# The cushion > Short fiction. She asked me to cane her, and before I would let myself do it I spent three weeks alone in the spare room hitting a cushion with a chalk cross. - Canonical URL: https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/the-cushion/ - 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 Do not cite it as testimony or as fact.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. Most of the stories here are told by the person over the chair. This one belongs to the man holding the cane, and it ends on the first stroke. --- > **Fiction.** An invented story about consenting adults. Not instruction, and not explicit. The practical version of this is on [using a cane](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/using-a-cane/). She asked me in October, on the phone, while I was standing at my own sink with the tap running and my sleeves wet. Twenty-two minutes, that call. She had rehearsed the first ninety seconds and then run out of script, and I listened to a woman I have known since we shared a bad office in Croydon explain what she wanted done to her and why she had decided it should be me. I said yes. Then I said, give me three weeks. I could hear that land badly down the line. She had spent two years by her own account getting to the point of asking, and the man at the other end had responded like somebody booking a survey. I tried to explain and made it worse. In the end I said: this is not a no. I would like to be good at it first. She went quiet, and then said fine, three weeks, and rang off, and I was left in the kitchen with the tap still going. --- It took me most of that first week to get my fear into words. Hurting her was the entire point and she had been specific about how much. What kept me up was the other kind. A cane puts everything it has into eight millimetres of rattan, and the gap between a stroke she asked for and a stroke that opens her skin is about two inches of aim. The classic disaster is the tip. It carries on past where you meant to stop and comes round onto the hip, where the bone sits close to the surface and there is nothing behind the skin to take it. Underneath that was something I like less. I did not want to be the man she picked and got wrong. She would have forgiven me, and that was the unbearable part of the whole business, because she is the sort of person who would have made a joke and put the kettle on, and I would have had to live with a woman being kind to me about a scar. --- The cushion came off the two-seater in the spare room. It was my mother's sofa, orange, and it has outlasted two of my relationships and four house moves. The chalk I bought in a stationer's on the Holloway Road. A box of twelve white sticks, ninety pence. I had a whole sentence ready about a friend's pub and its chalkboard menu, and the man behind the counter took my money and said something about the rain. You draw the cross on the cover, then you rub a stick of chalk down the length of the cane, and after that the cane leaves a white line on the fabric wherever it arrives. Including the parts of it you did not mean to deliver. That is the whole trick, and it is why a cushion is honest in a way that a person in front of you can never be. A person will tell you it was fine. --- First night, eleven o'clock. Spare room with the door shut, for reasons I could not have defended to anybody in the building. A man of forty-eight in his socks, in a room with a broken exercise bike in it, hitting his mother's sofa cushion with a stick. Twelve strokes. Four of them went where I had looked. One came off the edge of the cushion completely, which on a woman is the hip, and I sat down on the carpet for a while after that one. Nobody warns you about the sound. The impact is a flat dull thump into stuffing and tells you nothing. It is the half second before it that gets you, a thin rising note like a wire being drawn tight, and I listened to that fourteen times a night for three weeks and it still does something to the back of my neck. I put a folded towel under the cushion because of the man downstairs. I hoovered twice a week, because chalk dust travels. On the fourth night the cat came in and sat on the arm of the sofa and watched the entire session, and I have never felt more ridiculous in my life, and I carried on anyway. --- I kept a notebook. That is the detail I have been putting off writing down. Date, number of strokes, how many landed inside a hand-sized area, and a column for the ones that crossed a line I had drawn down the side of the cushion where a hip would be. Week one, that column had a number in it most nights. I still have the thing. It is a Ryman A5, there are eighteen dated entries in it, and if I dropped dead tomorrow and somebody went through this house it is the object I would least like them to find, comfortably ahead of anything else in the spare room. Somewhere in the second week I worked out where the wide ones were coming from. I was drifting. As my arm tired I stepped in, half an inch a stroke, so that by the tenth the tip was arriving four inches further across than I thought. You cannot feel it happening. The chalk knows and you do not. So I put two strips of masking tape on the carpet where my feet went, and checked them every few strokes like a man reversing a caravan. My right forearm ached for a fortnight. I learned that the stroke lives in the elbow and the wrist and nowhere else, because once your shoulder joins in the thing is committed and there is no calling it back if she moves. --- She rang halfway through the second week to ask how it was going. I said fine. She said fine how, and I told her about the cushion, because I have never been able to hold onto anything on the telephone. She laughed. Properly, for about ten seconds, and I let her get on with it, and then the laughing stopped in a way I could hear happening. She said, every night? I said, most nights. Four seconds of nothing. Then she said she had to go and put the bins out, which was untrue, and at one in the morning she texted to say that nobody had ever taken that much trouble over her and she did not know what she was supposed to do with that. I took two days to answer and sent back something short and fairly useless. About the right size of reply, I think, arrived at by accident. --- By the end of the third week I could put six inside a hand without having to think about it while I did it, which is the real test. And then I found out that the fear had not gone anywhere. It had changed jobs. Aim is the part you can practise. Aim was never the whole problem. What do I do with my face while a woman I have known for eleven years is bent over a chair in front of me. What if I say nothing when she needs a voice in the room, or read her wrong at stroke four, or stop when she did not want stopping, or keep going when she did, or hear her go quiet and take the quiet to mean the thing it usually means. What if she cries the ordinary way rather than the way she has told me to expect. What if some part of me turns out to enjoy this in a manner I have not met before and would rather not. You cannot draw a chalk cross on any of that. --- On the last night I did twenty strokes and stopped. The seam along the top had given up around day sixteen and there was stuffing coming out of it like a burst pillow. You could not find the cross any more, because by then the middle of the cushion was all cross. I hoovered the room and put the cane back in its bag on top of the wardrobe. Then I turned the cushion over and put it back on the sofa with the marked side down, because I could not make myself bin it and could not tell you why. It is still there. People sit on it. --- Her flat, twenty past nine on a Friday. She had folded a towel over the back of the armchair and made tea she was not drinking. We went through it twice: the word, the number, the position, and the part about telling me on the way to bad rather than once she got there. She said, you have already asked me that. I said I know. What surprised me was how quiet I was inside. I would not call it confidence. Three weeks of doing a thing in a shut room settles your hands, and that is all it was. She got into position and said right, and then said sorry, and shifted her feet an inch, and said right again. I put my left hand flat on the small of her back, which was agreed, and measured the distance with the cane the way I had measured it against an orange cushion a few hundred times. Lower half. Well clear of the far edge, because everything I know about my own arm says that I drift. I looked at the exact place I wanted it to go, and I took my arm back from the elbow. It landed where I had looked. ## Read next - [Using a cane: aim, wrap-around and spacing](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/using-a-cane/) - [Topping for the first time](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/topping-for-the-first-time/) - [The woman who asked me](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/the-woman-who-asked-me/) - [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.