Page 125 of Beneath the Desert Bloom
“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.
