"In the greater Washington, D.C. area, many people commute to work as "slugs." They catch a ride with someone else going into the capital city, saving on gas and time - because a car with a slug aboard qualifies for the HOV lane.

Pat Wilson, a recent addition to the suburban population, decided one day to host a slug or two, being possessed of a brand new Hyundai. Not being familiar with the specific rules of slugging, he simply tacked up a notice on the bulletin board of the nearest grocery store.

An email arrived back that very day, from someone named "Col," asking if he had room for said Col, one Sui-Chen and a Ladonna.

Colbert, he guessed. Sui Chen. Sounded manly. Two guys and a lady. Sounded safe enough.

He pulled up to the designated park-and-ride lot at the designated time and waited. He watched the people go by. He watched a woman, a beautiful redhead, pass through the lot, peering at every white car. He savored the sight of her long, strong legs and the way she filled out her blouse and how her curls tossed in the morning breeze. She must be a slug, he thought, a rather unfortunate label for such a pretty woman.

After a moment, she turned and looked at his car. She squinted at him through the dawn's early light. She approached, looking hesitant, and knocked on his window. He rolled it down, wondering what she wanted.

"Do you know a Patricia Wilson? I'm sorry to bother you, but my friends and I were supposed to catch a ride with her today and she said she drove a white Hyundai with Virginia plates YDF-7654. Maybe it was a typo on the email."

For a minute, he was confused. Then, it hit him - and her - at the same time.

"You must be Pat-rick Wilson!"

"You must be Col-leen Kennedy!"

An awkward silence followed as they considered the ramifications. Should she and her friends ride with this complete stranger? Could he trust her not to be the front-gal for a carjacking ring?

She decided. She tossed her flame red curly hair, shrugged her shoulders and called her friends over from their respective cars.

Out came a beautiful Asian woman, dressed in a prim little business skirt and blouse and wearing satin-sheen pumps. That must be Sui-Chen. A lady. Well, he didn't know Chinese.

Out came a lovely, tall black woman in a lavender dress and red pumps. Ladonna.

Sui-Chen and Ladonna slid into the back seat of his car and Colleen took the front.

A few spatters of rain had begun to fall, so they were in just in time. The combined fragrance of their perfume blended like a garden of flowers in the confinement of the car and he drank it in appreciatively. This would be a very nice drive, or so he thought.

Scarcely had they hit the expressway before Colleen was rooting in her purse for something. A tinge of anger rose in him when he saw she held a box of Marlboro cigarettes.

"No smoking in my car, please," he said. "It's brand new."

Colleen had a cigarette now in her hand and her lighter in the other.

"What?"

She seemed genuinely shocked.

"You did not write in your email no smoking," chimed in Sui-Chen from the back.

Was that some non-verbalized slug rule?

"It's an hour ride into the city," said Colleen. "I need a cigarette or two along the way. It won't kill you. We'll get a ride home with someone else. I can see this was a big mistake."

"No smoking in my car," he repeated.

"We outnumber you," said Ladonna. "Unless you plan to dump us out on the middle of the expressway and hear from our lawyers about abduction and endangerment, you'll shut your mouth and let us smoke. One damn hour won't kill you."

Us? The others smoked too?

Colleen flicked her lighter and calmly sucked in a breath of smoke, flaring her cigarette to life with a cherry as red as her hair. She exhaled a pungent stream of smoke with an audible sigh. It spilled from her lips and across the dashboard.

In the back, Ladonna had her own pack of cigarettes out. Colleen leaned back in her seat to light the woman's cigarette for her -- her own cigarette, clenched in her lips, bending perilously close to Patrick's face.

He pretended to ignore the scene, staring out at the rain-wet road and feeling angry and helpless. It was like that time in middle school when a girl, a girl of all things, had knocked the hat off his head and tossed it to a friend, another girl, who tossed it to a friend, and he had seen the pleasure in her eyes at being able to torment him.

Ladonna smoked Kools, menthol. He could tell even within seeing the box, by the powerful puff of smoke she expelled purposefully in his direction - burning mint leaves from hell, it seemed.

Maybe that would be it.

But then he heard a giggle and saw Sui Chen with a slender Capri in her lips, trying to light it with the cherry on Ladonna's cigarette.

She succeeded and began to sip in the smoke from her narrow cigarette. A Capri - there wouldn't be much smoke from that, he guessed.

But Sui Chen kept inhaling. Lord, the woman must be all lungs. When finally she wrapped her pale fingers around her cigarette and lowered it from her lips, a long ash had already formed, which she casually knocked off onto the floor, since her window was closed.

"Watch out for that cardboard box in the road," she said, leaning close to his face to deliver that message but using her vantage point to exhale the longest, narrowest stream of smoke he had ever seen directly in his face. He could feel the very heat of the fresh smoke and the force of her lungs pushing it forward. It was potent but surprisingly sweet.

