Prosecco and Betrayal

The glass was still pressed to my lips when Tyler said it.

"Jess and I are official. Been official for a while, actually."

I choked. Not delicately — a full, graceless splutter that sent half my prosecco down the wrong pipe and the other half onto the sleeve of a boy from my seminar whose name I had never bothered to learn. Somewhere behind me, someone laughed. The music thumped on, indifferent, and the fairy lights strung across the Duca garden strung themselves around my throat.

Jessica slid her hand up Tyler's arm and let it rest there, ownership in every finger. She was watching me, not him. She had been watching me since the moment I came through the gate.

"Careful, Nikki," she said sweetly. "It's not your birthday."

No. It was Tyler's. The cake was his, the candles were his, and the boy I had spent four years of secondary school writing terrible poetry about was standing in the middle of his own party with his arm around the girl who had made my life a misery since Year Seven.

I hadn't known. That was the thing that sat in my chest like a swallowed stone. I hadn't known they were together — not properly. Sophia had mentioned Jessica's name once, in passing, and I had filed it away as nothing, as a rumour, as a thing that couldn't possibly be true because Tyler would never.

He would, apparently. He had.

"Right," I said, and set my glass down on the nearest table with a steadiness I did not feel. "Well. Congratulations."

Tyler's eyes found mine over Jessica's shoulder. He opened his mouth — and then closed it, because she had already turned him away, already drawn him into the middle of the crowd, already won.

I survived the next hour the way I survived most things: by making myself useful. I carried drinks. I laughed at jokes I didn't hear. I stood at the edge of the fire pit and let the smoke sting my eyes until it looked like the wind's fault.

Then someone produced a bottle of vodka and a set of rules, and the party rearranged itself into a circle on the lawn.

"Truth or drink," Jessica announced, delighted, spinning the empty bottle. "House rules. If you refuse the truth, you finish your glass."

It landed on me. Of course it landed on me.

"Nikki." Jessica tilted her head, the picture of innocence. "Are you seeing anyone?"

The fire popped. Every face in the circle turned towards me, and I felt the whole evening narrow to a point — one question, one answer, one chance to say *yes, actually, a man with grey eyes and a house full of locked doors, and he doesn't know who I am.*

"No," I said.

Then I picked up my glass and drank, and the vodka burned all the way down, and Jessica's smile widened like a knife being drawn.

"Interesting," she murmured. "Because I heard something rather different."

"Jessica." Tyler's voice, from the gate. He'd gone to fetch more ice. He hadn't heard the question.

She didn't stop. She never stopped. She turned to the circle with the easy confidence of a woman who had been rehearsing this for years.

"You know what I remember about Nikki? From school?" She leaned back on her hands. "She wrote Tyler a love letter. Three pages. Front and back. She left it in his locker, and he read the whole thing aloud in the common room at lunch. Everyone heard. I mean *everyone*."

The circle laughed. Not all of them — a few had the decency to look at their shoes — but enough. Enough that the sound went through me like a nail.

I could have corrected her. I could have said that Tyler never read it aloud, that he'd found me crying behind the sports hall and torn it into four pieces and told me he was sorry, that it was the kindest cruelty anyone had ever done me. But that would have meant defending him, and I was not sure I had it in me.

So I sat there and let it happen, and my face went hot, and I understood with perfect clarity that this was the point — not the story, but my face while she told it.

"Bit rich," I said finally, "coming from a woman who's been recycling the same personality since Year Nine."

A few snorts. Jessica's jaw tightened. But she had already won, and she knew it.

Then the gate swung open, and Tyler came back through it with a bag of ice under each arm.

He stopped. He looked at the circle, at me, at the wet shine on my cheeks that I had absolutely not permitted. He dropped the ice. And he crossed the lawn straight to me, past Jessica, past everyone.

"Come on, baby," he said. "I'm taking you home."

The word landed like a slap. Jessica's head snapped round. I heard someone whisper, and the whisper travelled the way whispers do, faster than any truth.

"Tyler—" I started.

"Not a discussion." He put his hand flat between my shoulder blades, gentle, and steered me towards the drive. Over his shoulder, to the driver already holding the car door: "Get Nikki home."

I didn't look back. I couldn't. But I felt Jessica's stare on the back of my neck all the way to the car, and I knew — the way you know weather — that this was not over. This was only the beginning of what she would do with it.

The car pulled away. The fairy lights shrank to a smear in the rear window. And I sat in the dark leather with my hands in my lap and thought about a promise made to a girl by the sea, and a man who had asked me if we had met before, and the fact that I had just told an entire garden full of people that I was seeing no one.

*Was Tyler wrong to call me baby in front of her?*

I still don't know. But I know what it cost.