The door to the guest house opened and Tim leaned against the frame, holding a bottle of beer. He looked Felicity up and down before lifting the bottle up and wrapping his lips around the end. Jasmine hoped the sound of her breath catching wasn’t as audible as it felt. The butterflies in her stomach thrashed, indiscernible from nerves. The feeling of uneasiness she felt around him was amplified in Felicity’s presence. He squinted as he walked over to them and placed his beer on the table. He barely looked at Jasmine, and she saw his eyes flit across Felicity’s exposed shoulder. There was something peculiar about the way he reacted to Felicity being there. She felt complicit in it, as though she had brought her friend for him to play with. She observed the way he looked at Felicity, the same way a cat looks at a small defenceless bird. Is that what she had done? Why hadn’t she told Felicity about what happened at the fair? Why hadn’t she told her what she suspected Tim had done? She should have told her parents, too. They never should have left her alone with him and she never should have put Felicity in harm’s way. Why did she bring her here? She felt sick.

Tim sat with them; he was laughing at the lame anecdotes that Felicity was telling them. Jasmine didn’t think half of them were true, but she smiled and nodded anyway. Occasionally Tim glanced over to Jasmine and the look on his face was so strange that she couldn’t tell what it meant. His smile dropped and he looked almost sad for just a split second before he started laughing at something Felicity did again. The nausea in Jasmine’s stomach was not helped by the vodka, but she didn’t want to be completely sober right now as she watched what was unfolding in front of her. The more she drank, the more resentful she felt. Maybe the fact that she was afraid of Tim made him more appealing to her; her fear and attraction had somehow mutated into one, almost dependent on each other. She knew she was being melodramatic, but she wanted to run away and hide. In a way this felt like a show for her benefit, but what did Tim have to gain by getting with Felicity, apart from the obvious? In the back of her mind she couldn’t help wondering why he had never behaved this way with her. Felicity wasn’t prettier than her, she knew she wasn’t. She just had something that Jasmine didn’t, confidence maybe.