Page 12 of The Dirty Version

Caleb had said serious . Tash could be serious. Caleb had said they needed to buckle down .

And Tash awoke with this in mind, ready and resolved to thus be fully buckled.

She rubbed her eyes clear, then wrestled herself into a sports bra and some running shorts.

She jogged the circuit from her duplex to the ocean, along the long sandstone promenade, past the wooden surfboard racks outside the juice joint, the entire stretch balmy with the scent of pressed green apple and melting sunscreen.

She got home and marched herself into the shower.

She scoured the image of Caleb in Manta Ray’s parking lot from her body and from her brain.

She did this properly—with a local grapefruit sugar scrub and sustainably harvested Florida sponges, sloughing off the spell of his nearness, leaving her psyche lighter.

She wrung her hair in a headdress of twisted towel, face to the magnifying mirror; in the morning light, she glowed regal and attachment-free.

She felt like Noab after a training exercise, fresh from her spear work. Except she had no spear, just sharpened pencils and her pride. Tash exited the duplex. She shut her front door with a determined slam.

By the time Caleb arrived at her studio, Tash was on her second iced masala chai, buzzing from vanilla and cardamom.

She no longer kept a coffee maker in her home or in her workspace—she’d shed the habit when she shed her fiancé.

She’d let Zachary keep the roaster and the grinder and returned to her roots.

She’d been taught by her aunt to make chai for her father, the process both a time suck and a respite; the boil-and-stir both soothing and an obligation, like so many things about her dad.

Vikram Grover’s love came always with a flip side of disappointment: Proud of Tash’s success as a writer, mortified by her actual book.

Thoroughly modern in his ambitions for her, throwback in his dismay at her itinerant singlehood.

Critical that she dallied on at the college as just an adjunct, thrilled that the elastic nature of her schedule allowed for family dinner in West Palm on any given night.

“Hot or iced?” she called out to Caleb from the studio’s tiny kitchen, straining the milky black tea mixture from a steel pot, inhaling star anise and ginger and cinnamon steam.

“Whatever you’re having.” He shucked his messenger bag onto the low-slung sofa, stepping to the studio’s floor-to-ceiling windows, taking in the gnarled mangrove forest and the intermittent beams of filtered sun.

“Tash? You might have undersold this when you said your office had ‘natural light.’” His voice marveled.

“This is amazing. I feel like we’re in a dinosaur terrarium. ”

Tash filled a tumbler with ice cubes. “Easy there, Hollywood. In Florida, we just call it outside.” Although, to be fair, the dry land edge of the mangrove was home to several species of large iguanas.

“Don’t downplay this! Did you lure me here to feed me to your velociraptor? This place is bonkers.”

The garden-apartment studio was 1,500 square feet of Intracoastal-facing hidden gem—which was how Tash’s younger brother, Rohan, threatened to advertise it in the listings whenever he needed sibling leverage.

“I can’t take credit. My parents bought it for my dadi—that means ‘grandma’—to try to get her to move here, from Kentucky.

” Tash’s dadi said it was like sleeping in a rainforest fishbowl; she spent one night, then handed Rohan the keys.

“It belongs to my younger brother now. But he lives in California with his boyfriend, so he lets me use it as an office.”

“Your brother lives in California?”

Tash granted him this tiny tidbit. “West Hollywood. He works at Cedars-Sinai. My dad tells people he’s a doctor, because he thinks it sounds more macho, but Rohan’s actually a transplant nurse.”

“West Hollywood is near me. I live in Silver Lake.” Caleb had turned back to the windows, his scruff and shoulder outlines reflected as he gazed. His ocean-colored eyes examined the primordial fern thicket. “Do you ever go out there?”

“To California? All the time.” Tash arranged his iced chai on an end table. “Actually, if it wasn’t for these scenes, I’d be visiting right now.”

Caleb abandoned his ogle of the mangrove.

With the driest of faux sympathies: “Oh, I’m sorry!

Is the way you gave a major film studio the slip and held up their production, potentially costing them tens of thousands of dollars, ruining your summer plans?

That sounds terrible! I can’t imagine what that’s like. ”

Tash suddenly was bashful. “That isn’t what I meant.”

But he was teasing. Caleb joined her at the coffee table, sinking into a club chair—seating Tash had added to Rohan’s furniture mix, upholstered in a softened, sun-bleached jute.

“That isn’t what I meant, either.” He thumbed to the lush, reptilian courtyard.

