we take metaphors this far

this is probably illegal, but this book hasnt actually been published yet. and who's looking? anyway, this is an excerpt from feed by m.t. anderson and. well. please read it when it comes out in october.

Violet was off someplace talking to the doctor. I say “someplace” because we were using the examination room to blow needles at an anatomical guy’s basket.
Link and Calista were standing real close by the vibrating bath, and I realized that they had probably decided to hook up. It looked like Calista was getting over Link being so stupid, which was brag, because he’s a nice guy. Quendy sat there on the table, glaring at them.
Violet came back from the doctor. She was all intense looking. She said she’d found a place she wanted to show me. I said sure, and I went wit her. We went out into the hall. Now I could hear the lights again. The shouting from the examination room was more distant. We walked for a ways through some tubes and so on. People floated by automatically on gurneys.
She walked in front of me. Her slippers went fitik, fitik, sliss, fitik on the floors. They were soft sounds, like the sounds mouths make when they open and close. I watched here from behind. When we stopped to wait for an uptube, she lifted her ankle so her heel came out of the slipper, and with her toes she slid it back and forth on the tiles without thinking about it. She massaged the floor. When the uptube was free, she settled her foot back in, and walked, fitik, fitik, sliss, fitik, right on in.
She took me up to a huge window. We stood in front of it. Outside the window, there had been a garden, like, I guess you could call it a courtyard or a terrarium? But a long time ago the glass ceiling over the terrarium had cracked, and so everything was dead, and there was moon dust all over everything out there. Everything was gray.
Also, something was leaking air and heat out in the garden, lots of waste air, and the air was rocketing off into space through the hole, so all of the dead vines in the garden were standing straight up, slapping back and forth, pulled toward the crack in the ceiling where we could see the stars.
“Whoa,” I said.
“Isn’t it beautiful?”
“It’s like…,” I said. “It’s like a squid in love with the sky.”
She was only looking at me, which was nice. I hadn’t felt anything like that for a long time.
She rubbed my head, and she went, “You’re the only one of them that uses metaphor.”
She was staring at me, and I was staring at her, and I moved toward her, and we kissed. The vines beat against each other out in the gray, dead garden, they were all writhing against the spine of the Milky Way on its edge, and for the first time, I felt her spine too, each knuckle of it, with my fingers, while the air leaked and the plants whacked each other near the silent stars.