She smokes.

My angel wife smokes Misty Lights, just shy of a pack a day. Or Satins, when she can find them. She puts that little tube of tobacco to her lips and fires it up and burns me down. She smokes in our car, in the bathroom, at dinner ... in the bedroom.

She was fourteen when she started, she said. She had a friend who smoked and she wanted to be cool like her. It worked -- she went from unknown to hot ticket at our school almost overnight.

You wouldn't know that she smokes by looking at her. Like I said, she keeps it under a pack a day, so you're not likely to catch her at it unless you spend some time with her. She's a goddess, a glory to look at, toned and trimmed by years of working out and eating right. I don't think she's had a burger in ten years. She keeps her pretty toes painted, her clothes in style, and her hair in the latest fashions

But everybody has a vice, I guess, and she loves her cigarettes.

I have a sneaking suspicion she will long outlive those sloppy, overweight ladies who give her the evil eye when they see her lighting up in public -- and probably the uptight, anoxeric ones, too.

I love to watch her smoke, especially when she has the time to enjoy it. She draws in the fumes like incense, slow and deep, then exhales them thoroughly.

She tells me sometimes that she loves her cigarettes more than she loves me. Sometimes I think she's teasing. Sometimes I get the idea that she's serious.

We met in high school. I'm sure that I loved her from the first time I saw her, in a fluffy sweater and Jordache jeans. She was two rows over from me in Geography class, tossing her red hair and surreptiously wedging a piece of well-chewed bubble gum under her desk.

I didn't think that she would ever notice me. But cigarettes gave me the opportunity, one wet day in March. I was going down a hall at school about ten footsteps ahead of Mr. Grigg, the principal, heading for the west wing, which was mostly empty classrooms. Word was, a kid could get into one of these restrooms here and not get mugged for his lunch money. Why I would believe such a rumor (lack of adult supervision equals safer student environment?), I don't know. I was just a dumb kid who happened to be good at math.

I rounded a corner in time to see Haley, my goddess, and a couple of her girl friends, enveloped in telltale tobacco smoke. Why they were brazen enough to share a smoke in school, albeit in a pretty much empty hallway, I don't know. Maybe the monitors were staking out the bathrooms that day.

The smoldering evidence was cocked in Haley's beautiful hand. Her suspension was assured, for even if she threw away the cigarette in time, the leftover smoke would give her away.

There are times in life when you just act, moments when you do everything right without hardly thinking.

"Grigg is coming," someone beside me announced. Haley froze. I went into overdrive.

"Haley -- give me the cigarette, and your gum. Pop in a fresh piece!" I commanded. "Hurry."

I was almost a total stranger to her at that point, just the nerdy kid who let her copy his papers and tests now and then. But she obeyed, though she clearly couldn't understand why.

In a flash, I rubbed her cigarette filter against my hands, transferring the fragrance -- then took the neon purple piece of gum that she gingerly plucked from her mouth, shoving it into mine.

My mouth was flooded with the taste of synthetic grapes, a billion delicious Haley cooties -- and the bitter taste of her smoking.

Just in time.

Grigg roared around the corner, having smelled smoke and sure of catching his quarry. Though I flicked the cigarette away when he saw me, I was obviously guilty. I had tobacco on my fingers, on my breath, and the butt in the corner was clearly mine, as far as he knew. I got busted big time. But I pled momentary stupidity and the school let me off with a ten day suspension. After all, I was one of their prize gifted kids.

This isn't the movies. We didn't date and fall in love. She was grateful to get off the hook, I suppose, but she couldn't let it show. I simply continued to adore her from afar and console myself with the thought that chewing her used bubble gum that day was probably as close to a kiss as I would ever get.

Times change and people, too. We met again in college. She was standing outside the Student Union, poured into blue jeans even more tightly than before, her red hair aflame with the morning sun. I felt the old desire surge up inside me again.

