Unsticky (25 page)
Authors: Sarah Manning
‘OK,’ Grace whispered, and she flexed the hand he was still holding and waited for him to let her go. Without Vaughn’s touch, Grace felt slightly disorientated as she took a step back. Then another. She could keep taking steps as far as the door, she thought, then down the stairs and out into the night.
She could . . . but instead with clumsy fingers, she reached for the concealed zip and inched it down. Staring at a point approximately six inches above Vaughn’s head, Grace started to wriggle out of the diaphanous chiffon folds.
‘Slowly,’ Vaughn said quietly, though Grace didn’t remember asking for any audience participation. But she decided it didn’t matter when he breathed in sharply as her breasts emerged.
They shimmied in the dim light as the dress got stuck on her hips. Objectively Grace knew that her breasts were damn fine. They still aced the pencil test every time and had a few good years left before they started a gradual descent and she’d have to start sleeping in a bra like Marilyn Monroe. So she concentrated on stepping out of the puddle of material rather than clamping her elbows to her boobs, and kicked free of her flip-flops so she was standing there in nothing but her M&S cami-knickers. Then, before she could stop herself, Grace bent down to pick up her dress and placed it neatly over a chair.
It wasn’t seductive but Grace had blown an entire term’s student loan on the Ossie Clark dress when she’d found it languishing in the back of a vintage shop in Manchester and she couldn’t just leave it on the floor. Nope. That wasn’t the way she rolled.
Maybe that’s why Vaughn was staring at her like she’d just back-flipped across the room but Grace simply shrugged, which sent his eyes right back to her chest, and hooked her fingers in the waistband of her tap pants.
‘No,’ Vaughn said suddenly. ‘Come here.’ And he tapped one finger against his thigh.
Grace approached with some apprehension but Vaughn wouldn’t have been looking at her like that, with something approaching awe, if he wasn’t pleased with her performance so far.
‘Hey,’ Grace said, as she straddled his thighs and wound her arms round his neck, their faces so close that if she leaned forward a couple of millimetres they’d bump noses.
‘Hey,’ Vaughn said, hands coming to rest on her hips, eyes almost closed so Grace couldn’t tell what he was thinking. ‘There’s no need to look so anxious.’
Grace frowned. ‘I’m not,’ she denied hotly. ‘Do I look anxious?’
But Vaughn didn’t answer because he was kissing her.
His kisses were as contradictory as he was. Forceful, demanding but also concise, even sweet as he bussed the tip of Grace’s nose with his lips as he settled her more securely on his lap. They were the kind of kisses that made Grace come slightly untethered because good kissing, really good kissing, wasn’t about being in love with the person you were with. It was all about the technique of the person you were with.
And Vaughn was right up there in her Top Five Best Ever Kissers. In with a bullet, when he did something with his teeth and her tongue that made Grace sigh into his mouth and almost swoon if she hadn’t been grinding herself against his cock.
Vaughn’s lips left hers to nuzzle a path along her neck, lifting her up again like she was much lighter than 123 pounds so he could mouth her breasts, sucking at one tightly budded nipple while Grace ran her fingers through his hair.
She tensed momentarily when Vaughn’s hand crept between her legs but he made an approving noise when he discovered how wet she was and she thought that maybe she’d never been quite this turned on before. It was a potent combination of being with a man who actually knew what he was doing and knowing this was just an arrangement, which had seemed sordid but was now edging firmly towards the door marked
illicit thrill
.
illicit thrill
.
‘For fuck’s sake,’ Grace muttered as she tried to undo his shirt buttons with clumsy hands. ‘Jesus.’
‘Don’t be so hasty,’ Vaughn said against her skin. ‘Stand up for a minute.’
Grace slid off his lap, and even the floorboards beneath her bare feet felt like sensory overload as Vaughn slid down her panties and cupped her bottom to bring her close again.
