# Counting to twelve > Short fiction. Being hit she could manage. Being made to say the number out loud, in her own voice, in her own dining room, was another thing entirely. - Canonical URL: https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/counting-to-twelve/ - 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 Do not cite it as testimony or as fact.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. She had always assumed the hard part of a formal punishment would be the strap. It turned out to be her own voice. --- > **Fiction.** An invented story about consenting adults. Not instruction, and not explicit. The practical version is on [counting and ritual](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/counting-and-ritual/). The first time he asked me to count I said no. Not a scene no. A kitchen no, with a tea towel in my hand, in the middle of a conversation about how the following Friday might go. I said it sounded ridiculous, and that I was forty-four, and that I did not see the point. All three of those were true and none of them was the reason. The reason was that I could not imagine hearing myself do it. --- We tried it anyway a fortnight later, because I am worse at leaving things alone than I am at admitting to wanting them. It went badly. I got to two and produced a sound somewhere between a cough and a question, and then I laughed, and then I could not stop laughing, and the whole evening turned into the two of us sitting on the dining room floor while I explained that I had heard my own voice and it had sounded like somebody doing a bad impression of me. We also tried sir, once, that same evening. I got about half the word out. Never again. Some things do not fit your mouth and there is no use pretending otherwise. --- What I could not explain to him then, and can now, is why speaking is worse than being hit. Being hit happens to you. There is a great deal you can do inside your own head while it happens, and I had been doing all of it for years: going somewhere else, narrating, treating the whole thing as an interesting experiment being conducted on somebody who slightly resembled me. You can be absent for it. I was very good at being absent for it. Speaking drags you back into the room. You cannot say a number from the ceiling. You have to be in your body, at that moment, with air in your lungs, doing a thing with your mouth on purpose. Every count is a small admission that you are here and that you know what is happening and that you have not left. That is why it works, and it took me two years to be able to write that sentence. --- Friday. Twelve, with the strap, over the back of a dining chair. Number and thank you after each one. If I missed one, or got it wrong, or said it in a way he judged to be inaudible, we went back to the beginning. That last clause is his innovation and I would like it on the record that I argued against it. One. Thank you. It came out clipped and slightly too loud, the voice I use for a work call I have been dreading, and I heard the embarrassment in it like a stone in a shoe. Two, thank you. The same. Three, and I noticed I was rushing them, getting them over with, saying the words the way you sign a card in front of the person it is for. He waits, after each one, until it has been said. That is the part that gets you. There is no forward motion available. Nothing continues until I have produced a sentence, so the silence between four and five belongs entirely to me and I am the only one who can end it. --- Somewhere around five it started to change and I could hear it happening. That is the strangest thing about counting and nobody warned me. You are the speaker and the audience at once. My voice began arriving from further away, a half second behind where I expected it, and it had lost the performance. Six, thank you. Not clipped. Not bright. Slower than my ordinary speech, and lower, and with an evenness to it that I would describe as calm if I had heard somebody else produce it. Seven, thank you. Eight, thank you. By then I was not deciding to say them. They were being said, and I was listening, and I remember thinking with total clarity that this was the voice I have when there is nothing in the way, and that I hardly ever hear it. I have spent a good deal of my life managing how I sound. Not in a vain way. In the way most women do: adjusting for the room, taking the edge off, going up at the end of a sentence so nobody thinks you are being difficult. And here was this flat, unhurried thing that had apparently been underneath it the whole time, and all it had taken to get it out was a dining chair and a man with a strap and a rule that I had to speak. --- I lost count at ten. Not dramatically. I said nine, thank you, and then there was another one, and the number that arrived in my mouth was nine again. I heard it happen. I heard myself say a number I had already used, and I knew before I had finished it that I had gone. There was a pause. Then he said, "From the beginning." I want to be honest about what I felt, because I had expected to feel one thing and I felt two. The first was despair, immediate and total, of the sort that makes your eyes go before your brain has caught up. Ten of them, wasted. Twelve more to come and I was already past where I thought I could hold. The second was underneath it, and it was relief. Because he had noticed. Because the rule was real and had been applied, and it had been applied by somebody who had been paying enough attention to catch a repeated number when I could not. There is a certain amount of my life in which I am the person who catches everything. Not in that room. --- The second run was different in a way I still cannot entirely account for. They hurt more, obviously. But the counting had stopped being a thing I was doing and become the thing I was, and I got all twelve, and the last four came out in that low even voice with no gap between the number and the thanks, as if they had always been one word. Twelve. Thank you. Then his hand flat on my back, and the room coming back in around the edges, and the dining chair being just a dining chair again, with a jumper over the back of it that I had put there earlier without thinking about why. --- My throat was sore the next morning, which I had not anticipated and which amused me at my desk more than once. I insist on the counting now. It goes in every time, and on the two occasions he has offered to leave it out because I was tired I have said no, put it in. Not because I have learned to enjoy the sound of my own voice, which would be overstating it considerably. Because it is the only twenty minutes in my week when I am entirely where I am, saying true things in a voice with nothing added to it, and there is no other way I have found to get there. ## Read next - [More fiction and fantasies](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/) - [Counting, thanking and formal address](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/counting-and-ritual/) - [Bent over a chair](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/positions/over-a-chair/) - [Reading your partner](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/reading-your-partner/) - [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.