Page 51 of Beneath the Desert Bloom
She pressed her palm flat.
It wasn’t enough.
She didn’t know if he was watching.
She only knew it still felt like his hands were on her skin.
And that was worse than being alone.
She didn’t need the map anymore.
The thread wasn’t just on paper.
It lived under her skin now, pulling tighter every time she whispered his name.
CHAPTER 13
THE COFFEE TASTED wrong again the next morning.
It tasted…weird. Like it had absorbed some of the emotional residue clinging to the kitchen walls.
She added a little sugar and took another sip. Nope. Still off.
Nora set the mug down and stared out the window. The yard looked like a still from a movie: golden light, long shadows, nothing moving. Peaceful. Untouched.
A perfect scene for a mental breakdown.
She didn’t expect to see Asher standing there. But that didn’t stop her from checking.
She scanned the porch, the hills, the trees. Just in case he’d decided to materialize out of guilt. Or realized it was rude to ghost someone after going down on them.
No such luck.
The ache from yesterday was still there. Worse now. Like it had burrowed deeper, hooked itself to her bones.
She scratched her arm. Tingling. Again.
Nerves, she told herself. Hormones. Too much caffeine. Maybe a hangover from… orgasms? Was that a thing?
It had to be something explainable. She refused to be one of those women who had sex with a man once and immediately started rearranging her worldview to accommodate it.
Even if that man had bark for skin and glowed in the dark.
She wandered the house like a cat waiting to be fed by someone who was never coming home.
Eventually, her feet took her to the hallway.
The door to her old room was closed.
She stood in front of it for a long moment, staring like it might whisper something.
Then she opened it.
The desk was still covered in notebooks and tapes, cluttered with the chaotic logic of a man who believed the desert was alive.
Which… okay. Maybe he hadn’t been wrong.
She sat down and began flipping through the top layer. Most of the journals were standard old-man ramblings: weather, soil notes, conspiracy tangents, god-knows-what. Some had pages torn out. Some were blank. Others had only dates and single words.Hum. Echo.
