Chapter 3

“The key thing to remember,” Anthony said in the YouTube clip of a forecast from the previous year, “is this front is a very unstable system, so it could go any number of ways. Sometimes we just gotta be ready to roll with the changes, as REO Speedwagon used to say. Or was it my dad? Or maybe it was Dad quoting REO Speedwagon. Anyway, tomorrow would be the perfect day to bring an umbrella, a tube of sunscreen, and an open mind.”

Martin lay on his bed holding his tablet above him. He’d given in to his curiosity and looked up videos of Anthony. The man was cute all clean-shaven and bowtied, chatting with the weekend news anchors, but Martin preferred him the way he was now, a bit of a mess. Also, he’d modulated his natural accent on air to the point where it was indiscernible.

At the diner, they’d finished their breakfast with only polite conversation. Then Anthony had dropped him at Pockaway instead of taking him to his parents’ house to deliver the tree, saying his dad could help him unload it. Though they’d left things friendly and still planned to watch the football together the following morning, there was something…off between them.

Maybe it was more than embarrassment that had led Anthony to shut him out. Maybe it was how, even before Cody had shown up, they’d almost talked about the connection between them. Maybe Anthony wasn’t out here in his hometown, maybe not even out to his parents.

Or maybe he simply didn’t fancy Martin.

He scrolled down to the video’s comments.

I miss Anthony Bello! one read. He always made me laugh. Weekends just aren’t the same without him.

Why did they get rid of this guy? another asked.

A reply to this comment said, You know what they say about local news: “If it bleeds, it leads.” Weather doesn’t bleed unless it’s a hurricane, and we don’t get those in Pittsburgh. Gotta save those precious minutes for the latest murder spree or house fire.

He tapped on another video. It was clear why Anthony had been popular with viewers—he was good-looking and whip-smart, which was why his forecasts were on YouTube in the first place—but his tendency to eat into the time meant for news and sport would have no doubt ruffled feathers.

Martin shut down the YouTube app and set his tablet aside. Why torture himself over someone who was clearly conflicted, especially when they lived five thousand miles apart?

He examined the bandage on his right hand and wrist. His wounds had stopped hurting, thanks to an over-the-counter pain reliever, and so far the antibiotic hadn’t made him queasy.

What a morning it had been, one mishap after the other. If he were more obsessive, he might think the Curse had jumped the gun by two days—or worse, expanded its temporal reach beyond the twenty-fifth of December.

But it had never done so before, even when he’d traveled to the Highlands to visit his gran, or when he’d spent Christmas in Leicester for work. And when all was said and done, had this morning really been bad ? Thanks to Anthony, it had at least been entertaining.

Martin closed his eyes. Why was he trying to make sense of something so completely daft?

Because he was bored. And anxious. And…heavy sigh…infatuated.

His phone burbled with a text. He grabbed it—too hard and fast, the side of it hitting his injured right palm. “Ow.”

Anthony

How’s the hand?

Martin’s pulse pounded, making his wounds throb.

And the rest of you

He held the phone in his left hand and typed with a single thumb.

Martin

Hand not bad. Rest of me knackered from tetanus jag and adventuring

Thanks for the rec on the pizza place btw. The calzone was pure braw

That means delicious

I assumed from context but thanks

I also bought a pizza for tomorrow’s dinner so I wouldn’t have to leave the house

Did that sound pathetic? Was there such a thing as a sexy hermit?

So are you all adventured out for the day?

Was this an invitation? Rather than presume, Martin would play coy.

Need a lookout for your next petty crime?

You left the R out of pretty

His face warmed. This was flirting, right?

My keyboad just boke, petty boy

Martin bit his lip and hit send. Then he kept his eyes on the screen. After twenty seconds, it dimmed. After thirty seconds, it went dark.

Fuck. He’d come on too strong. It was so hard to read intentions over text.

He put down his phone. Immediately the screen lit up.

Drink? Maybe a Scottish half and half?

Well, then.

Sorry, you’re an adult and deserve to be invited out with a complete sentence. Would you care to go have a drink with me?

So formal! *clears throat* Dear Mr Bello, my heart overflows with gratitude for your kind invitation. However, I have been informed by the good people of USAntibiotics that alcohol and amoxicillin do not converse well and in fact are rather likely to quarrel. Therefore, I must regretfully decline. Yours, M Gibson

He hit send, then set up his next text and waited.

