Page 18 of The Dirty Version

The landscape that inspired the backdrop to Noab and Hewett’s earth-shattering alfresco beachside sex could be reached through a parting in the sand dunes, outside a restricted-access back door, which opened with a certain type of Biscayne Coastal key card, tapped against a wall sensor inside Ocean Science Research Laboratory Three.

During the regular school term, Tash knew the Marine Ecology adjuncts who supervised the study of this rare, limestone-rimmed lagoon—its razor-sharp rock base the result of tens of thousands of years of shell and coral and fossil accumulation, the largest sedimentary formation of its kind.

Between it and the shoreline, wind and water erosion had chiseled the terrain.

At high tide, in hurricane season, Tash had seen vertical spouts and jagged valleys force seawater plumes through its carved-out chimneys like blowholes, sending sea geysers fifty feet into the air.

At low tide, in calm weather, however—the preserve sunbathed stark white and bone-dry, as lazy afternoon waves half-heartedly lapped the sanctuary stretch of coast.

Tash’s faculty friends were all away for the summer. There was no one there to ask to tap their card. Instead, Tash and Caleb had to park near the adjunct lounge and hike up the beach, approaching the lagoon from the sand side.

“I like your campus.” Caleb’s flip-flops dangled from one finger, his bare footprints dissolving in the dune, his baseball cap low and his aviators mirroring the sun’s glare.

Beneath her own cap, Tash inhaled the scent of surf verbena and tide.

She’d never attempted to reach the passage this way, and up ahead, she spied the coral climb—ocean to the left, modern lab roofs screened by thatch palms on the right side.

In the middle, an alabaster range of pockmarked mini mountains cupping Noab and Hewett’s secret sex lagoon.

“I like this campus, too.”

Gulls screeched as Tash tipped her face up to the cloudless yonder.

“Although, honestly—the beach is the best part. My humanities block would not impress you. They stash us by the sports fields, near where Fishery Conservation dumps their tanks.”

Caleb glanced at her sideways. “But you still stay here.” Both statement and an inquiry.

The breeze tangled sea salt in the low knot of Tash’s hair.

“Yes. I like my colleagues. I love the chair of my department—she’s seventy-five and still producing poems.” Yandra Santos’s lyrical legend kept the entire English department afloat.

“She lets me teach as much as I want, and she let me write the curriculum for ‘Heroes and Villains,’ which is unusual since I’m not permanent staff. ”

“I’m guessing she also doesn’t pay you like you’re permanent staff.” The comment came out of nowhere—as if Caleb had just been commiserating with Tash’s father about the sad state of her career.

She slowed her pace, puzzled by the change of subject, sliding her sunglasses down her nose.

Caleb put his hands up. “Sorry, it’s none of my business! Stacy’s brother teaches physics at Pasadena, and she’s always saying he’s ridiculously underpaid. I think he might even have tenure. I’m guessing adjuncts get an even shorter end of the stick.”

Admittedly, Caleb’s concern felt different from Vikram Grover’s judgment.

“Yandra would pay me if she had the budget.” She slid her sunglasses back into place, starting the trudge up their first limestone knoll.

“I could also make it easier for her and finish my master’s.

In the meantime, the adjunct rate is fine.

And I have the flexibility to work on other projects. ” Like The Colony .

Like if she wrote something else.

Coral jutted from beneath the sand, and Tash and Caleb paused for a moment to slide their feet back into the flip-flops they’d been holding so they could scale the jumble of life-size sandcastle stairs.

They ascended to the preserve’s highest point.

From there, sharp crags sloped downward, fenced by ocean and trees.

They surveyed the descent, sandpipers hopping between cratered puddles, the lagoon’s water level demure and low, though Tash knew, in a few hours, the same shoals would be flooded, the spiny decline made impassable by the influx of the tide.

The spiny decline made impassable...

Tash stopped, staring at the helpless bare skin on their rubber-thonged feet. She grit her teeth, taking one tentative step forward. She’d completely forgotten she and Caleb would need protective shoes.

A quarter inch of flimsy foam bowed beneath her arches.

“Shit. I never come this way. Ugh, Caleb, I’m really sorry.” She airplaned her arms for balance. “They give you knee boots when you enter from the labs.” Another step, and Tash felt barbed coral catch on the bottom of her flip-flop. She glanced back at him. “If this is stupid, we can turn around.”

“It isn’t stupid.” He’d already begun to follow, his gaze trained on a dipping angle of thorned ground.

