Midnight Beneath the Mistletoe
Desire, secrets, and the dangerous intimacy of candlelight oaths
Masks and Candlelight Promises
Snow clung in feverish fists to the ancient stone of Merrowick Hall, each flake blurring the world beyond into a hush of possibility. Every window glowed with amber, betraying shadows in waltz behind frosted glass. I arrived late, boots crusted with road salt and the exhaustion only a season’s backlog of secrets can deliver. The world inside this place was all bare necks, brushed velvet, and candlelit corridors ribbed like a living vertebra, bodies pressed between legend and longing. Even the air felt weighted with the ache of things left unspoken, and my pulse answered like it remembered something forbidden.
They said the Christmas masquerade at the Hall was the kind of night that could twist reality, that men left changed, desire echoing in the walls like miners in catacombs. Legends stitched between memory and performance, my historian’s mind hungry for evidence, but my gut hungry for something older and rawer. The whispered rumors spoke of a hidden passage beneath the Hall, a path once sealed but treacherously unsealed, where the shadows of the past lingered too close to the surface, tempting those who sought to unearth its secrets. This passage, they said, was not just a relic of history but perhaps a key to understanding the mysteries of the Hall itself, a lure for those brave enough to follow it through the layers of time. To many, it was a place where past and present met, interacting in a dance of shadows and whispers that could reveal more than one might expect. Its presence felt like a lingering question, a promise that the masquerade held more beneath its surface than mere facade.
My mask was teal silk, edged in tarnished gold, as if to suggest I belonged here more than I did. I ran my thumb along the mask’s edge until the velvet nap calmed my nerves. In every glass I caught reflection after reflection, never quite my own. An old trick, to blend with ghosts.
“A historian shouldn’t disappear at his own field site. Irresponsible,” said a voice behind me, sly, rich as mulled wine left on a hearth.
I turned, catching his scent even before the man came into view. He wore a mask almost anatomical in its precision, silver filigree cut like bone over eyes that could bruise if you let them linger.
Felix. The nephew all rumor, returned to Merrowick after years haunting the continent. His time abroad was spent diving into the histories of forgotten places, searching for echoes of lives like ours that had slipped through the cracks of time. He spoke of intimate drawing rooms in Paris where he sketched stories by firelight, and hidden clubs in Berlin where the energy felt like an echo of thunder. One particular evening in Berlin, he recounted, stood out: the crackle of music and light as he stepped through a concealed entrance into a world where identities blurred and past grievances melted into unity. In this hidden enclave beneath the city’s surface, he found himself listening to the whispered stories of a woman who had defied societal norms in the last century. Her tale of courage and consequence mirrored the path he was beginning to carve for himself. These journeys, he hinted, taught him how to live outside rumor, how to navigate the delicate balance between anonymity and exposure, between the stories we write and those we hide. Yet it was always Merrowick that pulled him back, a tether woven through whispers and longing.
He bowed, ironic and too deep, but his hand found my elbow to steady me. I clocked his gloves, leather worn soft. We were both in disguise, but his was a thing you wore like a dare, not a shield.
“Will.” My name in his mouth vibrated differently. “Are you hiding, or plotting?”
“Both. Always.” I smiled, the one that meant I was tempted. “You look…” I trailed off, ashamed at the hitch in my voice, but Felix did not let me drown in it.
“Familiar, I hope?” he offered, stepping closer, the edge of his coat brushing my wrist. He dropped his tone, barely above a whisper. “You’re only half masked. The eyes give you away.”
A tremor moved through me, the ache of something old haunted by the ledger in the Hall’s library, generations of names coded, rumored, erased. My dissertation had found three, cross referenced in an old physician’s diary.
“Did you come chasing ghosts?” Felix murmured, reading my pause for more than nerves.
I laughed, too bright, too brittle. “Some men write themselves into history.”
His hand lingered at my elbow, a touch that promised restraint. Or release. “Some men rewrite it in one night.”
We circled each other in ritual, bodies orbiting the buffet, laughter muffled by fabric and hope. Around us, the room bloomed with gossip, masked couples drifting in and out of traditions: the peppermint shot passed hand to hand, the mistletoe swapped with a wink. There was a hunger here, old as the house, pressed between generations, never spoken outright, always performed.
