Page 26 of The Dirty Version

Tash woke up early the morning after she’d left La Playa. She texted Caleb to cancel their work session. Twenty minutes later, her phone rang.

“You can’t cancel.” His voice barely masked its irritation.

“I can.” She’d already quite decisively skipped her beach run.

“I have to.” She’d poured whiskey straight into her tea.

She’d hauled the rest of the bottle and a fluffy blanket out onto the palm hideaway of her balcony.

“There’s a scheduling meeting at Biscayne Coastal I can’t miss.

” Tash was proud of her made-up, erudite obligation.

“Fall classes go up for registration soon. I’ve got to be there. ”

Caleb persisted: “You said you were iffy about teaching in the fall.”

Tash buried her face in the blanket, muffling a silent howl, realizing yet another of her mistakes.

She’d confided to him that she’d been toying with taking a semester off, to explore the possibility of perhaps writing another book.

She hadn’t even processed the idea with Janelle yet—she hadn’t had the opportunity, what with the constant Caleb and The Colony .

Tash swigged spiked chai, clinging to her story. “That’s what Yandra wants to talk about. She’s pushing me to decide.”

“Come on. You told me your department head was traveling. You showed me pictures of her in Cuba.”

“She’s back now.” Yandra would be away until the end of the month.

But Tash couldn’t spend another minute near Caleb.

She wouldn’t survive another pass at illuminating her thesaurus, only to watch him not be able to read.

His redoubled professionalism was insufferable, and the prim face of his rejection bothered Tash even more—along with her own willingness to relinquish every wisp of self-preservation, if he’d let her.

Meanwhile, if she had any sense, she’d be celebrating his restraint.

Because for the first time, a man was prioritizing her work over his own stake; Caleb cared more about his duty to The Colony than sleeping with its author. This was a revelation. Tash should have been ecstatic. She should have welcomed his prudence and circumspection.

“I know you’re avoiding Episode Five’s dialogue, Tash. I’m not going to let you sabotage our work. We have to stick with it.”

She stifled the urge to throw her phone into the trees.

“We’re on a deadline. You can’t cancel, sorry.” Caleb’s aggravation scalded her ear. “I’ll come to you. I’ll be at the dinosaur den in an hour.”

He left her with no choice. She waited downstairs, resentfully—flushed from a shower, in cutoffs and a tank top, still a complete mess. Caleb kicked his flip-flops off and made himself at home on Rohan’s sun-bleached club chair.

“But before we get to dialogue, I think we need to know their movement.” He’d dropped his messenger bag on the sisal-covered floor.

Tash had presented him no tea.

Caleb didn’t deserve it.

She sat, braced on the sofa, knuckles white, evading his stare.

“I reread my notes from yesterday before I came here.” He leaned forward on jute cushions. “I think we got off track.”

“Did we?” She skirted her gaze from the threadbare neckline of his T-shirt to his wrinkled cargos. Caleb seemed a little messy, too.

“Yes. We have pages of language we can’t use. We can’t block figuratives. We need literals—explicit action verbs.” Forearms resting on his knees now. “We need specific words and movement. Body mechanics, like what we cooked up for Episode One. Then we can move on to the dialogue.”

But Noab and Hewett’s pre-intercourse syllables would be too intimate, too revealing, too much of an exposé of the inside of Tash’s head. The prospect returned her apprehensions to their original state, before Caleb became her ally. Before she’d had a glimpse behind his curtain.

“Or, if it’s easier, we’ll write the dialogue first. Your call. Either way, we need to nail the scene to its details. No more hiding behind wordplay.”

Tash could have shrieked at the unwitting irony. She hadn’t been hiding. The pages of yesterday’s language that he deemed useless were her version of emotional nudity.

“Look—I know you hate this.” Caleb raked his fingers through his bedhead as he misconstrued her fugue state.

“I wish we could go back to where we were before Vaudeville Striptease . Because Noab and Hewett have to talk, Tash. Then they have to touch each other. It would be great if you could help me write it.”

Tash booted back his agitation, her mind stalled out on his interpretation of her attitude. It struck her somewhere tender, someplace where Caleb valued their connection. “Fine.”

“‘Fine’? Is that today’s plan? One-word answers?” He stood from the club chair, stalking to the window and the green snarl beyond. “Why do you have to make everything so difficult?”

Tash rose sharply also. “Are you sure that’s what I do? Because yesterday you said I was ‘a pleasure to work with.’”

“Yesterday you left me with a hill of metaphors.” Caleb yanked a spiral notebook out of his messenger bag.

