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Lincoln Park Zoo; no more mooning over the pages of the eligible royal bachelors in the pages of Hello! magazine. No more dreaming.
    She was all about the facts these days. After her colossal misunderstanding of the most basic tenets of her relationship with Mr. Texas, she vowed that from here on out, when it came to men, she would actually listen to the words coming out of their mouths (“Sure, if you want to move to Chicago, you should.” = “You’re on your own, sister!”) rather than the dream dialogue she was hearing in her brain (“Blah blah move to Chicago!” = “I really want you to move to Chicago so we can live happily ever after. I love you!”).
    She could do this. She could stand firm and cool. All it required was honesty. Brutal honesty. Even while he was looking at her with those dreamy, gray wolf eyes.
    Steady girl.
    “Yes,” he replied matter-of-factly.
    That was clear enough, Bronte thought. Then, “What had I asked? Sorry I wasn’t listening.”
    “I think you asked if I wanted to be your Transitional Man, and I answered yes. Still yes.” His eyes twinkled over the rim of his coffee mug as the reflecting sun caught the long window of a passing bus on Halsted Street and flashed across Max’s face.
    Nice.
    Before Bronte could come up with a good retort, her cell phone started ringing. She glanced down, seeing Carol Dieppe’s name on the caller ID.
    “Do you mind if I take this, Max?”
    “Go ahead. No worries.”
    She smiled and flipped open her phone. “This is Bron.”
    Max looked across the café table at the fabulous view of Bronte Talbott swearing like a sailor into her phone. Her long, straight, chestnut hair gleamed as she swung it carelessly over her shoulder to position the phone next to her ear. The curve of her jaw rested on the palm of her other hand. She started to twist a strand of her hair absentmindedly, and Max wondered how soon he would be able to do the same. His fingers were already itching to run endlessly through Bronte’s hair, to caress the back of her long neck, to—
    “No fucking way… he did not… are you going apeshit? Are you spending the whole weekend at the office?… Bullshit, he’s just jealous… right… uh-huh… well, that’s a load of crap and you know it… okay, I’ll talk to you later. I’d love to run some of my ideas by you about a pitch I’m working on, no specifics…” Bronte was half-listening to Carol’s response as she glanced up at Max, thinking she would sneak a look. But instead of the quick peek she had intended, she met a penetrating gaze that seared right through her. His eyes went a darker shade of steel blue and contracted for a split second when they locked on hers.
    “Uh, yeah, I’m still here, Carol, but let me hop. I’ll call you later this afternoon… okay… bye.” Bronte ended the call and double-checked that the line was dead before she started talking about the person she had just hung up on.
    She looked back up at Max with a sheepish smile on her lips. “So, by the way, as you might have just gathered, I like to swear. A lot. And most of my friends call me Bron.”
    “No problem on the colorful language. If you want, I can beef up your repertoire with some Cockney rhyming slang or the well-placed shite .”
    Bronte laughed and, for the first time in months, it felt like she had really laughed, instead of feeling like a cracking piece of glass.
    “I am definitely adding shite to my bag of tricks,” she said through her waning chuckle.
    “So what’s your pitch next week?”
    “The ad agency I work for is pretty secretive about the whole thing, so I shouldn’t really say, but it would be really great if we got the account. And that was my old boss from New York on the line, and it looks like she might have a spot for me back in New York, in a new boutique operation she’s putting together with a couple of venture capital guys, so, just maybe, I can put this whole, sordid Chicago chapter to bed once and