Page 33 of Beneath the Desert Bloom (Of Beasts and Bloom #1)

It was her grandfather’s handwriting.

Neat, familiar in the same way a scar is.

She’s the bloom.

He’s the storm.

Together, they root.

Nora didn’t realize she was crying until Gloria handed her a napkin that smelled like lemon pie and cigarette smoke.

“He wrote it the day after your twelfth birthday,” Gloria said quietly. “Told me to hold onto it. Said I’d know when it was time. Typical Vale behavior… always leaving me with instructions and no damn timelines.”

Nora wiped her face and nodded, smiling through watery eyes.

They sat in silence for a minute. Two.

Then Gloria said, “You look different.”

“I feel different.”

Gloria smiled. “You glow different now. That’s how I know it stuck.”

Inside the house, Asher opened the door, barefoot, shirt half-buttoned.

He looked at Gloria, and Gloria looked at him, and neither said anything for a long time.

Then Gloria nodded once, like an old agreement had been satisfied. “You’re softer than I expected.”

“I get that a lot,” Asher said.

Nora let out a startled laugh.

“Don’t encourage him,” she muttered.

But her fingers closed around the paper again.

She’s the bloom. He’s the storm. Together, they root.

Gloria kissed Nora on the cheek, glanced at the sky, and left, with promises of a return with some pie in the near future.

***

They didn’t tell the town anything.

Not the truth. Not the parts of it that mattered.

Nora still showed up for groceries every Friday morning, windblown and half-dressed, her hair in a bun held together with a pencil and her tank tops always a little too sheer.

She still ordered two coffees from the Desert Spoon, one black, one with honey, and let Gloria pretend she didn’t already know who the second cup was for.

People stared. She let them.

Rumors bloomed like wildflowers.

She was a widow. A witch. A burnout. A botanist.

Her boyfriend was a fugitive. An anthropologist. A hallucination.

Her house was haunted. Her land was cursed.

The power lines always buzzed when she drove by.

She ignored most of it.

But once, in the hardware store, a man asked her if she’d ever found the “thing” her grandfather had been looking for.

She smiled, slow and sharp.

“I didn’t find it,” she said. “It found me.”

He didn’t ask again.

They fell into a rhythm, she and Asher.

Not domestic in any classic sense. There was no chore wheel, no grocery list taped to the fridge. They didn’t separate laundry. Half the time, they didn’t wear clothes long enough to make laundry.

But they shared things.

The way the light fell in the afternoon across the porch. The way the water tasted different when the wind came from the south. The unspoken agreement that some nights were for words and others were for skin.

Asher learned how to cook eggs.

Burned them the first dozen tries.

She didn’t correct him. Just watched him swear under his breath and scrape scrambled attempts into the trash with a look of wounded pride.

“You fought off settlers with your bare hands,” she teased. “But butter is your downfall.”

“I didn’t say I was good at being human,” he grumbled.

“You’re lucky you’re pretty.”

They slept curled into each other most nights. Not for warmth, but because the wild in them both needed contact. Needed skin to skin, breath to breath. Some nights, she’d wake with his hand at her waist, his forehead pressed to her shoulder, the desert wind howling like a choir outside.

He didn’t ask for reassurance.

But she gave it anyway.

“I’m not leaving,” she’d whisper.

“Good,” he’d murmur. “I just learned how to work the stove.”

The desert shifted too.

In town, they called it an anomaly. A climate blip. A freak string of blooms. Botanists came with cameras and frowns. Journalists called. Some tried to hike to Hollow Wash. Most came back with sunburns and broken compasses.

A few… didn’t come back at all.

And those who did told strange stories:

They heard a woman’s voice calling in the wind.

They saw shapes in the rock that moved when they looked away.

One said the air tasted like blood and honeysuckle.

No one believed them.

But no one tried twice.

At the library, someone painted a mural on the outside wall.

No one knew who.

It showed a woman standing barefoot in the wash, her hair a snarl of smoke and cactus thorns. Behind her stood a man, massive and bark-skinned, eyes like fire, half-shadowed. Around them, blooming flowers spiraled from the dirt.

Nora saw it while walking past one morning, a bag of oranges in one hand and her journal in the other.

She didn’t stop. She just smiled.

Her writing kept going.

It grew stranger by the day. Less linear, more like a map written in heatwaves. She started adding illustrations, scraps of dried plants, pressed feathers, teeth. Asher brought her things, like smooth black stones, twisted wood, a piece of antler with a pattern burned into the grain.

She wove them in and called the pages “fieldwork.”

Sometimes, she published them online under the name Notes from the Bloom Line . Sometimes she just tucked them in jars and left them around town, beneath benches, inside mailboxes, folded into books at the library.

The desert doesn’t forget.

It buries. It breaks. It blooms.

***

One day, she felt it in the wind. She was ready.

The tape clicked into the player with a soft mechanical sigh.

She hadn’t been ready to play it at first.

But something in the house had shifted.

The windows no longer creaked. The floorboards no longer sighed under Asher’s weight. Even the stove ticked more gently. The silence had ripened.

Today, the waiting was done.

She pressed play.

Static.

Then came his voice.

Dry. Weathered. Crumbling with age.

But undeniably Orin Vale.

“If you’re hearing this, then you stayed. I knew you would.”

She exhaled.

“This place doesn’t keep people. It lets them root, but only if they’re willing. If they give more than they take.”

There was a pause. The sound of him clearing his throat. A cough.

“It was always going to be you, little bloom. I only kept the door ajar. You were always going to walk through it. I just wanted it to be your choice, to let you live enough before the land called you home.”

A long pause.

“The truth’s not in the journals. It’s under your feet. Inside your blood. You’ll feel it when the wind changes.”

The tape crackled.

Something in his voice cracked too, softened.

“Now it’s your turn to blossom.”

The tape hissed again.

“You’ll know what to do. The land remembers. The blood does too.”

Nora pressed her hand to her chest. The mark on her neck thrummed beneath her palm.

Another pause.

Then, softer than anything he’d ever said to her in life:

“She’s the bloom.

He’s the storm.

Together, they root.

I love you, Nora.”

The tape clicked. Stopped.

And that was it.

A tear ran down Nora’s cheek as she sat there, barefoot on the kitchen floor, the morning light draping across her thighs, the smell of creosote and memories hanging thick in the air.

Something in her had ached to hear that voice again.

And now, having heard it, the words, the knowing in them, the love braided through every quiet pause, she felt like something inside her had finally been named.

It was closure, and also permission.

To stop doubting. To step forward. To become who he always knew she would become.

She rose slowly.

She was ready.

The desert wasn’t calling.

It was waiting.