“and he said her name to fill the space of five years.”

“My Sihaya,’ he said as he held her, ‘I have loved you for five thousand years.”

“He was said to have the body of a twenty-five year old, although no one knew where he kept it.”

“She was gone, and all that was left was the space you'd grown around her, like a tree that grows around a fence. For a long time, it remained hollow. Years, maybe. And when at last it was filled again, you knew that the new love you felt for a woman would have been impossible without Alma. If it weren't for her, there would never have been an empty space, or the need to fill it.”

“Come on,” he said quietly, bending to her and lifting her whole into his arms. He carried her inside. After setting her down next to the sink, he crushed five trays of ice into it and filled it with cold water. Tatiana thought he was going to tell her to put her face into it, and was about to meekly impotently protest—when Alexander submerged his own head into the ice.”

“Bit it was her scent that just about killed him. Clean skin. Woman. And something more—something that made him feel like dispensing with five thousand years of civilization, dragging her off to a cave somewhere, and filling her with babies.”