For six days straight, it had rained. It was a soft, clammy, icky sort of rain, more of a chilly mist than real rain. Sam hated it, nonetheless. He hated Washington State, hated having to move here in the middle of the school year, hated all the stupid kids at his new school. Some junior year!

But yesterday, the rain had stopped. The mud was drying up under a hot sun. And without the drizzle to mask it, Sam savored the scent of the fir trees that lined the long road from his house.

He listened to the sound of his own footsteps crunching through the dirt and gravel, and tried to identify the source of a funny little chirping in the brush. Maybe a chickadee. Sam considered himself almost an expert on bird calls. Unfortunately, the merits of that talent were lost on the jerks at this new school. If you didn't play ball, you were officially a loser.

He rounded the corner of the road, reaching the split rail fence that served as a bus stop.

He almost cried out in shock. He held back just in time to preserve his dignity, for the stranger who had surprised him was a girl, a blonde slip of a girl. A teenager, certainly, maybe even about his age.

And she was sitting there, casually, atop the rail fence, swinging her thin legs, which were bare because she was wearing denim shorts - and she was smoking!

Or at least, she was holding a cigarette in her fingers, a long white cigarette from which a curl of smoke twisted and turned. He could smell the strong smell of the tobacco, something totally unfamiliar to his world.

His heart pounded and his brain reeled from the bizarre contradiction. She looked like an angel. An avalanche of golden hair poured over her narrow shoulders and framed her slightly freckled face. She was . beautiful. The purest, loveliest, friendliest, most divine looking creature he had ever seen.

So what was she doing with a cigarette? In Sam's black and white view of the world, a cigarette shared shelf space with people robbing banks and shooting up heroin.

"Hi," she said. "I'm Angel."

Had she said that? Of course she was.

Sam had never been in love before. Had never paid or been paid much attention to by the girls around him, although maybe he had LIKE liked some of them.

But he heard the three words this goddess had said to him and they fluttered around his head like butterflies.

Now he watched, forgetting to breathe, as Angel lifted that cigarette to her lips, wrapped them around it, half closed her eyes and sucked in.

The cigarette tip glowed and the cigarette itself rose gently upwards like a finger being lifted in warning.

Suddenly, she parted her lips and exhaled, propelling a jet of thick, white smoke into the air before her.

Sam remembered to breathe just as he reached the verge of passing out. He ducked his eyes, embarrassed to have been staring. But she didn't seem to care.

She flicked a little ash from her cigarette and continued her introduction.

"I live up the road. Go to your school. I saw you on the bus the other day. You're new. It's not too far for me to walk here from my regular stop. Thought you might appreciate some company."

This gorgeous girl had walked down here to see him? Sam the bird-loving loser?

She took another drag off her cigarette. In the quiet of the morning, he could distinctly her the soft sound of her lips sealing shut on a mouthful of smoke, then the deep sigh of her breath as she exhaled a plume.

"Umm, yeah, I'm new," he said. His mind was still racing, trying to fit itself around the incredible fact that this Angel was holding a deadly cigarette in her fingers, that she was smoking it as casually as she might suck on a lollipop, that she knew how to inhale smoke into her body and blow it back out, that she didn't seem at all concerned about doing this very wicked thing.

No girls that he knew smoked. No women either, except that lady who worked in the library. Sometimes he had seen her with a cigarette outside, but she was about as interesting as an azalea bush.

And yet, he was captivated by this smoky, golden-haired Angel, in a strange, powerful way.

"Sit up here and talk to me," she said. "What's your name? What do you like to do?"

He climbed onto the railing beside her, very aware of the sweet, sun-warmed scent of her pretty hair and the pleasant, strong aroma of her burning cigarette. Sam was very sensitive to smells.

"Umm, I like to ." he searched desperately in his mind for something he liked that wasn't nerdy as hell to say.

"I like basketball."

"No, you don't," she said, squinting at him through a haze of smoke. "You're not the basketball type."

How could she know him like that? How could she read his mind?

Her cigarette was growing short. She raised it towards her lips again, and a heavy curl of smoke slithered from the tip and sailed slowly past Sam's face. Her lips seemed to stretch slightly as she opened them to hold the cigarette, and he could see, from his close-up new vantage point, that they puckered a little as she clenched them tightly around the filter, and that they trembled a little from the exertion. Was it that hard to inhale?

As she dragged in the smoke through the cigarette, it glowed fiercely again and he could see the white paper behind the hot coal burning away. The smoke that had been trickling from the tip had stopped, all being diverted into her mouth.

Pop.

She plucked the cigarette from her lips. For a moment, he saw her mouth full of white smoke. Then it vanished down her throat.

She opened her mouth and exhaled, and the smoke spilled like sweet incense out of her lips and surrounded Sam - fragrant, pleasant, and tingly in his mouth and nose. She did not seem to care. He did not mind. He inhaled the secondhand fumes spit from the mouth of this goddess and wished he never had to breathe them back out again.

"Do you smoke?" she asked, offering him the cigarette. He shook his head. He wasn't ready for that.

"I like smoking," she said. "I come out when it's quiet and walk along and have a cigarette. Nothing much else to do around here."

