# Telling him after nine years > Short fiction. She had a plan, refined over nine years. What she got instead was a bad sentence in an argument about a dishwasher, and twelve days of silence. - Canonical URL: https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/telling-him-after-nine-years/ - 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 Do not cite it as testimony or as fact.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. She had rehearsed the conversation for most of a decade. It arrived without her permission, in the worst possible words, on a Wednesday. --- > **Fiction.** An invented story about consenting adults. Not instruction, and not explicit. The practical version of this conversation is at [asking a partner you already have](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/asking-your-partner/). I had a plan. Nine years of plan, refined the way you refine something you have no intention of ever using. It had a location: the kitchen table, a Saturday, nothing else happening. It had an opening line, which was that there is something about myself I would like to tell you and I need you to let me get to the end of it. It had a fallback in case his face did something I could not survive, which was that I had read an article and been curious. It was a good plan. I could have presented that plan to a board. What I got was the dishwasher. --- A Wednesday in March, both of us tired, and an argument that started with whether the dishwasher had been stacked in a way that was actively hostile to plates. Nine years of marriage and we had about four arguments, on a rotation, and this was the one where I say he never notices anything and he says he cannot win. Somewhere in the middle of it I said that he never wanted anything from me. Not a thing. Not once. That I could stand in the kitchen setting fire to the curtains and he would ask whether I had had a difficult day. And then my mouth went into business on its own account, and what came out was: I want you to be angry with me. Properly. Once. I want you to do something about it instead of being reasonable at me. And then, into the silence, because apparently I had decided to burn the whole house down: I want you to put me over your knee. --- He laughed. Not cruelly. That is the thing I have to be fair about, then and now. It was the laugh of a man who is confident he has misheard and is giving you the opportunity to repeat yourself in a more sensible form. I did not repeat myself in a more sensible form. I stood there with my hands on the worktop and let it be true in the room. He stopped laughing. He looked at me for what was probably four seconds. Then he said, "Right," and finished the plates, and went up. --- Twelve days. I want to put down what twelve days of that is actually like, because when I went looking afterwards, everything I read had the conversation going well or going catastrophically, and nothing had the third thing, which is nothing at all happening for a week and a half while your life carries on around it. We were kind to each other. That was the unbearable part. We were so careful that a stranger would have assumed we had just met and were trying to make a good impression. He made me tea. I sorted out the card for his mother's birthday and he thanked me twice for it. On the Friday we had a curry and watched two episodes of something about a hospital and did not touch each other. I apologised on the Thursday morning. He said there was nothing to apologise for, which is the worst available answer, because it closes the subject while leaving it entirely open. At night I lay there and did the mathematics of the rest of my life. I read things on my phone at two in the morning with the brightness turned down, and deleted the history afterwards, which is a humiliating thing to catch yourself doing at thirty-eight in your own house. On about day eight I had the plan ready to go into reverse. I was going to tell him it had been a stupid thing said in temper. I had the sentence built. I could have said it at any point over the four days that followed and I did not, and I have never worked out whether that was courage or exhaustion. On day nine he put his hand on my shoulder going past me in the hall, the way he has done ten thousand times, and I had to go into the utility room and stand with the door shut for a minute. That is the part I would warn somebody about. Not the silence. The ordinary kindnesses continuing inside the silence, each one of them arriving like a question you cannot answer. His mother rang on the Sunday and I talked to her about her hip for twenty-five minutes and was, by all accounts, delightful. --- Day twelve. I was cleaning my teeth. He came into the bathroom and sat down on the edge of the bath, which he never does, and waited until I had finished, which took an unnecessarily long time because I was suddenly extremely committed to my molars. He said, "I have been reading." I looked at him in the mirror rather than turning round. He had the expression he gets when he has been quoted a price for something. "About forty tabs," he said. "I have been at it like a man planning an extension. Some of it is appalling. Some of it is not." And there it was. Twelve days that I had experienced as a verdict being handed down, and he had spent doing his research, because he is a man who does not say anything about anything until he understands it, and I have known that about him since 2011 and it did not occur to me once. --- Then he asked me a question I have never quite finished answering. He said, "Is it that you want me to be angry with you? Or is it that you want to be let off?" I sat down on the lid of the toilet, in my pyjamas, with toothpaste at the corner of my mouth, because he had got closer to the middle of it in twelve days than I had in nine years of lying awake. I said I did not know. He said that was all right and that he did not need to know tonight either. Then he said the thing that undid me, which was: "I would rather you had told me at the table. But I would rather this than not at all." --- It was not resolved that night, or that month. There were four or five more conversations, all of them clumsy, one of them quite bad. The first time we tried anything I laughed so hard I had to stop, and he sat there with the patience of a man waiting for a bus, and eventually we managed about ninety seconds of it and both felt as though we had been through something. We are all right. It is three years on and we are more than all right, and I am not going to write down the rest because it is ours. What I would say to anyone standing at the front of this is only that the silence afterwards may not be what you think it is. Mine sounded exactly like disgust for a week and a half. It was a man with forty tabs open, taking his time, because the question deserved it. And the plan, the beautiful nine-year plan with the location and the fallback, was never a plan. It was a way of not doing it that felt like preparation. I would have died with that plan. ## Read next - [More fiction and fantasies](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/) - [Asking a partner you already have](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/asking-your-partner/) - [How do I bring it up?](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/questions/how-do-i-bring-it-up/) - [Should I tell my partner?](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/questions/should-i-tell-my-partner/) - [Am I normal?](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/why/am-i-normal/) > ## 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.