With some rare time completely to myself – no immediate work that had to be done, and away from my wife and my kids – I thought about what I wanted to do. Walking on the beach was out of the question, given the tropical rain. There was TV or a book, but neither choice seemed appetizing.
There was, however, a dive bar about two blocks from our condo. And while most bars on this small beach island were non-smoking by law, this one was so old it was a “grandfathered” exception to the law. I think. All I know for sure is that on the rare occasions I’d gone in to this hole-in-the-wall, it was thick with cigarette and cigar smoke.
Given the nature of my recent discussions about smoking with Susan, the bar – where no one would nag me about my tobacco habits – seemed the perfect place to go to pass a couple of rainy hours. I grabbed my cigarettes and a cigar and walked the short distance through the rain.
I shook the rain off my umbrella as I walked in to the Crow’s Nest Bar and Grill. Despite the nautical reference in its name, and its location in a small Gulf Coast beach destination, there was nothing particularly nautical about the Crow’s Nest. If there was, I couldn’t see it: there were almost no windows to let daylight in, and the lights seemed dimmed for a purpose. Maybe that purpose was to hide the beat-up appearance of the floor and the ancient tables and chairs.
Before the pandemic, I had only come in here a few times on my work trips to South Padre. Through the dim light, though, it appeared nothing had changed since then. The bar had been closed for several months during the lockdown, and it appeared no one had used that time to remove the posters promoting football games in Fall 2019. Or bothered to clean the ripped carpet that covered a karaoke stage nestled in one corner of the room opposite the bar. In short, the Crow’s Nest was the sort of place Jon Taffer would love to visit for an overhaul on his “Bar Rescue” TV show.
Another thing that hadn’t changed since my pre-pandemic visits was the smoke, which compounded the difficulty in seeing anything in the bar too distinctly. That was probably a good thing, as visitors probably didn’t want to know what they would learn about the Crow’s Nest in the light of day.
On this visit, most of the smoke was coming from ten or twelve late-afternoon drinkers filling most of the seats at the bar, and a couple more at tables near the karaoke stage. I saw an open seat next to four women sitting at one end of the bar, though, and sat down. I put my pack of Parliaments, a cigar, and my lighter on the bar. The bartender – a wiry man about thirty who was dressed in beach wear – greeted me briefly. I ordered a Shiner Bock on draft, and lit a cigarette.
Before I started to ponder what to do about Susan’s demand that I quit cigarettes – or, in fact, continued thinking about that, as I’d thought about it on the five-hour drive down here from Houston – I got distracted listening to the animated discussion the four women next to me were having.
Each of these four women were smoking different brands. But the one I was sitting next to was smoking Virginia Slims 120s, a personal favorite of mine. And she seemed to be the heaviest smoker, with a nearly-full ashtray and leather cigarette case on the bar in front of her, and a lit cigarette in her hand almost constantly for the twenty minutes I sat at the bar and just subtly observed. For a smoking fetish fan, it was the best seat in the Crow’s Nest.
Casually listening in on their conversation, it seemed they all lived on the Island and knew it well. They mostly talked about which businesses they thought would survive the pandemic shutdown – which had curtailed 2020’s Spring Break and summer tourist seasons and led to some businesses closing for good. For a part- time “regular visitor” like me, it was insightful information to know. At one point, one of the women seated on the opposite end of the row of women from me said she’d heard that a particular beachfront restaurant had just reopened and was expected to survive the severe loss of business.
“Oh, that’s so good to hear,” the Virginia Slims smoker next to me responded. “I love their food. And the back patio is covered and you can still smoke out there.”
That was more confirmation that the one I was sitting next to was a serious smoker, so I was even more interested. I started to casually take a look at this woman. She was pretty good looking for her age, which I guessed was about sixty. She had brown hair, cut into sort of a bob, that may have been dyed at one point. About five feet and six inches, she had an ample bosom, brown eyes, and was a little bit overweight, but not obese. She was dressed pretty stylishly for this beach town in a patterned blouse and nice shorts. And she had a large diamond wedding ring on one finger.
This woman next to me also displayed some evidence of being a heavy smoker. She had wrinkle lines around her eyes, and others around her mouth that ran perpendicular to her lips. Her cheeks were a bit hollowed-in even when she wasn’t puffing on her Virginia Slim 120. She cleared her throat a lot and occasionally coughed, and had a rough smokers’ voice that sounded like her words were being run through sandpaper when she talked.
She was worthwhile enough to observe, or maybe flirt if I had the opportunity.
And as a man with a smoking fetish, there was a lot to observe from this woman’s smoking. I casually observed her style while she was listening to one of her friends expound on something. She had what I can best describe as a serious smoking style. She was clearly no lightweight when it came to smoking cigarettes. Nor was her smoking a casual matter, it appeared: she puffed often and deeply. She’d start each puff with the cigarette on the left side of her mouth, between the left corner and the center. The she’d spread her fingers about an inch apart, and draw in the smoke with cheek-hollowing force that would make the cigarette’s tip move quickly toward the sky. And she’d puff for a long period too, perhaps three or four seconds.
Then, after she finished pulling the smoke in to her mouth, she’d remove the cigarette from her lips. Next, she’d make an “O” shape with her mouth, and her chest would expand as she inhaled deeply. She’d hold the smoke in for a few seconds, and then exhale in a relatively tight cone.
Curiously though, one exhale wasn’t enough for this woman. After what seemed like the end of the cone, she’d inhale again – just air, not smoking the cigarette – and then quickly exhale again, this time expelling perhaps half the amount of smoke that she exhaled the first time. I had no idea if this she did this because her puffs were so big and deep, or her lungs were worn out from what I assumed was many years of smoking. Even this second exhale didn’t fully clear her lungs, as little wisps would continue coming out of her mouth for a few breaths afterwards. And because she was a frequent puffer, it seemed to me there was always some amount of smoke going into or coming out of her body.
So I sat there, sipping my beer, smoking cigarettes, and just enjoying the sighting. All things considered, there are worse ways to pass a little bit of time as a rainy afternoon slowly turned to a rainy evening.
Eventually, though, the blond Virginia Slims smoker next to me seemed to run into trouble with her lighter – namely, she had a fresh cigarette dangling between her lips, and the lighter wouldn’t produce a flame when she pushed the trigger button. I focused my attention on her when I heard the familiar clicking sound – a sound every smoker knows.
She met my gaze and through an unlit dangle, started to speak. “Sir, would you mind – this lighter doesn’t seem to want to –”
Perhaps reacting too quickly, but interested in a chance to learn more about these women, I cut her off as I picked up my lighter from the bar and clicked it to light. “Oh, of course. My pleasure. Here you go,” I said, bringing the flame to the tip of her cigarette.
She inhaled her first puff, brought the cigarette out of her mouth, and answered through a talking exhale. “Aren’t you a doll? I was just going to borrow it, but you offered me a light. Thank you,” she smiled.
From the corner of my eye, I saw that this woman’s three friends – in a row on the Virginia Slim smoker’s other side – were watching this exchange with curious looks on their faces. This was the sort of bar mostly inhabited by “local” residents in off-
season times like this in this little beach town, and non-regular customers were sometimes eyed warily.
The woman sitting next to me, however, seemed not to regard me with any suspicion. Indeed, she offered me her free hand, and warmly introduced herself. “If you’re going to light my cigarette, I at least have to know your name. I’m Donna,” she said with a smile.
“I’m Stan,” I said, shaking her hand. “Nice to meet you, Donna. I’m happy to light your cigarettes since I know what it’s like when your lighter gives out,” I said.
One of the other women down the row – a somewhat heavier redhead who was smoking a Salem 100 – interjected, perhaps to make a legitimate comment or perhaps just to establish a presence and let me know she’d be keeping an eye on me. But she did it in a friendly way. “Uh-oh. That may not be a promise you want to make, buddy. You’ll run out of lighter fluid fast with the way Donna smokes. You’re sitting next to the queen of the smokers at the Crow’s Nest.”
All of the women laughed, throatily and heartily, and I joined in as if to communicate I was not a threat to their small group.
As the short burst of laughter dwindled into a few coughs from some of them, Donna spoke. “Okay, okay. I smoke a lot. But all four of us do. And you, Mary- Ann,” – Donna looked at her Salem-smoking friend – “you better watch out what you say about my smoking, because they’re going to ban menthols soon. I can’t wait to watch how you try to make it through a day without a Salem.”
This was followed by more laughter, before Donna turned back to me. As I looked at her, I could see over her shoulder that the other women were listening intently, still curious, I guessed, about the new guest interacting with their little group. “There is some truth to what Mary-Ann said, though. I admit I smoke two packs a day. But that’s actually less than I used to smoke,” Donna said before taking a puff of her cigarette.
I am never one for witty comebacks and comments, but felt compelled to try under the circumstances. “Well, I guess since I don’t come here very often, it’ll fall to me to light cigarettes for the queen of the smokers,” I offered. While the group seemed to laugh at that comment, I realized I was now very intrigued by this female smoker’s “origin story.”
But well before I could get to that, I just wanted to figure out who she was. We started asking and answering the basic questions people exchange when getting to know each other. I gave her a summary of how I’d come to split my time between Houston and working in far South Texas with a condo at South Padre as a place to stay when I’m down here. She explained she is from Wisconsin and co- owns a business with her husband, but that she is semi-retired and really lives on this island while he’s running the business back in Wisconsin and preparing to turn it over to his nephews and become more of a part-time owner. Donna confirmed what I had surmised: that the other three women – who were talking among themselves but still appeared to be monitoring our conversation – all lived in South Padre full time. She told me they had all met here at the Crows’ Nest – “the last place on the whole island you can smoke indoors, if you can believe it” – and bonded quickly over their smoking habits and inclination to have a few drinks together at this bar most evenings.
While we were talking, I got to observe more of Donna’s smoking style without having to be surreptitious about it. Her style – serious and intentional, as I described – was really quite attractive, and she was an attractive woman even beyond her tobacco use. She was also a fun conversationalist and pretty smart. She’d managed construction projects for the business she owned with her husband, which is something, it seemed to me, that takes a fair degree of talent and intelligence.
When Donna put out her Virginia Slim and opened her leather cigarette case to pull out another, I seized the opportunity to learn a bit more about her smoking experience and habit.
Her leather cigarette case was well-worn, and unusually big. It looked to me like it could hold two packs of 120s – a size of case I didn’t even know existed. I decided to probe on this issue directly. “That’s a big cigarette case. Does that hold two packs?” I asked.
“Ha! Big cases for big smokers,” Donna laughed, before putting the filter of her long Slim in her mouth and taking a big puff when I gave her a light. “I doubt they even make these anymore. I found this in a little leather store in a small town in Missouri one time when we were on vacation years and years ago. I bought another just like it at the same time, because back then – believe it or not – I smoked three packs a day. This was long ago, when you could do that,” Donna said, before repeating her puff-deep-inhale-double-exhale cycle and continuing. “Plus, back then I smoked soft packs, and the cases kept my cigarettes from
getting crushed in my purse. The only way I can find Virginia Slims now is in the box, so I don’t need the case – but I just keep using it.”
Donna chuckled. “I guess I just use it out of force of habit. Like the cigarettes themselves.” We both laughed.
“So speaking of smoking,” Donna said, gesturing to my cigar on the bar. “You know you can smoke that in here, right? I don’t mind, and people smoke cigars in here all the time. You should feel free to light that big boy up.”
“You know, I think I might,” I said, never one to turn down an opportunity to have a cigar – and in this case, maybe continue the conversation. “Let me find my cutter here,” I said, feeling around in my pockets.
“Can I check this out?” she asked, pointing directly at the cigar. “It’s really big.”
“Of course, feel free,” I answered, and I told her about the cigar as she picked it up and studied it closely. “It’s a Diesel Unlimited. This brand comes in different sizes, but this one is the Presidente size – I think it’s seven inches long and a 58 gauge, so that’s maybe an inch wide. That’s more detail than you wanted to know for me to agree with you it’s a big cigar.”
Donna handed me the cigar and I went through the elaborate process of cutting it. She watched intently as I lit it up – a long process given its size.
As I finished lighting the Diesel Unlimited, one of her friends – all of whom had continued to occasionally look in our direction and sometimes seemed to lean in to try and hear what we were saying, but mostly talked among themselves – reacted with astonishment at the size of the cigar. This wasn’t a comically huge cigar, mind you. But it was definitely above average size. I mostly liked it for its robust, full flavor. Moreover, large cigars often give off a slightly cooler smoke that I find enjoyable.
“Oh my God, that thing is huge,” said Mary-Ann, the Salem smoker.
The group of woman, and I, laughed. I didn’t know these women nearly well enough to make the obvious innuendo.
But Donna did. To more laughter, she joked, “Bet it’s been a long since you’ve said that, Mary-Ann.”
Mary-Ann lost no time in responding. Looking Donna in the eye, she said, “I bet it’s been a long time since you said that, too,”
“Touchê,” laughed Donna, before exhaling a tight cone of smoke.
“Are you going to smoke a cigar, too?” Mary-Ann asked Donna.
“No. You guys give me so much grief about it when I do,” Donna said, smiling. Turning to me, she added, “I smoke cigars occasionally. Not ones that big, or that smell as good as that one. But they all give me so much crap about it I usually don’t bother when we’re all hanging out. But I do love the smell of yours and it’s very tempting,” she smiled.
“Do you want to try a puff? I’m fully vaccinated,” I joked, holding the unlit end of the cigar toward her.
“I am too. But don’t get me started on this whole pandemic thing,” Donna said, setting her cigarette in the ashtray and taking the cigar from my hand. As her friends looked on, she took a huge puff from the just-lit cigar and inhaled. As she held the smoke in her lungs, she gave a quick review. “Ooh, this is really good.” For a smoking fetishist in the cigars sub-category like me, it was an extremely impressive display.
Mary-Ann continued to jab at her friend with innuendo. “You look good with that huge thing in your mouth,” she guffawed.
Donna turned toward her friends and exhaled a cloud of cigar smoke down the bar – not directly at them, but in front of them. “That should keep all of you off my case or a while,” she laughed.
Donna turned back to me and handed back the cigar. Picking up her cigarette, she smiled. “So, where were we before we were so rudely interrupted?” she asked with a laugh, followed by two quick, chesty coughs.
I could have pushed to find out more about her smoking, how she started, her being a cigar smoker, all of it. But one thing I’ve learned is to be a bit circumspect about questions like that, to avoid tipping my hand about my fetish.
So we resumed non-smoking-related conversation. We talked about the hurricane season – a common topic on an island in the Gulf of Mexico with one bridge leading off it – her favorite restaurants, and other routine things. She asked me
some more about the arrangement with my company, and how I spent a fair amount of time by myself in South Padre even though I lived in Houston. I mentioned that my whole family only occasionally came down here for beach vacations, but enjoyed those days a lot. Throughout our conversation, I made clear I was married with two children.
Chapter 2: “I’ve Been Smoking A Really, Really Long Time”
After we’d been talking for some time, I heard Donna’s phone – on the bar in front of us – buzz when it received a text message. A second later, Mary-Ann tapped her on the shoulder and pointed to Donna’s phone. From the look on Mary-Ann’s face, I guessed the text Donna had received was from her friends, who had mostly been chatting among themselves while Donna and I talked.
“Excuse me, I think I need to read this,” Donna said. She read the text and let her Virginia Slim dangle from her mouth as she typed a reply and sent it. She glanced at her friends, and then turned back to me. “So, my friends here are going to call it a night. They want to make sure I will be okay if I stay so we can keep up our conversation,” she laughed.
“I’m glad your friends are looking out for you,” I said. Leaning in to the bar and looking down the row of her friends, I said, “Ladies, I promise, I’m harmless,” I laughed.
“I’m not sure I’d say the same thing about Donna. You better watch out,” Mary-Ann joked. The women gathered their things and left after we exchanged goodbyes.
After her friends left, Donna extinguished her mostly-smoked Virginia Slim and reached for her purse. “Finally, I can smoke a cigar in peace. They really do get on me about these. A couple of them don’t think women should smoke cigars. Even in this day and age. Do you believe it?” she asked rhetorically, bringing a Garcia y Vega in a brown plastic tube out of her purse. “Stan, I take it you have no objection if I smoke this, do you?” Donna asked.
“Of course not,” I said, setting my own cigar in the ashtray so my hands were free to light hers. After I lit her cigar, I asked, “So, how long have you been smoking cigars?”
Donna thought for a second as she slowly exhaled her first puff. “Hmm. I think I had my first cigar with my mother when I was fifteen. She smoked cigarettes but kept her cigar smoking hidden from my dad. That’s a whole other story,” she
chuckled. “Cigarettes, though, I had my first cigarette when I was ten. One of my mom’s Tareytons. And I’m fifty-eight now. So I’ve been smoking a really, really long time,” she said.
“So, your mother was okay with you smoking when you were only ten?” I asked.
“Well, she wasn’t happy about it, that’s for sure,” Donna said, after taking a puff off her cigar. With her words underlined by exhaled cigar smoke, she continued. “But she was easily a two pack a day woman, usually more. And my dad smoked cigars, and mom smoked them sometimes. And my grandmother smoked cigars. Now that’s really another story,” she smiled. “But this was, I guess, about 1973 or so, and I had a lot of friends who smoked. My older sister did. Everyone did. So while my mom didn’t like it when she caught me – which she did pretty quickly because I am horrible at hiding things and sneaking around – she couldn’t object too much, though. So she decided to let me smoke, although only at home until I was in high school. That’s when I changed to Marlboros.”
“And I never stopped since then, at least I’ve never quit for good. By the time I went to college, I was smoking two packs a day. But that’s when you could smoke in classrooms still, and in the library, and everywhere. It was such a different time.”
“What did you study in college?” I asked, very interested in her smoking history but trying to get other information to round out my knowledge of her as well.
“Architecture and design,” she said. “That’s what led me into the job where I met my husband, eventually,” she answered, before puffing again on her cigar and returning to her story. “I started smoking more of these, too, in college,” she gestured to her cigar with her free hand. “Cigars. Back then, I liked Tiparillos, skinny cigars with a little plastic tip you could kind of chew on.”
Donna’s story reminded me of the rather sexy Tiparillo print ads Susan and I had hanging in our cigar lounge, a housewarming gift from Susan’s parents.
Donna continued. “And I was a total, full-on cigarette smoker, too. By the time I graduated, I was almost a three-pack-a-day Tall 120s girl. Do you even remember that brand?” she asked.
“Barely,” I said, truthfully. They’re one of the long-gone 120s brands that I’ve read about, but don’t ever remember seeing a woman smoke.
“And when I met my husband,” Donna continued, “he was a pack a day guy. We hit it off immediately, and not just because we both smoked. My first job out of college was as a project planner at his father’s contracting company, which was getting into bigger building projects. The company was trying to get more professional with its services, which is why they hired me to help design bigger projects better – stay on budget and schedule, that sort of thing, and that was my training in college.”
Donna paused to take a big puff off her cigar, which gave me a second to consider the confirmation that she was married. Yes, she’d mentioned her husband and I’d seen her wedding ring – a pretty big diamond in an elaborate setting – but I’d found her very attractive, and her heavy smoking of 120s and cigars even more so. And Donna seemed to be flirting with me.
But if she was going to talk about her husband, I quickly reasoned, then she was probably signaling to me that she was actively attached to him and our flirty discussion would be just that – some harmless flirtation in a bar. In a way, that made things a bit easier for me: if this was just going to be some flirtation with a heavy-smoking, attractive mature woman, then I could just enjoy the “sighting” and her smoking history without worrying about how to position the night to set up another date or bring her home with me. Or the ethics of choosing to do so.
So, as I resolved just to enjoy watching her smoke and hearing her story, Donna made an “o” with her lips and inhaled the cigar smoke deeply. After holding it in her lungs for a few seconds, she thoughtfully exhaled and continued. “Donny – yes, we’re Donna and Donny – he’s a really talented craftsman. With his two younger brothers, he was being groomed to take over his dad’s business. But he had no head for finances or project planning. His father assigned him to work with me on designing and setting project plans for a couple of the company’s projects and learn that side of the business.”
Donna ashed her cigar and took another puff. “So over the course of working together, we started spending a lot of time together. One thing led to another and soon we were going out. And then, even though Donny is seven years older than me, we fell in love.” Donna exhaled a cloud of cigar smoke toward the ceiling.
“But even when we were dating, I was very clear with him that I was a heavy smoker,” Donna went on. “I mean, I smoked three packs a day and occasionally had a cigar. I was pretty much a chain smoker, and you could smoke anywhere in the office back then, so by that time he had certainly watched me smoke my way
through a whole day. After he proposed to me and we were planning our wedding, I told him I liked smoking, that I was hooked, and that I never wanted to quit.”