“I was actually asking if you ever go out there . Into your own personal jungle.”

“Oh.” Tash recovered. “Sometimes.”

By “sometimes,” she meant all the time—but on the balcony, upstairs. She purposely didn’t mention she lived in the duplex directly above where they were sitting. Or that the “jungle” Caleb referred to was basically the basement to her incredible beachside treehouse view.

“Well, Natasha.” He copied Janelle’s intonation, playful and austere, settling barefoot into her office’s relaxed lounge.

“I work with a lot of creatives. And I’ve met them in lots of funky places—a sweat lodge, a mountain yak yurt.

But I have never”—he swept a hand at the enclosure—“been anywhere this Jurassic. So, thank you. I can’t believe this is where you get to write. ” He was grinning.

Tash found herself grinning, too.

It boomeranged between them, and she realized he’d passed a secret test. In the same way Biscayne Coastal’s adjunct-lounge sandscape inspired The Colony ’s crushing shore, the undergrowth beyond Rohan’s apartment’s glass-box interior inspired the island’s beating heart.

To wonder at the thriving groundwork of stem and shoot and tuber was to appreciate her novel.

Buckle down.

They might have both heard the silent nudge at the same time. From her seat on the sofa, Tash reached for her laptop and her script notes. Caleb cleared his throat, unzipping his messenger bag.

Still, he asked another question. “What was the word you used for ‘grandma’? I don’t know it.”

Tash watched him decant his supplies: two legal pads, a tin of paper clips, a wad of pink sticky notes.

“‘Dadi.’ It means ‘father’s mother’ in Hindi.

” She stirred the metal straw in her iced chai, its spice-lite mirroring her looks.

Tash didn’t mind offering him the explanation, if that’s what he was asking: “My mother is white, and she’s from Ohio—but my dad’s parents moved from Mumbai to Lexington, Kentucky, when he was five.

” She smiled at the image of her tiny, spunky dadi in the sprawling Southern suburb.

“My grandma is a widow now, but she’s still ride-or-die bluegrass and bourbon, even if she doesn’t drink.

Think Indira Gandhi in cowboy boots. She actually wants her ashes sprinkled at Churchill Downs. ”

Caleb chuckled, positioning his laptop beside an array of pens. “So there’s a younger brother in WeHo, a rodeo grandma in Kentucky...”

Tash filled in the blanks: “And an older brother an hour north of here, in West Palm. Near my parents.”

“Is that where you grew up?”

She nodded.

“Are you guys close?”

The Grovers were close, but it was also not that simple. “I’m close to Rohan, the one in California. He’s two years younger than me, but people always thought we were twins. Before he went through puberty and became a giant.”

She could have left it there.

But maybe Tash wanted Caleb to know her family situation wasn’t perfect.

“Things with my parents are more complicated, though. They’re conservative in a way that makes it hard for them to get on board with some of my life choices.

” She could have referenced her flagging teaching career, or the way she’d managed to chase Zachary away, but the day was early.

Instead, she pointed to Caleb’s dog-eared copy of The Colony.

“For example, they’re not huge fans of the book. ”

“What? Why?”

Tash’s old hurt quickly resurfaced; she’d gotten used to playing it off, but deep down it pained her not to have her parents’ support.

“The throwing of the baby off a cliff, into the ocean?” To explain her parents’ perspective, she deliberately oversimplified the novel’s final scene.

“It bothers them that I could write something so radical. I think they felt it called their parenting into question.” It embarrassed them in front of their bridge group, at the high school where her mom taught, at dinner with her father’s colleagues—Tash had heard the long list, and could go on and on.

“But it’s a plot point in a book.” Caleb echoed the same rationale Tash had used in an attempt to reason with her mother. “It’s not like you go around killing actual babies.”

Tash gestured her agreement. “I know. But to them, the idea didn’t reflect well on my upbringing, or my state of mind.

They’d be happier if I could write a nice book.

” She smiled at him in self-deprecation.

“And honestly, they weren’t alone—my older brother felt the same.

He has two kids.” Tash sighed. “People have a weird way of taking fiction personally.” She did not mention Zachary, her ex-fiancé.

“So now we kind of just don’t talk about it. It’s how I keep the peace.”

Caleb air-quoted his incredulity. “Wait—you ‘kind of just don’t talk about’ your bestselling novel? The one that’s going to be a television show?”