The world is becoming water again in a heavy and unrelenting deluge. The 18-hole golf course designed by Jack Nicklaus is turning into 18 floodplains, with sand traps like miniature lakes. Waves of rain lap across empty tennis courts. The outdoor pool is overflowing onto its concrete apron and threatening rows of patio chairs. But somehow I prefer the resort this way — denuded of people, sinking into a jungle sea. These watery vistas fill my head with fantasies. I see a place where schools of fish jet across the fairways, where mermaids beach themselves on the tennis courts, where Atlantis sleeps in the swimming pool.

Humanity has retreated into the great indoors. Many guests are enjoying the spa and its various treatments, like “hydro-active mineral salt scrubs” and “aromatherapy contour masques”, which I read about on a placard outside the smoked-glass entryway. Other guests are torturing themselves in front of mirrors in the gym, or doing yoga with some kind of celebrity instructor named Vikram, or sitting in semi-darkness in the soundproofed meditation room. And there’s always the restaurants — three of them — with double-digit entrees and triple-digit wines, and the disco that pulses from noon until dawn, seven days a week.

I’m alone in the open-air tiki bar next to the tennis courts, surrounded by four walls of rain sheeting off the rectangular pole roof. The wind is tossing plastic chairs around and misting me with droplets. I sit with one bare foot tucked underneath me, the other disappearing into the rising water. First my toes were underwater, now my arch. Suddenly I’m filled with apprehension. Leeches! I hastily fold my legs Indian-style in the chair.

The pose creates an uncomfortably pleasant wind tunnel, right under my robe and up my thighs. I shift the terrycloth folds of a men’s size XXL monogrammed with the PUJAL RESORT AND SPA logo. Blame it on my freakish height — their women’s robes don’t even reach to my butt. Meanwhile the t-shirt and jeans and hiphuggers I’ve been wearing for the last two weeks are drip-drying after I handwashed them in the bathroom sink. Tomorrow I’ll have clothes again.

Tomorrow. The word is a chilling reminder of my poverty. It costs $250 a night to stay here — and that’s for the cheapest room at the resort! Every tomorrow costs me 1/4 of what I make in a month as Nick’s research assistant. I can’t afford to linger in Pujal. The realization is a dull thud somewhere inside me. I need to start moving again, before I’ve even completely stopped.

Maybe because I’m leaving here tomorrow, I gaze at the brightly-lit windows of the resort in desperate attention. Who are those figures inside? Their shifting silhouettes make me feel as if they’re slipping from my grasp, and with them the only loved ones I’ve ever known — my family, Saman, Nick. Especially Nick. But I don’t know whether he slipped from my grasp, or I slipped from his.

A figure presses against one of the windows, hands cupped around face, peering out into the rain.

I throb with the relief of connection, even just an imaginary one. Someone is lonely. Someone is lonely like me. I wonder if –

Then the figure vanishes back into silhouette, rejoining the crowd of shadows lost to me. My despair is a long useless feeling. Overhead the rain tattoos the metal canopy in a violent beat.

A door bursts open in the back of the resort, spilling light across the watery surface of the tennis courts. A tall poncho-clad figure splashes through the bright reflections, beelining toward…me? I glance over my shoulder in confusion. Nothing back there except a half-drowned golf course.

He’s running now. Definitely right at me. I slide my feet into the water swirling around my chair, ready to flee, my heart palpitating, he looks scary, he looks like…

“Nick?” I whisper tremulously, not daring to believe it, omigod omigod, but it’s TRUE, it’s really HIM, and suddenly I’m yelling “NICK!” at the top of my lungs as he arrives beneath the canopy’s shelter in a splashing rush. “What on earth are you doing here?”

He strips off his poncho and tosses it aside, incredulous. “What the hell do you think I’m doing here?” His fervent embrace almost breaks me in half, and I don’t mind at all. “I finally caught up to you!”

I’m clinging to him, almost crying, still happily stunned. “But — but how did you find me?”

Nick dips into his breast pocket for a polaroid, the rarest kind — a picture of me snapped in defenselessness, my veil of bangs pulled back in a ponytail. “Usted ha visto a esta gringa?” — have you seen this American girl? — he says, with a practice that matches the dirty fingerprints around the edges.

I snatch the polaroid away and hurl it into the rain. The motion causes my robe to sag open.

“Whoa. Are you…?” He moves in close, nuzzling me and peering down the front of my robe. “You are!” His hands slide down the lapels to the knotted sash, untying it.

“Nick!” I giggle, trying to hold my robe closed.

“Nobody’s going to see.” He tugs my arms out of the way.

My robe falls open, letting in the cool moist air. Letting in his gaze. I hover awkwardly, blushing, naked for him. He cups my cheek, pulling me into a gentle kiss, then lets his palm slide down the flat contours of my body…

“Look,” Nick says quietly. “You’re showing.”

“I am?” I stare down past my boobs — the part of me I want to get bigger, although they’re still just bumps — to the gentle swell of my tummy. Wait a sec. Gentle swell? Where’d that come from? I swivel my hips around, experimenting with the angle, and try sucking in my stomach. But the swell doesn’t go away. “Wow,” I murmur. “I didn’t even notice.”

He makes fists and presses them to his eyes, breathing deeply. “I thought I lost you, Nooshin. I thought you were gone, you and the baby, oh god…” For a painful heartbeat he seems to hover on the verge of tears — but then he drops his fists, and his angular features align into exasperation, and he’s harping on me. “What the hell were you thinking, anyway? Just taking off like that? And walking through the fucking jungle? The jungle, Nooshin! Look at all your mosquito bites! How many goddamn times have we talked about malaria — ”

“I got so hungry I almost ate a grub,” I say, pulling my robe closed.

He blinks at me, defused. “What?”

“A big juicy one. Except only almost.”

Nick collapses into a chair, making a noise that could be anything at first, but then turns into laughter. “All this shit goes down, and what’s the thing you remember? You almost ate a grub. You’re such a Nooshball.”

I pull a chair next to his and settle myself, snaking a hand into his lap. Our fingers entwine, a gesture which feels utterly and completely perfect. Together we watch an ocean sluice from the darkening sky.

“Nick — ” I start to say.

“No, it’s my turn,” he interrupts.

His knee pistons, that hiking boot heel splashing water. Minutes drag off the Corona Light clock hanging above the tiki bar. Our grasp starts to become clammy, then downright sweaty.

Finally his knee stops pistoning. “Alright, here’s the deal — I’m not leaving you, and you’re not leaving me.”

I nod and repeat after him. “I’m not leaving you, and you’re not leaving me. Got it.” Then I start to think about it. I find myself squeezing his hand a little tighter in excitement. “Like, we’re not leaving each other…forever?”

“Yeah.” Nick grins lopsidedly, half-confident, half-terrified. In the murk his eyes are cerulean and bottomless and I just want to fall in. “You cool with that?”

“Okay,” I say happily.