She listened really well, patiently, as I went on about Keisuke. "I thought he really liked me, Eileen," I said. "Do you think I'm being too forward?"

Eileen looked at me over the colorfully funky reading glasses she has affected. Oops, yeah, wrong question. For Eileen, there was never any such thing as, "too forward". "I'm serious, Eileen. He's from Japan. Maybe the women there aren't as forward."

"Maeve, he's male." She removed the glasses from her nose and let them dangle on their beaded chain. She held her Cosmopolitan in one hand, as if it were a prop for her to play with. Actually, being a drama student, everything was a prop for her to play with. Up to and including men. "He's got the same plumbing as men do over here, he's got the same damn Y chromosome."

I cut her off. "Forget it, Eileen. I have no plans to show up in his bed naked."

She guffawed at that. I think that's the main difference between the two of us - she's a lot more ballsy than I ever could hope to be. That, and she takes the ribbing she gets for her actions a lot more gracefully than I ever would. She took a sip of her drink, eyeing me all the while. "You want I should talk to him, Maeve?"

Our waiter arrived at that point with our food. "Thank you," I said, and Eileen merely smouldered at him, making eye contact. I don't think he even heard me.

"Is there anything else I can get for you?" he inquired, I assume of her, since he was looking at her. She shook her head, smiling at him. He smiled back.

"Actually, Eileen," I said after our waiter finally pulled himself away, "I'd rather you didn't talk to Keisuke. To be frank, I would rather he never found out about your existence on the face of the planet."

She swung her head towards me, shocked. "Maeve!" Her mouth hung open, and her golden eyebrows nearly disappeared into her blonde hairline.

"I'm not implying that you would steal him, Eileen," I assured her archly as I dipped a cheese stick into the marinara sauce. "I'm just an ordinary mortal compared to you, and I would like to have a chance at him."

She made a moue of dismissal. "You underestimate yourself, Maeve." A flash of anger passed through her eyes briefly, and disappeared just as quickly. I knew what she was thinking, but I didn't say it. She hated my ex-boyfriend Ryan. It was easy enough now for me to think of the things he'd said to me without pain, but after our last fight he'd gone to Eileen's, hoping to make me jealous I guess. Or, more likely, hoping to erode my much-abused ego. He didn't seem to understand that it's impossible for me to be jealous of Eileen. She had such a joie de vivre about her, that even if she were ugly, she'd still attract a coterie of men. Watching her flirt was actually like watching an artist work. She could be surrounded by a group of admirers, and manage to make them all feel special and singled out. So, he'd gone to her, remembering how special she'd made him feel, thinking perhaps that she really was interested in him. Once there, he'd complained to her of my many shortcomings, not realizing how angry he was making her. Did I mention Eileen's a black belt? She threw him right the fuck out and called me to tell me what he'd said. The phone on my end nearly quivered with her rage.

I refrained from mentioning Ryan to her, though. Ryan was the past, and I wanted to talk about Keisuke. I recaptured her attention. "I'm not selling myself short, Eileen. It's just that it's not your fault you're so bloody gorgeous."

She laughed, my mercurial friend, and said, "Oh, Maeve. He'll come around. And if he doesn't . . . well, I'll go beat him up gift wrap him for you."

I paused for a moment.

"He might like that."

She sipped her Cosmo. "True," she admitted. "But if he really likes you, he'll come around, he really will. He'll just sort of hover around at the edges of where you are, not quite within reach until it nearly drives you crazy, and you slap a restraining order on him."

We both cackled at that.

"Hey, Eileen?"

"Mm?" She looked up from the cheese stick she was eating.

"When you dream about having sex, do you ever see the guy in the dream?"

"Maeve, dah-ling, I don't dream about sex. That's the only time I get rest from sex," she drawled. Then she looked at me slyly, toying with the cheesestick against her perfectly painted lips. "Why?"

I thought for a moment, then sighed. "Never mind, Eileen. I don't want to bore you."

She sat up straight, putting her cheesestick down as well as her drink. "Bore me? Bore me? Maeve, tell! Tell tell tell!" She folded her arms on the table and leaned forward eagerly. "Why? Are you having dreams about doing it with the Japanese guy?"

"Keisuke?" I asked, and she nodded. "Um, no."

She bounced a little, her lips drawing back into a leer. "Come on, Maeve. You want to tell. You know you do."

I stirred my drink with the straw. She was right, I did want to tell. She was my best friend. She was one of the few people that Ryan didn't try to isolate me from when we were together, but that was more because he found her attractive than anything else. She was also the one who put me back together again, afterwards.

So I told her about the dreams. She wanted to know more about the sex dream that I had, which I'd only had once. "We didn't really do anything, Eileen," I told her. "I mean, it was just foreplay. We were naked and rubbing all over each other."

"Yes, but how did it make you feel?" she insisted.

I surprised myself. I blushed.

She saw, despite the dimness of the restaurant. Her eyes widened, then she grinned. "And it wasn't that Keisuke guy?"

I shook my head, not trusting myself to speak. I fiddled with my straw. "It was so weird," I told her, trying to get back to a non-sexual topic. I didn't want her to know that I'd gotten wet, thinking about how the dream made me feel. I looked into the large goblet that my drink was served in, stirring it and watching it pour off the straw.

"Mm-hm," she hummed, and I looked up at her. She looked pointedly at the creamy drink I was playing with. I pushed it away.

"Seriously, Eileen, seriously. All the, uh, sex aside, it truly was weird. He pushed me away and said, 'I'm not supposed to have dreams like this!'"

"You aren't?" she asked, raising an eyebrow.

"No, I mean, he said that about himself. That he wasn't supposed to be having dreams like this."

She continued to munch thoughtfully as I sat there, leaning on the table with my elbows. After a while, I muttered, "And anyway, I only had that dream once." I sighed. "It's as if all the guys in my life are avoiding me." Except the monster-man. I certainly hoped this didn't mean I was going to be stuck with loser boyfriends the rest of my life. And actually, monster-man didn't like me either, turning into a monster and attacking right before I woke up.

"You know what you should do," Eileen said at last.

I glanced at her, and she was serious. She continued. "The next time you see dream guy, ask him who he is."

I smiled, laughed a little. "I'm probably not going to dream about him again, Eileen."

"Of course you will, Maeve. I saw that look on your face." Looking at her again, she had a knowing look in her eye. I blushed again, realizing she'd either guessed or she'd known about my - ahem, other reaction. "You listen to me, girl, the next time you see dream guy, you ask him who he is."

"Why?"

"That's what you're supposed to do with those kinds of dream."

"Oh."