7
Brooke didn’t stay the night. If she couldn’t claim to have maintained true objectivity, at least returning to her hotel room preserved a little independence.
It took a long time for her to fall asleep, and she was awake before her phone alarm went off. She blamed it on traffic noise from the San Diego Freeway a stone’s throw away, though it wasn’t much noisier than her neighborhood in Queens.
As she came out of the shower, the phone was ringing. It was Dylan, confirming that he was on his way to meet her for breakfast.
“Then I’ve got something special planned,” he said in a voice that finally sounded like the high school kid she’d known. He hung up before she could even ask what he meant. Surely not s*x—they weren’t randy teenagers anymore.
It couldn’t have been his breakfast choic