Donna puffed her cigar again before continuing. “I told him how everyone in my family smoked. And none of us had ever thought about quitting, and I certainly did not. So I asked him to be sure that he could spend his life married to a woman who would almost always have a cigarette burning in her hand, and sometimes a cigar too. Now back then, this was maybe 1985 or so, you could smoke anywhere, so that wasn’t going to be the problem. But if he was going to have a problem with me smoking up our house, and our car, getting winded sometimes, any of that, and start nagging at me, I wanted him to think twice about us getting married. I mean, yes, he smoked, but there’s a big difference between a pack a day smoker like he was, and me. And we talked it over and he told me he had fallen in love with me knowing I was a heavy smoker, and he accepted me and loved me that way, and that he’d never try to change me or nag at me.”
“So we were fine with our smoking, and everything, the first few years we were married. Donny took a bigger role in his family business, it really started to grow, and we were getting along great. We designed and built our own house outside of town,” Donna said, before taking another puff of her cigar.
Donna inhaled, held the cigar smoke in her lungs, and looked wistfully above the bar before exhaling and continuing. “And then we got serious about trying to have babies. And that’s where everything started between us. It turns out I had issues with getting pregnant, but that wasn’t easy to figure out back then, and we didn’t know that for sure for a long time. But before we did, my doctor did tell me he thought three packs a day was a lot and could hurt our chances.”
“So I cut down,” Donna said, ashing her cigar. “I went from three packs a day to a pack and a half a day. I also switched brands – I had been smoking Tall 120s for years, but Max 120s seemed a lot lighter. But if you have ever cut down to a lighter cigarette, and smoked less, you know what a nervous wreck you can become. And I was, for three years while we were trying to get pregnant. Donny was super supportive, and he switched from Marlboros to Marlboro Lights.”
“But after three years, when the best doctors we could find told us that they weren’t sure why, but that we couldn’t have children, I started smoking Tall 120s again. And I crept back up to three packs a day again. But I stopped being a nervous wreck, finally,” Donna laughed, before puffing again on her cigar.
She continued after a deep inhale and exhale. “So, after a while, Donny sits me down one night, very serious. And he tells me he’s worried I’m smoking ‘too much again,’ and that he thinks I should cut down on how much I smoke. He also gives me this book. ‘Switch Down something or other,’ about how to go to lower-tar and nicotine brands until you can quit. He says he’s worried about my health and he thinks we should both quit.”
I was, of course, very familiar with the book Donna was referring to. It had been my mother-in-law’s primary, if unsuccessful, way to try to quit cigarettes.
“So I was like, really, you have to be kidding me. I ask him what ever happened to him knowing he married a three pack a day smoker,” Donna continued, her voice still reflecting the shock, surprise and frustration she felt perhaps three decades before. “And he says, well, we’re getting older, and nobody smokes that much anymore.”
On a tiny wisp of late-to-be-exhaled cigar smoke, she continued. “I just said, ‘like hell, Donny, I still smoke this much and you’d better still be okay with it.’ And it kind of stayed that way for several years.”
Clearly a bit agitated by remembering these arguments with her husband, Donna puffed her cigar quickly, inhaled, and exhaled again before setting the cigar with its fast-burning cherry in the ashtray. “Until his fortieth birthday a few years after that. He sits me down again, says he’s really worried about his own health, and he says he’s cutting down to a half a pack a day to get on the road to quitting completely. He tells me he’s also worried about my health – and I admit I was coughing a lot by then, especially in the morning – and asks me again to cut down, but this time to a pack a day.”
Donna rolled her cigar ash a bit in the ashtray. “But he said he accepted that he married me as a heavy smoker, and that if I couldn’t or wouldn’t cut down, he’d always still accept me and love me that way. And I thought that was really sweet and respectful of me. So I gave it some thought, and I told him I’d meet him halfway: I would cut down to two packs a day, and find a lighter brand with less tar and nicotine. I thought I was being generous even doing that, but he was kind of irritated by it and huffed that he’d find a way to live with it. And that response really bugged me. But I cut down to two packs a day. And then I ultimately switched back to the Max 120s anyway because the Talls were getting too hard to find, and they were kind of heavy on my throat sometimes.”
“All that changed in 2000,” Donna said, before puffing on her cigar again and exhaling a thick cloud of its smoke. “My mom was diagnosed with lung cancer. They caught it kind of late, they said, so there wasn’t to much they could do for her, and she died pretty quickly. Donny just up and decides that that’s it, he’s quitting smoking for good, and he just does. Cold turkey. And he demands that I do, too. He doesn’t ask me, and he doesn’t want to talk about it. Just tells me.”
“And that really pissed me off. I’m not his property and he can’t just order me to do something,” she said, animated at the memory. “And by then, I was in my late thirties and had been smoking heavily for years. You can’t just shut off a habit like that like a light switch, or at least I couldn’t. Smoking was a big part of my life then – and still is. I didn’t think I could quit, and I didn’t want too. So I just didn’t.”
Reader, at the risk of repeating myself, I’ll re-urge this comment I made in Part I of this work: This is not designed to be on the “darkside” shelf, way in the back of the online libraries where the devoted few keep this community’s written works organized for the rest of us to find. But some people do get sick as a result of their tobacco habits, and those illnesses don’t pass without notice by the people – smokers and nonsmokers alike – around them. Donna is, for sure, a mature smoker, and I’ve tried to write her character that way. She’s also a fictional character. But I don’t think this is an unrealistic scenario, and I don’t think her response is too fictional.
At the Crow’s Nest, Donna continued to tell me how her relationship with Donny progressed. “He didn’t take my decision not to quit very well. He started making snarky comments all the time, about the smell of smoke in the house or in our cars. Ultimately, we had the house repainted and he just declared that I’d have to smoke on the outside patio. You can imagine, with how much I smoke, I started pretty much living out there,” she laughed, before taking a puff off her cigar.
“Honestly, about this time, we started to grow apart,” Donna said, after exhaling her cigar smoke. “We were still great business partners, making plenty of money growing the business and building a great reputation. And we still loved each other. But I started hanging out on our covered patio more, usually alone, reading or watching a TV I put out there. And when we were together, he’d make mean comments about how I smelled or my cough. So I wanted to spend less time with him, frankly. It was one of those, what do they call it – a vicious circle? Vicious cycle?”
“I think it’s either one of those, and I get exactly where you are coming from,” I said, ashing my cigar.
“He did talk me into trying to quit one time, when I turned fifty. But it was a disaster for me because I really didn’t want to quit, and I was miserable. But that’s another story,” she smiled.
“Ultimately, about five years ago, we bought a house down here on the Island. We’d vacationed here for years, and the business was strong enough we could afford it. We picked out one we could use as a retirement home when that time came – but, of course, Donny had to tell me that if I kept smoking, I wouldn’t live long enough to retire down here with him. That really ticked me off. It was just so mean, and so uncalled for, I didn’t want to talk to him for a week.”
Donna took a puff from her cigar, holding and then exhaling a cloud of smoke before going on. “So then, about three years ago, Donny and I were making plans for the business. I’d brought on two other project managers over the years who had proved they were really capable of doing what I do, and they brought some very modern design ideas and methods to what we could offer our clients. And I had really grown to like it down here – the weather is great, especially the winter. So much better than Wisconsin.”
“So I proposed to him that I become a part-time employee, and work from down here,” Donna said. “He was a little stunned at first, I think. Maybe a little hurt, but he never clearly said that. A few months later, I moved most of my clothes and things down here, at least my summer clothes. He comes down for a long weekend every few months, and we talk daily. Sometimes I go back up there for a few weeks. So it’s not like we’re separated or anything. We just spend a lot of time apart.”
“And I now supervise my project team remotely, which is really a part-time thing,” she said, rolling some stray ash off of her cigar in the ashtray and looking at it thoughtfully. “Donny is preparing to turn the reins of the business over to his nephews and his younger brothers. But frankly, he likes the work too much to just retire for good now and let the two of us just be silent partners and share in the profits, even though the business is strong enough we could do that.”
Chapter 3: Disclosure
“So, that’s a very long answer to your question of how long I have been smoking,” Donna said, exhaling some cigar smoke. “Tell me about you. How long have you been hooked on this terrible habit?” she asked, with a laugh.
“Ha!” I laughed. “I’ve been smoking for a long time, too. Not quite as long as you, but years all the same. I’m 48 and I started smoking cigarettes when I was twelve, so that’s 36 years. Cigars I didn’t really get into until I got married, and that was fifteen years ago.”
Over several minutes and several puffs of our cigars, I gave Donna a very shortened form of Part I of this work. There was no way to leave Susan, and her smoking, out of my smoking history. I talked about how Susan and I had gotten into cigars together, and even smoked a pipe on occasion. I explained how my habit had remained generally steady while Susan – once a heavier smoker than me – had gone on something of a roller-coaster ride with her habit, before coming to the point that, with great difficulty and after several failed attempts, she’d essentially stopped smoking.
Donna seemed to understand when I talked about how Susan and I had come to feel different pressures to quit. How Susan felt a lot of pressure from neighbors and society in general to give up cigarettes, and how the effects of cigarettes – the smell and the lingering cough – weighed heavily on her. Speaking of weight, I told Donna how Susan believed quitting was causing her to gain more, although to me she was at a comfortable weight and as attractive as ever.
One pressure on Susan that was never really applied to me was from Susan’s mom, Linda. I picked up on Donna’s recounted tale of Donny giving her a book on how to switch to lower tar cigarettes. I explained that I was very familiar with that book, and how Linda had tormented Susan – and really herself – in a long and unsuccessful attempt to give up cigarettes inspired by it, even when Susan was in high school.
And to bring the story to the recent past, I told Donna how Linda’s lung nodules had finally prompted Linda to give up cigarettes, ostensibly for the last time. And how she had demanded I do so, as well.
I didn’t discuss my smoking fetish. Some commenters on Smoking Fetish Kingdom believe you should just put the fact of your fetish out there, right up front, in any relationship. I’m not of that view – I didn’t confess mine to Susan until we were planning to get married, and only then in a mutual exchange of thoughts on
our turn-ons. Even if I had the courage to do so at this particular time, the fetish was way too loaded a topic to bring up in a still-casual conversation with a smoking woman I’d just met at a bar.
I did, though, confess to the frustration I felt at Susan’s demand that I quit. The relative anonymity of our conversation somehow made me comfortable sharing that. Plus, Donna had already told me a lot about how smoking had driven her apart from her husband, so I surmised she’d understand readily. I explained I understood Susan’s points perfectly well from a rational point of view. But that I wasn’t ready, and I liked smoking – it had been part of my life for too long, setting aside the nicotine factor.
“It sounds like your relationship with your wife and mine with my husband are similar. My smoking, and my choice to keep smoking, has driven a deep wedge between Donny and me,” Donna said. “Yes, I’m addicted, that’s for sure. But smoking is a big part of my life. And it’s been part of my life since I was a girl in middle school. I’m one of the smokers that actually likes it, beyond being hooked. I haven’t changed my smoking, my husband is the one who changed whether he can accept it or not. And I think you’re in the same position, from what you are telling me.”
I agreed. I wasn’t sure what else to say, though. But it did feel very good talking about the issue I was having with smoking and my relationship with Susan. I didn’t know too many other people who smoked cigarettes and might understand it. For a second, I just enjoyed that feeling of having gotten words off my chest. And, I wondered what would happen next.
Donna also became quiet as she took a last puff of her mostly-smoked Garcia y Vega and set it in the ashtray to burn out. She held the smoke in her lungs and then looked at the ceiling as she exhaled a cloud of it upward, which quickly blended into the thick haze in the Crow’s Nest. Almost immediately, she withdrew a Virginia Slim 120 from her cigarette case. Instinctually, I picked up my lighter and gave her a light.
Through a talking exhale, Donna continued. “Thanks for the light again,” she said, smiling. “It’s such a nice gesture from a guy. Donny hasn’t lit my cigarette in years. We’ve really grown that far apart, you know?” she asked, before taking another puff and speaking more. “And you seem like a really nice, smart, handsome guy to talk with. I hope this isn’t too forward, or whatever. But it’s a
shame you’re married. I’m frankly kind of lonely a lot of the time down on this island by myself, beyond my friends here. If you know what I mean.”
Donna ashed her cigarette. “But one thing I definitely don’t want to be is a homewrecker, or the ‘other woman.’”
I puffed my cigar (bigger than hers, and so with a decent amount of tobacco yet to be smoked) and thought for a few seconds. I exhaled and turned to Donna. “I appreciate your full openness. And you seem like a fun, smart woman. And very pretty too, if that isn’t too forward.”
Donna blushed a bit and said, “Thank you,” through a wide grin. I don’t think she’d been complemented by a man in a long time, so she received my mild complement warmly. “You might find this weird, but I tricked you a little bit. My lighter wasn’t ever broken. But you seemed kind of cute. And you sat right next to me and weren’t bothered by all my cigarette smoke. So I figured I’d ask for a light to start a conversation with you and see what you were all about. I like what I see.”
I set my cigar in the ashtray for a second and looked into her eyes. “Let me tell you something about my marriage. This will seem like kind of a lot to hear, but you have been open with me so I’ll be open with you. Just hear me out, and do whatever you want with what I tell you.”
I picked up the cigar and took a quick puff to keep it going. And to give myself a second to figure out how to explain what I was about to explain.
“My wife and I have something in our marriage we call ‘disclosures.’ You see, when we first met, Susan was 21 and just out of college. I was 29, and had lived a full life in my twenties. We got serious pretty quickly and started talking about moving in together and getting married,” I said, before pausing to puff my cigar. I was watching Donna’s face, trying to gauge how she was following my story.
“We were head over heels in love, and knew we wanted to commit to each other. What Susan eventually confessed to me, though, was that she was afraid that by marrying me, she’d be giving up experiences in her life, and things about herself that she wanted to explore, that she didn’t even yet know. She was unsure about giving up other possible paths in her life. She was, again, very young. But she’s super smart and thoughtful. So she knew there may be other things for her to experience – in terms of companionship and intimacy – but she didn’t even know what they were yet. Is that making any sense so far?”
“Kind of,” Donna said, with a bit of hesitation. She took a puff on her Virginia Slim, thought for a minute and exhaled. “Maybe this isn’t the right way to put it, but it’s like she believed you were ‘the one’ for her, but she couldn’t be one hundred percent sure because she didn’t know what else, or who else, was out there, and what she really wanted. She didn’t know what she didn’t know, but she thought it might be something she might someday want, and she didn’t want to have regrets.”
“Actually that’s pretty much it. Exactly,” I said. “And my wife is not shy about sharing what’s on her mind. She told me all this pretty openly. We discussed it quite a bit before I proposed marriage to her. We both knew we were heading that way, and she didn’t want to marry me if she had any doubts. I absolutely respected and understood what she had to say, and tried to convince her that marriage to me would work, and that we could grow together and overcome any need she ever had. Even if she didn’t know right then what it was. But she wasn’t completely convinced, and she still had doubts.”
Donna was following this closely and waited for me to take a puff on my cigar before I continued. “So we kept talking about it and working it through. It was a lot of open and frank discussion. And honestly, I was willing to do anything for her, to get her to become my wife.”
“So we set some rules that became what we call ‘disclosures.’” I explained. “We don’t talk about them more than we have to, but they are always there and they are part of our marriage. Truthfully, it has worked pretty well and it’s kept us together. It lets her feel she’s never missing any part of her life just because she’s married, and we’re never dishonest or hiding these things from each other. And we occasionally learn some things about the other.”
Donna was listening, so I went on. “The rules we set up for ourselves are pretty straightforward, although we spent a lot of time working them out, and figuring out the boundaries. Maybe they’re more principles that rules. That’s something she would know as she’s a lawyer. But the first rule, or principle, is that we are always first for each other. No person can come before my feelings and love for her, and vice-versa. Anyone else in our lives is secondary.”
“But the next principle is that if either of us really believes we’re not getting something we need from the other person, or there’s something we need to explore that we can’t explore with the other, we can find what we need outside our
marriage if we have to, and in a limited way,” I continued. “Never in a way that displaces the other spouse, or would wreck the marriage.”
Donna had a curious look on her face, but wasn’t expressing disbelief. So I went on. “And the last rule we have is designed to keep us honest with each other, and keep us from having to lie. It’s that we have to tell each other – disclose – that something happened outside the marriage. We agreed we don’t have to disclose details to each other, only that something happened.”
“Now, sometimes, I’ll learn from her disclosures what’s important to her and that can help change something I do, or do for her. Sometimes not. But either way, I learn something about her when she feels compelled to explore something outside our marriage. And the most important thing is, it’s given us a very strong marriage. We keep the details secret from each other, but we’re not hiding important things from each other. Or, worse yet, feeling frustrated and keeping the frustration bottled up inside, which would be far worse in any marriage,” I said.
I surmised from the look on her face Donna was pondering all this as she took one last puff on her Virginia Slim and crushed it out in the ashtray. “Interesting,” was all she said as she held the inhaled smoke in. She looked straight at the back of the bar, exhaled a tight cone of smoke, and thought for a few seconds.
Then, she pulled another Virginia Slim from her case. Dangling the unlit cigarette, she asked, “Can you light me again?”
I promptly gave her a light. Through a talking exhale, she asked, “Can I ask you a little about this?”
“Sure,” I said, puffing on my cigar.
“So, how many disclosures have you and your wife had?” she asked.
Exhaling my cigar smoke, I answered. “Six total. My wife has made five disclosures to me, and I have made one to her.”
“Your wife has had five of these things?” Donna asked, with surprise in her voice.
“Well, we’ve been married almost fifteen years. Her first one was the first year we were married, when she was in her first year of law school,” I said.
“Really? That soon?” Donna said, seeming astonished.
“Yes, and with a much older guy. He was a philosophy professor at her university. They met by chance at a restaurant when they were sitting near each other. He became enchanted with her – she is a beautiful woman – and tracked her down. She really liked the attention and, it turns out, was wondering about being with an older man. That was something I couldn’t provide to her,” I said. “Maybe she has some daddy issues. I don’t know. But it wasn’t a need I could fulfill. I don’t know much beyond that, because like I said, we try not to share too many details.”
“Wow. That’s really something,” Donna said, listening intently.
“Two of her disclosures involved another need I couldn’t fill – they were with other women. One of them was a relationship with a woman who was actually her boss at her law firm. After a while, my wife and the boss both decided, wisely I think, to keep work and romance separate. They’re still good friends and colleagues today,” I said, before taking a puff on my cigar. I watched Donna’s eyes widen a bit. She was fascinated by my story.
I exhaled my cigar smoke and continued. “And the second one of those disclosures with women was with my boss’s wife. They actually had a lot in common, but really bonded over cigars. That’s back when my wife and I were both starting to get into cigars, and my wife had learned a lot about them. My boss’s wife had never smoked a cigar, and was curious.”
Donna’s jaw dropped a bit. She was hooked on my tale, for sure.
I continued. “So, after they satisfied their curiosities about cigars, and some other things, they both decided they had too much to lose if my boss caught them, so they broke it off. And it’s still their secret today.”
“And your secret,” Donna said through a positively lovely talking exhale.
“And yours now, too, I guess,” I said. “I do hope you’re good at keeping secrets.”
Donna, elbow on the bar and holding her cigarette out in her hand in a jaunty way, looked me in the eye. “Stan, trust me. As a woman who has some secrets – I understand. All of your secrets are safe with me.”
Donna took a long puff on her Virginia Slim, inhaled in her “O”-shaped mouth style, and exhaled after a couple of seconds of holding. “So, I’m curious. When was your wife’s most recent one of these, um, disclosures?”
“It was actually just a couple of weeks ago. I remember she told me on a Tuesday morning, because she’d gotten home late the night before from a long weekend trip to Dallas. Over the pandemic, she reconnected with some of her sorority sisters who live all over Texas. When things started to ease up, the lockdowns and all, a small group of them decided to get together in Dallas for sort of a reunion weekend.”
“Anyway,” I continued. “That morning, we had all gotten up, and Susan and I started getting the girls getting ready for school. Once that was underway, I grabbed a coffee and started to go out to a little room off our patio where I can smoke a cigarillo, as I usually do every morning. What I really want in the morning, of course, is a cigarette. But as I told you, apparently I’m not allowed to do that, and I’ll get all sorts of grief if I’m caught. So cigarillo it is. And as I am heading out the patio door, I cough. Not cough up a lung or anything, just a few coughs. Sometimes in the mornings I do that,” I said, my voice rising a bit to illustrate the frustration contained in my words.