A quick scan found clusters of men and women exchanging silent nods, alliances coded in the tilt of a glass or the brush of a palm. Nearby, a pair of women shared a moment beside the candle arrangement, their fingers touching briefly like a hidden promise. One of them, Anna, wore a locket that gleamed when it caught the candlelight. Every year, she placed a new photo inside, capturing memories of those nights. I recalled a whispered tale about Anna’s locket, a symbol passed down through generations, each photo a pact to return to Merrowick and preserve its secrets. Perhaps this year, the locket would hold special significance, linking her story to the legends of the Hall.
A trio of men, jaunty in their elaborate masks, leaned in close, whispering in a code of laughter and touch, their tradition being a shared toast with initials marked only on their glasses, as if the past and future were colluding in the present. It was said that one of them, Jonathan, had once discovered a hidden journal in the library, detailing the escapades of previous masquerades and binding him and his friends deeper into the Hall’s mysterious fabric. Against the flickering glow, Martin, a bearded man in a crimson waistcoat, stood at the edge of the room. He caught my eye for a split second before turning back to what appeared to be a hushed conversation with a young couple. Their gestures were brief but loaded with meaning, a touch to the shoulder, a nod towards the hidden corridors. Martin, keeper of many secrets, was known to pen anonymous notes of encouragement left in coat pockets, a quiet guardian of the Hall’s legacy. Legend had it, Martin had authored a play based on these notes, each performance an ode to Merrowick’s silent stories. It struck me as a continuation of an age old narrative, one that stretched beyond individual secretive looks to a network of shared understanding. This web, woven with humor and care, was what tied us all to the spirit of Merrowick, a tapestry of hidden stories, waiting to be documented in the pages of memory.
I shivered. Even in the crowd, queerness lived in the pause, in negotiation. In choosing, again, to be seen.
Felix’s arm slid against mine. He navigated the throng with confidence born of belonging, but every so often his hand would flutter near the place at my back where I ached to be guided. We stopped at the edge of a roaring fire. He leaned in, voice pitched for my skin alone.
“Legend says if you touch the old guestbook at midnight, you claim more than a place.”
The Hall’s guestbook. I had seen it, thick enough to stop a bullet, the names inside written in coded alphabets, initials only, a pressed flower, a date undone. There were gaps in the catalog, deliberate absences. I sometimes pressed my thumb to an empty space and wondered whose story resisted inscription.
“I’ve never written in it,” I admitted. “I never thought I had the right.”
Felix’s brows tilted in surprise, his mouth half expectant. “Would you, with me? Tonight?”
Desire rippled, sudden and visible. For a moment, the laughter and the scrape of glasses faded. I heard only the strain in my own breath.
“You trust me with your legacy, Felix?”
He watched me, dark eyes softening as he pulled a sprig of mistletoe from his pocket. Not the garish plastic kind, but real, plucked wild, with berries pale as teeth.
“Family tradition,” he said quietly. “My uncle said our men used to tie it to their lapels, to signal those who knew where to look.” He rolled it between his thumb and forefinger before tucking it behind his mask. “Will you keep this for now?”
He slid it not into my hand, but against the collar of my shirt. The warmth of his knuckle burned a spot just over my heart.
“I will,” I said, then, “Let me show you the library.”
We moved through the halls, echoes in our wake. I walked too fast, nerves taut as harp wires. Felix kept a half step behind. There was no language for the thrill his nearness summoned: danger, hope, the prickle of being truly seen. For a heartbeat I thought: here, we are just ourselves, not roles, not names. Body to body, desire a clandestine ledger written under flickering sconces.
The library’s doors were carved with laurel and bone, another encoded myth, I realized, as Felix traced the pattern with reverence. I unlocked them with the small brass key I had borrowed under the guise of research. Inside, the air smelled of dust and almond oil. The shelves loomed, filled with volumes where men like us had bent themselves flat to fit between covers, lives footnoted and erased.
Felix’s voice was gentler now. “You know, my uncle told me Merrowick was always the house of second chances. When he got sick, leukemia, he said the only thing that carried him through was imagining he had earned a midnight miracle. That, and the men who stayed after parties to keep vigil, no questions asked.”
