Page 29 of The Dirty Version

He nodded, his eyes reflecting the luster of tiny bulbs strung up overhead.

“At the very end of our last trip, which was a pilgrimage to see her favorite ballet companies. We went to Paris, Copenhagen, Sydney, and Milan—not in that order. I couldn’t tell you which productions we watched, but Viv was happy. Afterward, my dad met us in Kauai.”

“For ballet?”

“No.” Caleb’s expression clouded, poignant. “For a sand ceremony. It’s part of a Hawaiian wedding—you mix your grains of sand together. It was kind of like the two of them renewing their vows. Which was sweet and also torture—at that point they’d been on and off for years.”

Tash examined his angles. “But they were ‘on’ when she passed away?”

Caleb confirmed it. “It’s what they both wanted. And maybe also”—his nose wrinkled—“not super fair to my dad.”

They wrecked each other, Ilsa had said.

Tash set the coconut aside. “I’ve never been to Hawaii.” Then she yanked him closer, lightening the mood.

Caleb came willingly.

His granita-cold mouth found her just outside the ring of fairy light, before they strolled back to the duplex, before the swallow of jungle overgrowth, while they could still feel the water’s wide-open gale. “You’d love it. Lots of places like your lagoon.”

* * *

Eventually, Caleb needed clean clothes.

“I mean, do I, though?” He pulled Tash into his lap on her living room sofa, after they’d made it as far as the oceanside cantina for lunch. “I just figured out how to use your washing machine.”

Tash buried her face in the scent of her laundry detergent, her hands already plucking at his cargo shorts and cotton shirt. She re moved his aviators. “Don’t you think the people on the boardwalk are suspicious you keep wearing the same thing?”

Caleb rasped his beard scruff across her cheekbone. “You give your stoners at the surf shop too much credit. You’re right, though.” Shifting, roguishly dumping her backward on the sofa cushions. “You need to brush up for your podcast panel tomorrow. I’ll give you space and head back to the hotel.”

Tash laughed from where he’d tossed her, preventing his escape by locking her feet behind his calves. “I didn’t say you had to leave!”

He reached around to resituate her ankles on his shoulders, kneeling over her, blocking out the streaming daylight and birdsong warbling from her balcony.

“I need to get away from you.” He twinkled, lowering until he murmured it into her mouth: “Plus, Story Edit just moved up their meeting. They’re done with Episode Five notes. I have the call later today.”

“That’s fast.” Too fast, Tash suspected—Caleb had only sent the pages the day before. She felt him nod distractedly against her bra strap. “Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

He shrugged. “Can’t tell.”

“Can you take the call here?” She skimmed her hands up Caleb’s back. “Or take it from downstairs—Rohan’s is all yours. I’ll do podcast prep while you’re gone.”

“If you insist, I’ll stay. I have some emails to answer while I’m down there. Stacy gets mad when I don’t immediately write back.” He rolled them over, smoothing Tash’s hair behind her ear. “How dumb is it that I didn’t realize you lived upstairs?”

She smiled quietly. “You had other things to think about.” Tash propped her chin on her knuckles, resting on his sternum. “Hey. How did you and Stacy end up together?”

Caleb fixed a couch pillow behind his head.

“She was the assistant stunt coordinator on a show my dad designed the sets for. We just hit it off. The business was her idea, because there was a huge demand, and Stacy’s amazing with on-camera physical choreography—but she hates production negotiations and risk assessments and contract riders.

” He gestured like it was no big deal: “And I’m good at all that stuff. ”

She deadpanned. “Because you spent a lot of time on towel duty.”

“Because I’m used to being the glue between headstrong performers, tightly wound producers, and a visionary director.

” Caleb poked Tash’s ribs as he edited her rationale.

“I grew up on the daily clash of Ilsa and Viv. Viv and my dad. Viv and her dancers. A childhood in a burlesque bar has to be worth something. That’s why I don’t mind working with Braverman—they want me involved fully.

Not every production company lets me into the creative process like this. ”

Tash pushed up on her elbows teasingly. “Like this?”

Caleb narrowed. “Like this.” He waggled his phone in her face.

She laughed. “It’s worth it, is what you’re saying.”

“It’s Hollywood. I’ve worked on worse. I also happen to like my current project.

