At Her Service

Book 2: Out in Hollywood

by Amy Spalding

Genres: Contemporary Romance; Romantic Comedy

Synopsis

From the acclaimed author of For Her Consideration comes a sweetly sexy, thoroughly modern new novel for the digital age about single life, social media, career goals, life-coaching apps, and making the bold move to grab your own happiness—and write your own love story.For fans of Casey McQuiston and Jasmine Guillory.

Max Van Doren has a wish list, and a great career and a girlfriend are at the top. But despite being pretty good at her job as an assistant to one of Hollywood’s fastest rising talent agents, she has no idea how to move up the ladder. And when it comes to her love life, she’s stuck in perpetual lust for an adorably perfect bartender named Sadie. Her goals are clear—and Max has everything but the self-confidence to go for them. Even her mother seems to assume she’ll be crawling home to her childhood bedroom at some point . . .
 
When Max’s roommate, Chelsey—an irritatingly gorgeous and self-assured influencer in plus-size and queer spaces—offers to sponsor her for a new self-actualization app, Max gives in. If she can’t run her own life, maybe an algorithm guiding her choices will help? Suddenly Max is scoring big everywhere, and her dreams are achingly close to coming true. But when one of Chelsey’s posts reveals Sadie’s part in the app’s campaign, Max is poised for heartbreak on all fronts. Tired of the sponcon life with its fake friends and endless selfies, Max realizes that to have true influence, she’ll have to find the courage to make her own, totally authentic way in the world . . .
 
Fresh, feel-good, and endlessly relatable, here is a glorious love story for the digital age and beyond.

“Charming, uplifting . . . perfect for any reader who has ever dreamed of stepping into their own best life. I want to befriend Amy Spalding’s characters and live in her quirky queer romantic world forever.” —Susie Dumond, Author of Queerly Beloved

“A painfully relatable story of finding the courage to reach for what you really want from inside the messy reality of your twenties. A wonderfully hopeful, queer, LA love story.” —Anita Kelly, Author of Something Wild & Wonderful

“An ingenious millennial coming-of-age story about trying to find yourself in the age of apps and a culture of grind. Highly relatable, laugh-out-loud funny, and full of hot-bartender sapphic swoon.” —Alison Cochrun, Author of The Charm Offensive
 

Release date: February 20, 2024

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 320

Sample

Before I worked at Exemplar, I had no idea how quickly an hour could pass. If anything, time had gone too slowly my whole life. As a kid, I’d spent a lot of time willing myself to be older and more grown-up, like if that old movie Big was about a teen lesbian instead of Tom Hanks. Unfortunately, the years inched by without a magical instant adulthood.

I’d been twenty-five years old with very little to show for it when I’d started this job. And now it felt like I’d just blinked a few times and I was twenty-six. All of it was less magical than I’d hoped for. Today, in particular, was anything but magical, unless there was a fairy tale I’d missed in which an extremely hungover girl toiled away, unseen and overlooked, with the previous night’s mistakes pounding in her head in sync with the tequila, and then died alone.

I checked the time on my Apple Watch—I guess I couldn’t get away with saying that I was unseen and overlooked while wearing a birthday gift from my very generous boss—and tried not to curse. My watch glowed 8:52, but my Full Focus Planner laid out half a dozen tasks—written in my tidiest, least hungover penmanship—still unchecked.

Everyone said in job interviews for assistant positions that they excelled at multitasking and prioritizing, but the thing was that I truly excelled at multitasking and prioritizing! Normally speaking. At the moment, the tasks I was juggling were trying not to throw up and also trying not to think about what I’d said last night—and, worse—to whom. It definitely wasn’t the time to dwell on the fact that I’d, in my only truly safe place in LA, blurted out something incredibly horrifying to the woman I’d had the biggest crush on. Which meant that, in one fell swoop, I had neither a safe place nor a crush.

