The Lovely Lina

The Lovely Lina

    The day that Lina first came into my life seemed at first like any other.
That is not entirely correct. At first, it seemed worse than others. I was
tired, both physically and emotionally. Things were not working out at home.
Things were not going well at work. I was increasingly distracted and
frustrated by the elusiveness of the distractions. I was not where I wanted to
be, not at this stage of my life.

    I was getting worried that there was something wrong with me, too.

    For a long time (I was going to say "for as long as I can remember," but
that wouldn't be accurate; my memories go back, rather clearly, to age two), I
have been entranced by smoking. Women who smoke. Beautiful women and pretty
young girls in particular. I do not know why. I'm not even particularly happy
about it. But that's the way it is.

    One of the most misused words in the English language is "ironic." Like
that stupid Alanis Morisette song that's finally off the radio, "Isn't It
Ironic?" She keeps asking things like "Isn't it ironic that it rained on your
wedding day?" No, it's not ironic at all. It's bad luck. Or coincidence. Not
irony. But here's irony: I am sexually aroused by the sight of a woman
smoking, and physically repulsed by the smell of tobacco smoke. Or at least I
was, until I met Lina.

    My mother used to smoke. I hated it. But I was secretly fascinated by it.
By the notion of someone breathing smoke into her lungs dozens of times a day.
Despite her long-standing habit (she probably started young, because all four
of her older sisters smoked, too) I was made to believe that smoking was bad.
Not just bad for you, but bad. Only bad kids, "dirt bags," we called them,
smoked. That was an easy message to accept when you saw the greasy haired,
pimply faced, denim jacket delinquents smoking cigarettes and harassing
younger kids.

    But when I saw Carrie McGuane smoke, all that bullshit evaporated.

    Carrie was the older sister of my kindergarten best friend, Danny. She was
about four years older than us, so she was nine when I first met her. She was
beautiful. Of course, in our youth, a lot of girls are beautiful, but even in
retrospect, she was a lovely girl. It was two years later that I first saw her
smoking. I was seven, she was eleven and she was hanging out at "the Creek," a
trickle of a stream that was more a storm sewer than anything else, near my
house. She was sitting on a guard rail talking very casually with one of her
friends and they were both smoking. I was stunned, amazed, entranced,
enraptured. To me, she was much older of course, but now I realize how young
she was. And she smoked so freely and casually that it made it seem like she'd
been doing it forever.

    "Hello, Michael," she said, waving her cigarette at me as I walked slowly
by in amazed silence. Then, as if to punctuate her point, she took a long,
slow drag and smiled, exhaling through perfect white teeth.

    If a seven year old could come, I would have. After that, I began noticing
smokers.

    I remember Debbie Vivona and Gina Carrichiola, telling me in fourth grade
about how they were smoking and Debbie's mom caught them.

    I remember Kim Giblin, the leader of the pack of "cool" girls in sixth
grade, with a pack of Marlboros in the pouch pocket of her hooded sweatshirt.
We were giving her a hard time about even having cigarettes (we being the
"jock" guys) which she claimed were her mother's. All her girlfriends, Janet,
Miranda, Nancy and Kelly, came to her defense. Eventually they would all smoke
too. Every one of them. Janet lost 15 pounds after she started and went from
being a plump, friendly girl who had a crush on me into a tiny, sexy babe
entirely out of my league (I thought). Miranda, the brainiest one, started in
eighth grade after a lot of peer pressure from Kim and the gang. I remember my
shock when my friend, Mark, told me that he'd seen her smoking at the pizza
parlor. I went along with the notion of being shocked, but I was secretly
excited by the notion.

    Later, I started leaving Miranda anonymous notes critical of her smoking.
I was in a real paradox period.

    Kelly was the last to start. Kelly was a long-distance runner, a good one
too. She was a gorgeous tall brunette with model-like features. She was also
an airhead which (then) was an asset. I loved talking with Kelly, because it
almost always turned into a Burns & Allen skit. She thought I was a smartest
person in the world. I was very smart, especially in junior high and high
school, but I held no world titles.

