The undressing

Fiction, about two adults over 18. She had negotiated the implement, the number and the position. Nobody had warned her that the hard part would be a button.

Fiction. Every character in this story is a consenting adult over 18.

A story by the editor.

We had spent a fortnight negotiating like two people buying a house. Implement, agreed. Number, agreed. Where I would be, agreed, with an actual discussion about the height of the chest of drawers. Safe word, agreed and repeated back. I had been quite proud of how businesslike I was about all of it.

Nobody had said anything about the clothes.

I assumed it would just happen. That there would be a moment in the middle of everything where things came off, the way they do, without anybody having to look at it directly. That is not what happened. What happened was that James sat down on the edge of the bed, at ten past nine on a Tuesday, and said, "Right. Take your things off, and fold them, and put them on the chair."

And then he waited.

I want to explain what four minutes of that is like, because I have never read it written down anywhere and I looked.

It is not like undressing. Undressing is something I do a hundred times a year in front of this man without a single thought passing through my head. This was the same physical actions performed by somebody entirely different, in a room I suddenly could not remember the layout of, with my own hands behaving like somebody else's.

The cardigan was fine. I was still a woman taking off a cardigan.

The shirt was where it started, because a shirt has buttons and buttons take time. There is no way to do buttons quickly. You have to stand there and go down them one at a time while somebody watches, and the watching is not a normal watching, it is the kind where nothing is being offered back.

He was not smiling. He was not being unkind either. He was simply waiting for me to finish a thing he had told me to do, the way you might wait for somebody to find their ticket.

Halfway down the buttons I understood, in a way I have never understood from reading about it, that I was doing this to myself. Nobody was taking anything off me. My own hands, on the instruction of a man sitting quietly on a bed. Every button was a small yes that I was choosing to say, out loud, with my fingers.

I got the shirt off and folded it. The folding was his idea and I now know why: it takes twice as long and it makes you tidy your own humiliation.

The worst of it was not being undressed. It was the state in the middle.

There is a moment where you are wearing one thing, and one thing is much worse than nothing, because nothing has a sort of blankness to it and one thing looks exactly like what it is. I stood on my own bedroom carpet in one remaining garment with my arms not knowing where to be, and I thought: this is the most exposed I have been in my adult life and I am not even undressed yet.

"And the rest," he said. Not unkindly. That was somehow the thing. There was no relish in it. He sounded like a man reading out the next line of an agreed agenda, which is precisely what he was, because I had written half of it.

I said, "Give me a second."

He said, "You can have as long as you like."

Which was worse. Obviously it was worse. If he had hurried me I could have been hurried. Instead I had to stand there and eventually decide, again, in cold blood, with all the time in the world.

Then he told me to stand up straight and put my hands at my sides, and he looked at me.

Not for long. Fifteen seconds, twenty. Long enough that I found out what my own face does when there is nothing for it to do. I have been looked at by men all my adult life and I have never once been looked at like that: unhurried, with no compliment coming, and no possibility of deflecting it with a joke, because I had agreed in writing that I would not.

And here is the part I have never said to anybody except him and am only writing now because I have read enough to know it is not rare.

I was mortified. Genuinely, hotly mortified, in a way that made the back of my neck burn. And underneath the mortification, obvious to me and I assume to him, my body had made its own arrangements about the situation and was not taking instructions from the committee.

So there I was: forty-one, in my own bedroom, ashamed to the roots of my hair, and wanting it. Both, completely, at the same time, with no gap between them at all. I had spent about two years assuming that if that ever happened it would mean something was wrong with me.

He did not say anything about it. We had discussed that too, on the second Sunday, in the car park at the garden centre, in a conversation I could barely get through. I had said: if you notice, do not mention it. And he had written it down on the list along with everything else, and he did not mention it, and the not mentioning was the kindest thing that happened all evening.

The spanking itself took about twelve minutes. It hurt. I had asked for it to hurt. Somewhere in the second half I stopped being a woman with an opinion about how she looked, which is the closest I can get to explaining what I actually go there for.

What I remember most clearly is not any of that. It is being face down with my eyes shut, thinking, with total clarity: he has seen all of this and he has not changed. That is the sentence. Nineteen years of marriage and I had never once let him look at me while I was not managing the way I was being looked at, and the roof had not come off the house.

Afterwards he did something I did not expect and had not asked for.

Before the water, before any of it, he picked my dressing gown off the back of the door and put it round my shoulders, and did the belt himself because my hands were still not entirely mine. The scene was over and so was the being looked at, and he ended them both in the same movement.

I cried a bit at that and not at any of the rest of it. He said, "I know," which is his answer to most things and is usually correct.

Later, downstairs, in the gown, eating toast at half past eleven, I said, "The buttons were the worst part."

He said, "I know. That is why I asked for the folding as well."

Nineteen years. He is not a subtle man about anything else. He cannot buy a birthday present. But he had worked out, from one badly worded paragraph I had sent him at midnight, that the part I dreaded was not the implement, and he had built the whole evening around the four minutes on the carpet.

We have done it eleven times since and the undressing has not got easier. I asked him once whether he thought it would, and he said he hoped not, and I said that was a horrible thing to say to your wife, and we both laughed, and he was completely right.

That is the thing I would want to tell somebody standing at the start of this, braced for the wrong part. The implement is not the frightening bit.

The frightening bit is a chair with your folded clothes on it and a man who is prepared to wait, and the discovery that you will do it anyway, and that the shame does not kill you, and that somebody can watch the entire thing and think no less of you at the end than they did at the beginning.