Emily and I had been friends for about three years before the trip to Hawaii last Christmas. We were friends, but only at work did we see each other. We never socialized together after hours, we never talked on the phone outside of the workplace unless it was one of us asking the other for lecture notes or something like that. We were friends in the way that married people of the opposite sex have to be friends in our society: at a distance. If we had both been single when she joined the ranks of teachers at John F. Kennedy High School, I imagine that something might have developed in the romance department between us. After all, we were very compatible. Both of us had Master's degrees in World History and both of us were in the history department. We both shared a fascination with the World War II era and our discussions in the lunchroom were always animated and fun. I suppose that the rumor mill, which is no different among a high school faculty than it is any other place, had us sleeping together. Anytime that any two people were seen having lunch together more than once it was automatically assumed that they were lovers. But we were not; we were just professional friends. I was married to a corporate auditor that I had met in college and she was married to a one time minor league baseball player who was now a computer programmer. Both of us took our marriage vows seriously. Romance between us was not an option and, at least on my part, had never even been considered.

That is not to say that I was not attracted to her. I am a male after all and I like the sight of a pretty woman as much as any man. Emily wasn't stunningly beautiful. She wasn't ever going to be asked to model lingerie in a department store catalogue or anything like that. But she was attractive in a girl next door kind of way. She had reddish blonde hair and green eyes, the genetic mark of Irish ancestors. Her face was very innocent looking, making her appear to be somewhat younger than the twenty-eight years old she was the year of the trip. Though her body was usually well hidden by the collection of ankle length dresses she wore to school, you could still tell that it was shapely and that her legs, which were usually covered in dark nylons, were the kind of legs a man liked to run his hands over or feel wrapped around his back. It was not until Hawaii however that my suspicions about the allure of her attributes were confirmed. Until Hawaii I had never seen Emily dressed in anything but school marm clothing. The first time I saw her in shorts and a half-top, shortly after we checked into our Waikiki hotel on December 19, I found that my imaginings of what she looked like in such attire had been entirely correct.

The annual Christmas break trip to Hawaii was a tradition at JFK High that stretched far beyond my tenure there. Each year a group of eight to ten faculty members and their spouses would book with a travel agent and take the ten-day trip together. This entitled us to a reasonable group rate at one of the nicer Waikiki hotels during what is the busiest season for Hawaiian tourism. The couples would each have their own hotel rooms on the same floor of the building. The time would be spent taking in the sights and generally just enjoying the tropical weather during what is always a miserable time of the year in Seattle. The experience of being in such a place with friends made the trip something that was looked forward to each year and that kept the annual tradition alive.

My wife Sharon and I had included ourselves in the group every year since my employment. Sharon, as I've mentioned, is a corporate auditor and she is very career oriented. The rest of the year she is a driven woman, working eighty and ninety hour weeks trying to propel herself up the proverbial ladder. Naturally this puts somewhat of a strain on our relationship. She misses meals, she breaks plans, and she puts nearly everything else aside for her sacred job. I can sympathize with generations of corporate wives very well since I've been on the receiving end of the same process. The trip to Hawaii, in the past, has always been an opportunity for us to rekindle a little of the romance that had once possessed us and had driven us to marry in the first place. We could put all of our problems aside and spend long hours walking on the beach or going to shows or doing all of the tourist things or just making love in our room.

But in the last two years, as Sharon's career goals became closer and more distinct, some of the romance leaked out of the trip. Her drive to succeed at all costs became even more of an obsession during the rest of the year and during the trip itself she was always distracted as she worried about whether or not taking ten days off would exclude her from some crucial bit of favor with her bosses. She would spend a lot of time on the hotel room phone, checking in with the office just to see how things were going, trying to keep her name at the front of the right people's minds. Though we rarely fought at home since we rarely saw each other, the last two trips we took together were hotbeds of marital squabbling as I begged her to try and relax and she spent the entire time wishing she was not there.

