George Higginbottle was a lonely, nervous man, prone to stutter and stumble all over his words, especially when a lady was involved. He found his only solace in tending his tidy yard, carefully planting the right flowers for each season and keeping the place tidy as Martha Stewart's table-top.

So he had no idea why on earth he had responded to the ad in the back of the Sunday paper:

"History tutor wanted for fall semester for active teen. Will pay well."

Higginbottle had no particular love for teens. He didn't need the money, certainly not. Perhaps he hoped he might encourage some diligent young person to follow his educational passion. After all, he had read Gibbon and Herodotus both before he was 15.

But as the moment the student was supposed to show up drew nearer, he began to feel even more nervous. What if this turned out to be some punk like the ones who snickered at him at the mall? Backwards-ball caps and baggy jeans. He groaned out loud. He picked up the phone. He would call and cancel. That would be best.

He was too late. A car pulled up and two people stepped out: a beautiful blonde and a version of her about three years younger. The young one was sulking and pouty and angry. The older one, about eighteen he guessed, was smoking a cigarette. A cigarette! Higginbottle shuddered. He would tell them to leave. He couldn't deal with this. The girls started up his walkway. The young one, lagging behind, he distinctly observed kick at a chrysanthemum he had planted. Then she waded into the flowers and stomped them.

"Get the hell out of there!" the older girl shouted. She grabbed the young one's arm and practically dragged her up the steps -- but not before taking a last puff of her cigarette and flicking it still burning into Higginbottle's much-abused flowers.

Then the doorbell rang. Higginbottle ducked down from his spy-seat near the window and opened the door with a heavy heart.

"Hello, I'm Kristina Bellows and this is my stupid little sister Karen," said the older girl. Higginbottle just stood there. In the sheltered foyer, he could still smell the slight fragrance of the smoke the girl had just exhaled, and they were standing close enough to him that he could smell it on her breath.

Strangely, it was a pleasant scent, mysteriously alluring, although he had hated smokers all his life. What alien had possessed his brain this week? She was breathing hard, in the exertion of dragging her sister up the steps, and her breasts, the nipples clearly visible through the thin fabric of her halter top, rose and fell fetchingly, each time delivering that scent of smoke that was tugging at him deep inside.

"Well, you gonna let us in? What a freak," Karen said.

"You better shut your damn mouth, you little monster," said Kristina. "If you fail your history class, Dad'll beat your little butt till you whimper like a baby."

Higginbottle stepped back from the door and the girls breezed in.

"Um, have a seat," he said, gesturing at his coffee-table. They sat. Karen swung her bare legs and sneakered feet up onto the glass top, giving him a glimpse of a murdered chrysanthemum petal trapped under her sole. She snapped her gum noisily.

"Get your feet down," Kristina hissed. The girl ignored her.

"I'll get you both something to drink," said Higginbottle, remembering his manners.

"A beer," said Karen. "A Coke, for both of us," said her sister.

He reemerged with the drinks and handed one to each girl. Karen's hands were shaking as she took the glass. Was her sister driving her that crazy, he wondered.

She leaned over and dug something out of her purse, a glossy box. Cigarettes! She held the box in her hand, drumming it against her palm, while she fished out her lighter.

She was going to smoke without even asking permission! Had she forgotten where she was -- in a stranger's non-smoking house, with no ashtray in sight?

Karen noticed, with malicious amusement. She watched him watching her sister.

Kristina slipped a cigarette out of the pack and held it in her fingers. Then, with a quick motion like a baby jerking some toy it has found to its mouth, she raised the little cylinder to her lips and opened them just enough to poke the tip in, balancing it there. A flick of her finger and a flame leaped into life on her lighter. She half-closed her eyes, concentrating on touching the flame to just the right spot on the cigarette while her cheeks hollowed as she drew in a breath. In the silence of his house, the lighter click sounded like pebbles grinding, her inhale almost seeming like the rustle of wind across fall leaves, the pop of her lips as she completed her draw and lowered the cigarette like a kid slurping on a Crush bottle some long-ago summer day.

Then she exhaled. Her breasts seemed to push the smoke up out of her lungs and it spilled out her mouth in a creamy cloud that tumbled through the living room air and spread through the room.

