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Greg glowered down at his computer, and the blank document that was supposed to be a new script. He cleared his throat, feeling a tickle in the back of his throat.
Since it was hay fever season, this wasn’t exactly a rarity for him, and in fact he’d had an itch in his throat for the past few days. As such, he cleared his throat and stood to stomp over to the refrigerator for a bottle of water.
On his way back to the sofa, he coughed, reaching up automatically to cover his mouth. When the cough had subsided, he lowered his hand, glancing down at it.
And at the single, purple flower petal resting in the centre of his palm.
“Oh,” he said to no one in particular. “Shit.”
He closed his fist around it on instinct alone, crushing the petal as if it might make it, and all it signified, disappear.
Not that it mattered, since within the next hour, he’d already coughed up a dozen more.
When it became clear that he was absolutely not getting any additional work done – frankly, any work at all, as the document he’d been working on remained stubbornly blank – he shut his laptop with a decisive snap, dropping it next to the small pile of petals he’d accumulated on his coffee table, glaring at both as if he couldn’t decide which offended him more.
Well, one was certainly more pressing than the other. He was meant to have the script turned in for edits in two days’ time.
The flower petals probably wouldn’t kill him in that time.
So he decided to do the logical thing.
He decided to ignore it.
Look, despite appearances to the contrary, Greg wasn’t an idiot. Like anyone who’d been through compulsory health education in secondary school, he knew what Hanahaki Disease was.
He knew the signs. He knew what caused it.
And in his case, he even knew exactly who caused it.
Greg really wasn’t an idiot. He just occasionally played one on telly.
But he also didn’t exactly need an Oxbridge education to realise that his feelings towards the man usually sat to his left had evolved from acquaintances to friendship to ‘wouldn’t it be funny if we kissed on screen’ to ‘I’d actually really like to kiss you all the time if you’d let me’ over the past several years.
Much like the potentially fatal disease he’d now spent several weeks ignoring, despite an increase in both quantity and frequency of petals that he was coughing up, he’d long since resolved to ignore those feelings as well.
And look where that got him.
Greg coughed discreetly into the crook of his arm, swallowing down the petal he could feel trying to emerge despite his better efforts.
“Don’t tell me you’re getting sick,” Roisin said, returning to their table in the back corner of the bar with two fresh drinks, both a shocking shade of pink and certainly not the gin and tonic Greg had asked her to order for him.
“I’m not getting sick,” Greg said, picking up the drink and sniffing it gingerly. “Rois, what the fuck is this?”
“Dunno,” Roisin said brightly, taking a large sip of her own drink. “Bartender recommended it. Said it’d be enough to knock even you on your ass.”
Greg glanced at the bar, and the very cute and extremely young bartender eyeing him. He quickly looked away, taking a sip from the drink and almost enjoying the way it burned on the way down. “Fucking Christ,” he said, as mildly as he could manage. “Didn’t realise we were getting pissed tonight.”
Roisin just shrugged. “Why?” she asked. “You have something better to do?”
“Than spending time with you?” Greg asked, saccharine sweet, smirking when Roisin gave him a look. “Thought never crossed my mind.”
“Then I suppose you wouldn’t like me to get that cute bartender’s phone number for you,” Roisin said mildly. “He said he’s a fan.”
Greg rolled his eyes. “Yes, because I make a habit of sleeping with fans,” he said sourly. “Especially age-inappropriate ones.”
Roisin arched an eyebrow as she took another sip of her drink. “Maybe you should start,” she said.
Greg frowned at her. “Why the fuck—”
“I just thought you might want to get laid sometime this decade,” she said sweetly.
“Oh, fuck off,” Greg said grumpily, taking a large swallow of his drink.
Too large a swallow, given how he instantly started to cough. “Smooth,” Roisin sniggered, and Greg did his level best to glare at her while coughing into a napkin. “Since you’re already hacking up a lung, shall we pop out for a smoke?”
