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eBook Category: Science Fiction
eBook Description: A story entirely about eating, bulimia, weight loss and gain, and the culture thereof in Hollywood. Mouthwatering and gut-busting. No magazine in the US would, uh, touch it with a fork, but it's been published in Ireland, France, and elsewhere. Includes the revelation of the "Hollywood Diet Secret." Eat all that you want to and never gain weight. Unless.....

eBook Publisher: Fictionwise.com, Published: Deus X and Other Stories, 1993
Fictionwise Release Date: July 2007

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Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: eReader (PDB) [39 KB] , ePub (EPUB) [41 KB] , Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [25 KB] , Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [190 KB] , Palm Doc (PDB) [27 KB] , Microsoft Reader (LIT) [83 KB] , Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [98 KB] , hiebook (KML) [86 KB] , Sony Reader (LRF) [52 KB] , iSilo (PDB) [22 KB] , Mobipocket (PRC) [28 KB] , Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [56 KB] , OEBFF Format (IMP) [41 KB]
Words: 7576
Reading time: 21-30 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Format:  Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud DISABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED

When she returned from puking up the meat course in the ladies' room, the desserts were already on the table, enormous platters of profiterole au chocolate--six balls of vanilla ice cream encased in puff pastry and swimming in lakes of deep dark fondant.

"I took the liberty.... "Armand said suavely, smiling at her as he wrapped his lips around a dripping spoonful.

Christine had never met a man like Count Armand Kubescu before.

True, Los Angeles was awash in slick continental types laying claim to nebulous titles of nobility, dressing like Ruritanian diplomats, and living it up with no visible means of support. It was an old Hollywood tradition. They fronted fancy restaurants and clubs, pimped for sleazy porn producers, sold real estate or used Mercedes, or gigoloed for ancient has-been starlets flush with the proceeds of their latest divorce.

Like most of these counts from central casting, Armand Kubescu had thick straight black hair impeccably groomed in some unisex Beverly Hills salon, intense dark eyes under dramatic brows, and a light generalized European accent. Like most of them, he was slim, graceful, affected a languid William F. Buckley slouch, and seemed ageless.

Ordinarily, Christine Coleman avoided such creatures like the plague they were. If they weren't gay, they were impotent, and if they weren't impotent, they were into slimy fetishes or dumb bondage numbers. If they weren't out to sell you something, they were out to sell you.

Indeed, in a certain twisted sense, they were a form of competition, predators working the neighboring ecological niche. Christine understood them all too well.

For Los Angeles was even more abundantly awash in beautiful women of a certain age which made them a bit long in the tooth for starlets, with a sprinkling of walk-on credits extracted on low-budget casting couches, a garage apartment in the hills, and a cranky twelve-year old used Porsche. Women just short of enough acting talent to make it as tv bit players, possessed of just enough pride to prevent them from sliding into hookerdom or the fading porn industry, and too indolent, face it, to wait tables in topless bars.

Women, who, like Christine, surfed through life at the fringes of The Industry via affairs with tv writers, minor-league actors, and production managers, odd jobs in Santa Monica boutiques, a very occasional walk-on in a commercial, ectoplasmic this, and crystal-channeling that.

The Count Kubescus and the Barons of Brentwood worked the feminine flip-side of much the same turf, and while the competition from them might be rather oblique, the idea of actually dating one of them had always struck Christine as the moral equivalent of fag haggery. Like, what was the point? To see whose reach for the check could be slowest?

But Armand Kubescu was different.