Page 23 of Beneath the Desert Bloom (Of Beasts and Bloom #1)

A fact. Like gravity. Like the desert. Like the ache between her thighs that hadn’t gone away.

He’d been there the whole time.

She didn’t speak. She wasn’t sure if she could. Her voice felt too human for this moment.

So she nodded. Just once.

And he disappeared.

As if the land had pulled him back into itself like a held breath.

Nora backed away from the door and dropped into the old chair by the desk. The journal she’d left open the day before waited for her. She picked it up with both hands, turned the page. Her fingers moved automatically, but her mind was elsewhere.

Back on the floor.

Back under him.

Back in the moment where she said yes.

Not to the sex.

To all of it.

She stood abruptly, the chair scraping back with a groan. Her feet moved without thought. Through the hallway, into the bathroom.

The mirror waited.

The bite on her neck was still pink. Still visible. But something had changed. The skin around it shimmered faintly, like it remembered fire.

She touched it.

And felt her pulse there.

Her own. But not just hers.

She blinked.

Her irises looked darker. Like something had dropped behind them. A curtain pulled back.

She stepped back from the mirror and went outside. No shoes. No hesitation.

The desert didn’t welcome her.

It didn’t resist her either.

It simply knew her now.

And she knew it.

She walked barefoot to the edge of the wash, the wind catching her hair and brushing against her thighs like a hand that had been here before. There were no flowers blooming this time. No winds howling. Just silence, and dust, and the crackle of cicadas in the brush.

She knelt beside a flat rock and ran her hands over its surface. Warm. Dry. Familiar.

And then she whispered, “I sent him away.”

She waited.

The air didn’t answer.

She lowered her head, forehead pressed to the stone.

The stone was warm. The wind shifted against her cheek like a breath, like a blessing. She stayed there, kneeling in the dirt, letting the silence settle over her.

“I choose you,” she whispered.

But nothing whispered back.

Eventually, she stood. Brushed herself off. Walked back to the house in bare feet.

Inside, the obsidian stone sat still on the table. Not doing anything at all.

She made coffee. Drank it too fast. Tried to write. The words didn’t come.

The quiet wasn’t peace. It was a vacuum.

She didn’t want mystery. She wanted something real to hold onto.

She didn’t remember deciding to go to the diner.

One minute she was pacing the kitchen, still buzzing with heat and aftershock. The next, she was pushing open the glass door to the place that always smelled like burnt toast and yesterday’s gossip.

Nora slid into her booth near the back, where the morning sun couldn’t glare directly into her soul.

Gloria spotted her immediately. She wiped her hands on her apron, came over with a half-full pot, and raised an eyebrow like Nora had already said something suspicious.

“You’re up early,” Gloria said. “Or still not sleeping?”

Nora stared at the table for a second, then nodded. “One of those.”

Gloria filled her cup without asking. “You look like someone who touched the wrong end of a lightning strike.”

“I feel like I got scrambled by a storm god,” Nora muttered, wrapping her hands around the mug.

“Sounds about right.”

They sat in that kind of silence that belonged to people who’d seen strange things and decided not to ask too many questions about them.

Finally, Nora said, “She ever talk to you? My grandmother. About… any of this?”

Gloria nodded, slowly. “Not directly. But she knew something. Left breadcrumbs.”

Nora hesitated. “I don’t really remember her. I was just a kid when she passed. It was always just me and Pops after that.”

Gloria reached into her apron pocket and pulled out a weathered envelope, folded flat and sealed with a strip of red tape.

“She gave me this ages ago. Didn’t say when to give it to you. Just that I’d know.”

Nora took it. The paper crackled under her fingers.

Inside was one page. Handmade, uneven. A few lines in faded ink.

My dear Nora,

I stayed. I listened. But I never crossed.

The desert doesn’t demand obedience. It asks for becoming.

I couldn’t give it that. But I think you can.

Three things bind a Bloom to the land:

A touch freely given.

An offering made without knowing the cost.

A vow spoken with nothing but the heart behind it.

You’ll know when it’s time.

He will too.

And the desert will bloom again.

Nora blinked away the tears forming in her eyes. “Is this… like a ritual?”

“Instructions. Or maybe a warning,” Gloria said. “She said it’d make sense when the time came.”

Nora traced the words on the page with her finger. “Why me?”

Gloria stirred her coffee. “You stayed. You dreamed. You walked into the hollow and didn’t flinch. Most people leave before the dust settles.”

Nora ran her fingers over the page again.

“What happens if I do it?”

“I don’t know,” Gloria said. “Maybe nothing. Maybe the desert swallows you whole. Maybe you come back shining.”

“That’s comforting.”

“This isn’t comfort,” Gloria said. “It’s choice. One most folks never make.”

***

That night, Nora couldn’t sleep. Not because the wind was loud or the heat was unbearable, but because everything felt... expectant.

The flowers on her porch were half-wilted.

The air tasted metallic.

When she touched the mark on her neck, it throbbed like it had its own pulse. Like something inside her was keeping time with something outside her. And neither of them wanted to wait.

She opened her grandfather’s journal again and found pages she hadn’t noticed before. Or maybe she had, but they read differently now.

I’ve felt it watching. The land. The silence.

There’s a place near the ridge where nothing grows. No birdsong. No wind. I went there today and stood too long. The ground pulsed beneath me, not welcome. Not warning. Just… knowing.

Opal says the desert doesn’t punish. It remembers.

Someone else stood there once. A woman. Long before me.

The Bloom must choose, yes. But she must also be met.

This one wasn’t.

She gave herself too early. Or too alone.

The Guardian was not ready. Or not whole.

And the land held the memory like a scar.

Nora stared at the page, breath shallow. It didn’t feel like prophecy. It felt like grief. Like her grandfather had found a ghost and didn’t know what to do with it.

There had been another. Not a myth. A woman.

Not met. Not remembered by name.

But the desert knew her.

And it did not forget.