“Ye—” Greg started on instinct alone before pausing. He hadn’t exactly done loads of research into it, since he was still mostly pretending there was nothing abnormal growing in his lungs, but he knew enough to know that smoking and vaping only exacerbated the condition.
Which was probably why he was even more tetchy than usual, reduced as he was to gum as his sole source of nicotine.
“Can’t,” he said, aiming for airy and casual and probably sounding mental instead. “Go on, I’ll mind the drinks.”
But instead, Roisin frowned at him. “What do you mean, can’t?”
Greg huffed a sigh. “I meant shouldn’t,” he said, still aiming for casual, and when she didn’t look remotely convinced, he decided to try another tack. “Nor should you, for that matter. Neither of us is getting any younger.”
She ignored him. “If you had meant shouldn’t, you’d’ve said shouldn’t,” she said, just a little stubbornly. “You said can’t. And you’ve been coughing all night.”
He could hear the start of something like worry in her voice and winced. “I’m fine,” he told her, keeping his tone as even and measured as possible. “Leave it alone.”
“But—”
Greg shook his head. “I said leave it—”
Before he could manage anything more, he was wracked by another cough, this one accompanied not just by the petals he’d been swallowing down all night but by a full bloom, landing on the table before he could snatch it.
Roisin stared down at it, her eyes wide. “Oh,” she breathed, and Greg swallowed, brushing the flower and remaining petals off of the table.
“Outside,” he ordered in an undertone, standing and not even waiting to see if she was following him. Luckily, she did, and when they were both outside, he jerked his head down the road, away from the few people hanging around outside the bar.
When he had finally deemed that they were a safe distance away, he turned back to her, his weak attempt at an explanation dying on his tongue when he saw that her eyes were full of tears.
“It’s what I think it is, isn’t it?” she asked softly.
He jerked a nod, not quite meeting her eyes. “Yes.”
She took a deep, shuddering breath. “How long—”
He sighed. “Long enough,” he said shortly.
Roisin made a noise that was almost but not quite a shaky laugh. “Well, at least it explains why you didn’t want the bartender’s number.” She studied him for a moment before nodding decisively. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go.”
Greg raised both eyebrows. “Go where?”
“Back to yours,” she told him. “We’re getting proper pissed tonight.”
He considered it for a moment, then shrugged. “Yeah, all right.”
So they did.
For his part, Greg got drunk enough that he could almost pretend he’d never coughed up a single petal, let alone a full flower. Certainly drunk enough that when he woke the next morning facedown on his sofa with a headache that felt like his skull was being split in two, it took him a long moment to even remember how he’d wound up there.
The memory was hazy at best, but he seemed to remember Roisin and a bottle of tequila he’d been saving for a special occasion.
“Fuck,” he managed, shoving himself upright and immediately regretting it.
“Morning,” Roisin said cheerfully from his kitchen table, and he blinked at her.
She looked well-rested. He’d never hated her more.
“I made coffee.”
His hatred level receded by a small margin, especially when she was kind enough to bring him a steaming mug just how he liked it.
“Why the fuck aren’t you hungover?” he asked grumpily once he’d drained half the coffee in a single, desperate gulp.
She shrugged, taking a sip of her own coffee. “I switched to water when you started necking tequila directly from the bottle,” she said.
Well, that certainly explained it.
“And you didn’t think to stop me?”
He almost certainly deserved the look she gave him, equal parts disapproval and amusement. “Like I’ve ever been able to stop you from doing anything,” she said, which, yeah, fair play. “Besides, I figured if anyone deserved to get pissed…”
She trailed off and Greg swallowed and looked away. “Right.”
An uncomfortable silence fell between them, punctuated only by each taking careful sips of coffee until Roisin sighed and set her mug down. “Are we going to talk about it?”
Greg sighed. “I have the feeling you’re going to talk about it whether I want to or not.” He grimaced and drained his coffee before telling her, “Go on, ask whatever you’re dying to ask.”
But she didn’t ask anything, just worrying her lower lip between her teeth as she looked at him with such naked concern that he almost flushed. “It’s not usually fatal anymore,” she said finally, almost hesitantly.
