Page 14 of The Dirty Version

Actually, Janelle had said “lube it up”—but Tash was paraphrasing.

Then she apologized for the second time that morning, noting the pattern. Self-referentially: “She also says I shouldn’t fuck this up by offending my intimacy translator.” Tash would need to keep reminding herself not every exchange had to be a duel.

Caleb cracked a small smile, letting her slightly off the hook.

“Well, that would be a nice first step. The second step might be for you to give me a real shot.” He pinned her with a benchmark: “I’m willing to use everything you just said as our guidelines for working together.

We can even ask Janelle to test-read our scenes before we submit. ”

The mangrove outside suddenly seemed filled with olive branches. Tash smelled a peace pipe. But before she could reach for it, Caleb snatched it back.

“It’d be even better if you could meet me in the middle. I meant what I said about making this a safe space, but it has to go both ways. We need to respect each other’s intentions. From now on, for real—I don’t want to be the target of your personal attacks.”

Tash met his frank stare. She gathered up the many spears she’d thrown at him, and the evidence of his disarming patience. She glanced to the giant chip on her shoulder, considering where she might, temporarily, stash it away.

She stuck her hand out, touching him for the first time. “Okay, Rafferty. You have a deal.”

* * *

Once Tash agreed to Caleb’s revamped terms, they returned to dialing up sensuality, to Noab and Hewett and the forbidden, and to illicit moods.

They returned to the garden apartment for the next three days, side by side in its lounge.

Tash kept it all business—she buckled down , she was serious , no more personal attacks.

She gave in to Caleb’s creative methodology, following his instruction.

His tactics for assembling The Colony ’s screen strokes differed vastly from the way she’d written the book.

Instead of adding words, Caleb pushed Tash to distill them, stripping the scene to its essence, identifying emotion beneath the surface, then translating it into the vocabulary of muscle and sweat and skin.

“This is our chance at stage direction—we want to spoon-feed Ram evocative physical detail. It’s the closest you’ll get to creative control, Tash—which is why it’s so important. Braverman is always more receptive when the input is visually lush.”

“‘Visually lush’?” Tash took a break from her scene notes, throwing Caleb an impressed curve of her mouth. “How poetic.”

He glanced up from the grid of storyboards he’d laid out on the sisal rug.

“Is it? I guess that’s what happens when you spend so much time behind the scenes.

Every department has a different lingo—to get through to them, you have to change the way you talk.

” He knelt, swapping one sequence for another.

“For example, right now you and I are speaking Creative Genius—but wait until you hear me talk Marketing.” Caleb raised playful eyebrows. “That’s the real poetry.”

“I’m sure.” Tash fizzed with the coltish energy bouncing off the apartment’s walls. It had expanded seamlessly, filling the void her suspicions of Caleb had vacated. It seemed all the effort she’d been devoting to resenting him now flowed into repartee.

She discovered he couldn’t sit still while immersed in his process—Caleb moved in the pursuit of answers, armchair to rug to standing, hands clasped in his tousled hair, eyes closed behind his glasses, deep in thought, walking them through the scene:

“The Grove hut where Noab brings Hewett’s body—is it like a thatched shed? How big are we talking? And what exactly is this marble slab?”

Tash supplied answering detail:

“The slab she lays him on is like an altar table—made of coral, from the island shallows. The hut is empty otherwise. Banana-leaf roof, dirt floor, probably three hundred square feet. And most importantly”—in a display of unanimity and her grasp of Caleb’s technique—“the space is divine. It’s a holy inner shelter, inside a Prayer Grove, intended only for an ordained, select few.

Even Noab, who’s basically tribal royalty, isn’t supposed to be there.

And she definitely isn’t allowed to bring in a man. ”

Caleb’s eyes had opened, staring at her. “Excellent.”

Tash warmed when he approved.

“What’s Noab’s emotion once she gets there? She has this half-drowned, unconscious dude on the table—shirt torn, pants on, bleeding from cuts on his forehead and a nasty puncture on his thigh.” Handing Tash the verbal baton, he took up his whiteboard. “Word association. Go.”