I wouldn’t let this stop me. “Focus,” I whispered to myself in my sternest tone, which unfortunately was not very stern. Talking to myself, regardless of my tone, was probably one of the factors that contributed to having no work friends. But as usual, I was the first assistant to arrive in my little section of cubicles, so no one witnessed this particular incident.

I decided to take that as as good an omen as I was getting this morning and got back to my checklist. Assistants at Exemplar Talent Agency weren’t actually expected to show up to work as early as I did, but I was determined not to stay an assistant forever. There were so many tasks to be completed before my boss, Joyce, arrived that it just made sense to give myself extra time so that I could look as polished and professional and achieving as possible. Normally that worked out fine.

Still, despite last night’s terrible choices thudding in my head, the tasks got checked off. Headlines on Deadline, THR, and Variety were reviewed, my summary of the entertainment trades’ morning news was in Joyce’s inbox, the agency-specific client email inboxes were checked, the intra-agency grid was updated with the casting information that was my responsibility to input, and a K-Cup was loaded and waiting in Joyce’s Keurig. By the time Joyce’s number flashed on my phone, I practically felt like myself again.

“Good morning,” I greeted her.

“Can you get Peter at the studio on for me?” Joyce asked in lieu of a greeting. Actually, since I’d been working for Joyce for over a year now, I knew that it was her greeting.

“Of course, just a moment,” I said, placing Joyce on hold while I pulled up Peter’s information. When I’d started, I was overwhelmed by the shorthand—why not tell me Peter’s last name or what freaking studio he worked for? Now, though, I knew the players as well as Joyce did. I knew their names, at least.

After I got Peter on the line, I patched him through to Joyce but stayed muted so I could take notes since she was in her car on the way in. When I was first hired, I couldn’t believe that part of my job was to listen in on calls between Hollywood bigwigs. I imagined the A-list gossip I’d get would be ridiculous. Now I knew that the first half to two-thirds of the call would be about a vacation someone just took or some industry event someone else didn’t get invited to or a new restaurant that was impossible to get into which would be the expected setting of Joyce’s next business lunch. I’d yet to overhear anything that could be described as even approaching salacious.

By the time I was jotting down notes from the call with Peter and preparing to connect Joyce with whomever she wanted to speak with next, I realized the full-body jangle of panic had shrunk down to a mere pounding headache. Considering last night’s massive rounds of alcohol and humiliation, a headache? That I could manage. This job? I wouldn’t only manage it, I would keep proving my immense skills to Joyce every single day until I was officially on the junior agent track. Sadie? OK, no, the future where Sadie and I fell into each other’s arms was dead, but that future had never actually ever started. It was fine. I was fine.

After Joyce’s second call wrapped up, she let me know she was about to pull into the garage, so we said goodbye before her signal dropped off. I dashed into her office, pushed the Keurig’s brew button, and grabbed the oat milk creamer while the organic San Francisco Bay Fog Chaser blend dripped into Joyce’s YETI mug. I stirred in half a packet of stevia and walked carefully to the elevator bay; there were tales told of assistants fired for dripping beverages on Exemplar’s pristine white flooring—and, true or not—I vowed that I would never become an urban legend.

“Thank god for you,” Joyce said as the elevator doors parted and she stepped off. It was a pretty great morning greeting, even if it was potentially directed at the contents of the mug and not actually me. “I assume if there was any interesting news in the trades this morning you would have already told me.”

“Correct. And no new messages since the summary I sent earlier.”

We walked together down the main corridor, and my headache nudged me again, pounding in time with my feet hitting the floor. I tried not to wince because I already felt like such a disaster walking next to my boss. Joyce was inches taller than me to begin with. Her daily footwear was four-inch heels that cost roughly the same as my monthly rent, while mine was one solo pair of black Dr. Martens oxfords that I’d had since college, so the height difference looked even more extreme. On top of that, Joyce was the most stylish person I’d ever met. Today she wore a patterned yellow jumpsuit that contrasted really beautifully against her dark brown skin. Her black hair was up in a topknot that seemed to defy gravity—and make me look even shrimpier. Between the shoes and the hair, I probably appeared about a full foot shorter than Joyce. I felt lucky that she never seemed embarrassed that a tiny weirdo was always scrambling to keep up with her around the office.