This last year our home relationship had been particularly bad. Sharon had received a much wanted promotion in February, just a few weeks after we had booked with the travel agent, and her eighty hour weeks became one hundred hour weeks. She had to travel a lot, sometimes for four and five days at a time and, when I was graced with her presence at home, she was haggard looking and tired. As the time for the trip grew closer I wondered if the soothing beat of the tropical paradise was going to be able to work its magic on her at all this time. Was there anything left to rekindle? This was definitely not the woman that I had married.

I never had a chance to find out if the rekindle was going to work or not. In early December, when it was far too late to back out of the arrangements without losing our money, Sharon's team of auditors was given an urgent project that needed to be completed by the end of the year. Of course Sharon's boss, knowing that her vacation had been scheduled since February, said that she should go and that the team could carry on without her. I'm sure he used his best martyr voice when he said this and of course Sharon told him not to be ridiculous, that she could go to Hawaii any old time. This project was IMPORTANT for the company, for the firm, and for the continued prosperity of western civilization itself. She told me that night that she had to stay home.

This of course prompted a long and bitter fight between us, easily the worst of our marriage. From the time that she gave me the news until the night before the scheduled departure, we slept apart and when we weren't giving each other the silent treatment, we were arguing. In the end I put my foot stubbornly down. I told her that since the trip was paid for and since I wouldn't be seeing her over the holiday anyway, I would be going without her. I told her that I would send her a postcard from Hawaii. She protested my decision but it was to no avail. When the DC-10 left the runway at Sea-Tac, headed for Honolulu, I was on it and my wife was not.

I met Emily's husband, Frank, for the first time on that seven hour flight. I took the window seat on the left side of the plane and they sat next to me, Emily in the middle seat and Frank on the aisle. Emily had never talked much about her spouse during our discussions at school. Now, meeting him (this was their first time going along on the annual vacation) and talking to him as we flew six miles above the Pacific Ocean, I discovered something fundamental about him. He was a very annoying and unlikeable person. A short man, measuring up at about five-eight or so, Frank was afflicted with a nasty case of Short Man's Syndrome. He ran his mouth almost constantly and all he talked about was how much better he was at everything than anybody else was. He had endured greater hardships in his life than Ghandi or Jesus Christ. He had made greater achievements than they as well. He was smarter, stronger, faster, more agile, and generally just superior to everyone and everything. The bulk of his discussions revolved around sports and sport-related subjects. He enlightened me on how good he was at basketball, at golf, at football, and particularly at baseball.

"I had an upper three hundreds average for three straight years with the Philly's farm team," he said nostalgically. "Damn near broke the minor league home run record the last year."

"Is that right?" I asked, being polite but completely uninterested. Between us, Emily was giving off wifely vibes of annoyance towards him demanding he talk about something else. They were so strong that even I, who was not married to her, was able to clearly pick them up. But not Frank. He either had his receiver turned off or he was ignoring the signals.

"Damn right," he assured me. "I woulda gone pro too if it wasn't for hurtin' my damn knee near the end of the season." He shook his head regretfully. "That ended my baseball career before it could even get really started. Disabled me enough that the pros could never pick me up."

"That's too bad," I told him with feigned sympathy.

On and on his competitive, sports oriented conversation went. He explained his theories on the up and coming NFL playoffs. He explained his theories on the up and coming basketball season. While eating our in-flight meal he expanded greatly upon his failed baseball career, taking a moment to blame those "damn niggers and South American spics" for keeping him in the minors those first two seasons after being drafted. As I listened to his endless drivel and was bombarded with intercepted cease and desist vibes from Emily, I found myself wondering what had possessed Emily to date such a person, let alone marry him. I mean, she was so sweet and this guy was an asshole. What had happened?

It was as we banked over the island of Oahu and the pilot pointed out Pearl Harbor and the tiny Arizona Memorial far below that Emily asked me about the national monument. "You've been there a couple of times, haven't you?"

"Just once," I said. "On the first trip."