I knew her instantly, of course. Her angel face had showed up all over our high school yearbook, since her boyfriend at the time was the editor, and I had selected the best shot and cut it out and worshipped it ever since.

I didn't expect her to remember me.

So I was shocked when I heard her call:

"Hey, Harry -- got a light?"

I looked up and saw a long, white cigarette balanced in those perfect lips.

Now why would a nerd like me have a lighter? Well, the gods had smiled upon me that week. I swear, this has never happened to me before and probably never will again. But I had found a lighter in the grass two days ago as I was walking and I had picked it up and pocketed it just for the hell of it, maybe to assist me in burning down the jock's fieldhouse, and I happened to be wearing that same pair of pants today.

I willed my shaking knees to behave, and tried to whip out my flame-maker in a flirty flash. Of course, I dropped it. She giggled. That didn't help. I scooped it back up, summoned memories of lighting Boy Scout campfires, and managed to spark a passable flame on the thing.

Lighting her cigarette forced me to look at her and she at me. Damn, she was so beautiful, she almost hurt to look at. Those green eyes, that sprinking of Celtic freckles, that red hair spilling around her face in long, luscious curls, the smile on her lips behind that raw cigarette that awaited the touch of "my" lighter.

I took a deep breath to steady myself and lit her cigarette, watching that gorgeous face strain to suck in smoke, lips wrapping tight around the filter, cheeks collapsing to vacuum in the potent fumes, eyes half-closing in concentration, cigarette arcing upward with the force of her drag.

She inhaled, forever it seemed -- her signature sacred drags, every inch of her mouth, throat and lungs demanding communion with the tobacco smoke.

Then, before I could step away, it boiled up out of her lips and wrapped around me in a sweet fog, heady, strong -- the first of a million exhales to be spewed from her face into mine.

I had to date her, naturally, bringing a carton of her favorite cigarettes along with a red, red rose. I had to marry her, first available opportunity. I put a crystal ashtray in every room of the little house we rented our first year together.

The rules of our marriage are simple. I do what she tells me to do. She does what she wants to do. I hand over my paycheck and the first expenses deducted from it are her cigarettes. When we were in college and had no money, that was still the rule. I skipped dinner a few times, since the light bill, the car payment, the rent and her cigarettes didn't always leave us with much. I for sure was not going to ask her to forego HER sustenance, whether nutrition or nicotine.

I am in charge of cleaning out all the ashtrays. She hates for them to be dirty. I don't mind that chore at all. The sight of her lipstick kiss upon the filters sets me on fire as surely as they once were.

My car carries the scent of her cigarettes. So do my clothes, my books -- pretty much everything I own.

I can tell if she's home when I get there, before she even greets me, by the fresh aroma of her tobacco in the air. It's my welcome home, the calming aura that washes away the stress and the stink of a long, hard day.

Morning is my favorite time, sleepy and warm in our bedroom, when I am awakened by her rising and retrieving her cigarettes from the table. I don't know why she won't keep them closer to the bed or why she never makes me go get them, but it gives me a delicious view of her round rump flexing in her panties, which is sufficient to wake me up entirely.

She brings back her cigarettes and I light her up and hold her tight, and I swear, I can feel it when the first dose of nicotine hits her body -- she kind of melts against me and sighs softly and we both watch that beautiful exhale spill into the half-light of the room.

"Don't ever make me quit," she'll tell me -- as if I could ever make her do anything -- suffused with nicotine and drowsy with pleasure, and I watch the glow of the cigarette cherry rising and falling from her lips and I fill my own lungs with the misty haze of her spent exhales and kiss her firm, ripe breasts barely hidden beneath the silky nightshirt she wears to be and sometimes get the joy of feeling them rise against my face as she fills the lungs behind them with a breath of smoke.

She's getting double pleasure -- my questing lips nibbling on the outside of her, and her warm, potent cigarette smoke filling her up inside.

And you wonder why I'm late to work sometimes!