When I was hired last year, Joyce was already on the path to becoming Exemplar’s top talent agent. She would have already been there, I knew, if she had narrowed her client list to A-list stars and Oscar winners only. Joyce, though, was savvy enough to spot rising talent early on, and so her list was an interesting mix. It was still kind of shocking that I was the person who assisted her.

Even though every article on the internet insisted that workplaces were getting so much more diverse these days, especially in the entertainment industry, I was pretty sure I was the only visibly queer woman in the whole building. One time I thought I spotted another, but she turned out to be a delivery person, like I was literally living out “Ring of Keys” from Fun Home. (I waved to her anyway. She was confused I didn’t have any packages to be sent.) Not that my queerness was an issue here—it was just that Exemplar seemed to have an unspoken dress code of dresses and super femme jumpsuits and very tall heels and those sandals that kind of looked like boots or maybe the other way around but regardless I had never understood, exactly, what weather they were good for.

So I still couldn’t believe that I’d showed up in my nicest patterned Peau de Loup button-down and my only pair of pants that wasn’t jeans with my frantically polished Docs and then got the job. But since that was exactly what happened, I tried not to dwell on how out of place I still felt every day. I had twenty-six years of feeling out of place, after all. It was just a different kind of out of place in the entertainment industry.

“Today’s call with Paul is confirmed?” Joyce asked as I followed her into her office. We started every day this way, going over upcoming meetings and any breaking news. Since Joyce already had her coffee, this is when I usually made myself a cup, because she was generous enough to let me use her fancy organic brew and creamer. It went down a lot smoother than the cup I guzzled during my daily morning commute, but I couldn’t wait that long for the good stuff (especially this morning). After all, even cheap coffee got the job done.

Joyce’s office, like Joyce, was stylish and intimidating beyond what I could have imagined before landing this job. (I’d interviewed in Joyce’s favorite meeting room, and therefore wasn’t prepared to walk into this stunning space on my first day of employment.) Exemplar’s overall vibe was of bright whiteness, like an Apple store that sold talent and intimidation instead of phones and computers, but Joyce’s office, like Joyce herself, was vibrant and warm . . . and intensely intimidating. Paintings and prints in bold colors hung on the walls, and color had been injected wherever possible—the yellow sofa, the cobalt blue desk lamp, even the file cabinets were Tiffany blue.

I, a person without one ounce of interior decorating ability, didn’t understand how all the competing vivid hues didn’t clash or look like a nightmare circus, but it was the exact opposite. Joyce’s office was striking and anything but quiet, but it was also harmonious and beautiful. I was still a little amazed that I’d become comfortable here in this room. As comfortable as I was anywhere, at least. Anywhere except—oh my god. I couldn’t think about that.

“Your call’s confirmed,” I told Joyce, ignoring that while my headache had dulled, there was still a sensation of someone hammering around in my skull. Who needed to feel a hundred percent to do her job? Not me. When I’d started at Exemplar, I’d lived in constant fear of saying the wrong thing, dropping the wrong call, making a reservation at the wrong restaurant. So even though this would never be a stress-free gig, I liked feeling how much fear had fallen away since then.

“And Meeting Room 2 is reserved for you for your three p.m. with Tess’s team.”

“Wonderful,” Joyce said, and an Outlook reminder chimed on her computer and my watch at the same moment. “It’s just the weekly meeting. I assume you’ve already grabbed my chair for me.”

Oh, no. I should have known I couldn’t just power through my stupid headache and my stupid heartbreak. Somehow, even with my multiple systems set up to keep something exactly like this from happening, I’d let a task slip anyway. I’d not only forgotten that Joyce was due for the Exemplar executive meeting but—so much worse—I hadn’t reserved her seat at the conference room table.

