Unsticky – deleted scene

Hey!

To celebrate finally hitting the big 5000 followers on Twitter and to thank you for suffering through my many updates on Miss Betsy I’m posting a deleted scene from Unsticky.

It was written very early on and was inspired by a dinner at Bette’s in Chelsea, New York when it was the scene place to go. As I waited for the loo, I saw the most beautiful girl I have ever seen. Or ever will see. She was with a short, paunchy, obnoxious dude in a bad suit who wasn’t fit to kiss the hem of her frock. Unsticky was still in my head but that dinner and that trip to New York where I went to places frequented by investment bankers and their very stunning, very young girlfriends, really coalesced the whole trophy girlfriend/sex and money thing for me.

So, enjoy!

Sarra x

Vaughn didn’t get reservations at Butter for Saturday night. But Grace took it in her stride because Vaughn had managed to get a table at The Waverly Inn instead. Not just any table, but Graydon Carter’s own booth at the back of a tiny, amber-coloured room the size of her old bedsit. Apparently Graydon was in LA or Timbuktu. Grace didn’t much care because he wasn’t in New York and her arse was currently perched on his personal banquette as she tried to discreetly gawp at the other diners in the conveniently placed mirror so that Graydon always knew what was going on.

“You’re bouncing, Grace,” Vaughn said mildly, but a faint smile lifted up the corners of his mouth because she’d told him five minutes earlier that this was even better than getting promoted or the time he’d bought her a new Marc Jacobs bag unprompted. “Stop it.”

“I can’t help it. This is the high point of my whole existence.”

Grace wasn’t surprised when Vaughn rolled his eyes. She glanced across the room again, hoping to spot a stray Scarlett or Gwyneth. She’d even have settled for a Sienna. At a back table were a group of thirty something guys cultivating a scruffy, laidback hipster chic and the three girls who were with them may have been the three most beautiful girls Grace had ever seen in real life. But there was something wrong with the picture – one of the men was bald, one had a huge beergut and the other one had a face that even his mother must have found hard to love. And despite the heavy make-up and designer dresses, not one of the girls looked as if she was out of her teens.

“Don’t stare, Grace,” Vaughn drawled, raising his glass towards Baldie, or was it Fattie. Both of them waved back.

“How come you know them?” Grace asked, then groaned theatrically. “Don’t tell me. You charged them obscene amounts of money for some bizarre light installation.”

“Actually it was two Gavin Turks and a Banksy,” he said lightly.

“Are they, like, hedge fund managers or something?”

“They either are or they aren’t. There’s no like about and they aren’t. The three of them created a puerile college humour website and social networking platform that they sold to Google for a small fortune. I think it was about forty million dollars.”

Grace sucked in a breath. “Fucking hell!”

“My thoughts exactly,” Vaughn had been very twitchy tonight; he’d had a day of meetings that hadn’t gone well, but now he was undoing his top two buttons, which was A Good Sign.

“And who are the girls?”

Vaughn shrugged. “Standard issue MAWs. Model, actress…”

“Whatever,” Grace finished for him. “I guess forty million dollars makes even early male pattern baldness and a flabby gut look attractive.”

“If girls like them want to be with men like that, then what of it? Really, Grace, I’m not sure why this conversation is making you frown quite so ferociously.”

Neither did Grace, but her unfailing good cheer couldn’t last for ever. She sank back on her banquette and nibbled at the edge of her thumbnail. Did no one ever simply date anymore? Or was it that now she was fully inducted into the club, she was better at spotting other members? “But they’re not girlfriends, are they? They’re mistresses.”

Vaughn gave her a long, slow look. Like she’d surprised him and he was surprised that she’d surprised him. “No,” he said finally. “They’re girlfriends. Whatever reasons they may or may not have for being with men twice their age and weight, they’d all beg to differ.”

Grace rested her elbows on the table because that was all right if you’d already had you entrée and you weren’t sure if you were going to have pudding. “So if you’d just asked me out and I’d said yes and we’d started dating, and with you being older than me and, like, loaded, would I be your girlfriend or your mistress?”

Vaughn rolled his eyes again. “You’re in a very odd mood this evening. I’m not sure I like it.” He reached across the table and stroked a finger along the back of her hand and that shivery feeling she always got rippled up her spine. “It’s better this way though, Grace, don’t you think? Less confusion, less room for misunderstandings, hmmm?”

“I suppose,” Grace sighed, because her undefined thing with Vaughn was still confusing and prone to misunderstanding from the Noahs and the Lilys and all the other people who made up the outside world. Still, the Lily’s and Noah’s weren’t sitting at Graydon Carter’s personal booth, so Grace definitely had the better end of the deal. It was a struggle, but she found her happy place again. “Technically, if we were on London time, it would be Treat Sunday now so do you want to share an Apple Crisp for pudding?”