"Just once?" she said, raising the eyebrows on those pretty green eyes. "A World War II buff like you?"

"Well," I said with a shrug, "my wife isn't too keen on historical things. She went the one time with me and she never wanted to go again."

Before Emily could answer, Frank put in his two cents. "I'm with your wife," he said. "Who the hell wants to go see where a bunch of Japs ambushed us." He shook his head a little. "It's morbid you ask me. Fuckin' Japs. We should've nuked them a long time ago."

Neither Emily nor I pointed out that we HAD nuked them a long time ago. "It's not just the memorial," I said. "They have a museum there with a lot of artifacts from that era. It's actually quite interesting."

"I want to go spend at least a day there," Emily told him. "Let's pencil that in, can we?"

At that point a minor argument developed between them. Frank maintained that he had much better things to do on his vacation than wasting one of his days at a goddamn naval base. Emily pointed out that she was not asking anything else of him on the trip but that she wanted this one thing. Frank refused to commit. I listened to their squabble uncomfortably, the way people get when they are trapped with two people doing such a thing.

"Well what about when you go out with the rest of them on the golf trip?" she asked him finally. She was referring to the tradition that the golfers among us had of spending a day on the links at the exclusive and very expensive Turtle Bay Country Club on the other side of the island. Frank was of course a golfer and he had already been invited by the others to partake in the tradition. In one of his earlier discussions he had maintained that he was going to beat everyone there with his five handicap.

"Well what about it?" he asked defiantly.

"I'll just take the day that you're golfing and go there on my own. That way, everyone's happy."

Frank didn't seem very happy about this at all. I understood. To the Frank's of the world, someone is always trying to steal their woman out from under them and they do not like them to go out to such places as historic naval bases alone. I wanted to offer to accompany Emily there - I was not a golfer and, since my wife was not with me, I had nothing better to do anyway - but I held my tongue figuring that Frank wouldn't want me accompanying his wife either. But in this, I was wrong.

"What if John comes with me?" Emily asked. "He's been there before so he knows how to get there."

Frank thought this over for a second and then gave his approval of the plan. Apparently he didn't see me as a threat of any kind. I wasn't sure whether to take this as an insult or not. But in any case the plans were made. On the following Monday morning, while Frank was at Turtle Bay, Emily and I would catch a shuttle bus and go visit the scene of one of the greatest sneak attacks in history.

Dress in Hawaii is very casual, no matter what the occasion. It is one of the few places on Earth where it is possible to go into a four star restaurant wearing shorts, sandals, and a T-shirt without violating a dress code. As such we were dressed for comfort when we met in front of our hotel on Monday morning. I was wearing a pair of khaki shorts and a tank top. Emily was adorned in a pair of white shorts and a sleeveless pullover with a picture of a sailboat on the front. Her long legs were every bit as nice as I'd imagined they would be and it was difficult not to openly admire them. They were smooth and clean-shaven, the calves well muscled from her regular workouts. I could not help but compare them to my wife's legs, which had grown thin and bony since our marriage from stress induced weight loss.

We exchanged a few pleasantries while we waited for the shuttle to arrive and then compared notes on how our trip was going so far. I of course was not having the most pleasant vacation of my life. I was here alone and my wife was in a Seattle high rise pouring through the financial records of some huge corporation. Though I was in a tropical paradise full of innumerable things to do, the other members of my group were all couples and they did couple oriented things. Though they tried to include me in their activities I generally declined their invitations not wanting to be a third wheel or a fifth wheel or a seventh wheel. I had spent the majority of my time near the pool or on the beach, drinking tropical drink after tropical drink until I was drunk enough to go pass out in my room.

Emily professed to me that she was having the time of her life but I could tell that she was exaggerating her enjoyment. She and Frank had been doing what Frank wanted to do and never what Emily wanted to do. They had been to Aloha Stadium, where the Pro Bowl was played every year. They had been to the University of Hawaii, which touted a pretty good sports program for its students. They had gone para sailing because Frank had heard that it was a manly thing to do. They had gone deep-sea fishing for marlin. They had not gone to the Punchbowl or to Diamondhead or to the International Market Place. They had not gone on any romantic dinner cruises on the ocean.