“Which sucks, by the way,” Donna said. “I mean all of that. Getting the grief and having to sneak around, for sure. That’s nuts – I’d hate that. But the morning cough too – trust me, I know all about those,” she said, before taking a puff on her Slim. Through a talking exhale, she asked me to go on.
So I did. “And Susan yells across the kitchen to me, ‘Jesus, Stan, that cough sounds wonderful. Of course, go enjoy your cigarillo out there. Or is it a cigarette again this time?,’ all of which really pissed me off. Then, she comes closer to me and goes, in a low voice so the kids can’t hear upstairs, ‘And for the record, I had a disclosure in Dallas this weekend. He didn’t cough all the time because he doesn’t smoke. And neither did I, the whole weekend.’ And she storms off. We barely spoke until that evening.”
I puffed my cigar a bit and continued. “And it’s not the disclosure itself that bothers me. Those are the rules we’ve agreed to and lived under for years. It’s that she used it just to nag me even more. That irritated me about that one.”
Donna exhaled a thick cloud of cigarette smoke. “So, in that one,” she volunteered, “she needed comfort from someone who didn’t smoke, or was really going to quit smoking with her, maybe. That’s what it sounds like to me.”
I read Donna’s offering of what she viewed as helpful analysis as proof she was believing my words. Otherwise, why would she – or anyone – offer advice in response to what they thought was just a fictional story being told in a bar?
Donna ashed her cigarette and continued to offer her thoughts. “Look, it’s not wrong for your wife to be concerned about your smoking and your health. And it’s not wrong for Donny to be concerned about my smoking and my health. They both care about us,” she said. Holding her cigarette up toward me she added, “and we all know these things aren’t good for us.”
Donna took a puff off her nearly-spent cigarette, inhaled, and as she held the smoke in, she said, “But,” Donna paused to exhale a cone of smoke toward the ceiling, “what neither of us need is the constant nagging. It drives wedges between married people all the time. Donny and I are proof. Really, smokers should only be married to other smokers, I think.”
Donna put out her Virginia Slim, and immediately pulled out another cigarette. Whether she thought what I was saying was crazy or not, at least she wasn’t freaked out enough to go running home. I gave her a light as I contemplated how to continue.
Donna gave me a prompt as she exhaled her first puff. “So, you said you had one of these ‘disclosures’ yourself?” she asked. “What was that, uhh, about?”
I puffed my cigar and answered. “That was, in fact, a Winter Texan not long before the pandemic,” I said, referring to those folks – often retirees from the Midwest – who flee the winter for a few months by going as far south as they can go without winding up in Mexico, and that is pretty much South Padre Island. These folks keep the Island’s economy going during otherwise-quiet months. They were all generally older than me, and whenever I’d visited during this period, I felt like one of the younger folks on the Island – even in my late forties.
Donna, an Island resident in her late fifties, immediately knew what I meant by all of that.
“Really? So, an older woman?” she asked.
“She was older than me. We actually met in this bar one night, and kind of hit it off. I haven’t seen her since before the pandemic, and she didn’t come back down last winter, and doesn’t think she will this winter, either,” I said. “But we did a text a few
times over the past year, just to see if each of us was okay,” feeling a need to explain where my recounting of this disclosure ends.
“Let me ask you something,” Donna said, before turning her head away from me to exhale a cloud of smoke toward the back of the bar. She turned back to face me, but some residual smoke came out with her next words. “Did this woman smoke?”
I puffed my cigar as I pondered her intent behind that question. “Yes, she did. She smoked Marlboro 100s,” I answered.
“That’s really interesting about the smoking or non-smoking partner, for each of you, frankly,” Donna said, ashing her cigarette. She had clearly listened intently to my story and was honing in on the main points. “Sounds to me like your wife is using intimacy as a way to communicate about how much she wants you to quit. And your Winter Texan smoked.”
“Now, for you, Stan. I wonder if you just like to be with other smokers because you’re comfortable and not going to be nagged, or if you have kind of a thing for women who smoke. I noticed you light my cigarettes – which I really like, by the way – and you asked me about my cigarette case. And you just remembered the brand of cigarettes your friend from a year or so ago smoked. Those could be clues, don’t you think? Maybe you just like to be around people who won’t hassle you for smoking, and that’s probably what it is. And that makes perfect sense. Or maybe it’s more than that for you.”
Donna continued, as I shrugged my shoulders, falsely suggesting I had absolutely no idea about the possibilities she was raising. “You’ve probably never thought about this, but some men really get kind of, uh, turned on when women smoke cigarettes,” Donna said, taking a long puff off her Virginia Slim as if to underline her point. “My husband is one, or was one. We never talked about it much, but I could tell he used to really like it when I smoked cigarettes. But when my mom got sick from smoking, he sort of dropped it, I guess, and went the other way. Today, I think my smoking is a total turn-off for him.”
Donna exhaled a thick cloud of smoke. “That’s one part of the way our marriage used to be that I miss – sometimes I’d smoke a cigarette and I could tell it was really getting his attention. That, and we’d smoke together after we were, you know, together,” she said in a low voice, and with what I swore was a wink. But this bar was sometimes too dark to see very clearly if you weren’t directly in the beam of one of the few lights.
A note for your consideration, dear reader. Sometimes I wonder if anyone I know personally – not an anonymous correspondent on the Internet, who I’ve likely told in a forum posting somewhere – is on to my fetish other than Susan. Perhaps you’ve wondered that too. Maybe future technology will give us some sort of a fetish-detection counter-radar, so future generations of smoking fetishists will get a brain wave informing them their secret may have been intuited or otherwise learned by a person they’re speaking with. Or some such sci-fi device to accomplish the same purpose.
I really could have used such a device just then with Donna. Was she trying to hint to me that she had me tagged as a guy with a smoking fetish, like her husband? Or did she really think she was teaching me about the smoking fetish as a possible diagnosis for the disclosure I had told her about?
And if she had pegged me as someone with a smoking fetish: was that a good thing or a bad thing?
I didn’t have too long to ponder these questions before Donna took a big puff from her cigarette, exhaled after a long hold, and conveyed she believed what I had told her. “Well, it’s unusual, that’s for sure. But it’s really, I guess, smart to have thought this out. These ‘disclosures’ save you both a lot of heartache and let you stay honest and true to each other.”
She knocked some ash off her cigarette in the ashtray and continued. “I appreciate that you told me, too. That takes courage to tell someone you just met in a bar. And more than that, it takes honesty for you to tell me this. This all tells me you are a very honest person,” she said.
Donna took a quick puff and continued through a talking exhale. “It’s actually kind of fascinating to me. I wish Donny and I had set up something like this when we were married. I was much younger than he was, like your wife,” she said. “God knows I have needs that I wouldn’t have even dreamed of when we got married. I just didn’t know enough to know, or even to ask for something like that.”
“It’s a great way to set up a marriage, I think,” she continued. “Everyone has needs or wants, even if they don’t know them when they get married. It’s a question of the lengths we’ll go to satisfy those needs. And some of them, like some of your wife’s, can’t be satisfied inside the marriage. So you all figured this out beforehand, and set up a way to do it that makes the marriage itself work better, without lying or sneaking around.”
Donna took another puff, this time deeper. She rested her cigarette in the ashtray and stared at the back of the bar for a few seconds before exhaling a large cone of smoke that scattered among the dusty liquor bottles arranged on the bar’s back. She took a breath and exhaled another half-cloud of smoke to follow the remnants of the first one. Then she turned to me.
“So, since we seem to be making more confessions to each other than in a church, I’ll make another one,” she said, her voice low and leaning towards me a bit. “This sounds weird, but I’ll just say it. I have a thing for men – handsome men – who smoke cigars. It turns me on. I know that’s strange, but no stranger than how Donny used to find it hot when I smoked cigarettes. He doesn’t feel that way anymore about my cigarettes, like I said. But I still feel that way about cigars. I don’t know, maybe it’s a manly, macho type thing. Or because my father and my grandfather both smoked cigars. Sometimes, you never know why you like something, right?”
“I understand that entirely,” I said, truthfully, anxiously waiting to hear how far Donna was going to go with this.
“For years, I tried to get Donny to smoke them. I’d talk him in to taking a puff of mine, or buy him a nice cigar back when we went to places where you could smoke cigars. But he never liked them,” Donna said. “Maybe I should have told him why I wanted him to smoke them, but I couldn’t bring myself to do that. We never really talked about our inner desires that way.”
Donna took a puff off of her nearly finished cigarette before continuing. “So, after you came in and I was kind of checking you out, I saw you put that huge cigar on the bar. Right then, I knew I wanted to see you smoke it. That’s why I made sure to tell you it was okay if you smoked it here.”
“And watching you smoke it…” she smiled a bit. “Well, let’s just say I like it a lot.”
All I could do at this point was smile and then take a big puff on my cigar while staring straight into her eyes. After inhaling and holding for a few seconds, I turned my face away from hers only to exhale.
“Wow,” Donna said, and just stared at me, smiling, for a few seconds.
A thought interrupted her brief reverie. “But, to be clear,” Donna continued, putting out her spent Virginia Slim and getting another from her cigarette case, “I smoke too, and I’ve told you how I hate to be nagged about it. I do think smokers should
stick together, especially now. If only so one half of the couple isn’t putting up with the smoke and the other isn’t always looking for a place to smoke or being conscious of their smoking. So even if you didn’t smoke cigars, but only smoked cigarettes, that’s a positive thing for me, and I’d already be kind of inclined to like you.”
Donna dangled the unlit ultra-long cigarette from her mouth and leaned a bit toward me. “Plus, you light my cigarettes. Some women would consider that way out of date, for sure. But not me – I’ve always loved that. It’s a romantic, maybe even sexy, gesture. So, Stan, it’s not just the cigar – you have a lot going for you, if you know what I mean.”
I lit Donna’s cigarette and she took a deep puff. “So, you never answered my question,” she said, before exhaling. “Stan, do you think you have a thing for women who smoke? Does it turn you on?”
And here it was. I ashed my cigar to buy time. Confessing your fetish – even to a woman who already suspects it, and has a smoking fetish of her own – is always a bit like jumping off a cliff into a lake. You’ve convinced yourself it’s a safe thing to do. But at the last second as you do it, you have doubts.
But I went ahead anyway, because the lake was below.
“Well, Donna,” I said, looking into her eyes while putting my hand on her arm and caressing it gently, “I do get turned on by sexy woman who smoke, in fact. And to spend an evening talking to a sexy woman who smokes extra-long cigarettes like those…well, as you just said. I like it a lot.”
“I thought so,” Donna smiled, putting her hand on mine resting on her arm. She didn’t pull my hand away, but just rested hers on mine. “You remembered the brand of the woman you met here a year ago. And you told me how your wife switched from Marlboros to Virginia Slims to Slims Ultra Lights. That attention to details like cigarette brands tells me you think differently about women who smoke.”
Our eyes continued to meet as Donna took a cheek-hollowing, intentionally deep puff, inhaled deeply while puffing out her chest, and turned her gaze only slightly away from me to exhale after holding the smoke in her lungs for what seemed like forever, but was really only three or four seconds.
Donna turned back to face me directly, and continued speaking as her usual second half-exhale turned into a talking one. “And you’ve lit every cigarette I smoked, without missing one. That tells me either you are the most courteous man left in America, or you want to see me smoking and so you help me along. Either reason is fine, because as I told you, I love it when you light my cigarettes.”
After a short pause, Donna said, “Stan, I think it’s awesome that you like it when I smoke.”
As if to demonstrate this premise, Donna took another massive puff and held the smoke deep in her lungs before exhaling a huge cloud slightly away from my face. The only difference with this puff was that instead of talking after her first exhale, she undertook her unique practice of quickly breathing in after her first exhale and then having a second exhale of a smaller amount of smoke.
“And Donna, you have given me a great reason to smoke more cigars,” I said, with a wry smile. “I love smoking them anyway. But knowing an attractive woman likes to watch me smoke them, well…” I said, intentionally pausing to consider my next words.
I looked at my cigar – once very big, but now a mere stub after an hour of conversation – and held it up so Donna could clearly see it. “Speaking of smoking cigars, this one is pretty nearly done and the taste is souring on me. But I have a humidor full at my condo. Why don’t you come there with me and I’ll have another cigar?”
Chapter 4: Two Pleasures at Once
I gave Donna a brief tour of my condo – mostly, I figured, to make her feel secure. But also to buy myself a minute to figure out what to do next. I hadn’t had time to do that on the short drive from the Crow’s Nest. While I had walked out to the bar, Donna lived perhaps a mile away and had driven there, so she drove us back to my place. She’d smoked part of a Virginia Slim on the way, telling me that while it was a short drive, for her, “smoking and driving just go hand in hand.”
After I assured her it was okay to smoke in my place, I lit her Virginia Slim after she sat down on the couch. While I poured each of us a beer, we talked a bit about nothing of substance – housing prices in the neighborhood, that kind of thing – while we both pondered what would come. Could we sustain the flirtatious energy
that we had built between us at the Crow’s Nest, now that we’d had a change of scenery?
Donna moved first to stoke the fire we had started back at the bar. “So, at the Crow’s Nest, you said you were going to have another cigar. If you light one, can I have a puff?” she asked.
“Of course,” I said, opening the small humidor I kept on the coffee table. “I’m thinking of, hmm, let’s see,” I said, looking over the forty or so cigars in the cedar box. One thing about a house on the tropical Gulf Coast: your cigars always stay well-humidified in the constant humidity, so I’d taken advantage of the climate by building a decent collection to keep on hand.
“Maybe this Nica Puro Rosado?” I said, holding up a five-inch Robusto.
“You would know best about those really good cigars,” Donna said. “I’ve had some of those hand-rolled ones before, but never really got into them. I’ve always smoked the cigars you can get at a drug store, like the Garcia y Vegas in the plastic tubes or Tiparllos. So I’m happy to try whatever you pick out.”
I cut and lit the medium-sized, full-bodied cigar. Donna took note as my cigar smoke joined her cigarette smoke, already filling the living room. “That smells so good. Different than the one you had in the bar, but they’re both great. Once I’m done with this cigarette, I’d like to try it,” she said.
“Absolutely. You’re smart to wait to fully taste it, too. One thing about the hand- rolled cigars that’s different from your Garcia y Vegas is that they take a few minutes of puffing to really get going,” I said, exhaling another cloud of cigar smoke.
“I’ve noticed that too, when I’ve smoked ones like you smoke, those ones you have to cut. You need to spend a lot of time lighting it and getting it started. I think this is one reason I’ve always stuck with the Garcia y Vegas or the Tiparillos or ones like that: you can just fire them up and smoke away. You’ve smoked ones like that, not just these expensive ones, right?” she asked.
“Oh yeah, for sure,” I said, only partially truthfully. I’d always found the cigars you can buy at drug stores – made by a machine and with cheaper filler, not like my hand-rolled ones made with better tobaccos but with a higher price tag – not very flavorful. But Donna was a cigar smoker and had a clear interest in me smoking cigars, so I didn’t want to come off as a “cigar snob” just because she smoked
cigars I generally wouldn’t smoke. And because I had smoked some of these cheaper cigars on occasion, it wasn’t a lie.
“Plus, I was never sure about the cutting thing, and never really knew how to do that,” Donna said. “The cigars I smoke – and you know this, Stan – they come with little holes already in the smoking end,” she said, before taking a puff from her Slim and inhaling deeply. Holding the smoke in, she continued. “And because I was already a cigarette smoker when I had my first cigar, I’ve always inhaled cigars too, even though some people are shocked that I do and tell me I am not supposed to,” Donna exhaled a cloud of her cigarette smoke. “But I figure, tobacco smoke is tobacco smoke, right? If you’re not inhaling it, I don’t know what the point is. And every time I’ve had one of those cigars you have to cut, it’s like I don’t get a lot of smoke out of it when I puff it. Because I like a full draw, you know? That’s one thing my cigars with the holes give me.”
“I understand that,” I said. “For these hand-rolled cigars, if they aren’t kept exactly right – in a humidor, ideally – and allowed to rest for a time after they are rolled and shipped, they can get a little dry and it can be hard to get a full puff of smoke. I’ve let this one rest for a few months down here in the almost-tropics, so it smokes a little bit easier,” I said.
By now, Donna was finished with her long cigarette, and she inhaled her last puff as she put it out in the ashtray. She did her double-exhale and turned to me.
I carefully handed her the cigar. “Try this, Donna. I think it’s burning well. See what you think of the flavor,” I said.
Donna exhaled forcefully as if to clear any remaining cigarette smoke from her lungs, and then took a small puff off the cigar. She didn’t inhale the smoke, but just tasted it in her mouth and blew it out quickly. “Oh man, this is good,” she said.
Donna’s next puff was massive. She held the cigar to her lips with two fingers and drew in hard for about three seconds, hollowing her cheeks as she did. Her puff was strong enough to make the tip of the cigar glow bright red. I contemplated how someone who had smoked so heavily for almost fifty years could still have that much suction force in her lungs to take such big puff on a decent sized cigar. But where there’s a will, there’s a way, apparently.
As she did with her cigarettes, Donna made an “O” shape with her mouth and inhaled deeply. Her shoulders hunched up gently and her chest moved forward a bit. After about a second, she exhaled, then drew a breath in and exhaled again.
“This is awesome,” she said, looking at the cigar with its ash end still glowing red from her vigorous puff and a thin stream of smoke coming out of the puffing end. “I love the taste too. It’s sort of spicy and nutty, with a little bit of chocolate.”
“I’m glad you like it. This cigarmaker is a favorite of mine,” I said, while trying to find a way to keep this awesome display going. A close second to my fetish for sexy women smoking 120s is my fetish for sexy women smoking cigars, and Donna certainly knew how to smoke cigars.
I landed on a solution. “Donna, since you like it, why don’t you smoke that cigar for a while? Enjoy it. I’ll have a cigarette,” I said.
“Are you sure?” she asked.
“Of course I’m sure,” I said, finding my pack of Parliament 100s.
Over the next few minutes, Donna puffed and inhaled the cigar several times. The cigar was burning quickly under her big puffs and I was wondering exactly how high her tolerance for nicotine was – hopefully sky-high, or she’d be looking for a place to vomit in a minute or two. As a long time cigarette and cigar smoker, I can handle my nicotine, and inhale cigars on occasion. But even I know to be cautious with the nicotine in big cigars – too many inhaled puffs can spell trouble.
Donna appeared to have no problem handling the big cigar, though. “I really like this cigar. It has so many different flavors in it,” she said, exhaling a cloud of smoke. “So, let me ask you,” she said, looking into my eyes. “Do you like to watch me smoke this cigar?”
I was a bit taken aback by the direct nature of her question, but I saw no harm, at this point, in answering truthfully. “Yes. Yes, in fact, I do,” I said.
“That’s good,” Donna said with a smile. “So we both like to smoke cigars, and we both like to watch each other smoke them. Wherever this all goes, at least we can be cigar buddies at the Crow’s Nest,” she said. We both laughed.
“What about your friends who always get on your case when you smoke cigars?” I joked. “What’ll we do about them?”
“They’ll just have to get used to it,” Donna laughed. She took another immense puff and handed the cigar back to me as she held the smoke inside. “I think you can continue to go to work on this. I’ve enjoyed it, but I learned long ago to be a little careful with these full-size cigars.” I was amazed that she wasn’t already feeling nauseous, but maybe she was exercising a bit of prudence with her nicotine consumption.
Or maybe not. After I took the cigar from her hand, she pulled out another Virginia Slim. I gave her a light.
After exhaling her first puff, Donna spoke. “So, since we’re talking about this kind of thing – smoking, and what we like to see – and we’re both being open and honest, let me ask you one other question,” she said. “Of course, you don’t have to answer it. But when we were at the bar, you mentioned something about women who smoke long cigarettes. Are these 120s something that you find, err, appealing?”
“You have a memory like a steel trap,” I laughed, ashing the cigar.
Donna laughed. “That comes from spending years managing big projects with a lot of moving parts,” she said. “And if you do like me smoking these long ones, you should know this is the only length I’ve smoked since I was in college. I like them and I don’t plan to change,” she said, before taking a long puff.
“I like them. I think the longer the cigarette, the sexier it is, to be honest with you,” I said. “And to go even further, it’s sexy when an attractive woman like you puffs on her cigarette while she dangles it from her lips. Like you said about how you like to watch me smoke a cigar, I don’t know why. But it is what I like. You were dangling your cigarette at the Crow’s Nest while you were texting your friends, and it was just amazing to watch. ”
Donna smiled. “Really? You mean like this?” she asked, before putting the cigarette in her mouth in what for me was a perfect dangle – with the cigarette almost in one corner of her mouth, held only by her lips, and at a sizable angle toward the ground. “I’m kind of a master dangler. It comes from years of touring job sites with my hands full while taking notes on my plans, but still wanting to smoke a cigarette,” she said, as the cigarette bounced up and down in her lips. “So that’s fine with me. But I’m surprised you like this. Donny once told me he thought it was trashy, so I became a little conscious of it and tried to stop.”
