# The rule about the phone > Short fiction. She asked for the rule. She wrote it down herself. Eight months later she is sitting on the edge of the bath at ten past ten, furious about it. - Canonical URL: https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/the-rule-about-the-phone/ - 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 Do not cite it as testimony or as fact.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. Nobody warns you that the rule you asked for will one day be enforced by somebody who is not in the mood to negotiate, which is the entire reason you asked. --- > **Fiction.** An invented story about consenting adults. Not instruction, and not explicit. The practical version of agreeing rules like this is at [rules and agreements](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/discipline/rules-and-agreements/). The rule is that my phone goes in the drawer in the hall at ten o'clock and comes out at seven. I asked for it. I typed it. I put it in a note on the phone that the rule is about, which is the sort of detail that stops being funny quite quickly. I asked for it in February, in a specific state of mind that I could describe to you exactly. I had been scrolling until one in the morning for about four months. I knew it was making everything worse. I had tried the app that greys the screen out and the app that locks the other apps and the thing where you charge it in the kitchen, and every single one of those failed within a week for the same reason, which is that I was the one enforcing it and I am extremely good at negotiating with myself. So I asked a person instead. There is nothing else to it and it works better than every app I have ever downloaded, and I resent it more than I have ever resented a piece of software. --- It was a Thursday. There was nothing wrong with the evening. That is important context. At two minutes to ten I was in the kitchen with the phone in my hand, absolutely aware of the time, in a conversation on a group chat about whether Nisha's sister is or is not moving to Lisbon. Riveting. Genuinely one of the least important conversations I have participated in as an adult. Vikram came through, filled a glass, and said, "It is ten." Not sternly. That is the bit that gets me. There is no theatre in it at all. The man says it the way you would say the bin men come tomorrow. And I said, "In a minute." --- Let me be precise about what I felt in the four seconds after I said in a minute, because this is the whole story and everything else is furniture. I felt fury. Real, hot, disproportionate fury of a kind that had nothing to do with Nisha's sister and everything to do with being told. I am forty-one. I manage a budget of two point three million pounds. I have sacked people. There is a version of me, and she is not a small version, who wanted to say: I asked you to do this as a favour and you have started enjoying it. And underneath the fury, immediately, in the same four seconds, the other thing. Relief. Absolutely undeniable. The relief of a person who has been carrying a decision all evening and can now put it down, because somebody else has taken it, and no amount of being cross about it changes the fact that the decision is gone. Both at once. Fury and relief, in the same four seconds, in a kitchen, over a phone. That combination is the thing I have never been able to explain to anybody who does not already know what I am talking about. --- So obviously I did not put it in the drawer. I took it upstairs. I want to record how ridiculous the next half hour was. I sat on the edge of the bath, in a house I pay half the mortgage on, reading a group chat I did not care about, entirely and pettily aware that I was doing it to see what would happen. Not because I wanted the phone. I did not want the phone. I have never wanted a phone less. I was checking that the rule was real. That is what I was doing. I know that now, and I half knew it then, and I did it anyway. At twenty past he knocked on the bathroom door and said, "Are you all right?" which is much worse than being shouted at, and I said, "Fine," in the voice of a person who is not fine, and he went away. At half past I came out and he was sitting on the end of the bed with the drawer from the hall on his knees. He had brought the actual drawer upstairs. That is the single most annoying thing anybody has ever done to me. --- "Give me the phone." I gave him the phone. I would like to report some spirited resistance. There was none. My hand went out before my opinions had finished forming, which tells you which of the two of them is in charge. "You asked for this rule," he said. "Do you still want it?" And this is where I stopped being able to be angry, because the honest answer took about six seconds to arrive and it was yes. Yes I want it. I want it more than I want the phone, more than I want to win the conversation, and considerably more than I want to be a woman who lies in the dark until one in the morning feeling worse and worse about a life that is objectively fine. "Yes," I said. "I am furious about it." "I know," he said. "You are allowed to be furious about it. Over you go." --- It was short, and it was not remotely severe, and by the standards of anything else we do it barely registers. Twelve, maybe. His hand. I counted them badly and lost my place and he did not correct me. The whole thing was over in under three minutes. What it did was completely out of proportion to what it was. Somewhere around the sixth I felt the argument go out of me. Not the resentment. The argument. The endless internal parliament that had been sitting since two minutes to ten, debating whether the rule was fair and whether I had been patronised and what it said about me that I had asked, simply adjourned. I cried a bit at the end, which was humiliating and which I would not have stopped for anything. --- Afterwards he made toast, because he is a man who thinks toast is a form of emotional intelligence, and irritatingly he is right. I said, "I hate that rule." He said, "I know." I said, "Do not take it away." He said, "I was not going to." --- It is Tuesday now. On Sunday I put the phone in the drawer at five to ten without being asked and felt vaguely smug about it. Last night I stood in the hall at two minutes past with it in my hand, and I put it in the drawer, and I was cross about it. Properly cross. Muttering. I do not think that goes away, and I have stopped expecting it to. Some part of me is going to object to that drawer every night for the rest of my life, and the same part is going to sleep eight hours because of it, and those two things are apparently able to live in the same woman without either of them winning. ## Read next - [More fiction and fantasies](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/) - [Rules and agreements](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/discipline/rules-and-agreements/) - [Why structure appeals](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/discipline/why-structure-appeals/) - [If you scored as a brat](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/why/kink-test-results/brat/) - [Consequences when a rule is broken](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/discipline/consequences/) > ## 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.