Cover Story

by Celia Laskey

Genres: Romantic Comedy

Synopsis

A hilarious, emotional love story about an extremely anxious publicist who's tasked with keeping an extremely gay starlet in the closet—but who ends up falling for her instead.​

It's 2005, and Ali is a publicist for Hollywood's biggest stars. Part of her job entails keeping gay celebrities in the closet—which is pretty ironic, since she's a lesbian herself. When Ali is assigned a new gay client, Cara Bisset, who's breaking onto the scene with a (hetero) romantic blockbuster, keeping Cara's sexuality under wraps becomes Ali's biggest challenge yet.

Cara is unruly and unpredictable and hates that she has to hide such an integral aspect of her identity. After a series of increasingly close calls, Ali is sent on the worldwide promotional tour for the movie to help keep Cara in line. Instead, she finds herself drawn to Cara's confidence and bravery. For the past year, Ali has been mired in grief after losing her partner in a freak accident. But with Cara, Ali's fears about the world subside, and she begins to question the Hollywood closeting system she’s helped perpetuate. 

As Cara's fame continues to rise, both Ali and Cara have to decide which is more important: maintaining the status quo or risking it all for another chance at love.

Release date: March 25, 2025

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 206

Sample

Before, Ali woke up every morning to her partner Natalie throwing open the bedroom door to let in their scruffy black-and-white terrier mix, Glen. He’d bound onto the bed and stand on Ali’s chest, licking her face and panting his warm trash breath. Natalie would kiss Ali and recount the details of Glen’s walk: which route they took, which neighborhood dogs they saw, whether Glen had been in an agreeable mood or had been obstinate, and the quality and number of his poops. Natalie was an early riser and loved taking Glen out in the morning, which was fine by Ali, since she preferred to sleep as late as possible. After Ali had heard all about Glen’s walk, she would usually recount a catastrophic dream she’d had: a flood, an earthquake, getting kidnapped by a murderer, Glen getting hit by a car. She’d look at Natalie and Glen and sigh, relieved that all was well.

But now the catastrophe is real. Ali still wakes up to Glen, but not returning from his walk—he’s been next to her, trying to rouse her for at least an hour. When Ali’s alarm goes off and she finally, begrudgingly, opens her eyes, she immediately cries—this is how she has started each day since Natalie died exactly one year ago. In books and movies, grieving characters always say there’s a fleeting peaceful moment after waking up when they forget what happened, but Ali never experiences this. The instant she’s conscious, the knowledge is present, nauseating her like a form of morning sickness—not for a new life, but for a lost one.

Bright sunlight cuts through the blinds, and birds outside chirp blithely. Ali wonders if birds stop singing when they’re grieving—if grief is even an emotion they feel. Maybe what sounds like happy warbling to Ali is, in fact, a bird screaming into the void or calling out for a lost loved one. If she were a bird, Ali would fly straight up, like a rocket, until she reached the blackness of space. That’s where she feels like her mind is now: in the blurry, indistinguishable line between the blue sky of life as we know it and the darkness of the great mysterious beyond.

But Ali’s physical body is in sunny Los Angeles, where the weather never gives her the courtesy of matching her mood. It insists she get up, get over it. Glen would also like her to get up. He emerges from under the covers to lick the tears from her cheeks and look at her hopefully with his human-esque hazel eyes. His face is two-thirds white on the left side and one-third black on the right, with the black fur curving around his eye like a wide letter C. On the white side of his face, his ear is also white, with faded black spots like a dalmatian. This spotted ear is Ali’s favorite feature of his, and she leans over to kiss it.

“I’m sorry, buddy, we’ll go soon.” Ali removes a thick night guard from her upper teeth and places it in a plastic container on her nightstand, which is covered in stacks of books (mainly short-story collections by Alice Munro, James Baldwin, Lorrie Moore, ZZ Packer, and George Saunders), a box of Cheez-Its, stray earplugs, and a value-size container of ibuprofen for the headaches that debilitate her four to five times a week. This morning, she can already feel the pain poking at the base of her head, slightly above where her hair starts growing and just right of center—the spot where massage therapists sometimes press their thumb like it’s a magic button that releases all the body’s tension. If someone could keep their thumb pinned on that button twenty-four hours a day, Ali thinks she could feel like a functional human.