"Your husband is really into his sports, isn't he?" I asked carefully as the bus pulled up before us and the throngs of tourists began to move towards the door.

She gave me a crooked smile. "Yes he is," she said lightly. "Sports are his life."

We arrived at the huge naval base thirty minutes later and began our tour. Pearl Harbor is still an active base of the Pacific Fleet and two aircraft carriers as well as numerous destroyers, oilers, and other vessels were at anchor. We started our day by taking the small ferry that shuttled people from the dock out to the Arizona memorial, a white, archlike structure that stood out in the harbor directly over the top of the sunken battleship for which it is named. We ogled over the rusted hulk just below the surface of the water, a hulk in which American sailors are still entombed and from which oil still bubbles up from the boilers. Emily was amazed by the number of Japanese that took the tour. They easily outnumbered the Americans by more than two to one.

"Why do you think they're coming here?" she whispered to me as we stared down at the protruding smokestacks of the ship. "Isn't that a little... weird."

I took a moment to answer her. As she leaned in to keep her words from being overheard her breast pushed against my arm sending a chill through my body. I could feel the softness of her and a wave of lust went coursing through me. I mumbled something back about them being justifiably proud about the attack; something that probably would have been much funnier had I not been so distracted.

That was the first contact on our trip. There were others. As we stepped off of the memorial and back onto the boat for the trip back to shore, Emily stumbled a bit on the uneven surface. Instinctively I grabbed her around the waist to keep her from falling into the handrail. This brought my forearm around her midsection, allowing me to feel the firmness of her stomach and the underswell of her breasts against my wrist. She blushed a little at the contact but made no move to break it at first.

"Thank you," she said, smiling up at me gratefully. "That might've hurt."

"Anytime," I told her in a voice that was not quite normal.

We continued in that stance for a few moments until we sensed the impatience of those behind us, those we were holding up. I released her and we stepped aboard the boat. As we motored our way back we were forced to sit very close together on the small bench. This allowed my right leg to rest snugly against her left leg. I could feel the silky smoothness of her outer thigh pressing against mine and I had to resist the urge to rest my hand upon her leg. Neither one of us commented on the closeness. We simply discussed the Arizona and its status as a piece of preserved history, all the while pretending we were not noticing the contact.

Once back on shore we went to the museum, where we spent the next two hours wandering from exhibit to exhibit. We saw preserved radio message sheets, artifacts from the ships and from shot down Japanese planes. As we moved from place to place we talked easily, both of us sharing our fascination with this troubled era as we never had before. Our discussions were the comfortable talk of old friends discussing a common interest. It was the sort of conversation that I had never shared with Sharon and that I was sure she had never shared with Frank.

And as the day went on I found myself looking at Emily much more than was probably healthy. When she turned to examine a display behind a glass sheet I would let my eyes travel over the backs of her legs, which were tight and newly tanned from the Hawaiian sun. Or I would take in the sight of her midriff, which would occasionally peek out when the hem of her shirt rode up, allowing me to see her belly button. She had a fine fuzz of red hair trailing downward into her shorts and a smattering of small freckles around it. I wondered what it would be like to kiss those freckles. I could also not help but admire those wonderful breasts of hers, which bounced in her summer shirt in a way they never had in her school clothes. Though they were firmly strapped into a bra their very shape and size was pleasing to the male sense of aesthetics, making it quite easy to imagine what they would look like unadorned.

We headed back to Honolulu just after 12:00, wearily slumping in our seats on the bus, our legs once again in pleasant contact with each other. After being dropped at our hotel we stood on the sidewalk for a moment, looking at each other.

"I'm kinda hungry," I said, not really hinting anything, just making an observation.

