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Summary
Neil Josten has been carrying something inside him for months.
It grows in his throat, in the soft tissue of his bronchial passages, in the spaces between his ribs where secrets usually live. He tells himself it's just a cold, just a cough, just the lingering aftereffects of a childhood spent breathing dust and desperation.
He tells himself he'll be fine.
He is not fine.
A game. A collapse. A field of artificial turf stained with something that was never meant to leave a human body.And then, months later, a cactus on a windowsill. A name written in marker. The slow, tentative act of learning how to hold something that won't wound him.
Or: Neil chokes on the fruit of his love. Andrew, reluctantly, helps him raise it.