She had underestimated the cold, still not getting used to the drastic temperature change in her hometown with the current one. Steam came out of her mouth as she blew on her hands, rubbing them in an unsuccessful attempt to warm up. The coat, which was nowhere near the most suitable for the temperature, was adjusted while she shrugged her shoulders to try to make the raised collar cover her ears. In her coat pocket was her escape. Two badly rolled cigarettes prepared exclusively for that night.
She walked to the other side of the house's backyard, to an area where she could not be seen, where the light from the sidewalk just ahead could not illuminate her. The noise inside was intense - people talking, glasses banging, breaking, laughter, a faint noise of music and movement; and the farther she went, the more she could hear the ringing in her ear, and then only her shortness of breath that sought balance.
Taking one of the cigarette in her hands, she studied it for a while, turning it between her index and middle fingers before reaching for the lighter in the front pocket of her jeans. She scratched the stone and lit her cigarette, taking a long, deep drag. The sigh came out immediately, completing with the light-headed sensation of a pressure that dropped at the same time as the nicotine entered. She let her back rest on the wall of the house, watching the cold vapor mix with the cigarette smoke, until they mingled with the air and disappeared into the empty night.
"I didn't know you smoked," a male voice said, straight from the back door. With a start, she stretched again, pulling the back off of the wall and looking forward to find him with his hands in his pants pocket and his closed jacket, one obviously warmer than hers. "Sorry, I didn't mean to scare you," he laughed sheepishly.
"I don't smoke," she said in between drags, allowing the irony of the phrase to be absorbed at the beginning of the conversation. "It's just a reason to run away for 15 minutes," she added, hitting the ashes on the grass, looking down. He approached her with a raised eyebrow, "yeah, right", he laughed.
The truth is that she spent five years of her life without putting a cigarette in her mouth, but now ... now that she was there, alone, with no one looking at her, in another city, in another environment, she finally felt comfortable and every week she gives herself the dangerous luxury of nicotine that took months to get out of her body half a decade ago.
Then once a week, she would smoke her cigarette as a therapy, a Friday night ritual. She sat on her small porch, with a glass of whiskey on one side, her cat nestled on her feet and the silk paper in her hands, slowly adjusting the tobacco between her fingers, rolling it to the proper shape of a cigarette. She knew that when she was forced to go outside (because she also understood that she couldn't always live in isolation), that cigarette would be the perfect excuse to escape the crowd when the anxiety reached an unbearable level.
She didn't explain anything to him, but remembered that, for some reason, she had rolled up another cigarrete that night. "Do you want one?". She took it out of her jacket pocket and offered it to him, who came closer to take it from her hands, letting his warm fingers lightly touch her cold ones, reaching a thermal shock that ran through her body. She again scratched the stone from her lighter and brought the flame closer to his lips, waiting for him to take the first slow drag.
"Am I getting in the way of your escape?", He backed up to the back door stairs, sitting down on one of the steps. It was a polite way of giving her space, of not getting into her personal bubble. "No". She smiled without looking at him, walking slowly up and down the lawn in the backyard as she looked up at the sky between drags.
"I just get really tired. Sometimes I need to give myself some space to recharge my batteries," she looked at the cigarette again, as if it were her battery. "There are a lot of voices, people, a lot of smiles, laughter, friction. It's all very exhausting, do you get it?". He did not respond directly, making only a low murmur of affirmation.
The silence stayed for a while. "You are not quite what I expected," he finally comments, staring at her, tapping the ashes on the bottom step. "You expected a lively extrovert, right?" she laughed.
"Basically," he added, accompanying her in a low laugh. "But it's not a negative surprise, it just gives you more layers." Only then did she look at him with the same intensity, in a mental exchange of unspoken dialogue.
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