# Quieter than that > Short fiction. Twenty-two years of imagining it, and then a Wednesday, a ticking radiator, a laundry airer that had to be moved, and eleven minutes of it. - Canonical URL: https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/quieter-than-that/ - 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 Do not cite it as testimony or as fact.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 went wrong. He was kind, it was exactly what she had asked for, and she spent the evening quietly wrecked and could not have told you why. --- > **Fiction.** An invented story about consenting adults. Not instruction, and not explicit. The practical version is on [when it is not what you imagined](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/fantasy-and-reality/). In the version I had been running since I was nineteen, there is no laundry. There is a room, and the light is low and coming from one side, and there is a chair that is always the same chair although I have never owned it. It takes a long time. There is a stretch beforehand where nothing is said. In twenty-two years of running it I had never once had to think about where the airer goes. It has a soundtrack as well, which I have never said out loud to anybody. Rain on a window that is always on the left. Somebody moving about in another part of the building. A clock I can hear and cannot see. And a car going past outside at the exact moment he stands up, and I have tried it without the car, and it does not work without the car. I have run it on trains, in the bath, in the queue at the post office, and once, badly, in a hospital corridor while I waited to be told about my mother. I have revised it the way you revise anything you use that often. He had a different coat for the first ten years. On the actual Wednesday, Peter carried the airer out to the landing with my tights still on it, and said, "Where does this even live?" ## The room It was six o'clock and still light. The radiator under the window was ticking, because it always ticks when the heating comes on, and I have been meaning to get somebody to look at it since March. Three Sundays it took us to get to that room. Two of them went on things I would never have guessed I had an opinion about: which room, whether the door was open or shut, what he was allowed to say to me afterwards, whether I could keep my socks on. In the end I wrote most of it down, because saying it was worse than writing it, and the writing was bad enough. He was careful in the way I had asked him to be careful. He asked twice whether anything had changed since we talked about it on Sunday. He put a cushion where I had said to put a cushion. He used the word we had agreed on and he used it in a level voice, not a performance voice, which is exactly what I said I wanted, because I had been very clear that I did not want it done in a silly voice. And it was fine. It was completely fine. It stung, in the way I had been told it would sting, and I counted in my head without being asked to, and at one point I laughed, which surprised both of us. There was a bit in the middle where we had to stop because I had pins and needles in one foot. He waited. Neither of us could think of a single thing to say while we waited, and then we carried on. Eleven minutes. I know because I looked at the clock on the bedside table afterwards and did the sum twice. In my head it takes an hour. ## Afterwards He was lovely. He brought tea up. He asked if I was all right and I said yes, and I was telling the truth, and he sat on the edge of the bed with his hand on my ankle and asked whether it had been what I wanted. I said yes to that as well. Also true. That was the confusing part. There was a biscuit on the saucer. Nobody has put a biscuit on a saucer for me in about twenty years. He went down at about eight to watch something, and I stayed up there for a while with the tea going cold, and I could not work out what had happened to me. Nothing had gone wrong. Every single element had been the element I ordered. There was no complaint to make and nobody to make it to, and I felt like somebody had opened a door onto a room I had furnished for two decades and it turned out to be about eleven feet across. I cried a bit in the bathroom, quietly, with the tap running, which is a thing I have not done since I was about thirty. ## The week I did not say anything to him for six days, which was not fair on him and I knew it at the time. On the Thursday I kept thinking about the airer. On the Friday I was cross with him for no reason that would survive being said out loud, and he noticed, and asked, and I said work. On Saturday we did a big shop and he put the wrong bread in the trolley and I nearly said something appalling about it. I kept going back over it looking for the fault in it. The airer. The radiator. The fact that it was still light outside at six. The eleven minutes, which I did the sum on twice more that week and got the same answer both times. None of it was the problem. I picked it all up again anyway, most nights, in the ten minutes before I went to sleep. On Sunday morning I was upstairs stripping the bed, and I picked up the pillow he had put under me, which had been back on his side of the bed all week with him sleeping on it, and I stood there holding it. In the version I have been running since I was nineteen, there is nobody in the room I know. That is the thing. I have never once, in twenty-two years, put a face on him. He is a shape and a voice and a set of hands and he does not know that I take two sugars, and afterwards he does not exist, because afterwards was never part of it. There was no tea in it. There was no bloke going downstairs to watch the snooker. There was certainly no pillow that then goes back into the ordinary rotation of a marriage and gets slept on for a week. What I had been asking for was to be got at by somebody who did not love me. And I had asked the one person on earth who could not possibly do that, and he had done everything right, and I had come out of it feeling robbed, and the person I had been quietly furious with all week had bought the wrong bread. ## Sunday I did not have a revelation about it. I want to be honest about that. I did not stand there with the pillow and understand my own psychology. What happened was much smaller and more stupid than that. I thought: he slept on that all week. And then I thought about him standing on the landing on Wednesday with my tights in one hand and the airer in the other, asking where it lived, and I started laughing, on my own, in an empty bedroom, with a stripped mattress. He shouted up to ask what was funny. I said nothing. He came up anyway and stood in the doorway with a tea towel and I told him the thing about the airer, and not the other thing, because I did not have the other thing in any order yet. He said, "It lives in the box room. It has always lived in the box room." We have not tried again yet. We will. I have some idea now of what I would change and rather more idea of what cannot be changed, and I am not sure yet which of those two facts is the useful one. I put the pillow in the wash. Then I took it out again and put it back on the bed. ## Read next - [Your first time](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/first-time/) - [What if I hated it?](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/questions/what-if-i-hated-it/) - [Negotiation](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/negotiation/) - [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.