    One day, at a party in eleventh grade, I saw Kelly smoking a cigarette. My
heart simultaneously leapt (the fetish) and sank (the Dr. Jekyll part of me).
For the first time ever, I went over and talked to her about it. I wasn't too
judgmental. She explained that she'd been stressed out (she'd quit track after
an injury) and that she just picked one up from one of her friends one day and
tried it.

    At our tenth high school reunion, Kelly was (three kids later) still
smoking. Janet too. Kim had quit. More irony.

    I only dated a smoker once. My senior year, I crawled out of my shell and
tried out (with Mark) to emcee our senior variety show. We won the brief
competition and the show was a great success. The show traditionally consisted
of various groups of students performing sketches, songs, etc. We jazzed
things up some by writing bits to go in between the acts and performing in
them, making it more like a Saturday Night Live Show. It went over very well
and I went from being an unknown quantity honor student soccer player to the
center of attention. I liked the sudden (albeit brief) popularity. At the
post-show party, where I got pretty drunk, all sorts of popular girls were
hanging all over me. Most of them smoked. I was like a kid in a candy store.
But one girl, Marissa, did more than hang on me. She attacked (in a good way)
and I took her home.


    Under normal circumstances (as I was later to find out) Marissa was a very
reserved and moral Catholic girl. But after a few drinks, she underwent a
transformation. She became very sensual, very responsive.

    And, drunk or sober, she smoked. Catholic school and nuns notwithstanding,
Marissa smoked a lot. And as we danced that night of the party, I could smell
the sweet smell in her sweater and taste the slight bitterness on her tongue.
It did not bother me that night and, of course and as usual, it excited me for
some unknown and undisclosed reason.

    The Monday after the party, Marissa was embarrassed by her behavior and
apologized. But told her I liked it and asked her out and we soon became a
couple. I was instantly accepted by her circle of friends (the popular girls,
aka "the popularazzi"), a process made easier by the fact that my old
elementary school pals Kim, Miranda, Nancy, Janet and Kelly were part of the
group.

    These girls knew how to smoke and they didn't give a shit who knew. Sue
and Maura and Amy and Kelly and Kelly and Cindy. It just seemed constant.
Every afternoon, I drove Marissa home and she would light up automatically.
She even had a smoking party at her house once when her parents were away. The
memories of those girls smoking gave me masturbatory material for years to
come. But then something odd happened.

    I started to hate it.

    I started getting annoyed by the smell, by her preoccupation with smoking
rather than sex. By the almost constant presence of her increasingly annoying
and superficial friends.

    It's a shame. I never told Marissa how much of a turn-on smoking was for
me. If you asked her today, she would undoubtedly report that I was a
tremendous anti-smoker. We broke up after the prom. Her relationship with
cigarettes, of course, continued unabated.

    After that experience, I was off smokers as partners for a long time. I
became increasingly anti-smoking, although I continued to watch. I loved
smoking actresses and would travel great distances and waste a lot of money to
watch movies (this was pre-video) that featured smoking women. I particularly
liked the younger actresses who smoked. I was (and still am) in love with
Diane Lane. Jodie Foster, Linda Blair (man, those tits), Tatum O'Neal...to
this day I enjoy watching them.

    I met Cathy in college. Her suite-mate, Maria, was a hot little Puerto
Rican sex machine who smoked all the time. She smoked long ass cigarettes
constantly. Cathy, on the other hand, was a real athlete and (I thought) clean
cut girl. More my type. But she did occasionally partake, always outside of my
presence. She smoked maybe two or three cigarettes a day (I later learned).
But she knew (because I told her) that I hated smoking. So she quit. Just like
that.

    I have been married to her for ten years now and I have never seen her
smoke.

    There was an incident, you see. We were at a party and we were talking
with Maria and her boyfriend, Mark (yes the same Mark). Maria had a devilish
twinkle in her eye. A week earlier, after a weird night and a fight with Mark,
she had climbed drunkenly into my bed and grabbed my cock. I started rubbing
her breasts and then she backed off and left, but she knew she had me. She
knew I would have fucked her if I had the chance, even though she was dating
my friend and living with my girlfriend. So, anyway, Maria is smoking and she
exhales right at me and Cathy. And Cathy, who'd had a few drinks, asked for a
drag.

