“I’ll have a glass of Chardonnay,” a gray-haired businessman ordered at his outside table at Buenos Días Café. His young-as-a-daughter date sat across their small table with a controlled smile.

Ivan looked into her calculating green eyes and wondered whether she loved her older man or his older money.

The dirty-blond beauty looked up at him momentarily, as if to read his skepticism. Then she looked away, unconcerned by it.

Ivan chuckled to himself as he passed them by, outside the waist-high black iron gate that separated their table from the sidewalk. All he could think about was the numbers game: a fifty-two-year-old man, earning a mid to high six figures, and a twenty-eight-year-old date, earning a low five figures.

“I gotta stop thinking like an accountant,” he reminded himself as he walked.

When he arrived at Hooters and stepped inside, he blinked and readjusted his eyes. Damn. The bright orange was enough to blind a man.

“Hey, Ivan, over here.”

He turned to his left and spotted Catherine Boone, an old friend and fling from his undergrad days at San Diego State. She wore a lime-green dress, full of cleavage and curves, with matching lime-green heels. Her hair was shoulder length and straight, ideal for no-nonsense business. Her medium brown skin remained flawless.

As she stood up from her chair and table to greet him with an open hug, Ivan could see and feel that she had put on a good ten to twenty pounds of maturity.

“Whoa, you’re filling out a little bit,” he told her.

She smiled. “And?”

He hesitated. “And, what?”

“And, what does that mean?”

Women were finicky about their appearance. So Ivan remained coy.

“I don’t know. You tell me,” he responded.

Catherine broke away. “Ivan, is it a good thing or a bad thing? Because I like my new weight. I always thought I was too skinny in college.”

“You thought you were skinny?”

“Yeah, you didn’t think so?”

Catherine sat back down. Ivan sat in the chair across the table from her.

He shook his head and answered, “No, not really. Your weight was always fine to me.”

Catherine grinned at him. “It’s good to see that you’re still the same Ivan. You’re as vague and as noncommittal as ever. And no new girlfriend yet, right?”

Ivan smiled back. “I like keeping my concentration.”

Catherine grinned even harder. “Are we that bad, Ivan? I mean, really?”

She got all serious and stopped smiling. She wanted a sincere answer from him. A Hooters waitress broke them out of their groove before Ivan could grant her wish.

“Welcome to Hooters, my name is Claudia.” She immediately wrote her name down on a Hooters napkin in front of them. She was a breezy brunette in the bright white and orange uniform.

“Are you guys ready to order yet?”

The Hooters menu sat out in front of them on the tabletop.