Donna took a puff off the dangling cigarette that caused it to point toward the ceiling at a sharp angle, then inhaled and exhaled a tight cone of smoke through a small hole she made in her lips on the opposite side of her mouth from the Slim.
I answered her comment about whether dangling was “trashy.” “Every person likes what he or she likes, right? One person’s ‘trashy’ is another person’s treasure,” was the best I could muster, as I was becoming more than a bit distracted by her dangling performance. She was, in fact, proving to be a “master dangler.”
“So, Stan,” Donna said, with her cigarette moving up and down in time with her words. She paused to take a puff, inhaled, and then spoke as smoke billowed out of her mouth and nose. “We both know what we like, and I think we both know why we’re here. But I haven’t been seduced in a long time. I want to hear you tell me what you want to do. It’ll turn me on even more to hear the words.”
I took a puff off my cigar to think for a second. Donna was asking for a game plan, as it were. I hadn’t had to figure that out, or enunciate one, in a long time – Susan and I had known for a long time how to turn each other’s sparks into flames. And we usually didn’t put words to that, just carried out the actions we understood.
But I did the best I could. “Well, first, we’d kiss. We’d kiss like teenagers. We’d kiss to feel some of the emotional closeness I think we’re both looking for,” I said. “It would be hot-and-heavy, old-school making out.”
Donna ashed her cigarette and put it back to dangle between her lips. With a smile, she said, “I like it so far. Go on.”
“Then, after we’re feeling close, and comfortable, and maybe a little warmed up, we’d go upstairs to my bedroom,” I said. “But that’s only if you want to. I don’t want you to do anything you’re not comfortable with.”
“Oh, Stan, honey – if I don’t want to do something, trust me, I won’t,” she said, as smoke came out of her mouth and flowed around her dangling Slim. “If I didn’t want to be here, I wouldn’t be. So, tell me – what’s next after we go upstairs?”
I caressed Donna’s leg gently. “I’d take your clothes off. And mine. And I’d lay you down on the bed, and I’d kiss your face. Then your ears and your neck. Then I’d kiss and caress your breasts,” I said.
I could see Donna smile around the dangling cigarette and her eyes brightened. I took a quick puff on my cigar to heighten her anticipation.
“And then, so you can enjoy two pleasures at once, I’d light you a cigarette and put the ashtray next to you. You just lay back and smoke it, and enjoy it. That’s one pleasure,” I said, pausing a bit. “And the second pleasure is, I’d slide down your body, spread your legs, and kiss and caress you all over. And I’d give you as much pleasure as I can with my tongue and my fingers. All you have to do is lay back, have a cigarette, maybe another if you want. And let me treat you right between your legs.”
Donna raised her eyebrows a bit and ashed her cigarette. “I haven’t been treated right down there for a long time. That is definitely something I want. My husband doesn’t like to do that. And I’ve never been treated to that while I got to have a cigarette. But I want to try. Two pleasures at once,” she said in a hushed tone, before putting the cigarette back between her lips.
“So let me do it. I like to give pleasure,” I said. “I’ll give you as much pleasure there as you want. You just let the feeling wash over you.”
“Then, when you’re ready for me, we’d make love,” I continued, before taking a puff off my cigar – because I wasn’t sure I’d just said that.
“Whew. Wow. I like your idea, Stan. I like it a lot,” she said in a low, raspy voice, and with a wink. She took a big puff off of her dangling cigarette, inhaled, and after a few seconds exhaled though the corner of her mouth. At the same time, she rubbed her hand up and down my thigh, close to my groin.
Donna was clearly ready to go forward, and so was I.
“So, let me ask you,” I said, out of practice with exactly how to make the next move in this chess game toward intimacy. “You don’t mind kissing a man who has just been puffing on a cigar, do you?
Donna laughed. “I definitely do not mind kissing a man who has just smoked a cigar,” she said, before taking a last quick puff from her Slim and inhaling while stubbing it out in the ashtray. She held the smoke in as she gently took the cigar from my hand, and then through a talking exhale she added, “especially not if I get the last puff.”
Donna took a huge puff from the cigar, inhaled, and exhaled as she set it gently in the ashtray. Turning to me, she smiled and asked, “Now, Stan – do you mind kissing a woman who has just puffed a cigar?” Small tufts of residual cigar smoke followed her words out of her mouth.
“I don’t think so. But we’ll see, won’t we?” I said.
I leaned in and gave her a kiss. She reciprocated, clearly expecting the kiss. For several minutes, we made out like neither of us had in a long time. I was captivated by the powerful aroma of cigar and cigarette smoke on her breath and her clothes, mixed with a tiny amount of some perfume. I gently caressed her curves, exploring her body over her clothes. She lightly touched my back and arms and, eventually, the growing bulge in my pants.
Donna eventually broke off our kiss. With her face still close to mine, we gazed into each other’s eyes for a second. She spoke first, but said what was on my mind. “Let’s go upstairs to your bedroom. And bring our cigarettes.”
I took Donna’s hand and led her to my bedroom. Once there, we took off our clothes quickly and settled on to the bed, and I set a small ashtray and her cigarettes and lighter next to her. Starting with her face, I gently kissed her before moving down her body to kiss and caress her breasts. After a few minutes of this foreplay, Donna began to moan softly. Soon, she asked me to continue further down her body.
And so I did. Not long after I had started to pleasure her – starting by exploring her inner thighs with my tongue and fingers as something of a tease – she lit a cigarette. I observed her puff deeply and exhale with a look of pleasure on her face. She started to groan softly as I explored her vagina, teasing her clitoris with my tongue and slowly inserting my fingers – first one, then another – deeper into her.
Donna was beginning to get out of breath from excitement as she finished her cigarette and promptly lit a second one. As she smoked it and I continued to pleasure her, I felt her get more and more moist, and the volume of her moans increased. She was nearly screaming in ecstasy when her cigarette was almost done. Hastily stubbing it out, she uttered, “Get inside me, baby.”
Thrusting into her, I started to feel a release of tension that had been building up in me as a side effect of the strains my marriage was under. I’ll never know for sure, but if her passionate, loud moans were any indication, Donna seemed to be feeling a great release as well.
We both came at about the same time. I stayed on top of her, and for a while we just stared at each other, smiling and out of breath.
After sometime, Donna spoke. “Mmm. Mmm, mmm,” she moaned gently. “That was incredible. I haven’t felt that in a long time. You, sir, are amazing at this.” Donna paused and took a few deep breaths. “But,” she said, smiling and gently pushing me off of her, “right now, I need a cigarette. And you, my friend, deserve one after that.”
I smiled and took a deep breath myself. “I think we both do,” I said, getting the ashtray and my cigarettes from the nightstand on my side of the bed. I lit up Donna’s cigarette before lighting my own.
We laid next to each other, and were quiet for a minute as we took deep, relaxing puffs off of our cigarettes. With my free hand, I gently held hers.
Surely we were each thinking and feeling a thousand things in that quiet, smoky moment of post-coital bliss. But Donna shared her thoughts first. “You know, I didn’t know if I could still have an orgasm with a man. But apparently I can. I haven’t in a long time.”
Donna made the tip of her cigarette glow brightly as she inhaled a massive puff of smoke and inhaled deeply. Through a talking exhale, she added, “I use a vibrator a lot – I have a lot of lonely nights on this island – so maybe that helped keep me kind of ready for you.” She smiled through the cloud of smoke in front of her face. “And I think smoking cigarettes while you pleased me down there was like the cherry on top of an amazing sundae. I smoke sometimes when I vibrate, but honestly, this was just so much better. And then having you inside me – that’s just a million times better than any vibrator.”
I was heartened by her compliments, but wasn’t sure how to respond. I did the best I could, though, as some sort of response seemed required. “Well, whether it was the vibrator or not, making love to you was out of this world. And the cigarettes – I’m so happy they gave you pleasure, because it made me happy to look up from between your legs a couple of times and see you enjoying them, and the pleasuring, so much.”
We didn’t speak for another half-minute or so as we puffed our cigarettes.
“I don’t know how ambitious you are with me being here tonight,” Donna eventually said, exhaling. “But thinking of the pleasure we get watching each other smoke, I have an idea. If you were to smoke a cigar, it would definitely, um, keep me in the mood. And I have some other ideas for how to keep you in the mood, too.”
“I think that’s a great plan. The night is still young, after all,” I said, putting out my cigarette and getting out of the bed. “You don’t have to ask me twice to smoke a cigar, that’s for sure. And I’ll get us some glasses of water.” In a few minutes, I was back in bed, cutting and lighting a short cigar.
For about a minute or so, we were quiet. Donna watched me smoke the cigar as she finished her Slim and sipped some water. From the look on her face, I got the sense she was thinking about something. When she finished her cigarette and got a fresh one from her pack, I lit her up – wondering what wheels were turning in her mind.
Donna exhaled her first puff. “So…I want to try something if you don’t mind. I think it’ll help keep you in the mood and maybe get you ready for Round Two? This is something I did for Donny a few times. Long ago, when we were dating or maybe when we were first married, I forget exactly. I do remember he really liked it, that’s for sure. It’s also what made me certain that he got pretty fired up when I smoked cigarettes.”
I was now very curious to find out what this special thing was. I took a puff on my cigar and looked into her eyes, as I’d done at the bar. “Darling, at this point, you can try anything you want. I’m up for it.”
“Up for it? Interesting choice of words, Stan. We’ll see how up for it you are. Now, just knock some ash off your cigar, and lay back, put your head on the pillow, and enjoy smoking that cigar. What was it you said, something about two pleasures at once?” Donna said, smiling.
I did as Donna asked.
Still dangling her cigarette, Donna pulled the bedsheet off of me and, with the ashtray, slid down the bed and positioned herself so she was above my penis.
And then, dear reader, your obtuse author finally realized what a treat he was about to get. In Part I, my metaphor for receiving oral sex was that it pushed one of my buttons – but that receiving smoking oral was a big, red, this-is-hands-down- awesome button. Susan had given me such a treat on very rare occasions, and not in a long time, for sure. I was happy I’d received it even that small number of times, as it’s something of the Holy Grail in the smoking fetish world. At least in my smoking fetish world. As always, your interests may differ. And that’s fine.
Maybe what motivated Donna to give me this bucket-list-level delight was the common belief that one good turn deserves another – after all, I had given her oral pleasure, and she’d made clear her husband didn’t do that. Maybe it was that she was having a rollicking good time, doing wild things with a man she’d just met in a bar, and was getting carried away by the emotions of our evening. Maybe she just liked doing it.
But whatever her motivation was, Donna knew how to give one hell of a smoking blow job. She blew smoke on my member from all directions, before slowly starting to use her mouth and tongue on me. If it’s true she hadn’t done this in a long time, she certainly hadn’t forgotten exactly how to do it. All the while, I did as she asked, leaning back on the pillows and enjoying the sensation along with my cigar. Two pleasures at once, indeed.
I wasn’t exactly watching the clock, so I don’t know how much time passed in this very enjoyable exercise. But relatively soon, Donna had revived my nearly half- century-old member, still recovering from our earlier lovemaking, into a fully erect state. Sitting up on the bed and contentedly observing what her work had brought about, she took a last puff on her Virginia Slim, put it out in the ashtray, and slid the ashtray towards the edge of the bed and out of our way.
“This is ready for me now,” Donna said in her raspy voice as she mounted me. I realized I was still holding the cigar, and as much as I wanted to set it somewhere, she had moved the ashtray too far for me, on my back, to reach – and I definitely didn’t want to interrupt our congress over a comparatively minor matter like where to put my cigar. So, I clenched the cigar between my teeth and held Donna’s hands to steady her as she slowly moved herself up and down my member.
Donna kept her eyes closed most of the time, but I got to observe her face. I hadn’t seen a look of such utter pleasure on a woman in a long time. She alternated between biting her lip and purring quietly, before beginning to moan. Her moaning increased, as did the speed at which she bounced up and down on my penis. Ultimately, we both climaxed at about the same time.
Very satisfied, we caught our breath as we gazed into each other’s eyes.
Donna noticed the cigar clenched tightly between my teeth. “Oh my God, I moved the ashtray. I’m sorry,” she laughed, reaching for the ashtray with one of her hands and putting it next to me so I could finally take it from between my teeth.
I chuckled a bit. “You know, I was enjoying that so much, I didn’t even notice the cigar was there,” I said.
And that was pretty much true. Between encountering this sexy mature heavy smoker who spotted and understood my fetish, two rounds of lovemaking, and an amazing smoking blow job – none of which I was expecting when I’d gone out to the Crow’s Nest a few hours before – my average weeknight had taken a wild, wonderful, deeply gratifying turn. I was enjoying it all and living in the moment. The ceiling of my bedroom could have collapsed right then, and I doubt I would have paid it much attention.
Donna rolled off of me and laid next to me in the bed after putting a Virginia Slim between her lips, which I promptly lit before lighting a Parliament for me. We held hands and smoked our cigarettes for a couple of minutes, not saying much, just idly grinning at each other.
We were both spent, and a little tired by now. But the gentleman in me still had to ensure she was comfortable. “You know, Donna, you are welcome to stay the night. I’d like that, in fact, if you want to stay. I have to work tomorrow, but don’t have to be in the office at a set time.”
Donna smiled. “I’d like that,” she said. “I miss sleeping next to a man some nights down here,” she said, exhaling cigarette smoke. “And I’d like to wake up and see you. To know for sure a night like this wasn’t a dream,” she said with a smile, before taking another puff of her Slim.
As she exhaled, she continued. “But just to warn you: I have a nasty cough from years of these things,” holding up her cigarette. “It sounds worse than it really is, though,” she chuckled. “Just so you’re not surprised.”
Donna crushed out her spent Virginia Slim and pulled out another one, which I promptly lit. “Mmm,” she said, inhaling a long puff. “Something no non-smoker would ever understand is how good it feels to smoke after great sex,” she said before exhaling a huge cloud that floated across the bedroom. “Or, frankly, for me, just to have great sex even without the cigarette after. Donny and I haven’t made love in months. We’re practically celibate now. I miss sex. A lot.”
I puffed on my cigar and exhaled. “Well, it’s not my place to give relationship advice. But honestly, if Donny ever had a thing for you smoking cigarettes, then one night you should just surprise him with a cigarette in one hand and give him
oral the way you gave me. That was amazing. That’s not something I’ve had at home in a very long time. If that doesn’t give him a charge, I don’t know what will.”
Donna smiled. “You liked that, huh?” she asked, squeezing my hand. “Although I don’t have to ask, because I could tell by how you responded that you did. I haven’t made a man, um, stand at attention that quickly in a long time. It felt good, and it feels good to know I can still do that.”
Donna double-pumped her Virginia Slim and held the smoke in her lungs as she rolled ash off the burning end into the ashtray between us. “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll try that with Donny, to see if I can get the spark back between us. But I stopped doing that for him because he never wanted to return the favor, if you know what I mean,” she said. “But for you and me – there are a lot of things I’d like to try with you if you are up for them. You make me feel like a woman again, and I like that feeling, a lot. I want to try a bunch of things with you because I like feeling this way. And Donny and me, well, we love each other, but we may just be a lost cause in the sex department.”
Chapter 5: “I Have A Cigar Thing”
The next morning, I woke up early when the sunlight started streaming around the window curtains. Despite an amazing night, it was going to be another workday for me. Donna was sleeping soundly with her back toward me, so I was able to gently get up and out of bed without waking her. As I went downstairs to the kitchen, I noted the smoky smell everywhere. I generally smoked cigarettes and cigars on the terrace, to keep the place in acceptable shape for when Susan and the girls came down. Last night, I’d made an exception to that rule. I made a mental note that I’d have to air the place out, use a ton of Febreze, and get the cleaning people in here before Susan and the girls came down for a beach weekend.
But my brain was skipping ahead to the cleanup, when there was a much more pressing and more current issue to be worked over. This main issue was: what was I going to do, if anything, with Donna? We’d had amazing sex and she pushed a lot of my fetish buttons, but did I want to make this a regular thing? If not, how would I get out of it? I decided to think on that a little bit later, as I poured two coffees – both black, as Donna had confirmed last night that we take our coffee the same way – and headed back upstairs to the bedroom with them. I’d have to do some detailed thinking on this whole thing, and the time to do that was not when she was still sleeping in my bed.
Donna opened her eyes as I set her coffee on the nightstand on her side of the bed, saving me the awkwardness of waking up a woman in my bed who I had only met about twelve hours before. She looked at me and her eyes widened for a quick second, as her brain switched on and reconstructed what had happened the night before, where she was, and who I was.
She was quickly alright with what she recollected, however, because she smiled widely and said, “Good morning, hon. You brought up coffee! What a treat to have coffee brought to me in bed,” in a dry, raspy voice. She reached out to me with one hand and touched my arm, while her other hand went right to the nightstand and instinctually grabbed a Virginia Slim out of her pack, and put the filter in her mouth. “I strive to offer first class service,” I said jokingly, as I picked up her lighter and gave her a light.
I went around to my side of the bed, climbed back in, and lit my own cigarette. Watching Donna, I was treated to a three minute demonstration of severe, hard- core nicotine addiction, seeing a craving satisfied by this almost-fifty-year, heavy- and-almost-chain smoker with no intention or ability to give up cigarettes.
Probably everyone who is more than a light smoker and reads this understands what a morning nicotine craving is about. In case you’re not in that group, dear reader, let me try to explain. In my case, since I was in college, I’d woken up every morning with a little bit of a gnawing in my stomach and a bit of tenseness in my nerves. It was really the start of a simple balancing reaction, really. My body – essentially every cell in it – had been used to doses of nicotine in varying amounts over the course of the prior day, and then I had the bad judgment to suddenly stop that nicotine dosing for about seven hours while I slept. Until I’d corrected this error – by smoking a cigarette or a cigar, chewing nicotine gum or snus, or even vaping, for after being deprived so long the body wouldn’t seem to care much about the form of delivery – the pit in my stomach and the tenseness in my nerves would only grow. My brain, responding to these urgent messages, would structure my morning in such a way as to get the craving satisfied as soon as possible.
For the first years of our married life, Susan and I had structured our mornings to satisfy our cravings immediately as soon as we woke up, with cigarettes at the ready on our nightstands. We never really talked about this process – it was just something we’d both understood from the first morning we were together, that we’d wake up and then light up, usually before we’d even made it to the kitchen to get coffee. In more recent years – with Susan struggling to quit smoking – I’d been forced to rearrange my routine to smoke later, after I was up for a little while and
could get out of the main house to our patioside smoking room. Susan, for her part, had always found abandoning her first cigarette of the day to be the biggest hurdle to clear in her many attempts to quit cigarettes.
So, as a smoker married to a longtime, pretty heavy smoker, I understood the concept of needing to smoke upon, or soon after, waking up.
At least I thought I understood it. But I’d never seen anything quite like Donna’s urgent need to get nicotine into her body.
From the moment the flame of my lighter touched the end of her long cigarette, Donna essentially puffed that cigarette the entire time, except for two occasions when she’d quickly knock ash into the ashtray. She triple-pumped very puff, and would often be taking these puffs as smoke billowed out of her nostrils. She had smoke inside her the whole time, either fresh smoke going in to her lungs or spent smoke on its way out, having given her some of the nicotine she very desperately needed. It put me in mind of some of the speed-smoking videos available on some corners of the Internet.
I’d been trying to be discreet while trying to watch this amazing display. But eventually Donna caught me glancing at her, and she rolled her eyes a bit and smiled. As she ashed her cigarette, a volcano’s worth of smoke tumbled out of her mouth with her words. “Yes, I need this,” she said in a joking, wheezy voice before quickly putting the cigarette back in her mouth and continuing through a dangle. “I used to love my first one of the day. Now it’s definitely a need.”
As the Slim burned to its filter with intense speed, Donna took one last huge puff, crushed out the butt in her ashtray, made her usual “O” with her mouth, and inhaled deeply. She exhaled twice, expelling huge clouds of smoke each time. She turned to face me and as residual smoke streamed from her mouth and nose, she smiled and said, “Okay. Now I am ready to start the day.”
