Visits.

He looked roughly the same as the last time I had seen him. He hadn’t gained any weight, or cut his hair in a while. The shag looked good on him though. He was clean-shaven, which was a huge shock.

“I know, it’s quite a shock. The lab I’m working at now requires a clean shaven face.”

I stood up and he still towered a good 6 inches over me. I kind of smiled and shook my head. Even after not seeing each other for 3 years he could still read my facial expressions like a book.
We exchanged pleasantries for a while, and sat there. Just being there and sitting next to him I knew it was what I was supposed to be doing. All my worrying had been unnecessary. We stood up and walked back to our cars with a plan for me to follow him back to his house. When I got in my car I chuckled. Here I was driving a brand BMW that Dolan had bought me and Chris was still driving the same Honda Civic he had before he went off to college. He fell in love with the car and told me one night that he would never get rid off it, not until the day it died and couldn’t be fixed.

What probably should have taken a half hour took us 15 minutes to navigate through. He pulled into the drive next to a rather decent sized house for being in the middle of a major city. I pulled over in the road right in front and got out. The house was brick, and had a white walk up. The yard was small, but what more would you expect? What it was lacking in quantity it made up for in quality. The grass was soft and the rose bushes emitted the most amazing scent I had ever smelled. I took a closer look at the rose bushes despite the gaining darkness and stepped back. I couldn’t believe it. Immediately I thought it must have been a coincidence.

“Chris… yellow?”
“Yea, yellow.”

We walked in the door to a rather cluttered foyer. He pardoned the mess and took my jacket from me. We walked in the kitchen and he opened the fridge. I didn’t want anything, so he pulled a water out for himself and popped it open. We sat at the table by ourselves for a good hour talking about small things before deciding we were both hungry. Chris opened his cabinets to reveal anything you ever wanted. We settled on spaghetti, the only thing we were both excellent at making and content with eating.

As we sat down to eat, he finally asked me why I was there. I carefully thought over the answer. Even though I hate it, I answered a question with a question.

“Have you ever heard of the game ‘Truth’? You get to ask the other person anything you want and they have to answer with the truth. Or not at all. But if they don’t answer, they risk losing.”

He nodded no, and then shrugged.

“Oh, well, I was going suggest playing, but we don’t have to.”
“It seems like a high school drink party game to me.”
“Funny, I’m pretty sure that’s where I learned it.”

Chris agreed to play, so I started. I asked simple questions at first asking about how he got his job, what happened with him and his last girlfriend, why he had such a big house for just himself, and why his cabinets were so well filled. He answered honestly – a friend knew a suit at the lab, they didn’t see eye to eye on the importance of work verses a relationship, because he liked it and it already had yellow roses in the front, and his parents had just left two days ago and his mom did his grocery shopping for him one day. Chris asked small questions back about how college was going, had I finally decided on a major, how I was handling the work. But the he dropped the big one.