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As anxious as I was about that date and all the potential mistakes I might make, once I saw Chris’s smile, a fair chunk of my anxieties melted away. The goofy restaurant name written out in a cursive neon sign also likely helped diffuse some of the tension, but above all, the mere sight of Chris brought a sense of peace that I couldn’t ignore. It was nice to look at him. It was nice to be with him, especially as we stepped into Pasta Pizzazz.
There was a rush that came from our entrance that could have overwhelmed me, as the employees all turned to greet us with smiling faces and wide eyes. And Chris’s presence beside me was the support that kept me from being completely adrift. There was no real threat to them, though. There was no judgment or condemnation on their faces. Rather, they were happy to see us, they said, and judging from the light in all of their eyes, that was the truth and not something that had to be said in front of their boss. In fact, they hardly seemed to notice him much at all. All of their eyes were on me. There was just an irresistible excitement that came with my sudden appearance, like I was some celebrity or cryptid that had wandered into the shop.
And by some standards, that was what I had become. According to them, Chris had talked about me endlessly since I came back into town. Good things, they were quick to promise, though they hesitated to go into too many details. But even that vague report turned Chris’s blushing face away. But I still caught a fleeting glimpse of his flustering, though. I smirked and asked for more of the details while Chris buried his face in his hands and stepped away from the moment, as if he could escape the reckoning so easily. But it wasn’t up to him.
An older gentleman in the back looked up at me from his workstation with a toothy grin plastered across his face. His voice was gruff and low when he called out, “He said you're very pretty.”
We all laughed. Mine was laced with my own disbelief. I wasn’t the sort to get compliments and had started to think I just never would. And yet, they were apparently being said behind my back by a sweet young man in a restaurant he owned.
“Pretty, huh?” I joked towards Chris, trying to get his attention.
But Chris didn’t meet my gaze. He was distracted by the red glow overtaking his face, specifically he was focused almost exclusively on hiding it.
“Yeah, he downplayed it,” another man called out from the soda fountains he had been cleaning. He slapped the counter with his rag twice. “Rude of him, am I right?”
Besides the lengths he seemed to go to shield his face, Chris took the teasing in stride, especially after he saw that I enjoyed this hearsay, these reports of conversations about me and the feelings therein. It was an indirect confession, one that some might have rejected, but the two of us saw value in it. We saw how it kept the both of us safe in our guarded towers as we built up the courage to lower our defenses. It was an assurance, some might say, that the act of a more direct confession would be well-received, wherever we could muster one.
Chris gently nudged me towards one end of the counter and gestured towards the long line of various foodstuffs kept behind a tall wall of plexiglass. Some noodles, some sauces, and a whole slew of fresh toppings. Anything that one might need to make their version of the perfect pasta bowl was there. Some Italians would likely call this method of assembly sacrilegious, and I couldn’t disagree. This wasn’t authentic pasta by any means, but it still sounded delicious.
“You start here,” he said. “With your pasta base. Fettuccini, spaghetti, or farfalle.”
“Fettuccini,” I replied.
“And for you, Chris,” the young man behind the counter said.
I lifted my gaze to glance at his nametag. David, it read. And I tried to not wrinkle my nose at the sight. It was a perfectly respectable name, but I had used it on some of my worst characters because of a personal vendetta I could no longer remember.
“I’ll get it after she’s settled in,” Chris said. “Don’t worry about it for now.”
And I liked that plan. It didn’t matter that it was full of inefficiencies. That part didn’t matter to me. I liked that he wanted to take care of me, that I was so important to him that he needed to ensure I was alright.
From there, Chris walked me through all the other choices that had to be made. There was pasta sauce to consider as well as a protein, and whatever toppings I could have ever desired in my heart of hearts. Of course, I didn’t go for the more daring choices. I just got chicken, mozzarella cheese, onions, and broccoli. The vibrant green of the broccoli leapt out from the alfredo sauce coating and turned a bowl of pasta into an art piece.
“It looks good,” I told him when my concoction was finished and handed to me.
He chuckled in response. “I’m more than a one trick pony, you could say.”
“Yes, but I’d love to know what those other tricks might be,” I retorted with a smirk.
The blush on his face returned, but that was the only answer I received. And it was the only one I needed.
No one at Pasta Pizzazz would let me pay for my meal, which should not have been a surprise, I supposed. I was the co-owner’s date. This was the bare minimum everyone could do to help him impress me. I just wasn’t used to being the sort of person that had to be impressed.
The old man with the toothy grin was the one to hand me my cup. “We’ve got one of those fancy custom soda machines,” he said.
I snuck a glance at Chris. “Was that your idea too?”
He blushed. He knew it wasn’t. That had been mine. Years ago I mentioned it to him when the concept was first sent out to specific burger shops, including ones by the university.
“You should get one,” I had said, back when I was younger and more confident that I would eventually become a person who could handle herself in the world.
For a moment, I was that girl again as I marched over to the soda machine and picked out a vanilla flavored one for my troubles while Chris ran back through the line to make his own bowl.
The evening was still young. No one was about. There was no line for him to cut in front of. And we were able to sit together in the relative calm of the restaurant for a while. Employees moved about to make sure everything was orderly, but with the university still on summer break, there wasn’t going to be a huge rush anytime soon.
And I wouldn’t have had it any other way. The quiet was something we could share as we sat beneath the metal lights that hung from the ceiling with all its exposed beams. It meant we could enjoy the view, but it also gave us opportunities to talk about the directions our lives had taken since my college days. That was a conversation we had already started, but there was so much to say and so much we both wanted to know. It felt like an endless conversation, but even though we would never truly reach the end of it, there was still something exciting about taking that next step.
Chris told me how and under what circumstances he’d taken over the family business. There wasn’t anything too dramatic about it, though. His father just got older, and running a business in the shadow of a major university required a quicker step than what he could muster in said old age. And Chris was ready. No one doubted it. Consequently, no one was proved wrong. Happy Flour thrived under his care, but without a struggle to work through, he grew a bit bored. In search of that next great horizon, Chris approached a friend about opening Pasta Pizzazz after seeing how popular a certain build your own burrito place was.
I listened intently while Chris spoke, but even still, sometimes I lost sight of what he was saying in favor of a twinkle in his eye or a way he hit a specific word. He enjoyed telling the story, relishing in his victory in a way he often didn’t get to. But when he smiled, I noticed that one side of his mouth rose slightly higher than the other, which shouldn’t be so surprising because every face is slightly asymmetrical. For me, my eyes didn’t perfectly line up. But when Chris looked at me, I didn’t care about that or about anything, like the scar on my arm that my mom wanted me to erase with fifty dollar medication that seemed to market itself on false promises or the acne that made occasional reappearances around my hairline despite how far from puberty I was. Those things were there, but they didn’t matter. They were a part of me, and he liked me.
It was an unfamiliar feeling, but I welcomed it all the same. Just like I welcomed the fresh onions and their distinct taste in my mouth. Fresh onions always make a meal better, but you don’t usually get them in a restaurant like this. It’s a matter of cost. But Chris went above and beyond in that and all things.
Right then, with a mouth full of onions, I almost felt myself fall in love with him all over again. What stopped me was already being too deep to keep falling. There was simply no other place for me to go.