# Not that kind of want > Short fiction. She is a lesbian. She has also wanted, since her early twenties, to be put over a man's knee. Both of those have been true the entire time. - Canonical URL: https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/not-that-kind-of-want/ - 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 Do not cite it as testimony or as fact.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 adults over 18. Two facts that have lived in the same person for twenty-four years without ever once agreeing to make sense together. --- > **Fiction.** An invented story about consenting adults. Not instruction, and not explicit. The practical version of this is on [kink and orientation](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/why/kink-and-orientation/). I am forty-five and I am a lesbian. I have never had a single hour of doubt about that, which I understand makes me lucky. Since my early twenties I have also wanted to be put over a man's knee. Those two sentences have been sitting inside the same person for twenty-four years and they have never once got easier to say next to each other. --- For most of that time I treated the second one as a clue. That is what you do with a thing that does not fit. You assume it is evidence of some larger fact about yourself that you have not yet got round to admitting, and you wait for the rest of the picture to turn up. I waited through most of my twenties. I was braced for it, honestly. I had already done the difficult work of telling my mother one thing about myself and I was not looking forward to going back and amending it. It never turned up. Here is the part that took me years to trust. I know what wanting looks like from the inside. I have wanted women for my entire adult life, and it is not subtle: it sits in my stomach, it changes what I notice when I walk into a room, it makes me measurably stupider. When I look at the man in the thing I have wanted all this time, none of that is present. He does not even have a face. In twenty-four years of running it, I have never once given him a face. He has a knee, a voice, an arm across my back and a hand, and that is the entire specification. That is not a man I am attracted to and failing to notice. That is a piece of equipment. --- What is he for, then. I have turned that over more than is reasonable. The closest I can get is that he is there to be categorically not one of us. The whole apparatus depends on somebody being a different order of creature from me: bigger, older, unbothered, in charge in a way that requires no discussion because it is simply how the room has been arranged. I have tried imagining the identical scene with a woman and it collapses immediately. It turns into two people who could talk it through. That is a lovely thing to have and it is not what this is for. If any of it were sexual the man would obviously be a problem. It is not, so he is furniture. He is the chair, and the hairbrush, and the fact that it is a Thursday afternoon. I am aware of how that sounds. I have watched people's faces while I say it. --- I tried to raise it properly once, at a women's group that met upstairs at a pub near the station. Good room, good people, the sort of evening where everybody is trying. A woman I liked said, kindly, that it sounded like there was some internalised material there worth unpicking. I sat with that for about four days before I worked out why it had annoyed me so much. What she meant, and she did not mean it cruelly, was that a woman only wants a man in the room for one reason, and that if I could not identify the reason then it must be buried somewhere. Which is the same assumption I have spent my entire life on the wrong end of. It had just arrived from an unexpected direction, in a room where I had assumed I was safe from it. I did not go back. That is on me at least as much as on anybody there. Nobody threw me out. I simply could not face starting again with the next person. There is a specific loneliness in wanting something that has no ready-made explanation attached to it. Other people's wants come with a story you can hand over in a sentence and watch land. Mine takes twenty minutes, two diagrams and an apology. --- I told Roz on a Sunday in February, badly, after eleven months of rehearsing it, which is not an exaggeration. What I had been afraid of, for all eleven of those months, was that she would hear it as I want a man. Nine years together and I could not think of a single arrangement of words that would stop that being the first thing she heard. Her first question was: do you want him, or do you want it. I have never in my life been so relieved by a question. I said it, and she nodded, and then there was a long silence in which I understood that the easy part was over. Because the difficulty is not the man. Roz does not mind a man. What Roz minds, and she put it much better than I am about to, is that there would be a room she is not in. I could not argue with that and I did not try. It is true, and no amount of reassurance goes anywhere near it. It is not jealousy in the way people use the word. It is the plain arithmetic of an appointment in the diary that is mine and not ours, after nine years in which almost everything has been ours. We are not finished with that conversation. I am not sure it is a conversation that finishes. What we have agreed, so far, is that I can look, and that she knows when and where and who, and that either of us can stop the whole thing at any point without having to build a case for it. --- Which brings me to the men, and to why none of this has actually happened yet. There was one who was good for three weeks. Fifties, patient, asked proper questions, used the word non-sexual back at me without flinching or making a small joke about it. I had started to unclench. Then, in the middle of an otherwise sensible message about where we might meet: *and obviously if something develops naturally between us I would be open to seeing where that goes.* I typed four hundred words explaining, again, from the beginning. I deleted them. I wrote: it will not develop, that was the one condition I gave you. He replied within a minute, cheerfully, saying no worries, just being upfront, and I closed the app and stood looking at the kettle for a while. He was not a villain. He sent me nothing I had not asked for and he did not argue. He simply could not hold one sentence in his head for three weeks. That is where it gets hard, and it is not a complaint about men in general. It is arithmetic. The number of people who want to do this at all is small. The number who can hear non-sexual as a statement of fact rather than as an opening position is a fraction of that. I need somebody from the second group, which is why I have been at this for two years and have had exactly one afternoon that nearly happened. --- I have not solved any of this. I want to be clear, because I have read a great many accounts of this sort of thing that end with the writer arriving somewhere, and I have not arrived. What I have stopped doing is requiring it to make sense before I am allowed to want it. That turns out to be a completely different project from understanding it, and a far cheaper one. I spent twenty years trying to get two facts about myself to agree with each other, on the assumption that a person is supposed to be internally consistent throughout. I have no idea where I got that idea. Nobody else appears to be. Roz asked me about it last month, in an ordinary voice, while doing something else. Where I had got to. Whether anybody had turned up. It is the least dramatic sentence in this entire account and it is the one I would keep. ## Read next - [More fiction and fantasies](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/) - [Kink and orientation](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/why/kink-and-orientation/) - [Does spanking have to be sexual?](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/is-it-sexual/) - [More than one partner](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/more-than-one-partner/) - [Women who play with women](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/women-with-women/) > ## 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.