Sorrow threaded through the warmth. Some stories you inherited; some you made.
We stood quiet, heat radiating from our shoulders. Felix brushed my jacket sleeve, tentative. I looked down and saw his hand, shaking slightly. If I had learned anything from years of listening to patients, it was that the body never lied. A want so honest it came as tremor, as sweat, as the sour sweet tang of adrenaline.
“Consent, Will. If it gets too much…” He left the rest unsaid, but the promise was there.
“I’ll tell you. You can trust me to say stop. And I trust you to listen.”
He smiled at that, the color coming to his cheeks in the firelight from the corridor outside.
“We’re good, then? Boundaries? Neither of us gets written in as a ghost?”
“Not unless we want haunting.”
He relaxed. The spell between us tightened, but did not snap. I felt every inch of space between us, and the ache for more. But we kept to ritual. To story. To the slow, careful build. The ledger waited, thick with possible futures, as the world spun beyond the glass.
Outside, snow buried the gardens, sealing us in tradition. Somewhere, a clock chimed once, a cue and a warning. The Hall had a way of remembering, and men like us, men who ached, men who wrote their own stories in the margins, had always found a way to belong between candlelight and midnight.
I saw my future on the line in the shadow his hand drew across the table, in the mistletoe pressed to my chest, in the hush that comes before courage. The risk was real. The promise was too.
Breath Shared Against the Ledger
There is a moment, knife bright and shuddering, in which I become viscerally aware of how close Felix stands behind me. The library’s hush is not empty at all. It collects us, makes us a footnote for someone else’s future research, trapping our breathless shuffle against parquet floors and the brittle hush of ancient paper. The sprig of mistletoe he tucked at my collar is a cool weight, both warning and promise against my skin.
I reach for the ledger on the cold oak table, my fingers hovering. The covers are cracked, initials scuffed by generations unacknowledged. My touch feels almost illicit.
“Don’t open it unless you mean to,” Felix murmurs. His voice is low. There is a thread of tease in it, but beneath, something near reverent. “Superstition says anyone who does in secret owes the truth before dawn, if the other man asks. It is house doctrine, he always said.”
He does not offer his hand, does not press, but I feel his permission in every carefully measured silence. I could bolt. I could say nothing, just catalog his outline and pick my old loneliness back up in the morning. But the ache in my chest says: record something. I nod and let my palm flatten on the book, the chill of the leather a jolt.
“You’ll ask?” I whisper.
Felix’s lips curve, mouth so close I imagine the brush of it over the shell of my ear. “If I am brave. Braver than I was as a kid, running through these halls pretending my uncle’s friends were all just eccentric bachelors, not men like us, marking each other with bargains.”
He steps into my space at last, definite now, shoulder to shoulder. His warmth against my arm is blissfully real, skin fragrant with something resinous, clove and wintergreen and sweat. I tilt my head to meet his gaze through the latticed mask. For a second, he lets everything show: fear, hope, the shadow of someone older and hurting, a scan of my body that is almost clinical in its precision. Not hungry yet, but cataloguing.
“Tell me about your people,” Felix prompts quietly.
I let the ledger fall open to a random page. Half of Merrowick’s secrets are genetic. My mouth is too dry.
“My family’s from the next county. Catholic, all hush and myth, you know? My dad died young, fell off a ladder in a blizzard. Mum worked night shifts. I grew up in the house of thresholds, every door framed with hope or threat. Medicine was safety. Studied bodies because people talk less to doctors. Thought maybe if I wrote the right paper, I would get my own myth too.”
Felix’s hand goes to my wrist. Not possessive, but precise. His touch is diagnostic, lingering over my pulse.
“And this myth, does it hurt to live in it?”
I want to laugh, but it comes out like the shaky start of a confession. “Hurts either way. My first boyfriend, David, was a nurse. Got outed by his own brother, small town hell. He drove up here once, left a flower on the Hall steps, a code, I suppose. We kept each other alive that year, more by touch than by faith.”
