‘But Gracie, he’s really into you. Obviously. So couldn’t you use your influence and persuade him to give me another chance?’
Grace sighed and decided she might as well come clean. ‘Look, I have no influence. I’m on the outs too. About another week should do it,’ she added, groping for the cigarettes, because lately her nicotine consumption had tripled. ‘It was the only reason I was with him - to be pimped out to impressionable Young British Artists.’
‘Well, Gracie, it’s not exactly a newsflash,’ Noah said, shifting closer so he was pressed against her. ‘Everyone knew you were only with him for the money.’ Now it was Noah’s turn to pat her knee and keep his hand resting heavily on her leg, while Grace concentrated on smoking and drinking and pretending that Noah wasn’t way too close for comfort. Light, flirty banter was one thing, but that was all she was in the mood for. ‘I have to say though, he was really fucking scary when he told me to leave you alone. Guess he had a change of heart.’
‘He doesn’t have a heart,’ Grace scoffed. ‘He probably had it removed, got Damien Hirst to cover it in Perspex and sold it to some Russian with more brains than taste.’
‘You’re so sexy when you get mad. Your face goes all pink, it’s adorable,’ Noah husked in her ear as his hand slowly and predictably travelled up her thigh. ‘It must have been a fucking nightmare being stuck with him night after night.’
‘You have no idea,’ Grace said, calmly removing Noah’s hand. ‘Back off, Art Boy.’ She looked around the room for a diversion from Noah who was huffing slightly. ‘Oh, hey! I haven’t played
Guitar Hero
in ages.’
‘You want to play
Guitar Hero
?’
‘Can we?’ Grace begged, already off the sofa and crawling across the floor to pick up one of the guitars. ‘Is it hooked up to your Nintendo or your PlayStation?’
It was the good, old-fashioned kind of fun that Grace dimly remembered from the days of Liam. Though even Liam had never let her climb on his sofa so she could jump off it in the middle of ‘I Love Rock ’n’ Roll’. She’d been so down on the old Grace that she’d forgotten how much fun she could be.
‘You’re such a dork,’ Noah scoffed, when Grace insisted that they both stand back to back and brandish their guitars in unison to ‘Sweet Child of Mine’, but he didn’t seem to mind, and when she got so giggly that she thought she might start to hyperventilate, Noah skinned up a couple of spliffs and made Grace a mug of tea exactly how she liked it. And toast with peanut butter because, unlike certain men she knew, Noah could operate a kettle and a toaster and knew how to have fun that didn’t involve black and white subtitled foreign films or boring parties at embassies.
Grace sat cross-legged on the sofa sipping her tea and looking at Noah from under her lashes as he assembled another joint. He glanced up and grinned at her. ‘I’m glad you don’t look sad any more.’
‘Me too. Being sad sucks.’
It occurred to Grace that once she was done and dusted with Vaughn and had given herself a suitable amount of time to get over him, Noah would be the perfect rebound romance. He was cute, ambitious, funny ha ha rather than funny peculiar, had his own place and he was really into her in this normal, unambiguous way. She’d have to tell him that she had zero tolerance for communist relationships, but apart from that wrinkle, Noah would make a great boyfriend.
‘You know, it’s probably a good thing that you and Vaughn are calling it quits,’ Noah remarked as he expertly rolled another joint. ‘He doesn’t make you happy - anyone can see that. Don’t you think you deserve to be happy, Gracie?’
‘I am - I
was
happy. I just got in over my head and now . . .’
‘You should be with someone who really gets you,’ Noah whispered, and they were on the same page and that was another point in Noah’s favour. No mixed signals. And in the end, though it wasn’t quite what Grace had planned, which involved getting closer and closer to Noah so that the kissing was inevitable, Grace just turned her head and kissed him because really, what difference did ten more days make? She and Vaughn were done and there was no point pretending otherwise.
The kisses were all teeth and tongue. Not good kisses. Not even bad kisses. But kisses that were just a prelude so they could get to the next part, which was Noah pressing Grace back against the arm of the sofa so he could lie on top of her and grind his hard-on into her hip.
Grace shoved him away slightly so she could yank her sweater over her head, then lay back down so Noah could wrestle with her bra clip, and then he was cupping her breasts so he could lower his head and kiss them and it was nice. Super-nice, but it wasn’t making Grace get that swoony feeling that weighed down her limbs and made her want to arch her hips and close her eyes and become short of breath.
‘Kiss me again,’ she murmured, pressing herself against Noah, and he was happy to oblige, sliding his tongue into her mouth and stroking her face even as his other hand delved between them.
‘I wanted to fuck you the first time we met,’ he muttered as he pulled down her zip. ‘Couldn’t you tell?’
‘Not really. I’m crap at picking up on stuff like that,’ Grace admitted, rubbing her knuckles against his cropped hair, which felt surprisingly soft, like goose down. She waited patiently for Noah to kiss her again but he was already fishing a condom out of his back pocket.
‘You have the most fantastic tits,’ Noah said, watching them shimmy as he pulled his jeans down, didn’t even take them off and fisted his cock once, before he started pulling on the rubber. ‘I can’t wait to see the rest of you.’
Grace had thought that maybe they’d just have a little bit of a snog, maybe some dry humping, which wasn’t so terrible in the grand scheme of being almost dumped. For a second, she thought about taking her jeans off because she’d started this, she’d kissed Noah, so she couldn’t exactly back out . . .
‘Come on, Gracie, get your jeans off and let’s do this,’ Noah urged her, squatting back on his haunches as he wanked himself off with slow strokes.
