# Her and her > Short fiction. Nine years, one kitchen drawer, and a rule about telling the truth about work. Two women in Sheffield, and nobody in the room to perform it for. - Canonical URL: https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/her-and-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 Do not cite it as testimony or as fact.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 two adults over 18. She keeps saying yes to work she has not got room for, and she keeps not mentioning it, and Cath has stopped pretending not to notice. --- > **Fiction.** An invented story about consenting adults. Not instruction, and not explicit. The practical version of an agreement like theirs is at [rules and agreements](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/discipline/rules-and-agreements/). The hairbrush lives in the drawer with the tea towels, which is either very funny or slightly sinister depending on who is opening the drawer. Nine years we have been doing this. Cath bought it in a chemist in Chesterfield on a Tuesday afternoon and paid cash, which she still cannot explain, because nobody in Boots has ever once asked anybody what they wanted a hairbrush for. We have one rule. Not a list. One. I tell her when I say yes to something at work. --- That sounds thin written down, and it is the whole architecture of my life. I am a person who says yes. I said yes to the strategy group, and the mentoring, and the thing on Thursdays that nobody else would take, and each individual yes was a small reasonable sentence in a corridor. Then it is October and I am crying in the car park at half past seven because I cannot work out which of the four things I have promised is the one I have already failed to do. So the rule is not about work. The rule is that I have to say it out loud, in the kitchen, that evening, to somebody who will then look at me. I broke it for eleven days in March. Not dramatically. I took on a piece of work that should have gone to a man who is paid more than me to do exactly that, and I did not mention it, and then I did not mention it again, and by the fourth day the not mentioning had become its own separate thing, heavier than the work. Cath found out because I was awake at two and she is not stupid. --- Here is the part I would not have predicted when I was twenty-five and reading about all this with the brightness turned right down. The best thing about doing this with a woman is how little I have to explain. I do not have to say that this week is not a good week for it. I do not have to describe what my skin does in the fortnight before, or explain why the same hairbrush leaves nothing in one week and a proper mess in another, or manage somebody's face while I tell them. She has the same body and the same calendar and she works it out before I do. Once, years ago, she moved a Sunday to the following Thursday without either of us discussing why, and I sat in the passenger seat afterwards and thought: oh. And the other thing, which is bigger and harder to write. We have both spent thirty years at work taking up less room. Different cities, different offices, same instruction: be nice, be easy to have around, apologise first. Two women past fifty who have spent their working lives being agreeable, sitting in a kitchen while one of them takes charge of the other, on purpose, out loud. Nobody has to be talked through why that is not nothing. --- The assumption we keep meeting is that it must be for somebody. A man at a munch in Leeds, perfectly pleasant, three pints in, asked which of us was the real one. Not who does what. Which was real. As though between two women there is a genuine article and a stand-in, and the arrangement is a sort of understudy performance until the proper cast arrives. Everything you can find about two women doing this is shot from the outside, lit for somebody who is not in the room. Long looks at a camera. Both of them performing being looked at, which is the exact opposite of what actually happens in a kitchen in Sheffield on a Wednesday, where the whole point is that nobody is watching and nobody is going to. I have stopped explaining this to people. Cath never started. --- When we began I went looking for something that would tell us how to do it, and there was nothing. Everything assumed a man somewhere in the picture, usually holding something. The advice on positions assumed a difference in height and reach that we do not have. The advice on afterwards assumed that one of us would be the one who needed looking after, and in this house that has never once been decided in advance. So we made it up, badly, for about a year. The first six months were mostly the two of us being too careful with each other, which is its own kind of failure. Two women who have each spent a lifetime managing everybody else's feelings are not naturally good at this. Somebody has to be willing not to soften it, and neither of us had ever been given any practice. --- On the twelfth day she said the thing she says, which is my name and then nothing else, and I went and got the brush myself because that is how we do it. Fetching it is worse than anything that happens afterwards. It takes eleven seconds and involves a drawer full of tea towels. She did not lecture me. She asked me to say what I had agreed and what I had done instead, and I said it, and hearing my own voice describe eleven days of small evasions was the actual punishment. The rest was over in a few minutes. Over her knee on the kitchen chair, the good one with the solid seat, her hand flat on my back between. Enough that I could not sit properly at dinner. Then it was finished and she said so, in a sentence we have used for years, and I put the brush back in the drawer myself. --- We sat on the kitchen floor afterwards with our backs against the units, because we are sixty-one and fifty-four and neither of us can get up off a kitchen floor with any dignity, and we did it anyway. She said, "Are you going to tell them on Monday that you cannot do it?" I said I would. She said, "Good," and then, after a while, "You are allowed to just not want to do things. That is also a reason." Which is the sort of sentence that goes in about four inches deeper than anything a hairbrush has ever managed. --- People ask, when they find out, whether it is a sex thing. They ask it in a slightly strangled voice, as though the asking is generous. I have three answers depending on how much I like them. The true one is that it is a thing that happens in a marriage, and marriages contain a great many things, and I do not itemise ours for someone who has had two glasses of wine and thinks they are being open-minded. What I would say, if anybody ever asked me the better question, is this. On Monday I told them I could not do it. I have never once managed that on my own in thirty years of working. The thing in the kitchen drawer did not give me courage, or confidence, or any of the words people use. It just meant that not doing it was going to be more trouble than doing it. That turns out to be all I ever needed. ## Read next - [More fiction and fantasies](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/) - [Do women do this too?](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/questions/do-women-do-this-too/) - [Rules and agreements](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/discipline/rules-and-agreements/) - [Periods, menopause and what changes](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/periods-and-menopause/) - [Munches and meeting people in person](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/uk/munches/) > ## 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.