Felix’s thumb strokes over my knuckle, grounding me. “I was ten when my uncle brought this ledger to a hospital on Christmas Eve. Said the worst wounds are the ones nobody dares to document. He made the ritual. Let his friends, his lovers, even a nurse or two, sign if they ever needed a place to come back to. When I got older, I realized why. He almost died once, during the crisis. HIV. Half the men on that page…”
He trails off. Silence falls. Felix does not apologize for it. His hand does not slip, but tightens slightly, exacting as any medical resident I have known, learning to map pain and consequence. I hear, in my chest, the echo of a hospital ward at Christmas: IV drip, the salt tang of cracked lips, old protocols of compassion among queer men bearing witness.
“My uncle was not ashamed,” Felix says, quieter. “But he recorded everyone by their initials. Sometimes a symbol, a code. I thought it was about shame, but maybe it was hope. That they would want to come back and finish the story.”
It would be easy to make a joke, defuse the gravity, drag us both back to the bright unreality of the masquerade. But something has changed in the room. The air pulls tight, lit by the possibility of legacy and loss. Candlelight from beyond the door throws our shadows in duplicate along the spines of books. We are living between the lines, ancestors and strangers as witness.
Felix shifts, his knee brushing mine. In my mind’s eye, our names are already a rumor on these pages, a code only we could break.
“I want to,” I say softly. “I want to write our initials, yes, but only if you will come back next year. To check. To ask if I regret it.”
He nods, solemn. “Deal. Future checkpoint. We keep the ritual alive. And if either of us is lost, or drifting, we send a message or leave a flower at the gate. That will be the sign.”
I reach for a pen, and his fingers cover mine, synchronizing the pulse at our wrists. Felix’s control is immaculate, but beneath it there is tension, a tremor that betrays just how much he wants this moment.
“Do you want to show them you belonged?” I ask, voice so thin it nearly trembles.
He lowers his head, forehead pressing gently to mine, mask nearly denting against my cheek with the force of his closeness.
“Yes. And I want you to remember how I looked. In this room. With you. Whether or not we ever find our way out of these stories.”
I want to kiss him, but what I crave first is contact: hands, forearms, the long press of chest to chest. I inhale, and his scent is soaked through me, cedar salt and something wilder. Bit by bit, the heat climbs, slow in my stomach, pricking at my skin like pins and needles in frost.
Felix slides his palm to my chest where the mistletoe still rests above my heart. His thumb traces my sternum, slow, then up to my trailing scarf, hooking a finger into the wool and using it to pull me closer.
“I am going to ask once, Will, and then you will have to tell me again if anything changes. Are you with me? Mind, body, and ghost?”
He waits, not daring to breathe. It steadies me, the patience and the precision.
“Yes, Felix, yes. Just slowly. I do not want to be a secret, even tonight.”
He grins, the first full smile I see. A relief like poppies in snow. “No secrets. Not in this room.”
I close the distance, our mouths meeting, hesitant at first, then slanting with sudden hunger. Not a kiss from a holiday card, but mouth open and recalled from the taste of regret, velvet heat, wet and truthful. The kind of kiss that knows this is more than a dare, that the texture of lips and scrape of teeth matters for the record. I let myself sink, my hands mapping his jaw, scrubbed with late day stubble. I want that friction, tangible and man made, more real than memory.
The library, always so frigid, is hot now. My heart gallops, and Felix’s body aligns to mine, an exhale landing at the hollow just below my ear. There is no confusion about want here. He aches, just like I do. The relief is edged with something dangerous, a low hum against my ribs. In the corridor, a couple of party guests pass, voices blending into the hush, but they do not enter. Witness and safety, both.
Felix breaks first, eyes wide and bright. “Do you… is this enough? For now?”
I swallow, breath shaky. “More than enough, but can we just hold? I do not want to leave marks that do not fade.”
His laughter is ragged, grateful, but he does not move away. Instead his hand cups the back of my neck, thumb making slow circles where tension pools after hours of masking. I melt. My backbone curves into him and, for a moment, every risk is worth it.
We stay like that, pressed together, hearts in sync, hands gentle but greedy, learning the fine print of each other with velvet patience. The world shifts. Traditions are not ancient by accident; they are lived, renewed by hands and hope.