Instead, she stretches her neck to either side, then pulls her mouth as far apart as she can to rotate her jaw in circles, pressing her pointer and middle fingers into the corner joints that connect her upper and lower jaw. Ali has ground her teeth at night since she was a teenager, but in the past year, she’s chewed through four different night guards touted by their respective companies as “indestructible.” She swallows two ibuprofen for the headache, a probiotic for her irritable bowel syndrome, a vitamin D for her body’s deficiency thereof, and a birth control pill for her ovarian cysts. (The fact that she, a lesbian, must take birth control always strikes her as annoyingly ironic.)

On top of ZZ Packer’s Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, Ali’s BlackBerry vibrates with a text from her best friend, Dana: Thinking about you. Remember to be kind to yourself today, and I’ll see you tonight for dinner. Ali doesn’t reply to the text and instead opens her Dell laptop to check her work email, her stomach surging and chest tightening as she prays no catastrophes have struck since she went to bed. Ali is a publicist at a well-known firm that specializes in public relations for celebrities, and you never know what kind of trouble they’re going to get into. Plus the whole PR culture is to treat everything as a matter of life and death—a recent career survey ranked public relations executive as the eighth-most-stressful job, behind actual life-or-death occupations like soldier, police officer, firefighter, and airline pilot.

Ali doesn’t view her work with such gravity—she sees her position as that of a glorified babysitter with a laptop, managing the moods and bad behavior of adult children. She never would have chosen this career, but her first job out of college was as a receptionist at a PR firm, and she ended up ambivalently climbing rung after rung on the publicity ladder due to her outsize student loan payments and what bosses called her “knack” for the job, which Ali thought was simply having a modicum of competence and responsibility. It was like a wave had carried her to the shore of a land where she’d never intended to live, and she’d stayed simply because it was easier.

She always used to tell herself she would quit and find a job that suited her better, but no career consists of reading and writing short stories, which is all she truly wants to do, so any job would likely feel as pointless to her as PR. Besides, thirty-five is a little late to switch careers and climb the ladder all over again, and most days Ali is resigned to her fate. The job provides stability and excellent health insurance, and for a person with an untreated anxiety disorder and a side of hypochondria, stability and excellent health insurance are necessities.

Shockingly, this morning her inbox contains no emergencies, which is so rare it’s like the blooming of a corpse flower. Instead, it’s the usual trash heap of press requests, pitch responses, and media inquiries. She checks the weather: seventy-six degrees currently, with a high of eighty-nine, which makes her groan. It’s early September, which for most places in this hemisphere would mean cooling temperatures, but in LA, they’re still hitting the high eighties or the nineties, and this will continue well into October and maybe even November. NASA scientists recently said 2005 was on track to be the warmest year in over a century.

Ali can’t believe people continue to deny climate change when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans only days ago. Photos of the disaster flood the news: people sleeping on their roofs while waiting to be rescued, brown water only a few feet below them; cars floating in streets turned to rivers, street signs nearly submerged; a shaft of sunlight beaming through a hole in the Superdome roof after it was emptied of thousands of survivors. Ali pictures a skinny polar bear stuck on a jagged ice floe, the pier in Santa Monica underwater, fires that make it “snow” even in Los Angeles. The fires will start any day now, marking Ali’s least favorite season, when blazes rage in all directions for weeks on end, making the air unbreathable and her anxiety unmanageable.

Glen nudges Ali’s laptop with his snout, then stands on her chest and pants into her face.

Ali grimaces. “God, it smells like someone had diarrhea into a fish tank, then fell into the fish tank and drowned, and after the body rotted and the diarrhea molded, you took a long drink.”

Glen pants harder.

“Okay, okay. You wanna…?”

Glen raises his ears.

“Go for…?”

Glen wags his tail.

“A dental cleaning?”

Glen cocks his head.

“A colonoscopy?”

Glen cocks his head the other way.

“Or… A WALK?” Glen jumps from the bed and shoots out of the room.