    And I made the dumbest mistake of my life.

    I protested, I gave her shit, I expressed my disdain. Why?

    I know why. Smoking was sexual and bad and Cathy was good. Smoking was for
sluts and cocksuckers and I thought she was an angel. I did not want my angel
tarnishing her wings.

    She got my message (the wrong message) and backed off and has not, to my
knowledge, smoked since then.

    I once (only once) tried to undo that error. About a week after that
party, we were driving home for spring break. One of my housemates friends had
left a pack of Virginia Slims behind. So I offered them to her. I tried to
make it out like I was apologizing and told her that I wanted to see her
smoke. If she had, I would have pulled over and confessed all of the foregoing
and fucked her brains out. But she declined. She was never addicted, so it
didn't bother her to stop. I had convinced her (and myself) that I disliked
smoking and she, out of love for me, just set it aside.

    Then the most amazing thing happened. She began hating smoking, too. She
cannot tolerate it now. And I have never told her how I really feel.

    So that's what I'd been thinking of, that and all the women out there in
the malls, in the bars, on the street, in the movies and on the Internet,
lighting up, inhaling, exhaling, repeating. And all the young girls starting,
learning, getting caught and getting permission.

    Then I met Lina. Let me tell you how.

    I'm a lawyer and, from time to time, I get asked by the local judges to
act as a law guardian for some kid in the middle of some dispute. It's usually
a pretty useless task. You just show up in Family Court or Surrogate's Court
"on behalf" of the "infant" (anyone under 18 is known as an infant in court
proceedings). But the factual summary that accompanied this assignment caught
my eye. It involved smoking.


    Toni L. (We always use initials for parties in familial disputes) was a
ten year old girl whose parents were getting divorced. Mrs. L (Lina) was
asking for custody. Her soon-to-be-ex husband, Barry, was opposing the
application. Barry claimed that living with Lina would be "unhealthy and
detrimental" and not "in the best interests of the infant" for two reasons:
(a) Lina smoked and (b) Lina let Toni smoke.

    What?! Dr. Jekyll became indignant: this woman "lets" her ten year old
daughter smoke cigarettes? What kind of a monster was she? Couldn't she read?
Was she trailer park trash who couldn't understand that 10 years old is about
8 years too young to smoke? What the fuck was this woman thinking?

    And then my dick got hard. As I read this legalistic piece of crap that
Barry's fairly shitty lawyer had slapped together, I got and erection and
started rubbing myself through my suit pants.

    On the Internet, I had read a bunch of stories about young girls smoking.
My favorite was "The Mall Incident," about a seven year old whose mother lets
her smoke at the mall. I always came a bucketload whenever I read that story.
But they were just stories. This was real, and I got involved. I set up a
meeting with Toni and Lina.

    After our initial awkward introductions, we sat down in one of my
conference rooms and I went into my lawyer spiel. Toni paid very little
attention to me. She was a very cute little blonde girl. She reminded me (a
little too much) of my niece, Tricia, who was also ten. Lina was tall,
five-foot-seven, with short brown hair. She looked a little like a young
Elizabeth Taylor, except her features were a little sharper. More Sherilynn
Fenn-like. She was dressed very professionally. Not exactly the dirty
sweatsuit look I was expecting. And she wasn't as defensive as I thought she
might be. In fact, it was very clear very quickly that she was under the
impression that I was her lawyer.

    "Lina," I said, after she insisted I call her by her first name, "You need
to understand that in this matter, I am representing Toni and her interests."

    "That's fine," she said. "Our interests here are the same--keep Toni away
from my asshole husband."

    "That's just the point. I realize that you feel that way and it's pretty
normal in these things. But Toni might not. And the judge might not. And I
might not. You just need to understand that. But let's put that aside for now.
I want to know how you got to this point."

