# His list > Short fiction. Twenty-three years married, and he handed her a folded sheet of paper in the kitchen and went out for a walk so she could read it alone. - Canonical URL: https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/his-list/ - 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 Do not cite it as testimony or as fact.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. He wrote it down because he could not say it, and then she had to decide what to do with a man she suddenly knew better than she had that morning. --- > **Fiction.** An invented story about consenting adults. Not instruction, and not explicit. The practical version of this conversation is on [asking a partner you already have](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/asking-your-partner/). He gave it to me on a Thursday, folded in four, and then put his coat on and said he was going to walk down to the bridge and back. Twenty-three years. I know that man's face in every weather there is, and I had never seen the one he was wearing in the hall while he did up his coat. He did not say what it was. He said, "Have a read of that," and went out, and I stood with it in my hand and listened to the gate. My first thought was that he had been to the doctor. That is what a folded piece of paper means at our age. I had got as far as imagining the consultant's waiting room before I unfolded it. --- It was numbered. Of course it was numbered. Twenty-three years of shelves put up to the millimetre and a loft that is labelled, and the man wrote out the most frightening thing in his life as a list with a heading. The heading was: *Things I have wanted for a long time and have never said. You do not have to read past the first page.* There was only one page. I have thought about that a lot since. He had written "the first page" because he could not bear to write "this". Some of it I could have guessed, if I had ever let myself sit down and guess. Some of it made me put my hand over my mouth, standing there by the fridge with the dishwasher going. Number four was: *I would like you to be the one who decides. Not me asking you and you agreeing. You deciding, and telling me.* Number six was: *If I ask you to stop, and I have not used the word we agreed, I would like you to carry on.* That is the one that frightened me. It still does, a bit, and we have been doing this for two years. I read it about nine times. He had underlined "the word we agreed", which meant he had thought about it properly, which somehow made it worse rather than better, because it meant this was not a whim I could talk him out of over a cup of tea. And then at the bottom, not numbered, in different ink, so written later or written last: *If it is no, it is no. I will not ask again and I will not be different with you. I would rather have you than have this.* --- Now. The part I have never told him, and which I am putting down because I think the honest version is more use to anybody than the version where I am wonderful about it. For two days I was furious with him. Not shocked. Not disgusted, whatever I might have expected of myself. Furious, in a small, mean, domestic way, and the shape of the fury was this: I am the one who books the dentist. I am the one who rings the care home about his mother and who noticed the boiler and who knows when the car is due. Twenty-three years of being the one who holds things, and now there was a new thing, and it was the heaviest one yet, and it had been handed to me folded in four while he went for a walk. On the Saturday I looked at him across the table while he was reading the paper and I thought, very clearly: you are pathetic. I am not proud of that. It lasted about four seconds and I have never got rid of the memory of it. I think it is worth writing down because people who talk about this all seem to have leapt straight from the letter to the loving embrace, and I did not. I went via two days of resentment and one genuinely ugly thought about a man who had just done the bravest thing of his life. --- What changed it was the sixth night. He had not mentioned it. Not once. Not a look, not a joke, not a heavy silence. Six days of a man being completely normal about the fact that his whole interior life was sitting in his wife's handbag with the receipts, waiting for a verdict he had promised not to chase. I came down at about midnight for water and he was asleep on the sofa with the lamp still on and his reading glasses pushed up on his head, and the tenderness that went through me was so violent I had to sit down on the arm of the chair. And sitting there, I got at the truth of the anger, which was not about the dentist or the boiler at all. I was frightened I would be bad at it. That is all it was. I was frightened that I would try, and be clumsy, and see something in his face, and that we would both then have to live in the house afterwards with the knowledge that I had been given the one thing he had ever asked for and had made a mess of it. Anger is so much more comfortable than that. I would recommend the anger. It lasts about two days and then it lets you down. --- I did not tell him. I wrote on his list. Underneath the last line, in my handwriting, which is nothing like his: *Yes. Sunday, after your mother's. Four is agreed and I will be better at it than you expect. Six we are going to talk about properly, twice, because I need to understand it before I will do it. Everything else stands. Do not thank me at breakfast, I will cry.* Then I folded it back in four and put it under his phone on the worktop and went to bed. He read it standing up, at about ten past six, in his work things. I watched from the stairs, which I had not planned to do. He read it twice. Then he put his hand flat on the worktop and stood there for a while with his head down, and then he put the paper in his back pocket and put the kettle on. He did not thank me at breakfast. He has never once, in two years, thanked me at breakfast. --- Sunday was short. Twenty minutes at most, in our own bedroom, on an ordinary evening in March, with his mother's biscuit tin still in the car. I had thought about it all week and in the event almost nothing I had planned was any use. What was useful was going slowly and saying what was going to happen before it happened, in the same voice I use for everything else, because it turned out that the voice was the whole thing. He did not want a different woman. He wanted this one, doing it on purpose. At some point his hands, which had been braced, went loose. I did not know then what that meant. I know now. Afterwards he cried for a bit, quietly, with his face against my leg, and I sat on the edge of our bed with my hand in his hair and thought: I have known you since I was twenty-six and I did not know this until Thursday. --- The list lives in the plastic wallet in the filing box, with the wills and the deeds and the letter about his pension. That was not a decision I made carefully. I put it there because it was obviously that sort of document, and I only worked out afterwards what I had been saying by doing it. Because you cannot give it back. That is the thing nobody tells you about being on my side of it. He handed me a piece of paper and I cannot un-know what is on it, and there is no version of the rest of our lives in which I have not read number six. If I had said no, he would have gone on making the tea and putting up the shelves, and I would have known, every single day, exactly what I was saying no to. So it was never really a choice about spanking. It was a choice about whether to be trusted, which is a thing people ask you for perhaps three times in a life, and always at a bad moment, and never in a way you can prepare for. Twenty-three years. Folded in four. On the worktop, under his phone. ## Read next - [More fiction and fantasies](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/) - [Asking a partner you already have](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/asking-your-partner/) - [Negotiation: what to agree beforehand](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/negotiation/) - [Safe words](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/safe-words/) - [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.