Before the next day comes, before anyone can catch us unmasked, we find the courage to put pen to ledger. Two initials only, side by side, and a tiny inked mistletoe I sketch, trembling, in the margin. Our promise. Our checkpoint. Our proof we existed beyond rumor and snow.
When Felix lifts his head, his eyes are wet but unafraid. “Next year, then. Or sooner, if you dare.”
I brush my lips over the back of his hand in reply. “Checkpoint,” I say quietly. “I will come back. Even if the risk grows. Even if the stories try to forget us.”
A thump and laughter echo from deeper in the Hall, party guests, a burst of living folklore. The boundaries we drew tonight are not just for us, I realize. The ritual, the marks, the care, they say to anyone listening that men like us belong. Not just footnoted. Not just legend. Documented, and worth returning for, year after year.
Ledger, Skin, and Candlewax Oaths
A draft of cold from the window peeled back the heat between us just long enough for our heart rates to catch up with what we had not said. Felix braced his hand against the old oak edge of the table, breath coming shallow and sharp from his chest. Above us, the candle chandelier flickered, each flame a pulse. Our initials glimmered in the ledger, fresh ink drying beside the mistletoe I had sketched, both marks of oath and risk.
Felix’s hands begged for occupation. He traced the mistletoe at my collarbone, adrenaline turning the brief touch into a plea.
“One more time. Boundaries, Will?”
“Yes.” I swallowed, throat clicking. “If I say stop, you listen. If you say wait, I freeze. If we say nothing, just keep asking.”
His forehead rested against mine again, anchoring us. “I want all of you tonight. Here. Not a secret, not a story we regret.” His lips hovered at my ear, voice cut with nerves and need. “I want to feel…”
I answered by undoing the top button of my shirt, blood hot with anticipation. My hands shook at the memory: another Christmas, alone in a hospital on call, trying to warm a dying man’s hands with my own, learning that comfort was half clinical and half faith. Felix alive, flushed, mouth trembling, felt like a reversal of fate. A holiday miracle, only messier. I never found ritual in prayer, but the way he watched me undress gave my body new scripture.
Felix unfastened his mask with a surgeon’s control, drawing it away from his face. He laid it gently on the table beside the ledger, two talismans, side by side, proof of what it means to show your truest face only to someone who names the cost. I could not manage speech, watching him, so I let my fingers follow the line of his lower eyelid, the bone beneath.
“You are beautiful,” I whispered. It was not ceremony, just confession, bare as nerve.
The air in the room thickened with longing, and when he pressed his mouth to mine, it was no longer a question. The kiss was open and deep, velvet and wet, our teeth meeting, pulling noise from my chest. He shifted us so my back pressed to the table, ledger at my hip, so every action was part history and part future promise. He caged me with his hips, hands braced around my head, warm palms mapping the curve of my skull as if learning me by touch alone.
The first time his hand slipped beneath my shirt, I hissed. He let it linger there, warmth seeping from palm to chest. The feel of his scarred knuckle under my ribs rooted me, reminding me what bodies could carry, scars, yes, but also survival. He pressed his lips to my collar where the mistletoe had been and murmured, “Do you want slow, or do you want…?”
“Both,” I croaked. “Make me remember.”
He moved with a gentleness that was almost clinical. He knelt, drawing my shirt from my shoulders inch by inch, his hands mapping goosebumps across my arms. Each sensation built on the next: the quick brush of his mouth over my collarbone, the stubble scraping sensitive skin, the first drag of his tongue over my navel, circling, not yet dipping lower. He hummed against me, his hands holding my thighs apart.
“Hold still, historian,” he teased, but his voice was reverent and careful, as though each new place he touched wrote another line into the room’s memory.
A doctor’s son, a man trained to listen to heartbeats and small hesitations, Felix attended to every twitch.
“Let me know if you need air,” he said, and then his mouth was moving lower, painting a path of kisses, pressure mounting with every inch he claimed. The cold air bit at places his lips left wet, adding a shock that pulled my muscles back to the present.
I reached for him, cupping his jaw, pressing my thumb to his pulse.
“You okay?”