    It was a legitimate question, but the tightening in my pants reminded me
that I was interested in the answer for more than just the legal
ramifications. Just then Toni leaned over and whispered something to her
mother.

    "Okay, honey," she said. "Mr. Poston--"

    "Michael."

    "Okay, Michael. Is smoking permitted in here?"

    "I'm afraid not," I said, suddenly regretting my small role on the
committee which had banned all smoking from the office. Toni dramatically
rolled her eyes. "But we can go somewhere else," I suggested. "We don't need
to finish our meeting here."

    We took the elevator down to the cafeteria level and I watched in
amazement as Lina opened her purse, extracted two long cigarettes and her
lighter and handed one to Toni. They held them like loaded pistols and
impatiently waited until we were beyond the no-smoking boundaries. Lina then
lit her cigarette, took a deep drag and then bent down to light Toni's
cigarette. I stood there (we hadn't even found a table yet) in stunned silence
(just as I had that day I saw Carrie) and watched this young girl and her
mother smoke.

    Toni was no novice. She started by inhaling deeply and then inhaling again
without exhaling (Lina later explained this is called a "Double pump"). Her
exhales were thick and smooth and she got such a satisfied smile after these
two drags that I could tell she was a true class smoker. I immediately pitched
a tent in my pants, which Lina must have noticed. Getting my attention (which
wasn't easy) by aiming an exhale right at me, Lina lifted her hand up near her
mouth, bent her wrist, tilted her head to the right and smiled, "You like it,
don't you?"

    Her perception was great. True, I was fairly obvious in my gaping, but
that could have been out of surprise rather than excitement.

    Then, quoting Chauncey Gardiner, the Peter Sellers character from "Being
There," I summed up my smoking fetish thus: "I like to watch."

    "I can tell," Lina said, waving her cigarette towards my erection. Toni
giggled and I shifted uncomfortably. "It's okay," Lina smiled, "We like it,
too, don't we Toni?"

    "Mm-hmm," Toni said through the filter of her cigarette. Then she
extracted it and breathed deeply and deliberately in, smiling a smile that
most ten year olds reserve for ice cream.

    "Let's sit down," I pleaded, "Because I need to hear this story."

    Lina started at the beginning, with her own smoking story. She had started
smoking at 12, stealing cigarettes from her parents. But it didn't stay a
secret long. She was incredibly honest even then. Her parents accepted her
smoking without a lot of fanfare or objection and she was off to the races. By
ninth grade, she was smoking two packs a day, a pace she had pretty much
maintained since then. Except of course when she was pregnant with Toni. Then
she cut back to one pack.

    "So I've been smoking since before I was born," Toni joked, helping
herself to a second cigarette.


    She met Barry in college. Barry, she explained, turned her on to the
sexual side of the smoking fetish. Before that, smoking had just been fun,
something she loved to do, something that made her feel good. But Barry was
different. To him, smoking was as sexual as fucking (Lina said "fucking" in a
whisper, as if to shield Toni from such talk, but Toni was too busy smoking to
notice).

    "How about you, Michael? You think smoking is pretty sexual, too, don't
you?"

    I didn't answer, because I was getting confused. "If Barry was so into it,
why is he objecting to it now?" I asked, flipping through his brutal
allegations.

    "I'll get to that, " she said. "Anyway, he really opened my eyes. We did
all kinds of wild shit. He also liked for me to sit at a bar and seduce other
guys with my smoking, getting them all hot before he'd walk in and whisk me
away. Then we'd go at it like crazy. He'd tell me to pretend he was some other
guy. 'Pretend I'm that guy from the bar,' he'd say. Show me what you'd do to
him. Show me how you'd smoke for him."

    "Did it ever go further than that?"

    "Not back then. It was all pretty much fantasy stuff, which was fun. And
then we had Toni and a lot of the sex got put on the back burner. You know how
it is."

    I did know. Cathy and I hardly fucked at all since Hannah was born. And
when we did, it was devoid of excitement.

    "When Toni was eight, Barry told me that he wanted to teach her to smoke."

