Only Fan

I know my husband has a secret. I don’t know what it is exactly, but something is definitely off. For months now, he’s been sneaking around the house like a man hiding either an affair or a body. Vanishing for hours at a time, locking himself in his office, emerging only to make coffee and mutter things like, “Where’s the cordless impact driver?” before disappearing again. Most suspicious of all is the sign. DO NOT DISTURB. It hangs permanently from his office door. At first, I respect it. Then I become curious. Then suspicious. Then deeply suspicious. The sort of suspicious where your imagination starts writing stories far more interesting than reality. Tax fraud? A secret family? Model trains? Honestly, I don’t know which would be worse. Then one Friday afternoon, through a combination of habit and stupidity, I forget all about the sign. I push open the door. And immediately wish I hadn’t. My husband is standing in the middle of the room wearing nothing but a mischievous grin, a pair of heavy-duty workman’s boots, and a DIY tool belt. That’s it. Nothing else. Absolutely stark bollock naked. Not casual naked. Not “oops my waistband gave out” naked. The kind of nakedness that would have the vicar rubbing holy water into his eyes and reconsidering his relationship with God. The laptop camera is recording. A cordless drill sits on the desk. A spirit level is balanced against one shoulder. And somehow, impossibly, this appears to be going very well. “WHAT THE—?” His face drops. As does something else. “Oh.” A pause. “Naked DIY,” he stammers. “Naked… what?” “Naked DIY.” I stare. He stares. Even the drill seems uncomfortable. “Something liberating about it.” The laptop, however, tells a different story. I squint at the screen. Then squint harder. Then wish I hadn’t. “Are you on—?” “Only Fans.” He sighs heavily. “Yeah. We needed the money.” That’s right. My husband is on Only Fans. Although frankly we ought to drop the S. Only Fan. Singular. Because he only has one subscriber. And no, it isn’t me. Apparently his sole customer is a woman from America called… Honey Tits. I learn, through a series of conversations I never imagined having as a married adult, that Honey Tits has been bed-bound for years due to severe overeating. Ye gods. If this isn’t the saddest thing I’ve ever heard, I genuinely don’t know what is. “She has a thing for men with tools,” says Mat. “Finally, a fetish I understand.” “No seriously.” He spins the laptop around. And I nearly choke on secondhand embarrassment. Transactions. Endless transactions. Page after page after page. Not modest amounts either. Thousands. Actual thousands. I scroll silently. My jaw slowly detaches from my face. “Bloody hell,” I whisper. “She really does like her power tools.” “£4,500 for drywall drilling.” “What?” “Yep.” I scroll further. My eyes widen. “Twenty grand?” He scratches the back of his neck. “That one involved a bit of sawing.” His eyes drift towards his office chair. Or rather, what remains of his office chair. Because it has been sawn completely in half. The poor thing looks like it had hopes and dreams once. And suddenly I notice everything else. The holes. Dear God. The holes. The walls resemble a block of Swiss cheese. Tiny holes. Huge holes. Strategic holes. Absolutely unnecessary holes. There is even one in the ceiling. Jesus wept. He really has been going to town. “How much have you made?” I ask. Trying desperately to apply logic to any of this. “Millions.” I laugh. He doesn’t. “Seriously.” I stop laughing. “With one fan?” “Yup.” He looks genuinely proud. And honestly? Good for him. The man’s built an entire empire around one lonely American woman’s fetish for power tools. That’s innovation. Shakespeare wrote sonnets. Henry Ford built cars. My husband drills holes into perfectly good plasterboard with his shlong out. Everyone leaves a legacy somehow. “Anyway,” he says, checking his watch. “I’ve got another drilling sesh in five.” Then he physically ushers me towards the door. “Do close it behind you.” The cheek. Absolute cheek. But still… All that money. I’ve already started spending it. The extension. The dream kitchen. The island. The downstairs shower room. The heated flooring. The garden. Oh God, the garden. A proper zen garden. With a water feature. Maybe koi carp. Maybe mood lighting. Maybe one of those ridiculous stone Buddhas that silently judges my interpretation of feng shui. My mind runs wild. Greedy little thoughts breeding like rabbits. And truthfully? It’s just nice seeing him happy again. The last five years haven’t been kind to him. The corporate world chewed him up. Spat him out. Then reversed over him for good measure. Two managers he refers to only as Cunt Face and Ball Bag Chin spent years grinding away at his confidence. Death by a thousand meetings. Eventually they pulled his job from underneath him, rebranded it, and offered it back in a form they knew he’d never accept. A corporate mugging dressed as strategy. Why have an honest conversation when you can stab a man through the jugular with a PowerPoint presentation? For a while afterwards he seemed to shrink. Too many years spent being sanded down, planed back, and filed into something better resembling their own image. Then Honey Tits arrived. God help us all. And suddenly he had purpose. Every Saturday he visits B&Q. The staff know him on a first name basis. “Building