Maybe the waxer she’d seen had been right because Vaughn pushed Grace down on the bed, arranged her as if she was one of his pieces of art, and started to explore her pussy like it was his new, absolutely favourite thing in the world.
‘Do you like it when I do that?’ he asked Grace, propping himself up on one elbow from between her thighs, and she felt dismay wash over her. She didn’t do dirty talk and she’d been percolating nicely when his fingers were delving, mouth too busy for questions.
All of a sudden it felt ridiculous to be sprawled out, legs scissored, sheet wrinkling underneath her. ‘You still have your clothes on,’ she pointed out, and rubbed the back of her knuckles against his cock. She felt it give a little leap of excitement; it distracted him beautifully.
Vaughn’s hand curled around hers and together they dragged down his zip.
When he came, Vaughn said her name like it was a prayer, then he was silent, burying his head against her breasts as Grace stroked the thick hair that he’d never grow long enough to become curls.
Grace had the scent of Vaughn on her, a little bit citrusy, a little bit sweaty, the taste of toffee in her mouth from their kisses and a slight ache between her legs because he’d been inside her. He’d fucked her. And she’d been fucked enough times for it not to mean very much. But when Vaughn finally disentangled himself with one last clinging kiss, Grace was glad to be free from his embrace because lying skin-to-skin, his arms around her so she could feel his pulse slowing down to a steady thud, had been much harder than she expected. It was intimate in a way that had nothing to do with sex or their names signed on a legally binding agreement. Why hadn’t she realised that? Because she was stupid, stupid, stupid.
Grace shifted away from him but Vaughn pulled her back into his arms so she could feel his softening cock against her arse as he dotted her shoulderblades with kisses and petted her belly with lazy fingers. ‘Don’t go,’ he whispered in her ear. ‘Let’s stay like this for a while.’
Afterwards was always messy and sticky in Grace’s experience but she lay against Vaughn quietly, fingers curled around his upper arm.
‘What this?’ she eventually asked, when her fingers traced around the edge of a plaster.
Vaughn made an odd snuffly noise. ‘Nicotine patch.’
‘I didn’t know you smoked.’
‘Well, I haven’t for three years hence the nicotine patch.’
‘You know that you’re not meant to wear them for that long, right?’
‘Yes, I’m well aware of that.’ There was no need for him to sound quite so snippy. This was traditionally the time when you really looked at each other, swapped stories about childhood scars and . . .
Grace inched her head closer because now she’d opened her eyes and adjusted, wincing, to the light he’d left on because he’d said that he wanted to look at her, she could see that the nicotine patch wasn’t the half of it. Vaughn had a tattoo. Not some tiny Chinese letters that probably spelled out
I’m a gullible wanker
, or an equally risible tribal band. This was a big, no-holds-barred inking, only half-lasered off. Grace could just make out the edge of a flush of cards, maybe a dice . . . and was that a skeleton or a rabbit?
I’m a gullible wanker
, or an equally risible tribal band. This was a big, no-holds-barred inking, only half-lasered off. Grace could just make out the edge of a flush of cards, maybe a dice . . . and was that a skeleton or a rabbit?
But if he got that pissy about a nicotine patch, then Grace guessed that his bigass greaser tattoo was also another no-fly zone.
They stayed like that for a few more minutes, Vaughn’s hands slowing until they rested on her hips. Grace tried to ignore a tickle somewhere around her left ankle. She’d never been one for snuggling and eventually, when the tickle became an itch, she shifted out of Vaughn’s loose embrace and leaned over so she could scratch her ankle.
‘So, are you all right?’ Grace asked as she sat up and tried to casually wrap the sheet around her. Really, she wanted to ask if she’d been all right but that would have violated all kinds of unspoken first-time rules.
‘Never better,’ Vaughn assured her with a lazy grin. ‘Do you mind if I have the bathroom first?’
‘Go ahead.’ Grace ran a hand through her hair, which felt very birds’ nesty. ‘It’s all yours.’
