Chapter 1

I was in Las Vegas, at the Merchandise Expo, manning the small booth I'd built to display my line of wind Chimes. It was well into the third day of a four day show, and my gross profits had just climbed to break even point for the show. I'd spent a little more than six thousand on fees for the booth and for putting my products on display. So far, I'd taken firm orders for a tad more than three thousand units to be delivered during the following month. From this point forward, I'd be in the black with every extra unit sold.

My girlfriend, Leslie, had called me three times that day, anxious to hear that I'd at least broken even for my efforts. She still couldn't believe that I'd entered into an agreement to purchase sixty thousand wind chimes spread over the next ten months. Sometimes it seemed unreal to me as well, but there you have it, and I'd acted impulsively in order to force certain career path changes on myself.

I'd been drifting along with my small town mentality, content with being a large minnow in a small sized pond. I was your basic small time operator, buying a little bit of this or that closeout, then selling what I'd purchased, just as soon as I could, taking a fat middleman's profit on the deal. It paid all my expenses, but offered no real future that I could see. When I was younger, I didn't need to see any future. The present being taken care of was more than enough for me.

That was then though, before I turned twenty five. Back then, I only had myself that I needed to worry about. Things had been changing lately though, and now I felt a need to make something more of myself. I was slowly getting to a place where I was isolating my responsibilities, accepting those I chose, rejecting those I no longer wished to assume on other's behalf.

Mainly, it was my brother Danny, his wife, Kaitlyn, and their three children that I was pulling back from taking too much responsibility for. I didn't consider Leslie a responsibility; to me, she represented more of an opportunity. We had a long, and somewhat checkered past history with each other. One that covered many different phases, and one so volatile, that she and I hadn't been either in contact, on speaking terms, or on each other's radar screens for the vast majority of the time we'd known each other.

I think I was either four or five the first time I saw Leslie Ackerman. Whatever my age, she was a month younger than I was. She was mean and bossy, but we both had nearly identical interests. She was the leader, and there could be no doubt that she was. We tried to change our relationship once, from best friends to boyfriend/girlfriend, but that had ended disastrously in a matter of scant days. From the time we were ten years old, until I was almost twenty four, she and I had nothing to do with each other. It was my brother, Danny, who had suggested her name as a possible employee, back when I was first beginning to try to expand my business.

Leslie had broken her back in a bad fall from a horse, becoming paralyzed in both her legs. She was either fourteen or fifteen when this happened. From that point on, she was forced to live her life from a wheelchair. This had occurred at a time when she and I were no longer in contact. I'd been aware of her accident, but it hadn't registered at the time like it probably should have. I'd lost both my parents when I was eleven, and had gone to live with my brother and his wife. I was too self involved in my own circumstances to give much thought to anything not directly impacting on me.

Even when Leslie and I renewed our acquaintanceship, it wasn't a case of smooth sailing from that point forward. Although I grew to feel an emotional attraction for her, our lives were still badly out of synchronization. We had different perspectives, and were trying to satisfy disparate needs. Once again, this lack of being in the right place with similar needs caused us to grow apart. Feeling this estrangement from Leslie had played a large role in my determining that I needed to make some pretty radical changes to the way I was living my life.

I'd acquired a coterie of hangers on. I'd taken responsibility for my brother for many years, believing that he needed the support I provided him with. The same was true for his wife and for their three kids, usually ending up with me providing whatever Danny and Kaitlyn fell short of producing for themselves. I tried rescuing them when it would have been better to have allowed them to experience the full brunt of their failures to be prudent and responsible.

There was also Bridget, Kaitlyn's sister, and her lover Delilah. Both girls had been a little older than me, and a year ahead of me in school. Somehow I'd ended up living with both these women, providing them with shelter and security in return for receiving their sexual favors. Delilah was bisexual, but Bridget was nearly exclusively gay. In our many threesome's, most of whatever pleasure she derived, came from Delilah's touch. Delilah and Bridget traded their affections to me, but shared a much higher level of true emotion with each other. For me, that trade off was one I'd deemed worthwhile.