“What?” Joyce asked, watching me, and I knew my face must have given me away.

“I’m so—let me see what I can—”

Joyce’s gaze was so intense that I stopped as if she’d actually interrupted me. The seat thing was actually the story I told the most on first dates when people asked me if it was as ridiculous working at a talent agency as it seemed. Not always, I’d say. But there’s this thing about “the good seats” for the executive meetings though, where the only way to hold your spot in advance is that your assistant has to write down your name on a buck slip—Do you even know what that is? Why would you? It’s like this old timey slip of heavy-duty paper—and put it on the chair in advance of the meeting. Otherwise they’ll get stuck with a shitty spot and also everyone knows your assistant sucks. I loved telling the story because Hollywood was indeed often very silly, but also because I never messed that up.

Never before today, at least.

I took a deep breath and tried again. “I know how important it is to—”

“It’s fine,” she said in a tone that made it clear it was anything but, and I tried very hard not to burst into tears. It was bad enough being tiny and weird—weird for this world, at least. I couldn’t also be a crier.

Joyce’s phone rang, and even though in more casual moments, I might have just reached over and answered it from her desk, I knew to carefully transport my fancy coffee out of there and back to the relative safety of my cubicle. An easy call would be great right now, honestly. I could solve some small problem, Joyce would witness how great I was at literally almost every single part of my job, and I’d be distracted enough to forget everything I’d messed up in the last twenty-four hours.

“Max, it’s Karissa. Looks like we still haven’t received Dan’s payment for Last Year’s War. I know you were looking into this, did you have an answer for us yet?”

“Yes—no, I mean, I don’t have an answer, but I am looking into it and—”

I realized Joyce was standing right in front of me. I shook my head to let her know she didn’t need to concern herself with the call, but considering she was on her way into the meeting that I’d messed up for her, I didn’t feel as competent and irreplaceable as I’d aimed for. I didn’t even feel mildly useful, and I was definitely destined to be alone forever. That didn’t really have anything to do specifically with my job here, but somehow it all felt tied together right now, not just the boring work parts or the exciting romantic parts, just all of it.

Joyce headed into the meeting and I handled the call, and by the time I was off there were a dozen new emails to sort through, and on any other day all of this would be a great distraction. No matter how much I had to do, though, my head kept pounding. The hangover turned into a constant murmur, as if I could hear someone talking from a room or two away. All I could hear was Sadie, Sadie, Sadie, over and over, like my headache and my heartache had a little chat and were now sharing information freely. I’d been in this business way too long not to have made them sign NDAs.

After all, I wasn’t built for hangovers and regretful mornings. While everyone else I knew had spent the tail end of their teens and their early twenties off at college, getting these experiences out of their system—or at least learning how to mess up and move on—I’d commuted all four years. I had stayed up too late sometimes, sure, but I was usually reading Supergirl fanfic in bed and working on homework assignments, not drinking at cute bars while even cuter bartenders—

The phone rang again, and now I had to figure out a “more inventive” location for a client dinner tomorrow night. Apparently, Horses had fallen out of favor since I made the reservation one week ago. I pulled up The Infatuation in my browser but also texted my roommate who was objectively cooler than me, as well as my former coworker who was not only also objectively cooler but in a relationship with an actor so would know where talent liked to eat these days. Hollywood really was silly and stupid, but for some reason I loved all of it. OK, most of it, the thing with the buck slips on chairs was beyond.

Joyce stopped by my desk on her way back from the meeting, smiling broadly. “I forgot Andrew’s out this week. Didn’t have to sit in the worst chair after all.”

“Oh, good,” I said, hit with a rush of relief that sort of washed over my anxiety but didn’t clear it out all the way. Obviously, it was great that Joyce was in a good mood, but my screw-up was still fresh and I didn’t like rehashing any part of it.

