Sasha, Not Aleks

ten - shashlik

CORALINE

UNKNOWN: it's Sasha. I have a plan. I'll make dinner if you want to come over and go over it with me. I need help on two things.

He texts like he's a first grader who just learned what a complete sentence is. However, I find myself reading it over several times before responding.

CORA: what are you going to make?

SASHA: show up and find out. I live above the restaurant. It'll be ready at 8.

I consider it, ultimately heading home and asking Marie if I should. She's been out of the loop on the mafia side of this relationship and I honestly think that's a good idea, all things considered, but she knows that I got a ride home from him and she knows that I think he's attractive and I think she knows that I'd totally say yes if he asked me out, which he didn't, but she thinks he did.

I just don't particularly want to inform her that I'm going over to help him figure out the best way to kidnap someone.

You know, because she might not understand why I'm willing to help a stranger kidnap someone.

Simple answer: people make dumb decisions when the person asking questions is attractive.

Lots of dumb decisions.

But my point stands: I have nothing to do and I've been doing nothing for like two years and I'm kinda done being nothing after college. I thought I was going to be going out every weekend with a huge group of friends but nope, it's just me and Marie, and Marie has a bunch of work friends she goes out with sometimes but I'm just here because I work with my goddamn married brother and my 56 year old father that has no interest in a lively social life spare for him and some of his old friends that go way back with him.

So, Sasha, despite being the son of a mob boss, is literally the only thing that I've seen in months that could break me out of the little hole I'm in.

Because what else am I supposed to do? Go up and ask to be friends with someone at a club? No. Find love on the MBTA? Probably not, let's just put that on a back burner because I've only seen three attractive people on the MBTA in my entire time using it. Hope that someone attractive wanders into the shop? He did. His name is Sasha, he's got a Ducati Superleggera V4 somewhere and I want to see it.

So that's why I'm standing at the side entrance to the little Russian restaurant at 7:30 at night on a random day in the middle of spring. It's still ass to grass cold in Boston, the snowmelt making the roads slushy and the temperature a very very wet 40 degrees.

I knock on the door without a second thought about it, like maybe there's mobsters inside living with him or something.

I don't know why I'm not more scared of this but up until like a week and a half ago I didn't think that the mob was real and now that I'm lowkey involved in it, I still have a hard time believing that there's guys walking around in suits with cigars in their mouths directing high-value crime and telling public officials what they can and can't do. It's still in the range of 'funny movie trope' and not 'violent underground unknown entity within the international community' so it's leading me into making rather iffy decisions.

It's like about a year ago when I discovered that polo, like on a horse, isn't fake. I genuinely didn't think it was real until I was driving past some field somewhere on the way to fix a car out north and almost swerved into a ditch because there were people out on a massive field running around and hitting a ball on horses.

I swear I went home and watched like an hour straight of polo videos because I didn't know what was going on and how it managed to slip past me that polo was, in fact, a real sport.