There was something mystical about his young bride Josephine: She always knew what brought him joy.

She seemed to anticipate when he was horny, cuddling with him almost before he himself felt aroused. She had a sixth sense about everything; she would be melancholy about a friend or relative — who would be diagnosed with a quickly advancing terminal disease weeks later.

Her visions and moods were preceded by a lack of appetite or staring out a window for hours, by the need to play a sonata on the harpsichord, her eyes cast down at her long, pale fingers. In her sex life with Edgar, Josephine’s erotic desires were mirrored in the color of her panties. It took him a while to understand what at first seemed to be “coincidences,” mere household events, not a code.

In fact, it was only after looking at intimate snapshots he had taken of her that he noticed the different colors of panties she wore over the years. Edgar, a city planning architect, knew that the different colors of rooms affected the emotions of those who dwelled in them. He himself found he was more creative in rooms that were painted green, more calm in a room colored blue, and more agitated in one that was yellow.

He thought back to when they were young. She was 18, he was 38, and she wore girlish cotton panties with rosebuds gathered along the leg bands and a bouquet at her crotch, spilling upward toward her waist like fireworks. In these panties, her pussy had a cherry essence to it, a flowery scent. He loved to lick her pussy, loosening sweet, sugary fluids that lubricated her first for a finger, then for a long hard fuck, then another and another.

Often she’d lead him along a country path where they’d spontaneously stretch a blanket down and fuck in an open field or meadow. Josephine loved to get on all fours, her flowery panties down around her knees. Her moans grew louder, like a she-wolf, as Edgar pounded her from behind, his hands firmly on her hips, his hips bouncing off of her big butt cheeks, his tool making juicy, audible noises as it slid in and out of her pouting slit. Only when she was exhausted, falling forward, lying on her stomach, did he cease. “Oh, no more, Edgar,” she’d whisper.

“No more.” What wonderful words! Edgar would then grip his cock and spray all over Josephine’s upturned cheeks. A soft semen rain dappled her skin, and she’d sigh with pleasure and ask him to rub it in. He’d slide his palms along her large, fleshy globes, turning them almost pasty white, as if his come was like suntan lotion.

Then came the more creative years of their relationship, where these experienced lovers would, in a way, try to out-Herod Herod with whispered fantasies. These ran the gamut of imaginative vices and elegant decadence. Josephine was now prone to wearing elegant, white-lace rhumba knickers, with rows of bubbly white latticework on them, a threaded froth spilling all over her backside.

When her silky panties became too well used from being pulled down or stretched and wetted by foreplay, and a few small ladders of wear began to show at the seams, Josephine delighted in being deflowered in them. She could work her fingernail right over her moist mons and rip the fabric that pressed against her slit. With deep breaths that made her bosom swell, she’d leave it to Edgar to poke his cockhead through the fabric until the frayed edges framed her shimmering, pink labia.

She would grab hold of the white waistband and pull, the fabric tingling up in her ass crack, while Edgar drove himself deep inside her pussy, his passion getting more wild and out of control, riding her hard, her orgasms like sparks amid the sound of silk ripping apart more and more. Finally, she’d be thrashing underneath Edgar, her wet panties falling away in shreds, like the petals of a dying flower.

In his mid-40’s, able to control himself sexually and last as long as he liked, Edgar varied his pulsating strokes until her raw pussy was gripping his cock tight and seeming to coax out his load. She would gather the mottled remains of her panties and press them against herself to sop up the spend from her thoroughly fucked cunt.

Through the next decades, as their sexual prowess matured to the point where they knew each other’s moves, Josephine re-lit the fires by wearing orange panties, pink panties, red panties, lurid panties of magenta or purple. Still young enough to play the coy, virginal maiden even at 30 or 35, sometimes she would wear flowered cotton briefs or innocent white-lace panties.

