This is the truth he lives with under his skin, how the ocean has left salted thumbprints all up his throat and marked him for drowning.

Jonathan Covey wears it well, this obsession the sea has with him. It’s as if he has drowned already, water swollen up against the sharp confines of his ribs, and he is simply waiting for the day when he will let the ocean lick up what’s left of him. He will be nothing but bones curled under its salt-strewn tongue, towed down deep where everything is cold and dark and quiet, no fight in him because he never wanted to be that kind of person.

The kind cored by violence.

This is why he’s so upset about the blood ribboning between his fingers, staining the crevices of his shaking palms in a spill of cherry red. There’s so much of it. His nosebleeds are always bad, but this one seems never-ending, his mouth numb against the rising bruise. His fault, of course. It always is.

He lowers himself onto his stomach on the floating dock nestled between the tall pilings underneath his house, ignoring the stacks of tackle boxes and nets that he’s meant to be loading into his father’s fishing trawler. His face hovers inches from the water and the ocean laps against his lips in an open-mouthed kiss, licking away the blood with a tenderness he finds nowhere else. This will cleanse him, will make him forget.

He and the ocean have a history of salt and blood and brine together, and when the tide breathes out, Jonathan feels it in his lungs. It has always been this way between them: a love story, but the wrong kind.

“I need you,” he whispers to the sea, “to fix my life.”