Swipe Right for Puckboy

POV: Alice

If you stood on Hanover Street on a Friday night and followed the sound of clinking glasses and Sinatra crooning about lost love, you would end up at Casa Amore.

The red awning has faded over the years, but the script is still elegant. Nonna Giulia insisted on the name. Love House, she said. If you cook with love, they taste it. If you cook without it, they know. There is no hiding from garlic and God.

Inside, nothing has changed since 1987. Red checkered tablecloths. Bottles of Chianti with wax necks that nobody actually drinks anymore but nobody dares remove. Framed black and white photographs of the North End before the tourists arrived. Frank Sinatra on the speakers, always. Sometimes Dean Martin if Tony gets bold.

And the cacio e pepe. The best in Boston. Alice will fight anyone who says otherwise.

She has been working here since she was eighteen and broke and had nowhere else to go.

Back then, she walked in with a backpack and two days’ worth of clothes and lied about having experience. Nonna Giulia looked at her for exactly four seconds and said, You look hungry. Can you carry three plates at once?

Alice said yes.

She dropped the first order she ever carried. Shattered porcelain, pasta everywhere, marinara sauce in her hair. She expected to be fired. Instead, Nonna Giulia handed her a broom and said, We do not cry over pasta. We make more.

Alice never left. Casa Amore helped her pay her way through community college and get a teaching degree.

She does not need the money anymore. She has an apartment now with real furniture and a savings account and a credit score that does not make her flinch. She could quit anytime. She had a day job teaching middle-schoolers who worshipped her.

But she will never stop showing up for Nonna Giulia.

She owes this place everything.

Tonight, the place smells like lemon oil and hot bread and impending disaster.

“The Bulldogs are here,” Tony mutters as he polishes glasses behind the bar.

Alice does not need to ask which Bulldogs. There is only one team in this city that behaves like it owns the oxygen supply.

The Boston Bulldogs have taken over the back dining room.

She can hear them before she sees them. Loud, table-pounding, calling for more wine like they are summoning servants. A chorus of deep voices layered over Sinatra’s smooth croon. Someone laughs so hard it sounds like furniture is being rearranged by force.

Alice tightens her ponytail and grabs a notepad.

She has a firm policy about hockey players.

It is the same policy she has about open flames.

Do not get close. Do not engage. And definitely do not let them in the building if you can help it.

Too late for that tonight.

She pushes through the swinging door into the back room.

They are exactly what she expected. Big. Broad. Expensive watches. Hair that looks artfully careless. The kind of faces that have been told yes since high school.

A bottle of Barolo sits open on the table, barely touched.

“Finally,” one of them says as she approaches. “We thought you got lost.”

She smiles without showing teeth. “Kitchen is busy. What can I get you?”

A man at the end of the table snaps his fingers. Snaps.

She does not look at him.

“The veal’s cold,” another one says, sliding his plate toward her. It is not cold. Steam still curls lazily from the sauce.

“I’ll have them refire it,” she says.

“And more bread,” someone calls.

“And another bottle.”

“And can you turn the music down?”

Dean Martin does not deserve that kind of disrespect.

Alice writes nothing down. She has memorized it already. She gathers plates with steady hands and leaves the room without hurrying.

In the kitchen, she exhales.

“They’re sending food back?” Tony asks.

“For sport,” she says.

He grunts. “Athletes.”

She thinks of the last hockey player who flirted with her over tiramisu and then threw her out of his life like she was a used napkin.

Open flames.

She works the next hour on muscle memory. Refill. Clear. Smile. Dodge hands that linger too long when passing plates. Deflect comments that hover just on the edge of inappropriate.

One of them asks her name.

“Alice,” she says.

“Like in Wonderland?”

“Like on your receipt.”

That earns a laugh from somewhere down the table. She does not look to see who.

By ten thirty, the entire restaurant is packed. The air hums with conversation and garlic and red wine. The music has moved on to something softer, something about moonlight and mistakes.

Alice feels the familiar burn between her shoulder blades. She has been on her feet for six hours. She will be on them for four more.

When the Bulldogs start chanting something unintelligible after a toast, she decides she needs air before she commits a felony with a bread knife.

She slips through the kitchen, ignores Tony’s raised eyebrow, and pushes open the back door.

The alley is narrow and dim, lit by a single flickering bulb above the door. It smells like rain even though it has not rained. Brick walls on either side, graffiti near the dumpster that has been there longer than she has.

It is quiet in a way that feels sacred.

She pulls a cigarette from the pack in her apron. She does not smoke often. Only on nights when the noise crawls under her skin.

The lighter sparks. The flame flares. She inhales.

First drag.

Peace.

Second drag.

The world narrows to the burn in her lungs and the faint hum of the city beyond the alley.

Third drag.

She closes her eyes.

The door creaks open behind her.

She does not turn immediately. She has dealt with too many men who mistake solitude for invitation.

Footsteps. Not rushed. Not sloppy. Measured.

“Got another one of those?”

The voice is low. Calm. Not slurred.

She turns.

He leans against the brick wall like he has always belonged there. Tall. Broad shoulders under a dark jacket. The kind of posture that says he does not need to prove anything to anyone. His blonde hair is slightly too long in a way that suggests intention. His face is unfairly godlike.

