Page 32 of Beneath the Desert Bloom (Of Beasts and Bloom #1)

THE DESERT DIDN’T feel like a threat anymore. And it felt like the house that had finally opened its windows.

The rooms felt warmer now, less like a bunker sealed against the world and more like something living, breathing, willing to open its eyes.

The windows stayed open most days. Wind moved through the curtains.

Light lingered on the floorboards. The tap of Nora’s bare feet sounded less like intrusion and more like rhythm.

The house breathed.

So did she.

The mornings were fuller now. She showered with the windows open, letting the steam roll out into the desert. She sang sometimes, just loud enough for the land to hear. Fresh coffee steeped in the sun-warmed kitchen. A cast-iron skillet on the stove, garlic hissing in oil.

Asher lived there now, though he never said it aloud. He slept in her bed. Sharpened knives in the early light. Split mesquite logs in the yard. Tended to their small but flourishing garden. Drank from her chipped enamel mugs like they were sacred vessels.

That first morning, she found him in the bathroom standing over the sink with his giant hands hovering uncertainly beneath the faucet. Bark-streaked fingers trying to decode the knob logic, staring at the faucet like it might bite him.

“You can twist it,” she offered. “It’s not a rattlesnake.”

He stared at it like it was an ancient trap. “Why does it hiss?”

“Because it’s old. Like most of the things in this house.”

“Will you hiss when you’re old?”

“Already do.”

That got a half-smile out of him, small and slow, like a muscle he was still learning to use. He turned the tap. The pipes groaned. The faucet spit. He recoiled, and Nora laughed so hard she nearly fell against the wall.

“Congratulations,” Nora said, wiping tears from her eyes. “You’ve defeated indoor plumbing.”

Later, when he crouched at the edge of the garden and watched a hummingbird without blinking for a full three minutes, she fell in love with him all over again.

There was peace now. But not stasis.

The land still moved beneath them, softly and subtly.

Flowers bloomed in strange places. Cracks in the steps, the center of her old boots, the windowsill where she’d set down her tea.

Rain swept through their yard but never reached town.

Coyotes watched from the ridge but didn’t come closer.

The wind curled through the chimes she had forgotten she hung. The house creaked differently now.

Her body hummed with it. The desert remembered her.

She slept deeply now, wrapped in Asher’s arms or sprawled across him like a sun-warmed cat. He let her. He never pulled away.

And when she woke, she cooked.

That morning, she cracked eight eggs into a bowl and stirred them with cream.

Diced tomatoes. Garlic. Toasted thick slices of bread.

There was something sacred in the sizzle of oil in cast iron, in the way Asher leaned against the counter behind her, arms crossed, watching her like it was a ritual.

The scent of cooking filled the space like a memory she hadn’t known she missed.

She plated breakfast and set two forks on the table. She didn’t say “come eat.” She didn’t have to.

Asher slid into the chair across from her and picked up his fork with both hands, like the act of eating something she made was still holy.

Nora watched him chew, watched the way his eyes fluttered shut when he swallowed. She found herself smiling again, the kind that started deep and didn’t need to be seen.

Her veins still glowed faintly. She noticed it most in the morning, when the sunlight hit her skin at a slant and made her wrists shimmer like water.

Asher still changed, his bark morphing slowly into something softer, like human skin. The land was still changing them, but not violently now. More like tide and sediment. Slow, inevitable, sacred.

After breakfast, she cleaned the pans while he stacked firewood by the porch. She hummed as she worked. The sound of someone who didn’t need to rush.

The mattress on the floor wasn’t meant to be permanent.

Just something she’d dragged into the back room during the heat wave, when the front of the house got too hot and the desert air needed to be let in through every screen, every door. It was thin. Lumpy. Smelled like sage and old stories. She loved it.

Asher was already there when she wandered in, shirtless, sprawled on his back with one knee bent, one arm behind his head. His chest rose and fell slowly, his eyes half-lidded but open. He looked like he’d been waiting without urgency, like he would’ve laid there all day if she hadn’t come looking.

She stepped into the room, her tank top loose against her bare skin, soft cotton brushing her nipples as she moved. She’d showered, but only barely. There was still dirt on the arches of her feet. A smudge of ash on her elbow.

He looked at her like she was still glowing.

“You’re staring,” she said, easing down beside him.

“You always say that,” he murmured.

“Because you always are.”

He didn’t argue.