“None of which are useful.” Rifling until he found his page, brandishing it at her like evidence of her obstruction.

“‘Transformative’ isn’t helpful, Tash.” He flipped.

He pointed. “‘Mythologic’ doesn’t tell me where the actors put their hands. ”

He chucked the notebook on the sofa bitterly. “We said we’d be a team, but then you give me nine pages of deflection. What am I supposed to do with that?”

“I don’t know.” Tash steadied herself beside her desk, one hand on the trestle table lamp. Her fire chilled, a glacial freeze creeping across the phrases in his discarded notebook—each of them ripped directly from her heart.

She grabbed her tote bag icily. “Write the scene yourself, maybe. You’re the expert.

Since all I contribute are useless figures of speech.

” Recalling her favorite from yesterday, which Tash believed was abundantly clear: “Like how ‘she offers herself to him like a sacrifice.’ Start there. Block that one however you like.”

Caleb’s incredulity followed as Tash made her way to the front door. “You’re leaving?”

Her hand turned on the knob.

His incomprehension wore a fading sunburn and a shin scratch from their lagoon trek, trailing her to the opened door with a wide-eyed, flabbergasted look on his face. “You’d just hand me your main characters? To position however I want?”

All frost, Tash swiveled on the walkway.

“Is there a reason that I shouldn’t? You’re a good guy, right?

” She cast cold contempt back at his daftness, her spine straight with pride.

“Everyone says you’re the best—especially our lead actress.

Whose feelings are apparently your priority.

” Tash cursed herself for mentioning Astrid.

She moved before she could incriminate herself further, flinging Rohan’s house keys in Caleb’s general direction. “Lock up when you’re finished. Leave the keys under the mat.”

* * *

Tash’s footsteps faltered once she turned the corner on the stone path, the entrance to Rohan’s apartment disappearing behind the bend.

She slumped against a honeysuckled trellis scaling the building’s outer wall. She worried Caleb might come chasing after her, then was disappointed when he didn’t show. She coaxed herself upright again, pulling it together, marching toward the hedge of beach sunflowers lining the shared drive.

The shared drive—the driveway shared by her duplex and Rohan’s apartment.

Tash halted by her oakleaf hydrangea, contemplating the flight of stairs to her front door, reluctant to be hemmed in so soon after fleeing.

She began the walk to the ocean.

Just as she registered the black clouds darkening the sky above her, and the faint thunder rumbling from the coast.

Tash reversed course, slipping cautiously back past her mailbox; beneath the buttonwood branches, around the wild cactus, breath held the whole time.

She skittered up her duplex stairs, quietly closing the door behind her.

She abandoned her bag somewhere by the kitchen, then crumbled onto the white shag beneath a bedroom window overlooking Rohan’s front door.

She settled in full-blown sniper mode. She kept her gaze fixed on the outside. She grabbed her phone from her pocket, dialing Janelle to fill her in.

“Why are we whispering?” Janelle’s summer backdrop clanged with toddler playground.

“I don’t want Caleb to hear me.” Tash cupped her palm around her hushed tone, which definitely made no sense. “I tried to go to the beach, but it looks like it’s going to rain here. Now I’m trapped in my apartment, waiting for him to leave.”

“You have to speak up, babe. Hold on.” The connection rustled. When Janelle returned, her voice was close and low. “I’m under a seesaw.” Distant sandbox laughter filtered through the phone. “Are we whispering because you need me to talk you through some cunnilingus?”

“What? Are you insane?” As Tash herself rocked back and forth on the carpet like a lunatic, eyes on Rohan’s front door. “Why would you ask that?”

“Because I’m a lesbian.” Janelle said it plainly. “And you’re supposedly writing good sex. At some point, you’ll need my guidance.”

Tash did take a moment to file it away as a resource. “No. I just walked out on Caleb. I left him at Rohan’s. He doesn’t know I live here.”

“Natasha!” Janelle seemed to guffaw. “You continue to be my favorite prickly creature. You actually ran away? What are you, one of my children?”

Tash thought over her enraged exit; perhaps it had been juvenile. Perhaps it also had been extremely adult. Perhaps she’d wisely left before she said too much.

“Where’d you hide your car, then?”

The car. Caleb would see it. The car was a dead giveaway.

“Why’d you walk out in the first place?”

“He didn’t like my metaphors.” Tash heard the absurdity of it; for Janelle, she added the real truth. “Also—something almost happened between us the other night. I’m rebounding poorly.”