” He smiled softly, shifting the subject sideways: “Did you know our office has a yoga studio? It doubles as a mat room. Stacy meditates with actors before and after scenes.” Meaningfully: “She’s even taught me a few tricks for staying calm when I’m dealing with certain personality types. ”

“I cannot imagine what you refer to.” Tash laid her cheek to the amused sound in his chest. In the contented silence that followed: “Stacy sounds cool.” Tash’s thoughts non sequitured to her own work wife.

“If I really do take time off next semester, I don’t know how I’ll function without Janelle.

We eat lunch together every day we’re both on campus. ”

“You couldn’t still go in to meet her?”

Tash shook her head under his frown. “The whole point of a sabbatical would be for me to write. I’d need to sit around in my pajamas, no other obligations.”

His fingers played along her spine. “Am I allowed to ask what the next book is about now?”

Tash considered for a moment. She didn’t answer. Instead, she disappeared into her bedroom to retrieve her mother’s letters.

“I don’t know if it’s a next book. I found these in my closet when I went searching for my contracts.” She plunked the carton on her coffee table.

“What am I looking at?” Caleb righted himself, straightening his glasses, already peering over the box’s worn cardboard flap.

“Letters from my mom, from when Rohan and Neel and I used to get sent away in the summers.”

Carefully, he riffled through the tattered envelopes. “You make it sound like the Grover siblings did hard time.”

“Well, we did get shipped off to New Jersey.” She smiled wryly.

“To my dad’s sister, who ran a proper Indian household.

We were supposed to learn all the things my dad was too busy to teach us and my mother didn’t know.

But instead, what really happened was the boys were allowed to run around outside in the backyard in the nice weather, and I had to stay inside and chop vegetables with the disapproving aunties. ”

Caleb’s mouth went tender. “Baby Tash!” He pulled her into his lap again. “You’re killing me—no wonder you don’t need a man! They stuck you in the kitchen.”

Tash indulged his sympathy. “Funny thing is, Rohan and Neel can actually cook. The only traditional thing I make is tea.”

“Is that what the next book’s about, then? Mean New Jersey summers?”

“I don’t think so.” Tash shook her head. “But finding an old trove of letters has the potential to be very dramatic, right? They should at least be a jumping-off point—I just don’t know for what.”

Caleb studied the carton. “That’s a lot of correspondence. Is your mom a writer, too?”

The notion made Tash laugh. “No, she’s the opposite. She taught high school math. She’s extremely analytic. We have almost nothing in common. It’s hard for us to get along.”

“And yet.” Caleb pointed at the evidence.

“And yet.” Tash couldn’t help but agree. “She wrote us every day.”

“That’s kind of incredible.” Caleb murmured into her hair. “Sometimes I wonder what it must have been like to have that.”

Tash gasped at her own tone-deafness. She trapped him in a tight hug. “Baby Caleb! Now you’re killing me!”

* * *

Tash sat outside on her balcony relistening to an episode of Leo Rousseau’s podcast while Caleb called in to Story Edit from Rohan’s apartment downstairs.

In the gathering dusk, the Eurogeek lilting of Leo’s consonants flowed through Tash’s headphones, his upper-crust accent dead sexy.

Most people would never guess he grew up in rural Indiana.

Leo Rousseau had asked her out the second time he guest-lectured for her graduate requirement in critical theory.

Tash was shocked Leo even noticed her presence—she hadn’t engaged in his classroom discussions at all.

At the time, Leo’s young-professor enthusiasm for dissecting Modernity and Dialectics far exceeded Tash’s ability to make sense of it; if he’d mistaken her for attentive, it was probably because she’d been pondering his sideburns.

Beneath showy, too-long-to-be-a-stodgy-academic blond hair, Leo wore them like muttonchops.

After two ninety-minute lectures, Tash still hadn’t been able to decide if he was coolly handsome or slightly gross.

Leo convinced her of the former—over drinks, in a bar near his faculty apartment on Washington Square.

Leo also eventually convinced Tash he loved her, but that monogamy was unenlightened, and any failure to see it that way was her fault.

Leo convinced Tash to help him launch his journal, but her name couldn’t go on the masthead—because the teacher-student taboo was silly, and it could also cost him his grant.

Leo Rousseau had convinced a younger, foolish Tash Grover of a lot of things she regretted now, although she suddenly found it difficult to care about past grudges with Caleb Rafferty in her present.

With Caleb Rafferty dropping his bag by her front door again and smiling at her through the balcony’s sliding glass.