Half a minute later…

No problem

Martin hit send again.

But I could pure murder a mocha

Was this a date? Maybe. Anthony had put on a nice shirt, the dark-green button-down that he’d been told complemented his semi-swarthy, half-Sicilian complexion. He’d trimmed his beard and even dabbed on aftershave. He wouldn’t do that for someone who would merely be cool to hang out with. So it was probably a low-key date.

His headlights shone on the back of Pockaway as he pulled up. Martin was waiting outside. The wind ruffled his fine, coppery hair in a way that made Anthony want to know firsthand how soft it was.

Yep, this was a date. Anthony felt it in his thudding heart, his warming face, and in several other body parts.

“Hiya,” Martin said as he stepped up into the truck. “Ah, the glasses again. Do you only wear them in the p.m. hours, like white tie and tails?”

“Depends. I’m allergic to mold, so with all the damp leaves this time of year, eventually every day the contacts gotta go or my eyes look redder than a rooster’s ass.” He winced. Why was he trying to act more country than he really was? “I’ve never owned a rooster.”

“I like the specs. They make you look, erm, urbane.”

Anthony tilted his head. “Urbane? Seriously?”

Martin touched his own lips. “I don’t think I’ve ever said that word out loud before.”

“Well, I feel special, then.”

“Good.”

Anthony put the truck into drive and tried to rein in his smile. The way Martin’s tongue punched the d maxed out the goodness in the word good .

They set out on the county road toward town, Aloe Blacc’s Christmas Funk album crooning from the stereo. “Is this okay?” Anthony asked, pointing to the console. “I can put on something less seasonal if you hate Christmas. No judgment here.”

“It’s great. And I don’t hate Christmas.”

“Okay. Cool.” Anthony cued up the words I’m sorry for being weird earlier on his tongue, but they stayed there, held back by embarrassment and fear: embarrassment that he’d been awkward about this… thing between them, and fear that Martin wouldn’t have a clue what he was talking about, that he’d be surprised Anthony thought this thing was even a thing.

“Hold on.” Martin leaned over and turned up the volume on “I Got Your Christmas Right Here.” Then he asked, “Why does this guy’s voice sounds familiar?”

“I’ll let you figure it out, but lemme know if you need a hint.”

Martin sat listening. “I’m getting long-time-ago vibes.”

“If 2013 is a long time ago, then?—”

“Wait!” Martin lifted his hand. “Is it…” He put his hand down. “I’m afraid to guess wrong and look an eejit.”

Eejit . Was that where idjit came from? Supposedly everything in Appalachia traced its roots back to Scotland or Northern Ireland or both. Maybe that was why he and Martin rarely had to ask each other to repeat sentences—though he still wanted to know how to spell the curses that had spilled from Martin’s mouth while Pumpkin Spice was shredding his skin.

Or maybe it went deeper than that. Maybe they just understood each other in a way that was exciting but also scary as all get-out.

They’d only met yesterday, for crying out loud. But Martin was right when he’d said over breakfast that they’d been through a lot together. And there was the whole seeing-him-naked moment that had kept Anthony up until two a.m. wishing he had a photographic memory.

“Wake me up!”

Anthony jerked back to reality, nearly driving off the road. “Jesus Christ.”

“The song. ‘Wake Me Up’ by Avicii. This guy sang on that.”

Anthony snapped his fingers. “Got it in one!”

“Brilliant. What’s my prize?”

“A coffee drink, a dessert, and…” What would sound enticing without coming on too strong? “An insider’s tour of Harpers Ferry.”

“I accept.”

They crossed the bridge over the Shenandoah, then started the uphill climb into the contiguous town of Bolivar, concluding with a descent into Harpers Ferry’s Lower Town. Martin craned his neck to look at the nineteenth-century buildings and stone walls.

Anthony found a parking spot near the cafe, then turned off the engine. “Listen.”

Martin let go of the door he was about to open. “Yeah?”

“Sorry for going a little cold on you this afternoon.”

“I didn’t take it personally.”

“Good.” Anthony let out a sigh of relief. “It wasn’t anything you did wrong. The opposite, more like.”

“What do you mean?”

“You did me a solid by paying off Cody.”

“What was I meant to do,” Martin said, “stand back and watch him slice you up like a side of beef?”

“He wouldn’t’ve.”

“How was I to know that?” He gestured to the truck bed. “If nothing else, he would’ve chopped up your parents’ tree and ruined Christmas. It’s a personal mission of mine to save Christmas whenever I can.”

