Page 35 of Beneath the Desert Bloom (Of Beasts and Bloom #1)

They stayed like that a long time.

Eventually, he softened.

She turned beneath him, and he slid out of her slowly, the stretch sweet and obscene, their fluids wet between her thighs.

She looked up at him. He was panting, glowing and beautiful. She smiled, and he kissed her so softly she could barely feel it.

Later, they lay in the dust, her head on his chest.

She traced the ridges of his chest, the bark-like patterns on his stomach, the curve of his thighs, the sacred lines of him. His skin was still cooling beneath her fingers. Still flickering faintly in the places where their bodies had pressed.

She wanted to remember him like this. Sacred. Hers.

He was quiet now. So was the desert.

She let her palm rest over his heart, felt the slow rhythm there. The beat was heavy, rooted. Like something finally at rest.

No wind stirred. No petals fell. Just the hush that comes after becoming.

She breathed in the silence. Let it settle.

And for once, she didn’t reach for meaning.

She just stayed.

Eventually, she sat up, stretching, gloriously bare.

She gathered a handful of petals from the earth, held them in her palm, and let the wind take them. They scattered high, curling, rising. Blooming.

She turned to him, her voice quiet, full of something older than words.

“The land remembers us now.”

He stood, joined her in the sun, and said:

“It always did.”

They walked back barefoot.

Nora didn’t put on her clothes. She didn’t need them.

The air wrapped around her like silk. The ground didn’t hurt her feet anymore. Asher walked beside her, quiet, shirt slung over his shoulder, his hand brushing hers every few steps like he couldn’t stand to lose contact for long.

When the house came into view, it looked different.

Clusters of cactus flowers bloomed along the edges of the porch.

The Joshua trees had curled inward slightly, like guardians bowing their heads.

A desert hare sat in the middle of the walkway, unafraid.

Quail chirped softly from the fencepost. A bobcat napped in the shade of the rain barrel.

The desert had left its blessing.

And they belonged to it now.

***

Later that day, Nora sat at her desk, damp hair curling against her shoulders, sunlight warming her through the open window. Asher was napping on the porch, snoring softly.

She opened her journal, flipped to a clean page, and wrote:

We did not tame the land.

We fed it.

And it bloomed.

She didn’t submit her thesis. She didn’t return her advisor’s calls. She didn’t explain a single thing to anyone. She just kept writing.

Sometimes, Opal came by to drop off herbs and occasionally stayed for dinner. She never asked questions. Just smiled and said the land looked better these days.

And no one went to Hollow Wash anymore.

Not without leaving something behind.

One night, a week after the bloom, Gloria showed up unannounced.

No knock, just the slow creak on the porch and a muttered “Don’t shoot, I come bearing cheese.”

She had a small brown paper bag, a bottle of wine, and her usual expression of dry amusement. Nora met her at the door in cutoff shorts and an old tank, her braid half undone, a smear of ash still on her wrist from whatever she'd been drawing on the floor.

“You look like a woman who either just hexed a senator or finished very loud sex.”

“Both,” Nora said, stepping aside. “Welcome to the temple.”

Gloria whistled low, eyeing the way vines had started creeping along the porch columns. “Place smells like sage, wet dirt, and the kind of trouble I would've chased at twenty.”

“I recommend it at thirty-six, too.”

They sat on the porch, the three of them, legs up on the railing, sipping wine while watching the sun drop behind the red horizon. Cicadas buzzed in the still air.

Gloria leaned back in her chair, watching a hawk circle high above the Joshua trees. She didn’t speak for a long time. Just looked at Nora, then at Asher, then out at the stars.

Finally, she said, “He’d be proud.”

Nora’s throat tightened. “He wasn’t big on pride.”

“No,” Gloria agreed. “But he believed in legacy. You’re the one that bloomed, baby. He always said the land would choose someone like you.”

“And Asher?”

Gloria tilted her head, smiling softly at Asher. “He was the storm. But even storms want to rest, eventually.”

She looked out across the yard. The flowers hadn’t stopped blooming. The air still shimmered. The land remembered.

“My mother used to say the desert doesn’t keep things unless they’re useful,” Gloria said. “But I think she was wrong.”

“Oh?”

“I think the desert keeps what it loves.”

Nora swallowed. That landed somewhere deep.

Then Gloria pulled something small from her pocket; an old silver ring with a pale desert agate set in the center. Rough. Weather-worn. Familiar.

“This was your grandmother’s,” she said, placing it on the armrest between them. “She gave it to me, said one day it would come back to the bloom.”

Nora picked up, turning it over in her palm. “You kept it?”

“Didn’t feel right to wear it. Didn’t feel right to lose it.”

She looked over.

“Feels right now.”

Nora slipped it onto her finger. It fit. Not just her hand. Her.

She spun the ring on her finger, imagining her grandmother wearing it. Her grandmother never stepped into the desert fully. But maybe that was the point. She stayed in the world long enough to leave a trail. And Nora had followed it.

As they sipped their wine, no one said much. The desert didn’t need narration anymore. It just was.

Later, Asher found her in the kitchen, barefoot, scribbling symbols and drawings on the wall with charcoal. Her tank top was damp with sweat, her braid messy and full of flower petals from who-knew-where.

He pressed up behind her, wrapped his arms around her waist.

“Are we a fairytale now?” he murmured.

She laughed.

“No,” she said.

Then turned in his arms, kissed him slow, and pulled him toward the bedroom.

“We’re the part that comes after.”

That night, she lay in bed beside Asher, the window open to the sound of wind and blooming things. His hand found her waist like it always would.

The desert never stopped blooming.

And neither did she.

She was no longer just Nora.

She was the one who stayed.

And the land bloomed with her.

And this time, the desert kept what it loved.