I was only halfway done with my cigarette, but this tremendous display of the awesome hold Donna’s addiction had on her, and the vigorous way she satisfied that need, was giving me a morning erection. I was considering what to do next when Donna pulled out another Virginia Slim and leaned toward me for a light. Clearly, Donna’s next step was another cigarette.
After Donna took her first puff, she started to cough – a few coughs at first, then what seemed like a never ending stream of them, growing somewhat in their force.
She got them under control for a second and smiled wanly at me. “Here it is, the morning cough train. Sometimes it’s right when I wake up and sometimes it’s a little later. But it always comes,” she said. She coughed a few more times and excused herself into my bathroom. From behind the closed door, I heard a succession of half-minute coughing fits, interrupted only by a few seconds of quiet between each one. Eventually, I heard the toilet flush and the sound of water coming into the bathroom sink.
Reader: a quick note on the “coughing fetish.” It’s one of the close cousins of the smoking fetish. As I wrote in Part I, I’m not a huge fan of coughing, especially when it’s done by a woman I know (my wife, or in this case, Donna). A random cough by a heavy-smoking mature woman who is more or less anonymous to me can be interesting at times. In this case, though, any gratification I felt by Donna’s heavy coughing spell was outweighed by my legitimate concern for her well-being – given she’d just sent the night with me and I was more than a bit smitten with her. So, my concern for her health was more on my mind than any sexual interest in her cough, at that given moment.
Donna opened the bathroom door, returned to stand by her side of the bed, and put out her cigarette in the ashtray. “I’m sorry about that. It sounds kind of brutal, I know,” she said. “But I think the worst of it is over.”
“It’s perfectly okay, my dear. We’re smokers and that comes with the territory,” I said. “And anyway, a sexy woman wearing nothing but one of my t-shirts is welcome to cough or do whatever she wants in my house,” I joked, trying to put her back at ease. I pulled the sheet off my body to reveal my erect member and patted the empty place in the bed next to me. “Why don’t you come back into bed for a few minutes? I don’t have to get up for work quite yet.”
Donna grinned broadly and laid on the bed next to me. Pulling me close to her, she said, “And I thought coffee in bed was a morning treat. I didn’t know you had more in store for me.” The smell of fresh smoke on her breath only made me desire her more.
We made love. Donna’s cough had receded, replaced by a thick wheeze that did not interrupt the proceedings.
After our post-sex cigarettes, I told her it was time for me to get ready for work, and asked her to make herself comfortable while I showered.
“Are you sure there isn’t room for two?” she asked, smiling as she extinguished her Virginia Slim.
I readily agreed to having her shower with me. I gave me a chance to explore her body more – curvy in the right places, as I’d observed before, and not at all bad for a woman in her late fifties. She didn’t seem to mind soaping up a man in his late forties in decent shape, but whose corporeal form had slowly morphed over the years into a typical suburban “dad bod.”
Donna enjoyed scrubbing my private parts, and ultimately her gentle touching and caressing started to give me another erection. She grinned as the shower water ran down her face, apparently pleased that she was able to get me hard twice in the short span of time we’d been awake. Donna lightly squeezed my member, and asked, “My, what’s this, Mr. Andrews? Looks like someone wants more. I do too, but I want to get you off to work so you don’t get in trouble. I’ve got a conference call with my team in a little while, too.”
I’d learned last night that her nipples were very sensitive, so I quickly grazed one of them with the back of my hand to give her a bit of a thrill in response. She gasped quickly and smiled.
“Well, a raincheck, then. But not for long?” I asked.
“I hope not. I don’t think I can wait very long,” Donna answered.
After I got dressed for work and Donna cleaned up, I offered her breakfast – a gentlemanly thing to do, I thought, and fortunately I’d stocked up on food on my drive down from Houston. “I don’t have much here, but I can make you some oatmeal and I have some fresh fruit.”
Donna was warmed by this humble gesture. “You’re making me breakfast??” she gushed. “No one has made me breakfast in a long time. Thank you!”
I think her feeling of being well-treated compensated for my offering of my simple, usual “bachelor’s breakfast” I ate when alone on the Island – instant oatmeal, fruit and Greek yogurt, with more coffee. After we ate, I lit her Virginia Slim and my own cigarette.
As Donna exhaled, she asked me a question. “Stan, do you remember when I said I want to try a lot of things?”
“Sure,” I said. “Which is a great attitude, by the way. I’m always up for ideas and I feel comfortable with you. Tell me what’s on your mind – the worst I can say is ‘no’ if it makes me uncomfortable.” I recalled Donna saying that last night right after we’d been intimate – that she wanted to try things she couldn’t do with Donny – and while I assumed she meant sexual things, quite frankly it could be anything. Maybe Donny didn’t want to try windsurfing. Or deep-sea fishing. Both of them were popular pastimes here on South Padre, and maybe she was looking for a water-sport companion. I figured it couldn’t hurt to know.
Donna held her cigarette in her hand and stared at me as if she needed to be sure she could tell me something on her mind. “This is weird. But I feel comfortable with you.”
Now I was thinking Donna had something sexual in mind – you don’t need to be comfortable with someone to tell them you want to try windsurfing or offshore fishing. But I encouraged her to continue anyway. “Nothing’s really too weird, Donna, trust me. At least to talk about. I won’t laugh or judge you for whatever is on your mind. I’m honored you feel comfortable enough to tell me what you want. That’s important to me,” I said, before taking a puff on my cigarette. “So go ahead – try me.”
Donna exhaled a cone of smoke, then inhaled a bit of air and exhaled again. “So, here it is. I have a cigar thing,” Donna said.
“ I know. I’m always happy to smoke a cigar, both for my own enjoyment and your, uh, viewing pleasure,” I said with a smile, not sure why Donna was telling me something I thought we had already established.
“Well…it’s not just you puffing on one. Something else,” she said, exhaling a thick cloud of cigarette smoke.
“Okay. Tell me. I’m game for just about anything,” I said.
Donna ashed her cigarette in the ashtray and looked down at it as she spoke. It seemed she was a bit uncomfortable with what she was about to say. “So, as I told you…I use a vibrator. And sometimes I have thought about what it would be like to, um, pleasure myself with a big cigar like I do with my vibrator.”
She looked up at me as if to gauge my reaction, which was one of surprise but interest. “You mean like Monica Lewinsky? Do you remember hearing about that?” I asked.
I’d caught Donna mid-puff with my question, so she nodded her head and then inhaled before answering. “I do. Like that,” she answered. Donna exhaled a large cloud of gray smoke that spread around my breakfast table. “I remember hearing about it back then, and thinking it was so perverted. But I don’t know, now – well, I didn’t vibrate back then, so maybe I didn’t understand it.”
“But it’s occurred to me over the past few years that maybe there’s something to it. So, what I have in mind is, if you can get me, you know, kind of warmed up there, I’d like to see what a cigar feels like inside. Especially one of the big ones like you smoked last night,” she said, before taking another puff on her Slim.
“And then, after that, if you want to taste it, you could light it up and smoke it,” Donna said, through a talking exhale. “Which is where you come in, Stan. I can use a cigar to touch myself anytime. But kind of the really sexy part of it, that I can’t do myself of course, is watch you smoke it. After it’s been in me.”
I took a puff on my own cigarette and thought for a second about all of this. What Donna was proposing is not something that’s “mainstream” in the smoking fetish, by any means. It’s an outlier, even in a fetish that has a lot of kinks and interests that the majority of folks would think are pretty odd. But maybe that’s why the smoking fetish is a fetish, anyway – if it was mainstream, everyone would be doing it. And certainly everyone is not smoking to sexually stimulate their partners.
So, yes, Donna stimulating herself with a cigar and then having me smoke it was weird, and not something I’d seek out in the corners of the Internet where smoking fetish pictures and videos tend to be found. Perhaps it’s the oddest thing to come out of the Clinton impeachment matter a quarter-century ago. The Internet was just starting then, and maybe we’re all fortunate – if this sort of conduct came into the public sphere today, all of us would be dealing with massive amounts of negative publicity on our somewhat small, remote cove off of the great ocean of sexual proclivities and likes.
But in considering Donna’s request, I applied two principles that seemed to open the door to me agreeing. First, consenting adults are the only people who should be involved in any kind of sexual conduct – and that was met here, as Donna was 58 and I was in my late forties. Second, and simpler: you only live once.
So, I agreed. “Okay,” I said. “Let’s try it. I’ll pleasure you and then we’ll use one of my big cigars. Then I’ll smoke it. It’s a little wild and out there, that’s true. But
we’re both adults and I don’t know why we can’t indulge in a little fantasy,” I said. “But let me ask you: do you want to taste the cigar too, once I light it up?”
“Oh, yeah,” Donna said, now smiling. I surmised from how her posture changed that she was relieved I’d greeted her revelation of what she wanted to try warmly. “Absolutely.”
Donna snuffed out her cigarette and retrieved another from her leather case. I lit her cigarette and after taking her first puff, she continued. “Stan, I feel I can tell you anything. And you can tell me anything, too. So, tell me something – what’s a dirty, kinky thing you want to try? Like you said, the worst I can say is no.”
I felt emboldened by Donna’s rather extreme request. She had shared a deep desire with me, risking my reacting negatively. And Donna knew I had a smoking fetish. So my brain pulled up the list of “smoking scenes I want to see” and looked over the many that hadn’t been crossed off. You, dear reader, may have such a list yourself.
I picked one of the naughty deep-smoking-fantasy items off my list and just put it out there, as they say. “Well…you know I think it’s sexy when you dangle your long cigarette, Donna. I’d like to watch you dangle an entire cigarette, from me lighting it to down to the filter, without putting your hands on it,” I said.
Fortunately, Donna didn’t laugh. She actually seemed fine with the idea. She smiled a sultry smile for a second, and then dangled her Virginia Slim on the left side of her mouth.
Donna took a deep puff off her cigarette, and exhaled around the still-dangling butt. The Slim danced as she responded. “So this dangling really turns you on, huh? Well, I’m happy to dangle a cigarette for you, Stan. From start to finish.”
Realizing the ash on her cigarette was a little long, Donna quickly knocked the ash off and put it back to dangle between her lips. “But we should probably do this in the shower, where the ash can fall on the tile and won’t burn the floor. And,” – she paused to take a puff, and continued after exhaling – “I think it might be kind of sexy if you tied my hands behind my back while I smoke the cigarette. Not in handcuffs or anything, but just loosely. To keep me from trying to take the cigarette out of my mouth just out of habit. And, because, well, being a little submissive or tied up is a little sexy to me. I’ve never tried that.”
I was stunned by Donna’s idea. I’m not a huge dom/sub sort of guy, frankly. But the idea of Donna having her hands tied up turned the dial up even higher on my request. And, she’d not only heard my fantasy without complaint, but she seemed interested in doing it.
There wasn’t much I could say, but I had to try. “So, this would be, sort of, ahh, another form of two pleasures at once. One for you and one for me,” I said.
Donna exhaled another cloud of smoke around her dangling cigarette. “That’s a good way to put it, Stan. Two pleasures at once. And to make sure you are getting your pleasure, I’d like you to watch me do this without any clothes on either of us,” she said. She puffed her cigarette and, still dangling it, exhaled a cloud of smoke in my face. “I assume that’s okay with you? Because once I can see that you’re, how should I say, demonstrating your pleasure, then, when my cigarette is done, you can free my hands and we can get in the bed and both have a lot of pleasure together.”
I was, by now, essentially speechless and lost in the fantasy Donna was putting out before me.
When I didn’t say anything for several seconds, Donna realized she had me. She decided to end our first encounter on what any observer would consider a high note.
Donna took one last big puff off her dangling cigarette and inhaled deeply, opening a corner of her mouth a little bit to pull in some air to help the inhale along. As she held the smoke deep in her lungs, she spoke. “I take it we have a plan, then. We’ll try some new things.”
Donna exhaled a huge cloud of smoke around the cigarette, this time right in my face. She removed the nearly-finished cigarette from her lips and put it out in the ashtray. She exhaled some more smoke and then just looked at me and smiled for about five seconds. I was still unable to muster any words.
Donna’s smile widened even more. She clearly knew she’d made a big impact on me by accepting my fantasy and then playing it out even further, beyond a frontier my fetisher’s mind hadn’t yet even reached. “Let me help you clean up and then you have to go to work, and I have to go get on my call. And I’m almost out of cigarettes. I smoked a lot last night,” Donna said with a wink. “Will you text me later?”
Chapter 6: Trying New Things
Dear reader: The following section contains rather explicit content. Although it is
tied to the smoking fetish theme of this piece, it is not for the faint of heart.
After Donna left, I finished getting ready for work and drove in to the office. It was tough, however, focusing on my work, given the wild night and morning I’d just had.
For a short time that morning, I considered just not contacting Donna again, and filing the whole thing away as a wonderful experience.
But part of me wanted more. So around noon, I texted her:
Donna Me
Hi. How are you?
I’m good
Actually great. Really still on Cloud 9
Me too, last nght was amazing
Night, I mean
So, what are you doing tonight, or do you want to rest up and get together maybe next week
Tonight, absolutely
I’ve been thinking about the new things we said we wanted to try
And I am up for trying them
Do you have any of those big cigars
left?
You mean the Diesel Unlimited Presidentes Yes, I have some if you’d like to…
It’s called the Presidente?
That’s an ironic name for what I have In mind…
We made arrangements to get together at my place that night. On the way back to the Island, I stopped and picked up ready-made dinners, ice cream, and flowers
from the supermarket. I thought about cooking her a full dinner, and while I’m a good cook, I’d never fully equipped the kitchen in our beach condo to make a big dinner. And she rejected my offer of going out to dinner, saying she really wanted to continue where we’d left off. Which was a hard offer to turn down.
So with some guidance on what she liked to eat, I hit the fresh-made, heat-up- meal case at the local supermarket. I had just put them in the oven when Donna arrived.
Donna clearly dressed more to impress tonight than when she went out the night before for just a happy hour drink with some friends. She was in full, well-done makeup, and wore a red silk blouse, tight-fitting beige linen skirt, and nice shoes.
She blushed when I gave her the flowers. “Aww, Stan. I usually only get these on my birthday. Thank you,” she gushed.
Since the dinners still needed some more time to cook, I poured her a drink and lit her Virginia Slim. She took two dangling puffs before removing the cigarette from between her lips with a wink. “Just a little sample for you…we still have to eat dinner, of course,” she said in a low voice.
As if to kill time, or perhaps to not appear too anxious to each other, we talked about a bunch of things not related to the real purpose of our encounter that night. She told me how her team meeting went, and about some of the projects she was working on. I told her about some of the accounting mistakes I was still cleaning up from before my company acquired this business. It was absolutely fascinating conversation.
But it did kill time. And after we’d had our dinner – not bad for a bachelor host, I think, but far from five-start cuisine – she dangled a Virginia Slim for me to light. “Just one of these for me, I think. At least here – I’d like more in your bedroom,” she said in a sultry voice.
“That’s a great idea,” I said, lighting her cigarette. “Because I’ll be in the mood for an after-dinner cigar.” Donna smiled at my foreshadowing.
After some more conversation, we finished our cigarettes at about the same time. Looking at me as she crushed out her cigarette, Donna said, “Stan…I’m ready for trying new things if you are.”
“I’m ready,” I said, meeting her gaze. “Let me get a Presidente.”
Armed with the cigar, cutter, lighter, and our cigarettes, we went upstairs. We sat on the bed next to each other, momentarily unsure of the next move.
I decided to take the lead. I slowly removed the cellophane wrapper from the seven inch cigar, making something of a show of doing so.
I handed the cigar to Donna as if to add to the drama. “Smell it. Doesn’t it smell divine?” I asked her. “I’m going to cut it and set it next to me. And then undress you and get you ready for it.”
Donna smiled and slid the cigar lengthwise under her nose, sniffing the aroma of the fine tobacco that would soon be inside her most intimate part. “Yummm. This smells almost as good as when it’s lit,” she said. “I’ll tell you when I am ready for it and we’ll put it in together. I’ll know how it should feel.”
She handed the cigar back to me, and I slowly cut it, set it in an ashtray on one edge of the bed, and put my lighter beside it. While giving her a few little kisses on her lips and neck, I slowly unbuttoned Donna’s blouse and removed her bra. She helped me remove her skirt and underwear, and then unbuckled my pants and kissed me as she unbuttoned my shirt.
We were both soon naked on the bed and I began to kiss her, slowly at first and just on the mouth. Then, with a bit more speed to pick up the tempo, I started kissing her ears and her neck. When I moved down her body toward her breasts, Donna lit a Virginia Slim. I slid the ashtray, cigar, and lighter towards her, so they’d be in easy reach of both of us.
As I massaged and kissed Donna’s breasts, she increased the speed at which she was puffing her cigarette and the intensity of her inhales. Moving one finger around the edge of her vagina, I could tell she was beginning to get moist.
Donna put out her mostly-smoked Slim, placed another one between her lips, and lit it. She dangled it through a wide grin. Exhaling smoke at me around the cigarette, she said in a seductive voice, “Go ahead, Stan. Get me ready.”
I did as she asked, and started to pleasure her orally. Donna began to groan lustily as she puffed her cigarette.
When her cigarette was almost done, Donna let me know. Snubbing her cigarette out quickly in the ashtray, she pulled herself up a bit so her head was resting on
the pillows and she had a better view of my position between her legs. “I’m ready, Stan.”
I picked up the large cigar and slowly ran its cut tip around the edge of her vagina. She gasped. After I did that for about ten more seconds, she placed her hand over mine. “Follow me,” she whispered.
Donna inserted the cigar into her vagina, clearly leading the way and using it as a sensual tool to stimulate her in ways I wouldn’t have known to do. I loosely held the opposite end of the cigar, being more of an observer to her pleasure.
And what pleasure it was. Donna gasped and moaned several times, and bit her lower lip as she moved several inches of the cigar back and forth inside her. Eventually, she took a huge, deep breath, and slowly exhaled. She removed the cigar and handed it to me. In a quiet, husky voice, she said, “Light it up, Stan.”
I moved up the bed to lie next to her, and before I lit the cigar, I lit the Slim that Donna had put between her lips. Donna watched me intently as I slowly lit the cigar. It was slow to light, as it was somewhat moist – not sponge-wet, but lightly moistened. Her body had given it a slight salty taste. By the third puff as I got the cigar burning, I discovered this slight addition of saline flavoring enhanced a great cigar. I was enjoying the taste of the cigar, and the moment, immensely.
“This is heaven,” I said, looking at Donna. “I mean – this tastes great,” I added, quickly running out of adjectives to describe an entirely new experience and cigar flavor. The blood flowing to my member in response to Donna’s body, and now her dangling her cigarette, might have helped my brain build a better response if it had gone there instead.
Donna exhaled around her dangling cigarette as she spoke. “Let me finish this cigarette. You enjoy that for a few minutes while I just leave this long cigarette parked right here.”
Donna continued to dangle and puff deeply on her cigarette, removing it only a few times to add some long white ashes to the ashtray between us. I continued to enjoy the cigar, now well past its early burn and giving off big clouds of gray smoke. We didn’t speak, but just observed each other.
Donna put out her cigarette and I gave her the cigar. She took a puff, inhaled, and exhaled, before looking at the cigar again and repeating that cycle. As she
exhaled the second time, she said, “Wow. This is really pretty awesome, to taste myself in a cigar,” she said.
I kissed her free hand gently. “Donna, you taste like a goddess.”
Donna looked at me for a few seconds as she puffed the cigar again. I was afraid I was gilding the lily with my over-the-top prose. But as it turned out, I was really just giving her confidence to go a step further.
“Stan,” she said through a talking exhale of cigar smoke, “I want to try something I don’t know I’ll be able to do. There’s actually videos on the Internet I found today of this, but all of them were younger women trying it. So don’t be disappointed if I can’t make this work. But slide down to the end of the bed so you can see between my legs.”
I had a hunch I knew what videos Donna was talking about as I slid down to take a position at the foot of the bed. They were the extreme of the extreme, and if my hunch was right, even too extreme for me. All the same, there I was. To paraphrase Star Trek, I was about to go where few in the smoking fetish community had gone before – and over a frontier many of them may not even want to cross.
Sure enough, Donna put the cut end of the cigar in her vagina, and slid it in about an inch or two. She was watching carefully to avoid burning herself, although I’d noticed that since last night, she had trimmed her pubic hair – perhaps preparing herself so that hair would be less of an issue if she tried what she was now trying.
I saw her face strain as she tried to puff the cigar with her vagina. Nothing happened to the cigar. She thought for a second and tried again. Nothing again.
Donna looked at me. “Okay, I think I know.” She slid the cigar out of her and slid it back in. She leaned back to straighten her body out more, but keeping her head at an angle that would let her watch her groin. She took a deep breath and tightened what appeared to be every muscle in her body.