Her turn to close her eyes, then. In earlier rounds, Caleb had suggested she say whatever came to mind. “Fear. Apprehension. Curiosity. Dread. Lust.” Tash enjoyed the linguistic salad. “Desire. Doubt. Wonder. Hunger. Panic.”

“Great.” Caleb steered the exercise. “Now put those things against a backdrop of Noab’s inexperience. It amplifies her transgression, right?” His pause was careful. “That’s what I was getting at, when I mentioned it last time.”

And Tash nodded, careful also; indicating it was safe to proceed.

“Knowing she has zero experience—that being together there is completely off-limits—makes the situation hotter .” Caleb’s grin was self-effacing.

“Which is the very scientific word Ram would also use to describe the mechanics of maximizing the erotic—so we can just make it our shorthand.” In deference to his deal with Tash: “While also abiding by our own principals.”

Tash smiled. “Got it.”

“Now we put it all together—and this is still a spitball, okay? We just say everything in our head until we get it right. In terms of visually explicit physicality—while Noab is tending to Hewett’s body, what is the most innocent yet hottest thing she can do?”

Tash jumped in with something entry-level. “She could trail a finger down his body.”

Caleb nodded. “Be more specific. Like”—he scrawled it on his whiteboard—“she could trail. Her pointer finger. Down the center. Of his bare sternum.” Caleb added his own line: “She could cradle. His jaw with her palm.”

“She could bite her lip as she does it.” Tash bit her own lip, in illustration.

“She could give a sharp intake of breath. She could heave her bosom.” Grinning at him over the cliché, having fun now.

“She could tilt her head back and gasp.” Tash figured Noab wouldn’t be caught dead doing such a thing, but it was fun to roll with the drama.

“She could feel her pulse race.” Tilting her own neck back, accidentally knocking the clip out of her hair, tossing the unleashed mane behind her shoulder.

One hand to her throat, tracing the beat there as it fluttered.

“Um.” Caleb’s marker hovered, forgotten, by his whiteboard. His eyes dazed a bit, maybe even caught on Tash’s neck and hand. He gestured between her and his paperback copy of her novel. “Do you want me to leave you two alone?”

Since they’d been at it for a while, and in a safe space, the blocking exercises had removed all shame. Tash grabbed Caleb’s felt eraser and chucked it at him, grinning wide and not embarrassed. “You said this was a spitball!”

He chucked it back at her. “No. You’re right.” Still laughing. “By all means. Do go on.”

And it went on.

In a nonstop stream of descriptive arousal, mixed with easy humor, the scene presenting challenges Tash had not known would await.

Hewett’s lack of consciousness turned most of the conventionally sexy ways Noab could touch him into something creepy.

Each move Tash and Caleb brainstormed had to be gut-checked against the idea of consent.

“Which brings us to this puncture wound—upper thigh, correct? Are we talking inner or outer?” Caleb stood from the sofa, extending one cargo-shorts-clad leg.

“He’s lying on his back, so I assume it’s bleeding from the front.

Is this an inner-thigh, full-on groin situation?

” Caleb’s hands parenthesized his hip bone to his fly.

“No.” Tash stood from the club chair, mirroring his posture, forming her own brackets.

“Absolutely not. It’s an outer-thigh, curve-of-butt-cheek situation.

” Highlighting the front pocket to the side seam of her cutoffs.

“Which has the advantage of bringing Noab’s attention to Hewett’s groin, but with a tangential elegance.

That way, she doesn’t get a face-full of his balls.

” Remembering that Caleb had instructed her to use anatomically correct language, she added: “I mean testicles.”

She sparkled, fully aware of an outrageous shift—in a blur of mere days, they’d gone from arguing feminist theory to talking testicles, surely a sign of true collaboration.

They floated giddily on their progress, now near a finish line.

They splashed each other with offhand vulgarity, aware it was unseemly.

Tash would have yelled at herself about it, but she was having too much fun.

“Oh, right! Tangential elegance. Of course.” Caleb smiled sarcastically as he sat back down on the sofa.

“Don’t you think so?” Tash continued to dissect it. “The outside curve of a man’s hip could be equally suggestive—think of it like the male version of side boob.”

