"Come inside."

Such power in two little words! Such invitation, such danger.

But when you are just a young teen, hoping to earn a few bucks mowing a lawn, you don't think much about the power of a moment to change a life.

So Robbie went in.

He was old enough to recognize that this neighbor of theirs, was a gorgeous piece of work - and not much older than his big sister, if that.

So he had watched her surreptiously over the weeks since she'd moved into the duplex next door. His bedroom window overlooked their shared carport and sometimes he was awakened by her early morning departures. He'd see her, a shadow in the gloom, slipping into her little white Hyundai. Then, after a moment, the sudden glow of her lighter as she fired up a cigarette for the drive.

If he was lucky enough to be home when she pulled in after work, he'd be treated to the sight of her final drag on yet another cigarette, before she stepped out of the car and crushed it firmly beneath her heel.

His mother - his sweet, immaculate, non-smoking mother -- had complained about cigarette butts piling up in the carport. She hadn't cause to complain for long. Because Robbie happened to be fooling around in the grassy edge of the carport one day when he espied one of the offending butts, blown by a bit of breeze, trapped in the tangle of a dandelion.

Something surged inside him at the sight of that half-smoked cigarette, its burned end still clinging to an intact cylinder of grey ash, its creamy white tip kissed by a perfect crescent of lipstick, its filter deeply stained with tar.

He scooped it up without a moment's thought and scurried inside, where he worshipped it in adolescent exultation. Then, at dusk, he returned to the carport and collected a dozen or so other butts that she had dropped, all Mistys, all marked with varying shades of her lipstick. How could he not have paid attention to this lovely litter before - how many of her beautiful cigarette ends had been blown away in the wind?

Owning her cigarette debris elevated his adoration even more - in the privacy of his room, he could hold the quenched cigarette beneath his nose and inhale its tobacco aroma and imagine her sweet lips closing tightly around it to take a drag. He could lovingly kiss the lipstick marks on the filter and imagine himself kissing that same smoky mouth.

And now, here he was, invited to step inside her home.

How ironic that his own mother had set this up. Had, in neighborly chit-chat with this youthful goddess, volunteered her son to mow the woman's lawn.

So, with his whole body trembling, he had made the excursion this Saturday morning the million or so miles to the house next door, and knocked, three times.

A whole agonizing minute or maybe two, he waited, staring at the dark wood of the door, before it opened, finally.

She looked out at him, squinting with sleepy blue eyes - her hair a tangle of messy red curls, her lean body obscured by a bathrobe. He realized, to his horror, that he had woken her up.

But she invited him in.

So he went in.

He followed her through the entryway, trying desperately to think of something to say, anything at all.

She saved him. Sort of.

"You're here to mow the lawn. Such a fine looking boy."

Her eyes went up and down him, in a way that made him burn inside. Then she smiled.

"I . better get started," he stammered.

"Sit for a minute," she said, smiling again. "It won't get hot outside for a little while yet."

It was hot enough inside, he thought, as she flicked away a stray curl from her forehead and seated herself beside him in the kitchen.

"Coffee?" she asked.

Huh? Oh, yeah, coffee - that stuff that grownups drank, his exploding mind remembered.

"Sure."

He'd never had a sip of coffee in his life.

She got up and turned on the coffee maker, then sat down close beside him again and laid her hand upon his. It burned, in a delicious sort of way.

"So, Robbie, do you always go around waking people up on Saturday morning?" Was she chiding him or teasing him? Should he apologize?

She let go his hand.

"Get my purse for me."

A flick of her pretty finger pointed it out and he meekly complied.

Was she going to pay him in advance?

"You good at math?" she asked.

He was very good at math. It was his favorite subject. He started to babble, glad to talk about anything, just to break up the steamy silence.

Her next move, however, silenced him utterly.

She withdrew a pack of Misty Lights from her purse, and placed one of the sweet cylinders in the center of her lips. She snapped her lighter to life and raised the flame to the tobacco. Her lips sealed around the filter and she inhaled, hollowing her fine cheeks to suck in maximum smoke, as the flame bit into the cigarette and it glowed fiercely.

She set the lighter down. She set the cigarette down in a crystal ashtray between them on the table. Its long curl of smoke weaved like a silver serpent through the still air and tickled his nose.

Her mouth opened and he caught a glimpse of cottony white smoke swirling around her teeth before it vanished down her throat. He imagined it deep within her lungs, warm and fragrant and potent, somewhere behind those full, ripe breasts that half-peeked at him from her robe.

Her eyes locked upon him, those baby blue beautiful eyes. He was as helpless as a butterfly pierced with a pin.

"I, umm, " he stammered, some Sunday School part of him urging him to get up and flee.

She exhaled.

Her lips parted and, propelled fully and completely on purpose, smoke as white as milk streamed forth in a misty jet against his face.

He counted three unbearable seconds of her eyes locked on his and the smoke pouring forth - hot as fever, sweet as a spoonful of warm honey, billowing, burning, biting like ants into his watery eyes.

Somewhere beneath his flushed face, everything else, well, almost everything, had turned to absolutely jelly. He could no more stand up than he could lift his arms and fly.

Mesmerized, he followed her fingers as she picked up her cigarette again and once more, took a drag of audacious proportions, pulling the smoke into her mouth for an apparent eternity, while the cigarette glowed like a firefly in the hazy gloom of the kitchen.

This time, she opened her mouth and as he watched, transfixed, she let the smoke escape - but as it left her lips, pulled it into her nostrils.

A French inhale, he would learn later.

Their eyes locked again. He wanted to be drowned in her smoke, again, inexplicably, hopelessly.

She exhaled. Audibly. With a whoosh of breath that made his tortured body shiver. But this time, with her lips pursed to waste the smoke in the air beside him. He could only watch helplessly as the stream burst from her mouth and diffused into the room. It occurred to him to lean into it but his body wouldn't move.

For to do so would be to acknowledge that this supposedly good little boy was burning with a man's wicked need and that this woman had him utterly in her power - no easy thing for a youth to admit, even with the wordless gestures of body language.

He was an apple hungering for her teeth to bite into him and shred him and moisten him to mush upon her tongue; a bar-stool boor desiring to feel the sting of her hard slap upon his face; a worm wanting to feel his body helplessly yielding under the slow and fatal pressure of her deliberately crushing heel.

One more time, the cigarette rose to her lips. It bobbed like a twig under a bouncing bird and glowed like a hot coal as her lungs extracted nicotine-rich smoke from what remained of it.

Again she looked at him, and he at her. Again, she exhaled. Again, away from him, ever so slightly. But this time, he took control of his shaking corpse and leaned into the stream, affecting a casual air, as if he were trying to get a better view of something outside and hadn't noticed a woman was blowing smoke over there. And the faintest of a smile touched the edges of her mouth and she bent the rest of her exhale now to meet him -- like new lovers moving into a kiss.

She stood up.

She walked away from him, towards her bedroom. He couldn't help it. His eyes followed. She lifted her bathrobe - and shut the door behind her in the same motion. His eager eyes got only a tortuously brief glimpse of silky blue lingerie.

But it was enough to melt him, to burn him up as completely as her cigarette, dying now in the ashtray.

Somewhere outside, a lawn languished unmowed.

To be continued...