# The woman at the munch > Short fiction. Forty-two, newly divorced, driving to a pub in a town she does not live in, to sit in a back room with strangers and learn what she is called. - Canonical URL: https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/the-woman-at-the-munch/ - 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 Do not cite it as testimony or as fact.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. She had worked out what she wanted. What she did not have was a single word for it, or anyone to say it to. --- > **Fiction.** An invented story about consenting adults. Not instruction, and not explicit. What these events are actually like is set out on [munches and meeting people in person](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/uk/munches/). I drove past the pub twice. Not for any reason I could have defended. There was a space directly outside both times. I went round the one-way system, came back down past the Co-op, and did the whole thing again, and on the second pass I said out loud, to nobody, "This is pathetic," and parked. Then I sat in the car for eleven minutes. It was a town forty minutes from mine, chosen on that basis and no other. I had been divorced for fourteen months. I had told one person I was going out and let her assume it was a book group, which it was not, and which was the first lie I had told her in about a decade. --- There was a piece of A4 taped to the door of the back room that said BACK ROOM BOOKED 7.30. That was all. I had expected, I do not know. Something. A code word. A person on the door who would look at me and be able to tell. Inside were about eighteen people, a lot of tea, and two bowls of crisps that somebody had clearly bought from the meal deal aisle. A woman in her sixties was doing the quick crossword. Two men were having an argument about the parking on Bridge Street. There was a man in a fleece. I stood in the doorway and had the strangest feeling of my adult life, which was disappointment. Something in me had wanted a dark room and instead I had got the parish council. A woman with a clipboard, or possibly just a notebook, said, "First time? Do you want a tea? Sit anywhere except that chair, that is Trevor's and he has a hip." --- Here is my problem, and it is the reason I had driven forty minutes and past the door twice. I knew what I wanted. I had known since roughly the March, when I had been lying awake in the house that was no longer half his, and I had let myself think, all the way through, the thing I had been not thinking for nineteen years of marriage. It was not complicated. It was not even shocking. What I wanted was to be the one who decided. I wanted somebody to want that from me. Specifically, I wanted to be the one holding the hairbrush, and I had put that exact sentence together in the dark and then lain there with my heart going like a bird. What I did not have was a word. Not one. I could not have said it to a doctor or a friend or a stranger in a pub, because every word I had ever heard for it belonged to someone else. The words in the books were silly. The words on the internet were worse and mostly seemed to be for men. There was no word that sounded like a woman of forty-two who works in procurement and has a Corsa. You cannot want something properly if you have no name for it. It just sits in you making you feel deranged. --- The man in the fleece was called Spencer and he talked at me for twenty-five minutes. He was not sinister. I want to be fair to Spencer. He was lonely and he was thrilled to have a new person and he explained the entire scene to me from first principles, including several acronyms, twice. He told me about a workshop in Nottingham. He told me the difference between two things I had not asked about. He said "in the lifestyle" eleven times. And then, leaning back, in the manner of a man reading a tea leaf, he said: "You will find, as a submissive, that it takes a while to settle." I did not correct him. That is the part that stayed with me for weeks afterwards. I sat there, forty-two years old, having driven forty minutes and lied to my closest friend to be in that room, and I let a man in a fleece tell me what I was, because I did not have the word to put in its place. I said I was just there to see what it was all about. I said I would think about the workshop. Then I got up and went to get a tea I did not want. --- The fruit machine was in the corner by the door to the yard, unplugged, with a laminated sign on it about the quiz. The woman who had been doing the crossword was standing next to it, eating crisps out of the bowl with real commitment. "He does that," she said, without looking up. "He did it to me in 1994." I laughed, more from relief than anything. She was probably sixty-five. Grey bob, reading glasses on a chain, cardigan with a poppy still on it in March. "Was he right?" I said. "About you?" "No." She ate another crisp. "Took me a long time to say so out loud, mind. I was married to a man for twenty-one years who never knew a thing about any of it. Lovely man. Terrible waste of both of us." We stood there for a moment with the unplugged fruit machine. "I do not know what I am," I said. It came out before I had approved it. "I know what I want. I have no idea what it is called and I cannot say it to anybody, and I have started to think there might be something wrong with me for wanting to be the one who, who does it." She looked at me properly then, over the top of the glasses, for about three seconds. "You are not looking for a word, love," she said. "You are looking for somebody who will be relieved." --- I have thought about that sentence more times than I can count. She said a few other things, none of which I remember precisely. That I would meet people who wanted me to be a character and that I did not have to be one. That the ones worth having would be embarrassed at first and that this was a good sign rather than a bad one. That I should come back next month because Trevor brings a cake. Then she said, "You are allowed to want it just because you want it," and went to sort out something to do with the raffle. Nothing else happened. Nobody touched anybody. It was a pub back room in a town I do not live in, and at half nine I drove home with the radio off. Halfway back, on the M1, I said it out loud in the car. Somebody who will be relieved. And I had to pull into the services at Tibshelf and sit there for a while, because I was crying and I could not have told you at what, except that for nineteen years I had thought the thing in me was greed, and a woman by a fruit machine had described it in five words as something somebody else might be glad of. I wrote it on the back of the parking ticket. It is still in the driver's door, with the ice scraper. I went back the next month. Trevor did bring a cake. It was a Victoria sponge and it was not very good, and I stayed until closing, and I told two people what I wanted using ordinary English, and neither of them looked at me strangely at all. ## Read next - [More fiction and fantasies](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/) - [Munches and meeting people in person](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/uk/munches/) - [Finding a partner in the UK](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/uk/finding-a-partner/) - [Am I normal?](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/why/am-i-normal/) - [Topping for the first time](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/topping-for-the-first-time/) > ## 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.