Friday night in L.A…

Isela isn’t looking for a one night stand; she’s desperate for one last shot at saving her career. But the night has different plans …

With a stolen invitation to the hottest party in LA, Isela Vargas is determined to meet director extraordinaire Tyler Banks. But she spends the night of her dreams with his brother, Sebastian and the next morning brings her worst nightmare to life.

Read an Excerpt:

“When you’re a failure in Hollywood, that’s like starving to death outside a banquet hall with smells of filet mignon driving you crazy.” - Marilyn Monroe

“So what are you wearing with my shoes?” my sister barked over the cell phone and straight into my earphone.

Meet my sister. My happily-married-to-her-high-school-sweetheart sister, who recently provided our mother’s only grandchild.

When I think of her that way, it’s really hard not to hate that bitch.

“These aren’t your shoes anymore,” I informed her. “You gave them to me.”

“I let you borrow them. Now what are you wearing?”

I looked out the window and instantly forgot Lydia’s question. Twelve years of living in L.A. - eight of them wasted in various low life positions in the movie industry - had ruined plenty of my illusions and my romance with the city. Except this. This view of downtown L.A. as my BMW flew down the 105 onto the 110, still got to me. Ribbons of red brake lights crept toward the cluster of green sky-scrapers that rose out of the milky darkness. Downtown L.A. at night was the closest thing to Oz on this earth.

“Oh Goddamn it!” Lydia shouted, the force of her voice tickling my ear. “You’re wearing my shoes with the uniform.”

Uniform?

“God give me strength,” she muttered. “Let me guess. Black suit with a button-down shirt from the Limited and a silver necklace. How could you do that to my shoes?”

Not that it’s conducive to this story, but I actually have suits in gray, brown, tan, blue, and black, with red pinstripe, that I could wear if I had time to workout.

And furthermore, with the way Lydia carried on about the damn shoes you’d think they were Manolos. Between us, they’re faux designer from Footsie Tootsie.

“Don’t you have a child to breastfeed?” I asked her.

“Not for two more hours.”

If I hung up on her, Mom would be calling within five minutes. “I’m wearing a sheer black 1920’s dress-”

“Sheer? How sheer, cochina?”

“Sheer enough for a nude-colored slip.”

“‘Bout damn time you show off that figure you got. Shit, I’m never gonna get mine back.”

Now I shouldn’t blame Lydia for thinking I live this glamorous life up in L.A. She lives back home in Chula Vista where the epicenter of fashion is Toda Moda.

“Where are you?” she asked.

“On the one-ten.”

“You got the pass?”

“Yep.”

“And your boss let you have it?”

Nerves knifed my insides, which hurts by the way. “Not exactly.”

“You’re not going to get fired again, are you?”

For the record, I’ve never been fired. Well, not that Lydia needs to know, but yes, I was “let go” last week.

“Dale is in Chicago,” I answered.

Dale is my boss—sorry, ex-boss—who is unaware that a year ago I optioned a short story with money reshuffled from loans and credit card debt. It was the boldest move I’d ever made and when I think about it, I get light-headed. But this story was the only thing in a long, long time that gave me “The Feeling.” The same feeling I got when Candace Bushnell was trolling Sex And The City to Hollywood. (I made the photocopies at the production company I was interning at.) And again when I read that adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s Ladyin the Lake, which Tyler Banks directed and resurrected David Duchovny’s career.

When I pushed for Sex, I wasn’t hired after my internship ended. After I insisted on Chandler, my boss axed my position and hired his niece as his assistant. Calling him a moron might have played a factor in that decision.

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” Lydia sighed.

“I do. I just need to schmooze the right people.”

“That’s what you’ve been doing the last eight years And look where you are.”

Here it comes. I moved the phone so she wouldn’t hear me sigh.

“Why don’t you think about coming home?” she asked. “Tony knows this guy who has a video production company that makes commercials and wedding videos. You could work there.”

A shrill car horn sounded behind me and I jerked the wheel back into my lane. “What? Are you trying to kill me?”

“Okay forget I said that,” Lydia insisted. “I never even said it.”

“Yes. You did.” I something felt catch in the back of my throat. Where was my bottle of water? With the wheel in one hand, my life suddenly depended on reaching across the passenger seat to pluck my water bottle from where it lodged itself between the door and the seat.

“It’s just that-”

“I know, I know, I fucking know.”

I heard her breathing on the other end. “I just worry about you. All alone up there.”

Shit. I slammed on the pedal and the car heaved forward, brakes groaning as the redtail lights of the beater in front of me came at my car. Even if my lease payments put me in debt, thank God for German engineering.

“I’m meeting someone tonight,” I told her with that mad dog feeling flaring up inside me as I sat there stuck in a sea of traffic.

“But there are plenty of guys down here,” she pled. “And you can still stay in the movies.”

Traffic stayed locked in a standstill and I squeezed my eyes shut with frustration. If I had the money to replace it, my cell phone would’ve been splattered against the windshield.

You see, Lydia wasn’t looking into the face of thirty after having jumped from one windowless office to another. I was staring down into a pit filled with one failure after another.

I’d pitched my project all around town for a year and no one wanted it. There was only one chance left and his name was Tyler Banks. He appeared out of nowhere three years ago with a movie about a con gone wrong and his second film, the Raymond Chandler flick I mentioned earlier, won him the Palme d’Or and an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. And every subsequent film of his knocked it out of the park at the box office.

Tonight Tyler would be at Que Bella’s post-Screen Actors Guild Award party in Downtown L.A. Tonight I had Dale’s VIP pass in my nifty clutch purse for said party. Tonight was my last chance to pull myself out of the depths of development and unemployment hell and make all these years worth something.

“I gotta go.” Or else I was going to say something that would guarantee Lydia wouldn’t speak to me for six months. “Give Jody a kiss for me, okay?” I said, missing my little niece.

“Won’t you just think about what I said?”

“I’m not that desperate.”

“Excuse me but you’re wearing my shoes.”

Okay. So she had me there.

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