Here the Whole Time - Vitor Martins Page 0,13
destiny, or Venus in the house of Mars, but for the first time in my life, things start to go the way I was hoping.
I’m lying in bed, checking what’s new on Twitter, when I hear a slight knock on the door. I lift my head and see Caio standing there, holding a pillow and looking like an abandoned puppy.
I don’t know what to say, so I keep staring at my phone and tweet my reaction: Houhfjkxhfdoduighl. Send tweet.
“So, um … Hi. Can I sleep here tonight? It’s … the couch, you know? It—” Caio starts to explain himself.
“It’s terrible. I know. You can say it,” I interrupt, trying to sound funny. But I think my answer ends up sounding a bit rude, so I try to fix it by being cute: “Of course you can sleep here! It should have been that way from the beginning, but I … well, you know. I’m sorry. Make yourself comfortable. I’m sorry, again.”
Caio just stands there looking at me, and I almost break out into a rendition of “Be Our Guest” from Beauty and the Beast, when I suddenly realize that I put away the guest mattress. I get up to pull out the retractable bed where Caio is going to sleep and apologize three more times. Two because I bump into him in the process and a third one for no apparent reason. I do all that in darkness because at no point did I realize that it might be a good idea to turn the lights back on. But Caio doesn’t seem to mind.
When the guest bed is all set, I go back to my own bed and try to assume a position in which my belly won’t flop to the side, so the hole in my shirt won’t show. The room is still dark, so I honestly don’t know why I even care. Caio throws the pillow onto the mattress, lies down, and lets out a sigh of relief. I can imagine him saying, “With god as my witness, I’ll never sleep on that couch again!” like in that scene in Gone with the Wind.
But he doesn’t say a thing.
Neither do I.
I keep staring at my phone screen. Surprisingly, I got two likes on my last tweet. I start typing “How to start a conversation” in Google, but even before I hit search, Caio breaks the silence.
“Thanks, Felipe.”
“For the bed? I told you. It’s fine.”
“Also for the bed. But I meant the book. That you left for me. Thank you.”
“Ah. Yes. The Two Towers. A good one. I hope you like it.”
And there I am, thinking this would be another standard-issue dialogue in my collection of standard-issue dialogues with Caio, but he keeps going:
“I’ll take good care of it, don’t worry! It looks like it means a lot to you. It even has a personal dedication. Who’s Thereza?”
“My grandmother. It was the last present she gave me before she died,” I say, swallowing hard.
My grandmother, Thereza, would always give me books as Christmas and birthday presents. Most of them were classics that I never felt like reading, but after she was gone, I ended up reading all of them to feel closer to her. In all the books, she always wrote the same dedication:
Lipé,
The whole world is yours.
With love, Thereza
I always hated it when people called me Lipé, but when it was her, I didn’t mind. My grandma gets permission.
The bedroom goes quiet again because, true to form, on the first opportunity I have for an actual conversation with Caio, I decide to bring up my dead grandmother.
“I’m sorry,” Caio says in the softest voice.
I smile because I can tell that he’s really sorry.
“It’s okay. She’d love to know that someone borrowed the book. My grandma used to work at the library downtown. She spent her whole life helping people borrow books.” Caio laughs a low laugh, and I don’t know if it’s the darkness in the bedroom or the fond memories of my grandmother, but I keep talking. “What did you think of the first book?”
“In general, I was surprised! I’ve always wanted to watch the movies, but I can’t watch a movie unless I read the book first. It feels like cheating otherwise, y’know? So I grabbed the first book out of curiosity and I’m really liking it. Some parts are a little boring, but the story is awesome. I couldn’t put it down! I just wonder what the second book is going to be like, now