath before he adjusted his posture so his back was as stiff as his face. ‘You’ll accept what I’ve offered you.’

  It was a statement, not a question, and Grace wished that she had the self-respect to tell Vaughn that he could stuff his flat and his credit card and his pieces of art. Her feet were firmly planted on the floor, all ready to push her chair back and do just that, but she wasn’t moving, wasn’t opening her mouth to do anything but take a frantic gulp of Chianti. He didn’t want her any more but he was still giving her the chance to move forward, be someone other than the girl she used to be. And Grace knew she’d done many stupid things since she’d met Vaughn, but turning this down would be the most stupid.

  ‘Yes,’ she said in a voice so small it was almost a whisper. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘In that case the month’s notice stands,’ Vaughn said smoothly, because she’d just given him permission to be the selfish, autocratic bastard that he really was. ‘No more tantrums and you’ll keep the pouting and the snide remarks to a minimum?’

  ‘I s’pose . . .’ Grace said, not even attempting to dial down her sullen expression. ‘Well, I’ll try at least.’

  ‘Good girl.’ Vaughn smiled at her and when she stared back at him with a stony face he sighed and his eyes flicked down to her breasts, which to be fair, were heaving as Grace tried to get her emotions under control. ‘Shall we order pudding or should I get the bill?’

  Grace wanted to tell Vaughn to order something off the trolley because it was the only treat he’d be getting, but she just said diffidently, ‘It’s up to you. I’m not fussed either way.’

  They hadn’t talked about it, but Grace was one hundred per cent sure that she wasn’t going to sleep with Vaughn any more, whether it was a breach of the contract or not.

  Vaughn must have picked up on the telepathic messages Grace was sending out because he didn’t even try to cop a feel in the taxi, so Grace assumed that there was a no-shagging clause for the notice period. One of these days she really needed to ask Madeleine for a copy of the contract, then sit down with a legal dictionary to work out exactly what it did say.

  But it didn’t really matter what the contract said, because once they got home and Grace dived for the front door as Vaughn paid the taxi driver, she’d only just got to her room when she heard him coming up the stairs. She waited to hear him continue the trek to the second floor where he could bloody well sleep alone, but he appeared in the open doorway.

  She opened her mouth to tell him to leave, to get out because she had nothing left to say to him, but Vaughn leaned against the door jamb and the words dried up in her throat because he looked so beautiful standing there in the soft light. Or not beautiful, not exactly, he had too many angles, but the top button of his shirt was undone so Grace could see the long line of his neck, and his sleeves were rolled up so as Vaughn flexed his fingers she could see the play of muscle along his forearms and it made her remember what it felt like to be held by him, when she’d believed that he was hers.

  They stood like that, not speaking for long moments, but the silence wasn’t awkward. It was thick and charged until Vaughn crooked one long finger at her.

  ‘Come here.’ He used what Grace thought of as his sex voice, pitched low, and it seemed to vibrate under her skin.

  So she went to him, not thinking of anything but closing the distance between them.

  ‘Come on, Grace. Let’s make up,’ Vaughn whispered in her ear, and she didn’t want to be a pushover, didn’t want him to think he had a hold over her, but he did and it had nothing to do with the contract. Besides, she only had one month left to stock up on the kind of orgasms she’d probably never experience again.

  She was in the mood for something urgent and wild, like it always was when they’d been arguing and matters were unresolved because their bodies were still in fight mode. But Vaughn was planting a row of soft kisses against her neck and it wasn’t what Grace wanted. Not tonight when there was too much to think about and she didn’t want to think at all.

  ‘No,’ she muttered, pulling away. ‘Not like that.’

  Vaughn looked supremely pleased with himself as he loosened his tie. ‘Then how?’

  Held down. Held open. Tied up. Bent over. Against the wall. On her knees. On her back. Grace didn’t care.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she whispered, because although Vaughn had annihilated most of her inhibitions, when she wanted him this badly she could hardly speak, let alone give him a list of action points.

  ‘If you’re capable of doing it, then you should be capable of saying it,’ Vaughn drawled, and she got why he was so bloody smug - he hadn’t thought she’d put out tonight. But her desire was written all over her burning cheeks and the way she had to struggle for every breath she took, so e
ven the displacement of the air against her skin as she stepped away from Vaughn made Grace want to scream.

