Page 28 of The Dirty Version

Caleb had said he worried the research would distract them. So Tash delighted when, quite conversely, the venture of their professional relationship into new territory added a unique synergy to their adaptation work. Once she’d tasted trust with Caleb, she wanted it for Noab and Hewett, too.

“Let’s just try it as the genesis for this sequence—I really do think it’s ‘trust’ more than ‘danger.’ More than ‘survival.’” Tash squiggled the last two words through with a marker, Caleb’s whiteboard bolstered by her bent knees.

“Even more than ‘risk,’ actually.” She squiggled that out, too, Caleb’s too-big T-shirt sliding off her shoulder. “I know you don’t like figuratives—”

“I do now.” He interrupted, grinning and bare-chested, propped against her pillows, rumpled with bed-warmed skin. “You’ve convinced me metaphoric phrasing can be instructive.” He reached loftily beside him to Tash’s night table, raising an eyebrow and his double chai. “Please. Continue.”

She smiled back, lingering on his relaxed, muscled appeal: on the sex-hair that was now her doing; on the big feet poking out from covers draped across his bottom half; on the intimacy collaboration made so much clearer, now that she’d worked through their real-life scene.

She refocused and started over. “The emotional core of Episode Five ties to trust.” She felt sure.

“That’s the backbone of the story when you scrape everything else away.

We’re at the midpoint of the series”—she put her hand up, preempting Caleb’s inevitable quip, laughing when he batted her palm away—“yes, also known as the climax—where she suspends her beliefs. She’ll trust him; then it’ll all be downhill until the very end, when he betrays her. ”

Caleb’s expression tested her theory, arms crossed over rugged freckles.

“One thing, though. They’ve just survived the python and their adrenaline is high.

Their emotions could easily tie to lust or hunger.

You said it was ‘building for too long.’” He referenced this without his notes.

“Animal instinct would be easier to cinematically block than trust. Trust is kind of abstract.” Acknowledging the freshest iteration of their teamwork: “Even though you know I’m in favor of the idea. ”

Tash thought about it, turning toward him, leaning sideways against her headboard.

“Hunger is more obvious, and it’d be easier, agreed.

But I think I was wrong the other day. Instinct and lust play some part, sure”—eyeing the whiskers darkening the line of Caleb’s jaw—“and the sex wouldn’t happen if there wasn’t some level of attraction—”

“Or an insane level of attraction.” He cut her off again, raking her with his gaze.

“Or an insane level of attraction.” Tash repeated it, conceding to his correction. “Either way, I’d like to revise my earlier characterization: I think Noab makes a deliberate decision. I think the sex goes slow.”

“Okay.” Caleb unfolded his arms. He leaned close, unhurriedly dragging his fingers over the whiteboard pressing against Tash’s naked thighs.

He multitasked, rubbing out the letters of the dismissed words, his mouth lazing in the hollow of her neck: the scrawl of danger , survival , risk , lust , hunger all disappearing until only trust remained.

Tash swam in the hot rock canyon of his two-days-in-her-sheets scent, which suddenly evoked Silver Lake farmers’ market Sundays and dog-walk conversations about character motivation, and sprinting home to fall right back into bed.

None of which she’d even consciously considered—the picture of it all simply arrived, parading across the front of her mind, as Caleb slid the whiteboard from where it’d lodged between them, one-handing his glasses to drop beside it on the rug.

He kissed her, and for a searing moment the sequence escalated alarmingly into West Hollywood brunches with Rohan and Wes.

Until Tash caught herself, tucking that particular craving back into its hidden place.

She pushed him away gently, camouflaging her swerve into hipster picket fence visions by wriggling out of his T-shirt and throwing it at him; it landed where she’d left him face down and chuckling on the bed.

“Put some clothes on, Rafferty. We have work to do. An entire production budget depends on your professionalism—show the process some respect.”

She ducked into her closet and emerged in a Florida-winter hoodie and track pants, upping the bedroom air-conditioning.

Caleb laughed at her in earnest as Tash chose the overstuffed armchair beside her window this time—far away from him but still facing the bed.

She sat on her hands and waited for Caleb to collect himself.

“Apologies.” He kept smiling, definitely not sorry, retrieving the whiteboard from the carpet and balancing it against her reading lamp.

