At midnight, we stood in a room on the second floor and I emptied a bag of balloons onto the revelers in the courtyard.  Then I kissed Andrea.  I lifted her off the ground, with my arms around her waist, by her ass.  She wrapped her legs around me and put her tongue in my mouth, and I put my tongue in her mouth.  Everyone else in the room on the second floor was alone, and I felt bad kissing Andrea so long in front of them.  But I kept kissing her anyways.  We stopped kissing and I took her by her shoulders and looked in her eyes and told her I loved her.  She said she loved me too.  I was angry at everyone else in the room, in her room.  I wanted to be with her alone.

     We left her room and walked through the house.  In the living room, a group of Brazilians sang karaoke to a ten year-old pop song.  The line for the bathroom split the living room from the kitchen, so we pressed through it.  In the kitchen people were talking and mixing drinks.  I didn’t know any of them.  We walked through the kitchen and out the door.  In the narrow side yard were friends from college, leaned along the rickety bare-wood picket fence, smoking cigarettes, making jokes.  I said hello to some of them as Andrea and I passed and they said hello in return.  A couple I didn’t know passed us going the other way and said, “Happy new year.”  I said, “You too,” and took Andrea by the hand.

     In the courtyard were more people, milling about, drinking and smoking, talking and laughing.  The balloons I had thrown from the window littered the floor, forgotten.  Here and there were young men and women too drunk for polite company: the curly-haired boy talking too close to a strange girl, the French girl asleep on a couch next to the dance floor, dreaming a Rubens painting.  The music was loud and the constant vibration of bass osmosed easily through the crush of sweating dancing bodies.  Smoke and steam rose from the scrum.  Through thin layers of fabric, sexes rubbed against one another, against thighs and asses.  Andrea and I drifted into the flotsam and danced the jostle.   She was beautiful, and we danced without touching, as we always do when the music is fast.