Anthony examined him, looking for the joke, but Martin seemed earnest—either that or he’d perfected his poker face. “So you’re some kinda magic elf?”

Martin’s laugh echoed in the truck cab. “You’ve got no idea how funny that is.” His smile faded as quickly as it had appeared. “So how was me doing you a good turn a bad thing?”

“I don’t know, it just felt like too much. Like it meant something about us.” His pulse pounded in his ears. “I’m saying this all wrong.”

“No, you’re not. I get it.” Martin fidgeted with the frayed stitching on the edge of the passenger seat. “I’m away the afternoon of the twenty-sixth. So us…spending time together doesn’t have to mean anything more than spending time together.”

Anthony swallowed. “Right. Yeah. No meaning.” He cleared his throat. “It’s not like we’ll ever see each other again after this week. I’m okay with that if you’re okay with that.”

“I’m extremely okay with that.” He took one hand out of its glove and put it over Anthony’s. “It doesn’t have to wreck us.”

Anthony looked up to meet his gaze. It matched the sudden eagerness inside him. No wreckage, just…them. Them and this electric current passing between their bare hands.

He grinned and pulled the keys from the ignition. “Let’s go get you that mocha.”

The cafe’s only sofa was taken, but maybe that was a good thing. Anthony wasn’t sure he could sit directly beside Martin without wanting to slide onto his lap and kiss him until their lips fell off. It was hard enough lounging here by the fireplace in two cozy armchairs, their knees nearly touching as he watched Martin’s face while he devoured one of the cafe’s famous carrot-cake cupcakes, and of course some of the cream-cheese icing got stuck on the corner of his mouth, begging to be licked off, and?—

Anthony snipped that run-on thought by popping another chocolate macaron into his mouth. The spongy texture forced him to focus on chewing to avoid choking.

“So,” he said once the goodies were safely down their throats. “I have a personal question.”

“Hmm,” Martin said, scraping the crumbs from inside the cupcake wrapper. “Go on, then.”

“My mom says people who vacation alone on Christmas are running away from something.”

“Accurate.” Martin set down his plate and picked up his mocha without elaborating.

“Usually it’s memories, she says. Usually of someone they lost.” He bit his lip. That prompt was too personal. But if he was going to “spend time” with this man, he at least wanted to know what had brought him here.

“It’s nothing that dramatic. Or maybe it’s more dramatic, I dunno.” Martin stirred the whipped cream into his mocha for a long silent moment, then shifted to the edge of his chair and leaned in. “I’ll tell you, but you’ve got to promise not to laugh.”

“I wouldn’t.”

“Wouldn’t promise or wouldn’t laugh?”

“Neither. But I’ll try to treat whatever this is with the seriousness it deserves.”

Martin snorted. “How much seriousness it deserves is the real question.” He slid a forefinger along the edge of the teak coffee table in front of him. “Only a few people know this about me.”

“I’m honored,” Anthony said, though he sensed Martin could be about to hoodwink him. Better to take him too seriously and look like an ass than not seriously enough and actually be an ass.

Martin unbuttoned the sleeves of his checked shirt and turned them up over those of his pine-green sweater, as though preparing for manual labor. “So, I said earlier I don’t hate Christmas, and it was the truth. But Christmas definitely hates me.”

That was not what Anthony had expected. “How can Christmas hate anyone?”

Martin waved his hand. “I’m speaking figuratively. Obviously Christmas is not an entity which can hate people. My point is, every year something bad happens to me on Christmas Day. It’s a curse. A Capital-C Curse.”

“Huh.” Anthony kept a straight face. This was clearly a pivotal moment. If he smirked or gave Martin the side-eye, it could put up a wall between them. “Interesting.”

Martin held his palms out. “I know it sounds daft, but I’m not daft. And I don’t believe in curses. I’m an engineer, for fuck’s sake. Or I was, until the Christmas Curse ruined that, too.”

Intriguing. “How long have you been cursed?”

“Thirty years to the day. It started when I was seven.”

“So you know what cursed you, then.”

“Not what. Who.” Martin leaned closer and motioned for Anthony to do the same. “It was the twenty-third of December. I was in a long queue to meet Santa. They gave every kid got one free cup of cocoa, and I drank my first one pure fast so I could pretend they skipped me and get a second cup.” He shook his head. “Dunno what they were thinking, handing out cocoa to children who were already buzzing.”

