On Sunday morning I wake slowly, surfacing through dreams of Saman sawing between my thighs and Nasrin yelling at me and my parents just staring in abject betrayal, until my eyelids finally flutter open in a brief placeless panic. Overhead is a shell of colorful fabric rippling in the wind. Dawn is streaming in through a mesh door, casting a radiant halo around the boy-shaped silhouette watching me. I take deep breaths and let my eyes adjust and the shadows resolve into Nick, sitting bolt upright.

“How long have you been awake?” I murmur, shielding my horrible morning breath with a hand.

“Did you hear it too?” he asks without preamble, and I feel a jolt that prickles my skin into goosebumps. He rolls out of his sleeping bag, fully dressed in what I’ve come to recognize as his hiking uniform — cargo-style bush pants made from rugged canvas and a skintight black thermal vest. He ties on his hiking boots while glancing outside. “You wait here while I check it out.”

Nick vanishes through the tent door in a hunched-over scramble. I peek after him in rising alarm. He circles past the mesh door in widening loops, a heavy stick clutched in his hand, glancing around, occasionally pausing to listen. After a while he returns empty-handed, relaxed again, grinning. He squats down outside the mesh.

“What do you think it was?” I ask a little breathlessly.

“I was afraid it was a who, not a what. Mojados. Wetbacks. Illegal immigrants. They can do desperate things when they need food and money, like jumping backpackers. But it was probably just a coyote or something.”

“Just a coyote,” I groan. My childhood in East LA was full of stories about urban coyotes lurking at the fringe of parks and playgrounds, waiting to snag cherubic little meals from their baby strollers. Grandfather repeated the stories as if they were fact. That was an America he could understand.

“Come see this dawn before the sun gets any higher.” Nick straightens up and his legs disappear from view.

I’m mummified in a sleeping bag zipped up tight. Underneath I’m wearing my black track suit with white pinstriping — and feeling horribly self-conscious about it. Did I come here to breakdance or backpack? One of Nick’s stocking caps is pulled low over my forehead. I adjust my bangs so they screen the right side of my face, hiding my crooked eye. Then I put on my Nikes and crawl out the mesh door. The morning cold reaches past my chattering teeth and seizes my lungs.

We camped in a gentle saddle of chaparral, one side rising further into the hazy blue mountains, the other side falling into a steep ravine choked with oak trees and giant boulders. Everything is painted with the delicate highlights of dawn, pinkish tones above the horizon line, purplish ones below it. Behind us the last stars are twinkling on the still-dark western horizon.

Nick is contemplating the panorama with bare arms folded across his chest. The pose is implacable, a man mobilized against something I can’t quite see. His icy blue eyes melt a little when he notices my giddy delight. “You like this camping stuff, huh?”

“Totally! It’s even better than I always imagined it would be. Except…is it normal to be this stiff?” It feels like every vertebrae in my spine was fused overnight.

“Don’t worry, you get used to it. You hungry?”

He can probably hear my stomach making un-dainty noises. “Yeah, I’m hungry.”

“A lot hungry, or a little hungry?”

“A lot,” I admit.

“I’ll get breakfast started.”

I backtrack from the ravine in search of privacy, glancing over my shoulder to make sure the campsite is receding. Past an upland meadow of fuzzy yerba santa bushes I find a wasteland of boulders calving from the mountainside. Behind a rock I hook my thumbs inside my waistband and pull down my pants and underwear, bending over at a comical angle, peeing. It’s a trick I haven’t mastered despite some practice yesterday.

Nick is making vegetarian breakfast tortillas when I return, spreading a homemade black bean mixture across the browning circles. “Looks like you managed not to hit your shoes this time,” he chuckles.

“Ha ha. I bet you couldn’t do any better if you had girl parts.” I settle myself on a rock across from him, tucking a foot underneath me. “Can I help with anything? Anything at all?”

“It really bugs you when I cook, doesn’t it?”

I feel my cheeks heat up in a blush. “Actually, I kind of like it.” The words come out all wrong, like a backhanded compliment. “I mean, um…” Finally I just give up and stare down into my lap, ashamed of my stupid inarticulate voice.

“Hey. Nooshin.” When I look up he’s brandishing two little bottles of salsa, one in each hand. “Hot sauce, or hottest sauce?”

