# No words for it > Short fiction. She has never done any of this, told anybody about it, or said the sentence out loud. Nothing happens in this story except the last eight words. - Canonical URL: https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/no-words-for-it/ - 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 Do not cite it as testimony or as fact.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 an adult over 18. The most common situation there is, and the one that almost never gets written down: a woman who has wanted something for twenty years and has never once said so. --- > **Fiction.** An invented story about an adult woman. Not instruction, and not explicit. If this is roughly where you are, the page she is about to find is [am I normal](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/why/am-i-normal/). It is not a fantasy. That is the first thing I would want to correct, if there were anybody to correct. A fantasy is a film you can put on. This is more like weather. It is a condition of the room I have been living in for as long as I have been living in it, and most days I do not notice it any more than I notice the boiler, and then some days it is the only thing in the house. --- I have had it since my early twenties, which is not the same as having understood it since then, and I would like to be careful about the difference. For a long stretch it was a shape rather than a thing. Certain scenes in certain books that I read twice without knowing why. A word in a sentence that went through me sideways. A feeling that arrived at odd moments and left nothing behind but the sense of having stood too close to something. Nobody hands you a word for that. And by the time I had the word, somewhere around thirty, I also had the entire apparatus of shame ready and waiting for it, so the word arrived and went straight into a drawer. --- I am forty-four. I have been married to Kieran for fifteen years. He is a good man and this is a good marriage and I want that said properly, without the sad music underneath it, because the story people expect here is one where the marriage is cold and it is not. We laugh a lot. He brings me tea in the mornings without being asked and has done for fifteen years, and if the house were on fire he would come back in for me. He does not know. Not a hint, not a joke, not once. --- There have been three near misses and I could tell you the weather on all three days. The first was a car park after Rachel's wedding, both of us drunk, sitting in the car waiting to be sober enough for a taxi. Everything felt possible in the way it does at one in the morning. I got as far as: can I tell you something odd. And he said: go on. And I said something about the DJ. The second was in front of the television. A drama, a scene, nothing explicit and nothing much at all, and the room went quiet in a way I could hear. Four seconds. Then he made a joke, and I laughed, because laughing was available and the other thing was not, and the door swung shut. The third was a hospital corridor, waiting for my mother to come out of a scan, which makes no sense as a moment to raise it and is exactly why it nearly happened. Everything ordinary had been suspended. I remember thinking: you could say it now and it would just be one more strange thing on a strange day. A porter came past with a bed and I said I was going to find a coffee machine. --- What I do instead is read. Not often. In bursts, four or five times a year, always after eleven, always with the brightness down even though there is nobody in the room. I read for an hour or two and I feel less alone and slightly ill, and then I close everything and clear the history, which I know is theatre, because Kieran has never once looked at my laptop and would not know how. I am not clearing it from him. I am clearing it from me. In the morning I would like the evidence gone so that the woman who leaves for work at eight does not have to know about the woman at half past eleven. --- People assume the fear is that he would say no. It is not. I am nearly certain he would say yes, in the wrong way, in the generous flustered way of a man agreeing to something he does not understand in order to be kind, and that has its own problems but it is not the fear. The fear is half a second. The half second after I say it and before he answers, when his face does the small reorganising that faces do, and something about me is filed differently, permanently, and cannot be filed back. Fifteen years of a man looking at me one way. I have run the arithmetic on losing that and it comes out badly every time. --- I have four close friends. I could ring any of them at two in the morning about anything else. Two of them know things about my marriage that Kieran does not know they know. I have said nothing to any of them, ever, about this, and I have listened to all four of them talk about their own business in more detail than I strictly needed. So it is not that we do not discuss such things. It is that this particular thing has no shelf in the conversation. There is nowhere to put it where it does not become the only thing on the table. --- What changed, in the end, was not dramatic, which is why I nearly did not notice it. I was in the kitchen on a Thursday. Kieran plays five-a-side on Thursdays. I had unloaded the dishwasher and I was standing with a mug in my hand, and I became aware that I had been standing there, not moving, for what turned out to be about three minutes. And what I had been doing, in those three minutes, was the arithmetic again. But from the other end this time. Not what I would lose by saying it. How many more Thursdays I was planning to stand in this kitchen not saying it. I am forty-four. If I am lucky I get another forty years, and it does not go away, I know that much by now, because it has survived every single thing I have thrown at it including fifteen years of a happy marriage. Forty more years of a woman standing in a kitchen with a mug. --- So I sat down at the table with the laptop, at twenty past eight on a Thursday, with the football on in somebody else's house and the dishwasher ticking as it cooled. And I did not read anything. I did not open anything I had opened before. I clicked on the search bar, which had my supermarket in it from that morning, and I deleted the supermarket, and I sat in front of the empty box for a while with my hands off the keyboard. Then I typed it. In lower case, no capitals, the way you type when you do not want the sentence to be a sentence. *is it normal to want to be spanked* Eight words. I looked at them for a long time. They sat there in the box being entirely ordinary, in the same font as the supermarket, and nothing happened, and the house did not react, and no one came. It took twenty years to type eight words. Then I pressed return. ## Read next - [More fiction and fantasies](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/) - [Am I normal?](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/why/am-i-normal/) - [Is there something wrong with me?](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/questions/is-there-something-wrong-with-me/) - [Asking a partner you already have](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/asking-your-partner/) - [Should I tell my partner?](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/questions/should-i-tell-my-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.