Emily smiled, showing her sparkling white teeth. "Me too," she said. "Frank won't be back for another three or four hours. Why don't we go have lunch by the pool?"

I certainly wasn't going to turn that down. We walked together through the lobby and to the spacious though crowded swimming pool area. The pool was enormous and was complete with numerous waterfalls, waterslides, and other attractions. It was filled with splashing and shouting tourists, both children and adults, enjoying its coolness and the novelty of swimming outside in December. The dominating odor was of coconut scented suntan oil and chlorine. The pool area had a full service bar complete with circulating cocktail waitresses and a small café type eatery. We walked over and grabbed a table, ordering hamburgers and mai tais from a Filipino waitress who was dressed to look like a Hawaiian.

As we ate and drank we continued our discussion, moving from our interest in history to what our lives were like in high school and college.

"Sometimes," Emily told me with a giggle after her second drink, "I marvel that I even managed to get through high school."

"Oh yeah?" I asked. "Why is that?"

"Well," she said, "I used to hang out with the wrong crowd you know. During my senior year I got into the stoner lifestyle. I would cut class and go smoke dope with some pretty shady friends."

"You smoked dope?" I asked in disbelief, wondering if she was serious. Emily looked about as straightlaced as a person could be.

"Pounds of it," she assured me. "It was only when the cops busted me and my boyfriend smoking out behind a park that I stopped. They dragged me home and told my mother what I had done and she..." she giggled a little, shaking her head. "Well, let's just say she convinced me that I wouldn't be doing that anymore."

"I can't picture that," I told her. "You look so innocent."

"That was my advantage," she said slyly. "I got away with coming home stoned so many times because my parents just couldn't believe that I was capable of doing such a thing."

We had a laugh together and ordered another drink. As we sipped it I told her of my own marijuana experiences, which were considerable in my high school and early college days. I had quit not because I was caught at it - to this day my parents do not know I ever smoked any - but because I had nearly flunked out my first year because of the lethargic effects of too much pot. I was one of the smart ones who was able to leave that childhood indulgence behind.

"I still miss it sometimes," Emily said nostalgically. She hefted her drink up. "This stuff is all right when you want to get rid of reality a little but it makes you soooo sick if you have too much. Being high was nicer. I haven't done it in ten years, but I still remember how it felt."

"Yeah," I said, nodding. "Me too. It's a pity that you can't relive some of your..." I trailed off, a crazy thought striking me.

"What?" she asked, raising her eyebrows again.

"You know," I said thoughtfully. "There's a lot of marijuana for sale here in Hawaii."

"What?" she said, wrinkling her brow now.

"Every time you walk down on the boardwalk or on the beach, someone tries to sell you some."

"They do?" she said.

"Well," I amended. "They do to me. Maybe they don't hit you up because you're a woman. But they do me."

"So what are you saying?" she asked, though she knew exactly what I was saying and was obviously interested.

"Let's get some and smoke it," I whispered. "For old times sake."

She giggled a little again. "Do you think we should?" she asked.

"Why not? We're not in school anymore. Our parents don't have any say in what we do. The school district doesn't drug test us. And most important, we're on vacation. Why shouldn't we have a good time?"

She thought it over for a few seconds and then smiled in a naughty little girl way. "I find you make a good point," she said. "Do you really think you can get some?"

"You go get some rolling papers," I told her, "and I'll get us some pot."

"Deal," she said. "Come up to my room when you get it and we'll go over to yours to smoke it."

Ten minutes later I was walking up and down the boardwalk, trying my best to look like a harmless tourist that was looking for a little fun. I was a little nervous. After all, when one buys marijuana one is necessarily dealing with a criminal element. But the nervousness was kept at bay by anticipation. I really had enjoyed smoking grass way back when and the thought of getting high again was exciting. Coupled with this was the thrill of doing such a thing with Emily who, aside from looking so innocent, was also tripping the lust meters in my mind.

