# The woman who asked me > Short fiction. Twenty-two years of friendship, then Nell, hands in the sink, asked me to be the one who does it. Neither of us had a word for what followed. - Canonical URL: https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/the-woman-who-asked-me/ - 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 Do not cite it as testimony or as fact.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 had thought carefully about who to ask, and the answer was me, and I have never been so frightened by a compliment. --- > **Fiction.** An invented story about consenting adults. Not instruction, and not explicit. If somebody has asked this of you, the practical page is [topping for the first time](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/topping-for-the-first-time/). Nell asked me on a Sunday, in her kitchen, with her hands in the washing up, which I have since worked out was not an accident. If your hands are in the sink you do not have to look at anybody and you have a reason not to. She had clearly rehearsed it, and the rehearsal had not survived contact. What came out was: "I want to ask you something and I need you to let me get to the end of it." Then about ninety seconds of the worst-constructed sentences I have ever heard from a woman who writes for a living. --- We have been friends since we were twenty-three. She was at my wedding and she was at the other thing four years later. I sat in a corridor at the Norfolk and Norwich with her for eleven hours the night her mother went, and neither of us has ever discussed what either of us said in that corridor. So I did not think she was mad. I want to be clear about that, because I know what people expect the reaction to have been. There was no moment where I thought less of her. There was not even much surprise, which surprised me. What there was, sitting in my chest like a swallowed stone, was vertigo. Because she had thought about it. Properly, for months, from the sound of it. She had gone through everybody she knew, every friend and cousin and person from the internet, and worked out who she could stand to be seen by while asking, and who would not make it into an anecdote, and who could be relied on to stop. And she had arrived at me. I have never been so frightened by a compliment in my life. --- Here is what I said, and I am not proud of the order of it. First I said yes, too fast, because she was standing there with her hands in grey water and her ears going red and I could not bear it. Then, about four seconds later, I said: "Wait. No. I mean yes. But wait." Then I asked her whether what she actually wanted was a doctor. That is the question I am proud of. Her mother had been dead fourteen months. She had lost a stone and a half without trying and she was doing that thing where she was extremely fine at all times, and if somebody in that state asks you to hurt them, the only responsible first question is whether you are being handed something that belongs to a professional. She said she had been seeing someone since the February and had told her about this months ago, and that the woman had said something useful, which was that wanting a container is not the same as wanting to be punished. Then she said: "It is not instead of anything. It is just a thing I have wanted since I was about nineteen and I am forty-five and my mother is dead and I have stopped seeing the point of dying without having asked." So we sat down at the table. --- The conversation that followed was the most awkward and the best two hours of the last decade of my life. Neither of us knew any of the vocabulary. I called it a safe word and then apologised for calling it a safe word, and Nell said, "No, that is what it is called, I looked it up," and then we both laughed for about a minute because she had looked it up and I had looked it up and neither of us had told the other. We were both writing things down by the end. Me on my phone, her on the back of a gas bill. What she wanted, which was to be held to something rather than hurt in any interesting way. What she did not want, which was a much longer list and included every single thing that involved a costume. How we would stop. What she would say if she wanted it to be over, and what she would say if she just wanted to be somewhere else in her head for a minute. And then the question we both avoided for twenty minutes and eventually did not avoid, which was whether this was a sex thing. The honest answer, which took both of us to arrive at, was: not in the way you mean, and neither of us can promise what it will feel like, and if it turns out to be complicated we will say so out loud rather than going quiet for a month. I have never had a more grown-up conversation with anybody, including two husbands. --- The first time was three weeks later and it was fine. Not transcendent. Fine. She knelt on a dining chair because her back is bad and I read out the thing she had done, which was a small stupid piece of self-neglect she had agreed to stop doing, and I did it with a hairbrush I had bought in Boots like a woman buying a murder weapon, and I stopped twice to check she was still there. I shook for an hour afterwards. She did not. She made toast at eleven at night and said, "You were worried you would enjoy it," and I said yes, and she said, "Did you," and I said, "Not the way I was afraid of," and she said, "No. Me neither," and that was the entire debrief. --- What I had been frightened of, and did not tell her for nearly a year, was that I would find out I liked it. Not the hurting. I have no appetite for the hurting and I still have not developed one. What I was afraid of was liking the other part. Being the one who decides. Being the one whose sentence closes the matter. The small clean authority of saying that is enough now and having it be enough. I have spent my whole working life being called bossy in a tone that meant something else, and I did not want to find out that they had all been right. What I actually found was less dramatic and much harder to explain. I do not like it. I like her being all right afterwards, which is a different thing altogether, and it took me two years to be able to tell the two apart. --- People want to know what we are. We are not together. I am not attracted to her and I am reasonably sure she is not attracted to me, although we have both stopped saying that sentence with quite as much confidence as we used to. We are not playing at anything. She is not my submissive, a word we tried once out loud and abandoned within the hour because it made us both laugh. She is my oldest friend, and once a month or so I am the person who tells her that what she did was not good enough, and afterwards we have toast. Nell calls it Thursdays. That is the only name it has ever had, and after two years I have stopped looking for a better one. ## Read next - [More fiction and fantasies](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/) - [Topping for the first time](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/topping-for-the-first-time/) - [Negotiation: what to agree beforehand](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/negotiation/) - [Safe words](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/safe-words/) - [Do women do this too?](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/questions/do-women-do-this-too/) > ## 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.