Cigarettes. No matter how many cheap beers or sticks of gum he puts in his mouth, you can always taste them, she laughs.

If you close your eyes and let his hands run over you, his lips and tongue graze over your body, he is still that cigarette somehow. Transformed. Smokey; like the lingering residue that embeds in your skin from a campfire – a smell that can’t be washed out for days.

It’s similar to how she gets addicted to those men. It goes something like that.

It’s like you’re 13-years-old again, she explains, and you really inhale for the first time. “Not that inhale/hold-in-your-mouth and exhale shit.” We’re talking lung-toking. Deep. All the way inside and out again.

“Having your cake and eating it too.”

That first real inhale enhances you. Makes you feel good. Taste better. You want more, even though the more you have the more you need.

Those men are like that.

“Personal addictions.” That’s what she calls them. “Infatuations” is a better word, I think. “Obsessions,” even better. I would never say “love,” even though she did love every single one of them.

They’re always fleeting though. Usually. Some have gotten under her skin.

“No matter how many men you’ve had,” she told me once over too many pints and cherry bombs, “it’s always the ones who get away you can’t fucking forget.”

It’s easy to respect a line like that. Especially when you know exactly what she means. Too many of those men do get away because of: (1) significant others, or (2) time complications, or (3) kids, or (4) whatever other kind of commitment.

I tell her this: that I understand this feeling; that I have been swimming in this feeling forever. I could show her my pruned fingers if she cared to see.

“Then change” this about myself, she says. Be something other than serious…always. “Caring and passionate and cold.” Smile more. And laugh. Loud. Moan louder. Really inhale and stop bitching about how smoking causes fucking cancer.

We all gonna die someday sweetheart.

I know she’s right and wrong. We’re both right and wrong. Like that single cigarette; that single real inhale at 13. Comparable, even, to that stupid apple (actually, I hear it was something closer resembling a pomegranate) plucked from the tree so long ago.

(That was a woman too, by the way.)

I want to taste just once – the cheap beer and gum and cigarette. Breathe in and swallow it whole. All of it. One big gulp.

You either spend your life wondering about the ones who got away or you really inhale and forget the rest. You’re killing yourself either way, she says.

Drinks a beer. Inhales smoke.

“You might as well feel good about it.”

Exhales.