# Wednesday, the third year > Short fiction. It is raining, she is tired, nothing is wrong, and she still wants it. Three years in, the wanting has become something other than excitement. - Canonical URL: https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/wednesday-the-third-year/ - 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 Do not cite it as testimony or as fact.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. Nobody writes about the middle of things, which is where most of it actually happens. --- > **Fiction.** An invented story about consenting adults. Not instruction, and not explicit. The practical version of a scheduled arrangement is on [the maintenance session](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/scenes/maintenance-session/). It is raining, which it has been since Sunday, and there is a wet coat over the bannister that neither of us has moved for two days. I got in at twenty past six. There is a chicken thing in the oven that I put together on Sunday and froze, and the recycling did not go out because it is Wednesday and the recycling is Tuesday, and I have a call at nine tomorrow that I am not ready for. In about two hours my husband is going to take me upstairs and I am going to let him, the way I have let him more or less every Wednesday for three years. I have been trying for a while to work out how to describe what that feels like now, because it is not what it felt like at the beginning and there is nothing written down anywhere that I recognise. Everything I have read is about the first time. The first time is easy to write about. Everybody remembers their first time at anything, and the words are all sitting there ready: terrified, exposed, undone. Nobody writes about the hundred and fortieth. --- Here is the closest I can get. At the beginning it was an event. It had a shape like a wave: days of dread building up in front of it, then the thing itself, then two days of feeling scoured out and slightly holy afterwards. I could not eat on Wednesdays. I used to sit in meetings in the afternoon and think about it in a way that made my ears go hot, and once, in the second month, I had to leave a leaving do at half seven because I could not hold a conversation about somebody's move to Leeds. That has gone. I want to be honest about that because I think women expect it to last and are alarmed when it does not, and conclude that they are doing it wrong or that they have broken something. What replaced it is harder to name. The best I have managed is this: it stopped being an event and became a fixture. Like Sunday lunch at his mother's, except that I want it, which is not a thing I have ever been able to say about Sunday lunch at his mother's. Wanting and being excited are not the same, and I did not know that until this arrangement taught me. I want the second cup of tea in the morning. I am not excited by it. If you took it away I would notice all day. --- Some weeks it is a chore. I am going to sit with that sentence rather than rushing past it, because every account I have read skips it and the skipping is dishonest. There are Wednesdays when I am tired to the bone and my back hurts and the last thing on earth I want is to be turned over anything. There have been Wednesdays where I have thought, with total clarity, halfway up the stairs: I do not want this, I want a bath and an early night and to not be looked at. Twice I have said so. Both times he said fine, and we went down and watched something, and it was completely uneventful, and both times I was mildly annoyed about it for reasons I could not defend. The other times, the ones where I do not say so, something usually happens about ten minutes in that I have stopped being surprised by. The reluctance turns out to be the outside layer only. Underneath it is the same thing that has been there since the start, and it does not care that I am tired or that the recycling did not go out. It has a very simple appetite. It wants the decision taken away for half an hour, and it does not much mind how it gets there. Which is, I think, the actual reason it survived three years and the first version did not survive one. The first version depended on drama. This one runs on almost nothing. --- He is downstairs on the phone to his brother. I can hear the shape of it through the floor: the rise at the end, the long silence, the laugh. We do not discuss it any more, which surprised me. In the first year we discussed it constantly, endlessly, in the way you talk about a new car. Afterwards, the next day, the following weekend. Was that too much. Was that enough. What did you think when I did that. Now it is Wednesday and neither of us says a word about it all day, and at some point after nine he will put his hand flat on my shoulder as he goes past the sofa, which is the whole of the negotiation. I remember minding, briefly, when the talking stopped. It felt like a diminishment. Then I worked out that we had simply finished the conversation. There was nothing left to establish. Everything that needed saying had been said in the first eighteen months and was now sitting underneath the thing like foundations, invisible and load bearing. --- The scene itself, three years in, is short. That is another thing nobody tells you. It has got shorter every year. At the beginning we would be up there for an hour and a half with all the elaboration of two people building something for the first time. Now it is perhaps twenty minutes from start to finish, and eight of those are afterwards. It is the same hairbrush. It is the same position, which we tried to change once and both hated. He says almost nothing. There is a stretch in the middle where I stop being aware of my own commentary, and that stretch has got longer as the sessions have got shorter, which seems to me to be the entire point and the reason people keep doing this into their sixties. Then it is over and I am on the bed with my face in the duvet doing that breathing you do, and he goes and gets water without being asked, and neither of us says anything for a while. --- What I have not resolved, and possibly never will, is what it is for. In the first year I had a theory. It was to do with control, and running a department where fourteen people ask me things all day, and it was a tidy theory, and I could produce it at will in a way that sounded articulate and slightly clinical. I am fairly sure now that it was a story I told myself so that the wanting would have a respectable shape. These days I do not have a theory. I have a Wednesday. Sometimes the wanting is obviously about not being in charge for half an hour. Sometimes it is about being cared for by somebody who has to concentrate on me for twenty minutes. Sometimes, honestly, it is about being sore on Thursday and knowing why, walking around the office with a piece of private knowledge in a building where the biggest live question is whether the coffee machine will be fixed. Sometimes it is nothing at all, and it happens anyway, the way you go to the gym. --- The oven is beeping. The rain has not stopped. There is a wet coat on the bannister that I am going to move in a minute, and then I am not going to move it, and it will be there tomorrow. In an hour and a half a man I have been married to for eleven years is going to put his hand on my shoulder on the way past, and I am going to feel something settle in my stomach that I still do not have a word for, and I am going to get up and follow him, on a wet Wednesday in March, tired, with a call at nine. It is not exciting. I want to be extremely clear that it is not exciting. I would not give it up for anything. ## Read next - [More fiction and fantasies](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/) - [The maintenance session](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/scenes/maintenance-session/) - [Maintenance and punishment](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/discipline/maintenance-vs-punishment/) - [Stress relief](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/why/stress-relief/) - [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.