# Both sides, twenty hours apart > Short fiction. Saturday night she was over the arm of the sofa. Sunday afternoon she was holding the hairbrush. Same room, same brush, two different appetites. - Canonical URL: https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/both-sides/ - 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 Do not cite it as testimony or as fact.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 two adults over 18. People keep asking her which one she really is, as though one of the two nights was a rehearsal for the other. --- > **Fiction.** An invented story about consenting adults. Not instruction, and not explicit. The page underneath this one is [what the switch result actually means](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/why/kink-test-results/switch/). Same hairbrush. Same sofa. Twenty hours between them. On the Saturday I was over the arm of it with my face in a cushion that smells of the dog, and on the Sunday afternoon I was standing up with the brush in my hand and Fran was where I had been. Nothing about the room changed. Everything else did. --- Saturday first. I had earned it in the ordinary domestic way, which is to say I had been unbearable for most of a week about something at work that was not anybody's fault, and by Friday I was picking arguments the way you pick a scab. Fran did not lecture me. She said the room and the time and then went back to what she was doing, and I had four hours of knowing, which is the part of it that I would not be able to explain to my mother. Then twenty minutes, mostly her hand, the brush at the end. Slow, with long gaps. Nothing spectacular. What I want to record is what happens to time. Somewhere in the middle of it the clock stops being a thing that applies to me. I am not enduring it and I am not enjoying it in any way that word would cover. I am just entirely occupied, for the first time since the previous one, with no room left over for the running commentary that otherwise never stops. Afterwards I could not have told you how long it went on, how many, or what she said in the middle. I know she said something. I could not repeat a word of it. I lay on the sofa afterwards being stupid and warm and wanting toast, and Fran brought toast, and I was asleep by half ten like somebody after a long walk. --- Sunday. Fran had asked on the Thursday, which is how she does it, in a text, in the middle of a conversation about the car. She likes to have it arranged and then not discussed. I remember all of it. I remember that the radiator was ticking. I remember she had a thread hanging off the hem of her jumper and that I decided not to mention it because mentioning it would have been kind and Sunday afternoon was not for being kind yet. I remember counting in my head and losing count at nine and covering it by pausing and putting a hand on her back, which is a thing I have learned to do and which she has never once noticed. I remember watching her hands. That is my whole instrument panel. Loose is carry on. Gripping is working hard. Flat and open is somewhere useful. And I remember the exact moment they went flat, because that is when I slowed down, and stopped talking, and went from doing something to her to keeping something steady for her. Twelve with the brush. She had asked for fifteen. She got twelve because at twelve something in her shoulders let go and I am not in the business of spending what I have just been given. Then I could not sleep. I did the washing up at midnight, which I never do, and I lay awake running the whole afternoon back through like a woman checking a spreadsheet. --- It took us about two years to work out that the afterwards has to be different as well, and we got it wrong in both directions before we got it right. After a Saturday I need almost nothing. Toast, a blanket, somebody in the room, no conversation. Fran learned early that a question asked on a Saturday night gets a nonsense answer from a woman who is not fully back yet, and that anything worth saying will still be true in the morning. After a Sunday I need the opposite, and I could not ask for it for a long time because it sounded ridiculous in my head. I have just spent an afternoon being the competent one, and what I want is for somebody to ask whether I am all right. Fran does it now without being prompted, in the same four words every time. The first occasion she did it I had to go and stand in the kitchen for a minute and look at the wall. --- So. Two nights, one weekend, one hairbrush. People assume they are two settings of the same thing. Two dilutions of one appetite, one of which I must prefer, with the other one there as a hobby or a favour. They are not that. I have stopped reaching for a comparison, because every comparison I have tried makes them sound like two flavours of the same drink, and they are not. They are two different appetites that happen to use the same furniture. Being on the receiving end is about disappearance. Nothing is mine for half an hour. No decisions, no monitoring, no forward planning, and afterwards a blessed hole in the memory where the middle should be. Being the one who decides is the exact opposite. It is the most present I ever am. It is arithmetic and attention and a low hum of fear, and I come out of it with total recall and a heart rate that will not come down for three hours. I do not disappear. I am more there than I have been all week. If you told me I had to give one up I would ask which of my hands I could keep. --- Which brings me to the question. Somebody asks it every single time. At a munch, in a group chat, in the polite interrogation people conduct when they find out. But which are you really. Underneath it there is always a theory. That switching is a phase you pass through on the way to knowing. That it means I am undecided, or greedy, or still hedging, or that one of the two is the true article and the other is me being obliging. Online tests are the worst for it. They hand you a percentage like a diagnosis, as though a woman can be sixty-two per cent one thing. There is a version of the question I do not mind, and it is rarer. Somebody once asked me which one I would want if I only had one evening left, and that is a real question and I sat with it for a week. The answer, in the end, was that it depended entirely on what sort of week I had just had, which is the least satisfying answer available and happens to be true. Both of them are me. Neither of them is a costume. Fran has never once asked me the question, which I did not notice for about three years and which I now think is the single kindest thing about her. And the thing I would say to anybody sitting on the fence with a test result in front of them is that the fence is not a fence. It is a house with two rooms in it, and nobody is checking which one you sleep in. ## Read next - [More fiction and fantasies](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/) - [Kink test result: switch](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/why/kink-test-results/switch/) - [Reading your partner](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/reading-your-partner/) - [Top drop](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/top-drop/) - [Headspace](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/why/headspace/) > ## 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.