# The changing room > Short fiction. Marks at day five, a leisure centre changing village before work, and a colleague at the next locker who wants to talk about the office move. - Canonical URL: https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/the-changing-room/ - 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 Do not cite it as testimony or as fact.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. Nothing whatsoever happens in this story, which did not stop it being the tensest forty minutes of her month. --- > **Fiction.** An invented story about consenting adults. Not instruction, and not explicit. The practical version of the problem she is solving here is at [how do I hide the marks](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/questions/how-do-i-hide-the-marks/). I swim on Thursdays at seven, before work. I have done since 2018 and I am not sentimental about much, but I am about that. Thirty-two lengths, the slow lane, the same lifeguard who has never once looked at the water. It is the only forty minutes of my week in which nobody can reach me and I am not required to have an opinion about anything. Saturday had been the good kind. By Thursday I was at day five, which as established elsewhere is the yellow-and-green stage, and none of it was in the least bit sore. What it was, was visible. --- We had done the negotiation properly. Marks were fine, marks were wanted, marks stay where clothes go. That covers work, that covers the pub, that covers every single ordinary situation in a British woman's life. It does not cover a changing village. If you have not encountered the modern leisure centre changing village, it is an architectural decision made by somebody who has never been shy. It is one large room. Around the edge are cubicles with doors that begin nine inches off the floor and stop a foot short of the ceiling. Down the middle are the lockers and two long benches, and at the far end, for reasons known only to the county council, the hairdryers are mounted in a row facing outwards, so that using one requires you to stand with your back to the entire room. A swimming costume covers everything I had. That was never the problem. The problem is the eleven seconds between the towel and the costume, and the fact that those eleven seconds have to happen somewhere. --- I had a plan. I had had a plan since Sunday, which tells you something about how much of my week this occupied. Arrive at ten to seven rather than seven, when it is emptier. Corner cubicle, the one by the fire door, because the sight lines are worse. Costume on underneath, at home, before leaving the house. Towel over the shoulder rather than round the waist. Out, swim, and dry off in the same cubicle afterwards without hurrying, because hurrying is what makes people look. It was a good plan. I was quietly proud of it. I had thought about it in a meeting about procurement. --- Deborah from finance was at locker forty-one. Deborah does the mileage claims. Deborah has worked there nineteen years. Deborah is a fundamentally kind woman who once organised a collection for somebody in dispatch nobody else had noticed was ill, and who talks the way other people breathe. "You're never a swimmer," she said, delighted, with one arm in a cardigan. "Nineteen years and I never knew that." And there went the plan, because you cannot execute a discreet corner-cubicle manoeuvre while a colleague is asking you what you think about the office move. --- What follows is not a story about being caught. Nothing happened. I want to be honest about the scale of this: I am describing a woman standing in a public building, wearing a swimming costume, being spoken to about parking permits. And yet. The arithmetic that went through my head between ten to seven and five past is more complicated than anything I did at work that week. Where is she standing. Which way is she facing. If I bend to put my bag in the bottom locker, what is the angle. Can I reach the top locker instead without it looking like a decision. If I sit on the bench I am safe, but then I have to stand up again, and standing up from a bench is the single worst manoeuvre available to me today. Then the hairdryers, afterwards. Facing outwards. Absolutely not. Then, underneath all of that, a second calculation running the whole time, which was: what would I actually say. If she saw. If her face changed. I had three versions drafted by the time I got to the pool. The tumble down the stairs at home. The new gym class with the weights. And a third one, which I did not have words for and which was closer to: nothing, I would say nothing, because it is none of your business, Deborah, and I am forty-one. --- She did not see. Obviously she did not see. She was talking about a man called Roger and the disabled parking bays and she was looking, throughout, at the middle distance, in the way people do when the point of the conversation is the conversation. I got in the water at four minutes past seven with my heart going like I had done something. --- Here is what happened somewhere around length eleven, and it is the reason I am writing any of this down. I was cross with myself. Sitting in the water being cross, doing that thing where you interrogate your own conduct while breathing every four strokes. All that planning. A whole week of low-level dread about a leisure centre. What a ridiculous way to live, I thought. What a lot of energy spent on being ashamed. And then, quite clearly, from somewhere: I am not ashamed. I am careful. They are not the same thing and I had spent five days assuming they were. Shame would want Saturday not to have happened. Shame would be doing this arithmetic and hating the reason for it. I did about eight more lengths waiting for that to show up, honestly checking for it, and it was not there. I did not want to un-have Saturday. I would have Saturday again in a fortnight and had already said so. What I wanted was to control who knows, which is not a moral position at all. It is the same instinct that stops me telling Deborah what I earn, or what my marriage is like, or what I think about Roger. Privacy is not the same as secrecy and secrecy is not the same as shame, and I had them stacked on top of one another for five days without checking. --- I dried off in the corner cubicle afterwards, without hurrying. Deborah was at the hairdryers with her back to the room, entirely unbothered, at sixty-three, in the manner of a woman who has long since stopped auditing herself for other people. There is a lesson in that which I am not ready for yet. In the car park she asked whether I would be there next Thursday, and I said yes, and I meant it. Then she said the office move had been put back to November, which was the most useful thing anybody told me all week, and I went to work with wet hair feeling about four inches taller. --- I have adjusted one thing since, which is that I now book the Saturday and the swim in the same conversation. If I want to be in the water on Thursday I say so, and he keeps it above the line where a costume sits, and it costs him nothing to do that. Which is the whole of what I would tell anybody standing in a changing village doing sums. You are allowed to want both. You do not have to give up the Thursdays to have the Saturdays, and you do not have to be ashamed of arranging your life so that the two of them never meet. ## Read next - [More fiction and fantasies](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/) - [How do I hide the marks?](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/questions/how-do-i-hide-the-marks/) - [Marks and bruising](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/marks-and-bruising/) - [Negotiation](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/negotiation/) - [Can I do this without anyone knowing?](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/questions/can-i-do-this-without-anyone-knowing/) > ## 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.