At the dawn of 2020, sex goddess Hannah Ward seemed to be riding the crest of a wave, fully clothed of course. As the face of the increasingly successful wetlook fetish website hannah2o, she held countless admirers in the palm of her hand, even facing up to the looming pandemic with an ironic smile, telling her followers that masturbating over her was good For their immune system. Then, just when her fans needed her most, she vanished. What happened? Where did she go? Four years on, Hannah is finally ready to reveal all about the horrors she has endured since…
“I can feel you hovering over my shoulder, Gabi, what are you doing?”
“I’m reading over your shoulder. ‘Sex goddess’? Bloody hell, Han, wind your neck in.”
I turn around to my flatmate with an indignant look. “Are you saying I’m not a sex goddess?”
“I wouldn’t dare,” she grins. “I like the bit about having them in the palm of your hand, I see what you did there, little bit suggestive but doesn’t overstep the mark. But come on, writing about yourself in the third person? That’s lame.”
“It’s meant to be a magazine article, my big comeback statement. No-one else is going to write it for me, are they?”
“Oh, got a new album out, have you?” laughs Gabi. “I’ll do it. I’ll interview you, how about that?”
“But you already know everything that’s happened to me, and us, over the past four years.”
“Then I’ll know what questions to ask, won’t I?”
I sigh a sigh of defeat. “Go on then. Do your worst.”
Gabi snorts in mock indignation. “God, you have such a low opinion of me, don’t you?”
“Journalism isn’t what it used to be. Come on then, Piers, let’s have it.”
Pulling a face, Gabi takes my laptop, deletes everything I’ve already typed, and starts her interrogation.
So, Hannah Ward, at the start of 2020 you were eking out a living as a grubby sex worker, with your seedy fetish tales of…
“Bitch! Do it properly!” We both collapse in a fit of giggles.
Alright then. Hannah, in early 2020 you were very much on the way up, with a popular blog and a successful Patreon, detailing your thoughts and stories about the wet clothes fetish. Then, after you’d invited your readers to boost their immune system by cracking one off over you…
Watch it!
…as the pandemic hit the UK, you disappeared, leaving your fans high and, quite literally, dry. What happened?
Huh, well, you know what happened, COVID happened. Remember at the beginning of March 2020, we were laughing at the Italians in lockdown singing to each other on their balconies? Like, “ha ha, yeah, imagine if that happened over here, like fuck we’d be singing to each other, we’d be throwing eggs”?
Yeah, I remember that.
And then at the end of the month, I nearly died.
Sounds a bit dramatic now, but yeah, it’s true. I remember rushing you into hospital one Tuesday night at the end of March, rather than wait who knows how long for an ambulance.
I’d been struggling to breathe for days, I’d been in bed for about four days I think, and I got so fed up with lying there I decided I come and lie on the sofa in the living room for a bit, and it nearly finished me off. My lungs sounded like a coffee percolator.
Yeah, I remember. We called NHS 24 in the end, I spoke to them but they had to confirm details with you, and you could hardly speak.
That’s right. They asked me to confirm my name, I think they just wanted to make sure I wasn’t Darth Vader. They told me to come to the out-of-hours clinic, so you drove me there about 11pm that night.
Yeah, that was horrible. I don’t know what was going through your head, but I’ve never been so scared.
Honestly, I don’t remember feeling scared, looking back I feel like I should have been, but I was just concentrating so hard on breathing that everything else just took a back seat.
I was genuinely preparing myself for the worst, thinking about how I would carry on if you died.
Shit, really? See, I wasn’t thinking that far ahead, about what would happen, I was just trying to breathe. The only thing I remember, apart from how hard it was to get a breath, was how quiet the roads were.
Ha, yeah, it was an unusually quick journey. Then we got to the hospital and it was like the zombie apocalypse.
Yeah, and I had to go in on my own, that was hard, I could hardly stand, never mind walk. Even though you lived with me and you’d been in the same car as me, you couldn’t come in with me in case you got “infected”.
I know, right? I mean, we lived together, if you had it, then I must have had it. Although I still find it weird that you were so badly affected by it, and I don’t remember having it at all.
I think you had a bit of a cough for about a day, but that was it. You’re a medical marvel. Not like me, I’m only a medical marvel in as much as I’m somehow still alive.
At least you didn’t have to stay in hospital.
No, that’s true. I wonder now if it might have been better if I did. But they did some tests, said my oxygen levels weren’t bad enough to admit me, and sent me home to recuperate.
Uh-huh. I remember we were both pretty relieved on the way home.
Yeah, I assumed the worst was over and I’d just take to my bed for a few days and everything would be fine. But it went on for days, and then weeks, and then months.
I remember you telling me at the start that one of your friends had COVID and it took her three weeks to recover, and I was like, “Three weeks? Christ, imagine three weeks of this.” And then you were ill for three weeks, then four weeks, then six weeks, and you weren’t getting better.
Uh-huh. And now it’s four years on, and here I am. Still ill, absolutely screwed over by Long COVID, not getting any better, in all likelihood never will unless there’s some kind of miracle cure.
