# The grey dress > Short fiction. Twenty-six pounds in a January sale, the plainest thing in the shop, bought to prove a point. A year of putting it on, and of taking it off. - Canonical URL: https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/the-grey-dress/ - 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 Do not cite it as testimony or as fact.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. One plain dress, kept in a boot bag on the top shelf and worn for nothing else, and what a year of wearing it has done to the dress and to her. --- > **Fiction.** An invented story about consenting adults. Not instruction, and not explicit. The practical version, including how to choose the thing and where to keep it, is on [clothes kept only for spanking](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/clothes-kept-for-this/). It cost twenty-six pounds in a sale in January, and it is the least flattering garment I have ever owned. Charcoal cotton jersey. Knee length, barely any sleeve, no zip, no buttons and no waist at all. It goes on over the head in one movement and then it hangs, straight down, like a dust sheet over a chair. In a shop window it would look like an apology. I chose it to make a point. Stuart had read somewhere that one garment kept for nothing else does more than any costume, and he suggested it over supper, gently, the way a man suggests something he suspects his wife of eleven years will find ridiculous. I did find it ridiculous. I went into town on the Saturday and bought the plainest thing in the shop, on purpose, so that when it did nothing I could say so. I am forty-six. I am a quantity surveyor, and as a rule I do not believe in anything I cannot price. The point has been made, repeatedly, over the last year, and it has been made against me. --- It lives in a cloth bag that came free with a pair of boots, on the top shelf of the wardrobe, behind the spare duvet. Nothing else goes in the bag. It never goes in the laundry basket. I wash it by hand in the basin and dry it on the airer in the back bedroom, where nobody but us ever goes. The first time was a Friday at the end of January. He said, "Go and change," and I went upstairs and took it out of the bag and put it on and looked at myself in the wardrobe mirror and laughed out loud. I looked like a woman waiting to be called through for an X-ray. I came downstairs barefoot, feeling extremely silly, and the evening was perfectly nice, and the dress did nothing whatsoever. I said so in the morning. He said, "Give it ten." I had no intention of giving it ten. I gave it ten because he never mentioned it again. --- Somewhere around the fourth or fifth time it started, and I can tell you exactly where, because it happens in the same place every time now. It is the second when it is over my head. Arms up, the cotton coming down, and for about one second there is grey over my face and nothing else. The light goes soft. The sound of the house goes muffled, the boiler and the road outside both a long way off, and I cannot see the bedroom or anything in it. Then my head comes through, and I come out the other side of it slightly altered. The same woman, with the week left behind on the far side of a piece of cloth. I fold my own clothes and leave them on the chair, because that is the instruction, and the folding has become part of it as well. Work trousers, tights, blouse, the cardigan with the mended elbow. I fold them as if somebody is going to inspect them, which nobody ever does, and lay them square on the seat. Then I go down. The stairs are cold in a way they are not when I am dressed. --- In May I came home and the bag was on the bed. Nothing else. No message during the day, nothing said when I walked in. He was in the back garden with the radio on, doing something to a bicycle. The bag was in the middle of the duvet with the drawstring still tied, and I stood in the bedroom doorway in my coat with my car keys in my hand for what I would guess was a full minute. That was when I understood that the bag had started doing it too. A boot bag. It cost nothing. And the sight of it lying on a bed in the May light had done more to me in one minute than anything I could have bought would have done in an evening. --- In July his brother came to stay for a week. The bag went into my suitcase under the bed, the airer went into the loft, and nothing happened in our house for eight days except a great deal of barbecue. I found I kept thinking about the suitcase. Not about the evenings, which I could wait for. About the bag, in the dark, zipped in with my summer sandals. In August it was still damp on a Friday, and he said never mind, and we went ahead anyway with me in my own clothes, jeans and the blouse I had come home in. It was fine. It was a bit like watching a play rehearsed in ordinary clothes, every line where it should be and the light slightly wrong. It took me longer to get there, and I got there. I was glad afterwards that it had happened, because I had started to worry that the dress was the only way in, and it turned out it was simply the quickest. --- October was the one I was frightened would spoil it. It had nothing to do with him. I had taken a phone call in the car park at work that afternoon, about a friend, and had decided it could wait until the weekend, and it could not. About twenty minutes in I started crying, and it was the wrong sort. I knew it was the wrong sort. I said amber, and then, a moment later, red. He stopped at once. What I remember is what he did next, which was not to put his arms round me. He said, "Clothes. Your own," and went up and fetched my jumper off the bedroom chair, and turned his back while I got the dress off. He folded it himself and put it in the bag and pulled the drawstring, and only then did he sit down beside me and say, "Right. Tell me." I was cross with him for about a day for not holding me first. Then I understood what he had done. He had got the dress out of that evening before anything in that evening could get into the dress. By the time I told him about the phone call I was in my own jumper, warm from the radiator, and the dress was folded in a bag on a chair, nowhere near any of it. The next time I put it on, a fortnight later, I braced for a flinch. Nothing. Grey over my face for a second, the house muffled, my head coming through. The same as always. --- That is the other half, the half I did not see coming in January. Taking it off. "Go and put your own clothes on." It is the last instruction of every evening and it is as definite as a door shutting. I go upstairs. The dress comes off over my head the way it went on, with the same second of grey, and when I come out of it this time I am back. My own clothes are on the chair where I left them, folded square, waiting. I put them on in the order I took them off. In a year I have not once had to wonder whether it was over. --- It has gone soft. The jersey has bobbled under the arms and the charcoal has faded along the seams to the colour of wet slate. In September the hem came down at the back and I sewed it myself at the kitchen table one evening, with my reading glasses on, more carefully than I have sewn anything in my life. Last week Stuart said, mildly, that it was looking tired, and that he could get another. I said no before he had finished the sentence. He asked why, and I could not say, and then I could. "A new one would just be a dress." He said this one was just a dress. I said it was not, and that he knew it was not, and that it had been his idea in the first place. He laughed and put his hands up and conceded. It is on the top shelf now, behind the spare duvet. On cold nights, when I reach up for the duvet, the back of my hand touches the bag, and the whole year arrives at once, January to now, and I stand there on my toes in the dark for a moment. Then I take the duvet and go back to bed. ## Read next - [Clothes kept only for spanking](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/clothes-kept-for-this/) - [Roleplay, uniforms and what to wear](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/roleplay-and-dress/) - [Headspace: subspace and topspace](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/why/headspace/) - [Aftercare](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/aftercare/) - [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**. 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