    "What did you do?"

    "I said it was okay, if she wanted to." And then Lina looked me right in
the eye, waiting for my reaction. When she didn't see Dr. Jekyll in there,
with reprobations and all, she smiled broadly and took a deep pull on her own
second cigarette. "Good for you, Michael. You didn't judge me. But I'll tell
you why anyway. I love smoking. Always have. I guess I have a lucky smoking
gene or something. I love the feeling of smoke going down into my lungs and I
love the way men look at me when I do it. Sure, I'm addicted, but I love being
addicted. I started smoking when I was 12, and I'd always wondered why I
waited so long. So when Barry suggested that Toni start, I had no problem with
it at all. In fact, he said he'd wanted her to start even earlier."

    "Really?"

    "Yeah, I said I would have let her. Maybe just the occasional drag or
something when she was six or seven. But eight was fine. So we taught her.
Actually, I did most of the teaching. Toni wasn't really into it at first,
oddly enough. Isn't that right Toni?"

    "Well, at first it was hard to smoke, before I knew what I was doing."


    She knew what she was doing now.

    "But she got into it soon enough. I remember the first time she ever asked
me for a cigarette. She was so cute. She didn't know if it was okay to ask,
you know? She thought that maybe she was supposed to wait for us. Then she
just said, 'Uh, mom, would it be okay if I had one of your cigarettes?' I was
so proud of her. Bear in mind, she was just in second grade then. God, that
seems so long ago."

    "And she's been smoking ever since?"

    "Oh, yeah. Honey, what are you up to now, a pack a day?"

    "Pack and a half, Mom," Toni said with a proud smile.

    "Barry loved to watch Toni smoke. Sometimes we'd be sitting around after
dinner watching TV and Toni would just casually light up. Her hands are so
small though, that she'd have to hold it in her lips and use both hands to
work the lighter. Then she'd do something like a French inhale--show Mr.
Poston your French, honey--"

    Toni obliged with a very decent French inhale. I applauded and adjusted my
crotch. Lina noticed and reached over with her free hand and patted my thigh,
as if to say "it's okay that my little girl is getting you horny."

    "Well, anyway, that would get Barry going. He'd start sucking on my neck
and we'd be up in bed in no time, fucking just like the old days. Barry is
pretty good in bed too. He doesn't have the biggest cock in the world, but he
knows how to use it okay. Then we got into a bit of a problem."

    "Did he ever try to--you know--with Toni?"

    Lina thought for a long moment. "I don't think so. I doubt it. I mean,
it's possible. He definitely got aroused watching her smoke. Just like you,
Michael." Now she patted my penis. "But I don't think he molested her, and I'm
not sure I want to ask her about it. But he did worse, he abandoned her."

    "What happened?"

    "Well, as our sex life picked up, we got back into playing some of our
games. We'd even involve Toni sometimes. I'd go someplace with her and we'd
both smoke. Man, you should see some of the looks we'd get. But there'd
usually be some guy who you could tell was turned on by it. Anyway, one night,
it just got out of hand. I was a little drunk, Barry pushed a little too far
and I ended up fucking this guy named Richie. Barry went nuts. I mean, he set
the whole fucking thing up and then he had a fit when something happened. He
started calling me a slut and a whore and he just couldn't get over it. So he
moved out. We were devastated and, of course, it was all my fault."

    "Did you try to get back together?"

    "A few times. But it just wouldn't work. He was so jealous, which I never
expected, you know? So many of our fantasies involved me screwing some other
guy, I really expected him to get turned on by it, to tell you the truth. But
it didn't. He ended up meeting someone else. And guess what? She doesn't
smoke." She said this with such disdain that even Toni looked up from her
cigarette.

    So Barry had something akin to a Born Again transformation and turned into
C. Everett Koop overnight. Which lead to the divorce and the nasty bit of
history rewriting in the custody petition.

    Lina got a little teary-eyed for a minute but regained her composure with
an emboldened drag off her Marlboro 100. At that point, I knew I had to have
her.

    "So, what do you think, counselor?"

