Page 37 of The Dirty Version

Unsurprisingly, Brian Doolittle never replied to Tash’s email. She understood she deserved it—after all, she’d initiated the bridge-burning from their first exchange. She accepted the karmic snub on the morning before her deadline.

Outside, on her balcony, the tree canopy dripped traces of a storm Tash hadn’t heard.

She dialed her brother. She’d unearthed and recharged her phone on the off chance Doolittle might call.

When she’d turned it on, she discovered Caleb had not attempted to make contact; Tash churned with this knowledge, sad and angry and hurt and relieved.

Crushed and used up and furious all over again, resolving once more to see her project through without him.

“Hey!” Rohan loud-whispered, Wesley still asleep. “I’m leaving for a shift. How nice to hear from the sibling who’s been ‘too tied up with work’ to call.”

“Rohan. I fucked up.” Tash announced it hoarsely, lifting her face to the sky’s disappointment, a trickle of whatever tears she had left dampening her cheeks.

“I have a submission deadline in twelve hours. I don’t know what to write, and I don’t have the right resources.

When I get this wrong, the studio will have another reason to do whatever they want with the script. ”

The sound of a drawer banging came across the line. “Shit! Hold on.” A door shut solidly. After a minute, Rohan’s normal volume returned. He put Tash on his car’s speaker. “Start from the beginning. What happened to our handsome writing guy? Can’t he help you?”

Tash had bandaged up that wound and had begged herself to keep it covered, just for the meantime. “He’s not here. He turned out to kind of be a mole.”

“There’s espionage ?” Rohan boomed like a diva. “What the fuck, Trash?”

On another day, it might have made her smile. “The bigger issue right now is that I owe the studio another scene—and I’ve been staring at a blank page.”

“Which scene?” Rohan knew the book almost as well as Janelle.

“The assault, near the end. The studio wants to make it less upsetting.” Tash had written everything else she thought Braverman might ask for, including Noab and Hewett’s bittersweet goodbye sex—which actually had been easy, after her call to La Playa.

“And...?” Rohan sounded confused.

“And I don’t want to change it! It’s supposed to be a symbol of what women endure every day.

I’ve been trying to come up with something horrible enough to be worthy of the story that the studio will still accept—but I don’t have their notes, so I don’t really know what I’m doing.

” Tash began to cry again. “I’m going to disappoint so many people, and it’s my own fault. ”

“Hold on. Just breathe.” Rohan made his voice soothing. “Listen—if anyone can manage ‘horrible’ and ‘upsetting’, it’s definitely you. You are the queen. You wrote a whole book about baby-killing just to get out of marrying that flaccid pediatrician.”

Tash actually did smile then. “Zach broke up with me. And you know I wrote most of it before I met him.”

Rohan’s bias insisted. “That’s what I’m saying—reverse psychology! You’ve always been very sneaky. And very, very talented. Just finish this. Then get out here and visit me.”

In the end, Rohan’s sneaky gave Tash the idea.

She decided on a hybrid solution. She let Hewett’s crew ambush Noab but not physically harm her—they tricked her into a cage.

Then Tash took her own words and stuffed them in the crew’s mouth—making them describe their plans for Noab, the trauma all dialogue, maybe even a reverse riff on burlesque, the language unambiguous and awful, the fear it inspired ever visceral.

The crew advertised the fact Hewett had done this many times before, regularly pleasuring himself with women he double-crossed.

Then Tash let Noab cleverly provoke them, earning a smack to her jaw with the butt of a gun.

She wrote the slow spread of Noab’s smile as she spit her blood into the water, summoning her fellow female monster.

She wrote Noab’s conviction that the Mother Beast would take her side and protect her—because they were Sisters.

And because the animal would sense she’d been depleted, now only a spent vessel, with nothing inside left to consume.

* * *

Tash half expected her laptop to explode once she’d uploaded the file. Or melt, or whimper, or ding with an immediate response. Instead, her computer just lazed there mutely.

She’d hit the finish line, and now she could fall apart.

She parked her car alongside Janelle’s manicured hedges, glancing down to assure herself she’d dressed.

She made it to the front door without alarming the neighbors.

She remembered it had to be naptime for at least one of the girls and let herself in without ringing the bell.

She found Janelle in the kitchen wiping counter crumbs and eating discarded grilled-cheese crusts, Denise by the Danish high chair in a pencil skirt.