The burning end of the cigar sprang to life, glowing a bright red and giving off a thick cloud of smoke that wafted upward. Donna watched herself puff the cigar for about five seconds, before releasing her breath and her muscles and opening her mouth into a wide smile. A huge burst of cigar smoke, imbued with a high pressure like the steam whistle on a locomotive in old movie, blew out of her intimate part around the cigar. The fast cloud hit me in the face and spread around my head.
Extreme as this was, I loved every second of it.
Donna did too. “Whew!” she said. “I had to really work at that. I moved some muscles I forgot I had,” she laughed, a bit out of breath.
As I’d been most of the night, I struggled to find words. “Incredible,” I said. “Just incredible. I’ve never seen anything like that before. You’re amazing.”
With her mouth, Donna puffed the cigar as I crawled back up the bed to lay next to her. I think she was at a loss for words too, perhaps overtaken by the moment like me. “Thank you,” she said, in a quiet voice. She smiled at me and puffed the cigar contentedly for a half-minute or so. While we were both enjoying an intimate moment, I was wondering what would come next.
Donna knew. She reached her hand under the sheet that partially covered my erection. “Oh, my,” she said, smiling as she exhaled a cloud of cigar smoke. “I really have to be careful dangling my long cigarettes around you, Stan. And now I’m smoking this big cigar, too, and you helped me give it this special taste. Well, you know what comes next, don’t you, darling?”
Donna handed me the cigar and gently rolled me on my back. “You have let me fulfill a fantasy I’ve had for some time, but that I didn’t want to do alone. So now lay back, puff that cigar, and enjoy two pleasures at once,” she said erotically.
After I lit her Virginia Slim, I laid my head back and enjoyed as Donna asked. As I smoked the cigar, she used the smoke from her Slim and her mouth to bring me to a climax very quickly.
We spent the next fifteen minutes or so smoking in bed – Donna her long cigarettes, and me still puffing on the Presidente – and talking a little bit about the fantasy she had fulfilled. Eventually, Donna started dangling her cigarette and puffing away on it. “So, when do I get to return the favor and dangle a cigarette for you without using my hands? Can we do it now? I’m kind of excited to see how this goes.”
“Two pleasures at once and then a dirty fantasy fulfilled? And it’s only a Wednesday night,” I said, joking.
“There’s no rule against trying new, dirty things on a Wednesday,” Donna said with a throaty laugh, exhaling a stream of smoke around her dangling Slim.
Donna had clearly thought through the mechanics of how this should work. “We should run the shower first a little bit so the floor is wet. This way, the ashes won’t leave burn marks on the tile. And do you have something you can use to tie up my hands behind my back?”
I had thought this part through. “I was going to use the belt from my robe. It’s soft, and if you get really uncomfortable you can wiggle out of it. Or just say something and I’ll untie you,” I answered.
“Like a safety word. Maybe ‘octopus’?” Donna proposed.
“Octopus it is. If you say that, I’ll take the cigarette from your lips and untie you,” I agreed.
“Great. And I want you to stand there, naked, and just watch me. I want to see what this does to you,” Donna said.
Naked, we went into the bathroom and ran the shower for a minute or so to get the floor wet while Donna put a fresh Virginia Slim in a comfortable position in her mouth. She fiddled with it a bit to get it positioned in just the right spot between her lips for her comfort. Then, I loosely tied her hands with the belt from my bathrobe. I made sure she could move her hands out if she really wanted to – I wasn’t viewing this as some sort of real confinement exercise – but the belt was tight enough that she’d have to wrangle her hands out of it somewhat. Donna stepped into the shower and turned to face me.
“I’m ready,” she said. I lit Donna’s cigarette and leaned back on the sink opposite the shower door. She puffed on it a couple of times while she watched me, her gaze traveling from my eyes to my penis and back.
Donna decided to add try some erotic dialogue to her hands-free dangling demonstration – she clearly wanted to watch me get aroused. “Stan, I think you should know how much I love to dangle my cigarette. It makes me feel like smoking a cigarette is just a natural part of me,” she said, as smoke poured from a corner of her mouth and her nostrils.
She took a huge puff that forced the tip of the cigarette to bounce up, inhaled deeply, and exhaled a huge cloud. Even as my gaze was fixed on her, I felt a stirring in my midsection. Donna noticed the movement of my member as well. “There it is,” she said with a smile as her cigarette dangled.
Donna took another huge puff. As she held the smoke in her lungs, she added, “And you know how much I love to smoke these long cigarettes. Two packs a day,” she said before exhaling another massive cloud that spilled out of the shower and enveloped me. She smiled again as she saw the increasing effect her display was having on me.
“You should have seen me back in the day,” Donna continued, before taking another deep puff. “Three packs a day of long cigarettes, and I’d almost always have one dangling right from this same spot where I have this one.” Another cloud of whitish-gray smoke billowed in my direction.
The cigarette, burning fast, danced as she went on. “But now that I can see what a, um, significant impact this is having on you, you better watch out. I’m going to be dangling all the time in front of you,” she said, before taking another puff. “At the Crow’s Nest, or if we go out for dinner somewhere. Even on the beach.”
Donna blew out a wave of smoke in my direction. Her cigarette had grown short, in direct opposition to my phallus. “And especially here in your condo. Or in my place. Anytime you want this, baby, I’ll dangle a cigarette for you.”
Donna’s Virginia Slim was nearly burnt to its filter, and a thick cloud of cigarette smoke filled the shower. The now-short cigarette danced upward as she took one last puff, and she inhaled deeply. Her next words came out of her mouth on clouds of exhaled smoke. “Stan, I’m almost done with my cigarette. And I want to fuck you. Will you put this out, untie me, and bring me back into the bedroom?”
Donna didn’t have to ask twice.
Chapter 7: Johnny Belsom
One weeknight not long after we’d met, Donna and I were at the Crow’s Nest.
Her three friends were there with us at the bar. As we’d agreed, Donna had told them that we were “seeing each other” by then. She didn’t tell them any details about what we were doing, at least if I was reading her texts right. Our text exchange about this earlier that day had gone this way:
Donna Me
Hey there, hot stuff. How are you?
Good! Ow are you?
Ow = How
I was just thinking about you
I was thinking about you too –
Are you still up for meeting up tonight? Maybe at the Crow’s next at 6 or so? Next = Nest
I can pick up some of those ready- made meals if you want – you know for
later !
Yay !
I might meet the girls at Crow’s Nest earlier Around 5
Which gets to something I want to ask you. Can I tell them that we’re seeing each other? I think they have probably figured that out But trust me I am not giving them the details You know
But only if you are OK with that
Sure, I think so – but with no details, I want to keep those to ourselves ”
I’m not the best at reading emojis. I think they’re a very imperfect form of communication. That said, I took Donna’s texts to mean that while she’d tell her friends we were seeing each other, she wouldn’t tell them how far we’d gone (the two people in bed emoji) or anything to do with smoking as a mutual turn-on in our relationship (the cigarette and little cloud ones).
All the same, I wasn’t sure exactly what I’d hear when I met Donna and her friends at the Crow’s Nest around six that night. I got some wry glances from a couple of the women in her small clique, but nothing I could read. I cut and lit a cigar to see if that elicited any reaction that could clue me in to exactly what Donna had told the group.
“Another cigar tonight, Stan?” Mary-Ann, the Salem smoker, asked me. “You smoke those things every time you come in here,” she commented. A true statement – every time I’d met Donna for a drink at the Crow’s Nest, I smoked a cigar. For my enjoyment, for sure. But also because I knew Donna liked to watch me smoke it. So Mary-Ann’s comment itself didn’t give me any information about what Donna may have said, and probably just reflected that she wasn’t a huge fan of cigar smoke.
“You know by now I’m a cigar smoker, Mary-Ann. I just like them,” I said.
“You always have different ones, though. Some big ones and some smaller ones, and different shades of brown. I don’t know anything about them – I’ve always been a menthol cigarette girl myself – but I have to ask: don’t they all taste the same? If they do, why do you smoke different kinds of them?” Mary-Ann asked.
Donna gave me a look as I briefly considered my answer. I had no idea if she had told her friends about the “Monica Lewinsky treatment” we’d enjoyed together. If she hadn’t, I certainly didn’t want to tip her friends off to something that confidential between us. If she had, I didn’t want to add to what her friends knew, because for my part, I thought Donna’s rather extreme fantasy was best kept between us. And so the less said to others about it, the better.
So, I answered Mary-Ann as neutrally as I could. “Actually, no, Mary-Ann. No two cigars taste alike. It depends on how they’re made, and the type of tobaccos that get rolled up in them. Some are better than others, that’s for sure. But I’ve had some recently that have really tasted extraordinary.”
I would have winked at Donna, except I wasn’t sure how her friends would have interpreted that. So I just gave her a quick glance, and she was wearing a thin smile.
As the group of us chatted for a half hour or so, it became pretty clear to me that Donna hadn’t told her friends much beyond that we were having a casual relationship. She hadn’t shared any details about our bedroom interests, which was a relief to me. Soon, Donna’s friends closed their tabs and left.
I expected Donna to light a Garcia y Vega cigar when her gang left, but she didn’t. She offered an explanation, though, leaning close to me and whispering so other patrons couldn’t hear. “Stan, I expect we’re going to go back to your place tonight. At least I hope so. I’ve decided that, if you don’t mind, tonight I want to try
something I have never tried before: instead of a cigarette after we make love, I want to smoke a cigar. So I think I’ll hold off on having a cigar now and just have another Virginia Slim instead.”
Donna put a fresh cigarette between her lips and I lit it up. As she dangled it and gazed at me, I responded. “Donna, you know you can smoke whatever you want, wherever you want, as far as I am concerned. Especially, as an aside, if you’re going to dangle a cigarette in your sexy way,” I smiled. “So that’s fine. But you’ve been a cigar smoker for years, and you’ve never had a cigar after being intimate?”
“Nope. Never,” she said, still dangling her cigarette. As smoke came out of her mouth and nose, she went on. “Donny wasn’t big on cigar smoke, even back when he smoked cigarettes. So I never had the opportunity, and thought I’d give it a try. We try new things, right?” she smiled, as the dangling cigarette danced with her words.
Donna took a big puff and continued to dangle her Slim as her next words were punctuated by exhaled smoke. “I have had a cigar to avoid sex, though. That’s a story for another time. I’ll tell you that one later tonight when I am relaxing with a cigar in your bedroom,” she said, with a wink.
I was interested in Donna’s tantalizing tale. Later that night after we were intimate, I lit her a Garcia y Vega and one of my own cigars. We puffed away for a minute or so, enjoying the moment.
Finally, Donna exhaled a cone of cigar smoke and spoke. “I like this – having a cigar after we’ve been together,” she said. “It’s not something I’d do all the time. I kind of like the kick from my Virginia Slims at a time like this. But this is something I’ll do every so often.” She squeezed my hand gently with her hand that wasn’t occupied with the Garcia y Vega.
“And now you’ve tried a new thing,” I said, squeezing hers in return. “Another one to scratch off your list. So, speaking of cigars and sex, I’m curious. What’s the story you were going to tell me about how you had a cigar to avoid sex?” I asked.
Donna chuckled. “Oh, it was wild. It was a plan my grandmother came up with to keep me from feeling like I had to do something I didn’t want to do,” she said. “And it worked like a charm. Poor Johnny Belsom didn’t know what hit him.”
“Who was Johnny Belsom?” I asked.
“Oh, wonderful Johnny Belsom. He was the star quarterback of the high school football team. A dreamy, handsome senior with a sports car. All the girls wanted to go out with him. But he had something of a reputation as a love-em-and-leave-em sort of guy. He collected girls like conquests, notches on his belt, as we used to say. If you know what I mean,” Donna smiled.
“So, I was just sixteen, a sophomore, and one day Johnny asks me out. All my friends acted like I had just been made prom queen or something. And I was ecstatic. To be asked out on a date with Johnny immediately made me popular,” she chuckled. “Which I think is what I wanted back then.”
“Johnny asking you out was a good thing, then?” I asked.
“It was and it wasn’t. He took me on a few dates and we kissed in his car afterwards, which was spectacular. So at the beginning it was wonderful,” Donna said, before puffing on her cigar. “But then I heard from one of my friends – who was dating another football player – that Johnny had decided the time was right for him to go all the way with me. And that did not sit well with me at all. It’s not like I was a prude or anything. But I was saving myself for just the right man. And just because Johnny took me to dinner a couple of times, and had a really cool car, didn’t automatically make him the right man.”
Donna exhaled some residual cigar smoke and went on. “I was also pretty ticked off that Johnny had just decided, really for both of us, that he was going to have sex with me. He never asked me and we never talked about it. But he decided it, and apparently told everyone on the football team. Like it was all about him, and I was just going to be there to make him happy. I was mad.”
“On top of this,” Donna said, ashing her cigar, “was that Johnny hated that I smoked. This was 1978, mind you – almost everyone smoked. Definitely all my friends smoked. There were ashtrays everywhere. So it wasn’t like I was doing something way out of bounds or anything. But on our first date, I lit a Marlboro when we were seated at the restaurant, and Johnny just started in on me – how he never liked the smell of cigarettes, all of that. And after he kissed me, Johnny didn’t say how nice it was to kiss me, but he only talked about how much my mouth tasted like cigarettes and he didn’t like it. He wanted me to chew gum or something.”
Donna took another puff from her cigar and continued. “And if Johnny wanted a girl who didn’t smoke as his next ‘conquest,’ then he shouldn’t have picked me. I
was easily smoking more than a pack a day by then, and when I wasn’t in class, I was in one of the school smoking areas. I’d practically made a science out of how to smoke almost a whole cigarette in the time we had to go from class to class,” Donna laughed.
“So between not wanting to be just a notch on his belt, and him really irritating me by always getting on my case for smoking cigarettes, I was kind of conflicted,” Donna said. “To sleep with Johnny Belsom would have put me in the top group of girls in my school. I would have had a ton of dates after that, for sure. But on the other hand, I didn’t think I wanted my first time having sex to be with a guy I really didn’t care about, deep down, and who clearly didn’t really care about me at all.”
Donna took a big puff on her cigar, inhaled, and exhaled before telling me what happened next. “Now, one thing about my mom and me back then: we were actually kind of close. I don’t think that always happens with teenage girls and their moms. But I always thought that because we were both smokers – she actually introduced me to cigars, because she had to sneak them behind my dad’s back, which is another story – we’d sometimes smoke our cigarettes together and just talk, maybe more than we would otherwise.”
“So, one morning before school, I was thinking about all of this and what to do, you know?” Donna said. “And Mom and I were having cigarettes with our coffee, and she asks me what’s on my mind. My mom always knew when something was bothering me. And I told her – everything. What I’d heard that Johnny wanted to do, and how I felt about it. How he nagged me about smoking cigarettes. And Mom really just listened to me, and said she understood, and that she’d think about it that day and we’d talk more in the afternoon.”
“That afternoon, when I walked out of school, Mom was there in her car, waiting for me,” Donna said, ashing her cigar. “She waved me over and told my friends she needed me to run errands with her or something. But after I got in the car, Mom told me she had talked to her mother – my grandma – about the Johnny situation, and that the three of us were going to talk this over at Grandma’s house.”
“Wow! Did you want your grandmother to know?” I asked.
“No, not at all,” Donna said. “At first I was pissed off that Mom had told Grandma. But Mom told me Grandma gives the best advice of anyone she knew. And that women in these sorts of situations have to stick together. That made me feel
better – Mom and Grandma were treating me like an adult woman with a guy problem, not just a confused teenager.”
“So we go to Grandma’s house which wasn’t far from where we lived,” Donna continued after taking a puff from her cigar. “And Grandma’s smoking a cigar, and my mom lights a cigar too. By now, I’d smoked a cigar or two with my grandma, who was fine with it – a story for another day. So I light a cigar myself. And even though my mom has briefed my grandma on the whole situation, Grandma asked me to tell it all to her, and I did. She had some questions for me about how I felt.”
“And eventually my grandma just says, ‘Well, Donna, all these decisions have to be up to you. But I should warn you: if you let a man dictate these things to you now – when and where you have sex, and whether you smoke or not – they always will. What you decide now at sixteen will become the pattern you’ll follow with men your whole life. They’ll wind up making all your choices for you if you don’t own the choices yourself,’” Donna recounted.
“That was an interesting way to put it, to say the least,” Donna said. “I hadn’t put it in the context of my whole life, but she was right. And I told her and my mom, right then and there, that I did not want to give in to Johnny Belsom. That I needed to find a way out of this that would make it look like he decided to drop me, not that I turned him down, because I was afraid I’d be known as a prude.”
“Well, my grandmother puffed her cigar for a minute, and she thought. And then she came up with a plan,” Donna smiled wanly. “It was kind of wacky, but it worked. I never became another notch on Johnny Belsom’s belt. And, in fact, I wound up getting rid of him. It taught me to only go for guys who accepted me for me, and not put up with men who wanted me to change for them.”
“What was this great plan?” I asked.
Donna puffed her cigar and continued. “Well, the next Friday night, Johnny took me out to dinner. Before we went out, he told me he wanted to take me up to the Point afterwards – that was a secluded make-out spot on a hill above our town. Kids could do what they wanted at night at the Point as long as the cops didn’t think they were making too much trouble. And, of course, Johnny could get away with anything he wanted to up there since he was the star quarterback of the football team. So, I was pretty sure he was going to try to go all the way with me up there,” she said.
“So after Johnny took me out to dinner,” Donna said, exhaling leftover cigar smoke, “we get into his car to go up to the Point. I remember he had this souped-up sports car, maybe it was a Ford Granada or a Mustang or something like that. He was so proud of this car. And he just starts driving to the edge of town and up the hill to the Point,” Donna said, before pausing to puff her cigar again.
“And that’s when I put Grandma’s plan into action. I reached into my purse, pulled out a big White Owl cigar, and lit it up. I rolled the window down, of course. But Johnny had his attention on the road and he didn’t notice I was smoking it for half a minute or so.”
I laughed. “You lit a cigar in this guy’s sports car? How did he react?”
Donna guffawed. “Ha! You should have seen Johnny’s face. He entirely freaked out. He lost his mind. I remember him yelling, ‘Oh my God! You’re smoking a cigar in my car? You’re going to get it all gross in here. What are you thinking? What type of sixteen year old girl smokes a stinky cigar?’”
“And I just blew out a cloud of cigar smoke and said, nice as could be, ‘Well, Johnny, I guess my type of girl smokes cigars. I’m so excited for going up to the Point with you I needed this to calm down.’” Donna recalled with a smile.
“I took another big puff and consciously didn’t blow the smoke out the window, just let it hang there in his car,” Donna said, after taking a puff of her cigar in the present day. “Johnny just kind of made sputtering noises. He didn’t know what to say. ‘Johnny,’ I said to him, ‘You know I’m a heavy smoker. Didn’t they teach you in health class how addictive nicotine is? I need tobacco. I am hooked! Especially since this will be my first time with a boy.’”
“And then, to kind of get back at him for being so annoying about my cigarettes all the time, I played dumb. I said, ‘I’m smoking a cigar to make this better for you, Johnny. You said you don’t like the taste of cigarettes on my breath. But maybe you’ll be okay with a cigar taste.’”
Donna snickered at the memory of how her grandmother’s plan was coming together. “Well, Johnny spun the car right around. Right in the middle of the road. And he just guns the engine and starts flying back down the hill. He was so upset. ‘Do your parents know you smoke those nasty things?’ he asked me. And I said, ‘Actually, I smoke cigars with my mother and grandmother,’ which of course was true. He couldn’t believe it.”
Donna laughed. “Johnny’s head was exploding. ‘You smoke cigars with your mother and grandmother? What a bunch of freaks you people are! This is nuts!’ I remember him cursing at me the whole way back to my house.”
“He barely stopped the car so I could get out at home,” Donna continued. “‘Bye Johnny,’ I said, and he just muttered, ‘Get out. I’m never calling you again.’ My mom and grandma watched him drop me off from the front porch.”
“The three of us thought it was hysterical. ‘I’m glad it worked,’ was all my grandmother had to say.” Donna laughed a throaty laugh at the memory.
Donna took a short puff off her cigar. Through a talking exhale, she spoke. “So, that’s Johnny Belsom. And how I had a cigar to avoid sex. Now, as an adult woman, I can smoke a cigar anytime I want to. Especially after great sex,” Donna said, squeezing my hand gently.
I squeezed her hand in return and Donna smiled. “Johnny Belsom didn’t know what he was missing,” I said with a smile.
