Page 61 of Beneath the Desert Bloom
She wasn’t crying.
She wasn’t.
But the tears came anyway. Hot, fast, mean.
It wasn’t just the rejection.
It was the silence.
The unbearable, screaming silence that came after being so close to something that felt like meaning. Like connection. Like maybe she wasn’t completely lost in her own skull.
And then… just gone.
She bent forward, forehead to the dirt.
“Great job,” she muttered. “Definitely told off the magical desert entity in the most productive way possible.”
No echo came. No wind.
The obsidian stone in her pocket had gone cold.
Dead weight.
Whatever thread she’d been following was severed.
It should’ve felt like a win.
But it didn’t.
Because the worst part wasn’t that he’d come.
The worst part was that he didn’t stay.
She stood eventually and walked back toward the house without looking back. Each step felt wrong. Off-beat. Like she was walking away from the center of something.
Her boots were dust-caked. Her knuckles scraped. Her face windburned.
The obsidian stone felt like a joke now. A souvenir from something that had already chosen to leave her behind.
She unlocked the front door with stiff fingers.
The house was still warm, still scented faintly of sage and desert sun. But it didn’t feel like a sanctuary. It felt like a hollow body waiting for breath that wasn’t coming.
She dropped her bag and moved through the rooms slowly, like a stranger.
Everything looked the same. Nothing felt the same.
She stopped at the hallway mirror.
Looked. Really looked.
Her reflection blinked back, just a second too slow.
Her skin too clear.
Her eyes too bright.
Beautiful. But not in a way that comforted her.
