The music had stopped while one group of musicians was being replaced by another, leaving the dancers to catch their breath, and the square half empty. The sun was low in the sky now, little fiery orange and red tentacles streaking upward, long indigo shadows beginning to edge their way across the square. A few people strolled through the shadows, mostly families, the kids leaping about less enthusiastically as they started to wind down from the day's activities.

"That guy, that one there, the blond guy with the receding hairline. You think he'd like you?" Denise asked, pointing at a man who stood with his arm twined around a slender woman. "Or how about that one, the man with the beard. He looks like an accountant. Maybe he'd go for you."

My lips tightened. I refused to tell her that she was perfectly welcome to live in her misanthropic world, but I preferred a much happier place.

"Oh! Those two! Those two across the square, coming out of that building. Oh my god, they're gorgeous. That's what I'm talking about—perfect eye-candy specimens. Both tall, both dark haired, although I don't like long hair on a man, and both absolutely and completely out of our reach."

I looked where she was pointing. "Oh, I don't know."

She swiveled around in her chair to pin me back with a maliciously triumphant gaze. "You're never going to have a man like that, Pia. Neither will I. If we're lucky, we'll get some balding, paunchy couch potato, but the good ones are not for us."

"There's nothing wrong with a man who is balding and has a bit of a paunch," I protested.

"Oh, come on! They all end up that way, sure, but you don't want them to start out looking like that!"

"Not all men are alike," I pointed out. "Some men like more than just a perfect body, just as some women prefer men who aren't drop-dead gorgeous. There's no reason to assume that just because we aren't supermodel gorgeous, we'll never have a hunky guy like one of those eye-candy men."