Chapter 8: Denial
One morning after breakfast at my condo, Donna and I discussed going out to dinner that night. Many of the restaurants on the Island have outdoor patios to take advantage of the sea breeze, and most of those allow patrons to smoke. Given her heavy cigarette habit, I wasn’t surprised that Donna knew all of the ones that allowed smoking. We settled on a nice restaurant – nice, for this small beach town, meaning some of the menu selections weren’t fried – on the inland-facing side of the barrier island.
Donna surprised me by making a special request – not really a request of me, but rather proposing something she wanted to do when we went to dinner. “This sounds strange, Stan. But when you tied my hands in the shower and had me dangle my cigarette, it felt kind of neat to be a little submissive. I mean, I liked the dangling, and definitely seeing you get so turned on. But being a little bit restricted turned me on, too, in a way,” Donna said, putting out her Slim.
I lit up her next cigarette before she continued. “So, I thought about that feeling some, and there’s something I want to try at dinner tonight. I want to restrict myself from smoking to feel that restraint in the form of a craving I’m going to impose on myself. I want to be tempted by you smoking cigarettes, and I won’t smoke any. I’ll be watching you and totally jonesing for a cigarette, especially
when we get drinks and after we eat – you know those are two times I always have to light up. But then when we leave the restaurant, I’ll smoke one – actually a bunch of cigarettes in a row, for sure – and it will be like I punished myself by not smoking at dinner, but then released myself. Does that make any sense to you?”
“I think so. You want to tease yourself with your nicotine addiction, I think,” I said, trying to process her request. I’m not sure I fully understood, but getting to watch Donna try to wrestle with the “third rail” of her strong nicotine addiction was definitely something I was interested in observing. “You know I’m up for exploring things. This one especially, as all I have to do is smoke,” I laughed. “So let’s give it a try. Should we use the same safety word – if you want to let yourself loose from cigarette denial, just say ‘octopus’ and I’ll light you up?”
“Sure,” Donna said. “I’m going to try to go the whole dinner, though, from when we get there through when we leave. But if I can’t, I’ll work ‘octopus’ in a sentence,” she said, smiling at the crazy emergency brake we were putting in place for her game.
At the restaurant that night, Donna looked lovely. She was wearing a turquoise top that accentuated her cleavage, along with white shorts. She greeted me with a kiss and I smelled fresh cigarette smoke on her. “I had a cigarette in the car on the drive here. To sort of tide me over,” she offered.
We were seated quickly and after ordering our drinks, I lit a cigarette. Donna wasn’t showing any outward signs of temptation as I smoked it, and we chatted idly about how our days had gone.
Her craving increased when our drinks came. “You know how much I love a cigarette with a margarita,” she said, tapping her fingers lightly on the table as I lit another Parliament.
“Maybe the margarita will taste better if you’re not smoking?” I teased her a bit..
“I think margaritas taste better with cigarettes,” she laughed. “At least I am used to them that way. Don’t get me wrong, Stan. I can go as long as I have to without a cigarette. Shopping, at the doctor, whatever. I can hold out for a long time when I can’t smoke,” she said, idly playing with a table tent advertising happy hour specials. “The real challenge for me is when I’m in a place where I can smoke, like now, and I want to smoke. That’s the real temptation.”
Donna fidgeted with her napkin and silverware. “And what am I supposed to do with my hands?” she asked, trying to laugh but conveying a bit of tension in her voice.
As Donna looked at me for an answer, I took a deep puff off my cigarette, inhaled, and slowly exhaled the smoke. The sea breeze twisted it into a thick column that wound upward toward the hazy, early evening sky.
“I have ideas on what you can do with your hands, but we’re in a public place and we’d probably be arrested,” I joked. “But I get what you’re feeling, absolutely. We’re in one of the few places we can smoke on the whole Island. It’s a beautiful night. Absolutely perfect time to have a cigarette with your drink.”
“You’re turning up the tension dial on purpose, aren’t you?” Donna said, through a grin.
“Maybe just a little bit. Just to make your first cigarette after we leave taste even better,” I said, agreeing that, in truth, I was toying with her some.
After dinner, I lit a cigarette. Donna’s craving was building, and she instinctually reached for her purse – ostensibly to get her cigarette case – before stopping herself. Instead, she just watched me take a big puff off of mine.
Through a talking exhale, I moved to tighten the screws on the addiction that was squeezing Donna. “You know, I admire you for trying this. We just had a great meal. We’re outside, and a lot of people are smoking, so no one will give you any grief. And yet you’re still able to resist the urge to light up, when you know how good a cigarette would taste right now.”
Donna sipped her drink. “I know what you’re trying to do, Stan. And it makes this more of a challenge. But I can take it. I’m almost all the way through our night out without smoking,” Donna said.
“Speaking of smoking and after we finish our night out,” I said, before taking another puff and exhaling. I leaned in closer and lowered my voice, which drew Donna in toward me to hear – and, I fiendishly reasoned, smell more of the smoke from my cigarette. “I’ve been thinking of a way to extend your two pleasures at once. If you want to try.”
I ashed my cigarette and noticed that Donna’s eyes grew wider. She wanted to hear my idea.
“I was thinking this. And of course you can always say no,” I practically whispered, before taking a big puff, inhaling the smoke, and turning my head a bit to exhale. “But I know how much you love to smoke while I pleasure you orally. I love to watch you just puff away on your cigarettes, savoring each puff as well as the stimulation.” Donna fidgeted again with her fork and knife, and I surmised she was really feeling her craving even more than before.
I paused and slowly rolled the ash off my cigarette in the ashtray to make Donna wait to hear my proposal. “So, if you want, once you’re satisfied orally, and you say so, I’ll roll on my back,” I said, before taking another long puff and inhaling. “Then, I’ll light you another cigarette before you get on top of me. We can put the ashtray on my midsection to be safe. You can enjoy smoking a cigarette and enjoy feeling me thrust deep inside you at the same time,” my words accompanied by little wisps of smoke.
“Okay,” Donna said, laughing. “Enough. Octopus. I should have ordered the octopus.” She quickly got her cigarette case from her purse and I lit her a Virginia Slim. She tripled-pumped the cigarette to life, inhaled deeply, and then exhaled before double-pumping the cigarette without a pause. As she exhaled her second puff, I could see her facial features relax a little bit as the nicotine started to relieve her self-imposed craving. “Now you see why I couldn’t quit cigarettes even if I wanted to,” she said through a residual exhale. Donna aggressively smoked two more cigarettes in a row before I paid our check and we left the restaurant.
That night, Donna and I had a great session of lovemaking, and she tried my idea of getting on top of me while I laid on my back, and she smoked a cigarette during our intercourse. We both loved it.
As we smoked our post-coital cigarettes, Donna proposed an idea. “I want to try denying myself cigarettes again,” she said, exhaling a stream of smoke with her words. “Even though I didn’t make it the whole time, I kind of liked the feeling at dinner – the feeling of, I guess, having a craving of my own making, fighting it off as long as I could, and then the rush of relief when I smoked a cigarette when I wanted to.” Donna took another puff of her cigarette and held it out in front of her as she held the smoke in her lungs. “Usually when I need a cigarette, I just need a cigarette – I’m not really controlling it,” she said before exhaling, taking a short breath and exhaling again. “But in a weird way, I liked the feeling of having a craving that was one I set myself up for, and then satisfying it when I wanted to.”
“Interesting,” I said. “So, you denied yourself something you wanted, and then you controlled when it was over. I guess you could say by restricting yourself from smoking, when I could tell you were so desperate for one, you were making yourself submissive, but then exercising power over your own craving and submissiveness.”
“That’s a good way to put it,” Donna said. “So this time, I want to go big. I want to really feel the craving. And you know I have the biggest craving when I wake up,” Donna said, before taking a huge puff off of her Virginia Slim. “I can’t believe I’m proposing this. Since I was a teenager, I’ve smoked a cigarette – at least one – as soon as I can when I wake up. You’ve seen how much I need that cigarette,” she smiled as she exhaled. “But what I want to do is this. Tomorrow, when you bring up my coffee and wake me up, I’m not going to smoke a cigarette for thirty minutes. You just smoke away in bed. You don’t have to go out of your way to tempt me, but just seeing you smoke and smelling it is going to give me a huge nicotine fit.”
Donna tapped some ash off of her cigarette. “And after thirty minutes, we’ll go into the bathroom and I’ll get in the shower again. I want you to tie my hands behind my back like you did before with the belt from your robe. Then you can light my cigarette, and I’m going to dangle it for you while you watch.”
Donna dangled her cigarette from her lips. “I guarantee you, given how much I’ll need a cigarette by then, that it will be the best dangling you’ve ever seen me do.”
“And you do a lot of dangling,” I said, entranced as always by her skilled dangle. “I’m up for this if you are. Let’s go for it. Do you want to use the same safety word?”
“Octopus it is,” Donna laughed.
“Also,” I asked, putting out my cigarette, “Do you mind if I take a picture of you while you’re dangling your cigarette in the shower? You know I’m not going to put it on social media or anything; I’d get in trouble. But it would give me something to look at while we’re apart.”
Donna smiled. “Oh, of course, honey. That’s so sweet, Stan.” She took a puff off of her dangling cigarette. “And another thing: when we’re going to sleep tonight, could you take my cigarette case and hide it somewhere, and only give it to me
when we’re going into the bathroom? I don’t want to wake up in the middle of the night to smoke. This way it will be a real craving.”
I did as Donna asked, and hid her cigarette case in another bedroom before we went to sleep and after we’d smoked our last cigarettes for the night. In the morning, I woke up before she did and brought her a cup of coffee. She stirred at the smell of the coffee, and looked at the nightstand for her cigarette case for a few seconds. “Grr,” she muttered. “For a second, I forgot.”
By now, I was back on my side of the bed, about to light the Parliament dangling from my lips. “You can always call ‘octopus,’ of course,” I said with a sheepish grin. Consciously trying to test the limit of her will against her addiction, I lit my cigarette, took a long puff, and exhaled a cloud of smoke above the bed.
“I don’t give in that quickly,” Donna said.
Indeed, Donna wasn’t giving in – yet. But I observed some signs of the difficulty she was finding in passing the test she’d given herself. Not long after we woke up, Donna turned on the TV in my bedroom – something neither of us had ever done when we were in the bedroom together. She changed the channel to the morning local news.
I soon realized she was motivated less by catching up on local developments overnight as by watching the minutes pass. “Okay, so, you woke me up at 6:23, and it’s 6:26. There, in the corner of the screen. So, twenty-seven minutes to go,” she said, seeming to take comfort that some minutes had already gone by.
When my first cigarette was finished, I lit another. About then, Donna’s morning coughing fit – which I’d figured out was about five minutes of separate, short, sharp coughing fits – started. I decided to playfully rub in the pressure. “Uh-oh, the morning coughs – what did you call it, the ‘morning cough train?’ Sounds like it’s arriving at the Donna station,” I said with a grin, before blowing a cone of smoke toward the ceiling. “But is my cigarette smoke bothering you, Donna? I don’t want to make your cough worse. And I know how hard it can be to not smoke when you’re around people who are smoking, right? Especially when you really, really need one, like the first cigarette to start the day. Do you want me to put it out? I will if you ask me to,” I said, teasing but trying to sound serious.
Between coughing fits, Donna caught her breath and smiled a thin smile. “I know what you’re doing, Stan. And it is making it more fun for me. But I am going to
hold out – only 25 minutes to go,” Donna said. “So, you just keep smoking away. Enjoy! It’ll be my turn soon, and I can wait.”
Alas, Donna could not. She grew increasingly fidgety over the next quarter-hour or so, trying but failing to be engrossed in whatever stories were being presented on the local news. As I crushed out my fourth cigarette – far more than I would usually smoke in a row in the morning – Donna spoke.
“Okay, Stan. Octopus,” she practically yelled. “I’ve denied myself for nineteen minutes. That’s enough for me for now. Where did you hide my cigarettes?”
I retrieved Donna’s cigarette case from the drawer in the second bedroom where I’d hidden them, while she scampered into the bathroom and ran the shower to get the floor a bit wet to put out any ashes from her dangling puffs. I quickly tied her hands behind her back and lit the Virginia Slim she’d rapidly placed between her lips.
The wonderful display that followed should be on one of those “power smoking” video playlists. Donna practically destroyed the Slim, triple-pumping it so often the dangling slim never pointed downward, but was angled toward the ceiling essentially the entire time. Her puffs were so strong that the cigarette shook most of the time – so strong, in fact, that ash was almost always flying off of it and onto the wet shower floor. Her inhales were so deep that for the first minute or so, she didn’t exhale much smoke at all, keeping most of it in her lungs to help satiate her need for nicotine.
Donna’s smoky feeding of her addiction was a dream for a fetisher who loves to watch a woman take deep, powerful drags in response to her addiction’s mighty force. I was getting so turned on, I almost forgot to take pictures of this gorgeous display with my phone. But I wound up colleting several great pics, and made a mental note to move them off my phone into a backup drive when I was in front of my home computer in Houston.
Conclusion
It was a hot September night on South Padre Island.
The air conditioning in my beach house was working overtime – not just from trying to cool the oppressively sticky and hot air on this island in the Gulf of Mexico, but from trying to move a massive volume of smoke out of the bedroom.
Donna and I had filled the room to a level of smoke that would probably violate several Environmental Protection Agency standards during an extended lovemaking session. This was part of a comfortable pattern we’d set very early on: one or two nights a week when I was on the Island for work, we’d meet up at the smoky dive bar where we first met. We’d each have a couple of drinks while she chain smoked her Virginia Slims 120s and I had a cigar. We’d talk and she would dangle her cigarette often, having learned quickly that I found that to be an irresistible behavior and she enjoyed teasing me in public. We’d eat some fried bar food for dinner before heading back to my place together – earning ourselves a few innuendo-like comments from some of her friends at the bar.
Back at my beach condo, the pattern would continue. I’d make us each another drink, light the first of several Virginia Slims she’d smoke in a row, and light a small cigar for myself. We’d talk for a while about nothing in particular – goings-on on the Island or the hurricane season, that sort of thing – and then eventually she’d take the cigar from my hand, take a puff, and put the cigar in the ashtray. That was my cue that she was ready to make out. We’d kiss deeply and passionately, me enjoying her smoky smell and she enjoying some passion she’d been missing in her marriage for a long time. I’d grope her breasts and occasionally place a finger down her panties to feel her vagina beginning to get moist.
After a little while, Donna would break off our makeout session, put a Virginia Slim between her lips, and let me light her up. Puffing away on the long cigarette dangling from her lips, Donna would pull down my shorts and underwear and then give me the highlight of my week at South Padre Island: a smoking blowjob that amazed me each and every time. She’d alternate between puffs on her cigarette, wrapping her tongue around my penis, and taking the entire thing into her mouth. It was impossible for me to last the entire time it would take her to smoke her long cigarette, so after I came in her mouth, Donna would take one last puff on her cigarette and put it out. “Let’s go to the bedroom, Stan. My turn,” she’d say through a talking exhale, while grabbing her Virginia Slims off the coffee table.
We’d set a nice routine for what would happen next pretty well. I’d take her clothes off slowly, and then take mine off. She’d dangle a freshly-lit Virginia Slim and point at my still-exhausted member and make a comment about having to find ways to get it back up. Donna would then position herself on her back the bed while getting her Virginia Slims, a lighter, and an ashtray positioned within easy reach. I’d climb into bed next to her and start kissing her ears – an erogenous spot she’d identified early on – and her neck for a few minutes. This was important foreplay, even if it was a bit uncomfortable as she would still be puffing
occasionally on her Virginia Slim, and I’d have to be careful to maneuver around the burning end of her cigarette.
After that, I would move down to her breasts. Donna’s breasts, like the rest of her body, were physically somewhere on that arc between her youth and old age. They were ample – a decent C cup, I’d guess – and fifty eight years of gravity had given them only the slightest sag toward the ground. But the sag was only noticeable when I removed her bra: when she had her bra on, they stayed comfortably in place and attractive.
And they were sensitive. The first time we were intimate, I noticed that even lightly touching her areola or nipple with my finger would make her gasp with delight. As intimacy is as much about pleasuring your partner as yourself, I’d made mental notes of how she’d squeal and moan when I ran my tongue around her nipples. Fortunately for me, I did not have to experiment too long to find out how Donna liked her breasts treated as part of our intimacy. She felt no hesitation in teaching me just what she wanted me to do where they were concerned. During our first times being intimate, I’d listened carefully to her specific desires, offered breathlessly and between groans: “Rub your teeth across my nipple,” “Use your tongue again, Stan,” and so on. After a few lovemaking sessions, I was able to stimulate her whole body by spending a few minutes carefully kissing, caressing, and massaging her breasts. I’d learned that Donna’s long, guttural, throaty groan meant that my time with her breasts was doing its intended duty by getting her ready for more intimacy, because invariably after a few of those groans she’d gently push my head down toward her thighs.
Following her push, I’d slide down toward her navel, stopping to give it a quick kiss and look up at her to see the smile of intimate pleasure widening across her face. She would, of course, be puffing away on a Virginia Slim 120, and when she caught my eye she’d give me a quick wink, take a superlong drag, inhale deeply, and exhale a huge cloud of smoke in my direction.
My desire fueled by this brief, smoky pause, I’d continue down her body to her vagina. I’d kiss the insides of her thighs for a minute or so to tease her and heighten her anticipation before moving my attention to her wet core. Here, as with her breasts, I’d listened and learned to how she liked me to treat her most sensuous part. She’d begun shaving her pubic hair in response to my request, too. So together, we were making her receiving oral from me a highlighted and special part of our routine.
I enjoyed learning how to pleasure her most sensitive place almost as much as actually doing the pleasuring. There’s a tremendous sense of power that comes from watching a woman’s face light up in ecstasy and hearing her deep, almost primal moan as you please her orally. A simple touch of the fingertip on the right spot or a thoughtful caress with the tongue can lead to such amazing reactions. Every fiber of her being is responding to simple moves from you.
And Donna would puff away on Virginia Slims the whole time. Counting the cigarette she smoked while I was tending to her breasts, she would smoke three Virginia Slims before telling me to get inside of her. And when she called for me to do that, I was ready – while I was touching and licking the most sensitive parts of her body, I was enjoying glances at her long puffs and deep inhales. She was truly enjoying the “two pleasures at once” philosophy of combining sex and smoking. And seeing and hearing her sexual delight while watching her smoke 120s is always a synthesis of the best elements of my smoking fetish. So, even though I had ejaculated not long before, while I was pleasuring her I was becoming erect and waiting for her to tell me she was ready.
When Donna was ready, she’d let me know. As she started to orgasm in response to the oral pleasure, she would hastily crush out her cigarette. “Stan, fuck me,” or “get inside me,” she’d say, quietly through a talking exhale. I’d slide up the bed, enter her and make love to her, lasting a decent amount of time even though the thick smell of smoke on her face and body would be driving me absolutely crazy. I’d try to control my orgasm so we’d both climax at the same time, a skill I am still working on.
This was our routine for intimacy – varied occasionally to try different positions. It would always be capped with us both physically spent and sweaty, staring into each other’s eyes and grinning, catching our breath and letting our heart rates start to slow for a moment as we embraced. After a few moments, one of us would playfully suggest it was time to light cigarettes.
Tonight, I spoke first. “While this was amazing, outstanding, and totally wonderful, you’ll have to let me move to my side of the bed. I have to take an urgent call from Philip Morris,” I said, grinning,
“Yay! Me too,” Donna laughed. “I was feeling my skin starting to crawl but wanted to see which of us would mention it first. Gosh, Stan, you are as addicted as me.”
We adjusted our positions so we were next to each other but in reach of our cigarettes. In a few seconds, I was lighting her Virginia Slim, and she avidly double-pumped her cigarette while I lit my Parliament. We spent the next minute or so puffing on our cigarettes, clasping our free hands together and still basking in the afterglow of intimacy.
“Speaking of smoking, you should know I took your advice,” Donna said, exhaling a cone of smoke toward the ceiling of my bedroom.
“Which piece of my sage advice was that?” I asked with a grin.
Donna smiled. “One you gave me on the very first night we were together. You suggested that if Donny had ever been turned on by me smoking cigarettes – even though it turns him off now – I should try to spark our love life back up by giving him a blow job while smoking a cigarette. I thought about that for a while. I wasn’t sure it would work. And honestly, we’ve been so far apart, I wasn’t sure I wanted to bother to try.”