It seemed like their robust sex life would never end, that there were still so many variations of panties for her to arouse him with. There was an evening where Edgar contemplated making sweet love to his intended, but as she eased out of her garments, his mind switched gears. She was wearing light brown panties with two words embroidered across the back: “Fuck Me.”

He tried to whip her panties down, but she clutched them with tenacious strength and pulled them back up around her waist. Again and again, as he kissed her, held her breasts with his fingers on her nipples, and pounded his tongue down her throat, he could not dislodge her grip. The game grew more fierce, until Edgar managed to roll Josephine over onto her stomach. She still reached underneath herself to clutch her panties tightly, while Edgar, growing frustrated with their game, yanked at the waistband from behind.

He exposed the full blooming moon of her butt cheeks, but he couldn’t pull her panties all the way down off her kicking legs. “So, you want a different kind of penetration,” he growled. He leaped off the bed, rummaged in a night stand drawer and found a container of lube. Josephine hadn’t pulled her panties back up in his absence. His eyes glowed with perverse glee as he slathered a load of goo along her ass crack. She mutely let him do it. He added a bit more lube and worked a finger up her ass, finding her tightness beginning to lessen.

“You want me to stuff it up your ass,” he said, more a warning than a question. Did she really want this? Why else would she be wearing brown panties? She wanted his cock plumbing the depths of her asshole. And so, the full length of his shaft glistening, he positioned himself above the bulging butt cheeks that were so pillowy and inviting. He pulled her ass cheeks apart and nudged his cockhead into her anus. Her panties remained pinned around her thighs, keeping her in a sort of bondage, her pussy still hidden behind the fabric.

Josephine sighed with pleasure, and he could tell that she was moving her fingers over her panty-covered clit. His cock was sliding easily in and out of her tight butt, and she gave a little cry, and another sigh, and she urged him to fuck her hard and deep. He widened her tight tunnel and, pausing in his exertion, drooled some saliva, spattering her asshole and his cock. Then he went back at it, slowly sliding his full length into her, pressing his weight on top of her and kissing her neck, then breathing warmly in her ear.

“You want come up your ass,” he said. She moaned her approval. He spat hot stinging loads that seemed to surge up into her guts. She furiously rubbed her pussy through her panties, which were now dark wet brown from lube, pussy juice and his semen. Finally, she screamed in orgasm, again and again. She rolled over on her stomach and the whole back of her panties was a shimmering sheen of brown. Edgar watched with surprise and amusement as the wetness oozed like roiling bubbles from a steamy brown swamp.

Whether with simple white cotton panties or scarlet hues of nylon, Edgar and Josephine’s sex life extended into their middle age, through all the inevitable moments of stress, despair or ill fortune. It seemed that as long as they could retreat from reality into the bedroom, everything was all right.

But lately, there were too many evenings when Edgar returned home to her exhausted from work.

One evening his boss said, “You’re pretty close to retirement age, aren’t you? You should start training a replacement. I hope you’ve saved enough for your retirement, old man.” In a fit of moody misanthropy, Edgar sought to ease his mind with some simple recreational sex. Seizing Josephine by the wrist, he hustled her into the bedroom and rakishly began to remove her clothes, kissing her neck and muttering words of love and lust in her ear.

He unzipped the back of her dress and slipped it along her legs. He looked down. At first he thought that she was wearing smooth, skin-colored nylon underwear, but she wasn’t. Josephine wasn’t wearing anything at all. He slid his hand down her shaved mound, but something was wrong. His desire was gone. He jerked himself a bit, but his cock remained limp.

Several more times this happened. She wore nothing. His interest was nil. “Well,” Edgar said to himself, “maybe I’m getting old. Maybe all I have to do is abstain and it’ll be all right.” But he was worried. He couldn’t get used to the idea of life without sex.

For weeks afterward, he didn’t even try. He ignored Josephine. One night she stroked his hair and kissed him lightly on the cheek. “We’ve had many wonderful years together,” she said. “We’ve tried not to let reality interfere. We’ve lived one lovely day at a time. It was a good ride.”

