# Doing that to you > Short fiction, told by the husband who said no. He read everything she gave him, thought about it, tried once, and never found the thing the pages described. - Canonical URL: https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/what-he-could-not-want/ - 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 Do not cite it as testimony or as fact.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. My wife has written her side of this down and she is fairer to me in it than I would have been. This is what it was like from in here. --- > **Fiction.** An invented story about consenting adults. Not instruction, and not explicit. The practical version is at [what if my partner is not interested](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/questions/what-if-my-partner-is-not-interested/). What I said, in the end, was that I could not get to a place where doing that to her was anything except doing that to her. Two years ago. I have tried to improve on it since, because I know what it does when it lands, and I have not managed it. --- She told me on a Sunday evening, sitting down, in order, without crying. I did not interrupt, which she has since described as not nothing, and I want to be honest about why I managed it: for the first ninety seconds I thought she was working up to telling me she was ill. So a good part of what she read as composure was a man relocating from one kind of dread to another and being too busy to speak. When I caught up, the feeling was not disgust. I want that on the record, because it is the thing she was most afraid of and she was wrong about it. It was closer to being handed a form in a language I do not read. Somebody I have known for years was describing an entire room in herself, and I could hear that it was real, and I could not find the door. --- I spent the next fortnight doing what I do, which is research. I asked her a great many questions. What it is for. Whether it is about me or whether anybody would serve. When it started, which turned out to be in her early twenties, and hearing how long she had carried it was one of the harder minutes of my adult life too, from the other side of it. She gave me pages to read and I read them properly, the way I would read anything before doing it. I remember saying to her, "Right, so warm-up is not optional," and her laughing, and both of us feeling for about a day and a half that we were on our way somewhere. I was, at that point, entirely confident of arriving at yes, which is the part that seems most naive now. I had treated it as a competence problem. Learn the anatomy, be careful, be attentive, arrive. --- The trouble showed up in the reading and I did not recognise it for what it was. Every account, at some point, describes a feeling that arrives in the person doing it. Anticipation. Something between appetite and concentration, talked about as the thing that makes the rest of it possible. I read perhaps forty descriptions of it and followed all of them the way you follow a review of a wine you are not drinking. I kept waiting for the switch to be thrown, and assumed it would happen once there was a room and a person rather than a page. I have never in my life been unable to do a thing because I could not want it. That was the new information, and it took me a fortnight to even find the shape of it. --- We tried once. It lasted about two minutes and nothing went wrong. I could do the actions. That was not the difficulty. The difficulty is that I was doing them from the outside, watching my own hand from somewhere near the wardrobe, and about a minute in she flinched. Small. Involuntary. The sort of thing she has told me since is unremarkable and part of it. My whole body filed it under one heading and there was no second heading available. Not danger. Not a mistake. Just: you have hurt her, and she is the person you do not hurt, and there is nothing else this can be called. --- Afterwards I sat on the floor with my back against the wardrobe and apologised about eleven times. I have taken those eleven apart since, because it was too many and I wanted to know what they were for. Some were for hurting her. Some were for stopping, which she had specifically told me not to treat as a failure. And some, this being the one I would rather not have found, were for not being the man in the pages. I was apologising for the wrong species. She sat down next to me and was kind, and I could feel her understanding something she had not wanted to understand, and there was nothing I could do about that either. --- I took a week over the decision and I want to describe what I was actually weighing, because it was not what people assume. I was not weighing whether I could get used to it. I probably could have. There is a version of this where I grit my teeth twice a month and provide a service, and I thought about that version seriously for several days. What I decided is that she would know. She had not asked me to perform it. She had asked, if I have understood her at all, to be wanted at, and there is no word for that but it is the whole of the thing. A man going through the motions would not be a smaller version of it. It would be a counterfeit, she would spot it inside a month, and then she would have lost the thing and have to manage my feelings about failing to provide it. So the no was, in part, on her behalf. I am aware how convenient that sounds. --- The sentence I used was chosen with some care, and the care was all in one direction. What I was most frightened of was that she would hear no and file it under something being wrong with what she wanted. All those years of not saying it, and then she says it, and the answer is no. There is an obvious conclusion available there, it is the wrong one, and I could not think of a way to make it impossible. So I said the sentence I said because I wanted the fault to have my name on it. I cannot get there. Not: this is a thing that should not be got to. I do not know whether it worked. I have never asked, because asking would be for me. --- There is a grief in this that I have nowhere to take. She lost something and it was me who took it, so I am not entitled to bring my version of the loss to her. That would be asking the person you have refused to comfort you about the refusing. I have watched men do that. But it is there. I am a man who cannot give his wife a thing she waited years to ask for. Not will not: cannot, having tried, having read everything, having wanted very much to be able to. Somewhere in the first year I understood that I had been carrying an idea of myself as a man who could meet whatever was asked of him, and that idea is gone. I do not mention it. I am mentioning it here. --- For about four months she asked in different shapes. Could we just. What if it were only. I held the line, did not enjoy it, and never once resented her for pushing, because she was doing what anybody does at a locked door: checking whether it is locked in the same way today. When she stopped, she apologised, which I thought was unnecessary and told her so. --- What we have found is one small thing, and it is not what she asked for. I can listen. That is the extent of it. She can say it out loud, in her own kitchen, as a fact about herself rather than a request, and I do not go quiet or change the subject or become carefully neutral. Last winter I asked her what it is she actually pictures. Not to build up to anything, and she knew that, which is why the answer came. At the end of it I said it was a lot more about being told off than I had understood, and she looked at me as though I had got something right. I had worked that out from listening rather than from doing. It is the one piece of the whole business I have been any use at. --- That is where we are. She wants something I cannot give her, she is right to want it, I am right to say no, and she is allowed to mind. All four at once, in one house, permanently. What I can do is make sure there is one person on earth she does not have to hide it from. It is a great deal less than she asked for. It is not nothing, and I would like the record to show that I know the difference between those two. ## Read next - [More fiction and fantasies](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/) - [The one who said no, from her side](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/the-one-who-said-no/) - [What if my partner is not interested?](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/questions/what-if-my-partner-is-not-interested/) - [Asking a partner you already have](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/asking-your-partner/) - [Couples and existing relationships](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/couples-and-existing-relationships/) > ## 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.