Tash trudged in and laid her head down on one of the brightly colored plastic place mats on their dining table.

She dropped her haphazardly packed overnight bag with a quiet thud.

Without introduction, she launched into everything that had happened, from the beginning of the Big Gun soiree—the fleeting fantasy of Caleb’s California invitation; Tash’s private moments with Regina Bond, who was also Reggie and who worshipped data.

Tash recounted Caleb’s lion-taming, and his double-dealing, and the way he’d used their relationship to nudge her toward Braverman’s point of view.

She told them he’d known about the studio’s intentions all along and lied to her about them, while having the balls to sweet-talk at her with words like “trust.”

When Tash finished, Denise uncrossed her arms, bending stylishly in three-inch heels to retrieve an errant raisin from the floor. Janelle avoided eye contact. The silence in the kitchen felt entirely too loud.

Tash had expected some supportive wrath. “Hello?”

Denise glanced to Janelle. “I don’t know, Tash.

As someone who negotiates fairly complicated shit for a living, I think you might be blowing this out of proportion.

Just because Caleb heard other opinions and tried to find solutions doesn’t mean he was manipulating you.

It might mean he was trying to find a common ground. ”

Tash stared in ratty disbelief. “Denise! He was having full-on discussions about critical plot changes behind my back. He never told me any of it.”

“But didn’t you ask him to be the buffer?

Maybe not telling you was a fair part of that game.

” Denise joined Tash at the table. “Who knows what goes on in those meetings. In my job, when I want a certain outcome, sometimes I ask every stakeholder for their two cents. I let them all yap into a pot, and then I throw in my solution—which inevitably rises to the top. And then a man tries to take credit for it.”

Janelle chuckled, leaning back against the sink.

Denise said the next part carefully: “And while you do have a million amazing qualities, you also have a tendency to shoot first and ask questions later. Which, one could argue, is part of what got you in this bind. Maybe Caleb was scared of how you’d react to what goes on behind the scenes. Negotiations can be mental warfare.”

Yet Tash couldn’t forget the panic on Caleb’s face when he saw her and Regina together. She rejected the suggestion she’d misconstrued it. “But it was calculated. Braverman had an agenda from the start. Caleb’s first priority was always Astrid, and then the studio. Not me.”

“Are you sure?” Janelle seemed unconvinced.

“Yes!” Tash flailed, growing more annoyed, grasping at more straws, her friends’ doubt making everything much worse. “He even asked ‘What would be so bad’ about more seasons.”

“But that’s a great question!” Janelle exasperatedly shot back.

“I mean, as long as you could keep the crux of the story. Now that we’re on this road, we see that more seasons could equal more exposure for the book’s ideas.

And I thought Caleb really proved himself—I loved everything I read.

There’s no room for Braverman to twist the sequences you two showed me into something sleazy. ”

Tash dismissed this. “Episodes One and Five were less important. He was just working me to get what the studio wants for Nine and Ten.”

“What, like a long con?” Denise made her skepticism obvious. “Doesn’t that sound far-fetched?”

Tash glared at them on two sides of the kitchen. “What is going on here? The con was not that long! Caleb didn’t even have to try that hard. I made it easy!”

Janelle moved to the table, reaching to squeeze Tash’s hand. “Natasha, I love you. But you have never made anything easy.”

Denise smothered a chuckle. “So what did he say after you ran out of the party, when it was just the two of you alone?”

Tash dredged up that last fight. “I don’t know. I left.”

“You left?” Janelle exclaimed. “Without letting him explain?”

Tash could not have predicted this. She’d envisioned a wallow and tequila, some man-bashing and hugs. “Explain what? The other ways he could get me to sell out?”

Denise intervened, putting an arm up, in real-talk lawyer mode.

“ Compromising is not selling out , Tash. You agreed to compromise when you signed a contract for the film rights to your novel. It’s that simple.

You gave someone else creative license, and this is how it goes. You need to stop being so precious.”

“But it is precious!”

“It’s precious to you ,” Denise corrected her, sighing, glancing at her wife.

“Look.” She turned to face Tash fully. “Janelle is too nice to say this—but you cling to exaggerated principles because you like to be mad. Rage is your go-to, and you’re letting your feelings about Men stop you from dealing fairly with one particular man—who legitimately sounds like he was trying. ”

Tash swiveled to stare at her best friend. “Is that what you think?”