“I know,” Greg said shortly, because he wrote an episode of the Cleaner where someone died of Hanahaki, the body found nestled amongst heaps of flowers. Wicky hadn’t been quite so sympathetic to the cause but Greg had found it oddly poetic in his research, flowers taking root in your lungs from all the words you wouldn’t or couldn’t say.
Well, he’d found it poetic until it was him with the garden growing in his chest nurtured by his refusal to say how he felt.
But either way, his research for the episode had given him plenty of insight into how it isn't fatal the way it used to be, even if that wasn't particularly reassuring in the moment.
“They used to think it was unrequited love that did it,” Roisin continued, with the knowing tone of someone who’d read the Wikipedia page for Hanahaki and now considered herself an expert. “And that the only way to cure it was for the other person to love you back.”
“Thank god that’s not the case,” Greg muttered.
Not that the reality was much better. The only true cure was to tell the other person how you felt. Explicitly, plainly, without any attempt at a joke, tell the other person you loved them. And not just once, either. Repeatedly, ideally every day, until you either stopped feeling that way or you died.
It’d be easier to die choking on flowers.
“It takes time,” Roisin said, and Greg glanced over at her, confused. “Hanahaki. You don’t just develop it overnight.”
“No,” Greg agreed.
Roisin hesitated. “Takes about ten years, yeah?” she asked, and Greg knew she was doing mental maths to figure out just who had come into Greg’s life ten or so years ago that would be causing him to cough up flowers native to the Chiltern Hills.
Well. He doubted she realised the latter part, having not had the time he’d had to google image search all the various flowers he’d been hacking up or learn that the stupid purple one which made the most frequent appearance was the fucking county flower of Buckinghamshire.
“It’s not me, right?” Roisin asked tentatively and Greg laughed so hard he hacked up about two bouquets worth of feverfew before he managed to stop. “I’m just making sure!” she protested over his choking laughter, pouting just slightly.
When his laughter had died down to mere giggles, she asked, “Is it Alex, then?”
Whatever laughter he had left died in his throat. He sighed and drew a hand across his face. “Am I really that predictable?” he asked, mostly rhetorically.
“No,” Roisin said. “I’m just that observant.”
They both started laughing at that, somewhat hysterical laughter, aware as each was that there was really nothing funny about the situation.
But all too soon, the laughter ran out, and Roisin gave Greg a long look. “Have you been to see a doctor yet?”
He shook his head. “No.”
Her brow furrowed. “What do you mean, no?”
Greg just shrugged. “I mean, they’ve nothing to tell me that I don’t already know,” he said dismissively.
“Maybe not, but you do have to get the treatment scheduled.” Roisin hesitated, something unreadable flickering across her expression. “Unless—”
“Unless what?” Greg asked warily.
It was her turn to shrug. “Well, there is the other option,” she said, in a painfully off-hand kind of way.
“What, telling him?” Greg asked, barking a short, humourless laugh. “I can’t do that.”
Judging by the way she pursed her lips, she disagreed. “It’s for stupid, noble reasons, isn’t it,” she sighed, not pitching it like a question.
Greg just scowled and looked away. “Not wanting to blow up the best thing to ever happen to me is neither stupid nor noble,” he said shortly.
“Do you mean the show or do you mean Alex?” she asked, proving once again that she knew him too fucking well. She didn’t wait for his answer before asking, “So then why don’t you have the treatment scheduled already?”
Greg sighed and stared down into his empty coffee cup. “You know what the side effects of the treatment are.”
“Yeah,” she said cautiously. “So?”
His chest felt tight in a way that had nothing to do with the flowers threatening to overtake his lungs. “So it’s just– it’s a lot to consider.”
She frowned. “Like what?”
He scratched his beard, suddenly self-conscious. “Well…”
He knew immediately that she’d put it together, her expression softening as she raised a hand to her mouth. “Oh, Greg,” she sighed, and he gritted his teeth.
“Don’t say it like that,” he sighed.
But Roisin shook her head, undeterred, and even worse, her eyes filled up with tears. “You don’t want to forget him,” she said quietly. “Forget this.”
