Page 10 of The Dirty Version
Tash went home to submerge her body and her feelings in the bathtub.
She opened the duplex’s large windows to the salty surf-song drifting over from the beach. She knew she should have embraced Astrid, author to actress. She knew she should have been excited to answer Astrid’s questions.
Instead, Tash had choked on insecurity; she confessed this ashamedly to the soap and bubbles and cool porcelain of her claw-foot tub.
In the moments on that Seashell pool deck, Tash had coveted the clear warmth Astrid drew from Caleb.
She’d coveted their breeziness and affinity while she second-guessed herself.
She was bound to let them down. Firmly away from Caleb’s red-pen asterisks and confident claims, Tash despairingly contemplated what he’d assigned her—he’d asked for mood and verbs and adjectives and specific action: Noab undressing Hewett.
It sounded simple, but to write it, Tash would have to emotionally undress herself.
This was not her strong suit; she far preferred to dissect motifs in other people’s literature than bare her soul in her own.
She might have dropped out of her graduate program but only after she’d learned critique from a master—she’d dated Leo Rousseau at the inception of his acclaimed literary journal. They’d even cohabitated.
Their relationship was a train wreck, yes—but Tash had emerged from it with a useful set of skills.
And their intellectual intercourse still remained the best she’d ever had; Leo’s cheating might have crushed her heart and her ego, but Tash never let it ruin the way he’d enlightened her mind.
Which was why she bothered to still follow his journal.
It was why she’d said yes to being interviewed for his podcast’s summer tour, on a panel of Florida writers, taping live from Miami in a few weeks.
Leo Rousseau was a prestige ticket, and appearing in his lineup seemed an excellent way for Tash to recover the literary street cred she’d lost when Braverman’s “unnamed sources” spoke for her in the press.
In fact, if she could trust him, if he weren’t such a toxic, pompous douche, Leo might have been a better guide than Caleb through the writing of the new scenes.
A contradiction of sex and integrity would never flummox Leo.
He lived unapologetically at the intersection of base instinct and insight; of brilliant editorial work and that time he fucked an editorial assistant in Tash’s bed.
Which was why she’d never ask him how to write one thing without devaluing the other, or how to handle this crossroads, or how to separate Noab’s desire from Tash’s own vulnerability.
Instead, she shut off the bathwater. Relying on the distant ocean sounds for help, she conjured a sea captain, shipwrecked, scraped and tumbled and bloodied on the jutting coral edging a sacred Prayer Grove.
A man discovered accidentally by the heir to a female warrior crown, whose Sisterhood had banned men for generations.
Whose Lore told of the latent poison carried in every XY chromosome.
But Noab’s knees still collapsed on the shore beside him, despite every conscious warning.
She still hauled Hewett’s musculature from the dangers of the island shallows to the safety of the sacred shade.
She crossed a hallowed line, laying him in an inner sanctum, drawn inexplicably to his forbidden and fabled body.
Noab’s hands hovered and her thoughts raced—every cell fascinated and wholly terrified.
And then Tash stalled.
In the book, the rest occurred off-screen—ostensibly, Noab unclothed him in order to assess his injuries. Ostensibly, she experienced a male body for the first time—her fingers on his lips, perhaps. Her gaze on his lean and weather-beaten torso.
From there, Tash floundered.
She’d much rather write about the implications of the existential threat a man posed to an isolated island nation than the implications of what awaited in his pants.
* * *
The assignment gave Tash three pirate sex dreams over the course of the next two days, while she made no progress on her Noab-and-Hewett scene.
She answered each of Caleb’s How’s it going?
texts with a breezy lie: Amazing! Then she sent Janelle a screenshot of the conversation, adding, This is not true and I’m completely fucked.
To Tash’s latest text, Janelle replied, Good thing you’re on your way here to get your ass kicked. Yandra’s asking for you. Come get out of your head.
Tash was late to Biscayne Coastal’s annual end-of-term faculty bar brawl, formally known as Adjunct Night.
Manta Ray’s, the local campus beach dive, put it on at the end of every term—each department sent an adjunct to guest-bartend a subject-themed well drink.
Yandra Santos, the beloved Cuban American poet who ruled English Lit with an iron, age-spotted hand, had nominated Tash as this year’s cocktail slinger.
Patrons would vote, medals would be bestowed, bragging rights for the next semester would be obtained; at the birth of the tradition, there was even a cash prize.
As always, everyone expected Women’s Studies to take home the gold.
