# I expected better of you > Short fiction. She agreed the cane and the number and felt very organised about it. Nobody warned her that the questions in the kitchen would be the hard part. - Canonical URL: https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/i-expected-better/ - Section: Fiction and fantasies - Updated: August 2026 (2026-08-01) - 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 Do not cite it as testimony or as fact.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 the implement agreed and the number agreed and a note in her phone about both. Nobody had mentioned the talking. --- > **Fiction.** An invented story about consenting adults. Not instruction, and not explicit. The practical version is on [scolding and being told off](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/scolding/). We settled it on a Sunday afternoon at the kitchen table. Cane, six, over the arm of the sofa in the front room, because the light in there is worse and I had said that the light mattered. I put it in a note on my phone so that neither of us could remember it differently in a fortnight. I was pleased with myself for about ten days afterwards. I had asked for a specific thing in a specific quantity, the way you order a part for a washing machine, and I had got through the entire conversation without looking at the floor once. Four years in, and I finally sounded like an adult about it. He did say we would talk about it first. I want to be fair to him here, because he said it twice, and both times I heard it the way you hear a receptionist telling you the doctor is running fifteen minutes behind. Information about the waiting room. Nothing to do with the appointment. --- Ruth has been my friend since we were both nineteen and working in a shop in Guildford. Her mother died in February. Her husband moved out at the end of April in stages, over about five weeks, which I think is worse than all at once. She asked me to come over on the Saturday. I said yes on the Tuesday and I meant it on the Tuesday, and at twenty past six on the Saturday I sent her a message saying the car would not start. The car was fine. The car has been fine all year. It was the third time since her mother. March was a headache I did not have, and May was work I had already finished on the Thursday. I am good at the messages, which is the part I like least about myself. I put a small detail in, because a detail makes it true, and then I turned my phone face down on the arm of the chair and had a perfectly pleasant evening watching a programme about canals. I told Nick about it myself, which I would like some credit for. Nobody has offered any. --- It happened on the Thursday, at about a quarter past nine, in our kitchen, with nothing on except the light over the hob. He turned the radio off first. That is the bit I keep coming back to. It was not loud, some phone-in about parking permits, and switching it off took him a second and a half, and it did more to me than anything that happened in the following ten minutes. He did not raise his voice. I want that on the page before anything else. He has never raised his voice at me, not about money, not about his brother, and he did not decide to start on a Thursday evening in a kitchen. He stood near the door with his hands at his sides, about four feet away, and he asked me questions, and I had to answer them out loud. "What did you tell her?" I said, "That the car would not start." "Was that true?" "No." There is a gap between knowing a thing about yourself and putting it into a sentence in a quiet room, in your own voice, at somebody. I had no idea how wide that gap was until I heard myself say the word no out loud to his face. Then he said, "Why Ruth?" --- I did not have anything. I stood there with my arms folded and produced nothing at all for what felt like a fortnight, and then I panicked, and what came out was, "Because I am a selfish cow, obviously," in a bright voice, with a little laugh on the end of it. He did not say anything to that. A joke that fails in front of one person is a very particular kind of silence. It does not disperse. It sits in the room with you and slowly becomes a thing you did. I have never heard our house that quiet. The boiler was not even on. He let it run. Twenty seconds, thirty, I genuinely do not know. Long enough that I stopped being able to look at his shoulder and started on the cupboard door instead, and then long enough after that for the cupboard door to stop being any use to me either. Eventually he said, "Try that again." So I said the true thing, which took me three attempts and came out backwards. Being in a room with Ruth this year means sitting next to something I cannot do a single thing about, and I am no good at that, and I would rather be the friend who lets her down at twenty past six than the friend who turns up empty and sits on her sofa being useless, because the first one I can explain to myself in the car on the way home. Saying that to a wall would have been manageable. I have said worse to a wall at two in the morning. The problem is the you. There was a you in the kitchen, in a jumper I bought him, standing four feet from the bin, waiting for the end of my sentence. --- And then he said it, in exactly the voice he uses for everything else. "I expected better of you." Five words. No swearing in it, and nothing off any list the two of us have ever written down. I went from holding it together to not holding it together in about a second. I have been shouted at by men. It does very little to me except make me polite and quietly finished with them by the following week. Somebody telling you, mildly, that they had a higher opinion of you than this goes in somewhere you cannot reach. You cannot argue with it. To argue you would have to stand in your kitchen and say that he was wrong to think well of you in the first place, and I could not get that sentence out either. So I cried, fully dressed, with my arms folded, before anything at all had happened to me. Nothing had touched me. It was twenty-five past nine and I was crying in a kitchen because a man had said five ordinary words about his own expectations, and he let me do that as well, without moving. --- We went through to the front room afterwards and it went exactly the way we had written it down. It hurt. Six is not nothing and he does not soften it, and there is a particular one, the fourth I think, where the whole business stops being theoretical. And from the first stroke it was an enormous relief. I have turned that over a lot since. The best I can do is this: a caning only requires you to stay where you have been put. Nobody asks you anything. Nobody waits for you to find a word. Somebody else is doing the work, my entire job was to be there for it, and it stops when the number stops. I chose the number myself, on a Sunday, with a phone in my hand. Afterwards I was face down on the sofa with a cushion I did not need, and Nick was sitting on the floor with his back against it, and I said, without having decided to say anything, "That was the easy part." He turned his head round. He said, "The caning was." I said yes. I said it the way you report a fault to a call centre, and with the mild surprise of somebody hearing her own news at the same moment he did. Neither of us knew what to do with that for a moment. He laughed first, which I was grateful for. --- I went to Ruth's on the Saturday. I had nothing to offer her and I went anyway, and we watched two hours of people buying houses in Portugal. That Thursday, though, we ended up back in the kitchen at half past ten, because he wanted a biscuit and I did not want to be upstairs on my own yet. He put the radio back on, low. The parking phone-in had finished and it was somebody being interviewed about ferries. He could not find the biscuits he likes, so he ate two of the plain ones and complained about that, and I sat sideways on the worktop, which he says I am not to do, and let him get on with it. Later I got my phone out and opened the note. It is called Sunday, because I could not think what else to call it, and it has three lines in it, all about a cane. Six was fine. I would have taken twelve and thanked him. The thing I have no measurements for is a man four feet away asking me a question and then waiting. So the note needs doing again, and this time about the part I never thought to write down. How many questions. Whether I see them first, or whether that ruins the whole mechanism, which I suspect it does and I want to ask anyway. What happens to the number if I stop one halfway. A safe word for a conversation looks absurd written down. I typed it in anyway and left it there. ## Read next - [More fiction and fantasies](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/) - [The reckoning: when the offence is real](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/scenes/the-reckoning/) - [Consequences when a rule is broken](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/discipline/consequences/) - [Negotiation](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/negotiation/) > ## 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.