“Again with that tone—”
“You love him.”
Even after everything, Greg still squirmed a little uncomfortably hearing those words spoke aloud. “That is sort of the whole point of this,” he muttered.
“I know,” she said, “but this somehow makes it more real.”
That startled almost something like a real laugh out of him. “More real than me hacking up fucking bouquets of flowers?”
As if to punctuate his point, he coughed up several bunches of fairy flax, which she pointedly ignored. “Yes,” she said. “Because you’ve always treated it like a joke. Everytime over the last decade whenever anyone would ask or allude to it, you’d play it off like it was a laugh that you might be in love with Alex, even though you look at him like he’s hung the fucking moon. And this whole time—”
“This whole time he’s been married, with three children,” Greg interrupted, his voice tight. “And how I felt was irrelevant other than when we were filming, for the few hours when he’s mine.”
He certainly hadn’t intended on wording it that way, and Roisin’s eyes flashed to his and away again. “Then why—”
He sighed and scrubbed a hand across his mouth. “Because that’s all it’ll ever be.”
“You don’t know that—”
“I do,” Greg said tiredly. “I do know that.”
Because it was all it could ever be.
For a moment, it looked like Roisin might argue further, but then she just shook her head. “Then go see a doctor,” she said. “You don’t have to make any decision yet, but you don’t want to save the treatment for too late.”
“Yeah,” Greg muttered, if only to end the conversation. “Maybe you’re right.”
After all, it wasn’t like he had a lot of options at that point.
“They used to think it was a gay person's disease.”
Greg blinked up at the NHS doctor currently listening to his lungs with her stethoscope, a sturdy, no-nonsense Scottish woman and one of the few remaining NHS physicians still treating Hanahaki. “Sorry?” he said, in what he hoped was a polite way.
“It predated AIDS, obviously,” she said, moving her stethoscope to a different part of his back, nodding for him to take another deep breath, “but since, like AIDS, it seemed to mostly affect gay people, they thought that's what it was.” She shrugged and indicated he could lower his shirt. “Now, of course, we know it's because gay people were far less likely to be able to tell their object of affection for very real fear of retribution, which is why it tended to get worse with them.”
“Right,” Greg said, since it seemed like she was waiting for him to say something.
She pursed her lips, just slightly. “I was curious if that's perhaps the reason yours is as advanced as it is.”
As if to prove her point, he was wracked by a sudden cough that produced an entire stalk of marjoram, and he spluttered on the tiny white flowers. “It's not because he's a man,” he managed.
“Ok,” she said, as if waiting for him to elaborate.
“But he is married.”
Understanding flashed across her expression. “Ah. Bad luck.”
“It's not ideal,” he agreed.
She sighed and sat down on her little wheelie stool, crossing her arms in front of her chest. “Well, you're about half of the way progressed through the disease,” she told him. “You've moved from petals to full blooms and now, evidently, stalks as well.”
Greg glowered down at the stalk of marjoram as if it had personally offended him. “S'pose I should be happy it hasn't come to entire bushes erupting from my gaping maw,” he grumped.
She didn't look amused. “At this rate, your lungs will be shredded before you get to whole shrubbery,” she told him, and he winced. “Though at least you're not coughing up blood.”
“Yet,” Greg added automatically, one of Alex's pat jokes that shouldn't make his chest twist the way it did. “So what are my options to avoid that?”
“Well, first and foremost, you can tell him,” she started, but he immediately shook his head.
“I can’t.”
Unlike Roisin, she didn’t ask for an explanation of why he couldn’t. “Then your only other option is the treatment,” she said. “Or dying, but I think we'd both agree that's not preferable.”
“Ideally not,” he agreed. “I mean, let's not completely dismiss it, I am getting up there in years.”
She nodded. “Practically geriatric, yeah.”
Despite himself, he snorted a laugh. “Fuck off.”
“I don't think you're allowed to say that to your doctor,” she said mildly. “Shall we talk treatment?”