  ‘Fuck me,’ she ground out, and the desperation in her voice wiped the smile off Vaughn’s face.

  She was on her back before she’d even finished speaking, skirt pushed up and her knees somewhere around her ears. There was just a brief pause to tug down her knickers and then Vaughn’s fingers were inside her, his thumb working her clit, and Grace came just like that, quickly, her mouth pressed against his shoulder, her breath dampening the shirt that he hadn’t had time to take off.

  It was intense, maybe even a little frightening, to feel so out of control that when Vaughn started moving inside her with a glacial slowness like they had world enough and time, she scratched and bit at him, until he slipped out of her, ignored her howls of protest and pinned her arms above her head.

  ‘Why have you stopped?’ she panted, wriggling frantically, fingernails trying to score Vaughn’s wrists so he’d let her go and start moving again, start fucking her.

  ‘I don’t want to do it like that,’ Vaughn murmured, dipping his head to lick across the damp hollow of her throat. ‘I want to do it like this.’

  Grace turned her head away when Vaughn tried to kiss her, so, still holding her down, his mouth moved over her cheeks, kissing the tip of her nose and her eyelids when she closed them so she wouldn’t have to see the way he looked at her like she was his only reason for living. He placed soft kisses on her face, and with each touch of his lips Grace felt herself coming more undone until, when he let go of her wrists, her arms were around his neck and she was straining up for a kiss that Vaughn was only too happy to give.

  Then he slid back inside her, her legs wrapping tight round his hips, and this time Grace let it be slow and soulful.

  She lost count of the times she came, or perhaps she hadn’t stopped coming, and even when Vaughn finished with a hoarse grunt and pulled out of her, her body was still humming with pleasure.

  He rolled over, pulled Grace towards him and put his hand between her legs so he could coax one last orgasm from her, until she prised his fingers free. ‘No more,’ she begged, panting as she tried to come down, but all she could feel was the racing of her heart and the weals on her hands where she’d eventually wound them tight around the headboard because she’d thought she might float off the bed, the stinging in her eyes from tears she hadn’t shed yet.

  Vaughn pressed hot, open-mouthed kisses across her neck and shoulders. ‘See? There’s no reason why we can’t be civilised about this,’ he said throatily.

  chapter thirty-eight

  Grace had thought that getting through the next month would require guts and bravery and all sorts of other qualities she was sadly lacking. But it turned out she was wrong.

  Acting like nothing had happened was easy because, apart from Vaughn’s ultimatum, nothing had really happened. She still made him dinner, ironed his shirts and had sex with him every night.

  ‘Really?’ Lily queried, as they shopped for prams. ‘You don’t even do that thing when you snap, “Fine” even though you’re not fine?’

  ‘I know, it’s very freaky,’ Grace replied. ‘It reminds me of when my parents were splitting up. Like, once they’d decided to get divorced, my dad was still around for a while and they got on really well. I guess they realised they’d be rid of each other pretty soon so there was no point in arguing any more.’ Grace shook her head to clear the memory of her mother and father sitting in their tiny garden drinking tea and shooting her approving smiles as she pirouetted across the lawn. She’d been in the middle of her ballet phase.

  ‘You hardly ever talk about your parents,’ Lily noted, as she checked the price tag on a Bugaboo.

  ‘There’s nothing much to talk about. Just that carrying on as normal isn’t that weird.’ She prodded at the stroller with her foot. ‘Are you going to get this one?’

  ‘Well, really I wanted the three-in-one travel system with the detachable carry cot,’ Lily said regretfully, ‘but it is kinda expensive. My dad’s had to close one of his garages and Dan says we need to be more self-sufficient.’

  ‘My treat,’ Grace said as she fished for her black Amex card. ‘Officially sponsored by Vaughn for ruining your special day.’

  ‘Really? Isn’t it too much?’ Lily tried to sound doubtful but if she hadn’t been so pregnant, Grace suspected she’d have been jumping up and down with joy.

  ‘Yeah, positive,’ she said firmly. ‘About time I used this card’s power for good.’

