“Have you had enough wine? Or do you want more?” Lucina asked him.

Ivan sat down across from her. He still couldn’t believe that she was actually there in front of him. He nearly forgot to answer her question.

“Oh, ah…nah, I’m good right now with the wine,” he finally answered.

Like her messenger, Lucina refused to smile.

She asked him, “Where are you from?” and took a sip from her glass.

“L.A. Where are you from?”

“I’m from Bra-zil,” she told him. “But much of my family is Italian.”

Ivan nodded and smiled at her. He said, “I was thinking something like that. Your accent don’t sound Spanish or Filipino. But you look like you could be anything,” he told her.

Lucina ignored his comment. She said, “I like your website. I think it has a lot of pa-tential.”

She made Ivan’s small talk seem meaningless. She was there for strict business.

“So, you’ve been checking us out? How’d you find out about it?” he asked her. He was flattered by her research on him, to say the least.

“I see you plan to be very busy,” she responded. “So you want to throw parties now?”

It was a rhetorical question.

Ivan looked into her colored eyes and answered it anyway. “Yeah.”

He wondered what she thought of his eyes. The two of them were definitely close enough to get a good look at each other. However, Lucina stuck to her script, as if Ivan were faceless.

“I hear you work as an accountant. Are you any good?”

Ivan still couldn’t believe it. She had done her research well. With each new question she asked him, he kept thinking that he would wake up soon. But he couldn’t let her know that. So he grabbed hold of his emotions and rode out his excitement.

“I don’t think they would have hired me if I wasn’t,” he bragged.

However, he didn’t feel so secure after noticing Lucina’s sustained grille of icy demeanor. She took another sip of her wine and said nothing.

Damn, she’s just like she was in my dream, he told himself. She’s making me feel stupid over here. And I’m not even high now.

Before either of them could get another word out, a few of the people in the crowd called for Ivan’s attention.

“Hey, Ivan, we’re out of here, man. It’s a workday tomorrow.”

He felt hesitant to move. He looked into Lucina’s eyes first, as if asking to be excused. She had that kind of hold on him.

“Go ahead,” she told him. “I will wait for you.”

Ivan was still hesitant, glued to his chair. Then he shook it off. “Yeah, let me see them all out,” he told her.