“You spanked me last night,” I whined to Abel on the phone as he rode the train to work. “I was falling asleep. I had already fallen asleep! And you spanked me! Really hard! Why?”

“Well,” Abel said pensively. “You were there.”

I had been conveniently resting on my tummy, hands tucked under the pillow. Abel took this as an invitation: he pulled back the covers, and walloped me with his hand at least a dozen times. At the start, I was too sleepy to do more than squeak, but that didn’t last.

I fell back asleep, but every time I drifted half-awake in the night, and felt him turn, I wondered if he was going to do it again.

“Anyway, it wasn’t that hard,” he said. It was pleasant to think of him trying to form his responses tamely enough that the whole train carriage didn’t share the conversation.

“Yes, it was.”

“It wasn’t.”

“Was,” I took a sip of my coffee. Coffee puts me in a philosophical sort of mood. “You have to understand that whenever I get a spanking, at the time it’s the hardest spanking I’ve ever endured.”

He had nothing to say to that. Because it’s true.