# The locked drawer > Short fiction. Two lodgers moved into the spare rooms within eight months, and a woman of fifty-three found she was living in a house with an audience. - Canonical URL: https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/the-locked-drawer/ - 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 Do not cite it as testimony or as fact.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. Nobody in it finds anything. It is about logistics, and what it costs to lose the ability to be spontaneous. --- > **Fiction.** An invented story about consenting adults. Not instruction, and not explicit. The practical version of the same problem is on [setting and space](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/setting-and-space/). We let both spare rooms in the same year. Katie moved in that February when her flat share fell through. Fraser arrived that October for a new job, after the one in Leeds ended. They are twenty-six and twenty-nine, they both pay us rent, they are good company and I like having them here. And between February and October I lost, without anybody discussing it, the entire operating system of my marriage. --- You do not notice what an empty house gives you until it is full. For years we had a place where nobody came home unexpectedly. Where you could leave something on the bed at two in the afternoon and it would still be there and nobody would have seen it. Where a raised voice was just a raised voice, and a long silence was just a long silence, and neither of them required a story afterwards. Now there is a Vauxhall on the drive at unpredictable times and a man who works shifts and a woman who has friends over at weekends. --- The first thing to go was noise. I had never thought of us as loud. We are not loud. But there is a difference between not loud and inaudible, and it turns out our house has been telling everybody in it what is happening in every room since 1998, and neither of us had ever had reason to find out. We found out on a Wednesday in March when Katie went past the door on the way to the bathroom, and there was a pause on the landing that was about a second longer than a pause on a landing should be, and then she carried on, and I lay there with my face in the duvet doing sums about what that second had contained. Nothing was said. Nothing has ever been said. But we have not used that room in the afternoon since, and there is now a radio. --- The second thing was storage, which sounds like nothing and is not. We had a drawer. Not hidden, not locked, just a drawer in a chest in a bedroom nobody else went into, and that drawer had been perfectly adequate for eleven years. Then Katie asked one evening whether we had a spare phone charger, and I told her, without thinking, to look in the chest in our room. It lives in the drawer above the one that mattered. Nothing happened. She found the charger. But I stood in the kitchen afterwards with my heart going and understood that my entire privacy strategy had been based on nobody having any reason to open anything, which is not a strategy, it is a run of luck. So: a box. A proper one, with a key, and the key on my keyring with the shed key and the one for my mother's back door. Forty-one pounds off the internet and delivered to the office, which is its own lesson learned. And it lives on the top shelf of the wardrobe behind the suitcase, because I am fifty-three and Katie is twenty-six and I refuse to have a conversation with a lodger about why there is a locked box in this house. --- The third thing, and the one I did not see coming, was the loss of the unplanned version. The best of it, for us, was never the arranged evening. It was the Sunday afternoon where he would say something in the kitchen in a particular tone and the whole shape of the day would change. Fifteen minutes later we would be upstairs, and it was good because it had not been scheduled, because it came out of something real that had happened between us at the sink. You cannot do that with a full house. The tone in the kitchen now gets a small apologetic look, and the look means Thursday, and by Thursday whatever it came out of has gone. That is a genuine loss and I have not found a way round it. We have talked about it. He says the anticipation is a fair trade and he may even be right, but he is the one who does the saying rather than the waiting, and I notice that he has never had to hold a thing in his chest from Sunday to Thursday. --- What we have instead is a diary, which is the least erotic sentence I have ever written. Katie does a Thursday shift and stays at Meg's after. Fraser plays five-a-side on a Thursday and then goes to the pub, and he is reliable about it in the way you are at twenty-nine. That gives us one evening a week where the house is ours with reasonable confidence, and we use it, and we book it the way you book a dentist. Some of it is funny. We have a code for it. It is not a clever code, it is just the word "admin", as in "are we doing admin on Thursday", which started as a joke about the diary and has now been in use for eight months and has acquired an alarming amount of power. He said it to me once across a table at his brother's house and I had to go and look at the garden. --- There are three rules now and we made them at the kitchen table like people arranging a mortgage. Nothing anywhere but our room, ever, whatever the state of the house, because the moment you start assessing whether the downstairs is safe you have started gambling. Nothing that requires either of us to be quiet in a way that spoils it, because an evening spent monitoring your own volume is not an evening off. And everything back in the box before we go to sleep, no matter how tired, which he thought was excessive for about a month and does now without comment. --- They will not be here forever. Katie is saving and Fraser is looking, and at some point in the next two years this house will empty out again and I will be standing in a very quiet hall feeling something complicated. That took more chewing over than I expected. What I have concluded is that I would not trade it. I like them being here. I like the noise and the shoes in the hall and being asked what we are having for tea. But I would say, to anybody in the same position, that the losing of it is real and you should say so out loud to the person you are with, rather than both of you privately deciding the other one has gone off it. We nearly did that. We had about six weeks in the spring where I thought he had lost interest and he thought I was embarrassed, and neither of us said anything, and the actual problem was a lodger's shift pattern. We sorted it out on a walk. Not in the house. There is nowhere in this house to have a conversation like that any more, which is, I suppose, the entire point of this story. ## Read next - [More fiction and fantasies](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/) - [Setting and space](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/setting-and-space/) - [Couples and existing relationships](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/couples-and-existing-relationships/) - [Can I do this without anyone knowing?](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/questions/can-i-do-this-without-anyone-knowing/) - [Negotiation: what to agree beforehand](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/negotiation/) > ## If a story touches something in your own life > > > > Free UK support, any time: Samaritans **116 123**. 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