“Six thousand hits per day, hunh? How did we manage to do that?” Ivan asked them. He realized that his party promotion and street teams would hardly drive that much internet traffic. Something else was empowering the site.

Paul said, “It’s all about working the right search engines, my friend. So anything people search for in San Diego, we need to have a page up to identify it.”

“Yeah, because we’re I.D. Promotions, baby!” Jeff shouted in the background. “And we’re new. Internet viewers always want to check out what’s new.”

“Hey, Ivan, you still want to sell this site name to us?” Paul asked him.

Ivan laughed hard at that. He answered, “Like I told you before, I was only joking.”

“Are you sure?” Jeff pressed him. “We haven’t even made any official offers yet.”

“No offer would apply,” Ivan told them. “My name is priceless.”

“Well, we don’t want your name, we just want the I.D. Promotions,” Jeff responded.

Ivan continued to smile. At his apartment, he thought, They’re gonna want me to pay an arm and a leg to manage this website now. But they obviously know what the hell they’re doing. And a deal is a deal. So if what they’re doing makes me money, then it makes them money.

Finally, he told them, “I’ll tell you what, after about five years, we’ll see where we are with this thing, and I’ll let you make me an offer then.”

Paul said, “Five years? The world could be over by then. You see all of the problems going on in the Middle East right now?”

“Yeah, the Third World War is supposed to start over there. It’s been prophesied in the Bible,” Jeff added. “Maybe we’re already in it and we don’t know it yet.”

Ivan said, “Yeah, well, in the meantime, let’s keep on living. All right, fellas? We still got a lot of work to do. You guys haven’t even graduated from school yet. You got a lot left to live for.”

IN HIS QUIET TIME, only days before his second big event, with leftover tax work from the office out in front of him, Ivan daydreamed about how long it would take for him to become intimate with Ida. He had been so busy over the past few months with his mother’s funeral in L.A., his extra tax crunch at the office, and now with his new promotion company that he had gone without the naked touch of a woman for a while.

Ida seemed to be moving real slowly and carefully with him on purpose. She always seemed to have something to prepare for whenever they got too comfortable on their dates.