When makeup artist Nia Balewa signs up to work for the Glamorous Beauty Pageant, she is unaware that her ex-best friend, whom she hasn't spoken to in six years and who also happens to be the current Hollywood heartthrob, is judging the pageant.
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When Myles Torres found himself lying wide awake in bed at three in the morning—for what seemed like three whole months of inconsistent sleep patterns—he decided that it was time he admitted it to himself; he had a problem.
In the silence of the night, he could hear the regular ticking of the clock, but even their rhythmic beats did not help lull him to sleep. Nor did the 4-7-8; he mentally repeated the words as he performed the exercise: inhale for four seconds, hold for seven, exhale for eight—nothing worked.
What had started as a drizzle, now turned into a full-fledged downpour as the rain roared with the occasional thunder, drowning out the faint ticking and all of Myles' hopes of dozing off.
Having been used to sleeping with the lights on, all his life, he found himself rolling onto his side to shut them off tonight. Pulling the sheets up to his chin as the air suddenly seemed determined to chill him to the bones, he reached out his hand to locate the switch. When his fingers fumbled to turn it off, his eyes met his own, in the life-size painting that hung on the glossy, burgundy wall across from his bed.
That portrait of him was quite flattering, really. His nose had been painted sharper than it was, and his eyes had a mysterious glint to them that only proved how great of a job the artist had done. Myles couldn't seem to recollect his name, though; some famous painter from France who had sketched a couple of other celebrities too, and had charged a fortune for the same.
Such a waste of money, Myles had thought at the time, but some reporters had caught a whiff of the story and thanks to his publicist, Genevieve, he'd had to host a bunch of curious, but extremely nosy reporters—who seemed to have a lack of spicy gossip to keep their newspapers going—at his house, so they could write an article about this phenomenal painting that everyone in the industry was talking about.
Sitting up in his bed, he began to pour himself a glass of water from the nightstand. Glancing at the bottle of sleeping pills placed next to the jug, he wondered if they could help him sleep tonight. Not having a lot of options, he gulped down the tablet with some water and prayed that he would be blessed with a miracle that would cause him to fall asleep.
Lying back down, he closed his eyes and tried to steady his breathing. But after almost an hour of tossing and turning in bed, he gave up.
His mind clogged with several thoughts, he chose to flip his covers and walked up to the floor-to-ceiling slider windows at the far end of his room. The droplets of rain had now begun to hit the glass with a frightening ferocity that caused him to abandon any plans he had of walking into the balcony to calm his nerves.
It had been a pretty normal day for him—working out at the gym, lunch with work friends, drinks at the club—but as he stood there watching the rain, along with today's date, etched into his mind were the memories associated with it.
