# One line at lunchtime > Short fiction. Five words arrive at eight minutes to one on a Tuesday. A drainage meeting, a broken thermostat, a train home, and a phrase she cannot put down. - Canonical URL: https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/one-line-at-lunchtime/ - 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 Do not cite it as testimony or as fact.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. Nothing happens in this story except one message and the seven hours after it, which turn out to be most of the evening. --- > **Fiction.** An invented story about consenting adults. Not instruction, and not explicit. The practical version, including what to agree before anyone sends a message like this, is on [the words you share](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/the-words-you-share/). It arrived at eight minutes to one, in the second-floor kitchen, while I was eating a cheese and pickle sandwich I had made at seven that morning and had been regretting since about ten past. I am forty-four. I am a senior planning officer at a district council, and I eat the same sandwich at the same table on most days of the week. We have been together nine years. None of that is interesting, which is the point. The phone was face down by the microwave. It buzzed once. I turned it over and the lock screen told me what it always tells me, which is that there was a message and nothing else. I set it up that way in August, the week we agreed the rules, and I have been grateful for it roughly twice a month since. The rules took twenty minutes at our kitchen table, which is how we do most things. Only this app, only our two phones, never my work one. Nothing that would need a photograph, because there are no photographs. And a message in the daytime is a tease and not a booking: either of us can still say not tonight, at any point, without a reason, and the other one says fine. That last rule was mine. I insisted on it. I have resented it in a low, specific, simmering way on a number of Tuesdays since. I opened it with the phone held below the edge of the table. "Smacked bottom tonight, I think." That was all. No kiss, nothing before it and nothing after. He works on the other side of town, and he will have typed it between two other things, probably standing up, then put the phone back in his pocket and gone straight back to whatever he was doing. I would put money on him not having thought about it again since. I put the phone face down and finished my sandwich with enormous concentration. --- I have tried, on and off, to work out why those two words do what they do to me, and I have given up. I can read "spanking" all day. It was in a headline on somebody's phone on the train that morning and I felt nothing whatsoever, the way you feel nothing about the word "mortgage". Spanking sounds like something from a film, or from a website, said by people who do not live anywhere. A smacked bottom is something else. It is blunt and plain and it has the radio on in the background. It does not ask whether I would like one. It states it, the way you would state the weather, and the "I think" on the end makes it worse, because that is the voice of a man who has already decided and is only mentioning it as a courtesy. That is as far as the analysis goes. I do not know why it works and I no longer want to know. It is enough that it does. --- Lesley from building control put her head round the door at quarter past one and asked whether I was coming to the two o'clock. I said I was. She asked whether I was all right, because I had apparently gone pink. I said it was the heating. Everybody on the second floor blames the heating for everything. The thermostat at our end of the building has been broken since March and was last seen by facilities in, I think, May. I have never in my life been so grateful for a broken thermostat. Then I went back to my desk and typed a reply. "We will see." Deleted, because it sounded like bargaining, and I was not in a bargaining position and we both knew it. "Is that right." Deleted. Far too much. You could hear the eyebrows. Then, as an experiment, "Not tonight." I looked at it sitting in the box and found that I had no intention whatsoever of sending it. I also found it was good to look at. It meant that whatever happened at seven o'clock, I would have walked towards it myself, from my own desk, with the words to stop it sitting right there under my thumb. I deleted that too. I sent: "Noted." I write "noted" on about forty emails a week. It is the most neutral word in my professional vocabulary. On this occasion it was a lie, and he would know it was a lie, and that was the point of sending it. He did not reply. Of course he did not reply. That was worse. --- The two o'clock was about drainage on a development of forty-two houses at the edge of town, and it ran for an hour and fifty minutes, and for the first forty of them I was fine. Better than fine. I read condition fourteen aloud in full, including the paragraph about attenuation tanks, and my voice did nothing at all, and I was privately proud of it in a way I could not have explained to anybody at that table. Then Keith from highways leaned back in his chair and said, "Look, the bottom line is," and I wrote the word drainage in my notebook and underlined it twice. I did not hear what the bottom line was. I gather it was something about a culvert. --- There is a lull at about half past three when nothing in the office needs me, and that was the worst of it, because there was nothing in the way. This is the part I find hardest to explain, even to myself. Nothing had been promised. That was our own rule, and it cut both ways. He could come in at seven, tired, make a stir fry and never mention it, and he would be entirely within what we had agreed. I could be told something at lunchtime and not be given it, and that would be fair. So what I carried round the office all afternoon was not an appointment. It was the knowledge that at eight minutes to one, in the middle of his own day, he had been thinking about it. About me, and about exactly that, in exactly those words. And then he had sent it and gone back to work and left me holding it. At four I went to the ladies and stood in front of the mirror. I was pink from the collarbone up. I ran my wrists under the cold tap, which somebody once told me works, and which does nothing. --- Twenty to six, the train. By the second stop the phrase had settled into the rhythm of the wheels, which I would have said only happens in novels until it happened to me. Somewhere around the station before ours I decided that I was not going to raise it. I was not going to walk in and say I got your message. He had sent it. If it was going to be said again, he could be the one to say it, out loud, in the house. That was an easy decision to make on a train. It was much harder to keep in a kitchen. --- He was chopping an onion when I got in. He said, "Good day?" I said, "Long." He asked how the drainage meeting had gone, because he remembers things like that, and I told him about the culvert, which I knew nothing about, and he nodded as if it were interesting. We ate. It was a perfectly good stir fry. He told me about a man at his work who had reversed a van into a bollard, and I laughed in the right places, and nobody mentioned anything. I washed up and he dried, and I could feel every plate. I knew the exact position of his elbow. I knew that I could say not tonight at any point and it would be fine. I also knew, with real alarm, that he might simply never bring it up, and that I would then have to decide whether to ask, and that asking was a separate and much larger thing, and that it was nearly eight. He put the last pan away and folded the tea towel over the rail. Then he said, in exactly the voice he had used to ask about the drainage, "I did mean it, you know. About your smacked bottom." I had a fork in my hand. I put it down on the draining board very carefully, because I did not trust what my hand was about to do with it. Seven hours, five words at lunchtime and ten at the sink, and he had not laid a finger on me yet. ## Read next - [Smacked bottom or spanking: the words you share](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/the-words-you-share/) - [Turning down a session](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/saying-no-to-a-scene/) - [Photographs and video: what to agree first](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/photographs-and-video/) - [Can I do this without anyone knowing?](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/questions/can-i-do-this-without-anyone-knowing/) - [More fiction and fantasies](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/) > ## 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.