“I think it’s going to be one of those days,” Joyce said, and I felt a note of sympathy for my probably-very-obvious state of slight disaster. While I hated that she’d picked up on something, I also knew I was lucky to have a boss who actually saw me as a person. That wasn’t something taken for granted in this town—or even in this building.

“I’m afraid so,” I said, which made Joyce chuckle.

“Since I’m fairly sure I’m going to be stuck at my desk for the next however many hours, will you order over a salad for me? Get yourself one, too, all right?”

“Will do,” I said, even though I could think of no worse hangover food than crisp greens and a delicate vinaigrette. Today called for pancakes for lunch, or one of those burritos that they doused like an enchilada, or just a trough of mac and cheese. But it always felt so lucky when Joyce treated me, when Joyce assumed that someone like me fit into her world of expensive salads. I would never dare upset that balance.

Joyce was right about the afternoon; it stayed as busy as the morning, though for me it was less painfully so because my headache gradually faded, and the work was steady and just complicated enough that I wasn’t thinking nearly as much about Sadie. Obviously, I knew that it was impossible to notice you weren’t thinking about someone without actually thinking about them quite a lot, but I was pretending that I wasn’t. I was pretending I was already over her. I was pretending I hadn’t ruined the one true thing I’d found here, in Los Angeles, all by myself.

A DM popped up on my monitor around six, as I was compiling my end-of-day summaries and getting my task list ready for the next morning. I clicked on the message from Aidy, the assistant who sat at the far end of my row of cubicles.

Need your advice on something, she messaged.

Of course!! I tried not to feel too pleased at this. People gave and got advice all of the time. But if I was truly just a tiny-voiced oddball, people wouldn’t come to me, right? Definitely not Aidy, who’d been here a year longer and was one of two assistants assigned to Gary Kirchoff, one of the top agents at all of Exemplar.

Need to make dinner res for talent plus a producer way outside of Vancouver since that’s the filming location. I know I could hit up Yelp but since you’re Canadian maybe you have better ideas??

Oh, sorry, I’m not Canadian?? I typed.

“I’m on my way out,” Joyce said, appearing at my desk with her bag over her shoulder. “I believe I have another nine-thirty tomorrow, so let’s make sure everything’s set up, please and thank you.”

“Of course,” I said, while wondering if it was bad to seem like someone from Canada. It obviously wasn’t, people could be from anywhere. I’d just wanted an advice request on a topic I excelled at, that proved someone like Aidy saw me as an expert in an area. It was too bad that area was outer Vancouver.

A notification popped up on my screen. Oh, no problem, you just seem so polite and Canadian!

“Joyce,” I said, as she stepped back from my desk, “I really am sorry about—”

“I’ll see you in the morning.”

For some reason, I then gave her a thumbs-up instead of a normal goodbye. It was a minor miracle that it was very nearly time to go home because I was pretty sure I was only going to find a way to make my entire life more awkward than it already was.

My roommate Chelsey texted as I walked through the parking garage to my beat-up Yaris. Unlike my clothes and my whole general aesthetic, the car didn’t set me apart at Exemplar. The parking garage was cleanly split between agents and assistants; you could see where the border of Teslas and Alfa Romeos ended and the clump of old, rusty, or dinged-up moderately priced cars began.

Having people over for snacks and bevs before going out, Chelsey messaged. Mainly the usual suspects. Both a heads-up and an invite!

I navigated out of the garage and onto Wilshire Boulevard into a very still sea of cars. When I’d moved here, I’d hoped that traffic in LA was one of those unfair stereotypes that locals poked holes through, but unfortunately the rumors were true. Some of my coworkers dealt with this by living closer, but I couldn’t do it, even knowing I could sleep a little later and get home a little sooner. The Eastside was the only part of the city I could imagine living in, so I accepted my fate. There was also something about being in my car to and from with a Tegan and Sara album blasting that reminded me of commuting to college, back when all of life seemed to be ahead of me. I knew that twenty-six was technically not old, not even middle-aged, but, oh my god, if this was the life that had been ahead of me, sometimes I wished I could time-travel back and tell my younger self to lower her expectations, at least a little.

