There is always a lull in customers at the flower shop around 2pm. Debbie quickly rings up the last customer as her addiction begs to be satiated.
“Finally,” she sighs, throwing off her apron and heading to the rear exit. “I’m going out back,” she shouts to Valerie, who is in the middle of making an arrangement.
Behind the shop the two women quickly light their cigarettes and inhale deeply. Debbie takes a double drag and relaxes as the nicotine courses through her blood. She hates having to go more than an hour between smokes.
Valerie knows that Debbie will chain smoke at least two before going back inside. Lately, Valerie has started partaking in a second one herself. Debbie has been a bad influence on Valerie. When she started, Valerie only smoked on her lunch break, but now she takes a break whenever Debbie does. She’s started smoking more at home too.
The wind blows lightly and Valerie catches a clear view of her friend’s growing baby bump. Debbie catches Valerie’s gaze.
“I finally told Jessica,” Debbie tells Valerie.
“What did she say?” Valerie asks, taking a drag from her cigarette and exhales through her nose.
“She asked if Cody and I were going to get married. She didn’t say anything about my smoking.” Debbie rubs her tummy guiltily as she says this. She wishes there was some way she could quilt without feeling like she was going to kill someone.
Valerie nods. She is 23, and he husband has started talking about having children. Valerie loves kids, but she loves smoking more. She knows that in another year or so, she will be in Debbie’s shoes. She can’t imagine smoking through her pregnancy after what happened with her nephew, but she can’t imagine giving it up either.
“I think I might have scared her into quitting though,” Debbie adds.
“How’s that? I thought you wanted her to smoke?”
“Well, I do. I mean…I don’t know. But as we were talking about the baby, I had one of my coughing fits. She just stared at me. I couldn’t catch my breath to save my life. And then she didn’t smoke the whole rest of the evening.”
“That’s good Debbie. You know it’s better if she doesn’t smoke.”
Debbie nods halfheartedly and lights a second cigarette off the burning butt of her first.
‘’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’
“Hey, aren’t you coming to the park with me?” Jodi calls to Jessica.
“No, I’m just going to head to the cafeteria. I left my cigarettes at home,” Jessica answers.
“You can have one of mine,” Jodi offers hurriedly.
“No, I’m good,” replies Jessica.
Jodi shrugs and makes her way quickly to the park. She would have liked for her friend to come with her, but she wasn’t able to sneak her usual cigarette after second period, so she is desperate to calm her craving.
In the lunchroom Sarah sits down next to Jessica. “Why aren’t you smoking with Jodi?”
“I don’t feel like it today,” Jessica says, trying to make it seem like smoking was no big deal - something she can chose to do. Yesterday Jessica was resolved to never smoke again but today she’s starting to think that she might go back to smoking. She tells herself that if she can go two or three days without smoking she will probably treat herself this weekend.
“You can just not smoke?” Sarah asks.
“Yea. I just felt like I was doing it too much. I wanted to take a break.”
Sarah looks quizzically at Jessica. Sarah’s mother is a nurse, plus Sarah was in Jessica’s health class last year. Sarah thinks that once you smoke, you will immediately get addicted.
“Is it hard to quit?” Sarah asks.
Jessica feels a slight knot in her stomach. Last night before dinner the smell of cigarettes wafted through the house as her mother and Cody smoked downstairs. Jessica found herself inhaling slowly through her nose, drawn to the desire to keep smoking. She doesn’t want to admit it but she could barely sleep and has felt edgy all day
“Not really. I mean, I’ve thought about smoking. I just don’t want to end up like my mom.” Jessica interrupts her own thought, “Oh my god, Sarah, guess what my mom told me last night? She is pregnant!”
“Oh…I actually knew that…” Sarah answers sheepishly.
“What? How?” Jessica asks. All thoughts of longing for a cigarette are pushed from her mind.
“My mom works at Dr. Thomas’s office. She told me your mom was going to have a baby.”
“And you didn’t tell me?” Jessica asks, astonished.
“Mom says I couldn’t. Because of HIPAA,” Sarah looks away from her friend, ashamed.
“It’s okay,” Jessica says, softening her tone. “I’m still just amazed by the whole thing.”
Sarah nods sympathetically.
A few minutes later Jodi comes into the cafeteria and sits down at the table with Jessica and Sarah. Jessica smells the smoke on her friend, and immediately feels an overwhelming desire to smoke. Although she tries to keep calm, a subtle look of uneasiness appears on her face.
“Are you okay?” Jodi asks.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine,” Jessica says, trying to push away the craving.
“You should have come to smoke with me,” Jodi chides. She knows the look on Jessica’s face.
“I’ll smoke this weekend,” Jessica replies, surprised that she has just made such a commitment.
Jodi nods. She fully expects Jessica to join her at their usual spot tomorrow.
Jessica has trouble concentrating in her afternoon classes. She tells herself she has a lot to be distracted by with the big news for her mother. But the truth is that her brain has started relying on nicotine to keep her focused. Without it, Jessica fidgets in her seat and her mind jumps restlessly from topic to topic. She is relieved when the final bell rings.
“It’s about time,” Jessica sighs as she grabs her bag and makes her way to the front of the school.
“Hey Jessica.”
She turns around and sees Ryan waving at her. She stops to let him catch up but feels a little annoyed by the interruption. After the long day at school without smoking she is eager to get home.
“How’s it going?” Ryan asks.
“Fine. What’s up?”
“I was thinking. You want to go to the park?
“Why?”