I fixate on the hottest sauce because I know it’s what he wants me to do. “Is that the habanero salsa you were telling me about?”

“Lava in a bottle! You up for it?” He’s grinning like a fiend.

“I’m going to regret this, aren’t I?” I sigh. He hands me a paper plate sagging under the weight of its breakfast burrito, which is slathered in runny crimson salsa. The mere aroma makes my eyes water.

Nick leans over and puts a water bottle within easy reach. “Can you believe there’s such great backpacking right here in LA?”

His long-delayed surprise. We’re in a green quadrant of the Los Angeles County map, somewhere up a crooked line into the San Gabriel Mountains, not far from the X that marks Baldy Notch. The weekend surprise — the nights with him, really — stunned me into silence, at first because I thought he was joking, then because I realized he wasn’t. I still haven’t decided if it’s okay for me to be here. But that didn’t stop me from coming. My sister and parents already hate me for it. Just more proof that I’m going to hell, quicker and quicker.

“I can see a big stadium down here,” I say around a timid bite of burrito. The habanero salsa doesn’t seem that hot.

Nick nods in a pleased way. “That’s the Rose Bowl, in Pasadena. Sometimes you can even see downtown.”

“Downtown?” I’m distracted by the burning sensation spreading across my tongue.

“Yeah, downtown. That place with all the skyscrapers. You okay?”

“Um… I think so. The habaneros are kinda kicking in.” A total understatement. I feel like I’ve got a raging forest fire in my mouth.

“Gotta love the burn!” He shovels a dangerously salsa-drenched piece of burrito into his mouth and chews happily. “So are you going to take that McDonald’s job?”

I’m busy drinking the water bottle dry. I wipe my mouth with my tracksuit sleeve before I can find better manners. “Yeah. I might as well. It only pays minimum wage while I’m a trainee, but after that I get a 25 cent raise. And another 50 cents next year, because of the minimum wage increase. So I’ll be making $8.25 an hour pretty soon. Plus I won’t have to take the bus or anything. I can just walk to work, um…”

Nick’s gaze flickers at my periphery — my legs crossed Indian-style, my hands picking at things in the dirt, my hair blowing like a black flag. His forehead is slightly furrowed. Concentrating on me.

I catch myself in an awkward moment — longing for more time with a man who isn’t my husband, or an in-law, or a male relative. Suddenly every moment with Nick is unbearably precious, and the guilt just as unbearable.

“How would you like to make $9 an hour without even leaving Nasrin’s place?” he asks with a broad grin.

“What are you talking about?”

“I need a research assistant, since nobody at the COLEF wanted the job. You interested in working for me?”

I’m mazed in disbelief. “But… You? Nick, I couldn’t. No way. I’m not smart or a grad student or anything like that. I don’t even know Spanish! You said the archive is all in Spanish, right?”

“If you can run a scanner, you can be my research assistant.” He turns serious, almost grave. “I couldn’t make this offer if you hadn’t impressed the hell out of Hercules. But you did. He already likes you. I’ve been his bitch for four years and the old reptile still doesn’t like me.” Then the broad grin comes back. “So what do you say? Are you gonna be my research assistant or what?”

Suddenly I’m too excited to stand it. All my disbelief is replaced with blubbering. “Omigod! For real? For really real?!?”

“Of course for real.” Nick flattens air with his palms, motioning for me to settle down. “But I won’t let you accept right away. Sleep on it first, okay? I’m serious, Nooshin. Think about what it means. I’d be your boss. Not just your friend, your boss.”

I’m thinking about it, alright. Probably in the wrong terms — more entanglement with him. “I don’t care. I still want to be your research assistant.”

“Fine. But sleep on it first.”

“Okay,” I sigh.

He shovels the rest of his breakfast burrito into his mouth. “We can make Baldy Notch before noon. That still gives us enough time to hike out to the truck and drive back to San Diego.”

“You sure you don’t mind driving me back tonight? It seems like it’s so out of your way.”

“I don’t mind.” Nick says it looking right at me. The handsome angles of his face are back to their usual alignment. A mask of careful indifference. His way of keeping me — him, really — at the emotional distance he prefers. But his eyes are a stormy Arctic sea, and somehow that makes me feel warmer inside than the habanero salsa burning me alive.