Nothing in the last forty years prepared me. I thought I knew. I thought I understood, not just intellectually, but emotionally. I thought all our experience, all the intense open closeness of the last eight years would somehow compare.

I thought I was ready for more than this. I thought I was ready for the real thing, the up-close personal thing. I certainly thought I was ready for video. I was convinced I was ready for color pictures.

I mean they're just bits, right? Patterns of light captured in a photosensitive device, transferred to a computer, altered from the original color encoding into black and white to produce shades of gray? Ones and zeroes, nothing in and of themselves, of no more significance than the ASCII characters I use to write about them, that I type into this computer, that I upload, that you download, that you read?

But those black and white pictures ("The pictures," I have already started calling them. "The" pictures) were with me all that afternoon, intensifying and driving every moment of the day.

They were with me in the shower as I kissed her, holding the pulsating detachable showerhead between her legs until she almost came.

They were there when I left the bathroom and found her lying ready on her bed.

They were with her as I licked her, my head buried between her legs, my whole face against her, spreading her juices on her legs and her ass with my fingers until she came screaming and bucking.

They were with me as I licked her again, this time (at her suggestion) fucking her with her purple plastic vibrator, watching it slide in and out of her, feeling its vibration against my cheek until she came again even louder.

They were with me as I fucked her, standing behind her, her arms resting on her dresser, the dresser where she keeps the family-style photos of her men, watching her in the mirror, watching her watch me, calling her my gorgeous, naughty, pornographic slut, rewarding her and punishing her, reminding her whose hands were on her hips, whose cock was inside her, reminding her whose hands had been squeezing her breasts through her blouse and her bra as I stood behind her in the kitchen as she sat at the table before our shower, her laptop computer open, flipping through the pictures on the screen, the black and white pictures her new primary boyfriend took of her as she knelt before him, looking up with lust in her eyes and her whole face glowing, as she took his cock in her mouth, as she sucked him as she has sucked me for the last eight years ("Did I do that right?" she asked me in the front seat of the car parked under the elm tree after the meeting and I nodded in affirmation too dazed to speak), as she has sucked so many men before and since but only told me, never showed me. Only told me in our paradigm of intense emotional closeness and that I might write them down as stories encoded in harmless ASCII characters for your reading pleasure.

I do not know if I am ready.

I do not care if I am ready.

I only know I want. I want color. I want motion. I want sound. I want to watch for real.

Bring it on.