Page 36 of The Dirty Version
Tash survived the next days in a state between a smoke and a solid; she’d left her head on the bayfront grass outside that ballroom, and her heart slow-dancing on that hidden patio.
She’d left her collaborator shouting pleas at the taillights of her taxi.
She’d left herself with a ticking deadline she’d have to face alone.
The remainder of her had enough self-awareness to realize a single, stray thought of Caleb would destroy her ability to function—and Tash needed to function.
Specifically, Episode Nine needed her to function.
So she dragged herself to her desk and dove deep into The Colony ’s script at the only marker she could manage—the Mother Beast’s gorgeous, savage, retaliatory rising from the sea.
Tash zoomed in on Noab at the edge of the water, bloodied and forsaken and fathomlessly wronged.
She poured a ballroom’s worth of shattered trust into the Mother Beast’s score-evening arrival—from her first sniff of blood in the water to her vicious ripple of gills.
Tash let the island’s demonic sea huntress be chillingly repulsive in her hunger for meat, figuring Braverman’s one redeeming quality would be his special knack for cinematic destruction.
Tash piled on the helpful, descriptive minutia. None of which was necessary. The studio already had these broad strokes in their existing script.
The scene alterations Tash actually owed came earlier: what would turn out to be the farewell sex; then Hewett’s deceit.
Still, she passed whole mornings imagining Braverman’s head atop a ragged pirate tunic and Reggie’s lowlights on a scurvied form before Tash killed them off.
Doolittle died, too—but with less fanfare because Tash had never met him in person.
She could only picture a blinking cursor for his face.
This activity provided such immersive gratification that Tash got completely lost in it and distractedly, unconsciously, picked up the ancient landline in Rohan’s apartment when it rang.
“Just checking to see if you’re alive.” Janelle’s background clang indicated another summer playground. “You haven’t called in days.”
Afternoon light swamped the wall of windows. Tash wished it to dim. “I messaged you, though. I’m in a hole until this deadline.”
A hollow, more like—which she would not discuss. She’d texted Janelle only to say that work required all of her attention; then Tash turned her phone off and buried it at the bottom of her bag. She’d shut the bag in a drawer, locking her pain in a limbo.
She’d unpack it once she settled her obligation to the studio—once she hit submit.
“But I haven’t even heard about the party!” The rusty chain of a swing set creaked alongside Janelle’s complaint. “I’ve been waiting for feedback on my dress selection.”
Therapeutically, Tash glanced to the phantasmal homicide gracing her screen. “I have to send everything to Braverman on Friday. Can I come over then?”
“You better.” A child squealed somewhere near Janelle’s phone. “Also, invite Caleb.”
Tash returned directly to her fictional carnage to keep him from her mind.
She took a breather only when the day stopped shining in the garden apartment and she could slink upstairs to her duplex in the dark.
She wasted almost a week like this, pushing herself toward sleep on the unsolicited tweaks she’d made to the episode’s closing moments: Tash had expunged all of Hewett’s dialogue, rendering him voiceless; she’d made him set off straight for the horizon, sending Noab no last looks.
Tash spared Noab the anguish of having to hear his voice, or allowing him to see how much he’d maimed her.
She let Noab mourn in private, her eyes leaking her secrets, as the man she’d foolishly dropped her defenses for sailed swiftly away.
* * *
Ultimately, Tash had to force herself to inch backward through Episode Nine.
Her cutoff date for Braverman loomed, and the responsible cells in her brain commanded her to put the Mother Beast’s payback aside and deal with the treachery that caused it: the plot points between Noab waking warm in Hewett’s arms one morning and shivering, abandoned by night.
Just a span of hours for Hewett to betray her; just a span of days for Tash to choreograph Noab’s suffering.
Problematically, Tash and Caleb had discussed the scene only long enough to fight about the reason for Noab’s capture: for the slave trade, as Braverman wanted, or for Hewett’s men, the way Tash wrote it in the book.
She didn’t have Story Edit’s actual comments, and they suddenly seemed very necessary for Tash to successfully finesse the blocking.
And so, for lack of any other feasible alternative, at her most rock-bottom, she smothered her pride and emailed the only approachable story team contact in her possession, other than Caleb, forty hours before the deadline: Brian Doolittle, he of Nice job getting the author to loosen up .
The same guy who’d messaged constantly, on Ram’s behalf, in the month before Caleb arrived, and whose missives Tash had roundly ignored.
Brian Doolittle would definitely not be inclined to help her; she knew the email was a long shot, and also pathetic.
Hey Brian! With an increasing panic about the time crunch, Tash attempted blasé.
No big deal, just coolly begging him for the Episode Nine notes, without offering a case for why she might need them.
She prayed he could be discreet because Tash did not seek to open a channel to Braverman, and she wasn’t interested in hearing anything more from Regina Bond.
Then she refreshed her inbox a thousand times.
After a thousand more, she had a different idea.
She reattached Rohan’s landline to the wall socket and dialed the front desk of La Playa. This was official business—she called the hotel instead of Caleb’s phone. Also, she wasn’t sure he’d answer if he saw her name pop up on his screen.
She waited on hold. She cold-sweat convinced herself she’d be able to calmly ask him for the notes. She convinced herself she’d be able to hear his voice without shattering completely.
But her hand-wringing came to nothing—because Mr. Rafferty had checked out.
Tash slid to the floor.
Of course he’d checked out. Of course he’d gone back to California with the work they’d crafted together and the studio’s congratulatory backslap for a job mostly well done.
He’d packed up the freckles on the ridge of his shoulder and his bullshit about his dog.
He’d packed up the gaggle of older women who adored him, and he’d gone home.
He wasn’t coming near her—exactly as Tash had asked.
She wept on the sisal carpet in her brother’s too-bright apartment, next to the sofa Caleb had sat on when he didn’t know she lived upstairs.
She howled into the jute cushions of an armchair, and at the corners of the tiny kitchen where she’d made them tea.
She cried for all her hopeful soft parts, and for the hard shell he’d coaxed her to peel away, and for a dream she’d exposed to the elements, only to have it pummeled.
She cried because she was not strong, and because she’d forgotten her compass, or she’d misplaced it by choice. She’d dropped it into Caleb’s pocket. And now she was adrift and alone.