Ida noticed the laptop, pizza box, tax papers, and old work clothes that were strewn around his living room floor, sofa, and coffee table, and chuckled at it.

“Looks like somebody’s been working overtime in here.”

Ivan grinned. “Yeah.”

Ida walked over to inspect the family photos that Ivan had set out on the open spaces of his entertainment center.

“Your mother and brother?” she asked him.

“Yeah,” he answered, while cleaning up his work area.

“Looks like those eyes of yours run in the family,” she mentioned. “How much older is your brother?”

She could tell that his brother was the oldest by the swagger in his stance and the seriousness of his grille.

Ivan answered her while cleaning up. “He got me by five years.”

“That makes him thirty-three?”

Ivan joked, “Yeah, so you want him now instead of me?”

Ida picked up the sarcasm and read the story inside of the joke. “So, your brother’s the real player,” she assumed. “And let me guess; he’s been stealing all of your girlfriends since your late high school years?”

Ivan laughed while walking off toward his bedroom. He carried old clothes in hand.

“Not exactly,” he told her. When he returned empty handed, he added, “But he has had his share of women.”

Ida continued to stare at his family photos. She said, “But your mother still gave you the bulk of her attention.” She concluded that from the smiles that Ivan and his mother held in the picture, while his taller and older brother looked too bothered to smile.

Ivan hesitated. “Well…I guess you could say that,” he conceded. “But not really. She just gave us attention in different ways. But he would probably say that,” he admitted to her.

“So, in his eyes, you were the spoiled little brother who got a chance to go away to college,” she assumed again.

Ivan grimaced and turned his scowl into a grin. “How are you coming up with this?” he asked her.

Ida walked toward him and away from the photos when she answered him. “Well, I notice that he has the tattoos and such on his arms, with a long, counterculture hairstyle, while you’re pretty much a clean-cut corporate college boy all the way.”

Ivan laughed. But he didn’t like all of her insinuations. He felt he needed to add a bit of spice to his image for her.

“I’m not that clean-cut,” he told her as she approached him.

Ida walked right into his face. “I wouldn’t want you to be.” She took ahold of his waist to get closer to him. She said, “But I’ve been watching you, Ivan. And I do like what I see.”

He stood his ground and looked into her dark eyes with his light ones as they closed in on each other.

“Sometimes I couldn’t tell,” he told her. “Seems like you wanted to run away from me.”