# Not foreplay > Short fiction. Four months in, every time she asks to be spanked he turns it into foreplay. The story is her finding the sentence that explains the difference. - Canonical URL: https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/not-foreplay/ - 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 Do not cite it as testimony or as fact.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 is willing, he is interested, and he keeps handing her the wrong thing. Every sentence she can think of to explain the difference starts with a no. --- > **Fiction.** An invented story about consenting adults. Not instruction, and not explicit. The practical version of this is on [erotic spanking and how it differs from discipline](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/erotic-spanking/). Four months in, and I have asked Dan to spank me three times, and three times he has given me something else. He is a good man. I want that down before anything else, because all of what follows reads like a complaint about him and he has not done one thing wrong. He is thirty-nine, three years older than me, he fixes other people's bicycles for nothing, and when I said the word spanking to him in October he did not go quiet or funny or careful with me. He said, "Yeah?" like I had suggested Whitby for the weekend. --- The first time was in his flat above the chemist on Kirkstall Road, in bed, at the sort of hour where you can say things. He was delighted. He got about forty seconds in before his hand stopped landing and started doing something else entirely, and the whole thing folded back into the evening it had come out of. Second time I was more specific. Harder, I said, and for longer. He gave me maybe a minute of harder, which I want to be fair about, and then the same fold, the same soft turn back into what we were already doing. Third time I used a word I had rehearsed in the shower. I said I wanted to be punished. He laughed, kindly, in a way that was not laughing at me, and said, "What have you done?" and then kissed my shoulder, and that was the end of the conversation and the start of a different one. Every time, he heard it as news about him. Which it partly was. I do want him, that is not in dispute and never has been, and I understand exactly why a man hears "spank me" at midnight and concludes he is being paid a compliment. He was being paid a compliment. It was just not the one I was trying to pay. --- What I actually want is so unglamorous that writing it down made me feel ridiculous. A kitchen chair, brought through, or not even brought through. Twenty minutes. A number said at the beginning so I know how far off the end is. Him not talking much, and me not being consulted about anything for the duration. My clothes staying largely where they are. Then a glass of water and the two of us watching whatever is on, with nothing else expected of me at all. That last part is most of it. Nothing else expected of me at all. Try saying that at eleven at night with no clothes on and see how it goes. --- Here is the problem I could not get round for four months. Every sentence I came up with started with a no. I do not want it to be sexual. I do not want you to kiss me in the middle of it. Please do not touch me afterwards. Four months. You cannot open your mouth at four months and produce three sentences like that, not to a man who has done nothing but be pleased about you. He would have heard the no and stopped listening, and I would not blame him, because I would have done the same. I drafted it as a text once and got to two hundred words and deleted it. I tried it in the car on the M62 in the dark, which is the correct place for difficult conversations because nobody has to look at anybody, and what came out instead was a long anecdote about my sister. He said my sister sounded hard work. I agreed. Junction 27 went past. What I was frightened of was never him getting angry. It was him going wounded, and then careful with me, and the pair of us sliding into a polite phase that a four-month-old thing does not survive. --- Sunday. Raining properly, the kind that sits in for the day. He was at the kitchen table cutting an old inner tube into strips with the kitchen scissors, because apparently you can use them for something, and he had the football scores on low. Two mugs, one of them chipped. The window had fogged at the bottom. I had been awake since about six. I said his name. He said mm without looking up, so I said, "I need to say a thing and it is going to come out wrong, so let me get to the end of it." He put the scissors down. That is the detail I keep. He put the scissors down and turned the radio off, and then he waited, and I had nothing prepared because I had genuinely not expected to get that far. So what came out was this. I said what we do in bed is fine. Better than fine, and this is not a note about it. I said there is another thing I want and it is a separate thing, and every time I have asked for it you have made it part of sex, because that is the only sort there is as far as you know, and I have not been able to explain the difference without it sounding like I am turning you down. And then, because he was still waiting, and because a kitchen at half past ten on a wet Sunday is a room where you can be plain: "I want you to spank me the way you would if we were not sleeping together." Four months of drafting and that was the sentence. It had been available the whole time. --- He did the thing where you can watch somebody do arithmetic. Three or four seconds of it. Then he said, "So you do not want me to enjoy it." Not sharp. There was a bit of hurt in it and he was not hiding the hurt, which I have come to think is the single best thing about him. I said no, I want you to enjoy it, I want you to enjoy the other thing. He got up and filled a kettle that did not need filling and stood with his back to me for a bit. Not sulking. Thinking, with his back turned, which is allowed. It was about two minutes and I sat there and let it be two minutes instead of filling them, which took everything I had. Then he came back and sat down and said, "Right. Who am I meant to be, then?" I said what. He said, "While it is happening. I am not your boss. And I am not your boyfriend either, apparently, not for those twenty minutes, because your boyfriend would want to take you to bed afterwards and I have just been told he is not doing that. So who is sat on the chair?" I did not have an answer. I still do not. I had spent four months building one sentence and had built absolutely nothing to go after it. I said, "I do not know." He said that was all right, and then he said, "I would want to know before I did it. Not to be awkward. I would just want to know." Which is the most reasonable thing anybody has said to me about any of this, and it has been sitting on the table ever since. --- We did not do it that Sunday. We did not do it the Sunday after, either. I have written him three answers to his question and they are all rubbish, and the honest one, which is that I do not think he needs to be anybody, does not seem to help him and I can see why. On the Wednesday I got in from work and went to the drawer for a teaspoon, and the wooden spoon that lives in the jar by the hob was not in the jar. It was in the drawer, at the back, under the tea towels. Where you put a thing you have thought about. He has not mentioned it. Neither have I. I stood there with the drawer open for about a minute and then I got my teaspoon and shut it. ## Read next - [More fiction and fantasies](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/) - [Erotic spanking and how it differs from discipline](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/erotic-spanking/) - [Asking your partner](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/asking-your-partner/) - [Does spanking have to be sexual?](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/is-it-sexual/) > ## 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.