Page 92 of Beneath the Desert Bloom
Standing just beyond the ring of stones.
Half-shadow. Half-man. All too late.
His shoulders rose and fell like he’d run there. Like it had cost him something to arrive. The edge of his form flickered where the sun touched it, bark-rough, gold-veined, trembling faintly with restraint.
Nora’s heart stuttered, then slammed against her ribs like it wanted out.
His eyes locked on hers.
She stood slowly. One hand clenched the obsidian. The other curled into a fist at her side.
“You saw that,” she said, voice low. Rough. “You saw what happened and you just stood there.”
Nora crossed the stone circle like it was nothing. Like she hadn’t just been rejected by a sentient landscape in front of her imaginary boyfriend.
“You left me to try this alone,” she said. Her voice shook. “You let me bleed out on the inside while you stood in the dark and watched.”
Asher’s throat bobbed. His hands twitched at his sides.
Her anger cracked wide open, held back only by the heat still coiled between her legs. The grief. The ache.
“You want me when I’m dreaming. You want me when I’m spread open and glowing and begging for you. But when I try to claim this—claim you—you disappear.”
She stepped up to him, toe to toe. Had to tilt her head back to look at him.
“Do you want me or not?”
Asher inhaled sharply. His chest expanded. And finally, he spoke.
“I want you like the land wants its bloom. Desperate. Consuming,” he said, voice raw as wind through stone. “That’s why I hold back. Because loving you will invite the land to take you too. And I’m afraid it will devour you before you’re ready to choose.”
Nora stared at him.
Then laughed.
It was sharp. Hollow. Painful.
“Too late,” she said. “It already started.”
She pressed her palm to her chest, over the ache.
“I feel it every time you leave.”
And with that, she pressed the obsidian stone hard against his chest, right over the place his heart would be—if he even had one—and left it there.
Then she turned and walked away.
The desert didn’t stop her. It could have. But it let her go.
Nora’s boots crushed dry scrub and brittle blossoms underfoot. Her pulse beat in her throat like a war drum. The backs of her eyes stung. Her whole body buzzed, still keyed up from the ritual, the rejection, the way Asher had looked at her like she was already leaving and he didn’t know how to follow.
She didn’t know where she was going. Only that it wasn’t toward him.
Behind her, she could hear it.
Heavy footsteps against loose stone.
He was following her now.
