Page 82 of Beneath the Desert Bloom
He gave a small wave, turned, and walked away.
Nora stood there for a long moment, letting the silence settle around her like dust.
No pounding heart. No shaky breath. Just a stillness she almost didn’t recognize.
She wasn’t angry. She wasn’t grieving.
She just… wasn’t pretending anymore.
And for the first time in a long time, that felt like enough.
She stood in the doorway long after Eli’s car had gone, the dust of his exit still clinging to the edges of the road like a wound that hadn't scabbed.
The air was thick with heat, but something in her had cooled. Or hardened. She didn’t know which. All she knew was that she was no longer shaking.
She was something else now.
The silence returned, curling around her ankles like a loyal dog. She took one long, grounding breath.
Then she felt it.
She turned her head.
He was there, half-shadowed in the lean of a Joshua tree, broad shoulders outlined by sun and stillness, those eyes catching what little light remained like they could drink the sky.
Her breath caught.
He remained where he was, unmoving, unshakable.
A fact. Like gravity. Like the desert. Like the ache between her thighs that hadn’t gone away.
He’d been there the whole time.
She didn’t speak. She wasn’t sure if she could. Her voice felt too human for this moment.
So she nodded. Just once.
And he disappeared.
As if the land had pulled him back into itself like a held breath.
Nora backed away from the door and dropped into the old chair by the desk. The journal she’d left open the day before waited for her. She picked it up with both hands, turned the page. Her fingers moved automatically, but her mind was elsewhere.
Back on the floor.
Back under him.
Back in the moment where she said yes.
Not to the sex.
To all of it.
She stood abruptly, the chair scraping back with a groan. Her feet moved without thought. Through the hallway, into the bathroom.
The mirror waited.
The bite on her neck was still pink. Still visible. But something had changed. The skin around it shimmered faintly, like it remembered fire.