Finally, after fifteen minutes of walking up and down along the sandy cement path that ran the length of Waikiki Beach, I hit paydirt. They have a distinctive way of offering you their wares in the islands and the gentleman I made contact with kept to that tradition. He was a white man in his early twenties or so, dressed in the inevitable baggy shorts and absent of a shirt. He had a Jamaican hat upon his head and a wary, watchful expression upon his face. He was walking towards me along the path and his eyes took a moment to examine me as we closed with each other. As we passed he whispered, barely audibly: "buds?"

That was the signal. Had I been an undercover cop he could have denied ever saying such a thing. It had been spoken too softly to have been picked up on any recording device. Had I been uninterested in his product, I could have just kept walking and he would have done the same. That was what I usually did in such circumstances. But this time I gave him the clear signal that I was interested. I stopped and turned around to look at him. Seeing this he stopped and walked back over to me.

"How you doing today sir?" he asked me, holding out his hand for a shake, his eyes continuing to take me in. "Are you interested in a little Maui agricultural sample today?"

"Why yes I am," I told him.

"Then I'm your man," he said, jerking his head towards the shade of a beach shithouse. "Step into my office for a moment."

The deal was done very quickly since it was out in public. We established that we were talking about the same thing and then he named his price. It was a number that was a little steeper than I had figured.

"Fifty bucks for a sixteenth?" I asked dubiously, trying to play the smart businessman and probably failing miserably. I did have a little knowledge about what I was talking about however. I was a public school teacher and I heard the kids talk (as much as they thought we were clueless about their activities). I knew that in Seattle the going rate for an eighth of an ounce of good greenbud from northern California was about seventy bucks, or thirty-five for a sixteenth. I mentioned this to my Jamaican hatted friend.

"Dude," he assured me, seemingly insulted. "Have you ever smoked Maui-Wowie before?"

"No," I said, putting on my wise-to-the-ways-of-the-world expression. "But how much better could it be than California green?"

He assured me that Maui bud made California's finest seem like Arizona homegrown in comparison. "This stuff is the bomb dude," he told me. "One hit and you're in fuckin' oblivion."

"Really?" I asked, not believing him for a moment.

"Fuckin' really."

Though I didn't believe him and though I thought I was probably getting ripped, I nevertheless handed over two twenties and a ten and he handed me a rolled up baggie of brownish looking buds. A moment later he went his way and I went mine.

In the elevator on the way up to the eighteenth floor of the hotel, my suspicion of being ripped increased when, finding myself alone, I unrolled the bag to examine my purchase. The buds were brown and sticky and very moist. They were so moist that they adhered to my finger when I touched them. And the smell. It was an almost sickly sweet odor that was nothing like what I associated with marijuana. What was this crap? Had I just paid fifty bucks for dried out lawn clippings stuck together with corn syrup?

I collected Emily and we walked down the hall to my hotel room. Once inside I showed her the bag and expressed my doubt about the intoxicating quality of the contents. She agreed that it smelled nothing like pot and that I might have been taken unlawful advantage of.

"But maybe not," she said with a doubtful shrug. "Let's at least roll a joint and check it out."

I volunteered for the job, cutting the sticky buds up with the scissors attachment on my Swiss army knife. Though it had been more than ten years since I had last attempted such a feat, I did a fairly respectable job if I do say so myself. The end result was only a little twisted and only a little pregnant.

"Here goes," I said. We were sitting at the table next to the sliding door that led to the balcony. I reached over and opened the door, allowing the breeze in so that the odor would ventilate. I then picked up a pack of hotel matches and struck a light. It took a few moments of huffing and puffing and more than five matches before I finally got my doobie to light up. When it did a stream of acrid, sweet tasting smoke entered my lungs. It tasted vaguely like marijuana, but just vaguely. My lungs were not used to having anything but air sucked into them and they protested this abuse greatly. I suppressed my cough as long as I could but finally my gag reflex won the battle. I expelled a plume into the room.