“Yeah, that seems nuts.”

“So I’m waiting there, bouncing up and down, cos not only am I excited, I’m also in desperate need of a pish. But the second I get to the front of the queue, I stop bouncing, because I start feeling…no’ right.”

“Uh-oh. Where were your parents during all this?”

“My mum was waiting for me on the other side of Santa’s Grotto, by the exit. I wanted to be a big boy and talk to him by myself. If I’d any sense, or if Mum had been with me, I would’ve done a runner for the toilet. But I couldn’t leave my place in the queue.”

“Obviously. Especially if you still believed in Santa Claus.”

Martin tilted his head back and forth. “By that point, I didn’t totally believe, but I figured I should have a word with him, in case he was real.”

“So you stayed in line.”

“I stayed.” Martin took a deep breath. “When it was finally my turn, this helper elf—Tinsel Merry-Mittens, according to his badge, which had wee plastic candy canes pinned to it, I remember—comes over to fetch me. As he’s reaching down for my hand, my stomach makes this pure raging noise like rrrraaaawwgh, and I boak all over him.” Martin spread his hands to illustrate the carnage. “His green top, green leggings, red-rope belt, everything soaked in cocoa boak.”

“Holy shit.” Anthony didn’t need a Scots-to-American dictionary to figure out what boak meant. “So this elf cursed you for barfing on him?”

“Not right away. First he called me a wee fanny.”

“That’s kinda cute, him calling you a little butt. Weird, but cute.”

“No, a fanny’s the same as a cunt.”

Anthony’s jaw dropped. “Whoa.” He pulled back from Martin.

“Sorry. In my part of Glasgow, that word basically means person . Like, naecunt means nobody .”

“Got it.” Anthony rubbed his ear to anesthetize it. No wonder it was hard for some people to persist past the language barrier.

“Anyway, Tinsel Merry-Mittens goes, ‘Awa’ and bile yer heid, ya wee fanny,’ and then?—

“So is ‘heid’ like penis?”

“No, it’s just heid. Head, that is. Anyway, then I, being a right wee fanny, in fact, said, ‘Get it up ye, ya tadger!’”

“And a tadger is…”

“A penis.”

“Got it.” Anthony would remember that one.

“So then this snarly, overworked, and doubtlessly underpaid elf, he’s now pulling me by my arm away from Santa. I’m fighting him every step—it’s two days before Christmas, mind, my last chance to talk to the big man. Finally my mum sees me and starts running towards us. So the elf crouches down beside me, his jingly hat all shoogly to the side, and says, ‘Listen.’ So finally I shut it.”

Anthony leaned in.

Martin’s gaze pinned him down. “Tinsel Merry-Mittens gets right up in my face, looks me dead in the eye, and whispers…‘May all your Christmases be shite.’”

Anthony closed his mouth, then covered it with his fingertips to keep in the laughter. His eyes began to water.

“You can laugh,” Martin said.

Anthony did, so explosively he’d probably have a sore throat later. The cafe’s other patrons peered over, which only made him laugh harder at the thought of explaining it to them.

Martin rubbed his forehead like he was trying to smooth out its creases. “Hearing the story aloud, it sounds mad. But it’s real. I know it as truly as I know force equals mass times acceleration.”

Anthony wiped his eyes. “If you believe it, you must have evidence.”

“Of course. You think I’d invent something like that just to have a go at you?”

“We met yesterday. I don’t know what you’d do to me.” He held Martin’s gaze long enough for the accidental innuendo to sink in.

Martin smirked. “So two days later, early Christmas morning, our tree caught fire.”

“No way.”

“We weren’t hurt, and the house was basically okay, but all our presents went up in smoke. My family and I were standing outside in our jim-jams waiting for the fire brigade, and I wondered about Tinsel Merry-Mittens’ curse. But I didn’t believe it yet. Not even when I took ill with an ear infection the following Christmas. Or pneumonia the Christmas after that. It wasn’t until I was sixteen that I hardcore believed it.”

“What happened?”

“I was working at my first job, clearing tables at a posh restaurant. On Christmas Day I dropped a tray full of dishes.”

Anthony shrugged. “Anyone could do that.”

“I dropped it on a customer.”

“Ah.”

“One of the servers put a pure heavy plate right on the edge of my tray, and it tipped over into a city councilman’s lap.”