Greg took a deep breath and nodded. “Go on, yeah.”
She pursed her lips. “It's not pleasant, and I won't pretend otherwise,” she said. “It's essentially like treating cancer: a combination of chemotherapy and radiotherapy to destroy the flower roots in your lungs. And then there's the surgery and drug regimen that targets your hypothalamus.”
That was the part that scared Greg the most. “So that I forget him.:
She shook her head. “Not quite,” she hedged. “It'd be more accurate to say you'd forget how you feel about him, though every body reacts differently, and it is certainly possible that you would retain no memory of him.”
Greg didn't even want to think about what his life would be like if he had no memory of Alex. Bad enough to think about forgetting how he felt about him, about the thousand and one inside jokes only they understood, about forgetting how Alex’s stupid honking laugh had grown to feel like someplace Greg wanted to live in.
As if sensing his thoughts, the doctor patted his knee and said, somewhat bracingly, “You have some time to make a decision. In the meantime, there are some medications you can take to help with the symptoms. Including some lozenges that'll help with the whole spewing flowers every where.”
He gave her a genuine smile. “That’d be great, yeah,” he said, relieved. She nodded and turned to the computer and Greg hesitated before asking, in what he hoped was a casual sort of way, “And, erm, if I did get the treatment, what are the chances that it comes back?”
She glanced up at him. “The only true cure is telling him how you feel. You know that, right?”
“Yeah. But—”
“If you develop feelings again, if you develop Hanahaki again, there is no cure at that point.”
There was something sharp in the way she said it, and Greg winced. “Right.”
Something softened in her expression. “Getting to fall in love with him all over again isn’t worth a death sentence,” she said gently, getting so quickly to the heart of what Greg had been thinking that it felt like a punch to the gut, and he swallowed and looked away.
“Maybe not,” he agreed.
But if getting to fall in love with him once was, then…
As if his body was following his train of thought, he coughed up two red roses, and the doctor just shook her head. “It’s not romantic,” she said firmly. “It’s just suicide. Now let’s get those lozenges sorted, shall we?”
Greg nodded, not inclined to argue further.
Especially if he could instead delay the inevitable.
The lozenges, as it turned out, were a godsend. He swapped a lozenge for his usual nicotine gum during filming and was able to go a few hours without coughing up any flowers, petals, stems or leaves. In fact, other than Roisin getting increasingly and unnecessarily worried, it controlled things enough that the next few months passed without incident.
So much so that Greg forgot the urgency of the situation.
And one day while filming Taskmaster, after lunch between the two episodes being taped that day, Greg forgot to grab another lozenge before heading back to the stage for the second episode. “Fuck,” he muttered, patting his pockets.
“Problem?” Alex asked.
Greg shook his head. “Forgot my, er, gum,” he said.
Alex pulled a face, eighteen series of disapproval of Greg’s gum-chewing habits never far behind the surface. “Surely you can last until the first break.”
“Yeah,” Greg said, swallowing, hard. “Yeah, I can last.”
It was fine. It’d be fine.
And to his credit, he made it longer than he expected. Just not long enough.
“And sitting next to me, still claiming to be 6 foot 2 though we all know better at this point, it's– Little Alex Horne!”
He shouted the last bit in Alex's face, like he'd done so many times before, but this time, instead of accidentally spitting on Alex as he'd been known to do, a flurry of purple flower petals burst out of his mouth, hitting Alex directly in his face.
Greg froze as Alex stared at him, blinking through the petals as he reached up automatically to pluck one off of his forehead. The audience's applause and cheers were faltering and Greg could practically see the gears in Alex's head turning as he worked out how to handle this.
Abruptly, Alex grinned at Greg, a wide, cheerful, gap-toothed smile that didn’t remotely meet his eyes. “There are easier ways to get me flowers, you know,” he said brightly, brushing the petals off of his head.
“Oh, fuck off,” Greg said, barking a sharp, somewhat startled laugh, the contestants and audience laughing along with him, clearly assuming this was just their banter section for today.