“Remember you promised to smoke for me?” Ryan’s charismatic smile is contagious and Jessica can’t help but smiling back even though she feels the anxiety growing inside her.
“I can’t today,” she answers hastily, “I…I left my pack at home. I’m sorry. Maybe another…”
“How about tomorrow?” Ryan offer, still smiling.
Jessica’s heart races. She doesn’t know how to answer. She wants to. She likes Ryan but she promised herself that she would go at least two days before smoking again.
“Okay, but after school.” Jessica does the math and tells herself that it will be very close to 48 hours if she waits until then.
Ryan’s grin grows wider. “This time tomorrow would be perfect.” Just as Ryan is about to say more, Marissa walks up.
“I was looking for you,” she frowns at Ryan
“Sorry, babes,” Ryan answers, putting his arm around Marissa and winking at Jessica.
“Well, I’ll see you guys tomorrow,” Jessica says, quickly making her way off school grounds.
Jessica has also grown accustomed to smoking after school. As she unlocks the door to her house she is greeted with the pungent smell of stale tobacco smoke. She involuntarily takes a deep, longing breath. Her eyes gravitate toward the ashtray on the table, filled with cigarette butts.
“I can’t believe how hard this is,” she says out loud. “What am I, stupid? I know better than this. I never should have started smoking in the first place.”
Jessica grabs a soda from the refrigerator, her eyes repeatedly locking on each ashtray she passes. “It’s only been 24 hours," she muses to herself. “24 hours and I’m already falling to pieces.”
She shakes her head, trying to scatter her unpleasant thoughts. Upstairs in her room she lays across the bed and opens her textbook and notebook. There’s an Algebra quiz coming up in a couple of days and she needs to memorize some formulas. She stares at the first formula and copies it down in her notebook. Something doesn’t look right. She checks it against the textbook and sees two mistakes. She hastily erases and writes it correctly. She moves onto the next and makes the same mistake.
“Ugh!” She rolls over on her back and stares at the ceiling. Math has always been a good subject for her but her thoughts are too preoccupied to concentrate.
In a bout of withdrawal induced frustration she claps her textbook closed and sits up on the edge of the bed. Her cigarettes are in the top drawer of her bedside table. She opens it a bit and sees the gleam of the cellophane wrapped pack.
“I shouldn’t be doing this,” she whispers to herself, hands trembling as she slides a single cigarette out. She places the filter between her lips but doesn’t light it yet. She breathes through it, tasting the tobacco flavored air, the paper filter, and the chemicals she knows tobacco companies put in their products to hook kids like her. Then she flicks the lighter, pulls through the cigarette, and hears the small sizzle as it catches and she pulls the hot smoke into her young, relatively healthy lungs. She sits back on the bed and takes three consecutive drags before enough nicotine makes its way into her blood for her to feel the rewards of addiction.
Closing her eyes she takes two more deep inhales. “This feels so good,” she sighs, smoke pouring out of her mouth and nostrils. She pumps needfully on the cigarette, her cheeks collapsing as they draw harder and harder on the smoke, holding it in her lungs before exhaling big plumes of smoke into her room.
Soon the filter is burning and she crushes it out into the ashtray her mother brought up just three days earlier. She feels calm, relaxed, and satisfied and lays across her bed, enjoying the rush of nicotine coursing through her.
Minutes pass and the pleasure begins to wane. Jessica reopens her math book and feels focused. As she begins to work on the math problems she decides that the pleasures of smoking are worth the cost to her future self. Besides, she needs to be able to concentrate on her upcoming math quiz.
She can always quit later if she really has to.
‘’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’
That night, after studying, Jessica is sitting downstairs, smoking a cigarette when her mother comes home with dinner. Debbie is slightly out of breath from carrying groceries and leans on the counter for a minute. Jessica can hear her mother’s faint wheezing. She looks apprehensively at the cigarette burning between her fingers and takes a very long drag, pushing how much she can inhale.
Debbie catches her breath and comes to sit down next to her daughter. Jessica takes a cigarette from her pack and offers it to her mom. Debbie puts it between her lips and Jessica lights it for her.
“I thought you were quitting,” Debbie says.
“I tried.”
Debbie takes her daughter’s hand and hold it. “It’s okay, honey. I’m sure you could if you really wanted to. But you know I understand if you don’t.”
“I’m sorry I was hard on you, mom. I really didn’t understand what it was like to be addicted. I couldn’t even do my homework this afternoon because I wanted a cigarette so badly.”
Jessica takes a drag as she says this and Debbie watches as her daughter feeds her new addiction. “I might as well tell you then,” Debbie says, “I’m going to keep smoking through my pregnancy.” Debbie takes a long drag and exhales while rubbing her tummy.
Jessica nods. “I know it’s not good for the baby but...I think you should keep smoking. I’ve only been addicted for a little while and I see how stressful it is to quit. Stress isn’t good for the baby either and you’ve been smoking for years. Trying to quit now might be more unhealthy than not.”
Debbie rubs the top of her daughter’s hand. “ I’m glad you understand.”
That evening, Jessica relented to her cravings. She sat downstairs in the living room with her mom and Cody and they smoked cigarette after cigarette while watching TV. Debbie kept an ashtray balanced on her expanding stomach. The air became thick with smoke hanging around in a hazy cloud. When Debbie got caught up in one of her coughing fits, it made Jessica nervous and she found herself reaching for her pack and lighting another cigarette to calm herself down.
Submitted September 07, 2015 at 06:03PM by atomcrash http://ift.tt/1g5aZnD darksidesmokingfetish
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