He paused, eyes bright. “Nervous. Good nervous. I have not, not like this. Not in this house. Not where it counts.” One hand found my wrist in return, a mirror of our promise by the ledger. My thumb marked the rhythm of his pulse, each beat ratifying our mutual consent.
When his lips closed around me, careful and deliberate, I shivered, a rise of need crawling the length of my spine. He let his tongue tease, almost cruel in the way he would retreat, then press forward, breath hot against my hipbone.
“Do not stop,” I gasped.
His hands pinned me in place, gentle but absolute. “I will not.”
Each movement became its own ritual. He wrapped his fingers around my thigh, mouth descending in a slow, unhurried worship. The pace turned me inside out. Pleasure gathered at the base of my stomach, a pooling heat made sharp by the drag of his mouth and the clinical way his hands mapped my skin, two fingers pausing at a scar just above my knee, a remnant of a work injury never properly explained to my family. I did not flinch. I surrendered the truth of it to him.
Felix’s rhythm was studious, like a physician tracing a pulse: tongue circling, lips tight, then pausing, waiting for my breath to stutter, reading each rise. His breaths matched mine now. We were one sensation away from collapse. That care, that almost medical attention, was more intimate than anything I had felt. I struggled not to dissolve under it.
On impulse, craving more, I reached over my head and found the melted stub of a candle in its pewter base. I pressed it into his hand.
“A tradition,” I whispered. “The old ledger lists a ritual, wax for the body, to mark hope for the year.”
Felix froze, caught between surprise and hunger. “You are sure?”
“Yes,” I said. “I trust you.”
He smiled, teeth bright. “Then say when.”
A match struck, sulfur burning sharp in my nose. He tilted the candle and let the first drop of hot wax splatter just below my ribs. I gasped, the sensation lightning quick, pain and pleasure and heat, a mark only we understood. Another drop, timed to my pulse, and then his tongue soothed the sting, erasing and rewriting. Each drop became its own tally, body and ritual and risk converging in my skin. His mouth chased each line, tongue sweeping, breath cool after heat, every sense heightened. I moaned, unable to clamp the need back, the room closing in, warm with history and confession.
He worked his way back up, reclaiming my lips, breath sticky sweet with candle grease and sex.
“Still okay?”
“I have never felt so much at once.”
He pressed his forehead to mine. “No secrets. Not with you.”
We switched, trading roles. I slid my fingers into his waistband, uncertain but greedy for the way his body shivered under my touch. My palm splayed over the line of his back, cold sweat under my hand telling me more than words could. He bared himself, pushing his trousers down, sighing out a curse too soft for the ledger’s ears.
We fit together awkwardly, beautifully, skin on skin, chest to chest, letting friction set the terms. I wrapped my fingers around him, slow, thumb tracing the veins standing proud. He bucked, thrusting into my hand, his mouth desperate on my neck.
“Do not stop, Will, do not…”
He came first, a violent exhale shivering through him. In the aftermath he reached for me again, pulling me back into the circle of his body. We pressed together, my need rising unspent until I shivered against his thigh, his hand stroking me with clinical care, every squeeze a question, every answer my gasping consent. I spilled between us, clinging, groaning into his mouth and the hollow of his throat, unable to remember the names of any ghosts but ours.
We stayed fused, my cheek against his sticky shoulder, the skin between us marked by cooling wax and sweat. Felix found my hand and laced our fingers together, his thumb tracing small circles in the aftermath.
“We come back for each other,” he murmured. “We check in. If things are hard, if one of us goes missing for too long, I will send a flower. You leave a message. It is the ritual now. Our version.”
I nodded, numb with wonder. Through the window, the snow still fell, fine as dust. Party laughter refracted from the hall, a broken hymn of belonging. Someone might guess, later, what we had done in the library, seeing our initials, the marks on our skin, the slight shift in how we walked beside each other. That was the risk. That, I realized, was the promise that made any of it mean more than pleasure alone.
Felix’s tone changed. “You ever worry if you belong? Or if the old legends can really keep their promises?”