“I mean. It might be a little stupid.” Beneath his baseball cap, his mouth curved.

“I like how you made me go back to my car and put on more sunscreen, though. It’ll definitely help when I bleed out from my feet. ”

Tash laughed, not daring to look up. They proceeded downhill slowly. In her peripheral vision, she saw him edge alongside her, board shorts stretched across athletic thighs.

His T-shirt hung threadbare, molded to his chest. He teased her: “Just so you know—when the Mother Beast comes, you get eaten first.”

Out on the water, rainbow-colored sails ballooned. Far off, in a clearing, tufts of Bermuda grass rippled on the palm-lined side of the lagoon. Saw palmetto hedged the open dell.

Tash pointed to it. “That’s where we’re going. It doesn’t look like anything right now, but wait until we get there.”

“Don’t worry. I trust you. Kind of.” Caleb’s visual attention stayed on his feet. “Hey—you know what I was thinking about after our dinner the other night?”

Tash did not know, but she was going to fall over if he said, Tandoori chicken, in a bizarrely sexual way.

“You must have written The Colony while you were with the pediatrician.”

Tash paused, recognizing the trick of salt-spray triangulation: limbs too occupied with the danger of their scramble, brain too busy to guard words, the brined narcotic of the ocean too strong a truth serum, suggesting a confidence between Tash and Caleb and the sea.

Still, she answered. “When I met him, I’d just finalized a draft. Why?”

Caleb picked his way carefully beside her. “I don’t know. I was just thinking it’s the kind of book you could imagine being fueled by a breakup—not written in the throes of a romance.” He steadied on a spurred ridge. “I mean, I’m guessing. I’m not a writer of literary fiction.”

Tash smiled. “And yet you just said ‘in the throes.’”

He chuckled, aviators opaque. Sunscreen streaked his forearms, where he’d been lazy about rubbing it in. His calves flexed.

Tash kept deflecting. “Also, as we’ve established, nothing in the book is true. It’s fiction. I could have written it during the happiest period of my life. There doesn’t have to be a connection.”

Caleb straddled two calcified outcroppings. “I know.”

However. Safe space and seaside truth serum. And Tash would be baring other inspiration anyway. She told herself Caleb had grown up in a coven—all those chosen-family sisters.

“But you’re right, kind of. The impetus came from a bad date. It happened at a bar right down the street from where we met Ram that first night, actually.” She half smirked. “Maybe that’s why I came at you, guns blazing. I have a bad association with that whole zip code.”

Caleb half smirked right back. “I don’t think that was the only reason.” He softened. “You don’t have to talk about it. It was just a random thought.”

She realized she wanted him to understand her. “No, I don’t mind.”

She continued down the ragged bluffs, ripping holes in the rubber of her flip-flops. Caleb’s shins were scratched, but he didn’t complain. He just waited for Tash to talk.

“After I moved back to Florida, after I started teaching at Biscayne, I swiped right on someone who seemed nice, and I went to meet him.” Tash could barely picture the male in question—with time, the memory had grown blessedly faint.

“Yandra needed me at school early the next morning to set up for some conference with the dean. Which is funny, because otherwise I wouldn’t have been trying to cut the date short. The guy was actually very charming.”

Caleb nodded, clouds already gathering on his face.

“When it was time for me to leave, he wasn’t ready to let me go. He yanked me back into our booth by my hair.” Tash mimed a reenactment. “He pulled a whole chunk out.”

Sometimes, in grim moments, Tash could feel the skid of unfamiliar palm against her scalp and a split second of metallic taste in her molars.

“He did it with this perfectly blank smile. Then he dropped his hand and ordered me another drink. He kept on with the conversation like nothing had happened, but there was violence in his eyes, like he was daring me to try again. The bar was crowded, and I was so confused. I didn’t know how to react.

I didn’t even realize I was bleeding until after, when I got to Janelle’s. ”

Tash had given Hewett’s men that same vein of brutality, when they attacked Noab at the end of the book—it had been horrendous, and heavy to write, and Tash had been fortunate to be able to leave it on her pages.

“I was afraid if I tried to get up again, he’d do something worse. When the waitress came back, I pretended to recognize her. Luckily, she went with it. She sent another group of women over to say hi. One of them drove me to Janelle’s.” Tash had never been more grateful for the Sisterhood.

Caleb stopped, mid-stride, legs split between two rocks. “Tash.”