Because Hanahaki was something to be laughed at, joked about. No one let it get this far anymore, after all.
No one but Greg.
“Besides, it shouldn't have to come to this,” Alex added, mock-serious. “If you'd just be honest about how you feel about me—” Greg rolled his eyes, even as his chest again felt tight. “I'm happy to say it to you. I love you, Greg.”
“And I barely tolerate your existence,” Greg said, as pleasantly as he could manage. “Prize task time?”
Things went as expected from there, mercifully back on track, but Greg could tell from the way Alex’s knee bounced underneath his iPad that the matter was far from settled.
As soon as Andy called the first break, Greg was on his feet, desperately hoping to slip backstage before anyone could say anything.
An almost certainly unrealistic hope, since Andy himself grinned at him immediately. “Good bit,” he said, “but do we need to make the autocue text bigger so you can stick to what’s written?”
Greg forced a laugh mainly to give himself something to do other than look at Alex, who had stood at the same time Greg had and hadn’t moved from his spot next to him. “May I have a word?” Alex asked in a clipped tone and Greg winced.
“Surely it can wait—”
But Alex’s hand closed on his arm, and he practically dragged Greg offstage. “Ow,” Greg said pointedly, but Alex didn’t loosen his grip until he’d found an empty room and all but forced Greg inside.
“What was that?” Alex asked, and Greg sighed and looked away.
“Nothing,” he said, trying to force levity. “Thought I’d try something different for the banter section, and obviously I should have run it past you, but—”
Alex shook his head. “That wasn’t a bit,” he said flatly, and Greg swallowed.
“Not a very good one, I’ll grant you—”
“Not one at all.” Alex gave him a piercing look, not a hint of a smile on his face. “Do you think after all this time I don’t know what you look like when you’ve gone off-script with a bit, when you’re expecting me to ‘yes, and’ you? That little smirk you get as you wait for me to pick it up and run with it?”
Something warm bloomed in Greg’s chest at the reminder of just how well Alex knew him, something that disappeared immediately when Alex added, his voice tight, “You weren’t joking there. You were scared.”
“Nerves,” Greg supplied weakly.
Alex just gave him a look. “You have Hanahaki.” Greg didn’t even bother trying to deny it, just jerking a shrug. “You’ve been to see a doctor?” Now Greg nodded and Alex rocked back on his heels, something unreadable in his expression. “When are you getting the treatment?”
Greg cleared his throat. “I haven’t scheduled it yet,” he mumbled, not meeting Alex’s eyes.
“You haven’t– what?”
Greg winced, staring determinedly at a spot over Alex’s shoulder. “I needed to speak with you about the show first.”
“About—” Alex broke off sharply, and when he spoke again, it was with barely restrained impatience. “Greg, we’ve got six months before the next round of filming, that’s plenty of time for recovery—”
Despite the fact that there was nothing funny about the situation, Greg coughed something like a laugh. “It’s really not,” he said.
Alex eyed him warily. “What does that mean?”
This was more than Greg had ever intended to say to Alex about the situation, and as such he felt understandably off balance without some kind of mental script to guide the conversation. “There is some likelihood that the dynamic of things on the show will change,” he said, choosing his words carefully.
“I don’t know what that means,” Alex said after a moment.
Greg sighed. “The dynamic between you and me,” he elaborated shortly. “Though I suppose at this point it’s more a question of whether I ruin things now or wait a few months for the treatment to do it for me.”
Alex’s frown deepened. “What—”
“If I get the treatment,” Greg interrupted, pausing for half a second for Alex to supply his usual ‘big if’, but Alex said nothing and Greg sighed before continuing, “If I get the treatment, there is a possibility that I will forget you. Forget this, this dynamic we’ve created between us.”
He chanced a glance at Alex, who just looked confused. “But why would you—” He broke off abruptly, his eyes widening. “Oh.”
Greg swallowed. “Oh,” he agreed, a little grimly, looking down at the floor and waiting for any of the things that Alex could possibly say to that.
To his surprise, the only thing Alex said, his voice small, was, “You have to– to say it. For it to count.”
