Unsticky by Sarah Manning Read Free Book Online Page A

you’ll have to get pissed on your own,’ Grace said triumphantly and slapped her card down on the table.
     
    ‘God, you’re annoying sometimes.’ Lily scooped up the card with an aggrieved air because there was no truer sign of friendship than a shared pin number.
     
    Grace watched Lily walk to the bar with an automatic sway to her hips, which made every man in the place, even the too-cool-for-skool boys with their mullets and fugly trainers, look longingly at her like she was a Siren about to lure them on to the rocks and not a former Pony Club stalwart from Godalming who still couldn’t pronounce Nicholas Ghesquiere’s surname properly, no matter how many times Grace drilled her. Boys never seemed to care about stuff like that though.
     
     
    J. Vaughn Acquisitions Consultant
     
    She wondered what the J stood for. Jeremy? Jonty? Jacob? Jonathan? Justin? Jezedbiah? Julian? Job?
     
    Lily was flirting with the Aussie barman as Grace tucked her itchy palms under her arms and looked up. The door burst open and a crowd of people came in: a crowd of lanky-arsed, floppy-haired, unwashed people. And as usual, that first sight of Liam made her heart flip over because he really was pretty, but the stubble and the tattoos gave him a dangerous edge. God, the bad boys were Grace’s kryptonite.
     
    Grace steeled herself to smile faintly at Liam. She needn’t have bothered. He was too busy attaching his mouth to the neck of a waifish girl wearing a ratty rip-off of the Alexander McQueen skull scarf, which, hello, was beyond three years ago.
     
    ‘Gracie! How’s life in the fashion fast lane? Let you out of the cupboard yet, have they?’ Dan, Lily’s boyfriend who was the Mick Jagger to her Marianne Faithfull, bellowed as he strode over and took the bottle straight out of Lily’s hand before she could put it on the table. ‘I’ll get some more glasses, shall I?’
     
    ‘Hey, baby,’ Lily cooed, patting his bottom with a proprietorial air. Grace couldn’t blame her - The Waif was travelling in a pack.
     
    ‘This is Grace,’ Liam said, sitting down and almost pushing her off the sofa so he could make room for his little friend. ‘She’s in fashion.’
     
    Grace assumed a nonchalant expression as she was scrutinised by four sets of eyes all clocking her vintage Ossie Clark sundress and finding it sadly lacking.
     
    ‘Nice dress,’ Waify smirked. ‘I think my mum has one just like it.’
     
    ‘Oh, do you still live with your parents?’ Grace asked sweetly. ‘That’s so retro of you.’
     
    She got a glittering smile in return and then Waify played her winning hand. ‘Well, duh. Of course I live with my parents, I’m only seventeen.’
     
     
    ‘You utter, utter bastard! You replaced me with a younger model!’ Grace screeched much, much later. Two bottles of wine and a really ill-advised burger from a dodgy kebab shop on York Way later. There had been a vague plan to flag down a taxi but the glowing orange light of an empty cab had been an elusive sight as they trudged past bleak industrial sites and even bleaker council estates. Still, it had given Grace plenty of opportunity to get her rant on. ‘I had to sit there and slowly metamorphose into Patricia Routledge. What time is your curfew, young lady?’
     
    ‘Who the fuck’s Patricia Routledge?’ Dan asked and Grace wished that he and Lily would piss off so she could scream at Liam in peace.
     
    ‘Hyacinth - someone you don’t know because you weren’t brought up by two people in their seventies,’ Grace snapped. ‘And I was talking to Liam.’
     
    Liam was staring at the peeling toe of his sneakers and looking as if he wished he had an elsewhere to be. No one had asked him to walk home with them, but Heather and her public-school posse had piled into a parental people-carrier so they could go home and braid each other’s hair. Or whatever it was seventeen year olds did for kicks these days.
     
    ‘Have you fucked her?’ Grace