Here the Whole Time - Vitor Martins Page 0,53

side and get some more sleep.

I wake up a few hours later, and the first thing I notice is the silence. This could be the part in the story when I say a bunch of nonsense about how I can feel the silence, or something really cliché like “The silence was deafening.”

But what I actually realize is that I miss the quiet.

Not that Caio is a loud guest or anything. He’s as quiet as I am. But Caio’s presence is noisy, you know? When I’m next to him, it’s as if a siren goes off inside my head. And that happens even when I’m sleeping.

In my sleep, I can still feel him in the bedroom. I try to lie in a position that won’t show my belly as much, with half my brain still awake to warn me if I snore. I’ve been sleeping like that for the past few days, not even recognizing that I was sleeping so terribly. And now I realize how good it feels to wake up not caring if my T-shirt has rolled up and 80 percent of my body is showing. That I don’t have to hide my morning wood.

I missed getting a good night’s sleep.

And yet, all this soliloquy is to say that it’s still weird to wake up without Caio by my side.

What kind of person am I turning into? The kind of person who criticizes the “deafening silence” one moment, but in the next says that “Caio’s presence is noisy.” That’s the kind of person I’m turning into.

It scares me, because this whole time I’ve had a crush on Caio the way one has a crush on a Hollywood celebrity. But now I can see him up close. I’ve heard him cry. Heard him laugh. We drank together. We slept in the same bed together. And I’ve never done that with any celebrities. Caio is real. And maybe I’m, I don’t know, in love? I mean, really in love. Like “I want to kiss you right now but also every day” in love.

How can people be sure that they’re in love, though? Is there a test?

Obviously, as I think about all that, I’m already looking up “How do I know if I’m in love?” on Google. Here are my findings:

An article about “intrusive thoughts,” which, as I’ve just discovered, is an obsessive passion that can make the person spend 85 percent of their life thinking about the loved one. I don’t think I fit the bill. Kind of dangerous, by the way. And pretty creepy.

A quiz from a misogynistic website claiming that if you don’t mind a woman’s stretch marks, then it’s real love.

A slideshow with scenes from City of Angels full of quotes about love.

All the results show that being in love is either sick, a serious problem, or sappy. That’s not how I feel. What I feel is good.

I wish I had a best friend to talk to about it. But for the moment, I don’t have any best friends who aren’t actually the guy I’m in love with. In a healthy way that has nothing to do with obsessive passion, of course.

It’s weird to think that before Caio came to stay with us, all I wanted was to spend my entire vacation locked in my room. It’s now the middle of the day, and I can’t stand the loneliness.

I had a frozen lasagna for lunch and started a new Netflix show about teenagers fighting to survive a zombie apocalypse. (Vampires show up in episode three.) The show is terrible, but I’m almost done with the first season.

As I’m trying to decide if I should watch another episode or take a quick nap, I hear a phone ring in my bedroom. It’s not mine, that’s for sure. On the nightstand, Caio’s phone buzzes and blinks. I look at the screen and see Rebeca is trying to call. Caio saved her contact as “Pretty Becky <3.”

I let it ring until Becky gives up, because it doesn’t seem polite to pick up someone else’s phone without consent. She calls again, and once more I ignore it. But when the phone starts ringing a third time, I pick it up because A) the vibration of a phone against any surface annoys the heck out of me, and B) it might be an emergency.

“Hello?”

“Who’s this?” she says, suspicious.

“Hey, Becky. It’s Felipe. Caio went out with my mom. He forgot his phone.”

“Ah, yeah,” she says casually. She doesn’t seem to find it weird that