I thought of my hometown, rigid with tradition, and a family that never quite understood my pursuit of forgotten histories. They preferred stories tucked safely in photo albums, not whispered in shadowed halls. Or the scandalous whispers that used to swirl around another man like me, who tried to live openly once, setting the town alight with furious gossip. Those were legends too, but darker, reminders that some promises cannot protect you from being erased.
“Every day,” I whispered. “But tonight, I think we made a new one. For us, and anyone after.”
The rituals we create here, within the sanctuary of Merrowick, can reach beyond its walls. They can become a beacon for those who yearn for acceptance and understanding, offering a template for communities to follow. As more people embrace the courage to write their stories openly, perhaps the light we kindle here and the bonds we forge will inspire wider change, pushing against the bounds of tradition. Progress may be slow, but like stories that grow in the retelling, our shared hope becomes a living legacy, lighting a path of hope for others to follow in their own lives.
He squeezed my fingers, hand strong even in the trembling. We found our breath again, as the wax cooled and faded, as the guestbook went quiet behind us and the world, for once, felt made new.
Names Written in Morning Light
I woke to a hush so complete I believed, for a confused heartbeat, that I had fallen into a page of the ledger itself. Only Felix’s steady breathing, the weight of his thigh over mine, the faint musk of sex and wax and old books, rooted me in the living. My cheek stuck to his clavicle, dried sweat and melted candle remnants making our skin tacky, real. For several long minutes, I could only map the rhythm of his body, thumb tracing the thin ridge of an old surgical scar along his torso, breath slow as snowfall under my ear. My own body glowed with bruised aftermath. Every muscle loose in a way that felt like healing, not just aftercare but the repair that happens only when safe hands pull you back together after you have let yourself be undone.
Felix cupped the back of my skull, tracing a gentle line into my hair, not quite letting me drift off again.
“You are thinking too loud, historian,” he muttered, voice heavy with sleep and something gentler besides.
I pressed a kiss into his chest, lips skimming familiar territory now. “Cataloguing. Classifying. Wondering if the legends ever felt this much the morning after.”
His fingers found my jaw and tilted my face up until our eyes met. No mask, no hiding, just Felix raw, hair a mess, eyes still shining with yesterday’s courage.
“The legends never talked about what happened after the dare,” he said. “Only who came back next year.”
A kernel of fear moved in my chest. “Will you? Come back, I mean. Or will this be another vanished name, initials only, the rest left for someone’s dissertation?”
He rolled on top of me, body a slow press, arms bracketing my head. His gaze was a doctor’s, searching for a symptom he half dreaded finding.
“I meant what I said. Our checkpoint is not just for the ledger or the ritual. If anything tries to chase you back into hiding, family, history, my own cowardice, I will send a sign. Or come myself.”
“What sign?”
He grinned, mischievous and new. “The mistletoe, Will. It started before the war, men who could not say they loved each other, so they tucked the sprig into their hats. If you ever find one at your door, my message reached you. You do the same. Signal back. No matter the risk.”
I let myself believe him. The warmth of Felix above me, skin marked by wax and by my teeth, the way we were both quiet from aftermath, not shame, these were the promises that mattered.
“What if rumor spreads? I cannot write anonymous footnotes forever.”
Felix’s hand moved to the welt of wax below my ribs, thumb working the edge. “When my uncle started the guestbook for men like us, he said the point was not secrecy, but survival. Names written down are proof we existed, no matter who tries to erase us later. I want us to be a story that survives.”
In the hall, voices echoed, old friends carrying trays, kitchen clatter, boots squeaking against wet tile. Merrowick was waking, the masquerade residue dissolving into day. We would need to join them soon, to step back into a world of plausible deniability and coded looks. But I did not want to lose this suspension, this body anchored beside me, the knowledge that I had trusted someone with every part of myself.
I took a slow breath, filling my lungs with the scent of him, cologne gone to salt and sweat, the faint waft of clove from the candles.
“I will come back next Christmas. But there are worse tests than that. Real life. The hospital, the city, families that ask too many questions. What if I fail you when it is not just ritual?”
His reply was immediate and absolute. “You will not. But if you need to run, or go quiet, or if you ever get too lost, just write W and F in that ledger again. I will check. My uncle did, for years. He even kept a second book for forgotten guests, the ones who could not find the courage to sign until later. That is Merrowick’s true ritual. Not just a dare, but continuity. The promise to check in, year after year.”
