All day Friday, William tried to focus on work -- and failed miserably. He had a date planned for tonight and that was eating him alive.

He had met the girl, Heather just once, on Monday, when she was smoking on her break outside of some mall store. He had smiled at her and expected nothing more. He had kept going but then she tugged at his sleeve and stopped him.

“Stay here a minute, please,” she whispered.

Strange. But he stayed.

“Act like you know me. I’m Heather. Talk to me for a minute,” she said.

Stranger still. But what the heck? She was a beautiful woman, with long curls of red hair and green eyes and a dusting of freckles. And she was smoking. And smoking was something that turned William on like nothing else. Not that he had ever told anyone.

So they chatted for a minute, although William had trouble concentrating each time her all-white Misty rose to her lips for an inhale. He wanted so badly to tell her to stop politely turning her head with each exhale, too. Such sweet smoke, warmed by her lungs, wasted on the wind!

She dropped her cigarette on the ground and stepped on it, twisting her foot purposefully – something you just didn’t see much of these days.

“See you later, Will,” she said suddenly, and then, before he could do anything, she’d kissed him on the mouth and vanished into the mall.

Bewildered and bemused, Will decided that she must have been acting on some dare from her colleagues.

He saw her a few minutes later behind the counter at Hinckley Jewelry. She smiled. And giggled.

“You have to be the most confused guy on Planet Earth right now,” she said. “You see, some creepy dude has been watching me from the parking lot all week. I send mall security but he takes off every time. I figure if he thought I had a boyfriend, maybe he’d back off.”

So that was it. How nice. Now the creepy dude would turn his attentions to offing William.

She seemed to have that thought about the same time that Will did. Her hand went to her pretty mouth.

“It’s all right,” said Will, affecting a macho air. “Unless he’s a pro-wrestler, I can probably take him out. Unless he has a gun or something.”

“I had a boyfriend up until a month ago,” Heather continued, apparently reassured by Will’s humor. “He finally dumped me.”

“Why?” Will asked. “As pretty as you are, he must have been a moron. Or maybe he got scared of creepy dudes in parking lots.”

“Nah,” she said. “I wouldn’t quit smoking. He hated it. That’s all.”

“That’s all? That was his reason? He was an absolute idiot!” Will said – the closest he dared come to outing his obsession.

“I need another break,” she said suddenly. “Come with me.”

Meekly, he followed, savoring her beautiful name – Heather – almost as much as the rhythm of her walking.

They had lattes in the Food Court. He watched those soft lips wrap around her straw and imagined them clasping a white cigarette filter. But he dared not suggest it.

She rambled on about this and that and he tried to pay attention but she was so beautiful! And he desperately wanted this coffee break to turn into a smoke break.

He forced himself to concentrate, to wait for just the right break in her torrent of words. Here it came – she was talking about that ex boyfriend again and her cigarette addiction.

“Breaking a relationship because a woman smokes is utterly stupid,” Will said. “What’s so awful about smoking?”

The unexpected defense of her bad habit caught her by surprise and halted her verbiage momentarily. Will knew he had to proceed carefully. And yet, for the first time in his life, after years of flubbing it, he felt like he might actually get this right.

“It’s just that, a cigarette can look really good with the right person, that’s all,” he said, trying to sound casual and as if he were talking about something upon which all thinking folk agreed, like the merits of Chardonnay.

Say something! Please say something – he willed her.

But she was silent. Then, mercifully, she giggled.

“Like a movie star? Like Sharon Stone?”

“Yeah,” he said.

The wheels were turning in her head, surely. Don’t blow it, he told himself. Take this thing carefully, carefully.

“Well, I need a cigarette anyway,” she said. “Care to join me outside?”

Oh, words of an angel! But, though it absolutely killed him, he knew what he had to do. He had to decline her company this time. Years of failure had taught him. He had to play it cool. He had to show he was interested in her for her, not just because she was a smoker.

“No, I’ve gotta run,” he said. “Maybe see you around?”

“Yeah,” she said.

So that was how it was. He forced himself to walk away. He forced himself to wait five days before heading back to the mall. He avoided the jewelry store and stopped instead at the Food Court, picking himself up a taco.

She’d have to come through here for her smoke break, unless she picked a door farther away.