“Oh shit.” Anthony laughed again despite his sympathy. “Did you get fired?”

“No, but I took a bollocking from my coworkers for months—especially the bastard who put that plate on my tray. They never let me forget it.”

So far the Curse seemed like a pain in the ass but not disastrous. “What’s the worst thing that ever happened to you on Christmas?”

Martin’s blue eyes seemed to shutter, then he pulled his lips between his teeth as if to seal in the words.

“You don’t have to tell me,” Anthony said.

Martin drew his fists to his chest and rubbed his knuckles together. “I’ll tell you the second-worst thing.”

“Only if you want to.”

“I want to.” Martin stood and shifted his chair closer. As he sat again, his knee touched Anthony’s and stayed there, as though he needed an anchor. “You’re a scientist, so maybe you remember the Beagle 2 Mars lander about fifteen years ago? It was part of a mission run by the European Space Agency.”

“ Beagle 2. ” Anthony scoured his memory. “Is that the one that crashed?”

“Aye. On Christmas Day.” Martin pointed his thumb at his own chest. “I was in the control center when it happened.”

Anthony gaped at him. “You crashed Beagle 2 ?” He glanced around to make sure no one had paid attention. “That was your fault?”

“Not directly, not because of any mistake I made. But I was there, in lander operations at the University of Leicester. I was part of the team that waited and waited all night for Beagle 2 ’s signal to come, and it never did.”

“Did you worry about being there on Christmas?”

“Honestly, the mission was so all-consuming, I didn’t think about the dates, and when I realized I’d be at work on the twenty-fifth, I was mostly relieved there’d be nae danger of ruining my family’s holiday with another ‘Christmas Calamity,’ as Mum calls them.” He took a desultory sip of mocha.

“So you’re saying the Christmas Curse destroyed an entire space mission.”

“The lander part, at least. Tens of millions of pounds down the pan.”

“Did you tell anyone?”

“Fuck no. They’d have thought me a nutter for sure.” Martin sighed. “After the lander was lost, a lot of us were laid off, as there was no more mission. And here’s the punchline: Ten years later, the Beagle 2 spacecraft was found by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. It was completely intact.”

“So it never crashed?”

“It never crashed. But its solar panels didn’t fully deploy, and the stuck panels blocked the communications antenna, so it couldn’t carry out its mission.”

“Which was what?”

“Just the wee matter of looking for ancient Martian life.”

“Hoo, boy.” Anthony sat back in his chair and tried to wrap his mind around it all. It almost didn’t matter whether some curse had truly caused all this misfortune. Martin believed it had, and he’d carried this burden for decades. “What did you do after you were laid off?”

“I left Leicester, went home to Glasgow and became a teacher. I reckoned that was safe, as I’d never have to work on Christmas.”

“And the rest of the year you’re fine?”

“Nae problem. In fact, life is generally great.” Martin gave a wistful smile. “I love my job, my family, my friends.”

“What about…are you with someone?”

“Romantically? No, nothing serious for almost two years. My last boyfriend bolted when I told him about the Curse. He thought I was making it up to avoid meeting his family at Christmas.”

“Yikes.” He angled himself toward Martin. “So…how come you told me?”

“Because you shared the story of losing your job, and that couldn’t have been easy.” Martin set down his empty mocha mug and gave him a significant look. “And I suppose with you I thought, ‘What have I got to lose?’”

Martin tried to convince his legs that walking up Harpers Ferry’s steep streets gave them a much-needed stretch after the prior day’s long journey. They lodged a vigorous protest just the same.

At least the physical exertion distracted him from the unmoored feeling of exposing his rawest vulnerability to a near stranger. Had he said too much about the Curse? They’d never see each other again after this week, but that didn’t mean Anthony couldn’t do damage with the information, even unwittingly.

Still, the risk seemed worth it just to have a sympathetic ear.

The wind had picked up, shoving the scattered clouds aside to reveal the night sky’s principal player, a brilliant silver full moon. Even if Harpers Ferry hadn’t been aglow with faerie lights, the path Martin and Anthony walked would have been almost as clear as day.

“This town reminds me of some old Scottish villages,” Martin said, “where houses and shops are slotted into the landscape as though they’d grown there like trees.”

“It definitely has that intrepid feel to it,” Anthony said, directing him onto an even steeper side street. “So many human and natural forces have tried to take this town down, but it goes on.”