“Sure. Let’s get it down correctly, then.” He opened his laptop, beginning to type. “‘Ship-mast splinter, stab wound. Hewett’s outer thigh.’” He made a show of adding: “‘Male version of side boob. Tangential elegance. No face-full of testicles.’”

* * *

By some unspoken agreement each day, they’d worked through lunch. By the afternoons, Tash found herself starving. Her insides growled each evening when Caleb left the garden apartment; she woke up hungry every morning upstairs in her bed.

Having dreamed again of pirates, and shipwrecked blue heat, and the printed collars a certain hipster buttoned over a scroll of ink.

She dragged herself outside for another run each morning, another shower, another hard look in the mirror.

She remembered Caleb’s rebuke in the Manta Ray’s moonlight: They had a deadline.

She reminded herself she was there to buckle down .

Not a belt buckle, and not buckling knees, and not buckling a sex designer to her upholstered headboard.

Every morning, Tash locked her upstairs apartment and went downstairs to make chai.

She became a professional, with a production budget waiting and a reader fan base and an internet reaction and a film adaptation on the line.

She straightened sofa pillows and her script stacks.

She righted a tower of sticky notes. She weeded out the dry pens and wiped smudges from her laptop screen.

In the kitchen alcove, she added water and masala mix and black tea to a pot. Sugar and milk. She reminded herself: The only things to stir up were her characters and caffeine.

She and Caleb polished their blocking proposal in the fading sun of a fourth day. Caleb would package it into a shot list for the Braverman story team in the morning. Hewett’s unconscious state ruled out the need for dialogue.

Tash dubbed the approach they’d taken to Hewett’s injured pelvis area “chiaroscuro”; she was quite pleased with the term.

The scene sizzled with the juxtaposition of light and a shading—of primal instinct in a place of sacral worship, of raunch and holy.

It read both racier and more subtle than any film foreplay she ever thought she’d pen.

Most importantly, it didn’t feel cheap—it felt elevated, and Tash actually felt proud.

“You realize that’s burlesque, right?” Caleb collected his storyboards. “The idea of what you choose not to show? I don’t want to I-told-you-so—”

“So don’t.” Tash ferried empty tumblers to the kitchen.

“—but when Noab tugs Hewett’s pants down to rub salve into his wound,” Caleb continued, “while very much deciding not to look at his crotch—that’s burlesque. That’s ‘The Tease.’ The visual withholding of his manhood. Or, you might say, his foreign member.”

Tash stuck her head back into the hallway. “Why do I have a feeling you just wanted a reason to list more penis words?”

They’d already curated a catalog of genteelisms for Hewett’s length and girth; for the erection that would involuntarily arise as Noab soothed and sponged water on his body.

Caleb slung his messenger bag across his wide chest. His wink was dangerous. “Anyway. I know Ram and Doolittle are going to love this. Reggie in executive production, too.”

“And now you’re just listing Hollywood cartoon names.”

Caleb smiled at her from the apartment’s front hall. “Or, you know, the people on the story team who decide our fate.” He put his hand on the doorknob, seeming to weigh an option. “Hey. You know the boardwalk I drive by on my way here?”

“I do.” Tash’s stomach grumbled. She needed to go upstairs and order pizza.

“Are any of those restaurants good?”

Her appetite clamored, and Tash held it purposefully at a distance. “The Mexican is.” She called it out, blasé. “Order the fish tacos.”

“Want to join me? Celebrate writing your first rigid phallus?” Caleb sounded casual, and then a little sheepish: “I’ve been eating by myself at the hotel most nights. It’s extremely sad.”

She’d turned back to the kitchen sink, cold water spurting on her wrists. Tash took her time shutting off the faucet. She let her pulse slow, reminding herself of Manta Ray’s midnight parking lot, and Caleb’s succinct hood thump as he stood and strode away.

She had no desire to revisit that sense of bumbling miscalculation. But Caleb was lonely. His overture was definitely garden-variety.

Her breathing evened. “Sure.” She summoned her very professional composure as she dried her hands on a towel. “Let me grab my bag.”