Clinging to her

Mikhail could not tell if she was truth or figment, but as he stirred, he found himself clinging to her.

He brought his hands to his face;
          thought he might smell her upon them—
          the hope of it alone made him quicken.


He was astonished by how inexperienced he felt in her presence, and laughed like a boy in ecstasy, that things could be as clear as this.

He loved her.

He loved her because nature willed it.
Because they were somehow already united, and of one body.
The bare flesh on every part of him already belonged to her,
          and the scent emitting from her skin was his.

There could never have been a creature like her before. 
He was certain of that. 

When Mikhail first laid eyes upon her, he was terrified.
An unsettling heat radiated from her eyes—an intelligence that seemed innate.
It transfixed him.

She had no knowledge of her beauty really, not the full extent of it,
           making her all the more inescapable.

The length and ravishing curve of her form,

          and intoxicating presence of her hair, its color all miraculous. 

The look that stopped his heart. 

And, of course, the sagacity of her mind. That mind which contained within it a knowledge of him so beguiling,
          he felt himself fill up,
          fill like a well surging, from the deepest and most secret crevices of a universal love.

He had been no stranger to lust.
He had surrendered to it countless times before,
          could write an atlas of the female form.

But in his search for triumph (or, perhaps, for comfort),
          all he had ever acquired was worthlessness.
Nothing more.
All he received was the compliance to an utterly indifferent gratification.
He was left only with his own debasement.
A bitter emptiness.

Oh Shura, he murmured as his mind rose from the reverie, all women before you have turned to ash…