Perfect planning paid off. He heard her delicious voice call out his name. He looked up and noted with pleasure the unlit cigarette she held, bobbing like a little white pencil in her fingers. This time, he went outside with her. She shoved the cigarette hungrily into her mouth and lit up a little clumsily but sucked in a lungful of smoke like a pro.

Her exhale poured out in billowy beauty – aimed away from him. She still didn’t understand.

But there was time. Plenty of time to explain, later. For now, he just enjoyed the sound of her voice and the sight of her sipping from her cigarette, flicking away ashes, spinning it like a tiny baton in her pretty fingers, slowly burning it a respectable half-way down, then dropping it to the sidewalk and grinding it out. This even though a huge ashtray was not two feet away.

She smoked two cigarettes that way. And then he made the date, while she was surely riding high on a nicotine buzz, and she said yes.

***

The night arrived and the dinner went well, though the restaurant was non-smoking, like every other business in this uptight city.

They sat in his car in the dark afterwards. She looked at him and he at her, and suddenly, her beautiful face was coming his way and their lips met and her delightful tongue was pushing into his mouth, pushing hard and they crushed faces together until she pulled away, gasping for breath.

Perhaps she felt she was coming on too strong. But she wanted him, he knew it, and he wanted her and she knew it.

She fished her cigarettes out of her purse, needing something to calm her down.

“Okay if I smoke?”

Words of ecstasy! Oh, what he wanted to tell her! Oh, how it hurt to hold back! But he’d been this way before and blown it. Go easy, he told himself. Take it slow.

“Sure,” he said, striving for a casual air. “You look good with a cigarette.”

“Do I?” she said, holding up the long, white cylinder and contemplating it. She stuck it in her mouth and clicked her lighter to life.

He hoped for some film-noir moment, for her to say, “Zen light me up, dahling!”

But she was a modern girl, and she lit it herself, clamping her lips lusciously around the filter and dragging deeply.

He leaned in close, inhaling the scent of her and of the fresh cigarette. Damn, he wanted to kiss those smoke-spewing lips so badly!

It had to be said, had to be said right.

“I like that brand – it’s got a great fragrance.”

“My cigarettes – Misty Lights? Cigarettes smell good?”

“Uh-huh.”

“It doesn’t bother you?”

“It turns me on,” he said.

There. The dangerous words were finally out. Now he would learn if he’d messed up again – or if heaven was around the corner.

“That’s weird,” she said.

“Why? No weirder than somebody liking perfume or the aroma of a good wine,” he said. “Why should I hate something you love?”

He let her consider that idea for a while. No need to mention that dread word fetish, not yet. Maybe not ever.

He kissed her soft cheek and nuzzled her neck happily. She ashed her cigarette and then lifted it towards her lips again. She was so close and it was so close – absolutely surreal. He could see the little tar circle on the filter as it rose towards her mouth -- a small brown oval against the tight white cotton through which her hungry lungs had pulled exactly two puffs of rich, thick smoke – an ignored warning of what was surely coating her young lungs with each drag. He imagined her as a giddy teen behind some school building, sucking in that first puff, the first dusting upon her pink and unblemished lungs – now seasoned by a thousand packs of cigarettes.

She opened her mouth and wrapped her lips around the cigarette and he watched as it jerked upwards, trapped like a tiny animal in the grip of her mouth. Her jaw jutted slightly forward and her mouth squeezed tighter, her upper lip making a little arch where the filter refused any further compression. He inched forward and kissed the side of the filter as she inhaled, the side of his face jammed against the edge of her fingers as they balanced the cigarette, his mind thrilling at the thought of that longed-for smoke just on the other side of the paper, being pulled along helplessly towards its rendezvous with her body.

She giggled a little at the weirdness of it all but didn’t push him away.

The end of her cigarette glowed fiercely as the cherry responded to her inhale. He held his lips against the side of the filter until she had finished her drag, then turned to face her, in time to see the sexy little circle of her lips still in an O as she pulled the cigarette away, in time to see them seal shut with a pop like a cork on a wine bottle, in time to see her mouth full of cottony whiteness and her tongue twisting in it like a tiny pink fish swimming in a sea of smoke.

