“Pfft,” I said. “That’s beginner Kafka.”

“Touché.”

Then the train-station guy slid a clammy arm around my shoulder, and not only did I let him, but I emitted a minor shudder, the kind usually reserved for the acknowledgment of an electric current of attraction.

As the dusk deepened from voluptuous to near-orgasmic, we ambled down to the river for a view of the castle, now lit up gloriously against the violet sky.

“Hold on,” I said. “I have to write about this sky so I remember it.”

“Ew, don’t ever write about the sky,” cautioned the train-station guy. “It’s so trite.”

“Shhh,” I said. “I’m not writing it for you.”

Our location was so impossibly romantic that it made Before Sunrise look like Schindler’s List. The scene was set; the lighting was exquisite—it was a first-kiss moment to make any director proud, and all it lacked was a sincere feeling of romance. Instead, I was just confused: though he didn’t appreciate my art, the train-station guy was a perfectly nice person, actually very smart, and not uncute underneath his affected layer of grime. And, despite his denigration of my taste in literature both received and created, he seemed pretty interested in me. That was what I wanted, right? I would probably never have a moment like this again—young, free, and stupid on the bank of the Vltava River during sunset, with a guy who clearly wanted to kiss me. I basically had no choice but to realize it fully. So we kissed.

And it was monumentally gross.

I had by no means been expecting a great frenching session like Celine and Jesse’s epic spit-swap on that Ferris wheel, but the train-station guy’s unfortunate combination of stale nicotine saliva and mealy-mouthed lapping technique was lacking enough in physical chemistry that even the perfectly curated romantic moment couldn’t save it. And yet. Have you ever gotten to the point in an ill-conceived venture when you decided, for whatever reason, that you’d sunk enough time and effort into it that you might as well see it through? (See also: obtaining a literature Ph.D. But I digress.) So, I agreed to wipe the following day clean of plans (I’d intended to venture out to the suburbs to visit Kafka’s grave for the first time, alone, an activity I’d been putting off largely due to my fear of the Prague metro map) and meet up with the train-station guy in the morning. At that point, we would ditch our respective Hostelling International accommodations and, as the kids say, “get a room” together. It was, to this day, the firmest advance commitment to Verkehr that I have ever made.

While the relentless staging of the previous evening had all but coerced me into making out, the next day’s ordeal gave me ample time to think over my decision and back out of it. And yet, as we were turned away from one after another hastily erected tourist-accommodations office because nothing in our budget was available, my determination to see the day’s events through wore on—nay, strengthened, on par with the train-station guy’s increasing perspiration. This despite the fact that I assumed that the attendants everywhere we inquired knew instinctively that we were seeking a spot for a tryst, and heartily disapproved.

“No, idiots,” I imagined them saying to themselves in Czech, “I will not furnish lodgings for your hasty, ill-advised sex-plans.”

After four hours sweating around the city with my “small” secondary suitcase in tow, we finally found ourselves back at the grimy main train station, where the rail-side accommodations office catering to the truly desperate (desperate to have sex, I assumed they assumed) made a reservation for us and armed us with a map and extensive metro directions to what appeared to be an abandoned hospital deep in the boonies (where obvious havers of poorly thought-out sex should well be banished).

“Are you sure this is it?” he asked as we approached a sad concrete building so brutal that even the term brutalism didn’t do its architecture justice.

“Look,” I said, pointing to a small cardboard sign scrawled with HOTEL that someone had stuck in a window diagonally. The receptionist spoke no English, but she did speak about as much German as me, and that was the only way we were able to check in.

“Still think it’s a terrible language?” I asked, as we used our huge old-fashioned key to unlock a pocket-sized, whitewashed room with a twin bed flush against each wall, presumably unmoved since the tuberculosis patients, or unmedicated schizophrenics, or Soviet political prisoners slept there last.

“Well,” he said, “for twelve dollars I don’t think it’s all that bad.”

“Oh holy shit,” I said. “It’s our own bathroom. With a bath!” I’d only been enjoying youth-hostel bathing facilities for a few weeks, but that was long enough that I couldn’t believe this place had seen fit to give us our very own cardboard-stiff washcloth that posed as a towel and a bar of soap. Sure, that soap was so desiccated it almost certainly predated the Velvet Revolution, but at my normal caliber of lodgings, if you didn’t bring it on your person, you couldn’t use it to clean your person.

