# The drink > Short fiction. A bottle already open, a glass poured for her, and three small remarks about it. Nothing else went wrong, which is what made leaving so hard. - Canonical URL: https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/the-drink/ - 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 Do not cite it as testimony or as fact.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. He was pleasant the entire time. That is the part I could not explain to myself on the bus, and it is the part that took me nine days to stop arguing about. --- > **Fiction.** An invented story about consenting adults. Not instruction, and not explicit. The practical version is at [drink, drugs and why not](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/drink-and-drugs/). We had agreed it in writing eleven days before. I have the message. I have read it more times than is healthy. It was not even his rule or mine particularly, it was one of those things that comes up in a proper negotiation and gets agreed in a line and a half. Neither of us drinks beforehand. He had written back: *Completely agree, never understood people who do.* I want that on the record before anything else, because when I got home I spent a considerable amount of energy trying to convince myself that I had made too much of a small thing, and every version of that argument required me to forget that we had both written it down. --- Flat in Wood Green, a Thursday, about half past seven. I had done everything the way you are supposed to. Public place first, three weeks earlier. Kirsty had the address and a time to hear from me. My own money for a taxi. Coat and shoes by the door, which sounds paranoid and takes no effort at all. He answered the door and he was exactly as he had been in the cafe. Pleasant, slightly nervous, more nervous than me if anything. The flat was tidy in the way a flat is when somebody has tidied it that afternoon. On the kitchen counter there was an open bottle of red and two glasses, one of them poured. --- I said no thank you. I said it lightly, and I said something about the message, half joking, in the tone you use to give somebody an easy way to say yes of course, sorry, force of habit. He said, "Oh, I know, I just thought one wouldn't hurt." And he laughed, and it was a perfectly nice laugh, and he poured himself one and left mine standing where it was. That was the first one. --- The second was maybe eight minutes later, sitting down, talking about something else entirely. He said, "You're sure about that? It's a decent one." Nodding at the glass, which was still on the counter, still full, in my eyeline. I said I was sure. The third was later again, and it is the one I keep coming back to because it is the smallest of the three and it is the one that made me get my coat. He said, and he said it kindly, "You're very tense. That's all it's for." --- Here is what went through my head, in order, in about four seconds. First: he is right, I am tense. Second: he has told me what my own state is and then supplied the remedy, and the remedy is the thing I have now declined three times. Third, and this is the one that got me up off the sofa: if he is doing this about a glass of wine, in the first twenty minutes, while sober, while trying to make a good impression, then what he does about the word red at nine o'clock is not something I want to find out empirically. That is the entire reasoning. That is all I had. --- I said I did not think I was going to stay. I said it badly. I think I said something about not being in the right frame of mind, which was cowardly and also true. He was fine about it. That is the thing. He was completely fine. He said no problem at all, and did I want him to walk me to the station, and I said no thank you, and he stood in the doorway and said it was nice to meet me and he hoped I got home all right. Nothing happened. Nothing happened at any point. I want to be clear about that because I know how this reads, and I know that a story where nothing happens is a story a lot of people will think I have overinflated. --- On the bus I did about forty minutes of the following. He offered you a drink. That is what people do when you come to their house. You have made a man feel like a predator because he was hospitable. He was nervous, which is why he poured one for himself, which is a perfectly human thing to do. Three remarks is not a campaign. He did not put anything in it. He did not press it into your hand. He apologised, sort of. He said no problem when you left. He was nicer about you leaving than most men would be, and you have repaid that by deciding he is a certain kind of man on evidence that would not fill a postcard. And underneath all of that, running the whole way home, the real one: you have been talking to him for five weeks and you liked him and now you have thrown it away and you will have to start again from nothing. I did not cry, but it was close, and it was not fear. It was the specific misery of having been rude to somebody who had not, in any way you could point at, done anything. --- I told Kirsty the next day, over the phone, and I told it in the deprecating version, which is my habit. I said I had bottled it over a glass of wine. She let me finish. Then she said, "How many times did you say no?" I said three. She said, "Then he heard you three times." There was a pause while I did not say anything. She said, "You keep telling me the story as if the wine is the point. The wine isn't the point. You said no, clearly, and he kept going, and he was nice while he did it. That is the information. Nothing else about the evening is relevant." --- Nine days on, I have come round to it, mostly. What made it so hard is precisely that it was small. If he had shouted, or grabbed the glass, or got sulky, I would have been out of the door with total moral clarity and Kirsty would not have needed to say anything. Small is what makes you argue with yourself. Small is deniable, by him and, much more importantly, by me. And nice is the other half of it. He was nice the entire time, including at the end, and I have worked out that his being nice about my leaving is not the counter-evidence I was treating it as. It costs a man nothing to be gracious in a doorway. It costs him something to hear a stated limit and stop, and that is the one he did not do. --- I have not messaged him. I keep composing something that explains it, because part of me still wants him to understand that I was not being precious, and Kirsty says that is me trying to get permission to have left, which is annoying and correct. What I have done instead is write the whole thing down, including the forty minutes on the bus, because if it happens again in a year I would like to be able to read this rather than start the argument from the beginning. Three noes. Three remarks. Nothing else went wrong. Nothing else needed to. ## Read next - [More fiction and fantasies](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/) - [Drink, drugs and why not](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/drink-and-drugs/) - [Red flags](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/red-flags/) - [Meeting safely: the actual protocol](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/meeting-safely/) - [The one I walked away from](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/the-one-i-walked-away-from/) > ## 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.