I dance and dance and drunkenly dance, and the song rises and falls and rises again, until Jack and I are both screaming the lyrics. I forget about Andrew, about the money, about failed dreams. I twirl on the toes of my socks, and when I wheel around to face her, I see her eyes are on me, burning like open flames. She’s watching me dance, and even when I catch her, she doesn’t look away. She keeps watching, and I keep dancing.

Maybe I enjoy the feeling of her eyes on me. It’s almost like she’s touching me, and my skin prickles and burns in every place her eyes land. My throat, my stomach, my wrists, my ankles.

Maybe I should never drink alcohol again.

But I did drink alcohol, so as the song falls again, sweeping low into the final bridge, I do something incurably stupid. I touch her like this: two hands on her hip bones in an imitation of a middle school dance posture. I hold her like this: tugging her close, until she puts both hands on my shoulders, and we sway and sway.

It’s a joke. We’re joke-dancing, like in middle school. We exaggerate our movements, and we mouth the words, and I remind myself it’s only a joke. But she smells tangy and sweet, and I shift my hands so they cup around her soft sides, shrinking some of the space between us. I pull her closer, as close as she’ll let me. She lets me rest my cheek against her shoulder, so I do, feeling the soft fabric of a Cornell sweatshirt and the hard edge of her muscles and bones beneath. But it’s obviously only a joke.

Jack whispers the final lines of the song, and I feel the way they hit my temple like a light breeze. The song slowly eases into silence, but we don’t stop swaying in each other’s arms, and it’s not a joke, but I also don’t know what happens now. A pathetic dinner and a surplus of whisky are swirling in my stomach, and Jack is letting me touch her and hold her, and I don’t know what I should do next.

I know what I want to do next. I want to reach up and wind my fingers through her hair. I want to push myself up on my toes and seize her mouth with my teeth. I want another taste. I want to devour her. I have a huge, aching, lonely hole inside my chest and a memory of the way she once filled it, the way Jack smoothed the rough edges others had cut inside me over the years.

I don’t want to be Jack-Kim Prescott’s friend, and I definitely don’t want to be her sister-in-law. What I want—all I want—is to be hers.