She’d already mentally listed all the reasons why Noah was the right boy for her, but she hadn’t bothered to start on the reasons why he wasn’t. Actually there was only one reason: he wasn’t Vaughn and God help her, Vaughn was the only man she wanted. Even though having sex with Noah would be a spectacular ‘fuck you’ to Vaughn,
Grace knew she couldn’t go through with it, couldn’t sully what she had -
what she’d had
- with Vaughn even though it had meant so little to him that he could throw it all away.
Pulling her knees up, she groped for her sweater, turning her head so she wouldn’t have to look at Noah, at his dick.
‘I have to go now,’ she said in a tiny, tiny voice, which really showed that she could never go back to who she used to be. The old Grace, for all her fun-loving, dorky ways, wouldn’t have been able to say that much - would have just taken off her jeans and got on with it because she didn’t want to make a scene and get accused of being . . .
‘Don’t be a prick-tease. Come on, Gracie, do you want me to beg?’ Noah was smiling, like he thought that Grace had had a last-minute attack of the playing-hard-to-gets.
‘I’m sorry, I know I kissed you and everything, but I just can’t.’ Grace twisted away from Noah, and decided that it would be too awkward to get herself back into her bra. She pulled her sweater on and groped out a hand for her bra, which was lying on the coffee-table. ‘Don’t get me wrong - I think you’re really cool and cute, and you’ve been so nice to me - but I just can’t do this.’
‘You can’t start something and then back out,’ Noah insisted, and he was starting to sound rather belligerent. A little bit like he wasn’t used to being knocked back, though he probably wouldn’t appreciate being told that disappointment was good for the soul.
‘Look, I had too much to drink and I’m still with . . . technically I’m still with someone and maybe if I was single, things would be different, but I am and they’re not.’ The trick was to just keep talking. It didn’t matter that it was word salad. If stuff kept pouring out of Grace’s mouth then Noah would get the message.
But he sure wasn’t getting it now.
‘Gracie! Come on, I’ll go down on you for a bit and get you back in the mood.’
‘I don’t think I ever was in the mood,’ Grace sighed. ‘I just wanted to be.’
‘I thought you were cool and maybe you used to be, before you spent months with a supercilious wanker who probably can’t even get it up.’ Noah couldn’t have been more wrong, but Grace realised that he was properly angry now, all ready to lash out so she quickly stuffed her feet into her Converses and breathed a sigh of relief as she heard the rasp of Noah’s zip.
Grace stood up. She wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible, but she also felt the need to justify her behaviour. ‘I’m sorry, Noah. It’s just so complicated with me and Vaughn, and you just ended up in the middle of it and—’
Noah was walking away from her and Grace couldn’t blame him. It was a really lame apology. ‘Why the fuck did you kiss me then?’ he threw over his shoulder as he walked back into the studio.
‘I was looking for a way out and I thought you were it, so I’m sorry for that,’ Grace said, following him.
Noah turned around with such a determined look on his face that Grace really hoped he wasn’t going to smack her, or worse, try to kiss her again. But he just shoved her handbag at her. ‘Get out.’
‘Look, let’s just put this down to a communication breakdown. It’s not worth falling out over.’
‘Is that your way of asking me not to tell Vaughn what a dirty little slapper you are?’
It struck Grace that she’d been so busy trying to force Noah into her perfect boyfriend mould, she’d forgotten what an arsehole he could be. ‘Who do you think he’d believe, you or me?’ she asked haughtily, though it felt like someone had her heart in a strangle-hold.
‘I don’t know, Gracie. What do
you
think?’
The invisible fingers let go of her heart so it could start beating in a fast and frantic rhythm. ‘Vaughn trusts me,’ Grace blustered, but even to her own ears, it sounded unconvincing. These last few weeks, she’d realised that she didn’t have a clue how Vaughn really felt about her. Though he definitely knew about her propensity for lying when she was in a tight spot.
Noah was walking towards the door, Grace at his heels because the sooner he showed her the door, the sooner she could go and scour her brain free of the events of the last hour. Noah was already sliding back the bolt and Grace thought she was home and dry . . . when he turned round so she could get the full benefit of his spiteful smirk.
‘Were you always this screwed up,’ he said, ‘or is it just since Vaughn’s had his hands all over you?’
‘I was fucked up in a completely different way,’ Grace hurled at him venomously.
‘Yeah well, remind me to cry into my beer for you.’ Noah opened the door and with a mocking flourish showed Grace out. ‘You sleep with dogs, you wake up with fleas.’
Grace ducked under his outstretched arm, which was holding the big metal door open, and once she was safely on the other side, she decided it was worth one last shot to see if Noah had a little piece of his heart that wasn’t shrivelled up like his collection of dead flowers. ‘Six months ago, if I’d come here, things would have worked out differently,’ she said with this awful note of pleading that just made Noah’s smile broaden. ‘I didn’t even realise how much I’ve changed but I have, and if you could just understand that and realise that I wasn’t trying to lead you on. I was just really confused . . .’
There was a ringing in Grace’s ears as the heavy metal door slammed with such force that the reverb felt like it had perforated her eardrum. Nope, Noah’s heart was as black as last season’s nail varnish.
She couldn’t go home, because Vaughn would take one look at her and
know
something was horribly and terribly wrong, so Grace took a cab to Hampstead and holed up in a bar nursing an orange juice for an hour. A succession of chancers, losers and the hopelessly looks-challenged paraded over and tried to chat her up. Sometimes Grace wondered if she emitted a pheromone that only men with severe emotional problems could pick up. Eventually the landlord rang the bell for last orders and she couldn’t put off the long walk up the hill any longer.
It was raining torrentially, the kind of rain that you only got in pop videos, and Grace decided getting soaked to the bone was a suitable penance. She spat sodden rats’ tails out of her mouth as the damp penetrated the soles of her sneakers with every step that she took.