“Um…” said the train-station guy, reaching out for me expectantly as instead I raced to the tub and filled it, both to kill time and to model excellent bathing-behavior. “Okay,” he said. “Okay.” I shut the door behind me.

When at last I emerged and sat, with hesitation, on one of the tiny beds, he squeezed himself in next to me (still, alas, unbathed), and said:

“This is the slowest hookup ever.”

“Christ,” I said, “it’s two in the afternoon, and we’re already bunked down ten miles from anything. What’s your hurry?”

“I just figured,” he said, “that when you wanted to get a room, you really wanted to get a room.”

“Well,” I said, “maybe I just wanted to hang out.”

“Obviously that’s fine, too,” he said, nineties guy that he was. “But are you, like, sure you don’t want to do anything?”

“First things first,” I said. “Where are your condoms?”

“Uh,” he said. “I didn’t bring any.” (Never mind. Worst nineties guy ever.)

I sent him out for a box, and while he was gone I made a list.

Pro: My first one-night stand! How grown-up and cosmopolitan and European and glamorous!

Con: I wasn’t sure I liked this guy enough to have sex with him.

Pro: BUT, this guy liked me enough to have sex with me!

Con: Isn’t that threshold really low?

Pro: Praha, the Czech name for Prague, also means “threshold”! And wouldn’t that be a beautiful name for a baby girl?

Con: Jesus H. Christ, Schuman, concentrate for one second. Do you want to have the sex with this stranger out of some sort of misplaced Before Sunrise longing or no? You can back out and he’s not going to be mad.

Pro: Dylan Gellner didn’t like me anymore, but this guy did. How would I be sure another guy would ever like me again? This could be it!

Con: You have some serious problems with self-esteem, did you know that?

Pro: You came to Europe for adventure, and this is an adventure, so do it. Do it! Do it.

I stared around the room, which was bereft of all décor save for a single pot of artificial flowers on the tiny table in the corner. I paused in my stare-fest to scribble, with immense seriousness, in my artisanal journal: “I cannot believe what I am about to do.”

The door opened.

“Got ’em. The guy at the cigarette kiosk winked at me, I’ll have you know.”

The consummation that ensued was epic in its badness, due, I am sure, to both parties’ inexperience. At that point I boasted a full history of three sexual partners, thus making me the undisputed Wilt Chamberlain of the encounter: the train-station guy revealed to me that he’d only had sex with one other person, and only one time. This in and of itself is nothing to be ashamed of—except, in my wizened old age, I now know that when a guy tells you he’s “only done it once,” what that means is that he is too ashamed to admit to full virginity. In the end it was academic whether he was an actual virgin or just mostly a virgin—the result was an encounter that felt orchestrated by a seven-year-old who thinks he knows how sex works holding forth on the playground.

“Did you, uh…?” I asked, when, after about fifty seconds, the train-station guy’s herky-jerky force continued but his tumescence did not.

“Yeah,” he said. “I was trying to again.”

“Um,” I said, gently pushing down on his back to bring the motion to a merciful halt, and grabbing with terror at the base of the condom. “That’s not how it works. Did they not have sex education in Connecticut? You could get me pregnant that way.”

Why, why, why did I even think that thing about naming a baby girl Praha? Schuman women are notoriously fertile! Shit shit shit.

The train-station guy rolled off me, and I grabbed my dress to mop his sweat off my stomach. “That was…”

I pretended to be extremely busy procuring a glass of water.

“It was like we were two ill-prepared dancers using different music,” he said.

Excuse me? All I’d done was try my level best to respond to his paroxysms in a manner that might allow me to experience any pleasure—an attempt, by the way, that failed. To top it off, critical or not, the train-station guy had become flooded with postorgasmic bonding hormones, and I had not.

“You know,” he said, “it wouldn’t be impossible for us to continue a thing. You know, travel on together, and then maybe visit at Christmas and breaks and such. Write letters. I love correspondence. It’s a lost art.”