‘If you open the window, I won’t say anything if you want to have a post-coital cigarette,’ Vaughn murmured and Christ, Grace thought, sex really brought out the best in him. She could see that wrangling Vaughn into a sunny mood would involve spending a lot of time horizontal, and she wasn’t sure how she felt about that.
Grace watched him lope towards the alcove with the bath in it. His body was a testament to the benefits of having your own basement gym, which he’d mentioned the other night. Or at least the back view was. He was long-limbed, she’d already guessed that, and his arse was just as pert as any of her much younger boyfriends. Actually more pert than about fifty per cent of them because they drank too much lager and didn’t have basement gyms. Grace would reserve final judgement until she’d seen the front, she decided as she groped frantically for the free bathrobe because she hadn’t grown up in a naked house.
Curled up on one of the armchairs, sucking down a medicinal cigarette, Grace wondered if she felt used. But mostly she felt disappointed because at one stage, when it had been all kissing and hands pressing her into the mattress with a firmness that was just the right side of forceful, she’d thought that she might come.
There was no way Vaughn could have known she hadn’t. By the time you were twenty-three, you were meant to have the sex thing sussed, in the same way that you were meant to have memorised the fat units, carb content and calories in every M&S Ready Meal and know what time each morning TopShop got their new deliveries.
It was a small comfort but Grace prided herself on the quality of her fake orgasms. Unlike other girls she’d talked to, she didn’t go for the whole porn-star routine of flailing limbs and, ‘Yes, yes, fuck me, yeah fuck me, like that, just like that’ histrionics. Instead she’d fling her head back, give these little airless gasps and when the critical moment came, she’d clench everything she had in the way of pelvic-floor muscles. Grace liked to think that her performance was subtly sincere . . . and it had always got her rave reviews.
She quickly stubbed out her cigarette as Vaughn emerged from the bathroom nook and seemed to sniff the air appreciatively. ‘All yours,’ he murmured, now clad in boxer shorts. The front of him looked OK too, now that Grace was in a position to pass judgement. He didn’t have a six-pack, but Grace had never actually met a boy who did. Vaughn did have a spare, lean look to him, like he could actually order his own desserts and not have to rely on the kindness of other people’s sweet tooths. And she’d already felt the muscles in his biceps taut under her fingers as she’d clutched at his arms . . .
‘Seen anything you like?’ Vaughn enquired archly and Grace realised she’d been staring at him, possibly with her mouth hanging open as she often did when she zoned out.
She settled for a non-committal, ‘Hmm,’ as she edged past Vaughn, but he pulled her closer so he could kiss the top of her head. ‘Today was absolutely horrendous but you turned it around, so thank you.’
‘I thought you didn’t ever say thank you,’ Grace reminded him, as she stood in the cradle of his arms. Without heels, she was on an eye-level with the cleft in his chin, close enough to pout her lips and kiss it.
‘Well, I’m not going to make a habit of it,’ Vaughn said lightly, letting her go so she could scurry to the wash area.
He barely looked up from the book he was reading when she emerged in her Primark vest and shorts combo. As she climbed into bed and pulled the covers around her, Vaughn put down his book and reached over to turn the bedside lamp off.
Grace could feel her breath hitch in her throat as Vaughn settled down, plumping up his pillows and stretching out. She steeled herself for the inevitable arm hauling her in but it turned out that Vaughn wasn’t a cuddler. Or a sprawler. He arranged his limbs like a question mark and when Grace was sure he’d settled, she curled up in her usual foetal ball and willed herself not to fidget. Why was it that sleeping, just sleeping, with Vaughn made her feel more vulnerable than when he’d been
fucking
her? It made no sense.
fucking
her? It made no sense.
‘Are you a light sleeper?’ he suddenly asked.
Grace had spent the last two years of her life sleeping on a sagging sofabed, or sometimes the floor, when she couldn’t find the optimum position not to get poked by the springs. She figured that a firm mattress and Egyptian cotton might take some getting used to, but she could deal with it. ‘Not especially. Are you?’
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