Other disciplines could try, but Janelle’s crew usually put up the winning drink.
Their cocktail was usually a Blow Job—Janelle encouraged her acolytes to take risks in every area but this one.
She’d studied many esoteric human secrets, and she knew: The Blow Job was a sure thing.
Tash and Yandra had already identified the English department’s biggest competition for second place—the actual Manta Ray, owner of the bar and the creator of the Asymptote, which would go head-to-head with Tash’s Tequila Mockingbird.
Ray had been the multivariable calculus teaching assistant for at least as long as Tash had been at Biscayne Coastal; she’d heard he was a conclusion shy of finishing his number theory dissertation.
She’d also heard he had no real academic credentials—the math department just kept him in equations because they got a discount on hot wings at his bar.
Either way, Tash welcomed the excuse to leave her apartment.
She’d spent too many hours staring at her blank screen, typing verbs and adjectives and then pressing delete.
On the way out, she caught herself in the hallway mirror for a last glance, Boo Radley in a headlock under her bare arm.
A former student had named and gifted the life-size Halloween skeleton to her for the occasion.
A prop, he’d grinned, to promote the Tequila Mockingbird—revealing he’d definitely never cracked open the class reading.
Her phone trilled as Tash took the stairs down to her driveway. The name Caleb Rafferty splashed across the screen. For a moment, she thought about sending it to voicemail and turning off her ringer.
“Tash, hey.” Caleb’s voice spilled warm in the gathering dusk. “Read me your first page.”
Tash frowned at his abruptness as she unlocked her car. “Right now?” She tried to shove Boo Radley into the backseat.
“Is this a bad time?”
Tash had bargained with herself about this night out: She’d take a last-ditch pass at her homework bright and early, before she and Caleb were due to meet.
“Um.” A skeleton leg jabbed her in the belly button.
She shifted, the thrift-store pants she’d bought for Boo Radley bunching on his knobbed bones.
She pinned the phone between her chin and shoulder, wrestling a fucking Halloween prop to lie flat and not give her any trouble. “I’m kind of busy.”
“I won’t keep you.” Caleb didn’t let up. “Just read me the first page.”
Tash tried tugging Boo Radley into the car by his scrawny armpits. “Can I call you in the morning?”
“Tash.” Caleb’s tone had stopped cajoling. “I spoke to Brian Doolittle—Braverman’s head writer? He said you gave him the extreme runaround for several weeks. I can’t play games like that. It’s important we get off on the right foot.”
Boo Radley’s right foot hooked on a seat belt. “Fuck.” When she released it, the button on his lumbar spine depressed. His hidden speaker emitted a loop of ghoulish laughter.
Caleb sighed loudly. “Please don’t tell me I gave up a night of my reunion to work on this and right now you’re at Disney World on a scary ride.”
“What? Disney’s in Orlando—that’s nowhere near here.” Tash winced as Boo Radley cackled again.
“Tash.” Caleb made his impatience clear. “You have to take this seriously. We’re on a deadline.”
“I am taking it seriously.” As a last resort, she clicked her key fob. She dumped the skeleton sternly in her trunk. “Look, I’m struggling with the writing, I won’t lie. But I’ll get there. I have a college thing tonight—otherwise, trust me, I’d be working on it right now.”
Which was how Caleb Rafferty ended up at Adjunct Night, at Manta Ray’s Seaside Tavern, rubbing elbows with amateur mixologists and befriending an assortment of drunken Biscayne Coastal staff.
He ordered Russian History’s Moscow Mule as Janelle excitedly waved him over from behind her velvet rope—she sat with Denise at an exclusive high-top table she’d reserved, brandishing her tenure, while Tash stood behind the sticky bar, pouring house tequila into cloudy shot glasses for Ray’s less discerning clientele.
“ Wait. Your original, bespoke, literature-themed cocktail is just a plain ounce of crappy tequila?” Denise narrowed in suspicion when Tash finally made her way over and thunked three Mockingbirds down.
“Yes.” As Tash pointed out the obvious: “But the name.” She pointed to Yandra, who had dreamed it up, and whose gray fluff and long, flowing skirt were holding court in another corner. “Tequila Mockingbird! We could win just for being clever.”
She smiled a greeting at Caleb, who’d been bookended by Janelle and Denise. His hair curled slightly in the tavern’s humid racket. Ray’s was sawdust and peanut shells and jukebox; Tash had left the house in cutoffs. An hour of crowded adjunct bartending had dampened her with sweat.