# The week I was unbearable > Short fiction. Nine days of being vile to a man who did nothing to deserve it, and the Tuesday she stood in a doorway and asked him to do something about her. - Canonical URL: https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/the-week-i-was-unbearable/ - 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 Do not cite it as testimony or as fact.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. The hard part was not the asking. The hard part was the eight days before it, when I could see precisely what I was doing and could not make myself stop doing it. --- > **Fiction.** An invented story about consenting adults. Not instruction, and not explicit. The practical version of this is at [attitude and motivation](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/discipline/attitude-and-motivation/). I want to start with the inventory, because if I skip it this becomes a story about a woman who was a bit tired, and it was not that. On the Monday I was short with him about the recycling, which he had done. On the Tuesday his sister rang and I said something about the length of the call that was not a joke and was delivered as one. On the Wednesday I did the thing where you answer in three words. Thursday I cannot remember, which probably means it was the same. Friday I told him the shelf was crooked. It was crooked by about two millimetres and he had put it up on his afternoon off because I had asked him to. Saturday I was pleasant, and I have come to think Saturday was worse. I was pleasant the way you are pleasant to somebody at work. Then Sunday. --- Sunday we did not speak. Not a row. There was no row anywhere in the nine days, which is part of what made it so difficult to get hold of. We got up, we moved around a small flat, we ate two meals in the same room, and we did not exchange a sentence that was not about an object. At about four in the afternoon I was standing at the sink and I understood something that frightened me, which was that I could keep this up indefinitely. There was no natural end to it. Nothing was going to happen on Wednesday that made it stop. I had the horrible clear sense of a road going a long way ahead with nothing on it. People think the trouble with being unbearable is that you do not notice. I noticed everything. I could hear my own voice doing it, in the moment, with a little commentary running alongside saying that was unnecessary, he has done nothing, stop. And then the next sentence would come out with the same edge on it, and I would think: interesting. Apparently I am not driving. --- I have read the sort of writing where somebody has a bad week and their partner notices and takes them in hand, and I have always found it slightly false, because in my experience the other person does not notice in the way you want them to. Neil noticed. Of course he noticed. What he did with it was go quieter and more careful, which is what decent people do, and which made everything worse in a way I could not have explained at the time. Because careful is not what I wanted. Careful is somebody tiptoeing around a thing on the carpet that both of you can see. It confirms that the thing is there and that nobody is going to touch it. So it had to be me. That is the entire point of this story and it is why I am writing it down. --- Tuesday evening. He was at the table with his laptop doing something for work. I stood in the doorway for what was probably eight seconds and felt about twenty-two. I said, "I need you to do something about me." He shut the laptop, which I noticed. Then he did three things in a row that I have thought about since, in order. He said, "Are you ill?" I said no. He said, "Has something actually happened that I do not know about?" I said no, and I meant it, and I will come back to that. Then he said, "Is it me? Because if I have done something and you cannot say it, we should do that instead." That third question is the one. It is the question that separates a man who is willing to be handed authority from a man who has been waiting for a chance to use it. I said no, it is not you, and I watched him accept that at face value rather than fishing for reassurance, and something in my chest let go before he had done anything at all. "All right," he said. "Then yes." --- We did the boring part at the table, which is the part nobody writes about. Fifteen minutes. What it was for, what it was not for, what would be said and what would not. I was specific about one thing because I had thought about it while not sleeping. I said I did not want him to be angry. I said if he performed being angry at me I would be able to see it and it would be worthless, and worse, I would have to manage his performance on top of everything else. He said, "What do you want instead?" "Certain," I said. He wrote nothing down. He repeated it back to me once, in his own words, and got it right. --- It was not severe. I want to be honest about that because I think people imagine an attitude like mine gets met with something enormous, and it does not, and it would not have worked if it had. Over the arm of the sofa, his hand, and a long time. Unhurried is the word. He said very little and none of it was clever. He named three of the nine days, and only three, and he named them accurately, which meant he had been keeping count without ever once using it against me during the week itself. Somewhere in the middle of it the commentary in my head stopped. Not the pain, the commentary, the one that had been narrating since the previous Monday. It went quiet the way a fridge goes quiet, so that you only notice the noise by its absence. I cried for a while at the end and he let it happen without making it a conversation. --- Afterwards, on the floor with my back against the sofa, I said the thing I had been avoiding, which is that I was not sure all of it was mine. Marion left in June and they have not replaced her, so I have been doing most of two jobs since. I had not slept properly for about a fortnight. I said I did not know how much of the nine days was me being a person who needs pulling up, and how much was a woman running on four hours a night in a department that is one resignation away from a crisis. He thought about it for a while, which I appreciated more than an immediate answer. Then he said, "Probably both. I do not think you get to find out which." I have decided that is right, and I have also decided it is slightly unfair, and both of those are still true three weeks later. I did not get an explanation. What I got was an ending, and it turns out that at four o'clock on a silent Sunday what I actually wanted was an ending rather than an explanation. --- The last thing he did was the one that mattered. He said, "That is finished. I am not going to bring it up again, and neither are you." And the extraordinary thing, the thing I did not expect and cannot fully account for, is that I believed him immediately. No part of me was waiting for it to reappear in an argument in October. It was gone, in the way a paid bill is gone. I made us both a cup of tea afterwards, which I had not done in about a week, and we watched most of a programme about canal restoration, and I was bearable again by roughly nine o'clock. ## Read next - [More fiction and fantasies](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/) - [Attitude and motivation](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/discipline/attitude-and-motivation/) - [Consequences when a rule is broken](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/discipline/consequences/) - [What it is actually for](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/why/what-it-is-for/) - [Aftercare](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/aftercare/) > ## 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.