Do you, um… do you want to go through all the health problems COVID has left you with?
Not really.
I know we’d be here forever, but what are the main problems?
Well, I mean, let’s start with the heart condition, POTS, which means I can’t stand up or walk for more than a few minutes without getting dizzy, exhausted, heart palpitations, chest pain, all that stuff. So there’s that, and then there’s the chronic fatigue, which leaves me exhausted but unable to sleep. And there’s all sorts of other things like digestive problems, blinding headaches, kidney problems, brain fog…
…oh, and the brain tumour, of course.
Ha, yes, the brain tumour was a nice touch, I thought, but apparently that’s benign, and might not even be anything to do with COVID, just an added bonus. It might have been there for years, not causing any problems, and they’d never have found it if my GP hadn’t kept pestering the hospital to do a brain scan, “just to rule out anything like a brain tumour”.
Well, that sort of worked, I suppose.
In a way, yes. Although in a weird way, when they found the meningioma, although it was a shock, I did feel a sense of relief, as if that at least explained the headaches and some of the weird neurological symptoms, and presumably they’d whip it out and things would get better. And then the neurologist said no, it’s nothing to do with that, it’s just sitting there minding its own business, and I actually felt disappointed, like I was back to square one.
So what is your day to day life like now, four years after catching COVID?
Pretty shit, all things considered. I don’t get out much, because I can’t stand up for any length of time or walk any distance without my body complaining. Luckily I have a glamorous assistant to help me with most things.
Hi, that’s me.
Yes, the lovely Gabi, ladies and gentlemen. Honestly, I don’t know where I’d be without you. Probably dead. Or even worse, living back with my mum and dad.
God forbid! But yeah, I am pretty much your carer these days, and I’m fine with that. I mean, I hate what’s happened to you, but I’m fine with looking after you and doing all the stuff that you can’t do anymore, because, well… should we tell them? You didn’t tell them before, did you?
What? Oh, no, I didn’t mention it in the blog before, I wasn’t sure how my… (laughs) I want to say “fans”, it still feels weird that I have, or at least had “fans”, but yeah, readers… I wasn’t sure how they would take it. But yeah, we should tell them.
You tell them, then. It’s your blog.
It’s our blog now! Yes, okay, fine, the summer before the whole COVID thing happened, Gabi and I decided that we were… more than just friends. We’d been absolute besties since we first met at uni, really, we just clicked together, didn’t we?
We did, we realised pretty quickly that we had the same sense of humour, the same values… we just “got” each other straight away.
We were inseparable all through uni. We stayed in touch after graduating, even though I’d gone back down to Newcastle and you stayed in Edinburgh, and when I got made redundant in, when was it, 2017? 2018, wasn’t it, February 2018. I was at a bit of a loose end, and you said I should come back to Scotland and move in with you as your flatmate, and I bit your hand off. Not literally, but yeah, I realised how much I’d been missing your company. And then, it was nearly a year later, wasn’t it, I’d had a really miserable birthday because our old uni friend Dan had died, and we got talking about the time I tried to seduce him by joining him in the shower fully clothed… which is something of a Tik Tok trend now, I see, so I like to think I had a hand in starting that…
Ha ha, yeah, and that was when we first started to admit to ourselves that we had, well, “feelings” for each other, wasn’t it?
Yeah, that’s right, you didn’t know about my blog at the time, but we got very drunk and I confessed everything to you about my wet clothing fetish, and the next day you called me through to the bathroom and you were trying it out.
Yeah, I have to admit it, the thought of you getting into the shower with Dan fully clothed got me extremely hot and bothered. But we were still… well, I’d known I was bi for a long time, I wasn’t really sure about you but I suspected…
I mean, what you have to understand is that I’d discovered that wet clothes turned me on at a very early age, and when you have a particularly niche fetish like this, it’s much easier to find your equivalent of “porn” in the mainstream than if you’re just looking for naked people all the time. So when I was 13, watching Ministry Of Mayhem on a Saturday morning and seeing Holly Willoughby getting absolutely drenched with buckets of water and slime every week, I was in no doubt that I liked girls as well as guys. And there’s so much more wetlook content online involving female models than males, so as a horny teenager with an internet connection I was exposed to lots of beautiful women in wet clothes, and I knew I liked it. And I remember thinking you were absolutely stunning when I first saw you, like proper drop dead gorgeous, but I’d only ever been with guys, and I felt like that was what was expected of me. Plus I didn’t think I had the slightest chance romantically with a stunner like you, so I was happy just to be best friends with you. (pause) Are you blushing?
(blushing furiously) No… And then in the summer of 2019 we went on holiday together.
I’d been talked into going camping with my cousin and her kids the summer before that and it was horrific, mainly because spending a week in a tent with her made me realise what a terrible pain in the arse she was. But I remember absolutely loving the location of the campsite, down near the Mull of Kintyre, right on the beach, it was gorgeous, so I suggested the two of us should go camping there together.
You’d had one of your legendary “brain lunges” there with your cousin, hadn’t you?
