# The warm-up > Short fiction. For years she thought the first twenty minutes were throat-clearing. She would like a word with the woman who used to say get on with it. - Canonical URL: https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/the-warm-up/ - 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 Do not cite it as testimony or as fact.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. She spent a long time treating the start of an evening as the boring part, and a longer time working out that it was the part holding everything else up. --- > **Fiction.** An invented story about consenting adults. Not instruction, and not explicit. The practical version is on [warm-up](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/warm-up/). I used to say get on with it. Not out loud, not at first. It sat behind my teeth for about a year, and then one evening in the second year it came out, and Felix stopped with his hand resting flat on me and said, "Right," in the tone of a man who has been asked to do something stupid by somebody he loves, and did what I asked. That evening was a disaster and it took me another six months to understand why. --- Here is what I thought the first twenty minutes were. I thought they were throat-clearing. The bit before the bit. A politeness, like the small talk before a difficult conversation, and I had never had any patience with small talk either. I had been thinking about this since I was about nineteen and the thing I thought about was never the warm-up. Nobody's is. What you picture is the part with the weight in it, and you picture it arriving whole, the way it does in the imagination, where there is no build and no logistics and nobody's knee goes numb. So there I was at thirty-four, face down on my own bed, effectively tapping my watch. --- What actually happens in those twenty minutes is that I stop being a woman lying on a bed. That is the only honest way I have found to put it, and I have tried a few. At the start I am entirely myself. I am aware of the duvet cover, which needs changing, and of the noise of a car reversing outside, and of the fact that this is Felix, who I have been married to for eleven years, and that we are doing this at nine on a Tuesday like people who have booked a slot. I am watching myself from a corner of the ceiling and finding the whole thing slightly ridiculous. The first few land on a body that is still mine in the ordinary sense. They sting in the way an elastic band stings, small and bright and irritating, and my instinct is to flinch away from them, which is not a decision. It is the same reflex that pulls your hand off a hot plate. I flinch, I tense, I apologise for flinching, which he has told me forty times not to do. Then somewhere in the middle of it, and I could not tell you where, the flinch stops arriving. --- The change is not dramatic and it is not pleasure, or not at first. It is more like the moment in a hot bath when the water stops being an assault and becomes the temperature you are in. Nothing about the bath has changed. Something about you has. The skin goes first. It stops being a surface that is being struck and becomes a kind of warmth in its own right, and the warmth is not local, it spreads down the backs of my legs and up into my lower back like the feeling of standing too close to a fire in someone else's house. Underneath that there is an ache that is not sharp and does not object to anything. Then my breathing changes without my involvement. Slower, and further down. I notice it about a minute after it has happened, the way you notice you have stopped listening to the radio. And then the extraordinary bit, which I did not believe when other women described it and now know from the inside. I stop pulling away and start pushing back. Not decoratively. Not to be encouraging. My body arrives at it by itself, a small lift towards the next one, and the first time I caught myself doing it I was so surprised that I laughed into the pillow and had to explain why. That is the whole hinge of the evening. Before it, everything is done to me and I am braced. After it, I am in the thing, and it can go where it likes. --- The disaster evening went like this. He did what I asked, which is to say he started roughly where he would normally have been at minute twenty-five, and I was still the woman with opinions about the duvet cover. It hurt. Only that. There was nowhere for it to go and nothing to catch it, and within about ninety seconds I was somewhere between furious and tearful for reasons I could not have named, and I said the word, and he stopped instantly and put a jumper round me and made tea and did not say anything for a while. What I remember most is how cheated I felt. Not by him. By the evening. I had asked for the good part without the boring part and had received neither, and I sat on the edge of the bath afterwards feeling like a woman who has eaten the icing off four separate cakes. Later he said, "It is not a queue. You cannot skip to the front of yourself." Which is the single most useful sentence anybody has said to me about any of this, and he says it was not that good and I have made it better in the retelling. --- Now I would not let anybody skip it, and I have been the one to say so, which is a strange sentence to write about a thing I once tried to argue my way out of. I have also worked out what else is happening in there, beyond the mechanics of skin and nerve. Twenty minutes is long enough for the day to stop. Whatever I walked in carrying, the email I did not answer and the phone call to my mother and the small argument at work that I have been rerunning since two o'clock, all of it needs a while to go quiet, and it does not go quiet on command. It goes quiet because something else has been the only thing happening for long enough. It is also twenty minutes of being touched by somebody who is paying total attention to me. I would not have listed that as a need if you had asked me at thirty-four. I have since revised. --- I feel a certain irritation towards her, that woman tapping her watch. She had read almost nothing, she had asked almost nobody, and she was quite sure that the good part was the hard part and everything else was padding designed for people less serious than her. She also thought that wanting the build made you soft, which is the part I mind most, because I know exactly where she got that. The whole subject is written up as endurance, and if you have only ever seen it written up as endurance then of course you think the measure of it is how much you can take and how fast you can get there. Nobody tells you that it is closer to cooking than to weightlifting. --- Last Tuesday he took about half an hour over the start, because it had been a fortnight and he is careful after a gap, and I lay there for the first ten minutes composing a shopping list. Then, at some point I did not notice, I stopped composing it. The car reversed outside. The duvet cover still needs changing. And somewhere in there the woman who thinks about the shopping list packed up and went out, and left the rest of me on the bed being warmed up by a man who has known for eleven years exactly how long it takes, and has never once said I told you so about any of it. ## Read next - [More fiction and fantasies](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/) - [Warm-up: the part everyone skips](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/warm-up/) - [Pacing a scene](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/pacing-a-scene/) - [Does it hurt?](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/does-it-hurt/) - [Headspace](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/why/headspace/) > ## 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.