# Straight out of the bath > Short fiction. Three years in, they thought they knew the numbers. Then he told her to have a bath first and not dry off, and the arithmetic came apart. - Canonical URL: https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/straight-out-of-the-bath/ - Section: Fiction and fantasies - Updated: August 2026 (2026-08-01) - 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 Do not cite it as testimony or as fact.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. She had read somewhere that it stings more on wet skin and said so in passing, the way you pass on a fact. He waited a fortnight. --- > **Fiction.** An invented story about consenting adults. Not instruction, and not explicit. The practical version of this is on [spanking on wet skin](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/wet-bottom-spanking/). We have a scale. Rob and I built it over three years without ever sitting down and agreeing to build it, the way you end up with a system for loading the dishwasher. One is a tap. Ten is the thing we did last March, after which I stood up at work more than was strictly necessary. Most of what we do lives between four and six, and by now I can call the number from the sound alone, before I have got round to feeling it. So when I read, at about eleven at night, on a forum populated entirely by people who cannot sleep, that it stings a great deal more on wet skin, I filed it under interesting. I mentioned it to him the next morning while I was hunting for my other shoe. I was not asking for anything. I have asked for things, and I know exactly what my voice does when I am asking, and it did not do that. He said, "Hm." That is what he says. A fortnight later, on a Wednesday, he came back in from putting the bins out and said, with no weight on it whatsoever, "Have a bath first tonight. Don't dry off." Then he went to look at the boiler pressure, which is a permanent concern in this house. --- I have had a great many baths. That one was its own category. You cannot relax in a bath you are having for a reason. I lay in it with the water going tepid around my knees and read the back of a bottle of conditioner twice without a single word of it reaching me. The extractor fan ran and ran. Downstairs the telly was on low, which meant he was either not thinking about it or doing a very good impression of a man not thinking about it. I got out at ten to nine, because ten to nine was the closest thing we had to an arrangement. Here is a thing nobody had put in the paragraph I read. Wet, out of a bath, standing still on a landing in an English house in February, you are cold in about ninety seconds. Properly cold, with the hair up on my arms and my own hair delivering a slow line of water down my back every twenty seconds or so, and the carpet turning dark in two patches under my feet. I stood there with my arms folded and no idea what to do with my face, and I thought, quite calmly: this will be a variation. Slightly sharper. We will note it down and get on with our lives. He was in the bedroom getting the brush out of the bottom of the wardrobe, where it lives under a jumper, and the wardrobe door sticks. The delay had no meaning in it at all. We had also not thought about where. You cannot put a wet person on a bed. We ended up in the spare room with me over the arm of the chair and a bath towel folded underneath, which he had brought through and I had not thought of, and which rather punctured my working theory that he was improvising. --- The brush is a flat wooden hairbrush that cost four pounds in a chemist in Ipswich and has done more work than anything else we own. Dry, at a four, it lands as a thud with a bright edge on the front of it, and the bright edge goes before the thud does. I know that sound the way you know the sound of your own car door. What I heard instead was a crack. Quick and flat, more like somebody dropping a wet flannel onto a tiled floor from a height, and all of it arrived at once, with none of the half-beat of warning I have relied on for three years. And out of me came a noise I have never made. I want to be accurate about it, because it is the entire point of the evening. It came out low and short. It is the noise you make when you take hold of the wrong part of an oven shelf. Three years. I was under the impression I had made all my noises. I did not use the safe word, and that has stayed with me. There were perhaps two seconds in which no decision of any kind was available to me. There was only the information. He did three more, slowly, with gaps, which I now understand was him listening. Then he stopped. Nobody stops at four. Four is the bit before the thing starts. He said my name. It came out in the voice he uses when I have left the immersion on all day, which is a very long way from the voice he had been using ten seconds earlier. "I know," I said, into the arm of the chair. "I know. I felt it too." "That was a two." "That was never a two." "It was a two. I checked myself twice before I did it." --- So we ended up in the bathroom, which is where the towels were. Me on the edge of the bath with one round me and my feet on the mat, him on the closed lid of the loo, still holding the brush like a man holding somebody else's phone. We were both a bit shaken. I would like to be honest and say we were also both quite delighted, in the way you are when something you were completely sure about turns out to be wrong in an interesting direction. "Right," he said. "Where would you put it. Six?" "More than six. I have taken eights off you that I could have held a conversation through." "You have." "That was not an eight either. I don't know what that was." We did the sums out loud, sitting there, like two people working out who owes what after a holiday. A two, wet, had landed somewhere well north of an eight dry, and possibly a good deal further north than that, since the top of our scale is not somewhere I have been recently and I may be flattering my memory of it. Which meant the scale did not transfer. Three years of hard-won arithmetic, every number of it agreed between us and tested, and none of it survived contact with a wet bathroom. We worked out something else while we sat there, which is that a warm-up does not do its job on wet skin either. The whole idea of a warm-up is that it climbs. Something that arrives at full price on the first stroke has nothing to climb. He asked me to turn towards the light before I got dressed, which we do anyway. There were two flat red marks where at that number there are usually none at all, both of them the surface kind rather than the deep sort that turns up properly the next day, and nothing was broken. We looked at them the way you look at a dent in a car you have only had three weeks. Then we agreed on a third. Whatever number I ask for, he gives it at a third of the force, and we go up from there across several weeks, and if that turns out to be absurdly cautious then we will have wasted a few Sunday evenings being careful with each other. "We start at the beginning," he said. "Like the first month." "We were dreadful in the first month." "We were careful in the first month." "We were dreadful and careful." --- The part that keeps coming back is those ten minutes in the bathroom, and it has nothing to do with how much it stung. Three years. He knows before I do when I have had a bad day. I know the sound he makes when he has decided something and has not got round to saying it. Between us we have a shorthand so worn down that whole conversations happen in about four words. And there we were, both in towels, having the conversation we had right at the start, the clumsy one, where you say the numbers out loud because you have no shorthand yet and cannot assume a single thing. There is an intimacy in that which I had not expected and cannot get any other way. You have to explain yourself, in plain words, to a person who has known you for years. Neither of you gets to be the expert. Nobody can coast on what they already know, because what they already know has just been proved to apply only in dry conditions. On the landing afterwards he got his phone out, still in a towel, and added a line to the note we keep. It is called Notes, has been called Notes since 2023, and contains material I would find very hard to explain to a stranger. He read it out to me. "Wet. Divide by three. Possibly more." "Possibly a lot more," I said. He changed it. Then he put the phone in his dressing gown pocket and said, "Sunday?" "Sunday." He went down and checked the boiler pressure, because he was walking past it. I stayed where I was for a second longer, cold again, grinning at nothing. ## Read next - [More fiction and fantasies](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/) - [Warming up](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/warm-up/) - [Marks and bruising](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/marks-and-bruising/) - [When the skin breaks](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/when-the-skin-breaks/) > ## 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.