Donna took a huge puff of her Virginia Slim, made a small “O” with her mouth, and inhaled deeply. After she held the smoke in for a couple of seconds, she continued speaking through a talking exhale. “But he came down this past weekend, and we were actually getting along really well. I think we had missed being around each other, because I hadn’t seen him in a month or so. And he made fewer wisecracks about my smoking than he normally does, which put me in a good mood and made me a little less defensive.”
Donna rolled the ash off her cigarette into the ashtray between us. “So one night, we’d had a few drinks and were just idly watching TV and talking a little. I just, I don’t know, just decided to try it. I lit a cigarette and I dangled it while I started feeling his crotch with my hand. He was kind of surprised at first, but he caught on to what was going on in a few seconds. Pretty soon, I was helping him pull his shorts off.”
Donna puffed her cigarette again. “And then I did it. For the first time in maybe thirty years, I gave Donny a smoking blow job. And it worked! You should have heard how he groaned. And I haven’t seen him with such a big smile in so long. He loved it!”
Donna exhaled some residual smoke from deep in her lungs and cleared her throat. “Later that night, when we got in bed, he started kissing me and we wound
up making love. With real passion and feeling, you know? That hasn’t happened in a long time. And we never really talked about me giving him the smoking oral, but he didn’t make any comments about my smoking the rest of the weekend. And, get this: we went out for breakfast the morning after all this, and I went to light up a cigarette after we ate, and he lit it for me! He hasn’t done that in I don’t know how long,” Donna said, evidently very happy.
Donna inhaled deeply on her Virginia Slim. “For the first time in years, we were really close – emotionally and sexually – for a few days. It’s a real breakthrough in our relationship. I had kind of written our marriage off as emotionally dead, but now I think there is some hope.”
The power of the smoking fetish is pretty amazing, isn’t it? From what Donna had told me when we first met, I was pretty sure Donny had once had a smoking fetish, and had tried to suppress it out of concern for his health and Donna’s health. But once a fetisher, always a fetisher, I thought. Donna had figured out how to bring Donny’s sexual impulses back to the surface from the deep part of his psyche where he’d buried them for decades. Because anything buried can be brought to the surface with enough effort, and a smoking fetish is no exception. Donna had found out how to do that, prompted by an offhand comment I made.
I thought through the meaning of what Donna had just told me as I undertook the next step in our established routine: cutting and lighting a cigar. Donna had been clear from our first meeting that me smoking a cigar was a turn-on for her. And I had noticed that when I smoked cigars, she’d essentially chain smoke her Virginia Slims 120s – a brand that is my favorite for a woman to some, especially with her outstanding style. Plus, I’d grown over the years to really enjoy cigars. So to borrow a boardroom phrase and apply it to the bedroom, this part of our recharging routine after intimacy was a “win-win.”
Exhaling the light-up puff from my cigar, I spoke. “I think that’s wonderful. Really, I do. You two have been married for a long time and to put the spark back in it is absolutely awesome,” I said. “I’m glad I helped this with my advice. But,” I continued, looking into her eyes and cutting to the chase, “be honest with me about what you think this very positive development for you and Donny means for you and me.”
“I think this is a positive development for you and me,” she said, exhaling Virginia Slim smoke. “Or at least, we’re in the same place. My time with you helped relight
the fire under my marriage, that’s for sure. And now I’m grateful to you for that, which makes me want you even more.”
Donna ashed her cigarette before continuing “Plus, there’s things you can give me that Donny can’t. The excitement of someone new and a willingness to try new things with me – things I could never tell him, I feel I can tell you. And our time together hasn’t just relit the fire of my marriage, but it’s relit the fire under me, too. I just feel so warm, and, I don’t know – whole, somehow, or complete, after a night with you.”
Donna puffed on her cigarette, held the smoke and did her double-exhale before looking at my cigar and continuing. “Also, you pleasure me orally. Donny never likes doing that, but I love that feeling. And then there’s your cigars. Donny wouldn’t even dream of smoking one of those. Let alone enjoy them together the way we do,” she said with a wink.
As if to underline her point, I took a puff off my cigar and exhaled slowly.
Donna liked my modest display. “It’s amazing how you doing that makes me feel,” she said with a smile. She tapped the ash off her cigarette and held it up and toward me. “But speaking of our smoking, how are you doing with these? Do you still have to sneak around to have a cigarette at home?”
“Actually, I don’t have to sneak around anymore. Susan and I had sort of a breakthrough last weekend,” I answered. “We had a long talk and have kind of reset our whole relationship on our smoking.”
“Really? What happened?” Donna asked.
“Well,” I said, considering how to approach this. “What really happened was you, even if you didn’t know it. So, let me explain.”
I rolled my cigar a bit in the ashtray on the bed between us to get some stray ash off before continuing. “I’ve told you how since Spring, we were having a very difficult time with our smoking. I wanted to keep smoking, or at least I don’t want to quit yet, and Susan was struggling to quit and demanding I do, too.”
“My mother-in-law’s lung nodule turning out to be negative for cancer took a little bit of the immediate pressure off of the issue. But Susan continued to nag me any time she smelled smoke on me and she was just on my case incessantly about it. And at the same time, she fell off the quitting wagon every few days or so, and was
sneaking cigarettes out by the trash cans in the backyard. We were both miserable about it,” I said. “I think we both knew we couldn’t go on this way – something, somehow, had to give. I was at the point that – setting aside my wonderful time with you, which is a great reason to want to be down on this island and not in Houston – I preferred to be alone down here away from my family just so Susan wasn’t giving me grief and I wasn’t constantly craving a cigarette or sneaking around to have one. And I hated that feeling.”
“So, something had to give, but neither of us knew what to say to work this out, I think,” I went on. “Last Friday night, we had a breakthrough. It had been a great evening – a beautiful sunset – and the girls and I were swimming in the pool. I gave Susan my phone to take some funny pictures of the girls floating on tubes while I pretended to be a shark. We loved it,” I said, noting a look on Donna’s face that suggested curiosity.
“While the girls and I dried off, Susan went out to pick up a pizza and get some ice cream, and she said she had to pick up some other things at the store. When she got back, it was a very normal night – we all had a nice time together and watched a movie, and then put the kids to bed,” I continued. “And then, I went out to our patio room to have a cigar. Susan came out with me, and I assumed she was going to pick out a cigar and join me.”
“But much to my surprise, Susan pulled out a pack of cigarettes – Virginia Slims Gold 120s. You know how I notice brands, Donna,” I said with a smile before taking a puff of my cigar. “And I gave her a light before she told me everything she was thinking, and feeling, about smoking cigarettes. She told me how much she really missed a cigarette with her morning coffee, and after dinner. How much sometimes she just liked the feeling of having one cigarette.”
“But on the other hand,” I continued, “she told me how much she hated the smell of stale smoke now, and how she couldn’t stand being judged for being a smoker. And she was really afraid for her health, and my health, if we were smokers for the rest of our lives.”
“Those are realistic concerns,” Donna said, ashing her 120.
“They are – very realistic,” I agreed. “But Susan was also concerned abut her weight, which has gone up a little over the past few years. She says she’s gained weight because she’s not smoking much at all. I think everyone gained a little bit of weight in the pandemic, and to me she looks positively amazing. But she’s
concerned about the excess weight on her health, and the impact of the weight on her image and her confidence. Those things don’t offset the risks of smoking, for sure. But she sees not smoking as having some physical and mental health consequences as well.”
As was her pattern, Donna finished her Virginia Slim with a huge puff and her double-exhale, before immediately pulling out another cigarette. And as was my pattern, I gave her a light before continuing. “And one thing susan really missed, and that she said tipped the scales for her to try to find a way out of this quit-or- don’t-quit rut we were in, is the way she could turn me on with her cigarette smoking. We have no problems in the bedroom even when she’s not smoking, but she said she likes how my eyes widen when I watch her smoke a cigarette, and she says she misses the fun of the games we used to play when she’d smoke a cigarette and tease me a little.”
Donna laughed. “I know that look. Your pupils get really big,” she said. “I know that look so well. And I like teasing you, too, but you know that,” she said. “What did you decide to do?”
“Well, after she said all of this, Susan proposed that we make a deal about cigarettes,” I said, puffing on my cigar. “In my business, and hers, you make deals all the time, so it’s kind of our natural thing. So she said we should figure out if we could smoke some cigarettes, a small number, and not really be ‘smokers’ like we used to be.”
“We talked late in to the night, trying to find a way we could both smoke, but be really moderate about it to reduce the risks to our health,” I said. “And smoke so little we could hide it – more of Susan’s concern than mine, but a fair one, to be sure. Kind of smoke just enough so we could enjoy it, and enjoy what we like about smoking, yet not be tagged as the heavy smokers we used to be. And not go crazy without any cigarettes at all.”
I puffed my cigar and went on. “We settled on a compromise that we think will work. Time will tell. But it’s essentially this. Susan is going to smoke Virginia Slims 120s, but will limit herself to no more than two packs a week. I agreed to limit myself to three packs of cigarettes a week for now, and Susan said if I smoke more here at South Padre, she won’t object – but she really wants me to keep it moderate, and I agreed. We didn’t put any limits on our cigar smoking because we both enjoy that, and that’s kind of a pleasure we keep to ourselves and a couple of neighbors anyway. We also agreed to keep our cigarette smoking out of public
view and away from the kids, friends, and neighbors, and definitely from her mother. We’re not going to be fully closet smokers, but kind of one foot in the closet, you might say.”
“Wow,” Donna said, exhaling cigarette smoke. “That sounds awesome. You may have come up with something that works. Especially with the neighbors and all – I mean, look. What other people think is important, but at some point you two have to live your lives for you.”
“That’s right,” I said, ashing my cigar. “And we’ve agreed this is the way we’ll live our lives now, but it isn’t permanent. In about five or six years – when she turns 45, and I will be 53 – we’ll both switch to only cigars. She proposed that based on a colleague of hers who quit cigarettes when she was 45, and because she knows I’m not, now, ready to quit for good. And, she finally admitted to herself, neither is she. We’ll see how that all turns out in five or six years, but we are both good with this for now.”
“So, she’s not going to follow that switch-down-to-quit nonsense that her mother tried to push on her, and Donny wanted me to try years ago?” Donna asked.
“Nope. No switching down or quitting involved – thank God,” I said, before puffing my cigar. “We’re just going to be light smokers, and just be comfortable that way. I’ve agreed to keep my smoking pretty light, too, next to how much I used to smoke. I’ll have a smaller number of cigarettes every day in Houston, but I don’t have to sneak around, which was making me miserable. And of course down here on the Island, a few hundred miles away, I am pretty free to smoke when I want to.”
“Susan and I are comfortable with this,” I continued. “I think we both liked that we talked it through, and came up with a way to break the logjam between us. Things are much better now. We’re no longer on each other’s cases about smoking. Neither of us has to sneak around from the other. We’ve accepted there is a role, a small role, for cigarette smoking in our lives, at least for now. But we are, hopefully, minimizing the health risks and the impact on our social lives. Maybe it will help Susan lose some of the weight she wants to lose. And we still enjoy our cigars together, too.”
“Does she enjoy cigars the way I enjoy your cigars?” Donna asked, playfully.
I laughed. “Not quite the same way. She’d divorce me if I ever proposed what you did with that Presidente that night. Her mind just doesn’t stretch that far.”
“But she knows what she likes, within bounds,” I said. “And we’ve always been open about that. She likes that I indulge her feet, and she caters to my smoking fetish. We’re sort of back to an even trade with turning each other on.”
Donna spoke through a talking exhale. “Speaking of this foot treatment – what did you say you called it, a ‘pedicure?’ I think I’d like to try that someday,” she said, smiling.
“And I’m happy to give you one. Or give you ‘pedicures’ all the time, if you like them,” I said. “Because just as you said about my advice for Donny, I owe you a debt of gratitude for bringing Susan and I to a place where we could really talk openly about our smoking and work this all out. And I bet you didn’t even know it.”
Donna furrowed her brow. “I don’t understand – how?” she asked.
I puffed my cigar while I tried to find the right words.
“Well, for months, Susan had been debating inside herself about going back to smoking. But what really prompted her to admit she liked smoking and decide to be a light smoker, and then start the discussion with me to work something out, was that she discovered you.”
I exhaled the smoke from my cigar while Donna’s face continued to reflect a puzzled look. So I continued my explanation. “Months ago, I’d told Susan that we had met – my ‘disclosure,’ under our rules. She didn’t ask about it and I didn’t share any details.”
“But last Friday evening,” I went on, “when Susan was using my phone to take pictures of me and the kids in the pool, she saw the pictures I took of you in the shower dangling your cigarette. Those were the last ones I had taken, and they were on the screen when she opened up the camera.”
“Oh my God,” Donna said, clearly horrified – in fear of being the “homewrecker” she’d told me she didn’t want to become.
“No, honey, it’s not like that. Not at all,” I said reassuringly. “Susan said she was thankful for what the pictures taught her about my ‘disclosure.’ She said she learned something she didn’t really know – how much a cigarette smoking partner
is something I needed and wanted and didn’t have at home anymore. She said she wouldn’t have ever understood that any other way, and it wasn’t something I could ever tell her, given how emotionally charged our arguments about cigarettes had become.”
“Plus, she already knew she liked smoking. Not being a heavy smoker, but smoking a small number of cigarettes. What she learned from those pictures of you, she said, let her put all the pieces together. That’s why right after she saw them, she ran out to the store and bought a pack of her favorite cigarettes. During the movie that night, she figured out what she wanted to say to me and how we could work on this.”
I puffed my cigar to give Donna a chance to process all this.
Donna took a deep puff on her cigarette, and after holding the smoke in for a few seconds, followed her exhale-breathe-exhale routine before she spoke. “Well, I have to say, Stan, it’s a bit weird. But if you think this was a good way to have this discussion, I guess I’ll trust you. It does sound like things are a lot better between you two.”
“A lot better. And really, thanks to those pictures of you dangling a cigarette,” I said. “By the way, Susan said she’d forgotten how much I liked it when she dangles her cigarette. So since that night, every time she smokes, she makes a point of dangling and staring into my eyes. We’ve both been enjoying that.”
While I was speaking, Donna extinguished her Virginia Slim and promptly put the filter of another one in her mouth. With the unlit cigarette hanging loosely from her lips, she pointed to it and said, “Speaking of dangling.” I promptly gave her a light.
Donna puffed vigorously on the cigarette as if she hadn’t just finished one seconds before. Still dangling as she exhaled, she spoke. “So…where does this all leave us?”
“In the same place, or maybe better,” I said. “Not only because I am grateful that my time with you helped me get my home life back on track. But just like you said there are things Donny doesn’t give you, you give me things Susan can’t give me.”
“Like the Monica Lewinsky?” Donna asked.
“That one, at least,” I smiled. “There’s so much you give me. There’s the wild intimacy, for starters. And that we can talk so openly about so much of this. Then
there’s the comfort of being together. Plus, we both need some company on this Island.”
“So the things we’ve learned in this ‘disclosure’ of yours has made life better for both of us,” she said, as her dangling cigarette bobbed up and down on her words and smoke poured out of her mouth and nostrils.
“That’s absolutely true,” I said.
Donna ashed her cigarette and dangled it again from her lips. “Well, so far, so good. This all makes me really happy. I think we should keep using our relationship to improve our lives at home,” she said, before pulling the bedsheet off my naked body.
She bent over near my groin and took a huge puff off her still-dangling cigarette. “For example, if you want to get this kind of treatment at home, maybe you should disclose a picture of this,” she said, holding the smoke deep inside her lungs before exhaling a huge cloud of smoke around her dangling cigarette and over my member.
THE END
Insomnia
by Blackbladder
Sandra was counting cracks in the sidewalk as she shuffled morosely along the street. The orange sodium light spilling from the streetlamp glanced off the cheap watch on her wrist, and she realized that it was two in the morning.
It was two in the morning and Sandra was completely alone in the back alleys of her city.
Maybe Sandra should have gone back to the hellhole that was her apartment, but something kept her moving forward, something pushed her on.
The wind blew coldly around her and even through Sandra, it seemed, so thin was the material of her jacket. It sent icy fingers down the nape of her neck, and she hurriedly pulled the collar up to her ears. The night air smelled faintly unpleasant, reminding her of the dumpsters she was walking by, and of the more distasteful things lurking behind them.
She shivered. She was scared.
But she kept on walking, knowing that she was bound to find her. Sooner or later.
It was later. It was around four in the morning when she spotted the black bomber jacket in a corner alley.
She walked over to Lucy, rubbing her hands together for heat. “Fucker.” she whispered, the most cordial greeting she could think of at four in the morning.
She looked at Lucy from behind a cloud of cigarette smoke. “Nice to see you too.” She smiled, slowly, though she couldn’t see it in the shadows. “What are you doing up at this hour?”
Sandra looked away, as if ashamed to admit that she had been looking for her. “I – couldn’t sleep.” She shrugged, as if her relentless insomnia was nothing more than a bug bite. The streetlamps in this part of the city were fading, most of them broken and busted. The orange-yellow light pooled on her cheekbones, lips and chin, making her look starkly beautiful in the faulty light.
“You couldn’t sleep.” Lucy repeated, flicking open the pack of Silk Cut and pulling out a cork filtered cylinder. She nodded earnestly, her eyes on the cigarette.
“So, you went looking for me?” Lucy casually tossed the cigarette to her, and Sandra caught it awkwardly, with both hands.
“What makes you think that?” she proudly lifted her chin, as if to say “I need no one”. Not even you. Lucy laughed, and the dragon tendrils of blue smoke curled around her rosy cheeked face. “Well. You found me.”
Sandra sniffed, and glanced at the cigarette she now held in her cold hands. “You know I don’t smoke.” Her reply was swift and biting, almost childish. “Liar.” Lucy sniffed again. “Well, it’s bad for me. You’re tempting me again.”
Lucy smiled, and pulled out a silver lighter. One cavalier thumb flick and it lit up the entire alley with ice-blue flame.
“I know. Tempting you seems to be my calling in life.”
Sandra pushed the lighter away as she put the cigarette between her lips. She drew closer to Lucy, and closer and closer. Closer.
Until Sandra closed her eyes as Lucy lit her cigarette for her.
Sandra opened her eyes, and removed the cigarette from her mouth, exhaling a cloud of smoke. Sandra took several quick drags, sucking the smoke deep into her chest as Lucy watched from the shadows.
“I’m enjoying it.” She tossed the half-finished cigarette into a dumpster and fixed Lucy with a cool black gaze. She breathed the poison into her lungs, savouring the little heat that the cigarette could offer her.
Lucy looked up, dropped the lighter back into the pocket of her bomber jacket. “You look cold.” She blinked. “Do I?” She slipped her arms out of the bomber jacket, her misery suddenly forgotten. “Yes. You’re freezing, goddamnit.”
Sandra sniffed. Now that she mentioned it. “I can’t feel my hands.”
“Oh god. You shouldn’t even be here.” Lucy took off her jacket, and wrapped it around her friend.
“Thanks.” she murmured slowly. The sleeves, which were too long for her, draped over her hands, infusing her with warmth. She could smell the coat, a mixture of strong cigarette smoke, a whiff of cinnamon breath mints, sweat, sunshine and a bit of her.
Sandra sighed, glanced at her watch again. “I’d better be heading back—” she started to take the bomber jacket off. “It’s getting late.”
Lucy straightened up, a swift movement. “No, I’ll walk you back. You wouldn’t get to your apartment in one piece without me.” She grinned.
Sandra was grateful for the company. “Thanks.”
“Fancy another?” Lucy asked, taking back her bomber jacket, and offering Sandra a cigarette. Sandra nodded, and accepted the unlit cylinder from the pack of Silk Cuts. Placing the filter between her lips, she watched as Lucy lit her up in a swift movement. Smoke flooded her mouth, and Sandra took a delicate puff, trying her best not to cough. Lucy smirked, and lit up her own, taking a deep drag, as the end glowed red. Within moments, Lucy’s ball of smoke was sucked deep into her chest, and she blew a perfect cone upwards to the night sky, keeping her friend captivated by the sight.
“Let’s go.” Lucy insisted, as smoke wafted all around them. They walked in silence, smoking their cigarettes with differing levels of comfort; Lucy taking luxurious drags whilst Sandra fought the urge to cough at the smoke, as nicotine surged through her cold body.
When they reached the cheerless block of windows that was her apartment building, the sun was just beginning to rise. They stood in its glow for a moment, breathless, wondering what to say. The world was still asleep as she slipped out of the coat and handed it back to her.
“Will I see you again?” Sandra asked, watching her slender arm slip into the sleeve. Lucy shrugged, smiled. “Sure. Somewhere around. Just follow the trail of cigarette butts.” And as if to prove her point, she finished the cigarette she had been smoking and scuffed it out on the pavement.