Her eyes gave him permission, said she was enjoying this moment as much as he was. She parted her lips slightly and let a wisp of smoke escape. He bent in trying to kiss her and taste it at the same time but she inhaled sharply and the smoke pulled back into her mouth. But her lips still tasted of it and his body was responding and he could only hope to hold out.

For three endless seconds she held the smoke deep inside of her and he pictured the dark, moist depths of her lungs – pictured the smoke spinning and swirling in its prison, pictured the nicotine distilling from it and rushing to the pleasure centers of her brain, pictured her dazed cilia trying in vain to sweep the fumes out while she refused to yield, pictured her heart speeding up in response to the nicotine signal, pictured her own precious spent breath mingling with the smoke to form the stream within her that now demanded freedom.

She squinted at him through the haze of the mainstream smoke that was filling the car up fast, since he had the windows rolled all the way up. She licked her lips with that mesmerizing little tongue of hers. She looked him full in the face. She pursed her lips as if to kiss him, then began to exhale. He had exhaled just before she did so he was ready, able … and willing. He opened wide and inhaled the intoxicating combination of her sweet smoke and breath, pulling it deeply into his own lungs until he felt as light-headed as the day in high school that he’d shared a helium balloon with some buddies. His lungs burned like fire from the unexpected assault but he refused to cough – he wanted every milligram of that tar and nicotine and whatever the hell else they said was in cigarette smoke, every molecule that her own body had tasted, swallowed and released, to be absorbed into his own lungs and never let go.

The thick smoke was still streaming from her lips – more than he could take, in spite of his hunger for it. He had to stop this exquisite torture before he passed out.

As if reading his mind, she pulled away, blowing the last of her smoke into his eyes playfully, triumphantly.

He shuddered as his body, no longer able to hold back, began to declare in favor of loving her forever. He gasped out the remnants of her recycled smoke and wanted more but she jammed out the cigarette in the tray and lifted her blouse and they went at each other as if they were starving.

Epilogue:

His clothes smelled of smoke and her spilled ashes had burned a constellation of tiny holes in them. His throat was as raw as if rubbed with sandpaper. His eyes burned as if he’d been tear-gassed.

He sat at his kitchen counter and stared at the half-smoked Misty in a tray before him, its ash cold and grey, its tip still bearing a perfect crimson kiss upon it. Secondhand, through her exhales, he’d smoked almost as much of it as she had, during a frenzy of passion that had caught them both by surprise, not an hour from their first union in his car.

He was in love. Madly in love. He wanted to spend every penny of his salary to please her, to buy her what she wanted, to buy her cigarettes. He wanted her to move in and marry him tomorrow and fill his house and his life with her sweet smoke – but she had laughed and said, “Let’s take it slow.”

She was absolutely, totally beautiful, from her golden hair to the curve of her bottom to the polish on her toes. He had lost his mind in love for her -- wanted to lie on the floor and be stomped on by her like a bug, wanted to vote for all her favorite political candidates, wanted to go back to the day of her birth and marry her from that moment forward, wanted to carry her books home from school and do all her chores and homework and let her copy all his test answers and finish off every swallow of milk she left in her cup and every bite of food she’d ever left on a plate and make her mad at him over some silly little thing so that she would pound him with her little fists and kick him with her adorable little legs until her tantrum was spent.

He wanted to record every laugh that had ever left her lips and witness every little white lie she’d told to get herself out of a jam and be the interviewer for her first job and every job thereafter, wanted to be her teacher and give her straight A’s from kindergarten through college. He wanted to take home every candy wrapper she’d ever thrown on the ground and kiss every footprint she’d ever left in the dust and save every pair of shoes and every pair of panties that she had ever worn and heap up in a silver box every golden hair that her stylist had ever trimmed, and all her baby teeth.

But most of all, he dreamed of that day she had started smoking and wished he could still find that fateful cigarette that her young lips had first kissed and taste the bitter tar upon its tip that had surely wrinkled her teenage nose as she took her first drag, as her tongue first tasted the tang of tobacco. He wished he could have been there to watch her inhale and to stand in intimate closeness as she coughed and gagged that first potent lungful, and showered her with praise for her sudden smoky transition from girl to woman, from absolute beauty queen to omnipotent goddess. He wished he could have thrown himself into the dirt and become that cigarette for a moment as it lay spent and smoldering – and then felt the pressure of her heel trying to grind it out like an Olivia Newton John wannabee.