a house?” one cashier jokes. “An empire,” he replies with a smirk. And somehow he’s not joking. He’s changed. I can’t deny it. Ironically, I see less of him now than when he worked in London. You’d think I’d see more of him working from home. Instead the office door remains shut. The sign remains hanging. And the drill never stops. The truly ridiculous thing? My husband is terrible at DIY. Truly terrible. The sort of man who opens an IKEA flat-pack and behaves as though he’s just been handed a bomb with instructions in Swedish. The man needs AI, three espressos, two YouTube tutorials, and a brief argument with the manual just to assemble a bedside table. Yet now… To somebody out there… He’s a DIY God. A naked Michelangelo of masonry. A cordless Casanova. A titan of timber. Life is strange. Still. The money changes everything. The extension gets built. The kitchen arrives. The island. The heated floors. The dream home. And eventually… The zen garden. Exactly as I’d imagined. A beautiful water feature trickles gently amongst smooth stones. Perfect. Peaceful. Expensive. Or at least it should be. Because I’m usually sitting here alone. All this luxury. All this success. And nobody to share it with. The house grows larger. But somehow our lives grow smaller. Mat is always working. Always filming. Always drilling. Always chasing the next project. The next payment. The next message from Honey Tits. Sometimes I sit beside the water feature and watch the ripples, listening to the birds and trying to remember what life felt like before cordless drills became our primary source of income. And then — BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR. There it is. Again. That bloody drill. Echoing through the house like a profitable woodpecker. My husband, somewhere in the distance, chiselling his way towards financial freedom. One afternoon, I finally decide enough is enough. The drill has been going for three straight hours. The water feature is no longer soothing. It’s mocking me. I march across the house, through the extension, past the dream kitchen, and straight to the office. The sign hangs on the door as always. DO NOT DISTURB. I disturb. The room is empty. No Mat. No drill. No naked DIY. Nothing. Just the aftermath. The carnage. The desk is now only half a desk. One leg appears to have been removed entirely. A section of plasterboard is missing. There are so many holes in the walls that daylight is visible through at least three of them. The office looks less like a workspace and more like a scene from Homes Under the Hammer: Amateur Edition. And there, sitting amongst the wreckage, is the laptop. Open. Still running. I wander over. The screen shows a live feed. For the first time, I finally see her. Honey Tits. I immediately wish I hadn’t. She’s enormous. Morbidly obese and then some. A woman of such colossal scale appears to be sitting on the bed and slowly absorbing it into herself. She sits surrounded by takeaway cartons and empty crisp packets. A platter of junk food rests on her lap. Or what I assume is her lap. At this distance it’s difficult to be certain. She’s shovelling food into her mouth with the determination of somebody trying to plug a leak in their soul with onion rings. I stare. She stares at the camera. Neither of us says anything. Then: “Show us your drill then,” she says through a mouthful of fries. A bit of ketchup escapes and begins a journey south. Good Lord. And then… She notices me. I notice her noticing me. We both freeze. For a moment neither of us moves. Something shifts. The absurdity falls away. The joke stops being funny. For the first time, I really look at her. Not the username. Not the transactions. Not the endless stream of money. Her. A woman trapped in a bed. Surrounded by takeaway cartons and discarded wrappers. Paying fortunes to watch a middle-aged British man attack plasterboard with a cordless drill in the buff. And suddenly she doesn’t look ridiculous. She looks vulnerable. Painfully vulnerable. Honey Tits chews slowly. Watching me. Waiting. And for reasons I can’t quite explain, the woman on the screen begins to blur in that strange dream logic sort of way. And suddenly I’m not looking at Honey Tits anymore. I’m looking at Mat. Five years ago. Sitting at his desk. Trying desperately to please people who had already decided his worth. Jumping through hoops. Working harder. Giving more. Watching little pieces of himself disappear. All while somebody else benefited. All while somebody else got richer. The same story. Just different people standing at either end of the transaction. The extension. The kitchen. The heated floors. The zen garden. All of it suddenly feels heavier. As though every brick, every floor tile, every smug little ripple in that bloody water feature has been paid for with somebody else’s vulnerability. Honey Tits locks eyes with me. Neither of us speaks. The room is silent apart from the faint hum of the laptop. The cursor rests on a single button. DEACTIVATE ACCOUNT. My finger hovers over it. One click. That’s all. One click and the whole empire disappears. One click and Mat loses the thing that finally rebuilt him. One click and Honey Tits stops funding a fantasy she probably can’t afford. One click and nobody gets exploited. Or perhaps they already have. I stare at the button. Honey Tits stares at me. Waiting. And suddenly the drill falls silent.