Page 27 of The Dirty Version

“Something like sexual relations?!” Janelle’s excitement bounced off a jungle gym. “Why didn’t you call me?”

Tash quit her surveillance for the moment, falling back to lie prone on the rug, staring at the ceiling and wishing to be chopped up by the slowly spinning fan blades.

“No. Something like Astrid Dalton interrupting what might have been a moment.” Tash threw her bicep over her eyes.

“Or a whole night. I don’t know. He changed his mind.

He said it wouldn’t be professional, and that he has a responsibility to the project. ”

“Ha! I told you he wasn’t your usual dickhead! That sounds so sweet.”

Tash denounced it lividly: “Are you kidding?” Her phone bleeped; she pulled it from her ear as Caleb’s name lit up the display. “Oh, shit. He’s calling me.” She panicked. She swiped the button to ignore.

“Answer it!” Janelle was no help. “No! Let him leave a message!”

The screen returned to idling in Tash’s shaking fingers. “I sent it to voicemail.”

Minutes passed while they waited to see if he’d left a message, or if the phone would ring again. No notifications arrived. Tash might have wailed if she could do it without her fear of Caleb hearing.

“Hey. You freaked out on him, babe. He probably doesn’t know what to say.”

Tash dismissed the explanation; she didn’t know what she would say, either, but she still wanted Caleb to call again. She’d returned to her stalking station, eyes peeled. “Do you think I should call him back?”

Swing set noises indicated Janelle might have resumed caring for her children. “Sure. Can I stay on conference?”

“No.” Before Tash hung up: “I love you, though. Thanks for doing this with me.”

And then there was no time to dial because below, outside the window, Rohan’s front door unsealed.

Caleb emerged. He locked up. He very responsibly lifted the mat to hide the key.

He paused on Tash’s same stone-path footfalls, staring at his phone.

Then he took off for the driveway. Tash lost her visual. She popped up, following alongside, running to her living room, plastering herself to her balcony’s sliding glass doors.

She didn’t open them to step out—it was too near, she’d be right above him, the trees obscuring her, Caleb beside his rental, Tash hovering like the fast-approaching storm.

Her phone vibrated: Hey. Can you come back, please?

The sky crackled as Tash’s beachfront struggled to reconcile its uneven distribution of temperature between land and sea. Damp air lifted over the ocean. Electric charges banged.

Another text: It’s your book. I need your input on these scenes.

She fogged up the sliding glass with expectation, her gut a completely confused curl. Her phone rang. Tash hesitated, roiling with indecision.

“Hey.” Caleb sighed into her ear.

Apparently, her body had decided to answer. She retreated from the sliders. “Hi.”

“Can you please come back here?”

Tash backed up nearly to her bedroom. “I don’t think so, Caleb. Not today.”

“Look, I didn’t mean to push you. I value our partnership.” Point-blank everywhere she’d been baroquely ciphered. “If you can’t tell, I feel shitty about the other night. I’m just trying to get us back on track, Tash.”

She breathed. “Because we have a deadline.”

“Yes. Because we have a deadline.” Caleb’s exasperation lived on.

“And because I want this project to succeed. I was being stupid about the language, and I’m sorry—I’m not an English professor.

There’s stuff I don’t understand.” Blunt and beseeching, he pleaded: “Come back. I’ll listen. Break it down for me.”

Outside, thunder growled; broad leaves swayed in the gathering wind.

And beneath the trees, the translator standing in her driveway had asked Tash for basic paraphrasing.

She slid down to the floor, needing the grounding. She fortified herself. “Caleb, do you realize you never asked me how I felt about the other night? You just woke up and decided it was reckless.”

“No. I knew it was reckless as it was happening.” Of course he had to correct her. “It didn’t stop me, which is worse. It’s bad for both of us. I never should have crossed the line.”

Tash hunted for more courage, ignoring his nice-guy repentance. “But what if there’s no line? What if we’re a safe space?”

Another split of thunder. “Tash. You’re doing the metaphor thing again.”

She was doing the metaphor thing again. Because the starkness underneath it terrified her; the simplicity of what she wanted, and what she wanted to say. She hugged her knees, hearing Caleb waiting. She distilled the ember of her aching down to a glowing seed.

Before she could examine it too much, Tash reached for ordinary words. “I’m saying I want to trust you. Being close to you didn’t feel reckless. It felt right.”

Rain fell. Tash heard the fat drops plunging past the palm cover, splattering the wicker couches on her balcony. She died a thousand times in the space of Caleb’s silence.

Finally, he exhaled. “I want to trust you, too. Very fucking badly.”

It sounded like a promise. It sounded like unfinished business. Tash could not hear what else it sounded like over the rush of her own relief.

She was out her front door, barefoot, halfway down the stairs before she realized she should probably clarify, since they were going for candor:

“Caleb—you know trust is a euphemisim, right?”

She grinned at the exasperated sound of his head banging against automotive metal.

Which was how she found him: hair matted by the rain, messenger bag discarded in his front seat, smiling into the side of his rental car.

In both her ears as she approached: “Really? For what, Tash?”

