This is not how I see myself. I never thought I’d be this Nick, the one whose future turns on a greedy shower scene with a girl I barely knew. A girl who happens to be Muslim, and only a high school graduate, and married to some Iranian dude out of the Dark Ages. I’m supposed to be the icy academician who knows better, Mr. Never-Had-Unprotected-Sex-In-His-Life. My girlfriends are cognoscenti who hold several degrees and know secrets about dressage and lust after me with the hauteur of Almodovar characters, and our romances are just that — romances, with scotch and lingerie and postmodern dialog — and in the end I’m always apart and in control, the Goldilocks kind of heartbroken, not too much, not too little, but just enough to burnish me with a worldly patina, for I have loved (or close enough) and lost.

Instead I’m a balding farmboy who drifts through the hotel room mirror in worried nausea. There’s nothing noble or beguiling or rico suave about my reflection. I just look overwhelmed, and maybe a little bit scared. That’s why I keep my gaze aimed straight ahead as I carve a rut in this garish black-and-white-and-red tile. Two strides toward the open window and its steeply terraced vista of Guanajuato, two strides back to the bathroom.

Inside Nooshin is hunched over the toilet peeing on a stick — and murmuring something that sounds vaguely like a rap song. Lots of breathy syncopation and hummed sound effects. I feel my facial muscles crack into a smile. That’s my Nooshball, bustin’ rhyme while taking a pregnancy test. Then the peeing dies away, and slowly the rhyming too. I pause at the closed door. “Well?”

“Hang on. I’m doing the second test now.”

My hands ball into frustrated fists. “What did the first one say?”

“I don’t know yet. We have to wait five minu–” Her voice cuts off abruptly. “Oh.”

“Oh what?”

“Maybe it doesn’t really take that long.” The toilet flushes.

Nooshin emerges from the bathroom, a beautiful caramel skyscraper of a girl. Clothes hang awkwardly from her bony shoulders and hips, a pink Hello Kitty tanktop and a pair of my boxer shorts. Her octopus-ink hair is pulled back in a ponytail, revealing her delicate features — and that crooked wandering eye, already more interested in the view of Guanajuato than me.

She glances down at her outstretched palm. “Look, Nick. I — I think, um…” Her voice falters, and she tries again. “I think I’m pregnant.”

I’m blinking at the pregnancy test stick in dismay. Only two results are possible — a plus sign that indicates pregnancy, and a minus sign for not pregnant. The handle of her stick is decorated with a plus sign.

The bottom is already falling out of my world when Nooshin checks the stick in her other hand. “Oh. Wow. This one says I’m pregnant too.”

I grab her wrist to double check. Jesus fucking Christ. Another plus sign.

She stumbles past me, bare feet slapping on the tile, and sinks onto the edge of the bed. “When I was trying to imagine this, I thought I’d feel more, more…god, I don’t know. More something.” Her ponytail aims toward the ceiling as she considers the pregnancy tests in her hands. “Instead I just feel kinda, like… Wow.”

“Yeah.” I lean against the wall because otherwise I might fall down. “Wow.”

There’s a long dragging pause, as if she’s subsumed in her world and I’m subsumed in mine. Outside carwheels hum on cobblestones and an occasional tourist voice is raised. The faint aroma of honeysuckle drifts into the room, maybe from a passing flower girl, maybe from a hidden rooftop garden.

Nooshin is crimping her pink toenails into the floortile grout. “I don’t want you to feel trapped, Nick. You don’t have to…you know. Stay with me.” Her voice trails off again. We both watch her feet intently. “I can do this by myself.”

“Do what by yourself? Have a kid?” I laugh in cruel despair. “You don’t have a real job, or a college degree, or a place to live, or a car, or…” My head is a blender on puree, and her independent contractor agreement briefly whirls behind my eyes. “You don’t even have health insurance, for chrissake!”

Nooshin is fretting with her ponytail, coiling and uncoiling its end around a finger. I expect her to say something, but she doesn’t. She just sits there, small and vulnerable. A pregnancy test stick slides off her lap and clatters to the floor.

“Talk to me, would you?” I almost beg.

“What do you want me to say?”

“Shit, I don’t know. Something. Anything.”

She fidgets hopelessly with the other pregnancy test stick, tying and untying her fingers into knots around it. “It’s not me who needs to say something right now, but I will.” Beneath the straps of her tanktop, her bony shoulderblades rise and fall like an ocean swell. “I love you, Nick. And I hope you love me too, because otherwise I really am just a stupid girl, stupid with Saman, and now even more stupid with you.”

Her words are lashes on my back, a punishment I so richly deserve. I knew better, but I plunged into her in the shower anyway. On some level I must’ve wanted to get her pregnant, there’s no other explanation. Maybe it was just a reproductive impulse from a dark and reptilian corner of my brain. Or maybe I wanted to be pinned to her for the rest of my life. Not like it matters, really. I’m still the asshole who put her right back where she started, her whole wide-open future suddenly a closing aperture again. I spend an eternity in spin cycle, laundering my guilt.

It takes me a while to realize Nooshin is crying, making no sounds at all, just hurt leaking down her cheeks, her throat moving its painful knot around.

“Hey,” I say, pierced. “Nooshball.”

I collapse onto the bed next to her, sharply indenting the mattress. For a moment she tilts off-balance, then collapses into my embrace. I nuzzle along her sharp jawline until I can turn her chin toward me, brushing the tip of my nose against hers, kissing away salty tears. After a while she starts breathing harder, and her hands slide under my shirt, and we pull together so tightly that inaccessible parts of me suddenly have a voice to say “I love you” and “forever and ever”, and deep secret things are blooming in her eyes, and even though I’m scared shitless I still want her so unbelievably, I want this unbelievably, and what we’re promising each other changes EVERYTHING — except the thunderclap inside me isn’t as bad as I feared, maybe because everything needed to change. Maybe everything has needed to change for a long time.