# The last train > Short fiction. She did the thing she had wanted since she was nineteen, then had to get on a train back into an ordinary Thursday evening with everybody else. - Canonical URL: https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/the-last-train/ - 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 Do not cite it as testimony or as fact.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, and nothing in it is explicit. She is fine at Stevenage. Somewhere after Peterborough she is not, and it has nothing to do with regret. --- > **Fiction.** An invented story about consenting adults. Not instruction, and not explicit. The practical version of this journey is on [getting home afterwards](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/getting-home/). I was doing up my coat when it occurred to me that I would have to go home. Which is a stupid thing to be surprised by. I had booked the train myself, three weeks earlier, at my own kitchen table, with a cup of tea going cold next to the laptop. The 21:03 from King's Cross, advance single, eleven pounds forty, and the last one that does not leave you standing at Peterborough at midnight waiting for a bus. But you plan the going. Nobody plans the coming back. Declan stood in the doorway of the front room while I found my other shoe under the sofa, and neither of us knew what to say, because there is no sentence for it. He asked whether I wanted him to walk me down to the station. I said no, it is ten minutes. He said right. Then he said, "Text me when you are in," which we had agreed on the phone a fortnight before and had both written down. At the door he put his hand flat between my shoulder blades for about two seconds. Then I was on the landing, and then I was on Leighton Road at twenty-five past eight on a Thursday, in light rain, being a woman walking to a station. --- The corner shop was the first strange thing, and the strange part was that it was a shop. Fridge humming, and a man behind the counter watching football on his phone with the sound off. A special offer on Lucozade taped to the shelf edge at an angle. I bought a bottle of water and a Twix and it came to two pounds eighty-five, and he said cheers love without looking up, and I said cheers, and I went out. Forty minutes before that I had been bent over the arm of a sofa in a first floor flat two streets away, doing the thing I had wanted since I was about nineteen and had never said out loud to anybody until I was forty-four. Nobody in the shop knew. That is obvious and it is also enormous. The man with the phone did not know. The woman behind me with a pint of milk did not know. There was nothing on me that said it, no mark on my face, no change in how I walked, and I kept waiting to be recognised, and the world kept declining to. --- King's Cross at twenty to nine is a room full of people looking up. The board said my train was delayed twenty-four minutes and did not say why. Everybody was doing the thing where you read the board, look away, and read it again four seconds later in case it has changed. I stood by a pillar near the barriers with my bag between my feet. I was aware of my body in a way I am not usually. Warm, mostly. Very awake. There was a hen party outside Pret in matching pink cowboy hats and one of them had somehow lost a shoe, and I watched all that with a fondness that was not like me at all. At six minutes past nine the platform went up and eleven hundred people moved at once. --- I had a table seat facing backwards, which I had picked in March without thinking about anything. You do it in stages. Hand on the table. Down onto the front edge of the seat. Then back, slowly, until you find the angle where it is warm rather than sharp. It took about six seconds and anybody watching would have seen a woman with a bad hip. After that it just sits there, like a bruise you keep pressing to check. The woman opposite was in her sixties, in a good coat, with a folded newspaper and a biro. She was doing the crossword in pen, which I have always thought was showing off. She was on four down when we pulled out and she was still on four down at Stevenage, and she never once looked at me properly. --- I was fine through Finsbury Park, and still fine at Stevenage when the trolley came and I bought a tea I did not want because buying it was something to do with my hands. Somewhere after Peterborough it arrived. I want to be accurate, because I have had regret in my life and I know what regret tastes like. This had a different taste altogether. No thought came with it. Nothing turned up in my head saying you should not have done that, or what would your sister say, or any of the sentences I had been rehearsing for twenty-five years in case they ever came. What happened was that my eyes went hot, in the dark, at the window, on a train crossing the flat black nothing between Peterborough and Grantham, and I had to put my hand over my mouth. The closest I can get to explaining it is this. For two hours I had been the whole of somebody's attention. I had been allowed to stop deciding things. And now I was in seat 47 with a paper cup, and in an hour I would be putting the bin out for Friday, and both of those were true about the same woman on the same day, and my body could not work out how to hold the two of them at once. It took about ninety seconds to arrive and it lasted twenty minutes. The woman opposite pushed a packet of Polos into the middle of the table without looking up from the crossword. She did not say anything. I took one. She took one herself about a minute later, moved the packet back to her side, and carried on with four down. I remember her better than I remember most people I have actually met. --- I texted Kath at ten past ten. Are you up. Kath has had Declan's address in her phone since the Tuesday, with a photograph of him and the time I said I would be home. She asked nothing at all when I sent it. She sent back a thumbs up, and then an hour later, "have you got your charger". She wrote back inside a minute. "Up. Boiler." And then for four solid minutes she told me about the boiler. The man had come on Wednesday and looked at it for an hour and a half. There is a part. The part comes from Germany. The part is two hundred and ten pounds and the boiler has been going since 2012, and Dave says just get a new one, and Kath says Dave says that about everything including the dog. She sent a photograph of the boiler, and then a photograph of the quote, and asked me what I would do. So I sat on a train at half past ten with my face wet and typed out a considered opinion about a Vaillant boiler. She did not ask where I was. She did not ask how it had gone, or whether I was all right, and that is how I know she had thought it through before she started typing. If she had asked me whether I was all right I would have come apart in a lit carriage in front of a woman with a crossword. A boiler I could hold. She gave me twenty minutes of something to hold, and then she wrote, "Right. Bed. Text me when you are in." So I did. --- Newark North Gate at eleven at night is a car park with one light on it. There was a single taxi. The driver talked about the roadworks on the bypass the whole way and did not require me to answer, which was a kindness he had no idea he was giving. Seven pounds twenty. The hall light was on because I had set the timer that morning, standing there in my dressing gown feeling faintly ridiculous about it. Coming into a lit hall. It sounds like nothing and it was the best decision I made all week. I put the kettle on and then did not make anything with it. I made two slices of toast and ate them standing up at the counter with my coat still on, looking at my own kitchen reflected in the black window, and I was completely fine again. That is the part I still find odd. Whatever it had been on the train, it had finished. It stayed away all weekend, then turned up on the Sunday for about an hour while I was hoovering the stairs, and after that it never came back at all. I texted Declan. In. Fine. He wrote back straight away: "Good. Talk tomorrow evening as agreed." He is not a man who improvises, and that Thursday I would have paid money for that sentence. Then I put my hand in my coat pocket looking for keys that were already on the side, and found the Twix. I had carried it a hundred and twenty miles. Out of a shop on Leighton Road at half past eight, ninety minutes on a train and twenty in a taxi, and not once had I remembered it was there. I ate it at twenty past eleven, standing up, still in my coat, in a warm kitchen in Newark, on a completely ordinary Thursday. ## Read next - [Getting home afterwards](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/getting-home/) - [Sub drop, and why it is delayed](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/sub-drop/) - [The hour I paid for](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/the-hour-i-paid-for/) - [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.