# Two copies > Short fiction. His side. He wants it all agreed and written down before the first time, and she hears it as him not trusting her. A page and a half, two pens. - Canonical URL: https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/two-copies/ - 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 Do not cite it as testimony or as fact.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. A man who spends his working life watching honest people remember the same day differently, and a woman who thought he was asking her to sign a waiver. --- > **Fiction.** An invented story about consenting adults. Not instruction, and not explicit. The practical version, including what a written agreement is and is not, is on [trust, both ways](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/trust-both-ways/). I spend my working life listening to two honest people remember the same Tuesday differently. I investigate complaints for a housing association. Forty-odd a month. A tenant who is certain the plumber said he would be back on Thursday, and a plumber who is certain he said Thursday at the earliest. Neither of them is lying, and both of them are sure. In the twenty-two years I have done this job, the only thing that has ever settled one of these is whether somebody wrote it down at the time. That is not an interesting fact about me. I mention it because it is the whole reason Leonie nearly walked out of her own kitchen. --- We had met four times by then. A drink, a walk along the river, a long lunch, and then her kitchen on a Sunday afternoon in March, which was where we had agreed to talk about it properly. She is forty-one and runs the front desk of a hotel out by the ring road, which means she spends all day being pleasant to people who are wrong. She had done this before, for years, with somebody else. So had I. I had brought two copies. A page and a half, typed, because my handwriting is a disgrace, and printed on the printer in my spare room, which had needed persuading. At the top it said "What we have agreed" and the date. Under that were the things we had already said across four meetings, put in order. Implements. Where. How hard, as a number. Marks, and how long they could last. What red means, what amber means, and what I will do if she stops talking altogether. How she gets home. Then a short section at the end with my name at the top of it. I slid hers across the table. She read the heading and the first few lines, and I watched her face close. --- "You want me to sign something." "Nobody signs anything. I want us both to have the same piece of paper." She put it down. Not angrily. Carefully, the way you would put down something that belonged to somebody else. "I did this for six years," she said, "with a man who never wrote down a single word, and it was fine. This feels like the form you fill in at a tattoo place. In case I sue." She looked at the sheet and then at me. "You think I am going to say something about you afterwards." There it was. It was a fair reading and it had hurt her, and I could see exactly where. She had told me things over those four meetings that I suspect she had told very few people, and I had answered them with paperwork. --- I could have backed down. I know exactly how it is done, because I watch people do it every week at work: the soft retreat, the oh, it was only an idea. I very nearly did. Then I thought about the alternative, which was doing this on a nod and hoping, and I made myself say the true thing instead of the comfortable one. "Partly, yes. I am covering myself. I am not going to pretend otherwise." She looked at me as though I had confirmed something. "I am going to hit you," I said. "On purpose, in a room with the door shut. If anybody ever asks what happened in that room, there are two witnesses, and one of them is the one doing the hitting. I know how that sounds. I know how it would sound to anyone else, and I think about it more than I would like." "Nobody is going to ask." "Probably not. That is not the part that frightens me." --- This was the part I had not managed to say on any of the four occasions, and I said it badly, and she let me. What frightened me was not a policeman. It was her, in a year or in five, after a bad week or a bad ending, remembering one evening slightly differently from the way it went. Not lying. I have seen people lie and it is a different thing. I mean remembering. Memory edits. I watch it happen for a living: a phone call becomes a promise, a promise becomes a threat, and the person telling it is sincere at every stage. "If that happened," I said, "I would be the man who did something to you that you had not agreed to. In your head, for the rest of your life. And there would be nothing I could say that would change it, because it would be my word against your memory, and I would not even want to win." She was quiet for a long time. "It is not only for me," I said. "The section with my name on it is not about you at all. It is what I have said I will do and what I will not. If I ever go past any of it, you have it in writing that I said I would not. That is a page you can hold up against me. I want you to have it." "And legally?" "Legally it changes nothing. It does not make anything allowed that is not allowed already, and if I ever actually injured you, a page and a half would not help me and it should not. It binds nobody, either. If you change your mind on the night, the paper loses. It is there so that we both remember the same evening." --- She picked it up again, and this time she read all of it, including my section, which I had been more nervous about than anything else on the page. Under my name I had written that I stop on red, at once, every time. That I will also stop if I am not sure, even if she has said nothing, and that she is not to take that as a verdict on her. That I would like her to say amber when she means amber, and not push through it to make things easier for me. That if something sits wrong with her the next day, she tells me the next day and not six months later, and that I will not be angry. And that if I am not all right afterwards, I will say so. I had added that line at one in the morning and very nearly deleted it. She read that last line twice. Then she said, without looking up, "I do not know whether he went past it." I waited. "The last time. Before it ended. I have thought about it for two years and I do not know, because neither of us ever said where it was." She turned the page over and back, as if there might be more on the other side. "I used to think that meant we trusted each other." --- She asked for a pen. She crossed out "hand only, first time", which I had put in out of caution, and wrote "hand and the hairbrush" above it in her own writing, and looked at me with something close to defiance. I said fine. Under amber she added "and he checks after an amber before he starts again", which was already true, and which she wanted in her own hand. At the bottom of my section she wrote a line of her own. "Hugh can stop whenever he likes and I will not sulk." Then, near the top, she wrote something she had not said in any of the four meetings. Something she wanted, rather than something she was prepared to put up with. She wrote it in very small letters and turned the paper round for me to read rather than saying it. What it was is nobody's business but ours, and it was perfectly ordinary. I do not think she would ever have said it across a table. On paper it took her about eleven seconds. I copied her changes onto my copy so that the two matched, and we each wrote the date at the bottom of both, in our own hands. She folded hers in four and put it in the drawer under the cutlery tray, where she keeps the guarantee for the boiler. I said that was exactly the right place for it, and she laughed for the first time in half an hour. --- A fortnight later, on the Saturday, I took my copy out of my jacket before anything started. I had planned to read it back to her line by line and ask whether it was all still true, because a fortnight is long enough for anything to change, and if it had, the new answer was the one that counted. She already had hers out. It had been unfolded and refolded so many times that the creases had gone soft. "You first," she said. "Is your bit still true?" In twenty-two years of asking other people what they remember, nobody had ever asked me that. I read my section out to her, all of it, including the line about not being all right, and said yes. Then she read hers to me. Then I put both copies on the chest of drawers, one on top of the other, and did not think about either of them again for an hour. That, it turns out, is what they are for. ## Read next - [Trust, both ways](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/trust-both-ways/) - [Negotiation](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/negotiation/) - [If the law gets involved](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/uk/if-it-goes-wrong-legally/) - [Yes, no, maybe list: a printable checklist](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/yes-no-maybe-list/) - [More fiction and fantasies](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/) > ## 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.