He put his shirt on. He opened his laptop, using one of Tash’s pillows as a desk.

He stared at her over his screen and through the mist of bedroom afterglow. “So. Tell me how ‘trust’ moves.”

It took Tash a moment to remember this was where they’d left off—at midnight, in the minutes following a brutal python slaying.

In a private, coral-ringed grass oasis, beneath the swaying palms.

She took the prompt and heard ocean moonlight in the near distance.

She felt for the jagged limestone lip of a lagoon.

She closed her eyes and painted Noab’s racing pulse at python fangs and the breathlessness of being rescued.

She painted the awestruck shock at Hewett’s protective, ferocious savagery.

“I think it begins as an awareness that he’s saved her—which is crazy, because she’s the warrior, not Hewett.

No one’s ever stepped in to shield her before.

” Tash kept her eyes shut, sitting up straight and letting a warm sense of security wash her from head to toe.

“I think she stands tall under a female moon, and lets her armor fall away. Literally and also figuratively—she looks right at him, dismantling her defenses willingly, dropping them beside her on the grass. But it’s not coy.

It’s a baring—like, ‘This is me, and I trust you with it.’ Zero artifice. ”

Caleb’s keyboard continued to tap softly. “You’re good at this.”

“I have a good teacher.” Her eyes remained closed, guessing at his smile.

“I like it. It’s different from the power I originally had in mind, because she’s not setting out to seduce him.”

“Definitely not.” Tash shook her head.

“But she’s still on a stage, in a way.” The sound of Caleb typing filled the bedroom.

“What if they haven’t touched at all, yet?

What if they’re so shaken by the python, they’re silent and shivering as they wash the blood off in the lagoon.

Then Hewett staggers to the grass, stunned by his own actions—and that’s when Noab rises from the water.

She bares herself to him, but it’s not a power exchange—it’s more like a mirroring.

Then Hewett’s in the same place as the audience, vibrating with the will-they-or-won’t-they tension as she walks toward him.

It’s perfect. Because at this point, we owe our viewers a show. ”

“Come on, Rafferty—let’s not call it a show.” Tash smiled in her sweatshirt, teasing and also the truth. “You know I’m still getting my head around being this flagrant.”

“Oh, it’s a show. Don’t kid yourself, Natasha.”

She heard him close his laptop. She blinked open to see him toss the pillow aside. Caleb grinned wickedly, once he had her up and out of the armchair.

“Every time he had to pretend he didn’t notice her body?

Every time they argued, and she was so smart?

Every time he had to wonder what that fire would be like?

” Caleb hovered over her in the wreckage of her bed.

“Your audience has waited a long time to get right here. We’re absolutely going to give them a show. ”

* * *

Later that evening, as a reward for work well done, Tash led Caleb past Rohan’s front door toward the mangrove’s Intracoastal-facing boat dock—a sleepy little jetty too bound by buttonwoods for active use, but perfect for the coconut-granita stall set up by a local bar during the summers.

From her duplex, it was only a few minutes on foot.

But the stone path wound through the tree-root forest Caleb had so admired from inside Rohan’s living room, and at night, without the window barrier, Caleb seemed less sure.

Tash walked ahead to guide him, their fingers tangled, laughing every time he jumped at the encroaching chorus of croaking frogs.

“Rafferty. They’re tiny, harmless amphibians.”

Caleb tugged her back to his strapping shadow, shushing her mocking with a hard kiss. “Are you kidding? You said anything could be happening out here, and we’d never know it. You have to protect me.”

But then they emerged from the vine-choked coppice onto the fairy-lit wooden dock, and Caleb paused, taking in the waterway’s idyllic tropical scenery.

They leaned their elbows on the pier’s tall railing, the Intracoastal’s surface a tranquil chop, the canal’s opposite shoreline dotted with lanterns on patios and lamps in bedrooms. They shared a frozen coconut blended with candied ginger and key lime as small skiffs motored up to place their orders.

“This reminds me of the slushies we made for my stepmom when she was sick.” Caleb licked his spoon, bumping Tash’s hip when he could tell she didn’t quite know how to respond.

“In a good way.” He smiled. “We used ginger ale and orange-juice ice cubes. Viv kept me busy, trying to re-create a drink we’d had in Hawaii. ”

Tash turned to face him, interested and careful, alert to fragile memories. “You went together?”