She reached for him. “I guess we’re going to find out.”

* * *

The front door to Tash’s duplex thudded shut behind them. Caleb slipped his shoes off. His damp T-shirt clung to his chest.

It was a repeat of the linen closet, just without the pretense. He moved deeper into the open-plan space, his gaze sweeping through the living room. He took in the balcony, dim beneath the shuddering sky.

“You live here.” He turned in a circle, shorts slick to his thighs. He cataloged the dining table, the barstools at the kitchen island beyond it, the jars of seashells crowning Tash’s wall of floor-to-ceiling bookcase.

She perched lightly on the curved arm of her living room sofa, resolved to be explicit. “I do.”

“This whole time?” Behind rain-spotted glasses, his eyes threatened retribution. “You’ve just been coming upstairs, while I have to break a land-speed record getting back to my hotel room for a cold shower?”

She followed his movements. “Is that what you’ve been doing?”

“Do you really want to know?” The air around him hung dangerous, diffuse with delicious squall, the argument from the garden apartment wiped out. All their arguments wiped out.

Tash nodded, and suddenly, she found herself in the bracket of his knees.

“Then yes, Natasha, that’s what I’ve been doing.

While we could have been right here, trusting each other.

” Caleb slipped a finger under the strap of her tank top, pulling her to stand.

“We could have trusted each other that first night, at the piano bar.” His fingers mapped a trail from her earlobe to the point of her chin.

Tash arched her neck, letting his touch trail down the slope of her throat.

“First of all, that’s presumptuous.” With one hand, she pulled off his rain-streaked glasses, examining the espresso fringe of lashes, dark hem to the blue heat in his eyes.

“There was no way I was going to trust you then. I didn’t even like you. ”

He lowered his face into the cove above her shoulder. “I didn’t like you, either.” It came out muffled, his mouth beneath her waterfall of hair.

Tash felt him take a deep breath in, running his nose along her skin. She felt him smile; she felt him know he made her dizzy. Her palm went to the muggy cotton covering his sternum, to the warmth beneath the humid fabric, the rise and fall of his chest.

She crooked a finger into his belt loop, the hand over his heartbeat grabbing cold shirt in her fist. He kissed her like a man with faith in his vocation, invested in specific physical movement, who tasted like a thirsty shipwreck, like peeling her fate off and casting it eagerly into the sea.

He tasted like adult male, and she was the restless, devouring female of the species.

Outside, the storm lashed leaves against her windows; petals everywhere gasping and open, begging to be ruined.

She pulled him closer, his palms in the back pockets of her cutoffs. She tried to steer him toward her bedroom. They backed into the kitchen marble, fumbling into the hall.

At some point, Caleb caught her wrists.

“Tash.” Pausing their pilgrimage, pinning their lower halves against the wall. “Safe space, right?” Both of them panting, forehead-to-forehead, wound up. “Let’s just have one more conversation.”

Through a lust fog, Tash laughed: “About what?”

“About the fact that this could get in the way of work. You should care about that.”

“I do care.” She pulled one wrist from his grip. She wove her freed fingers through his now completely wild hair. Falsely, with a teasing smile: “I just think this could be great research.”

He chuckled. “We could get distracted.” As he proceeded to get distracted. “We could miss a deadline.”

“We won’t.”

Not really a conversation, then; Caleb hitched her legs up to lock around his waist.

She stripped him of his shirt the moment her bare feet touched down in the bedroom, walking him backward until he tipped onto her mattress, shrugging off her own top and tossing it into the sea of white shag to join other discarded garments; mementos of a strange world, where people needed clothes.

She feasted on the moment, kneeling above where Caleb splayed, his inked collarbone a lone contradiction to a fair expanse of muscle and freckled skin; his body broad and lean and rugged, as if Angeleno hipsters had declared push-ups the next big thing.

Frenzied , she’d predicted—and yet there suddenly seemed no rush. The rain outside seemed certain of its brunt and potence, and of its stamina. Without his glasses, Caleb’s gaze glowed molten and unleashed.

“Research, you say?” He locked her in place with a hooked ankle.

“Research.” Tash lowered leisurely into the straddle. “I mean. Doesn’t the great Caleb Rafferty block all his scenes this way?”

He retracted. “No.” He lifted to his elbows to underscore it. “No, Tash—I really don’t. Ever. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

Her heart tripped, just a tiny bit. She pushed him back down, huffing the pheromones of a man raised by a coven, who wanted to protect her story, who couldn’t help but break his own rules. She nodded. “Okay.”

“Okay?” He searched her gaze for further acknowledgment.

“Okay.” Tash smiled. Fumbling and authentic. “Yes. I hear you.”

Caleb flipped their positions. “Good.”

She let her hands roam then, collecting raunchy, man-candy adjectives. She deferred to Caleb’s skill set. They began the rough outlines of their blocking with hard verbs and raw nouns.

She tried to stick to literals but couldn’t resist the imagery—the bluffs and crests and flat plains and wingspan of his shoulders; the flex and clench of thighs. She rolled the syllables in her mouth. The brainstorm lit her body.

And this time, legitimately, she felt no need for further dialogue.