He looks like he is used to getting what he asks for.

She studies him for a beat. “Depends,” she says. “You with the circus inside?”

His mouth curves. “Not really.”

She sighs and pulls the pack from her apron again. She taps one out and holds it toward him.

He steps closer to take it. Close enough that she catches the faint scent of something clean and sharp. Not cologne exactly. Soap. Cold air.

“Thanks,” he says.

She lights her own cigarette again and waits for him to leave her alone.

He does not.

“They always like this?” he asks.

“Worse,” she says. “You should see them during the playoffs.”

He huffs a laugh. “Trust me. I have.”

“They sent back perfectly good veal.”

“A crime.”

“I couldn’t stop it.”

They stand in silence for a moment. The kind that is not awkward yet.

From inside, someone yells loud enough that it echoes through the door.

He winces. “They get loud when they’re happy.”

“And when they’re sad,” she says. “And when they’re bored. And when someone says the word carbs.”

He laughs properly this time. It transforms his face. It softens it.

“What would you call them?” he asks.

She considers it. There are many options. Most of them are unmentionable.

“Overgrown golden retrievers with bank accounts,” she says finally.

He looks delighted. “That’s generous.”

“Fine. Overgrown golden retrievers who think they invented fire.”

“Closer.”

She studies him more carefully now. There is something different about him. He is not posturing. He is not trying to impress her. He seems almost separate from the chaos inside.

“You don’t have to give me company. I can leave you alone,” she says before she can stop herself.

“No, stay.”

“Thanks.”

He shrugs one shoulder against the brick. “I like the company.”

“That’s dangerous.”

“How so?”

“You might start noticing things.”

“Like what?”

“Like how insufferable I find hockey players.”

He smiles slowly. “Trust me. I’ve noticed.”

She takes another drag. The cigarette is almost finished. She flicks ash toward the pavement.

“Why’d you come out here?” she asks.

“Needed a break.”

“From dinner?”

“Especially this dinner.”

There is something honest in that. It unsettles her.

She studies the cigarette in his hand. Still unlit.

“You’re not going to smoke that,” she says.

He glances down at it as if surprised. “Probably not.”

“Then why ask for it?”

He looks at her. Directly. Not in a way that strips her down, not in a way that makes her defensive. Just looking.

“Seemed like a good excuse,” he says.

“For what?”

“To talk to you.”

She snorts softly. “That line work often?”

“You have no idea.”

She laughs.

He pushes off the wall slightly, but does not step closer. He respects the space between them in a way that feels intentional.

“What’s your name?” he asks.

She hesitates. She does not owe him that.

“Alice,” she says anyway.

“Alice,” he repeats, like he is testing it.

“Don’t make it weird.”

“I’m not.”

She narrows her eyes. “I already have the loud ones inside. They’re already weird.”

He laughs under his breath. “Fair.”

She finishes her cigarette and crushes it under her heel.

“You should head back,” she says. “We are running out of Tiramisu and you don’t want to miss out.”

“What about you?”

“Me?”

He glances at the door. “Are you coming back in?”

“In a little bit.”

He studies her like he wants to ask something else. He does not.

Instead, he holds the unlit cigarette out to her.

“You can have this back,” he says.

There is something in the way he says it that makes her chest feel oddly tight.

She takes it from him. Their fingers brush. It is nothing. It is everything.

“Goodnight, Alice,” he says.

She opens her mouth to respond, to ask his name, to anchor this somehow.

The door opens behind him and a voice booms into the alley. “There you are!”

He glances over his shoulder, then back at her.

“Duty calls,” he says.

She watches him walk back inside without another word.

The alley feels colder after he leaves.

She stands there a moment longer, the unlit cigarette between her fingers, trying to identify the feeling blooming low in her ribs.

It has been a long time since anything surprised her.

The rest of the night blurs. Plates stack. Wine pours. Checks are dropped. The Bulldogs eventually stumble out into the street in a wave of laughter and cologne and crumpled receipts.

She does not see the guy with the leather jacket again.

By the time Alice locks the front door and counts the register with Tony, it is nearly two in the morning.

“You surviving?” Tony asks.

“Barely.”

He grins. “They tip well at least.”

She thinks of the alley. Of the unlit cigarette in her apron pocket.

“Yeah,” she says absently. “They do.”

She walks home through streets that are quieter now. The North End at night feels different. Softer. Like the city has exhaled.

In her apartment, she kicks off her shoes and drops her apron on the chair by the door.

The cigarette falls out onto the hardwood floor.

She stares at it.

It is ridiculous to feel anything about a piece of paper and tobacco.

She picks it up anyway.

She did not get his name.

The realization hits her with disproportionate force.

She replays the conversation in her head. The way he leaned against the brick. The way he called his own friends insufferable without hesitation. The way he looked at her like she was something to be considered, not consumed.

She did not get his name.

At two in the morning, standing alone in her kitchen with a glass of tap water and city light filtering through the blinds, she feels annoyed in a way she cannot fully justify.

She does not collect strangers.

She does not wonder about men who walk back into noisy rooms and disappear into them.

She places the unlit cigarette on the counter.

She will throw it away in the morning.

Probably.

Alice turns off the kitchen light and heads to bed, telling herself that this is nothing.

Just an alley. A smoke break. A stranger.

And yet.