“You’ve found someone else?”

“No, no, of course not,” Josephine said, more in sadness than in anger. We just have to accept that things change. Remember,” Josephine brightened, “those wonderful early days?” She went to the underwear drawer and found a pair of ivory white panties lathered in lace. She put them on and said, “We would fuck all night! Then we’d wake up and fuck some more!”

She paraded around the room, her hips undulating, her boobs swaying, hardly sagging a bit. Edgar smiled, then leaned back on the pillows and watched her dance. His cock began to itch and tingle and throb to life, until it was sticking straight up.

Josephine crawled onto their bed, straddled him, pulled the leg band of her panties to the side and guided his cock deep into her wet, slippery folds. It was a warm, tight fit. Edgar looked up at the heavenly vision in front of him, the nude woman dancing on his lap, stuffing his cock into her still-elastic snatch, gripping him with urgency. She settled into an undulating rhythm, boobs heaving, her face beginning to contort with an almost painful pleasure. Before long, Edgar’s body began to feel hot, hot as fire, and with devil-may-care mania, he bucked up to meet her thrusts. He wanted nothing more than to spurt load after load of his come deep inside her. He held onto her thighs until the electric zaps of orgasm sent his sap drilling into her tight hole.

She punched her orgasms into her clit with frantic fingers, then collapsed next to Edgar on the bed. The two entwined, and she wrapped her legs around his leg, the hot slick wetness that Edgar had injected into her pussy shamelessly drooling out. “It feels like I’m peeing,” Josephine giggled, just like a schoolgirl. “I bet you pumped a gallon into me!”

He wanted to tell her there was plenty more where that came from, but he knew something was wrong; he was restless to do it again but knew he couldn’t. He was feeling weak and tired, and he drifted off into sleep.

To his relief, Josephine didn’t wear any white lace panties again and, in fact, she didn’t wear any panties at all. Shaven and mannequin-like without them, he could almost convince himself that was why he lacked desire. But there were more days where he felt grim and hopeless.

One night Josephine wore dark blue panties. Edgar wasn’t turned on much. His mood somber, his mind in a funk, he wanted to try something, anything. He lay between her legs. He licked at the silky crotch of her panties, made them slippery and wet, then he finger-fucked her, the crotch of her panties pushed aside. He sucked at her clit, stropping it with his tongue, fucking her with his finger. She let out a soft moan and pushed his head away with her hands. He was content that she came and that she didn’t wonder why he hadn’t at least jerked off on her, if not fucked her.

One night, Josephine came home later than usual.

“Where have you been?” he asked, wondering if she was out with some younger man. “I was at the mall. I passed the lingerie store, and I had to go in.” She said nothing more. They retired to bed very late that night.

Edgar came out from the bathroom and stood at the foot of the bed. Josephine was already nestled between the crisp, white sheets.

“Are you going to model the panties you bought?”

Josephine’s face was pale, as if she was going to tell him some bad news. Instead of shining eyes, the dark brown orbs were dull and emotionless. “I’m wearing them,” she said in a voice that seemed strangely distant. Edgar pulled back the white sheet and drew a quick breath. He felt a choking in his throat.

Josephine was wearing black panties. Plain black. He crawled into the bed, gripped with fear, wondering if he could perform when it seemed that he could hardly breathe.

His heart began to beat harder and harder in his chest, almost painfully, like a hammer against his ribs. His brain began to go numb, his mouth went dry and a sinking sensation made the room slowly start to spin around him in an uneasy, lopsided rhythm.

Josephine’s eyes were glassy and they saw nothing. Edgar stared helplessly, the blood draining from his face. Her panties were black. The room was black. He sought her, blindly, lay atop her, and kissed her, and she kissed him back, and then he lost consciousness.

She held on to him all night, held him even as he became cold. In the morning, she dressed in a black cloak and somberly walked to town to make arrangements for his final rest. She left him under the white sheet, a lifeless shade of gray.