The sea tried to drown me again. You’d think I’d take the hint by now — she doesn’t want me. She’s sick of my verses, sick of my voice, sick of me rattling her cliffs at midnight like some parish bell that won’t quit. But she’s jealous too, I swear it. She spits me out only to drag me back under, as if she can’t stand that I loved Annabel more than I ever loved her.

So yes, I woke on the shore, coughing salt and weeds, and for a brief second thought I’d seen her. Annabel. Pale, hair slicked to her cheek, lips pressed with seawater. I said her name and then blacked out again. You’d think that’s the end of it. It should have been.

Except it wasn’t Annabel at all. It was him.

When I blinked awake the second time, I was in my chamber — though not as I’d left it. Fire stoked, linens pulled up, a basin waiting. The storm outside was rattling the shutters so hard I half thought the whole manor would pitch into the tide. And him — the sailor — standing over me like he’d been appointed by God Himself. Broad-shouldered, scarred down one arm, face carved by wind and sun. Not beautiful the way Annabel was, no. But arresting and captivatingly. You’d have stared too. Don’t pretend you wouldn’t.

He must have carried me back to the manor, the help must have shown him to my chambers, they themselves are too scrawny to lift me, not that I was the beefiest of men. Quite the opposite, yet even still, my help was scrawnier than me. I hope they’re home, sans Bellyings who lives at the manor, the rest should not be out in this weather.

I still feel the ghost of me, half-dead poet, clinging like a child while he trudged up the hill with the whole sea dripping off my bones. Don’t laugh. Dignity isn’t afforded to drowning men.

I slipped under again after that. Fever, salt-lungs, call it what you like. I woke to scraps of memory. Him spooning broth against my mouth, his rough palm steadying the back of my head, his voice (low, almost embarrassed) muttering things I couldn’t quite catch. I remember staring at his hands. Scarred, sailor’s hands. And there, ink smudged across his skin — my ink — where I’d scrawled verses before collapsing. My Annabel Lee. He must’ve picked up the quill after me. The words bled against his calluses, and God help me, I nearly wept.

So when I finally surfaced proper, hours later maybe, the storm gone quieter, there he was. Cross-armed in the chair in the corner like he’d sworn guard. Head tipped forward, jawline sharp in the dim light. Asleep, though not peacefully. Men like that don’t sleep peaceful, I reckon. Too much sea in their marrow.

I lay there staring. Half in awe, half in disbelief. A man. Not Annabel, not my ghost. Flesh and scar and storm. Yet I swear my heart surged the same way it had with her. That terrible, holy ache. I could hear it thrumming in my ears, saying: yes, even now. Even here.

What was I supposed to do? Pretend it wasn’t love because it came in a shape different than I’d begged God for? I’m no priest. I’m no philosopher worth his salt. I only know devotion when it burns me alive. And it burned.

So yes, I loved her. And yes, I looked at him and thought: A love like Annabel Lee. And perhaps that’s blasphemy. Perhaps it’s madness. But what’s grief if not a kind of lust for resurrection? What’s love if not defiance?

You want the truth? You want the scandal of it? Fine. I’ll give it to you plain.

I was a mourner who fell for a man who pulled me from the grave I kept trying to climb into. A sailor who wore the sea on his skin, and I wanted him anyway. Not instead of her, but because love isn’t a ledger to balance. It’s a flood. It chooses for you.

This is men loving men against God and sea. And it’s the only holy thing I’ve ever known.

So I waited until he awoke, I sat completely still until he did and once the stranger had, he blinked at me and I at him. Then I asked a name that would change the functioning of my mind for the rest of eternity,

“What is your name, sailor?”