I let my hand drift down his back, finding the knot of old tension between his shoulder blades.
“There is another ritual my mother used, at the end of a hard shift,” I said. “She would put the kettle on, write one silent note to herself, and tuck it into the spice tin. Called it the recipe for courage. She reckoned you could not forget a hope if you wrote it down.”
Felix’s eyes went soft at the corners. “Write me one now,” he insisted. “Then breakfast. Then we face whatever rumors come.”
He rolled off and went looking for my shirt, still patterned with faint wax and his own scent. It nearly made me laugh, the absurd domesticity after what we had done.
My fingers trembled as I wrote on a scrap from the guestbook margin: Our story, inked, to be checked here every year, even if only in secret. I pressed it into the ledger’s cover where our initials were still drying, letting hope and adrenaline mix with the ritual.
We dressed in silence, touches lingering, Felix fixing my collar, me smoothing the line of his jacket, careful not to erase the smudge of wax I wanted him to wear as proof. There was an ache, not just from what we had done but from what lay ahead, a world more complicated, every day stretching farther than the careful sanctuary of Merrowick Hall.
Downstairs, people gathered, party stragglers, staff, a pair of uncles trading quips about old times. I spotted Shaan, Felix’s cousin, threading a peppermint sprig into his lapel, a wink to us both. It was a private handshake, a code reworked for a new generation. Shaan caught my gaze, held it, then looked briefly at Felix before nodding. I realized, with a twist of gratitude and want, that others were always watching for the ritual to continue, to be protected, new names written even as the world spun on.
Breakfast was noisy, laughter bouncing off the beams, the kind of ribbing only found among survivors and true kin. No one commented on my limp or Felix’s too eager laughter, but those who knew simply met our eyes, the old code passing unspoken.
When at last we stood at the library doors again, Felix turned quiet, almost shy.
“Ready?”
“Never. But yes.”
We entered together, no masks, no hurry. The ledger, left open to our page, seemed to wait. I let my hand settle on the cover, then uncapped the pen and pressed it into Felix’s palm.
“You write first.”
He hesitated. “Full name?”
“Both of ours. For the legend. For whoever reads it next.”
He nodded, jaw clenched but resolute. In neat, deliberate letters, he wrote: Felix Thomas Merrowick. Then he handed the pen to me. My hands stopped shaking as I wrote: William James Rowan.
Below, Felix drew the symbol of the mistletoe, exact from memory. I added the date, then a single word: Return.
As we packed up the room, I caught Felix watching me, a tremor of old doubt warring with the relief now settled between us. He touched the place below my ribs, where the wax had cooled but the mark lingered.
“What is the word for this?” he asked.
I knew what he meant, the naming, the desire made real, the way history changes when someone bears witness.
“Future.”
We left the library with its secrets, joined the others at the manor’s hearth, and watched as snow finally let the world in again. New rumors would start about the historian and the doctor’s nephew, about names written not just as initials but as a flag for the next lonely guest. The ledger was heavier with us in it, the wax mark healed but present. The ritual lived, checked and rechecked, our bodies and stories proof that dare night at Merrowick could become more than legend for men like us.
The promise we carried out of that library was not just to each other. It was to every man who had waited for a sign, all those who had left a flower or a note or initials only. To anyone who still wondered if queer names would ever be written in the main book, not just as myth or afterthought. The ledger, the mistletoe, the wax, we had made them symbols for another year, another story, another proof that sometimes the dare does become a promise.
As the snow went on falling, covering Merrowick in a blanket of silence and possibility, we knew this was not an ending. It was a beginning, a promise to return to these halls with new stories and renewed hope. The echoes of laughter and whispered secrets would fill Merrowick again, as more people found their way to this sanctuary of courage and connection. Each gathering a chance to weave our names into the legacy, making sure the spirit of belonging and acceptance carried forward, lighting the path for others to follow. Before leaving, we set the mistletoe and the ledger together on the mantel, a visible testament to our promise. They stood there, a symbol of hope and continuity, whispering that men like us will always have a place to return to, where our stories matter and grow.