Page 115 of Beneath the Desert Bloom
Tangled their fingers together.
She stared at their joined hands. At the gold-veined glow that ran between them. At the way their skin touched without resistance.
She turned toward him and really looked.
His body was still vast. Still impossible. Broad as ever, bark-veined and rooted in something ancient. But the sharpness had softened. The hard edges that had once bristled like armor now shone with heat and humanity. His shoulders were less tense. His throat, less guarded. His jaw was dusted with gold sap and fine desert ash, and his mouth was relaxed in a way she’d never seen before.
His eyes were the same molten amber. But clearer now. No longer a wall of fire. A window.
“You look…” she started, then stopped.
Because it wasn’t just beauty she saw.
“You look real,” she said.
His lips parted.
No protest. No deflection. Just breath.
“I feel it,” he said. “Like I remember how to wear myself.”
Nora reached forward, fingertips brushing the edge of his jaw. She traced the line to his ear, the glowing scar that ran behind it, down the column of his neck.
“You feel warmer,” she murmured. “I didn’t know you could be.”
His mouth twitched. An almost-smile. But his eyes were solemn.
“You changed me,” he said.
She ran her fingers over his chest, finding the place where the texture of him had changed. Skin that had once been bark-like now felt like hot velvet.
“I don’t want to wake up one day and find you a man with a mortgage and a podcast.”
He laughed. Laughed. A real sound. Human and raw and bright.
“Not possible,” he said.
Then softer: “This… what you did… it didn’t erase me. It just let me breathe.”
She dropped her hand.
It hung in the space between them.
Then he lifted his own and caught it.
They sat hand to hand for a long time. Her smaller fingers wrapped in his gnarled, callused ones. Bark to skin. Glow to breath. Sacred and raw.
“I keep waiting to feel like myself again,” she said. “But I don’t.”
“You won’t.”
She nodded. “I don’t think I mind.”
He looked down at their joined hands, then back at her.
“You didn’t lose yourself,” he said. “You walked through the fire. And now you burn brighter than anything I’ve ever seen.”
Her throat caught.