Martin was embarrassed he’d not learnt much about Harpers Ferry before his arrival, but he admitted it anyway. “So what’s the story with this place?” he asked Anthony.

“It’s been through a lot. Hell, maybe it’s cursed too.”

Martin appreciated the too , which implied Anthony believed him. “What do you mean?”

“It changed hands eight times during the Civil War, but it’s most famous for being the place that made that war inevitable.”

“How?”

“Hmm.” Anthony lifted his chin and rubbed his dark beard, which looked neater than it had that morning. “Okay, for once I’ll give you the short version. One night in 1859, this abolitionist named John Brown and about twenty other guys snuck into town and seized the federal armory. He wasn’t just after weapons, though. He hoped the raid would inspire a huge rebellion of enslaved people all throughout the South.”

“Ah, well done, him.”

“It didn’t work out, and he got hanged for treason. But he was so persuasive about ending slavery—this guy had, like, Elvis-level charisma—that loads more people joined his crusade after he died. And on the other side, the raid made slaveholders so paranoid and radical that when Lincoln got elected, the southern states seceded from the Union. Boom, civil war.” Anthony mimed shooting a basket, then dusted his hands together. “Did you follow all that?”

“Aye, stunningly.” Either his brain was de-jetlagged at last, or he was finding Anthony more magnetic with each passing moment.

The road leveled out, and in a minute a barrier gate loomed ahead of them, preventing passage by car. Beyond it, a magnificent silent white building glowed in the moonlight.

Anthony led him around the gate, making a dismissive gesture toward the Private Property - No Trespassing sign. “That warning’s just for tourists,” he told Martin.

“Aye, right. Promise me Cody won’t show up with his machete.”

“At worst it’ll be a few ghosts, who are famously bad at carrying gardening tools.”

They came out of the trees into the clearing, where the building sat surrounded by chain-link fencing. With the windbreak of the trees gone, Martin tugged his coat more tightly around himself.

“My folks came to this hotel for their honeymoon,” Anthony said. “They fell in love with Harpers Ferry, and a few years later, they found a way to make it their home. My dad’s a general contractor, which is useful anyplace.”

“Were you born here?”

“Yup, but I still don’t feel like I really belong, what with my parents being from Baltimore. Ever heard that small-town saying, ‘A cat can have kittens in the oven, but that don’t make ’em biscuits’?”

Martin hadn’t heard it, but he was well acquainted with the notion. “It’s not just small towns. Glasgow’s a big city, but it can be a wee bit provincial too. I was born in Kilmarnock and moved to the city when I was nine. Sometimes I feel I’m not Glaswegian enough.”

Anthony chuckled. “Look at us, a couple of citizens of nowhere.”

They stopped at the fence, where Martin peered through at the abandoned building. Most of the windows were missing, and scraps of white-painted wood were cracked and dangling like broken teeth. The place looked ready to audition for the role of the hotel in The Shining .

“When I was a kid,” Anthony said, “we’d come up here for dinner. They had the best fried chicken in the world, and there was a piano in the lobby that someone’d be playing all the time.” His smile faded. “I heard the piano’s still in there, rotting away with the walls and the beds.”

“That’s so sad.”

“Yeah, but not forever. Someone bought the land, and they’re gonna open a whole new resort.” Anthony patted the chain-link, making it jingle. “Things are always changing, and not always for the worse.”

Martin looked at him to see if he was kidding on, but Anthony’s face showed pure sincerity as he gazed avidly at the derelict hotel. What was it like to have such a positive outlook, to be so open to any number of futures?

They walked on, past a smaller building with two levels of outward-facing rooms. Ivy trailed up its stairs and porch railings and looked as though its ambition was to cover—or perhaps bring down—the entire edifice.

“Watch your step. It slopes here.” Anthony switched on his phone’s flashlight, pointing it so the light bled behind him on the broken tarmac path, adding to the full moon’s illumination. Martin kept his focus on the ground, as this deserted location would be a horrible place to sprain an ankle.

The path leveled out at an open space with flagstones and two benches beside an empty flagpole. Martin looked up and?—

He stopped short. “Oh my God.” The view was literally stunning, as he wasn’t sure his brain could function in the face of it.

They stood on the edge of a bluff overlooking the confluence of the two rivers. Most of the town below was obscured by the trees on the edge of the bluff, so the natural world’s magnificence was reasserting itself with a vengeance.