Glen pulls Ali down the street and she struggles to keep up. She hates waking up this early, but once they’re outside, she has to admit it’s a nice way to start the day, and she can see why Natalie loved it. They’re in the Silver Lake hills surrounding the reservoir, meandering past magenta mounds of bougainvillea spilling over doorways and agave plants with what resemble towering stalks of asparagus growing from their hearts. Walls of jasmine bushes carpeted with white pinwheel flowers release an incredibly sweet perfume, and the white bark of eucalyptus trees sags and ripples, like the skin of a hairless cat, where the trunks meet the branches. All of it makes Ali cry again. She can’t decide whether being surrounded by such beauty is a blessing or a curse—it makes her both thankful and resentful to be alive without Natalie. If she lived in the arctic tundra, or a parched desert, would she feel more or less depressed, or exactly the same?

A few streets later, as they’re huffing up a steep hill, a coyote casually trots out from a yard about twenty feet ahead. Coyotes are a common sight in Silver Lake, especially near the reservoir, but they always send a chill up Ali’s spine. This one is German shepherd–size with a thick coat of fur, as opposed to the fox-size, scraggly ones that look like less of a threat. When Glen notices it, he kicks into gear, barking his head off and straining against the leash. The coyote stands there calmly blinking at them, like Go ahead and try it, little guy. Another coyote appears, bigger than the first, and Ali’s heart starts to beat double time. Her instinct is always to turn around and run, but she’s read that with coyotes, you should stand your ground and make as much noise as possible. She waves her unleashed hand above her head and stomps her feet while yelling, “I’m really sorry we humans are displacing you! I’m terrified of you, but I have to act like I’m not, so you won’t attack me! La la la la la!” At this, the second coyote takes a step toward them, and now Ali’s heart beats triple time. She puts her hand on the pepper spray clasped to her shorts pocket, which she carries not only for coyotes but also for violent dogs who might attack Glen (which has happened before) and men. At this point you’re supposed to throw something. She grabs a smooth, warm stone from a rock garden and tosses it at the coyotes, aiming just to their left. When it thunks near their feet, they finally trot off across the street and disappear.

Ali breathes in relief and squats down to comfort Glen, who coughs repeatedly from how hard he was pulling on his harness. “Yes, you’re a very big brave boy, you definitely could have taken those two seventy-pound wild animals, yes you could have,” she coos, petting his head. Her heart rate slows and sweat slithers down her stomach. Another day, another potential death narrowly avoided.

On days when Ali doesn’t have any after-work commitments, she takes Glen to the office with her, but today she has a doctor’s appointment and dinner at Dana’s, so she drops Glen off at his dog walker/sitter’s house on the way home because she thinks he gets anxious when left alone for longer than five hours, even though in reality, it’s Ali who gets anxious, picturing him curled up on the couch alone. If it were up to her, she would never be separated from him.

She has time for a quick cold shower before running leave-in conditioner through her shoulder-length, naturally straight black hair and throwing on a pair of lightweight black slacks, a black-and-white-striped T-shirt, and a pair of black leather sneakers. The striped T-shirt is about as wild as Ali gets, fashionwise. She prefers basic cuts in neutral colors like black, white, navy blue, and gray, which she’ll tell you is her favorite color when pressed to pick one. She never wears makeup, which she can get away with thanks to her even-toned, pimple-free skin, high cheekbones, and ridiculously long and dark eyelashes. Her one beauty ritual consists of dabbing a recently purchased “rejuvenating cream” under her eyes, an attempt to lighten the dark circles that have become more and more bruise-like over the past year.

Then Ali calls a cab to take her to her office in Hollywood. Ali has always found driving in LA to be a terrifying endeavor (see: merging onto a highway only to be forced to immediately merge over five lanes through a churning sea of traffic to get onto a different highway, trying to make a left-hand turn with no protected light and a steady stream of traffic whizzing by, other drivers who purposefully run red lights and whip U-turns with abandon and text on their phones while going seventy-five miles per hour), but two years ago, she got into a bad accident on the 10—a guy in a Mercedes merged right into her, resulting in a broken left arm, nerve damage in her neck and back, and ultimately PTSD so bad she stopped driving.

