Lost & Found

I met my friend B. yesterday night.
We don't see each other very often these days. We used to work together back when I was an office girl, and we had struck a friendship because we had a lot of similar interests and stuff.
We were the two that snuck out of the fire exit to have a mid-morning (and mid-afternoon) smoke.

Anyway, last night we met and we had a cigar and a drink and we chatted for a while and it turned out that while she was cleaning up her hard disk, B. found the rough draft of a story I had sent her about two years ago.
You know me: a rather straightforward smoking fetish corruption story.
I guess I was trying to get B. into smoking fetishism, back then.
Once again, you know me.


I had completely forgotten about that story, and I considered it lost with all the rest when my PC was stolen.
 But now here it is, in all its (dubious) glory.
It needs a serious rewrite (why, oh why do I always have characters called Tracy?) but it might be fun.
It's called "Hooking Harriet".

Here's a small preview, from the very beginning.


It did not take long for me to set my sights on Harriet.
She was just perfect.
Blond, pretty in an unconventional way, with sharp features and a pointy nose, her eyes sparkling green behind her Harry Potter glasses, Harriet was serious and aloof and sat at the front of the classroom to take notes.
Applied statistics.
Boring.
I sat at the front of the classroom too, not for the note-taking, but just because I liked to be front-stage and center, always. And if I had toned-down my Goth princess style from high-school, I still showed enough cleavage to distract overeager assistants, and my red hair was like a fire beacon.
Harriet was soft-spoken, usually dressed in low-heeled ballerinas, dark slacks and pale blouses. Minimal make-up, no jewelry. There were no holes in her earlobes, and she was a very vocal non-smoker.
As I said, perfect.
I approached her with a simple statistical problem. She helped me solve it. We hit it off, sorta. I started talking to her between classes, and I could not stop from visualizing her with a cigarette between her thin lips. I worked on her for about ten days. Then, frowning at my cigarette, she finally agreed that studying together for the final exam would be a good idea. We went for a coffee at the coffee machines.
I had already decided that Harriet would become a one-packet-a-day smoker.
For starters.
After all, a girl needs a hobby, right?