The previous December, after I'd shed myself of all responsibility for my brother, his family, and these two girls, I began to realize that I needed Leslie back in my life. When I communicated this fact to her, she happily agreed to give me another chance. We'd also agreed on a business/personal partnership, and to working together in the hopes of realizing a much more ambitious business plan.

Leslie had three more years of schooling to complete, and while she was engaged in doing this, I was taking it upon myself to lay a firm foundation for the wholesale marketing operation I had recently envisioned, and, later, had offered to share with her.

The same show promoters who put on the Las Vegas Expo were promoting additional shows in Atlanta and New York City. I had agreed, tentatively, to sign up to operate a small booth for both shows, subject to my sales results at the Las Vegas show being adequate. At eight that evening, as the third day of the show started winding down, I went over to the promoter's office and finalized my commitments for both shows. This represented another five thousand in show fees for me, but I was more than willing to break even on sales and expenses in order to build up a client and prospect list of potential buyers of these chimes I was representing.

My ultimate plans called for adding quite a few new product lines in the years ahead, and making far fewer trade show appearances while keeping in close personal contact through email offerings and phone solicitations of the buyers I was beginning to meet and get acquainted with. The wind chimes represented little more than a product to introduce myself with.

By the end of the fourth and last day at the show, I was really exhausted. I'd done everything by myself, including manning my booth the entire time the show was open. I'd prevailed on my neighbors on each side of my booth to watch things while I ran off to take a quick break to the bathroom, or else over to the snack area to get a fast bite to eat and something to drink. I'd also learned quite a bit just from speaking with some of the other exhibitors. I'd already known that the economy was struggling, but I felt better hearing people complaining about how low the turnout of buyers was, and the paucity of orders they were getting now, when their orders were compared to years past, at a time when the economy was more robust.

I figured my making a small profit, exhibiting during an admittedly weak part of the business cycle, boded quite well for my future prospects. It took me several hours to tear down and repackage my display, even though I was practically forced into paying the convention center people an exorbitant fee to truck my boxes out to where my pickup was parked. I left town at nine that last evening, determined to make the three hour drive back to my house in Hesperia.

Leslie and I had a nice little reunion when I got in just after midnight. She'd stayed up she said, not just to hear the final figures on how sales had gone, but also so that I could have sex with her and help her get the first decent night's sleep she'd have since I'd left to go to the show. It was no sacrifice for me to help her with that.

With some people, sex is something uncomplicated, involving two people who are willing, and a few moments of highly pleasurable effort. With Les's injuries, this wasn't the case for us. Her areas of tactile sensitivity were almost exclusively above her waist. It took a lot longer to bring her to the point where she had any degree of sensitivity or sensual feeling below her waist. The hotter she became from our above the waist foreplay, the more receptive she was to anything going on down there.

She was like a heavily laden locomotive, trying to pull a hundred freight cars. It took her awhile to get going, to overcome the heavy resistance of all that weight to pull. Once she got that train rolling though, her pussy, clit, and ass area became just as sensitized as any other woman's. I had fun for those first thirty minutes while I warmed up her little engine, and, when her little train left the station, I held on to her as tightly as I could and enjoyed the wild ride.

I never tired of the process, realizing that you appreciate anything that you had to work harder to obtain. Leslie felt the exact same way, and having waited so very long to realize her first significant, no doubt about it, orgasm, gave her fulsome thanks, to whatever power she recognized, each time she was rewarded with yet another pleasure filled "O". She gave me far more credit for producing these for her than I knew I deserved. I meant to let her know that I wasn't anything special in that department, but, somehow, I never seemed to get around to it.

"I think I'm addicted to this, Jimmy. I never was before, but these past few months, its like I can't get enough of this."

"We're getting better, too Babe. We're starting to get synchronized, like those underwater ballet teams at the Olympics. You should look into getting this added as an event at the Paraplegic Olympics, I'm sure we'd medal."

"I could enter, but I'm afraid you wouldn't be eligible, not with your present level of mobility. Still, I think you're right about adding this as an event. Do you think I should put an ad up on the bulletin board over at the rehab center, to maybe try to find another partner I could enter the competition with?"