Normally when I got a heads-up text from Chelsey, I headed to Johnny’s, even when I’d already gone the night before. A heads-up text from Chelsey was how I discovered Johnny’s in the first place. Tonight, though, it was out of the question. It was out of the question from now on! But I knew that a heads-up-slash-invitation from Chelsey was never actually an invitation, only a heads-up. And considering that I had two scripts to read before tomorrow morning, even if I wanted to hang out in the apartment while Chelsey and her friends snacked and bevved, I was in need of a quieter locale.

Mom called while I was still midway through my drive as well as my decision on where to go, and I reflexively tapped answer even though I didn’t want to. I just wasn’t the kind of person who knew how to send her mother to voicemail.

“Hi, honey, big day out there in Hollywood?”

“The guy dressed like Spider-Man was standing in the crosswalk at Sunset and Highland, clogging traffic, but I feel like that’s not what you mean.”

“It’s so great you get to have all these exciting adventures while you’re young,” she said.

“I feel like you’re not believing me here,” I said. “He’s emphatically not a very good Spider-Man. His boots are Uggs.”

Mom laughed. “You know what I mean. Not everyone gets to live and work in Hollywood. No matter what happens in life, no one can ever take that away from you.”

Mom said a lot of things like this, that later on I’d look back and enjoy this time of life so much, or that tales of buck slips and fancy salads would be hilarious fodder to share when I got back home. Because I knew that Mom loved me, I tried my best not to think about the fact that she clearly didn’t think I could make it out here.

“Today I was told we had to find a more ‘inventive’ restaurant for a client dinner,” I told Mom, as this was usually the closest kind of thing I had to industry gossip.

“Inventive?” She laughed, and I was relieved. I’d done my daughterly duty, a little entertainment and an anecdote I knew she’d tell her coworkers. Maybe a longer reprieve before she made me feel my days in LA were already numbered. “What does that even mean? I feel like the idea of inventing food already got covered a long time ago.”

“Or at least when Molly put Hot Pockets on a bed of lettuce and called it a microwave salad,” I said, which made Mom laugh even harder at the memory.

“I forgot all about that. Your sister was ahead of her time! Think they serve that at any of your fancy Hollywood restaurants?”

“Speaking of that, I need to figure out where I’m headed to get some work done,” I said. “Talk to you later this week?”

“You know that I don’t think it’s fair how often you’re working at night,” Mom said. “I know they pay you plenty, but that’s not a sustainable work-life balance.”

“I have enough of a life,” I said, which was even less true than Exemplar paying me plenty, but she already clearly thought I was bound to fail out here. I wasn’t giving her any additional ammunition.

“Remember,” she said, and I braced myself, “it gets too tough and unreasonable, you’ve always got a place here.”

“I know, Mom,” I said, even though the thought of my childhood bedroom felt like nothing but failure to me. “Love you.”

“I love you too, Max.”

My music roared back into the speakers, and I scrolled through a mental list of the easiest and cheapest spots where I could get dinner, escape my apartment for a while, and make my way through at least one of the scripts I’d brought home with me. It would be nice, I knew, if I had the kind of friend I could text for help. A quiet apartment to work from for the evening. A recommendation for the unknown-but-perfect spot. But that was something else I hadn’t figured out here yet, the whole chosen-family best-friends thing, so I ended up doing the easiest thing I could think of once I’d parked behind my apartment. Me, the scripts, and a big order of chips and queso at the taco stand down the block. It was kind of in view of Johnny’s, but only just barely, and I knew I could get away with holing away in a booth here until they closed. Plus, even though that salad had actually been delicious, grease and carbs were both long overdue.

B. . .