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Summary
Dennis Whitaker has always been good at enduring things: church on sundays, long shifts, the years old, quiet ache in his chest he refuses to name. He works, he fixes, he stays useful. Everyone agrees he’s holding up just fine.
Then he coughs up purple petals in a hospital bathroom and learns that love—unspoken, unwanted, and terminal—has been growing behind his ribs all along.
Ft. hanahaki disease, unrequited pining after allegedly straight attendings, bad coping mechanisms (cigarettes), and a man accidentally meeting his own cause of death on a nightclub dance floor.
OR
Dennis had his first cigarette after two years of quitting the first time he coughed up purple petals in the men’s bathroom at work.
In one fell swoop the relentless chest pain was finally explained and his death sentence was handed to him in paper thin purple petals, wet with saliva and sputum, coughed into the open palm of his healer’s hand.
It was strange that before then he’d never considered his own feelings for Robby. They had become very much like the pain in his chest: unpleasant but so long into it, also easily ignored and background noise to his every day.