Sharing a smoke
Published by charming, but single on 7.18.2006 at 7/18/2006 06:24:00 PM.
From CBS: Probably not the details y'all were hoping for ...
“Does anyone have a cigarette?”
The Nurse tapped his fingers on my knee and asked his question again, this time to me directly.
“You don’t smoke,” I said, the words floating playfully from my mouth.
His friend agreed with me. The Nurse got a devilish grin on his face and the tapping became more intense.
“She doesn’t either,” he told his friend, motioning to me with a nod. “But look, I’m sure she has some.”
He squeezed the back of my neck, just below my hairline, seeing my playfulness and raising it with a smug grin.
I set aside the leather flap on my hobo purse so he could see inside, proud to prove him wrong.
“Sure don’t,” I beamed as he peered into my straw bag and around my lipsticks and cell phone and compact. I rubbed his knee as to punctuate my smirk.
The friend passed a single Marlboro Red across the wooden table top and I moved closer to him on the corner bench. I watched The Nurse light the cigarette and take a long, slow drag, enjoying it like a smoker who only reluctantly quit because he, like me, was too smart to start to smoke in the first place. He paused to let tendrils of smoke swirl out through his pink lips and rise upward to the ceiling and his hand grasped my knee tightly.
“You want?”
I looked up from the cool brown bottle and nodded and he slid his hand over to my mouth, touching the cigarette to my shiny lips as it balanced between two of his fingers. I took it between them. It felt sexy and intimate to breathe in the smoke through his hand. Almost warmer than the quick peck we shared when I found him at the bar, when our bodies had barely touched, but I could feel his hand almost rest against the brown fabric of the shirt covering my stomach.
Taking a drag felt like the beginning of intense, teasing foreplay and the small bit of nicotine I allowed myself went straight to my brain and I felt clouds moving in like before an afternoon rain shower.
The fingers from his other hand drumming on my leg quieted the voices in my head that chided me for dabbling in the nasty habit I’d worked to quit.
I let my hand graze his arm as I pushed it aside, tilted my head away and shot him a sideways glance, our eyes meeting in a shared stare.
