"But we are talking," he said.
"No, you're reading," she said. "I'm sorry, I don't really like poetry."
"That's because you've never had it read to you," he said.
She stopped him at last by taking the book from his hands and pushing him back, her palms in the grass; and he entered her. Later, he read to her anyway.
If it had just been that.
They were not even his words, and now they mean nothing, are not even sounds in her mind. And now there is this thing that cannot hear her or does not choose to listen, until she gives up trying to reach it and only reaches into it, and bludgeons it and herself, seeking a reaction, any reaction.
"I fucking hate you," she says. "I hate fucking you."
The lifeboat decelerates. Metal clashes on metal. Gaskets seal.
The airlock opens overhead. There is light. Her eyes water helplessly and everything becomes glare and indistinct dark shapes. The air is dry and cold. She recoils.
The alien does not react to the light, the hard air. It remains inside her and around her. They are wrapped. They penetrate one another a thousand ways. She is warm here, or at any rate not cold: half-lost in its flesh, wet from her Ins, its Outs. In here it is not too bright.
A dark something stands outlined in the portal. It is bipedal. It makes sounds that are words. Is it human? Is she? Does she still have bones, a voice? She has not used them for so long.
The alien is hers; she is its. Nothing changes.
No. She pulls herself free of its tendrils and climbs. Out.