Chapter 2

I had been back in Chicago a couple days when I got a phone call from Hannah.

“Oh, Master, my bike arrived today! Oh, it’s so beautiful! I can hardly wait for tomorrow to ride it!” She sounded like a kid getting a new bike for her birthday!

“Did the serviceman go over it with you and make all the adjustments so it fits you and you can work it all right?”

“Yes, Master. He was very kind and very patient. The bike fits and feels wonderful! I can get on it by myself and I’ve been went up and down the sidewalk in front of my house a couple times to test it. Oh, I can’t thank you enough, Master! This is the best present ever!”

“Well, I’m glad you like it, my sweet slut.”

“Oh I do, Master! I love it. This is going to make it a lot easier for me to get around now! Before I had to pre-arrange a ride with the bus service so they could send over a bus with a lift on it. It only ran certain hours and then only took me to places I needed to go not places I wanted to go.

“I could go to the doctors office, to the grocery store and places like that, but it wouldn’t take me to the mall, to the movies, or to the park. And I loved going to the park. I can go out on the weekends when it nice, and go visit my friends without having them come to pick me up. It’s wonderful, Master!”

The happiness and excitement I heard on her voice was worth twice what I paid for the bike and knowing that she would feel less like a prisoner in her own home pleased me very much. She told me her first trip would be to go to the park and just ride around the park like she used to before the accident. She lived in a different town back then and it was a different park, but she loved being out in the fresh air, feeling the wind in her hair, and being able to go where she wanted as far as she wanted.

“Oh Master it was wonderful to see you this past week and I loved what we did together. But Master it was so hard to put you on that plane again. I missed you even before the plane took off!”

“Yes I know my sweet slut. I miss you also. That’s the hardest thing about an online relationship like ours – we want to be together but sometimes our situation prevents it. I live here in Chicago and you have your life there in St. Louis. And while it is only four hours driving and one hour by plane, it’s not something that we can do every day or even every weekend.”

“I know, Master. And I am thankful for whatever time you and I can spend together. But when you are gone this place just isn’t the same.”

“I know. I feel the same way. But what can we do about it?”

After that we changed the subject to something lighter and happeir. No sense in making what time we had together miserable!

A few days after our conversation, I was invited to a barbeque by a couple friends whose company I did some work for in the past and whose systems I maintained now. At the barbeque, I was introduced to one of their friends who happened to be a nurse at Northwestern Memorial Hospital.

Through conversation with this nurse, I learned that a lot of new information, techniques and medical research had taken place in the last few years on paralysis and recovering from traumatic injuries. I didn’t understand all the technical jargon – medicne wasn’t my specialty and I was lucky if I could find the aspirin in my medicine cabinet! But it was nice to know that strides had been taken to help people like my Hannah.

The next few weeks went by like normal. Hannah and I met online and chatted and Skype’d like we usually did. It wasn’t nearly as much fun as being together face to face, but it was better than nothing.

During this time that we were separated by fate, I did a lot of thinking and reflecting on my life here in the Windy City. I had a good job and made a good living at it, it’s true. And while I did have several clients in the Chicago area, I also had clients all over the country. In fact, when I thought about it, I spent almost as much time traveling as I did at home!

Being a IT tech, I can actually work from anywhere there is an Internet connection unless there is some kind of hardware issue to deal with. Which is where the travel comes in. But as far as a base of operations or home office, it can be just about anywhere. In fact, the only reason I had an “office” at all was because I didn’t want to clutter up my small condo with file cabinets and I could take the office rent utilities and Internet costs off on taxes!

I liked being in Chicago because it is somewhat centrally located east to west and close to the top of the country. Chicago is about the best large city for those who have to travel a lot because it cuts down those unbearably long coast to coast trips you might have if you lived in Los Angeles or New York. I can be anywhere in the contiguous 48 States in four and a half hours or less.

As for my home life, well that wasn’t quite as well put together! Actually I didn’t have much of a home life to be honest. Single and without any kind of romantic interest, my home was just a place I went to after work to eat and sleep. I didn’t date, I didn’t go out much at all really. It was actually kind of sad when you looked at it closely.

So here we were, Hannah and I, two lonely souls separated from each other and the happiness we may find with each other by location. And examining it from several different angles, it really didn’t HAVE to be that way. My job, my work, could be done from anyplace – I had already been doing that. And I knew that in Chicago, there were several companies and agencies that Hannah could do very well at – either as a disability advocate or as a regular secretary or receptionist type office worker.

Neither of us had many ties to our respective cities – I had no family anymore and Hannah only had one sister who was married with kids of her own. Neither of us what you would call socialites. My circle of friends consisted of purely business associates, and Hannah had one friend a couple blocks away, her sister and their family, and a little old lady that lived next door she would go visit because she didn’t have anyone either.

So with no work ties to worry about and no family or social ties to speak of, there really wasn’t much keeping us from being together. That was my thinking at least. I didn’t know how Hannah felt about the idea yet.

I would find out how she felt about it not more than a week later. I got a call that Monday morning from a very distraught client. Apparently she had been doing some work from her home computer and used a flash drive to transfer the work to her work computer (never a good idea!) She accidently transferred a Trojan virus and when it popped up on the screen she reached to turn it off quick, hoping that would cut off the virus before it did any damage. Flawed thinking aside, not only did it not stop the virus, but she knocked her coffee into the keyboard and it ruined her keyboard as well!

I told her to turn everything on the computer off and not to touch anything – don’t turn the computer on, don’t use the flash drive, just leave it sit till I got there. Then I booked a flight to Kansas City to see what I could do to fix her computer at best or recover her information at least.

When I got to Kansas City I took a look at the problem and I was able to recover her information and all she was out was the cost of a new keyboard and flash drive (which she had learned not to use to swap information now!) and of course my fee. She was happy and grateful that three years worth of business files were recovered along with her contacts and customer base information.

I had gotten a hotel room when I got to Kansas City – nothing fancy, just a place to sleep. Even though it only took a couple hours to fly from Chicago to Kansas City, I figured I would be there at least one night and booked it for two.When I returned to the hotel room I called Hannah for our regular chat.

I guess the window shades in the hotel were close enough in color to the ones I had at home because Hannah never suspected I was not at home. We had our regular chat and I gave her a couple “tasks” to do until our next meeting and we signed off as usual.