e've just hired an extremely talented, very attractive woman to be an editor of some sort at the Anchorage Press. Her attractiveness is as much personal as physical. We're playing video games over the computer network, and she's good enough to win. Who cares if this is company time — we exist in a dream. And, being a hard-boiled journalist, she smokes like a fiend.

I can't take my eyes off her cigarettes. One after another, she puffs, inhales deeply. The second-hand smoke just isn't doing it for me, and the withdrawals are that gut-wrenching, delirium tremens, can't think of anything else type thing. I start taking drags off of her cigarettes. A drag now and then, to stave off the pain, then a drag or two per smoke, then it gets ridiculous. I'm bumming them as often as she's smoking them, bumming them faster, smoking more and more until finally I find relief only in constant chain smoking.