"You don't hang out with the kids from school?"

"Hell, no. Ignorant creeps. I told some jackass one time that I actually like to read, real books, and I like to have never heard the end of it. Like I was some little prissy nerd or something. Hell. I read, a friggin lot, and who the "h" are they to diss me for it?"

"I like birdwatching," Sam burst out.

She fixed her baby blues on him for a moment, studying him carefully, ascertaining his veracity. "Yeah, you do," she said. "That rocks. We should hang out. I could like that, too."

She leaned down suddenly from the fence, pursed her lips and spit on the ground. Then she examined the nub of her cigarette, took one last puff and dropped it. Again, her exhale blew across Sam's face and he drank it in like sweet water.

She leaped down from the fence and stepped firmly on the cigarette, rocking her sandaled foot back and forth to flatten it out.

"Bus is coming, Sammy boy. Sit with me. Protect me from the jackasses."

He followed her in a haze of leftover smoke and love, enraptured by the way her hips shimmied in those tight shorts, each curve of her bottom shifting in turn as she stepped through the gravel and mud towards the bus.

Protect her? Hell. He would kill the first jerk that so much as snickered at her. With his bare hands.

There she sat, a trespasser in his secret spot. And he was angry, but only for a moment. He didn't own this little nook behind the big stump just off school grounds. And she was beautiful.

He knew her, Emily -- knew her from way back, had watched her grow up and fill out and slip into the orbit of the in-crowd and leave him forever behind. She was deeply desirable, with a fine curvy figure and waves of red hair that plunged past her shoulders and bounced down her back. She was also utterly unattainable. Somehow, she had managed to avoid the smear campaigns that usually plagued drop-dead gorgeous high school girls. Supposedly, one girl had tried to spread such a rumor, long ago, and Emily had beat the crap out of her AND the boy who had claimed the conquest.

You didn't mess with Emily.

But someone had, apparently. For this lovely spit-fire was sitting here, on the old chair he had stolen from the school and dragged to this place, and she was crying. Just sniffling, mind you, but definitely dropping tears.

In every boy's life, there is one magic moment, one quick-to-pass episode which burns into his brain and fuels his fantasies for the rest of his existence. Henry was about to have that moment.

Emily looked up as a branch cracked under his foot. The girl who never spoke a word to him, who never acknowledged his presence on the planet, now pointed to the log beside her. Henry walked over and sat down.

"What happened?" he asked.

"Health class happened," she said. He remembered that class today. All that talk about the social consequences of smoking. He hadn't paid much attention, since he didn't smoke.

"Your breath will stink. No one will date you. Your only friends will be other smokers -- if you can find them," Mr. Pugly had vowed.

Emily smoked. Henry knew that. So Pugly's words had hit her hard. That stupid old man!

Much, much later, when he was a grown man himself and thought back on this day, Henry would realize that for one brief moment, the casual confidence that helped Emily hang with the cool kids, had faltered. She was teetering,confronted with a direct challenge to her charisma. She smoked, therefore, Pugly had said, she was ugly. She liked smoking and therefore was trapped.

"Pugly doesn't know a damn thing," Henry said, hating the man.

Emily just looked at him, those green eyes shining.

"I can't quit. I started smoking six months ago and I can't quit. Everyone will hate me now."

"That's b.s.," Henry said. "Every damn guy in the school would kiss the dirt off your shoes if he could. Every damn guy in the school has the hots for you and who gives a $%^ if you smoke cigarettes? Lots of girls smoke. Brittany Spears smokes, so does Lindsay Lohan and Madonna and a bunch of other hot chicks."

Emily scrubbed moisture from her cheek.

"It makes your breath stink. It's like kissing an ashtray,"she said.

"B.s, b.s., b.s," said Henry.

They sat quietly for a moment. Then she leaned forward and withdrew a long white cigarette from her purse. Henry caught his breath. Something magical was about to happen.

She lit the cigarette and inhaled a deep breath. Then she blew a stream of smoke out before her and licked her lips. She took another drag, exhaled again.

"Is it bad?" she asked.

Was what bad? His mind raced. Her breath. She wanted to know if smoking made her breath ghastly. He leaned close to her, his heart pounding in his chest, his mouth inches from hers. She blew a stream of warm breath across his face and he drank it in like water.

"No-oh,"he croaked.

When he thought back on what happened next, he couldn't remember -- had he leaned forward or had she? Suddenly their lips met. Her mouth felt soft and warm and alive against his -- her lips were firm and full and they tasted of bubble gum and sweet, sweet smoke. And for just one delicious second, he could feel the tip of her tongue, hot and wet, glide against his mouth.

Then she broke the spell. She pulled away, for he was helpless to move. They sat in silence.

She remembered her cigarette, took one final puff, then flicked it away. Immediately, she plucked a fresh one out of her purse.

He watched in amazement as she balanced the tube of tobacco in her lips, using one dexterous, slender little hand, while crumpling the now empty cigarette pack in the other and tossing it vaguely in the direction of a bush.

Litterbug! Sweet, sexy rebel without a cause!

