Page 128 of Beneath the Desert Bloom
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 wakewith 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.