"Don't make the little man crash," said Ladonna.

Colleen up front had already taken another puff from her Marlboro and noisily exhaled.

"Damn, that feels good. A cig's a woman's best friend."

"You're gonna get cancer and die," he grumbled.

"I suppose," she said. "My little lungs are just like charcoal briquets. Tough for you that yours will be too, after today."

He stole a glance at her. She had such pretty green eyes, such beautiful red hair, such a fetching, freckled, girlish complexion - like a country maiden out of an Irish folk tale. She sealed her lips around her cigarette like she was trying to squeeze it to death and inhaled like she was afraid to breathe without a cigarette being involved.

Ladonna was beautiful, too, heir to the best of Africa's genes, and he realized suddenly how beautiful was the contrast between her smooth brown skin and the white cigarette against her lips and the pale smoke that drifted up into her dark hair. When she inhaled, she closed her eyes and drew it in like the caress of a lover.

Little Sui-Chen with her slender Capri - she looked like a school girl, like an exchange student, a naughty Chinese exchange student who had no business smoking. She sipped her smoke, barely seeming to inhale, but that was deceptive, for she seemed to be able to hold more smoke in her lungs than the other two women combined. And she would play with it, licking her tongue around her lips, expelling smoke in a tight corkscrew curl, even shaping tiny rings.

His anger was beginning to fade. They were right. One day wouldn't kill him, although his lungs and eyes were burning. And he had never realized how beautiful, how feminine, how graceful, how sexy, a woman smoking could be.

He had never realized that there was an art to it, an individual style - Colleen's casual puffs, Ladonna's powerful surges, Sui-Chen's mystical twists.

Neither had he realized the intimacy of female friendship. They brushed each other's hair, shared their lipstick and giggled over some "Sex and the City" rerun they had watched last night. After her second cigarette, Sui-Chen seemed so relaxed that she laid her head on Ladonna's shoulder, and Ladonna tenderly touched her hair and smiled like a mother with a child.

They were going to 4586 Wisconsin Avenue, a block from where he worked. They were almost there now. Measured in cigarettes, that was two each. He pulled up to the door of the business.

He had an hour to think, and to appreciate, and to ponder his next words.

"I'm sorry I was so rude," he said, surprising even himself with this change of heart. "I didn't actually mind the drive . or your smoking . like I thought I would. How about I take you all home this afternoon and we try this again tomorrow?"

The women looked at each other and giggled, like girls.

"I think we whupped him," said Ladonna.

He smiled weakly.

Colleen could not hide the triumph in her green eyes - nor pushing for another victory. "Sounds fine to me. How about you treat us all to dinner on the way home?"

He nodded, then watched them walk away, into their office building, so pretty, so healthy, so feminine, so strong. He was buzzing with secondhand nicotine. His hands were shaking on the steering wheel. He pulled into a parking lot and breathed in what was left of the smoke in his car. He pulled out one of Colleen's spent Marlboros from the ashtray and kissed the bitter brown tar stain upon the filter and then pressed the faint lipstick mark against his mouth, imagining her soft lips so recently lingering on the tube of paper. He could see the faint indentation in the seat where her lovely bottom had rested and he rubbed his hand across it, feeling the heat of her body still upon it. An impossibly long red hair lay twisted upon the seat and he gently picked it up and kissed it, thinking of the beautiful head from which it had been brushed loose.

He moved to the back and kissed the warmth where Sui-Chen's petite prettiness had been sitting, and found the two butts she had crushed out upon the floor, darkly stained with lipstick, even indented with her sharp little teeth. He kissed those bite marks, imagining those teeth biting down hard upon his fingers, his ears, his lips, in the passion of love. He imagining caressing the day's strain out of her shoulders and kissing her tiny toes, small but strong enough to firmly flatten the cigarettes she smoked.

He found a crumpled gum wrapper that Ladonna had dropped on her side and he inhaled the minty fragrance and pictured again her mighty exhales, pale against her rich, dark skin, and imagined wrestling with her on a hot summer night and feeling her body pressing him down and kissing those lips and tasting the fresh menthol on her breath as their bodies locked together.

The girls were waiting outside when he pulled up that afternoon - that afternoon that had taken forever to end. Pat had a surprise for them:

He had placed a carton of Marlboro's on the front seat for Colleen and a carton of Kools and Capris, respectively, in each seat in the back, along with the most expensive Italian lighters he could find, a long-stemmed rose and a genuine Gucci handbag each, just perfect for carrying anything.

Especially cigarettes.

That and the restaurant he had chosen would pretty much wipe out his paycheck this week.

But as Colleen, then Ladonna, then Sui Chen fired up their cigarettes and filled up his car with fragrant fumes all over again, he breathed deep of the nicotiney haze and decided a plasma television set could wait a while.