Another city, another motel. Drab furniture, drab service, drab life.

He sat in his room and clicked the television channels until he couldn’t stand it anymore.

This was not the life he had imagined for himself as a traveling salesman. He had pictured excited clients, big deals, and travels to places exotic and grand.

Pocatello ? Peoria ? Not his dream.

He had never been so tired, so miserable, so lonely.

Resolved to drink himself to death rather than endure another day, he left his lodgings and began to walk down the litter-strewn street towards the city. He passed a little park with a pond – almost passed it, that is. For something, someone, caught his eye.

It was a woman, a goddess of a woman in a white dress, standing by the water’s edge.

Before he realized it, his feet had left the road and he was standing next to a gazebo a few feet from the water. The woman turned and looked at him and suddenly his every sense awoke. She was a willowy redhead with a dusting of freckles across the creamy smoothness of her face. Her eyes were green, her nose small but pert, her lips soft and womanly, and her limbs lithe and supple -- the curves of her figure teasingly hinted at under the thin fabric of her dress.

“Hello,” she said, and smiled.

“Hello,” he said, and his voice broke.

“Will you hold my shoes?” she asked.

So it wasn’t the typical thing to ask a stranger. But he was under a spell and she could have asked him to do anything without surprising him.

“I want to wade,” she explained.

And she bent down and slipped off her white dressy sandals and held them out to him and he took them gingerly in his hands and felt an incredible urge to hold them to his face and bury them in kisses, strap to sole.

Sandals secured, she stepped into the water and shivered as its coldness wrapped around her feet and calves.

He stood entranced, holding her shoes, one naughty finger tracing the warmed leather of the sole where her bare foot had so recently resided.

A minute passed or maybe an hour as she waded and he waited.

Finally she turned around and smiled and he realized suddenly that he loved this woman more than he had ever loved a woman before, even if logic and reason could provide no explanation.

She stepped up onto the grass and held out her hand for her sandals. Instead, he knelt before her, took her right foot in his hand and gently eased the shoe onto it, then did the same for the other. The feel of her warm foot in his hands, the soft skin, the delicate bones beneath – it was indescribably delicious.

She walked to the gazebo, a bit of a breeze catching the fabric of her dress and toying with it. Wordlessly, he followed.

She caught the fabric beneath her in a most ladylike manner and sat down and tapped the bench to indicate that he should sit beside her.

His heart was racing, his soul was burning, his miserable life utterly forgotten.

From some invisible pocket in her dress she withdrew a small box – a package of the newest thing on the market for ladies -- Virginia Slims cigarettes. Chris thanked all the gods that he had failed in his vow to quit and had retained his lighter. He held it up and touched the flame to her cigarette. She leaned in, concentrating, her lips clamped tight around the filter, her green eyes narrowed in anticipation of the coming smoke. She inhaled and the red tobacco glowed to fiery life as she pulled the smoke into her lungs, deep, deep, deep, as if she feared never being allowed another inhale again.

She fastened her eyes upon him and opened her mouth and exhaled. From her soft, full lips the white smoke streamed out, spicy as a spritz of holiday cinnamon, sweet and hot as the breath of a cotton candy machine at the fair, heady as a shot of tequila. It hit his face with all the force of a little hurricane and surrounded him, thick and strong and rich. He drank it in, relishing how her body had taken this smoke in, mingled it with her own sweet breath, and changed mere smoke into something much more sensual and unique. He had been several hours without nicotine now, and even though her body had absorbed most of what her drag offered, what it let go was strong enough to suffuse and sweetly intoxicate him.

“I was going to kill myself today,” she said. “I was going to walk out into that pond and drown myself.”

He was stunned. What? This ethereal beauty, this goddess?

She lifted her cigarette to her lips again, drank down the smoke again and held it inside for at least three seconds while he struggled with the impact of those awful words. Then she opened her mouth again, turned her head to look at the water and expelled a long, tight stream that went on forever, drifting away into the spring breeze. He felt jealous of the zephyr.

“I’m not happy,” she said. “Or I wasn’t. Nothing’s worked out for me in this town. I made a bad mistake here a few years ago and no one will let me live it down. I just need to get away. Then you walked past. And you stopped. And you came down. And I could feel that you were different. I can’t explain it. You love me, don’t you?”

She tapped the ash of her cigarette onto the gazebo floor.

“I was gonna drink myself to death,” Chris said. “Guess misery’s all the rage these days. Yes, I love you. Love you enough to smash this town to splinters with my bare fists to get you out of it.”

She took another drag, again amazing him with the massive amount of smoke she pulled into herself each time. He had never know a woman who relished smoking so intently – or a woman who seemed less likely to be a smoker in the first place.

He touched her cheek softly and she looked into his eyes. He could see that hers were wet. He cupped her small chin in his hands, feeling an insanely powerful urge to get on his knees and propose to this gorgeous creature and take her away forever from this awful town.

She exhaled her smoke – so sweet, so fragrant, so alluring – and he leaned in through the stream and their lips met as the last of the exhale escaped her.

He dropped to his knees.

“I don’t know your name but will you marry me?”

Softly she answered, “Yes.” She dropped her cigarette to the gazebo floor and crushed it out beneath those beautiful white sandals of hers. He picked up the snow-white butt with its golden band and its tip stained with the pink gloss of her lips and he kissed it where her lips had held it and he carefully tucked it into his pocket.

“Something to remember from our first date together,” he explained. “And something to remind me always of you if ever I have to leave your side.”

“Don’t ever,” she said. “Take me with you.”

They watched the sun set in the spring-greening trees beyond the pond. He held her fragile hand and she snuggled close beside him and smoked another cigarette and they kissed through the smoke like silly teenagers and she showed off her ability to blow half a dozen smoke rings, execute a perfect French inhale, shape her tongue to form a perfect corkscrew exhale and even blast an award-worthy twin stream from her nose like some beautiful dragon goddess.

“I spent my last ten bucks on these cigarettes,” she said. “Stupid, eh?” She tossed her empty pack out onto the grass.

“I’ve got ten bucks,” he said. “And more in the bank. Let’s find a justice of the peace and I’ll buy you a fresh carton on our honeymoon. And then a million more.”

She drew in the last deep puff of the last cigarette of her pack, inhaling forever as if to suck every atom of smoke possible from the tobacco. She held it in her lungs until it seemed as if she had decided not to bother exhaling. Then she suddenly pulled his face to hers and pressed her lips to his lips and pushed his mouth open with her tongue and then exhaled her smoke into him and he drank it all in, hot and strong from her lungs – a shared pleasure, even a consummation of sorts.

A rational, logical outsider would have found this whole episode ridiculous. But every so often in the history of the world, a man and a woman meet and they know from the outset that they are meant to be. Chris and Stephanie did marry that spring of 1968 and they returned to that very park, though the gazebo was long gone, to celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary this year. They sat on the grass and he lit her a Virginia Slims and they cuddled together like kids as the smoke drifted away on the breeze.