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morning was some kind of emotional slot machine: 5 A.M ., awake. Flip. A pressing, horrific dread: Ray’s arms, his smell, already present. No. Can’t start the day like this—pull the lever again. Another twenty minutes of sleep, maybe forty. Flip. Okay, this is better, just another day, just Tuesday. I can live with this. Let’s go.
    She went through this exercise every morning for months, the wish and foreboding of it mingling each night before bed. Maybe tomorrow will be better. Maybe it will be the same.
    What drove Bea truly insane was her total lack of control in the whole scenario. No matter how good a day she had, how productive she was or how many friends she saw or how much she cried in therapy, there was no apparent correlation to how she would feel when she woke up the next morning. Or twenty minutes after that.
    There were a few weeks during the height of her
Main Squeeze
post going viral when she was so inundated with texts and DMs and emails and press requests that her frazzled, cluttered existence almost didn’t leave room for him. During those weeks, she wouldn’t wake up thinking about him; instead, he’d snake into her consciousness later, always buzzing at the periphery, waiting for a few minutes between calls or an unmoving lane of traffic to strike.
    Bea knew that pining after him was fruitless. One drunken, sloppy kiss five years ago; one perfect, awful night six months ago. He wasn’t the love of her life—he wasn’t even returning her texts. So why the hell couldn’t she move on?
    Bea dragged herself out of bed and ran through her calendar for the day—more or less empty since L.A. was slow to get back to the grind after the holidays. Nothing until her meeting at the Standard at three.
    Lauren Mathers. How totally strange.
    When her post blew up, Bea vaguely expected—okay, fantasized—that someone from
Main Squeeze
would reach out to her, maybe invite her to consult on the show, participate in some way? But the show’s producers had refused to acknowledge Bea’s post at all, not even with a bland press statement. Their strategy had been to ride out the criticism in silence—and it had worked, more or less. Bea’s post was only a story for a couple of weeks; there’d been a subsequent bout of thinkpieces debating the impact of the lack of body diversity in pop culture, but then those died out too.
    So it was incomprehensible to Bea why the new executive producer of
Main Squeeze
would be reaching out now that her post was all but forgotten. Bea had emailed her agent, Olivia, immediately after Lauren DMed her, but Olivia couldn’t dig up any dirt from her sources at ABS, so Bea was going into this meeting essentially blind.
    It’s probably just a get-to-know-you,
Olivia had emailed
, to make you less inclined to drag them through the mud again when the new season starts in March. Which reminds me—we should DEF get you booked on some morning shows around the premiere. Maybe some late shows too. You’re funny, right?
    Figuring out what to wear to drinks at the Standard was a futile endeavor. That particular part of town was the epicenter of L.A.’s looks-obsessed culture, where everyone was either an aspiring movie star or aspiring to sleep with one—people who couldn’t possibly fathom that Bea could be proud of her body. But Bea was determined to go to the meeting in a bold, dare-you-to-look-away style, so after an hour of weighing options, she settled on one of her favorite looks: lavender coveralls with a playful snake pattern from Nooworks, cinched with a top-stitched taupe corset belt to suggest a more defined waist, decadent cognac booties with a stacked wooden heel, all topped off with her favorite Tom Ford aviators and oversized rose-gold hoop earrings studded with rhinestones.
    She arrived ten minutes early, but Lauren was already waiting—she rose from their table and rushed to greet Bea as soon as she walked out onto the pool deck.
    “Bea! So great to meet you.”