The windswept rivers sparkled in the moonlight as they rushed to join each other, as though their union could defy the dark, overbearing mountains that constrained them.

“So that’s Maryland.” Anthony pointed to the left, then the right. “And that’s Virginia. And of course you’re standing on West Virginia.”

“Now I know why people killed each other for this vantage point. You can see everything.” He pointed ahead to where the Potomac began to curve to the left. “The bridge I drove across yesterday is just past that bend in the river, isn’t it?”

“Exactly.”

Martin rubbed his forehead. “That’s so disorientating, seeing the same place from opposite angles. Like watching a film that violates the 180 Rule.”

A low train whistle sounded in the distance. Anthony looked at his phone’s lock screen, which showed the time as 9:28. “That’ll be the Capitol Limited from Washington to Chicago.”

The whistle drew closer, then muffled. “It must be inside the mountain now.” The engineer in Martin was devouring it. “Imagine all the work that went into making that happen. And they didn’t even have computers to do the calculations.”

“Imagine being the first people to ride that train,” Anthony said. “Exciting but terrifying.”

Martin’s heart thumped just thinking about it. But it wasn’t only the train exciting and terrifying him. And it definitely wasn’t the ghost of a martyred abolitionist.

He held his breath, waiting for the train to emerge from the mountain. The tunnel began to glow, faintly at first, a few photons bouncing off walls, most scattering before they could reach his eyes all the way up here on the cliff.

At last the light brightened, coalescing around the engine’s piercing headlight as it rolled out of the tunnel and onto the great iron bridge spanning the Potomac.

The engine soon disappeared behind the trees beneath Martin, but he could hear that distinctive squeak of steel as the train came to a stop at the riverside station.

“There’s a little park next to the station,” Anthony said, “where the two rivers meet. We call that point the Point, because we’re creative and shit.”

“Ah.”

“Now that the public can’t come up here anymore, most people go to the Point to take pictures.”

Martin noticed how Anthony had switched from claiming this hilltop was closed to tourists to it being closed to the public , which surely included the two of them. He was glad for Anthony’s rule-bending in this case.

“I feel sorry for anyone who doesn’t have this view.”

“It’s a good view from the Point,” Anthony said. “Just different.”

“I’m glad we’re here.” Martin’s pulse drummed in his throat. “Cos if we were down there, I couldn’t do this.”

He took Anthony’s hand, tentatively, and when he didn’t pull away, leaned in and kissed him.

He’d intended it to be a quick kiss to test the waters. But when their mouths met, then merged, warm inside cold, it was clear it wouldn’t be quick at all.

Anthony let go a soft moan, then pressed his other hand to Martin’s cheek, kissing him recklessly, breathlessly. And then there was no end in sight to this kiss, which suited Martin fine. The train’s short whistle as it left the station didn’t startle them. In fact, he barely heard it at all.

Finally Anthony pulled away, just far enough to say, “You could’ve done that down there at the Point.”

“Yeah?”

He nodded. “But first kisses are best without spectators.”

“I agree. What about second kisses?”

“Oh, the rule goes double for second kisses.” He squinted at Martin through his glasses. “Did they not give you the book when you went through Customs?”

“Which book is that?”

“ How to Get with Americans. ”

“And the author?”

“It’s anonymously sourced. But very reliable.”

“Is there, by any chance, a copy of it back at my place?”

“Might could be.” He kissed Martin again, even more eagerly than before, as though a dam had broken and swept all his reticence away.

Mercifully, the walk back to Anthony’s truck was all downhill and was therefore three times as fast as the walk to the bluff. To be fair, they were also in more of a hurry.

Anthony pulled into Pockaway’s long driveway, where the dwarf spruces again glowed with faerie lights.

Martin gestured to the trees. “That’s beautiful, by the way.”

“Thanks. It’s not even a Christmas thing. People kept swerving off the driveway in the fall when the leaves covered it, so we decided some markers would be good.” He stopped the truck in front of the house. “I wish I could come in, but I gotta go home and take Betty out.”

Martin did his best to hide his disappointment. “I thought you lived with your parents.”

“I do, but I can’t count on them to take care of her while they’re busy getting ready for tomorrow night. Our family does a big Christmas Eve party and dinner.”

Right. Tomorrow was Curse Eve. “What if you fetched Betty and brought her back here?”

“That’s a great idea. I will do that.” Anthony leaned in and gave Martin a kiss that was brief but full of promise. “In the morning.”