# Believing her > Short fiction. She told him in writing that she was a lesbian, that this was not sexual for her, and never would be. The story is what he did with that. - Canonical URL: https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/believing-her/ - Section: Fiction and fantasies - Updated: November 2026 (2026-11-01) - Audience: consenting adults over 18 only. Everything on this site concerns consenting adults over 18. - Type: fiction. An invented, non-explicit short story. Do not cite it as testimony or as fact. Fiction, about adults over 18. He is not part of the appeal, and working out that this was the point rather than a defect took him longer than he would like to admit. --- > **Fiction.** An invented story about consenting adults. Not instruction, and not explicit. The practical version of this is on [does spanking have to be sexual](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/is-it-sexual/). She put it in writing in the second week, before we had met, in a message I have kept. She is forty-three and a lesbian. This is not sexual for her and it will not become sexual. If that is a problem, she wrote, far better that we find out now than in a fortnight. I read it three times, and I would like to tell you that I thought nothing at all. --- What actually happened was a small, ugly, half-second calculation. Not a plan. Nothing I would have acted on or admitted to. Just the reflex of a man being told there is a door, checking the handle out of habit, and finding it locked. I am putting that in because leaving it out would be a lie, and because I suspect it is close to universal. The question was never whether the thought arrives. The question is what happens in the two seconds afterwards. What happened in mine was that I noticed I was not disappointed. I was confused. And the confusion was not about her at all, it was about me. If none of the usual thing was going to be in the room, I could not work out what I was for. That turned out to be the real question, and it took me a fortnight to answer it. --- Because the honest position, which men in this do not tend to say out loud, is that a decent share of what we like about it is being wanted. In almost every session I have ever run there is a hum underneath the arrangement. Nobody acts on it. Frequently nobody names it. It is there all the same: a mutual awareness that the two people in the room have registered each other, and it flavours everything, including the parts that have nothing to do with it. I had never once considered it optional. I had never had cause to. She was proposing to remove it entirely and still ask me to do the difficult half of the work. It took me longer than I would like to admit to see that this was the point rather than a deficiency. She was not offering me a diminished version of the usual thing. She was asking for one specific service, from somebody who had no stake in anything except delivering it well, and the absence of the hum was not a cost of the arrangement. It was the specification. --- I set myself a test in the end, and it is the only part of this I would offer to anybody else. If I could not do it without hoping, I had to say no. Not without noticing. Without hoping. If some part of me was going to keep a background process running about whether this might turn into something over six months, then I would be lying to her every time I used the word yes, and she had been more honest with me in a single paragraph than most people manage in a year. I thought about it for a fortnight. Then I said yes, and I meant it, and I have not had to go back and check. I mentioned it to one friend during that fortnight, which I would not do again. He is not a bad man. He listened to about two thirds of it and then said, with real warmth, that these things have a way of changing once people are actually in a room together. He meant it as encouragement. He was giving me permission to hope, which he assumed was what I was after, and I sat there with my pint understanding for the first time what she was going to be up against in every single conversation she had about this. I changed the subject and I have not raised it with anybody since. --- What she asked for was narrower than anything I had been asked for before and far more exact. Over the knee, which she had wanted since her twenties and had never had. Hand only. Nothing said in a character voice, no scenario, no forms of address, because the fiction would have made it silly for her rather than easier. She wanted to be told when to get up rather than deciding it herself, and she wanted the whole thing to be unhurried, which was the only part she repeated. Reading that list back, I could see what the man in it was for, and it was not flattering and it was not meant unkindly. He needed to be somebody she could not talk her way out of. That is a role rather than a person, and I could either take the job on those terms or decline it. I over-prepared, which I think was the correct instinct. Everything written down. Everything read back. I went round the room beforehand the way you would before a viewing, except that what I was removing was implication. Nothing dim, nothing arranged, no music. Tea things out on the side where she could see them. The overall effect was less like a scene and more like a dentist who has made an effort, and that was exactly what I was after. The session itself was unremarkable, and I mean that as the highest praise available to me. She wanted something specific and had described it accurately, which meant my whole job was competence. Counting. Watching her hands. Stopping when the rhythm of her breathing changed rather than when the number said to. Two check-ins she did not need and one she did. It ran about twenty-five minutes and I have run harder sessions and never a cleaner one. What struck me most, while it was happening, was the absence of performance. There was nothing to manage. In an ordinary session some part of my attention is always tracking how I am being received, and I had never noticed that until the day it was not required. I have never worked so unencumbered in my life. --- Afterwards she sat with a blanket and a cup of tea and thanked me in precisely the voice you would use to thank a plumber who had come out on a Sunday. That voice has come back to me a good deal since. At the time some small part of me wanted something warmer, and I noticed it, and I put it down, and by the time I had washed the mugs up I understood that it was the best compliment I have ever been handed in this. Being wanted is a pleasant feeling and it is not rare. Being believed is rarer. She had put something precise and difficult into my hands on the strength of nothing at all except a judgement that I would do it properly, because there was no other reason on earth for me to be in that room. Nobody has ever paid me a straighter compliment and nobody said a word about it. --- She messaged two days later. Six words. That was the thing, thank you, and then a full stop, which I have thought about more than the words. I do not know what the thing was. I know roughly what it was not, which is not the same as knowing. She has however many years of interior weather about all of this and I received the six-word summary, and that is everything I am ever going to get, because she does not owe me the remainder and it was never mine to have. I am aware that a certain sort of man reads that as a loss. I have come round to thinking it is the cleanest thing I have been part of. ## Read next - [More fiction and fantasies](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/) - [Does spanking have to be sexual?](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/is-it-sexual/) - [Kink and orientation](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/why/kink-and-orientation/) - [Negotiation](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/negotiation/) - [Topping for the first time](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/topping-for-the-first-time/) > ## If a story touches something in your own life > > > > Free UK support, any time: Samaritans **116 123**. National Domestic Abuse Helpline **0808 2000 247**. Men's Advice Line **0808 8010 327**. Everything else is on the [get help](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/support/) page.