He watched enraptured as she touched a flame to the tip, hollowed her cheeks and sucked in suddenly, deeply, dragging in a lungful of thick smoke.

The cigarette arced swiftly upwards like a trodden snake, bobbing in her lips as she inhaled.

For one second, two, three, she held the smoke deep down inside her lungs, letting it deliver the most powerful nicotine punch possible to her body.

Then, distinctly in the stillness he heard the sighing sound of her exhale, watched the smoke spew from her lips and scatter across the shadowy clearing -- a tight, narrow stream that silently thinned into a smoky haze.

She licked her lips and smiled.

She looked so damn awesome!

“I don’t care what Pugly says! You look hot with a cigarette,” he said, feeling the burn rise to his face as his thoughts burst unexpectedly into words. Emily looked at him. He looked at her. He was trembling. He tried to force his knees to resume their previously solid status.

She could tell. Oh, she could tell. She knew she was burning him down just like her cigarette. Pugly’s warning was wafting away like her exhaled smoke, before the physical evidence of a smoking woman’s true appeal.

She lifted the cigarette to her lips again without breaking her gaze at him. He could see the very corrugations in the burning tobacco, see the golden brand letters on the filter, see a tiny, tiny freckle on the edge of her lip, see the glistening of the moisture at the edges of her mouth.

He watched her lips clamp down, squeezing the filter and mashing tight around it, sealing shut as she dragged in another mouthful of smoke. As her lungs began to work, dragging in the reluctant smoke, the cigarette tip glowed fiercely in its resistance but she only drew harder, pulling the smoke into her body, forcing it in, needing it in, wanting the rush of it deep within herself.

One second. Two. Three. Four. Five. How much smoke could one girl inhale?

He distinctly heard the pop, like a little cork pulled from the embrace of a bottle, as she plucked the cigarette free and her lips came together. He saw the cottony smoke-ball swish around her tongue and teeth before vanishing down her throat. He imagined her lungs, still pink, imagined the tar sifting down through the smoke deep inside of her to stain them, imagined the nicotine rushing into her blood and surging on a pleasure wave through every cell in her body.

One second. Two. Three. Four. Five. How long could she hold it?

Then it happened.

Still staring directly at him, she narrowed her eyes, opened her mouth and breathed out, aiming directly at his face, watching to make sure that her smoke stream struck him head-on.

He could feel the hot wind of her exhale as it hit his nose and mouth. His own air vanished in a pungent cloud of tobacco fumes that boiled around his face and burned into his nostrils and bit into his eyes.

One second. Two. Three. Four. Five.

He’d been around smokers before, caught the occasional whiff on the breeze. But never, ever, had he experienced this - a straight blast of undiluted, second-hand smoke still hot from the cigarette, filtered only by her lungs and mingled with her own precious breath and practically spit into his face.

Her eyes never left his. Her lips softly shut as the last of the smoke spilled forth. His heart surged in his chest, his knees gave up and he sank down to the ground, trying desperately not to faint. He willed away the stars that were sparkling in front of him.

Be cool. Be cool, he reminded himself, awkwardly trying to convert his slump into a sitting position.

She still hadn’t said a word. But, somewhere up there, she was watching this comedy show.

His right elbow collapsed and his face hit the dirt. He could see before him her beautiful, painted toes, the glitter of one toe ring, could smell the leather of her sandals, close enough to kiss.

Suddenly, her cigarette was dropping, hitting the ground in front of him. He could see the brown tar circle on the filter and the hint of her sparkly lip gloss. It smoked and smouldered in front of his face, strong and sharp, so close that he could almost feel the heat. He could see indentations where her girlish teeth had bitten down upon it.

Get up, dammit, he ordered himself, unsuccessfully.

Like a very shapely piston, her leg rose, just high enough to lift the edge of her sandal above the burning cigarette. Helpless as a bug, it lay before its doom and he lay watching an inch away as she stepped firmly on it, pressing down and twisting her ankle as if she were snuffing out a spider, crushing the molten cherry into a smear of ash.

One second. Two. Three. Four. Five.

Then her foot rose again. As disdainfully as a duchess, she arched her sandal and swung it his direction. He was transfixed. She wouldn’t!

She did. She pressed her sandal against his lips and rubbed off the dirt and ash from the sole as calmly as if his face were a carpet.

She had regained her confidence. His words and his actions had hit their mark. And with that in-his-face exhale and that cruel bit of clean-up she had hit her own mark -- relegated him back to his place and perhaps, just perhaps, said “thank you” at the same time.

She walked away, out of his life, swaying sweetly in her tight blue jeans.

It was a good half-hour before he felt strong enough to get up and walk home. He knew she would never speak to him again. He knew he dared not ever speak to her, or to anyone, of that moment in the woods.

But geek, nerd, whatever he might be, he had had the moment of a lifetime. And he had a crushed-out, 1999 vintage Benson and Hedges in an Altoids box in his bedroom to remind him.

And imprinted deep on his brain was the indelible lesson that a woman’s kiss should always taste of smoke. And smokers he would date and a smoker he would marry, helpless to change his own mind in the matter.