When Natalie was alive, Ali would ride to work with her, since Ali’s office was mostly on the way to Natalie’s, and whenever they ran errands or went out, Natalie would drive. After she died, it became clear how dependent on her Ali had been, how circumscribed her life had become. All her choices revolved around how far away activities were and how many cabs she’d have to take in a day and what it would cost her. She told herself daily cabs couldn’t be much more expensive than a monthly car and insurance payment, but that wasn’t true. Months ago, Ali had vowed to tackle her fear and be back on the road by now, but so far she’d only written down the names of a few driving schools, cognitive behavioral therapists, and, in a moment of desperation, hypnotists.

Today Ali’s cabbie is a chatty man in his twenties who drives like he’s auditioning for another Fast & Furious sequel. Ali takes measured breaths in and out as he barely taps the brake pedal at stop signs, weaves in and out of lanes like he’s forming fabric, and honks at anyone who takes more than .01 seconds to hit the gas after the light turns green, all while droning on about the screenplay he’s writing: “a futuristic Groundhog Day set in space.” Ali believes the personalities of cities in the US can best be summed up by how people drive in them, and people in LA drive with such urgency and disregard for traffic laws, you’d think someone were giving birth in every passenger seat. But no, they’re all just selfish idiots who do whatever they want, whenever they want, no matter how it affects anyone. Is it possible to like a physical place but hate almost everyone in it?

Ali grew up in North Dakota, in a town with a population of two thousand near the Canadian border. Her earliest and most enduring memories are of being cold: pressing her numb fingers and toes to the barely warm heater, making endless mugs of tea that would go lukewarm almost instantly, sleeping in three sweaters and a face mask. “Only people who sit still are cold,” Ali’s parents would say before making her scrub the bathtub or shovel the walkway or wash the dishes. At least the water was hot on her hands. When she got into UCLA on a full scholarship, she yelled, “I’m never going to be cold again!”

Ali has now lived in LA for sixteen years. For the last few of those, due to the aforementioned selfish idiots and the traffic and the wildfires and the earthquakes and the rising rents and temperatures (Ali doesn’t want to be cold but she doesn’t want to sweat through her clothes every single day, either), she and Natalie sometimes daydreamed about leaving, but realistically, Natalie’s job prevented it. She was a TV writer, and therefore it was necessary for them to live in LA. When she died, she was about to show-run her first series—a dramedy about a fictionalized WNBA. It had been her life’s dream to finally oversee her own show.

But now, with Natalie gone, moving seems unthinkable. How are you supposed to decide where to go all by yourself? How do you make friends as a grieving loner? At least in LA, Ali has Dana, her oldest friend from childhood, who moved here after college, and a “successful” career, albeit one she doesn’t want. So for now, she’s staying in LA, even though she just watched a car drive over a median to pull a U-turn, all to avoid a line of traffic at a red light.

After a minute of deep breathing in the parking lot, Ali passes a dense crowd in the lobby waiting for elevators and takes the stairs. It would be a reasonable choice if Ali’s office were on the second or third floor, but it’s on the tenth. Shortly after Natalie died, Ali watched a report on the eleven o’clock local news about how half the elevators in Los Angeles hadn’t been inspected for over two years. After that, Ali stopped taking them, no matter which floor she was going to. Her choice was validated when, a couple of weeks later, a woman in a downtown office building was killed by a malfunctioning elevator. The woman had put one foot in when it suddenly lurched up, the doors still open. She was dragged by her ankle between the elevator and the wall until her body was crushed. So if Ali is sweaty and winded by the time she reaches the tenth floor, so be it.

“Good morning, work wife,” says Ali’s coworker Namisa, who’s passing by as Ali swings open the door to the stairs, huffing and puffing. The greeting is a bit they do every morning, using a Valley girl baby voice to mock the Paris Hilton types who work in PR and sincerely use expressions like “work wife.” Even though Ali and Namisa use the term derisively, it is accurate to describe their relationship—Namisa transferred from the London office five years ago, and Ali doesn’t know how she ever survived at the agency without her. They get along well because like Ali, Namisa loathes the job, even though she’s very good at it. They discreetly roll their eyes at each other and mime shooting themselves in the head during meetings, and they bust into each other’s office yelling things like “Code red! I need one hundred and fifty cc’s of blood, STAT!” or “He’s flatlining! Hand me the defibrillators!” to make fun of all the other employees acting like they work in an emergency room instead of a PR office. Just as Ali would rather be writing short stories, Namisa would rather be choreographing modern dance routines. Before her career in PR, she was on the path to becoming a professional ballet dancer, but at twenty years old she fractured a bone in her left foot, which subsequently fractured her dreams.