Higginbottle felt like he was floating away somewhere...

"Higginbottle sat, still as a stone, unblinking, transfixed, as the expanding cloud of smoke that had spilled from Kristina's lips now drifted across the room. It almost seemed timid, exploring this virgin air where cigarette smoke had never been before.

Now the slowly-thinning, seductively spinning cloud reached him, swirled softly around him. It burned his eyes, making them water. It touched his nose like a smoky finger and he, who had been unconsciously holding his breath, suddenly inhaled.

For perhaps the first time in his sheltered life, cigarette smoke, secondhand smoke, crossed the threshold of his lips. He felt a rising panic. Tar, nicotine, benzopyrene -- he was being EXPOSED!

But every deadly molecule of this smoke was intimately hers -- had been hungrily sucked into her mouth, tasted on her tongue, swallowed down her throat, absorbed into the wet darkness of her lungs. The moistness of her young lips, the dampness of her little pink tongue -- her own hallowed girlish saliva -- had cooled off this hot smoke and mingled with it in the sweet stream that she had blithely exhaled.

He inhaled deeply, fighting the dizziness and the urge to cough that was strangling him.

They were talking to him. He swam up from his reverie and forced himself to listen.

"So how much?" Kristina was saying. She was still holding her half-smoked cigarette, between those fingers with their perfectly manicured little nails.

Like a mother spanking a mischievous child, her fingers smacked against the side of the cigarette, tapping off a dusting of spent ash onto his antique coffee table. She raised it to her lips again, opened them again in that captivating little "O" and captured the trembling cigarette, sucking on it heavily and sending its burning cherry into a spasm of fiery orange fierceness.

He saw her throat working to swallow the smoke, watched spellbound as it rose again and her mouth opened and she gustily exhaled.

"You okay?" she said.

He fought to compose himself. "Um, ten dollars a tutoring session. I specialize in English and history."

Long forgotten lovely little Karen grunted. "I hate English."

"Then that's what you'll study with Mr. Higginbottle," Kristina said, standing up suddenly. "Your grades have been crap this year."

"I'll drop her off twice a week for an hour," Kristina said. "Maybe you can keep her from flunking out of school."

"Can I have a cigarette before you go?" Karen asked.

"No, you may not," Kristina said. She dropped her own cigarette on Higginbottle's heartwood pine floor and stepped on it, one little press with the tips of her pumps-clad toes.

"Were you raised in a barn?" Karen said. "Did you ask the guy whether he wanted you to throw your stupid cigarette on his floor?"

For the first time, Kristina seemed to realize that she had even been smoking.

Higginbottle seized the moment. "Your sister Kristina," he said, trying to keep his voice from shaking like some kid, "seems like a fine young woman. She may smoke here anytime she wants. I shall provide an ashtray in future, like a proper gentleman would have. My floor surely sustained no lasting damage from her application of a cigarette end to its surface."

"Yeah, whatever," Karen said. "Can we get this tutoring over with? I'm supposed to meet Treshanda at the mall in an hour."

"I'll be back for you then," Kristina said, bending to scoop up her cigarette. Higginbottle touched her hand. "I'll get it," he said. "See you in an hour."

"I gotta pee," Karen announced. "Where's your bathroom?"

"Down the hall, take a left," Higginbottle said. "We'll go over your English assignments when you get back."

He showed Kristina to the door, drinking in the lovely sight of her and rejoicing that twice weekly he would be able to repeat this experience.

"Ten dollars isn't much," she said, as she stepped through the door. She smiled at him. "Thanks, by the way."

Then she turned and walked away, her fetching little rump swaying most desirably in her tight blue jeans.

Higginbottle returned to his living room. From down the hall he could distinctly hear the sound of Karen urinating, as she hadn't bothered to shut the bathroom door.

He sat on the couch where Kristina had so recently been and carefully picked up her cigarette. It was a Satin,long, slim, one end scorched, the other tinged with sparkly pink lipgloss and a neat, dark circle of tar on the filter. He lifted it to his face and inhaled its sweet scent. He kissed the mark of her lipgloss, tasting faint hints of strawberry, then the dark stain on the filter, bitter with nicotine.