She stretched out beside him, cheek against his shoulder, one hand splayed across his chest. The beat of him moved under her palm like a tide, low and steady. She traced the line where bark met flesh, her fingers catching in the roughness, then smoothing down over the curve of his ribs.

“Does it hurt?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “Not when it’s you.”

Her hand stilled. He didn’t say it with emphasis. Just truth.

She rolled slightly, pressing a kiss to his collarbone, then another just below it. Her lips brushed a glowing scar, still healing, still faintly gold. He let her. Didn’t reach for her. Just breathed.

She lifted one leg over his, straddling his thigh loosely, settling her weight into the hollow of his side. His hands came to her waist, large and grounding, his thumbs circling over the hem of her shirt.

They lay like that for a long time.

No urgency. No hunger. Just heat.

Eventually, he ran one hand up her back beneath the shirt, fingers spread, slow and reverent. Her skin arched toward him without thinking. She kissed his throat. His jaw. The corner of his mouth.

He turned into it.

The kiss was soft. Warm.

They just lay there like that, his body a long line of heat along hers.

His breath stirred on her neck.

She sighed and let herself melt.

It felt obscene in its tenderness.

Like the world had always been too loud, and now it had finally shut the fuck up.

His voice, when it came, was a whisper behind her ear.

“I used to think the desert only bloomed from pain.”

She didn’t open her eyes.

“It still does,” she murmured.

He kissed her shoulder, slow.

“But now I know it grows from love, too.”

She smiled, her heart full.

The room breathed with them. The desert waited outside the window. The mattress shifted with the soft weight of memory and skin and the absence of demand.

And for once, Nora didn’t feel like she had to prove anything.

She just was.

And that was enough.

***

Nora wrote with her feet in the dirt.

Literally. Toes buried, coffee within reach, laptop perched on the edge of a paint-peeled table under what passed for shade in the back lot. A half-dead aloe plant leaned toward her like it had something to add. A fly buzzed against the screen.

The words were flowing. Not cleanly. Not academically. Not with footnotes and citations and long, gasping paragraphs about cultural context. But they came anyway, feral, lyrical, sharp around the edges.

She wasn’t writing a thesis anymore.

She was writing a testament.

It started like this:

There are places where the wild waits.

Not hidden. Not dormant. Just quiet.

Waiting for someone to come back barefoot.

To bleed. To bloom.

She didn’t call it nonfiction. Didn’t even call it research. It was a collection of half-memories, sensory data, and strange poetry that her department chair would probably have called “a psychotic break.”

She called it true.

She saved the file under a fake name. She wasn’t hiding. The truth just didn’t need her name on it. If it worked, it would grow like a fungus. Whispered. Shared. Posted on Reddit under a burner account.

Do not look directly at the horizon after midnight.

If you hear the wind stop, don’t stop with it.

Leave offerings. Or leave.

Nora stretched her legs and leaned back in the chair.

Inside, she could hear Asher humming.

He’d picked up the habit from her, humming little nothing melodies while he boiled water, sorted rocks, stared out windows. She hadn’t realized how much she’d missed background noise until he became hers.

Hers.

She still wasn’t used to thinking that way. But the mark at her neck still pulsed when he touched her. And the desert still bloomed when she screamed.

So maybe she’d earned it.

She was about to go inside to refill her mug, maybe coax him into a second shower, when the crunch of tires on gravel made her freeze. It wasn’t the postal truck, or a lost hiker.

She stood slowly, brushing her palms against her thighs, and watched as a familiar cherry red Lincoln rolled to a stop just past the shade line.

The driver’s door creaked open. Gloria stepped out in a billow of perfume and attitude, her sunhat tilted dramatically and a shoebox tucked under one arm.

“You didn’t think I’d mind my business forever, did you?” she called.

Nora grinned. “I figured you’d been claimed by the diner grease gods.”

“Almost. But they said I could keep my soul if I brought you this.”

She lifted the box.

Nora’s stomach did a somersault.

“What is it?”

Gloria didn’t answer. Just handed it over.

The lid had been taped shut. Old masking tape, yellowed and curling.

Nora peeled it back carefully and opened the box.

Inside:

A folded piece of lined paper, brittle at the edges.

A cassette tape in a cracked plastic case.

A photo she didn’t remember ever taking: her, age maybe nine, barefoot in the wash, a feather tucked behind her ear.

A pressed flower, still red despite the years, tied with a thread of red string.

She lifted the note first.