(laughs) That’s right! The day we got there it had been stupidly hot and the drive had been pretty stressful, and we were getting very arsey with each other. Then she shouted at her kids for playing in the sea and getting their clothes a bit wet, and I decided I had to stick up for the girls so I decided I was going to show Marianne that getting your clothes wet wasn’t the terrible sin she seemed to think it was.
So you walked into the sea.
Yep, just strolled right into the waves with all my clothes on, dunked myself under and walked back out, soaking wet. It wasn’t mentioned again after that. But I loved the place and I knew I wanted to go back, just not with her. And then I started thinking about all the fun we could have there, on the beach, in the sea… (Hannah pauses for thought for a few seconds.) I don’t want to go into too much detail about this here, we should save it for the blog. But yeah, we went camping there in 2019 and, well, is it fair to call it a holiday romance?
Well, I suppose, but that suggests it was just a quick fling, and it’s a bit more than that, I hope.
Yes, of course, we should make it official, Gabi and I are a couple and have been for five years now. And every day I think about how lucky I am to have you and that you didn’t just walk out on me as soon as I got sick.
Bless you, you did say that I should just go and find someone else, but I couldn’t imagine being with anyone else. That night when I was driving you to hospital, thinking about what I’d do if you didn’t make it…
(long pause) Ask me something nicer, Gab.
Yeah, so, anyway… You had this blog going, and the Patreon account, and it all fell by the wayside when you got sick.
Yeah, it was the last thing on my mind at that time, I was mainly focussed on not dying for the first six months or so. And I still feel bad about that, because people were still paying for the Patreon and not getting anything in return, which made me feel really guilty, so I deactivated it with the intention of going back to it when I felt better. But I never got better, and the website domains lapsed, and everything just sort of fizzled out. And I can’t even reregister hannah2o.co.uk because it seems some other… chancer has helped themselves to it, so I can’t get that email address back, so it’s all very complicated.
I still feel bad that people kept giving me money on Patreon when I wasn’t writing anything, and that’s one reason why I’ve been resisting starting things up again, this nagging fear of the backlash from people going “Hey, I gave her money for months and got nothing in return!” And I hope to be able to make it up to the people who did keep supporting me when I wasn’t able to create anything, I’m very grateful to them, honestly, obviously I couldn’t work so what little money was still trickling in from Patreon was a godsend. But I’m now at the stage where I need to do something to keep my mind active and stop myself from going completely mad, so the two of us are going to start things up again together and see how it goes. But I want to do it a bit differently this time, we have some new ideas to keep things fresh and interesting.
Tell everyone about our ideas!
Okay, well, we came up with the idea of doing it like a magazine, maybe putting out an actual physical magazine every two or three months, but after looking into it, it seems to be quite eye-wateringly expensive, so we might just do it as a downloadable PDF, but I’m keen to have something that people can keep because I don’t like the fact that all the things I posted online just disappeared when the domain lapsed. I’ve managed to salvage a lot of stuff from the blog, so hopefully some old favourite stories will reappear at some point.
One of the things that struck me about your old blog, when you finally told me about it and let me read it, was that you were very opposed to the idea of posting photos.
Yeah. It would have been very easy to just take photos of myself in wet clothes and post them online, but I didn’t want to do that. My original vision was that it would be a place to post my writing and that that would be enough to satisfy people, but I kept getting pestered for pictures, because apparently people have no imagination. (laughs) I did give in eventually, I guess it must have been Christmas 2019, I found some old photos I’d taken of myself in the bath and posted some of those as a sort of advent calendar for my top tier Patreon backers, and I think I posted some more in about February or early March 2020 when there was this, sort of… meme going around that masturbation boosted your immune system. So I was like, “Here you go guys, hope this stops you getting COVID!” (laughs again) Didn’t bloody work for me, mind.
So will you be posting photos this time? I’m guessing not…
No, well, for one thing I’m not really up to getting wet anymore, my body’s so knackered I can’t even stand up long enough to have a shower these days. But that doesn’t stop us having fun, does it?
Well, a different kind of fun, but yeah.
And we’re both web technology graduates, so we’re both fascinated by things like AI image generation, which absolutely isn’t a replacement for proper art, I need to stress that, but we’ve been playing with AI software and generating pictures using our actual faces, like the ones I did to accompany this article where it looks like I’m splashing about in the sea in a black dress. It’s not perfect by any means, and they’re not meant to be taken seriously, but I think they’re quite fun and it’s a kind of compromise between not wanting actual photos of us out there on the internet, but people wanting some pictures to illustrate the writing.
Alright then, sum it up for everyone, why should they sign up for this new Patreon?
Oof, well, I hope some people will remember me from before and want to know what I’m doing now. Some things will be free to read, others will be exclusive to our supporters. I’m hoping it’ll be a mix of my real experiences and some fictional writing, maybe involving other characters. And, of course, I don’t need to keep it secret from you anymore, so we’ll be able to work together on coming up with ideas, which is great because Gabi is brilliant for bouncing ideas off and I love her more than anything in the world and I want to stop this interview now so we can go to bed together.
Gabi laughs and finishes up typing. “Sounds good to me.”