But he had missed that epic journey and he needed to make up for lost time.

There are some men, they say, who literally worship the woman they love. He knew it for a fact. He adored Heather’s every giggle and her slight Midwestern accent. A lifelong atheist, he went to her church and sang all the hymns as sincerely as if he were Billy Graham. He took pictures of her until she swore she’d go blind from the flash – Heather in the morning, swatting at him, Heather at the wheel of her car, Heather sleepy at night – and always with a cigarette in her hand.

For her part, Heather was a happy girl, too. She loved this adorable man who loved her so unconditionally, who had asked her to marry him on their third date and who had then melted into a puddle of joy when she agreed. It was great to have someone around the house who not only took on the manly chores like lawn-mowing but insisted on doing laundry and the dishes and everything else he could possibly do, just out of pure love for her.

His obsession for her might have been scary but for the fact that it never smothered. He loved her family and never got between them – in fact, he insisted that they get together every week. He happily released her to the company of her girlfriends whenever she got a hankering to hang out with them, and in fact, practically demanded that she go out with them at least once a week, too – girl’s night out, no questions asked.

He just smiled when guys whistled at her – why shouldn’t other men find this angel as adorable as he did? He refused to argue with her about anything or to challenge any of the habits she had that even she knew must be annoying. If he ever got irritated with her, he hid it or he slipped out into the garden and pulled weeds until he got over it.

But most of all, he loved her smoking. And to a woman who loved her cigarettes like a best friend – the aroma, the feel in her hands, the way they made her feel cool and sexy and slightly rebellious in one, the pleasure of the nicotine charging through her body -- who loved being a smoker more than anything else, who could not picture driving her car or soaking in the tub or watching tv without a Misty Light for company – this was heaven.

How many boyfriends had tried to make her quit, had banished her into the weather, had condemned her cigarette habit as a nasty vice, had said, “I could love you but …”

This man was the first in her life who enjoyed her smoking as much as she loved to smoke. This was a man for whom the words, “Light me a cigarette, baby,” were an invitation to the bedroom.

He loved to hold her in his arms and light her first cigarette of the day in the warmth of their blankets, as the smoke pushed away the chill of the night and she snuggled sleepily into his embrace. He always had a fresh pack for her to tuck into her smart little purse as she clicked out of the door in her high heels and business suit. She had an eight to four job; his was nine to five.

Her cigarettes were the first and last thing he bought with his paycheck – she made a good salary but from the day they became a couple, not a penny of her hard-earned money did she ever use again for smokes – that became his daily gift to her. Little things he used to like, such as season tickets to the Braves games, or CDs, or a new tool – that took second place to her nicotine needs now. Some lucky girls got roses – well, so did she, on every possible occasion -- and sterling silver lighters, crystal ashtrays, glamorous cigarette cases and fresh lipstick in all the shades she loved – the better to leave behind a dark and beguiling print upon those white filters.

He loved to come home to the sweet smell of fresh tobacco smoke in the house, knowing that she was somewhere within it, so pretty – and he’d hunt her down and kiss those lips and taste the fragrance of cigarettes upon them.

“Don’t you hate kissing an ashtray?” she asked once.

“Not when that ashtray has a face as sexy as yours,” he’d countered.

And he loved to draw her a warm, bubbly bath at night and caress her beautiful body from head to toe while she leaned back and smoked her second-to-the-last cigarette of the day and gave him a bath of sorts, too, in its creamy clouds.

And then -- while she grew sleepy over her Danielle Steel book, warm and clean and dressed only in the lacy lingerie she wore to bed -- he did the last tidying around the house, carefully cleaning each and every ashtray until they sparkled, piling up the soft gray ashes in an aluminum tin and the lipstick-stained butts in a separate tin, one by one, adding them to the growing pile testifying of their time together -- imagining where she was and what she was doing as she smoked each one. He imagined some day being able to leap into a great soft pile of those ashes or bury himself under thousands of lipstick-stained Misty’s.

And as she drowsily exhaled the last puff and dropped the cigarette into the tray on the table beside her to burn out safely but slowly like an incense stick, he enjoyed one last smoky exhale goodnight and one last smoke-scented kiss and then drifted off to sleep – the happiest man on the planet.