# The dictionary > Short fiction. She had been rehearsing one sentence since she was nineteen. On a Sunday evening, on a sofa, with the film paused, she finally said it out loud. - Canonical URL: https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/the-dictionary/ - 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 Do not cite it as testimony or as fact.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 happens in this story except a conversation on a sofa. She has been carrying one memory for twenty-five years and has never told a living soul. --- > **Fiction.** An invented story about consenting adults. Not instruction, and not explicit. The page underneath it is [when did you know](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/why/when-did-you-know/). I decided on the Wednesday and did not do it until the Sunday. That is the honest chronology. Four days of carrying a decision round the house like a hot plate, looking for anywhere to put it down. Adam had asked me something a fortnight before. Not a big question. We were talking about a novel he was halfway through, and there was a thing in it, and he said quite lightly, "Was any of that ever a thing for you?" and I said "God, no" and got up and did something unnecessary with the kettle. He let it go. That was the problem. If he had pushed I could have been cross with him, and being cross is easy and I am extremely good at it. Instead he let it go, and then it sat in the middle of the room for a fortnight like a piece of furniture we were both walking round. --- Sunday, ten past nine. Some film on that neither of us was watching. I was along the sofa with my feet in his lap and his hand round my ankle, which is a thing he does without any evidence of knowing he is doing it. I said, "Can you pause that." You learn a great deal about a man from what happens to his face when you say can you pause that. Some of them go straight to alarm. Adam paused it, put the remote on the arm of the sofa, and turned slightly towards me, and then said nothing at all, which meant that I had to. I had two versions ready. In one of them the whole thing was funny, an anecdote, delivered lightly, with a laugh built into the end so he would know which way to take it and I could watch him take it that way and we could both move on. In the other one I just said it. Four days of preparation and I was fairly sure right up to that moment that I would use the funny one. What came out was, "When I was nineteen I looked a word up in the dictionary at the central library." --- I told him about the library. There was an enormous dictionary in it, on its own little table, the sort that is too heavy for anyone to lift and has to be opened where it stands. I told him I already knew the word. I had heard it somewhere. I did not need to know what it meant. "That is the bit that took me twenty years to work out," I said. "I was not looking for a definition. I was looking for something else and I still could not tell you what. Evidence, maybe. That it was a real word, and it was in a book, and somebody somewhere had thought about it enough to write it down." "And?" he said. "About five words. Whatever it said. Absolutely no use to me at all." Then I told him the part I have never told anybody, which is what happened next, and which is nothing. I heard somebody coming. I turned the pages back towards the front so the book was open at the As. I squared it up on the table. Then I walked out of the library, and I was frightened, and not of being told off. "Of me," I said. "I understood at nineteen that I had done something that had to be hidden. Nobody had told me that. I worked it out on my own in about four seconds and I have never once questioned it since." And then, because I had come this far, "I have not told anybody that. Not Jasper, eleven years. Not my sister. Not the woman I saw every Tuesday for a year after the divorce, who I was paying. You are the first person. It is twenty-five years." --- I had been watching his face the entire time. That is the only reason I can tell you what it did, which was nothing. Not a blank nothing. Not the careful arrangement people put on when they have decided in advance to be supportive about whatever is coming. He was listening the way a man listens to directions he intends to follow. At one point he moved his thumb slightly, once, and that was the whole of his physical contribution. Then he did not say anything for what I worked out afterwards, from the clock on the shelf, was about eleven seconds. Eleven seconds is an extremely long time. I got four of them before I started to fill it, because that is what I do, and I said, "Anyway. Sorry. That is a lot for a Sunday," and he lifted his hand about two inches off my ankle, which is the most forceful thing he has ever done to stop me talking, and I stopped. --- He said, "Nineteen." I said yes. He said, "And you put the book back straight." Which was not a sentence I had prepared for. I had prepared for a lot of them. I had a response ready for everybody has something. I had a response ready for the sympathetic head tilt. I had a long, dignified, entirely imaginary response ready for a man who goes quiet, is perfectly fine about it for two weeks, and then stops replying to messages. What I had no response at all for was a man picking out the one detail in the story that I had never thought was the point, and being right about it. "It was open at A when I left," I said. "I have no idea why that felt necessary." "I know exactly why it felt necessary," he said. --- Then he said the thing. "I am not going to ask you what happened to you." And I heard myself say, far too fast and about an octave up, "Nothing happened to me." "I know," he said. "That is why I am not asking." I want to be accurate about what that did, because it is not the obvious thing. It was not relief. Relief came later, in the bath, at about midnight, all at once and rather undignified. What it was at the time was more like being handed back something I had not realised was being held. Because that was the fear. Not being told off, and not being laughed at either. Twenty-five years of being frightened that somebody would explain me. That a kind and intelligent person would listen to all of it, and nod, and then gently locate the damage, and from that moment on the thing I had wanted since I was nineteen would be a symptom of something rather than a fact about me. The woman I paid, on a Tuesday in the second month, had asked whether there was anything from my past I had not mentioned. She asked it in a voice with a destination in it. I said no. She wrote something down. I talked about my mother for the rest of the year and never went back to it. --- We started the film again at about twenty past nine and neither of us watched that either. The rest of it came out over the following few weeks, in pieces, on ordinary evenings. What I want, what I do not, what I think I want and am not sure about, all the sensible practical negotiating that people write down in lists and that I turned out to be perfectly capable of doing. None of it was hard. I could have written that list at twenty-five. It was the nineteen-year-old in the library I could not say, and once she was said the rest was admin. Near the end of the film he asked one more thing. "What was the word?" So I told him. It is not an interesting word. It is on the front of a hundred paperbacks. He nodded, and said "Right," and asked whether I wanted the last of the wine, and that was the end of the conversation. I have never in my life felt so unremarkable, and I mean that as the highest compliment I am able to pay anybody. --- Here is the part that stuck, and it is not anything either of us said. His hand stayed round my ankle for the whole of it. He did not grip when I said the thing about being frightened. He did not let go, and he did not pat me, which I think would have finished me off. At half past ten I looked down and it was in precisely the position it had been in at ten past nine, and he was watching the film, and he had no idea I was looking. ## Read next - [When did you know?](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/why/when-did-you-know/) - [Does wanting this mean I was abused?](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/questions/does-wanting-this-mean-i-was-abused/) - [No words for it](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/no-words-for-it/) - [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.