He could feel desire pulsing through him, such as he remembered from his youth. He found an empty Altoids box and gently placed the cigarette within it.

The sound of Karen peeing stopped. He heard the whirr of the toilet paper roll as she no doubt wiped the wetness from herself, then the creak as she stood up. No flushing followed.

"Now who's from a barn?" he thought to himself. She emerged, a lovely little creature, wiping her hands on her jeans and smiling at him.

She sat down on the couch beside him, intimately close, making him squirm. He could feel her hip seeming to burn where it was pressed against his.

"So what's so great about English?" she said, tossing her hair.

"We shall find out," he said.

"Lordie, I could use a cigarette," she said.

"You're too young to smoke," he said.

"I'm fifteen. I know how to smoke," she said.

He looked at her, feeling his heart pound as he prepared his words.

"If you have decided to smoke," he said, "who am I to impede you? In fact, I find it a most ladylike and grown-up occupation. You may smoke here to your heart's content."

"I don't have any cigarettes," she said. "I used to steal 'em from Kristina, but she caught me today and I haven't had a smoke since this morning."

"Make yourself at home. I have some errands to run and shall be back for your tutoring shortly," Higginbottle said.

He returned ten minutes later cradling his little package,still burning from the disgusted look the store clerk had given him. "To think that someone your age would take up smoking," she seemed to be saying."

Ah, but the cigarettes were not for him. He pushed open his door. Karen was sitting there, waiting. He held out the pack of Satins.

"For you," he said. "And I am well off. You shall have a pack of Satins from me every day or any other brand you choose."

"You rock," said the girl, grinning. "Light me up."

He knelt at her knees, shook a cigarette from the pack and held it to her thin young lips. She parted them and gripped the cigarette firmly in her mouth. He struck a match and held the flame to the golden tobacco peeking out of the cigarette. She half closed her eyes, calmped her lips tightly around the filter and drew in a deep breath that hollowed her cheeks against her face. The cigarette flared to life, a bright orange cherry forming on its lit end as she hungrily drew in a deep puff of smoke. She seemed to swallow it down forever, her throat pumping as if she was drinking a soda, the cigarette now seeming to stand stiff in her stretched-tight lips. With a pop that seemed to echo through the room, she suddenly plucked the cigarette away. She opened her mouth, filled with the last of the beautiful white smoke from her long drag, opened it wide as if she were about to bite something.

Then the smoke vanished down her throat.

Without realizing it, he was leaning on her knees, but she didn't seem to mind. She closed her mouth, holding the smoke deep within her lungs for at least two seconds, her face flushing with the exertion, then suddenly opened her mouth and exhaled.

Everything around him disappeared into a cloud of white smoke that was welling up from deep within her and being spit from her lips directly into his face. She steadily exhaled, an endless stream that seemed to have been drawn from the bottommost depths of her lungs, a fantastic puff of smoke that filled every inch of the air around him, that seemed to emerge from her mouth and fill his as thickly as if he'd been dragging off the cigarette himself.

Indeed, he could tell from the burning in his nostrils and throat that he might as well be smoking.

Again, she lifted the cigarette to her lips. She held it just a hair's width from his face, so close that he could feel the heat from the cherry singing his five-o-clock shadow, could feel the change in heat as her lips wrapped around the filter and she inhaled and the cherry glowed with the urgency of her nicotine hunger.

He could see her luminous blue eyes, wide as saucers and close enough to kiss, blinking in the smoke. Could see her delicate flaring nostrils, tickled by the smoke. Could see just a hint of fine, fine down on her lip and the faint lines forming by the exertion of her inhale.

Again,she pulled the cigarette away with a jerk of her fingers and opened her mouth wide. He leaned in, watching her swallow the smoke again, wishing he could follow it down her throat.

Again, she opened her mouth and exhaled, noisily, excessively, wonderfully, drowning him in smoke still hot from her lungs, blowing it into his face as if he were a fire she was trying to put out.

This fire would never go out.

Teasingly, she flicked a bit of ash at him. "Mightn't we better study?"

"Study, yes, let's do," he stammered.

Life, he thought to himself, should consist of beautiful surprises such as this.