“You can turn off the light if you want,” he says when he sees me walk in. And I feel like now is my opportunity to redeem myself. Maybe with the lights off, we’ll talk for hours and clear the air, then everything will be fine again.
I turn off the lights.
Get into bed.
And then Caio turns on his phone flashlight and points it at his book, so he can keep reading. And I, obviously, want to die.
“Good night,” I whisper.
I turn my back to him and will myself to sleep without waiting for an answer.
And I’m glad I don’t, because there is none.
I don’t know how much time goes by before I feel the earthquake. I’m in the middle of a dream with Ben Affleck, which I’m not going to describe here because it’s too embarrassing, and suddenly everything is shaking. I wake up with a start, and even in the pitch-black of night, I can see Caio poking my shoulder.
“Felipe! Felipe!” He’s whispering, but his voice sounds desperate.
“Huh?” is all I can muster.
“I’m sorry to wake you up like this.”
“It’s all right,” I lie, because I can’t get mad at him.
“I just had to talk to someone about it, and that someone had to be you, of course. I’m too excited! There was no way I could wait until tomorrow.”
“What?” I ask, feeling a streak of drool running down the corner of my mouth. I try to casually wipe it off on my collar.
“He’s back!”
Your desire to snuggle with me all night? I think.
“Gandalf!” Caio explains. “He’s back! I knew he was too important to die in the first book. But, you know, I was over it. And then he suddenly appears, back from the dead!”
That’s when I start laughing.
Because it’s so funny to see Caio genuinely excited about information that has been publicly available since 1954.
“I’m glad you’re enjoying it. The book, I mean.” My voice is still heavy with sleep.
“I think I’ll be done reading it by the end of the week.”
And then I’m attacked by the familiar feeling that the conversation is about to die. We’ll be out of things to say, and I don’t want to let that happen, no matter how tired I am. I find inside me the courage that I discovered yesterday (it’s a little harder without the beer, but still a bit easier in the dark.)
“Do you remember?” I finally ask.
Caio doesn’t seem surprised. He knows exactly what I’m talking about.
“Remember what? That I slept with you in your bed and it was kind of embarrassing? That I spent the day reading because I had no clue what to say? That I came up with this whole Gandalf-is-back thing just so I’d have an excuse to wake you up because I didn’t want to go to sleep without talking to you?” he says all at once. “Yeah, I remember.”
I take a relieved breath. “I was worried you might be the type who drinks and then forgets everything.”
“No. I remember it all perfectly fine.”
And then there’s an awkward silence for almost a full minute.
“Just like that Friends episode where Joey and Ross sleep together on the couch without meaning to, and then they realize it was really nice. Then they start doing it in secret,” I finally say.
“I’ve never watched Friends,” Caio says, which is a terrible answer for so many reasons.
“But, look, relax. It’s okay,” I say, trying to alleviate the tension.
“I get a little needy when I drink. I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”
I feel the now-familiar bucket of cold water hit me. Because I wish it would happen again. I wish it would happen right now, to be honest. But I don’t say it. I don’t say anything.
“I’m glad you’re okay. I didn’t want to go another day in silence. Not after I offered to be your best friend,” Caio says.
And I hear his voice saying the words best friend inside my head two hundred times before I fall back to sleep.
THERE’S THE EARTHQUAKE AGAIN.
I wake up to my mom shaking me by the shoulders. It’s not even eight in the morning, and I’m already in a bad mood because, seriously, what is wrong with people in this house who keep choosing to wake me up like this?
“Son, get up. I’m going to the community center today. Are you coming? I can’t miss the bus,” she says, not bothering to keep her voice down so my ears will comfortably receive this information.
“Huh?” I say, which is now my official answer when someone wakes me up unexpectedly.
“I’m heading to the community center. Are you coming?” my mom asks, slowly this time, like a robot.
“I’m staying home,” I decide in a heartbeat.
“Okay. There’s food in the fridge. Caio already had breakfast. He’s coming with me. Take care, love you, bye.” She kisses my forehead and doesn’t give me a chance to rethink my decision.
A minute later, I hear the two of them walk out the door, and I’m alone in the house.
I already regret staying behind, but now there’s nothing to be done. I turn on my 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.