# The line > Short fiction. He is in Doha for six months. On Thursdays at nine the phone goes against the fruit bowl, and she does what she is told in an empty flat. - Canonical URL: https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/the-line/ - 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 Do not cite it as testimony or as fact.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, three thousand miles apart. The arrangement did not stop when he got on the plane. It got stranger, and in some ways better. --- > **Fiction.** An invented story about consenting adults. Not instruction, and not explicit. The practical version is at [long distance](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/long-distance/). The phone goes face up on the kitchen table at nine, propped against the fruit bowl. That is the whole set. Six months of it and I have never once done it in the living room, because the kitchen is where we used to do it, and I am apparently more sentimental than I would like to be about a room with a boiler in it. --- He took the Doha contract in March. Six months, possibly nine, the money we needed for the extension and for his mother, and a conversation on the sofa where we both said all the sensible adult things about how it would be fine. Neither of us said anything about the arrangement. Four years of it, the whole architecture of how we work, and we planned the freezer contents and the standing orders and did not mention the thing that holds us together. He raised it in the car to Heathrow. Of course he did. That is where the men in my life say things, side by side, eyes front, at seventy on the M4. He said, "We are not stopping it." Not a question. I remember the relief coming up through me like a hot drink, and I remember being unable to say anything at all for about a mile, and then saying, "How?" "We will work it out. Nine o'clock, your time. Thursdays." --- What it actually is: a phone call, once a week, for about forty minutes, and a great deal of what happens in between. The in between is most of it and I did not expect that. There are things I have to do during the week and report on. There is a photograph of the completed task, which sounds like nothing and is not nothing when it is a quarter to eleven and you are exhausted and you have to do it anyway because you said you would. There is a message at eight thirty most mornings that just says *Morning. Good day.* and which I have found myself waking up before, like a dog before the postman. On Thursdays the phone goes against the fruit bowl. --- He starts the same way every week, which was my idea. He asks whether the door is locked. He asks whether my phone is charged and whether Nadia knows I am busy. Then he asks how the week was and he means it, and we talk about the week like people, and my mother's hip and his terrible flat and the man at his work who chews. Then there is a pause of about three seconds, which I can now feel coming from about a minute out, and everything in the flat changes. "Right. Where are you?" And I tell him. And he tells me what to do, and I do it, and there is nobody in the room, and it works. --- The middle of it goes undescribed. It is ours, and also there is genuinely not much to describe, because he cannot touch me. It is instructions, and me carrying them out, and a count that I say out loud into a kitchen with nobody in it. What I will say is that it is slower than being in the room and much quieter, and that his voice on a bad line at nine in the evening in an empty flat does something that I could not have predicted from four years of him being physically present. And that at the end he says the same six words he has always said, and they still work, through a phone, on a delay, from a country I have never been to. --- Now the honest part, because I promised myself I would put it in. It is not enough. It is not enough in a specific way that I did not anticipate. The scene itself is nearly all there. What is missing is the twenty minutes afterwards, and it turns out that for me the twenty minutes afterwards was never the reward for the thing, it was the thing. He says, "All right? Tell me how you are," and he stays on, and he is good at it. He is patient and he does not rush off. But I am sitting on my own kitchen floor with my back against the dishwasher, holding a phone, being looked after by a voice, and there is a point about eight minutes in where the wanting somebody's actual arm round me becomes so specific that it takes my breath. Twice I have cried and not told him, which is cheating, and I know it is cheating. And then he rings off. That is the worst thirty seconds of my week. Not the call ending, but the silence after it, the flat noticing that something has stopped, the fridge starting up. You put the phone down and the room is exactly as it was at half past eight and you are not. I have a routine for it now. Tea, the good blanket, something undemanding on the television for half an hour before bed. I built it out of necessity in about week three, and it is entirely adequate, and adequate is a sad little word. --- And now the other honest part, which surprised me a great deal more. Some of it is better. We talk more. That sounds like the sort of thing people say in magazines about long distance and I would have rolled my eyes at it in February. But when the only channel available is words, you use words, and we have said things to each other on that phone at nine at night that four years of being in the same kitchen did not produce. He asks better questions now. He has to. He cannot see my face or feel my back or read any of the things he used to read, so he asks, and I have had to learn to actually answer instead of doing the small shrug that used to do the work. I have said sentences out loud to that phone that I had never said to his face. And this is the strangest one. Doing what I am told when he is not in the room is harder, and being harder makes it mean more. In the kitchen with him standing behind me, staying in position is simply what is happening. Alone, at nine o'clock, with the door locked and nobody watching and no possible way for him to know if I stopped, staying is a decision I make about eleven times in forty minutes. I did not know that about myself. I would never have found it out if he had not got on the plane. --- Nadia asked me at work whether it was awful, meaning the six months, meaning in general. I said it was fine, we talk every day, which is what you say. What I did not say is that I am more looked after by a man three thousand miles away, on a Thursday, for forty minutes, than I was in eleven years of a previous marriage where somebody was in the house the entire time. That is the thing I keep turning over. Presence is not the same as attention. He is not here and he is paying more attention to me than anyone has in my life, and I have had to completely rearrange what I thought closeness was made of. --- Seven weeks left. There is a countdown on the fridge, written by me, in pencil, like a woman in a war film. We have already discussed what happens when he lands, and it is not what you would think. Not the kitchen, not that night. He said, and he was right, that we should not try to do it on the first evening, because we will both be expecting it to fix something that will not need fixing by then. So the first night is a curry and the sofa and probably me falling asleep at half nine. The Thursday after, though. The phone stays in the other room. And I will have the twenty minutes afterwards, in an actual pair of arms, in a kitchen with the boiler in it, and I have been thinking about that far more than about anything that comes before it. ## Read next - [More fiction and fantasies](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/) - [Long distance arrangements](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/long-distance/) - [Self-imposed rules and doing it alone](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/self-imposed-and-solo/) - [Aftercare](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/aftercare/) - [Accountability](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/discipline/accountability/) > ## 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.