Page 12 of Beneath the Desert Bloom
The wind moved over her shoulders, like warm breath against her neck. She shivered and turned, half-expecting tosee someone behind her. Nothing was there except the desert, simmering in the heat.
Her pulse wouldn’t settle. She shook her head and took a few deep breaths. She was definitely not about to have a panic attack in front of a rock formation. That would be entirely too on-brand.
Back at the car, she slid into the driver's seat and didn’t turn the key, didn’t roll down the windows. She just sat there, letting the heat surround her, letting it pin her to the vinyl until sweat beaded between her breasts and the metal of the seatbelt burned her thigh.
She drove back in silence, watching the sun fall behind the hills, dragging long shadows across the desert like black scars. She didn’t know what she’d stirred up out there in the dust. But it had followed her home.
CHAPTER 4
BACK AT THE house, Nora dropped the now-runny ice cream into the freezer, knowing it was a lost cause. She moved through the kitchen on autopilot, organizing the pantry with twitchy precision. Anything to keep her from thinking too hard.
She tried to work. Tried to summon words for her thesis, but they came out crooked and flat, like a dead language her fingers no longer spoke. She answered a few emails. Dodged the ones she didn’t want to read. Sent excuses to her professors that felt thin even as she typed them. Normally, being behind would gnaw at her. But out here, the rules didn’t apply. Not the academic ones. Not the social ones. Out here, the clock ticked different.
She fired off one last message.
To: Eli
I made it. Everything’s fine.
Cell service is spotty out here, FYI.
Take care,
–Nora
She hit send and leaned back, closing her eyes. That should buy her a few days of quiet.
Dinner was perfunctory. She barely tasted it. Afterward, she stepped into the shower and stood under the stream until her skin went numb. When she emerged, she toweled off and pulled on a shirt and boxers, letting the air dry what the towel didn’t.
She lit a bundle of dried creosote and lavender, watching the smoke curl and hang in the air. A glass of mezcal in one hand, she wandered back to the living room. The obsidian stone satbeside the stack of journals, like it had always been there. She picked it up. Without thinking, she pressed it to her lips.
Her thoughts wandered back to the Hollow Watcher. There was something about that place that didn’t let go. She remembered her grandfather talking about places where technology stopped working. Cars that wouldn’t start, phones that went dead. She’d hiked there before, but the memory was fuzzy, like it didn’t want to stick in her mind.
When she finally went to bed, the dream wasn’t gentle.
***
The night wind curled through the open window. The hush of the desert was complete, pressing against the house, dense enough to drown in.
She dreamed she was lying on warm sand. Her arms were limp at her sides, her body bare.
Above her, the stars spun.
A thousand pale eyes blinking open, watching. Ancient. Endless. Indifferent.
Then the weight came, surrounding her with heat and pressure and presence. The kind that pressed against her ribs, that made her breath catch in her throat.
He was there.
She didn’t need to turn her head. She felt him, so close that the hair on her arms lifted, her skin prickling with awareness. His breath was warm beside her ear. It smelled of sage, dust, and cedar smoke. Like something too old for names.
Goosebumps rose along her thighs. Her nipples tightened. Her body was already rising before he touched her, drawn toward him like a tide pulled by gravity.
Then his hand came. His palm was rough like bark in places, smooth like a river stone in others. It ghosted over the curve of her collarbone, down the line of her sternum, between herbreasts, slow and reverent, like he was mapping her body from memory.
She shuddered. Her lips parted, and a soft, broken breath escaped. Part of her wanted to fight it, to push him away. But the deeper, more primal part of her, the one that felt newly awake and hungry, wanted to pull him closer.
His hand skimmed the side of her breast, pausing just enough to make her chest tighten. She whimpered, heart beating like thunder.