Greg’s eyes met his. “I’d have to say it repeatedly, every single day,” he reminded him, harsher than intended. “I’d have to tell you on your children’s birthdays, on your anniversary with Rachel, I’d have to ring you up when you’re on holiday with your wife and children, just to tell you– Is that what you want?”
He delivered it as a challenge, and Alex looked away, swallowing hard. “Then you get the treatment,” he said after a moment.
Which Greg had known all along was the only option, but it didn’t mean that there hadn’t been the tiniest part of him holding out hope that Alex might say that it was what he wanted, that he did want to hear Greg say it, that day and every day.
A tiny hope that still hurt like hell as it was snuffed out.
“Then I get the treatment,” he echoed hollowly.
Alex’s eyes flickered to his and away again. “You don’t want to get the treatment?”
Greg shook his head. “I’m not scared of the treatment.”
“I never said you were.”
But Greg just took a deep steadying breath before telling him, honestly, with the only words he could manage, “I am scared of forgetting you. I’m scared that six months from now, I will sit down next to you on that stage and I will remember none of this, none of what we’ve built together.”
Alex swallowed, hard. “We can cross that bridge if we get to it,” he said, barely louder than a whisper.
Greg huffed an attempt at a laugh without even a hint of humour. “I don’t want to get to it.”
“So you’d rather die?” Alex asked sharply.
“No, of course not,” Greg said impatiently. “I just want—”
But he broke off, the words sticking in his throat like all the other ones he couldn’t bring himself to say, and Alex frowned at him. “What?” he asked, almost a challenge. “What do you want?”
“I want you to tell me not to get the treatment.”
The words were out of his mouth before he could even attempt to stop them, and something tightened in Alex’s expression. “Greg—”
But Greg didn’t wait to hear him say more. Words were their problem, words that had hung between them, unsaid, for years now.
Which meant the only thing he could do, and the only thing he did, was close the space between them, cupping Alex’s cheek with one hand as he bent to kiss him. Alex’s mouth opened against his with a sigh that Greg could taste on his tongue, his hand closing around the lapel of Greg’s black suit jacket as he licked into Greg’s mouth with an ease that suggested he’d been thinking of this just as much as Greg had.
It was a perfect kiss, a perfect moment.
Like the flowers that Greg coughed up at regular intervals, it could never last.
Abruptly, Alex pulled away, and Greg’s hands fell to his sides, heavy with the memory of what they had held, even fleetingly.
“I can’t,” Alex told him, his voice barely louder than a whisper, and Greg ducked his head, letting out a shaky breath.
“I know,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
Alex shook his head. “Don’t be—”
“I am, though,” Greg told him flatly. “More sorry than I can say.” He took a step backward, scrubbing a hand across his mouth as if to get a head start on erasing the memory. “I’ll call my doctor when we’re done with this series and schedule the treatment. The rest—” He hesitated. “The rest we’ll figure out.”
Alex jerked a nod. “Yeah,” he said softly. “We’ll figure it out.”
Greg shoved his hands into his pockets. “I need to– there’re lozenges that help. With the coughing. I’m going to– I’ll see you back out there.”
Alex just nodded again. “See you back out there,” he echoed.
Greg nodded once before finally leaving, feeling strangely hollow as he made his way back to his dressing room, as if he’d just lost something that he’d never even had in the first place.
Alex watched Greg leave, watched his shoulders hunch forward in a way that he knew had nothing to do with the cough he was probably fighting back, and it took everything in him not to say something, not to call him back, not to tell him to wait.
Instead, he watched him walk away, and when he was finally gone, Alex reached out automatically to steady himself against the wall, his heart pounding in his chest.
His chest that felt suddenly, painfully tight, and he cleared his throat before he was wracked by a sudden cough, one he hastily tried to stifle in his hand.
When the cough had subsided, he straightened, lowering his hand and squaring his shoulders as he headed from the room back to the stage, pausing in the doorway for only a moment to toss the yellow daffodil petals he’d just coughed up into the bin on his way out.