# Down or off > Short fiction. She had assumed knickers down. He said take them off, and hand them to me, and the gap between those two sentences was the whole evening. - Canonical URL: https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/down-or-off/ - 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 Do not cite it as testimony or as fact.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 a picture in her head of how a Sunday went, and it was accurate right up until the last four words of the instruction. --- > **Fiction.** An invented story about consenting adults. Not instruction, and not explicit. The practical version of this is on [degrees of undress](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/degrees-of-undress/). There is a version of this evening that I had already had four times, and I had got attached to it. It goes like this. Sunday, about seven, Andrew's flat, which is above a carpet shop and smells faintly of one. He makes tea nobody drinks. We talk about the week for twenty minutes in a way that starts as ordinary conversation and stops being ordinary somewhere in the middle without either of us marking the exact point. Then he puts his mug down, and says right, and I go over the end of the bed. And then the skirt goes up and the knickers come down, to about an inch above the knee, and that is where they stay for the duration. I had worked out somewhere around the third time why I could bear that so easily. Knickers down is a thing that happens to your clothes. You do not do it. It is done in one movement by somebody else while you are already facing the other way, and you are allowed to be a person to whom something is happening. I had never said any of that out loud. I am not sure I had entirely admitted it to myself. But I had let myself get comfortable, and five months in I had started arriving on Sundays with a picture in my head of exactly how the next hour was shaped. --- The fifth time he was in the armchair instead of on the end of the bed, which I noticed and did not think about. He asked about the week and I told him, and it took longer than usual because the week at work had been bad. He did not hurry me. That is one of the things about him that I have never been able to describe to anyone without making him sound like a therapist, which he is not. He sells industrial flooring. Then he said, "Right. Take them off." I had my hands at my waistband already, because my hands are quicker than I am and they had heard the first word and assumed the rest. And then the sentence caught up with me. Off. Not down. I actually looked at him, which I do not usually do at that point, and he looked back with an expression of no particular content at all, and then he added the second half. "And hand them to me." --- Those four or five seconds are the reason I have ended up writing any of this down. Down is something that happens to you. Off is something you do. And handing them over is a third thing that is not really about clothes at all, because it requires you to cross a carpet, on purpose, and put an object into another person's open hand while they wait for you to finish doing it. There is no way of handing somebody your knickers that looks like anything. You cannot do it briskly, because brisk is obviously a performance. You cannot do it slowly. There is no version with any dignity in it and there is no version you can do while thinking about something else. The other thing I noticed, in those seconds, is that I could have said no. I had the word. I had used it once in February about something entirely different and he had stopped mid-sentence and made toast. So the no was real and available and sitting there in my mouth, and I did not use it, and that is the part I keep coming back to. If it had been taken from me I could have filed it as something done to me. It was not taken from me. I stood on a carpet in a flat above a carpet shop and I decided. --- Then I reached for the hem of my jumper, because I had assumed that if we were doing off we were doing all of it. "Leave that," he said. I was relieved for about two seconds. Two seconds is roughly how long it takes to understand that you have been given something and that it is not a present. I had thought the jumper would be a kindness. What I had not understood, and I had genuinely not understood it, is what a jumper does to you. A jumper is a caption. It stops at a point on your hip and it draws a line, and everything below the line is now the subject, and it is the subject in a way that being undressed altogether would not have managed. If I had been standing there with nothing on I would have been a naked woman in a room, which is at least a category that exists. Instead I was a woman in a perfectly nice grey jumper, from the waist up entirely available for a conversation about parking, and from the waist down the reason I was there. And I knew exactly why the jumper was staying on, which made it worse. In March I had sent him an email with a list in it, because I could not say any of it with my face, and near the bottom of that list I had written nothing above the waist, ever. I remember hovering over it and nearly deleting it. It sounded so prim next to the rest of the email. He had written back about everything else in detail and about that line he had written, noted. Five months, and he had never once gone near it, and never once mentioned that he had never once gone near it. So the jumper was a promise being kept. It was the single kindest object in the room. And standing there with it reaching to exactly the top of my hip, I would have swapped it for nothing at all in a heartbeat, and could not ask, because asking would have meant explaining, and I did not have the explanation yet. --- I crossed the carpet. It is about two and a half steps. His hand was out, palm up, at the height of the arm of the chair, and he was not looking at his hand, he was looking at me, and he waited the whole way. I put them in his hand. He did not do anything with them. That is the bit I was not braced for. He folded them once, badly, the way a man folds something, and put them on the arm of the chair, in my eyeline, and left them there. I would have preferred a pocket. A pocket is a gesture, and gestures are theatre, and theatre you can watch. The arm of a chair is just a fact about where your knickers are now. --- He took his time getting to the rest of it. He wanted something out of the drawer, and he wanted a lamp on, and I stood in the middle of the room for perhaps ninety seconds in a jumper. I did a thing with the hem the entire time. Pulling it down about an inch, letting go, pulling it down again, letting go. It achieved nothing whatsoever, it is not a garment that stretches, and I could not stop. He saw me do it, I am certain, and he said absolutely nothing about it, which was the right decision, and I was furious with him about it anyway. Somewhere in there I got cold, which nobody tells you about, and the cold and the mortification arrived at the same time and got tangled up together so thoroughly that I still cannot separate them in the memory. --- The spanking itself was not remarkable, and it does not need writing down. It was a hairbrush, it was what I had asked for months ago, and it hurt in the ordinary way. What I remember is that about halfway through I realised I was not thinking about the hairbrush at all. I was thinking about the arm of the chair, and what was on it, and the fact that at the end of this I was going to have to ask for them back or be given them, and that either of those was going to be another thing that happened in front of him. He gave them back. Held them out, same open hand, no comment. I was embarrassed by how relieved I was, and then embarrassed about being embarrassed, and then he put the kettle on and the whole architecture came down in about four seconds the way it always does. --- In the kitchen, later, I said, "I need to say something about the knickers." He put the tea towel down and sat, which is what he does, and waited. I said that off was fine. That handing them over was fine, and that he should know it was the single most difficult thing that had happened in five months and that I would like him to do it again. He did not smile at that, which I appreciated. Then I said the harder one. I said that the jumper had to stop being a kindness and start being a rule. Written down, in the same place as everything else, so that it became a line he was not permitted to cross. Up to now he had simply been choosing not to cross it. Those are two entirely different things from where I was standing, and only one of them lets me stop keeping an eye on it while I am standing there. He said, "That is a better way of putting it than I would have got to." Then he got his phone out and typed it into the notes app, under a heading that already existed, which is how I found out he had been keeping one. ## Read next - [More fiction and fantasies](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/) - [Degrees of undress: over, down or off](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/degrees-of-undress/) - [Being bared, exposed and inspected](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/being-bared/) - [Corner time: standing, waiting, being left](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/scenes/corner-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.