  ‘Are you sure you’re OK, Grace?’ Lily asked, pulling Grace away from the brightly coloured Bugaboo accessories she’d started to gather up. ‘Even your fancy spa and the mineral make-up can’t disguise the dark circles under your eyes.’

  ‘Honestly, I’m fine,’ Grace insisted, because if she said it enough times then it would be true.

  ‘Whatever,’ Lily said, waddling back to the Bugaboo section. ‘But dark circles under the eyes never lie.’

  Once they got back to the office, Grace began to work on the menu for her final dinner-party. She ran her eye over the guest-list and spotted two new names: an Australian artist called Tabitha Grey who apparently did something with silk-screening. Grace wondered if Vaughn was lining her up as a replacement, until she noted that Madeleine had helpfully supplied the information that Tabitha’s plus-one was her ‘lesbian life partner, married in 2005’. There was also a Japanese sculptor who might be a woman until Grace Googled the name and discovered that it was actually a man who’d been born and bred in Liverpool.

  Maybe Vaughn had a period of quiet reflection between mistresses. Or maybe even he baulked at the thought of having outgoing and incoming women at the same table.

  She was just trying to get more dirt on Tabitha, who could be bisexual, and just what kind of freak didn’t have a Facebook, when Noah rang.

  Noah had become a four-letter word, never spoken out loud, so it caught Grace off-guard when he said hesitantly, ‘Hey, Grace? It’s Noah, can you talk?’ otherwise she’d have told him she was busy and hung up.

  ‘What’s up?’ she asked, as she glanced at a sample menu and tried not to blame Noah for her current predicament. He couldn’t help being an appalling artist.

  ‘Look, this is going to sound weird, so I’ll just come right out with it: could you drop round to mine this evening? I really need your advice.’

  ‘About what? No one ever wants my advice about anything except hemlines.’ Grace closed the menu binder so she could give Noah her full attention. ‘Can’t we do this over the phone?’

  ‘It’s more of a show than tell,’ Noah said, and it was all very intriguing, but this was Noah and she was Grace and Vaughn wouldn’t like it, even if Vaughn was probably at that very moment instructing Madeleine to book the movers for a week next Monday. Not that Grace cared what Vaughn did and did not like any more, but they’d had an agreement, which still had ten days left to run.

  ‘I can’t,’ she sighed. ‘It would be just too odd.’

  ‘Half an hour, Gracie. I’ll even pay for the taxi there and back,’ Noah pleaded, and he never did that because cocky self-assurance was his default setting.

  Grace looked up to see Celia, now newly promoted to fashion assistant, about to accept a package from the postroom without even bothering to ask for the delivery slip. ‘I have to go,’ she said distractedly. ‘If you’re in town soon, maybe we could meet for a coffee.’ A coffee during daylight hours was innocent enough, after all.

  ‘Yeah, I guess.’ Grace didn’t even know Noah could do dejected. ‘I’ll speak to you soon.’

  It was a conversation that Vaughn didn’t need to know about when he made his usual mid-afternoon call to ask her what she was making for dinner. But by five o’clock, Grace still hadn’t heard from him and when she tried to phone him, the call was redirected to Madeleine’s voicemail.

  He finally picked up at five minutes after six. Grace would have been fuming if she wasn’t making such a concert
ed effort to pretend she didn’t care. ‘Hey, what’s happening?’ she asked. ‘Are you on your way over?’

  From the noise coming down the other end of the line, it sounded like Vaughn was standing directly over a flight path. ‘I meant to call,’ he shouted over the din. ‘Could you make your own way home?’

  ‘Where are you? Don’t you want dinner?’ Grace winced - she sounded like the proverbial little wife worrying that the roast would spoil.

  ‘I’m in the Covent Garden Hotel. I’m meeting someone, a client, before he flies back to New York tomorrow.’

  That was fair enough. A little bit of notice would have been nice though. ‘OK, I might go out too - some of the subs are going down the pub.’

  ‘Fine,’ Vaughn said testily, like he couldn’t believe that they were still on the phone when he had an important client waiting.

  ‘Or I might go shopping,’ Grace added, just to keep Vaughn on the phone a little bit longer, because acting in a civilised manner didn’t meant she’d called a complete halt to baiting Vaughn just a little.