    "I think I want you, " I said. And Lina smiled.

    "Doesn't that mean that you'll have recuse yourself from this case?"

    "We'll deal with that later."

    Lina is not, Barry's allegations to the contrary notwithstanding, a slut.
But we hit it off pretty good. After dreaming up some phony excuse, I was able
to spend some time with her and Toni. Lina's policy on Toni was pretty simple:
"You may look, but no touching."

    I could live with that. I mean, I'm not a pedophile or anything. So I'd
watch. I watched Toni smoke. All night. And if I felt like touching, I touched
Lina. And then, after Toni went off to bed and Lina and I settled back with a
bottle of Merlot, I watched Lina smoke. I like to watch and she enjoyed
performing. I rubbed her feet. She snuggled up against me. Her shirt came off,
then her bra. I played with her pretty pink nipples, sucking on them as she
sucked on another, fresher cigarette. She kept offering it to me, but I
declined.

    "No, thanks, you smoke it."

    "C'mon, Michael, I want to see you smoke, too."


    But I was adamant. I had trouble explaining to her that, for me, smoking
was something strictly feminine, that I would no sooner smoke a cigarette than
I would suck a cock, and that I had no better explanation for that part of my
attitude than I did for any other. But her insistence subsided as I settled
down between her legs and licked her pussy into a sweet, warm wet frenzy. I
licked around her clitoris and put two fingers up inside her vagina, swirling
around on the top, front side until I found that little hard spot that made
her purr like a smoky cat and come. Her body shuddered and her lower lip
trembled and I moved up to kiss her full on the lips, tasting on her tongue
that bitter, warm, soft taste I remembered from Marissa, smelling in her hair
that distant sweetness that I knew I missed.

    The room hung thick with smoke. And it didn't bother me at all.

    When we finally fucked, she got a little louder. I think my cock was
somewhat bigger than Barry's, plus I knew what I was doing. She rode me up on
top, smoking of course, for a long time, but then I laid her down and took
over. As she moaned, I saw, off in the hall, the now familiar flash of Toni's
lighter, which illuminated her face ever so briefly in the dark. She was
watching us. As I watched her take a long, long drag and smile at me, I felt
my balls constrict.

    Lina must have seen her, too, because she suddenly lifted her head and
looked up at me. "Oh, look at her, Michael, isn't she something?"

    Then I came and Toni slipped back to her room.

    "Goodnight, Toni!" Lina called out. All we heard in response was some
giggling.

    We weren't done. Lina sucked me back to life and we had a more leisurely
fuck, trying doggy-style this time. Toni slept through that one. The next
morning, I had the pleasure of witnessing their morning ritual. Lina walked
into Toni's room, lit cigarette in hand, to wake Toni up. Because of our
interruptions, she was pretty tired. So Lina just held the cigarette in her
mouth until she started dragging on it. The she let it go and Toni got up,
smoking.

    Before I left, Lina handed me a pack of mild cigarettes. When I started to
protest again, she hushed me. "These are for your wife," she said. "Tell her
what you want her to do. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised." Then she
kissed me long and hard. "Thank you for a wonderful night Michael."

    Of course, I could no longer be involved in the case. So I wished Lina and
Toni luck and gave Lina a referral to a very good matrimonial lawyer. My fling
was over.

    And now I'm sitting here, this unfamiliar pack of cigarettes in my hand
and my wife in the next room. I don't know if I have the balls to approach
her. I am so unsure of myself. I panic and stash the pack into a drawer in my
room and go downstairs to get a drink. Five minutes go by. My mind is
unfocused. I start thinking about Lina and Toni and my penis reacts
involuntarily. Then I hear my wife calling me.

    "Michael," Cathy says in an unfamiliar voice. I look up and she is
standing in the doorway to the family room, dressed in the green silky
camisole that she bought for our tenth anniversary, her hands behind her back.
She has that excited and shy look in her eye that always reminded me of an
angel.


    "Watch this," she says, producing a cigarette and a lighter. She lights
up, takes a shallow drag and exhales with a smile.

    The End