Ali takes a moment to catch her breath. “Spin class kicked my ass today,” she says to Namisa in the same affected voice. “Spin class” is what she calls her ten-story climb to the office.

“My ass is getting fat ’cause my fiancé keeps cooking me extravagant dinners.” At the word fiancé, Namisa holds out her left hand and admires an imaginary hunk of diamond on her ring finger. “I need to go on a juice cleanse ASAP.”

Ali scoffs. “No way, girl, your ass looks fab. My ass is the fat one.”

Namisa gives her a playful shove. “No, mine is!”

Ali shoves her back slightly harder. “No, mine!”

“Mine!” Namisa pushes her hard enough that Ali stumbles backward.

“MINE!” Ali gives Namisa a don’t-fuck-with-me look.

Namisa holds up her hands. “Okay, whatever, we’re both fat-asses. Love you, wifey.” She kisses the air next to Ali’s cheek.

“Love you, wifey.” Ali kisses back, completing the bit before they duck into their boss Victoria’s office for the morning rundown.

Victoria eats a bowl of Lucky Charms while bent over what she calls an “adult coloring book,” which Ali has never heard of but Victoria claims will be “huge” in a few years. She designs them herself before coloring them in, and the only differences Ali can discern between children’s coloring books and Victoria’s are that Victoria’s are slightly more intricate and sometimes contain naughty pictures or words. You could say she has some arrested development issues. Her great-uncle founded the chain of stores that became Wal-Mart, so her family is extremely rich but also extremely fucked up. By the time she was twenty-one, she had already been to rehab three times, and when sobriety finally stuck, she reverted to a state of childlike innocence. She bought the firm a year ago to try to bring purpose to her life, having chosen it because she loved celebrity gossip, but she didn’t know anything about running a company, not to mention PR. During a meeting one day, Ali honest-to-God caught her googling “Define publicity.” Sometimes Victoria’s incompetence drives Ali nuts, but usually it results in Ali being left alone to make her own decisions, which she likes.

“Morning girls, help yourself to brekkie.” Victoria gestures to the boxes of Cookie Crisp and Cap’n Crunch and Froot Loops and Cocoa Puffs and Apple Jacks in her kitchenette. “How were your weekends? What did you both do?”

“I went on two fantastic dates,” says Namisa. “One of the blokes picked up his leftovers with his hands and put them in his trouser pockets—needless to say, I’m seeing him again.” The reason Namisa transferred from the London office five years ago was a divorce from a husband who’d turned out to be a sex addict. After that, she decided she needed a significant change of scenery. Ali can’t believe Namisa has stayed in Los Angeles—if Ali were facing the prospect of dating local men, she’d be on the next plane out. The women here are bad enough, and she tries not to think about how, in the future, if she doesn’t want to be alone for the rest of her life (which she has not technically decided yet), she’ll have to start dating, too.

“I, uh… watched a bunch of TV and deep-cleaned the bathroom,” says Ali, pressing her thumb into the back of her skull where her headache is still pulsing, despite the Advil she took earlier. These days, Advil might as well be a placebo.

“Wow, I don’t know who I feel worse for,” says Namisa, “you or me.”

“Well, you probably know what I did.” Victoria finishes her bowl of Lucky Charms and smacks her lips.

“Disney?” Ali and Namisa say at the same time.

Victoria beams. “We rode Splash Mountain five times and ate Dole Whips till we nearly puked.”

“Disney and dates,” says Ali. “Between the two of you, my nightmare weekend is complete.”

“Okay, hit me with some good news.” Victoria flips open the Lisa Frank stationery she special-orders from eBay, poising a strawberry-scented glitter gel pen above the first line.

“People are going absolutely wild for Jen’s Vanity Fair cover,” says Namisa. “Everyone has been dying to hear her side of the split from Brad, and the article definitely delivered.”