“If it’s Treat Sunday then I don’t see why we have to share.” Vaughn huffed and he was faking the outrage, but Grace didn’t know if he was trying to distract her from asking any more difficult questions or if he was really indignant about having to go halves on dessert.

Either way, she couldn’t resist punching him on the shoulder as she stood up. “Either we share or I’m skipping having waffles for brunch tomorrow,” she hissed, because sometimes her ability to withhold sugar was about the only power play she had. “I’m going to have a fag.”

When she got back Vaughn was deep in conversation with the couple on the next table; a woman with a loud Long Island honk, which had previously made Vaughn flinch every time she opened her mouth, and her husband who did something with diamonds. Grace wasn’t sure what exactly, but she smiled politely, as she sat down.

Vaughn was swapping cards with Mr Bling then turned back to Grace. “Play your cards right and I might just hook you up with that tiara,” he said, which Grace thought was tasteless considering the conversation they’d just had. “I ordered pudding,” he added as Grace wriggled to get purchase on the leather seat in her slippy satin skirt.

Of course, Vaughn ate most of the Apple Crisp, Grace had to fight for every spoonful of vanilla gelato. Unusually, Vaughn didn’t want to linger over coffee and brandy either but asked for the bill and signed it, without even checking the final amount.

“Let’s get out of here,” Vaughn said, already helping Grace out of her chair.

“I just need to freshen up,” she said, as they came face to face with one of the couples from the back table, the man already hailing Vaughn like a long lost brother and not someone who’d stung him for marked-up graffiti art.

“This is Marisa,” Baldie said proudly, presenting his companion with a flourish.

Marisa was so stunning that all Grace could do was stare as Vaughn introduced her to Baldie with absolutely no flourish. Marisa had shiny, flicky straight hair, skin so flawless it looked airbrushed and was wearing a plunging Viktor & Rolf dress that showed a good two thirds of her breasts, which owed their awesome aerodynamics either to her barely pubescent years or a really good surgeon.

“I’ll get your coat,” Vaughn murmured, leaving Grace with Marisa, who must have needed to pee too though Grace couldn’t believe she possessed something as prosaic as a full bladder. Marisa hadn’t acknowledged Grace’s presence in any way and now she propped herself against the wall, as they waited in the narrow alcove, like her beauty weighed so heavily that she couldn’t stand up straight. It was hard not to look at her in the same way that it was hard not to look at a beautiful pair of shoes or a Narciso Rodriguez dress.

And OK, her upper lip was the tiniest bit too short but that was just clutching at ugly straws and staring at that perfect arch where her sooty eyelashes swept down or the elegant curve of her cheekbones made Grace feel like a blowsy, thrown together girl that didn’t deserve the good fortune that was currently getting her coat.

Even Marisa dropping the hauteur long enough to ask Grace if she thought that they should bang on the bathroom door and ask the current occupant what the hell they were doing, couldn’t pierce the pity bubble that Grace found herself in. Especially as Marisa decided that they should bond, which meant showing Grace pictures of the adorable spaniel puppy that “me and Archie just got from the pound.”

Vaughn had been right. Marisa expected guys to fall in love with her. Rich guys. Even if she was selling her beauty to the highest bidder, she got flourishes and puppies out of it and Grace? Well, she had a credit card, the best table at The Waverly Inn and an expiration date stamped on her forehead that was only visible to Vaughn. Because Grace wasn’t beautiful or smart or whole enough to be anyone’s long haul girl.

And when she got back to the car to find Vaughn waiting impatiently for her, he said, “For God’s sake, Grace, stop pouting. You look like you’ve had filler injected into your bottom lip.” Grace knew for a fact that Archie would never, ever say anything like that to Marisa.

It turned out that Vaughn had wanted to get back to the apartment for a midnight conference call to Beijing. He took it in the study, which left Grace free to make her own fun. Grace wasn’t sure when making her own fun, which mostly involved mentally planning her Sunday shopping expedition to Soho, became snooping.

She’d never snooped before. Not even when she’d been left on her own for days in the Hampstead house – she’d been brought up to respect other people’s privacy. But then she’d also been brought up to save herself for the man she married, never drink to excess and strive to be all that she could be; all things that she’d failed to deliver on, so having a quick rummage in Vaughn’s drawers wasn’t so terrible.

Apart from a half-eaten bar of Green & Blacks, which she bet Gustav knew nothing about, her search proved futile. There wasn’t anything incriminating in the bureau either, no porn stash under the mattress and absolutely no photos of the ex-wife or the women he’d had arrangements with before Grace. She could hear Vaughn’s tread coming down the hall and quickly arranged herself decoratively on the bed, her heart pounding, her cheeks stained with red. Vaughn didn’t notice that anything was wrong but maybe that was because Grace was on her knees, unbuckling his belt, before he had a chance to ask why she had such a guilty expression on her face.