# Lucky to be asked > Short fiction. Fifty-two, divorced, and sure she was in no position to be fussy about this one thing. She got three quotes for the flat roof over the kitchen. - Canonical URL: https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/lucky-to-be-asked/ - 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 Do not cite it as testimony or as fact.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 did nothing frightening. She apologised twice in the first fifteen minutes, and then she heard herself say a sentence she could not put down afterwards. --- > **Fiction.** An invented story about consenting adults. Not instruction, and not explicit. The argument underneath it is set out at [confidence, worth and settling for less](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/confidence-and-settling/). I got three quotes for the flat roof over the kitchen. Three, in writing, itemised. I rang two of the references the second man gave me, and one of them was a woman in Sowerby Bridge who talked at me for eleven minutes about her guttering, and I let her, because by the end of eleven minutes I knew what he was like when something went wrong. The third one came in a van with no name on the side and could not tell me what he was proposing to put down. I said I would let him know. I did not let him know. That is what I am like about everything. Contracts go past me at work before they go out, which is most of what I do and the part of it I am good at. I once made a director take a clause out of a lease by sitting there with the pen down until he agreed to it. Fifty-two, divorced three years, and I have never in my life signed something because the man had come a long way. --- I have wanted somebody to put me over their knee since I was twenty-two. Thirty years of it, on and off, mostly on. I never said it to Robert in twenty-four years of marriage, not once, not even in the last bad year when we were saying everything else there was to say. After the divorce I left it a year and a half and then I started reading. Sensible reading, the sort with headings. Then the forums. Then a profile with no photograph on it, and four months of working out how to write a first message that did not read like a hostage note. And somewhere in there I made a decision without noticing that I had made it. It went roughly like this. I am fifty-two. My body has done a marriage, a divorce and twenty years at a desk. Half the women on that site are thirty. So whoever turns up, I take, and I had better be pleasant about it. --- Martin messaged in March. Fifty-nine, out towards Halifax, and he wrote in whole sentences with the punctuation in the right places, which after some of the others felt like being handed a chair. Six weeks of that. He was good company on a screen. Then a coffee, half past six on a Tuesday, one of the chains near the station, because I wanted somewhere with other people in it and a member of staff who would remember my face. I was four minutes late and I apologised for it twice before I had my coat off. That was the first one, although at the time I would not have counted it as anything. The second was references. I had it written down. Had he done this with anybody who would be willing to say a few words to me. I had rehearsed the wording so it would not land like an accusation. He said there had been a few over the years and that he was not in touch with any of them now, and something about how people in this are entitled to their privacy, which is perfectly true and which he said in a way that made it sound as though I had asked him for their home addresses. So I said, "Sorry. I know that is a lot to ask." And he said, "You do ask a lot of questions." He was not unpleasant about it. He said it the way you would speak to somebody counting out coppers at the front of a queue, with a bit of a smile on the end of it so that nobody could object. I said sorry again. Then I looked down at my phone on the table and it was seventeen minutes past. --- The rest of the hour was mostly fine, and I want that written down properly, because it would be a tidier story if he had been awful. He was funny about his dog. He asked what I did for a living and then asked a second question about the answer, which is more than some manage. When I asked what would happen if I said stop he was impatient in the small way a man is impatient when you ask whether he has checked the oil. "I stop. Obviously I stop." A beat. "You have been reading a lot of horror stories." I had. That was the irritating part. There was always something true in it. --- Then, about forty minutes in, while I was trying to get round to asking what he had in mind for a first time, I heard myself say this: "I know I am probably being difficult. I know you have got other options." He said, "It is fine," and asked whether I wanted another one. I said no thank you. And then I sat there with both hands round a cold cup while that sentence went round again. I know you have got other options. I had said that out loud, in a coffee shop, to a man I had known for six weeks through a screen and forty minutes in the flesh, on the subject of whether he might be trusted to hurt me on purpose in a house I had never been to. That sentence was mine. I brought it with me on the train. --- I did not say anything at the time. We talked about the dog. He walked me back to the station and was perfectly nice about it and said he would message, and he did, on the Thursday, and it was a perfectly nice message. I left it eight days. Then I wrote and said I had given it a lot of thought and did not think I was the right person for him, and thanked him, and wished him well. He wrote back: "No problem at all." That was the whole reply. So it was over on a Tuesday evening and I had not been handed one single thing to be right about. --- The week after was horrible. I want to be accurate about the week, because I have never once lived the version where a woman walks away and feels marvellous on the bus home. On the Wednesday I went back on the site and read the same profiles I had read in February. There were eleven of them in any sensible distance of me and two were obviously not real people. I did the arithmetic you do at four in the morning, where you take how long it took to find the last one and add it to your age. Twice I got as far as composing something to him. The second time I got the whole thing written, a message saying I had been overthinking things and would he like to try again, and I put the phone face down on the arm of the sofa and went and stood in the kitchen with the tap running until it had stopped being an option. Because he had not done anything. That is the part I could not get round, and I have stopped trying to. He was vague about his past and a bit tired of being asked things. There is no way of telling my sister that story in which I do not come out of it sounding like a fussy woman who wanted a reference check to go on a date. And there might not be another one for a long time. I know that in daylight as well as at four in the morning. It could be years. Nobody is going to come along and make that all right, and I have got no argument to put against it except one sentence I said out loud with my coat on the back of a chair, and how little it sounded like me. My sister asked how it had gone and I said it had not, and she said, "His loss," the way people do. I changed the subject. It was one Tuesday I got out of, and I did not want a bigger word than that put on it. --- The roofer came on Saturday to measure up. I asked him seven things, including what happens if it rains when the old felt is off, and he answered all seven and did not mind being asked. He is starting on the twelfth. Ellen rang on the Sunday wanting to put her boxes in the back bedroom while she moves, and I said she could not, because I am painting it. She said since when. I said since Thursday. The paint came yesterday. It is a green my mother would have had a great deal to say about. I have got the radio in there already and I am doing the skirting boards tomorrow. ## Read next - [More fiction and fantasies](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/) - [Confidence, worth and settling for less](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/confidence-and-settling/) - [Vetting a partner](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/vetting-a-partner/) - [Finding a partner in the UK](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/uk/finding-a-partner/) > ## 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.