“The internet is also getting a real kick out of the paparazzi photos of Paris in her Team Jolie shirt and Nikki in her Team Aniston shirt,” Ali says, pretending she cares. This was hard enough to do before Natalie died, but since then, the pretending has felt especially sapping. Ali feels like a cell phone you’ve had for a few years too many that can no longer hold its charge, and the second you perform one task on it—like replying to an email or playing a game of Snake—the thin line of low power appears. She wishes there were an outlet she could plug herself into.

“And Britney has agreed to do a People cover about the birth of Sean Preston,” Namisa chimes in.

“Excellent,” says Victoria. “Bad news?”

“All the gossip blogs are running those paparazzi photos of Lindsay Lohan with a boob falling out of her tank top,” says Namisa. “Fucking crikey, I miss the good old days.” The good old days being only a few months before, when media was mainly relegated to print or TV and all the major outlets were in publicists’ pockets. Most published stories came directly from publicists, and if they didn’t want certain information covered, all they had to do was threaten to cut off access or sue. On the rare occasion a scandal did come out, publicists at least had days to get in front of it. Now these online gossip blogs can publish stories in minutes, and publicists find out at the same time as the general public. The tipping point was around May, when Perez Hilton (previously known as PageSixSixSix), YouTube, the Huffington Post, and a US version of OK! all launched, and when camera phones started to outsell brick phones. Suddenly civilians could catch celebrities doing anything from picking their noses to leaving clubs wasted to cheating on their significant others. Over the course of 2005, the number of blogs has skyrocketed from ten million to twenty-five million, and for the first time ever, news seemingly moves at the speed of light, reaching countless people in a flash.

A prime example was Tom Cruise jumping on Oprah’s couch to declare he was in love with Katie Holmes. Thanks to YouTube, short clips from the show almost immediately whizzed around the internet with titles like “Tom Cruise kills Oprah.” Most people sharing the clips hadn’t even watched the full episode, in which the crowd was even more hyped up than Tom, and Oprah was goading him into talking about his personal life. In context, while the interview was being conducted, it seemed more like he was playing along, but without the context, it looked like he had lost his mind. After that, it was all downhill for Tom, and no publicist could control it.

“Re: Lindsay’s boob…” Victoria’s eyes light up with one of her terrible ideas. “Could we say it was a stunt to increase awareness about breast cancer?”

Ali kicks Namisa under the desk.

“I think we’re better off just letting it fizzle out,” says Namisa. “By tomorrow the blogs will move on to something else.”

“You’re probably right,” says Victoria. “Is there more bad news?”

“Perez is threatening to out Lance Bass again,” says Ali. Pre–gossip blogs, they never had to worry about celebrities being outed. But since gossip bloggers have no relationship with publicists and thus nothing to lose, plus Perez himself is gay, one of his missions seems to be outing closeted celebrities. “If you know something to be a fact, why not report it? Why is that still taboo?” Ali doesn’t believe anyone should be outed against their will, but she does kind of see Perez’s point—how will gayness ever stop seeming like a shameful secret unless the media stops treating it like one? As an out lesbian with no shame about her own sexuality, she hates the hypocrisy involved in counseling her gay clients to stay in the closet, and she wishes things were different.

She still remembers the first time she learned an A-list celebrity was gay and hiding it. Ali had just started as an assistant at her first PR agency—she was twenty-three, and it was 1993, before any celebrities had publicly come out. She’d been backstage at a movie premiere, struggling to hold about ten different purses and clutches, when she saw XXXXXXXXX, an actress in her early thirties with two Academy Awards, lean toward a woman standing next to her, someone Ali didn’t know, and plant a casual kiss on her mouth.

Ali dropped all the purses and clutches and grasped her coworker Sharon’s forearm. “Did you see that?” Ali gasped.

Sharon appeared completely unruffled. “Oh yeah, that’s her longtime partner.”

Ali blinked repeatedly. “I’m sorry, what?” A waiter passed by with a tray of champagne flutes, and even though they weren’t supposed to drink at events, Ali grabbed a flute and took a big gulp.

Sharon laughed and p. . .