# The list of medications > Short fiction. She takes a blood thinner, and rehearsed telling him for a fortnight, certain it would end things. He asked what the pharmacist had said. - Canonical URL: https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/the-list-of-medications/ - 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 Do not cite it as testimony or as fact.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. There is a particular kind of dread that belongs to having to hand somebody a fact about your body before they have even seen it. --- > **Fiction.** An invented story about consenting adults. Not instruction, not explicit, and not medical advice. The practical version is on [health conditions and medication](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/health-and-medication/). I had the sentence ready for two weeks before I said it. I had it in the shape of a text, and in the shape of a thing I would say over coffee, and once, at about one in the morning, in the shape of an email I did not send. The sentence was: I take an anticoagulant, which means I bruise very easily and bleed for longer, and I understand if that is a problem. Look at the end of it. *I understand if that is a problem.* I had built the escape hatch into my own disclosure, because I was so sure of what was coming that I wanted to hand him the exit myself. Less humiliating that way. If you offer somebody the door, you can tell yourself afterwards that they were only being polite when they walked through it. --- Some background, because it matters to how frightened I was. I am forty-four. I have been on blood thinners since a clot in my leg four years ago, which arrived without warning on an ordinary Tuesday and which I do not much like thinking about. The tablets are not negotiable and I have no intention of stopping them, and anybody who has ever suggested otherwise to me has received a short answer. What they do, apart from the important thing, is turn my body into a sort of ledger. I catch my hip on the corner of the kitchen island and there is a bruise the size of a saucer three days later. A routine blood test left a mark on my arm for a fortnight. My legs in summer look like I have been in a minor traffic accident, permanently, and I gave up explaining it to people about two years ago. So when I finally admitted to myself what I wanted, which took an embarrassing number of years, the first thought was not excitement. The first thought was: well, obviously not. Not you. Not with that. --- I met Howard at a munch in a pub function room that smelled of carpet shampoo, and then twice more for coffee, and by the third coffee we had done all the sensible things. References that answered. A phone call. My friend Cath with the address and a time. In every single one of those conversations, I did not say the sentence. I told myself I was waiting for the right moment, which is what people say when they are waiting for the moment to stop existing. What I was actually doing was enjoying being a woman he was interested in for a few more days before I handed over the paperwork. In the end I said it in the car park of a garden centre, which is not romantic and is where I seem to say all the difficult things. I got most of the way through it. I did the escape hatch at the end, and I looked at the dashboard rather than at him. --- Here is what I had braced for, in order of how likely I thought it was. First, the flinch. The small facial adjustment people make when a body turns out to be a medical object, which they cannot help and which I can spot from about thirty feet. Second, the kindness that means no. "God, I would not want to risk hurting you." Said gently. Absolutely final. Third, and this is the one I dreaded most, the bravado. The man who says it is fine, it is all fine, do not worry about it, and who has understood nothing at all and will find out the hard way on my body. What I got was: "Right. What did the pharmacist say?" --- I had to ask him to repeat it. He said it again, in exactly the same tone, the one you would use asking about the parking charges. Had I asked anybody who actually knew. What had they said about bruising. Was there anything I had been told to watch for. And I sat in that car park and burst into tears, which was mortifying, because nothing bad had happened. Nothing bad at all had happened. That was the problem. I had asked a pharmacist, as it happens, eight months earlier, in a Boots in a town where nobody knows me. I had gone in with a story ready about being clumsy and having started a new exercise class, and I had not needed it, because she answered the question I actually asked, which was whether the bruising meant anything was wrong, and told me what a bruise that needs looking at looks like. Nobody asked me a single thing about my private life. I had rehearsed a fictional cover story for a conversation that turned out to be about six sentences long. --- We did not play for another three weeks after that, which was his suggestion and not mine. What happened instead was a conversation with a piece of paper in it. He wanted to know how long a mark from an ordinary knock takes to fade on me, because he had worked out, correctly, that this was the only usable measure either of us had. He wanted to know whether I could tell the difference between a bruise forming and a bruise that had gone somewhere it should not. He asked what my plan was if something looked wrong at eleven at night, and did not accept "I would probably just wait and see", and made me look up the number for the out-of-hours service and put it in my phone while he watched. Then he said the thing that undid me for the second time in a month. He said: none of this is me deciding whether we do it. This is me finding out how. --- The session itself was not the point of this story, so it is not here. It was, by any standard, mild. Hand only. Nothing that stung and then stopped, everything that built slowly, and stopping a long way before either of us wanted to. Afterwards he looked at the marks with me, in decent light, without any squeamishness at all, the way you would look at a bike that had been in a hedge. He noted out loud what was there. He said we would look again in the morning, and we did, and again on the Wednesday. I bruised, obviously. More than most people would from that, and both of us had expected it, so it was information rather than a shock. He adjusted for it the next time, downwards, without a discussion and without making a performance out of being careful. --- What I want to record, because I have not seen it written down anywhere, is that the competence was the sexiest part of the entire thing. Not his hand. Not the fact that somebody wanted to. The fact that a man asked what a pharmacist had said, and wrote a number in my phone, and treated my body as a real object with real properties that could be worked with rather than as either a tragedy or an inconvenience. I had spent four years experiencing my own medication as a thing that made me less. Less spontaneous, less easy, less choosable. Somebody treating it as a specification rather than a disqualification did more for me than any amount of being told I was still attractive, which is a sentence that always arrives with the word still in it. We are eighteen months in. I have a small ongoing argument with myself about whether I would have said the sentence at all if the garden centre car park had not been so boring. But I did say it, and the answer was a question about a pharmacist, and I would tell anybody sitting on a disclosure like that to go and get it over with. The worst outcome is that you find out early who somebody is. ## Read next - [More fiction and fantasies](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/) - [Health conditions and medication](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/health-and-medication/) - [Marks and bruising](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/marks-and-bruising/) - [Negotiation](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/negotiation/) - [Vetting a partner](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/vetting-a-partner/) > ## If a story touches something in your own life > > > > Free UK support, any time: Samaritans **116 123**. National Domestic Abuse Helpline **0808 2000 247**. 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