Wheels In Motion Ch. 01

*** This series was awarded the Most Literary/Genre Transcending award in the 2020 Reader's Choice Awards. Thank you to all my readers and all who voted. ***

Hello friend. Welcome to my series, Wheels In Motion.

This is a slow-building lesbian romance story. There is no sex in the first few chapters. If that's not your groove, please feel free to skip it and go find something else that works for you. I promise I won't be hurt, and you'll be happier. It's win-win!

You don't have to have read my other works to enjoy this story; you certainly won't be lost here if you haven't. However, if you have read my other stories, you'll get a little bit more out of this series because you'll have some background knowledge you might not otherwise have. Then you'll get to feel superior to those who aren't in the know! Also, this story contains massive spoilers for my Hard Landing series. You've been warned.

Special thanks to my beta-readers, Salandar and ArmyGal33, and my editors, VixGiovanni and AwkwardMD. Without their help and support, this series wouldn't have gotten off the ground.

I hope you enjoy. Leave me a comment if you care to.

~~ Pentagon City, Virginia, October ~~

I had no reason for the butterflies in my stomach. There was no doubt in my mind I could do this, but the noise from the thirty thousand or so people lined up behind me wasn't helping me with the nerves that came from lining up for my first ten-mile race.

Three UH-60 Blackhawks did a pre-race flyover in formation. The crowd ooh-ed and aah-ed while I suppressed a yawn and adjusted my sports bra. I'd flown as a flight medic on a Blackhawk for more than two years, so I was less than dazzled. My therapist at Walter Reed had suggested that seeing them up close again might cause me anxiety issues, but so far, I'd had no problems.

When the Army Golden Knights parachute team dropped in carrying the American flag for the pre-race National Anthem, I was more suitably impressed. The six jumpers landed one after another on a bullseye three feet across after dropping from five thousand feet above the Pentagon. That was nothing to yawn at.

The worst part for me was the playing of the National Anthem. When the opening bars started, the urge to jump to my feet was overwhelming. Three years in the Army had drummed it into me that I should be at attention, saluting the colors, but I wasn't in uniform anymore. Nor was I standing. I had to be satisfied with sitting up straight, hand on my heart.

When the last note faded away, I listened to the cheers of the crowd behind me while I put on my baseball cap and adjusted my ponytail. I donned my sports sunglasses to shade my eyes from the brilliant fall sunshine, checked that the Velcro wrist straps on my gloves were snug, and then grabbed the push wheels of my wheelchair and rolled closer to the start line.

The Wounded Warriors, as they called us wheelchair athletes, were always in the first of the ten waves of the Army Ten-Miler race. It made sense, really. It took me a little bit to get up to speed, but once I got going on flat ground I was faster than most runners. I'd looked up the winning times for the wheelchair competitors from the year before. The first-place finisher had done it in forty-four minutes. An average of almost a four-and-a-half-minute mile for ten miles. Not too many people could do that on foot. Since this was my first Ten-Miler, I had no delusions about finishing in under an hour, but I'd been hitting over ten miles easily for the last few weeks in my training runs and I knew I could at least do the distance.

I pulled up next to a truly impressively-built man wearing a sleeveless Marine Force Recon t-shirt. He probably would have been six-four had he been standing. His arms looked as big around as my waist and the one closest to me sported an Eagle, Globe and Anchor tattoo. His racing chair was the same model as mine, just two sizes bigger.

"Ooh-rah, Recon," I said. He looked over at me and I saw his eyes go to the Eighty-Second Airborne patch on my hat.

"Hooah, Airborne," the Marine replied.

"Have you done this race before?" I asked him.

"Yeah, it's my fifth time."

"This is my first. Any advice?"

"You're going to be tempted to slack off going up the hill towards the Capitol, but if you push through to the top, you can coast for almost a mile and recover while coming back down. Nice chair, by the way."

"Thanks, I just got it a few months ago. I'm Liz Charles." I offered my hand and he shook it. My hand disappeared in his gigantic fist.

"Mark Graziano."

Despite his monster muscles, he was cute. I had thoughts of offering him my number for about a half-second, but as a general rule I didn't date Marines.

"How do you like your chair?" I asked.

"It's one of the best on the market. I tried some of the cheaper ones but you gets what you pays for. You made a good choice for your first."

"I can't take the credit. My PT at Reed recommended it to me."

"Well, you--" Mark was interrupted by the PA announcer calling for the first wave to take their places. "Sorry, race time. Maybe I'll see you when you get to the finish line," he said. The gun sounded and he took off without looking back.

I really hadn't planned to get competitive for this race, I just wanted to finish, but I suddenly got pissed off. 'See you when you get to the finish line' my ass. I grabbed my wheels and started pushing myself after him. I guessed there were maybe a hundred wheelchairs in the race but he was so big that it was easy to keep an eye on him as I kept pace with him from about fifty feet back.

I'd only had my racing chair, an Invacare Preliminator, for a couple of months, which really wasn't much time for getting used to any chair. It was a really sweet piece of tech though; so much better than the ones at Walter Reed that I'd started training on, and half their weight. The two main wheels were canted out away from the seat, giving me a better angle to push, and the bearings were so smooth it felt like it would glide forever when I was coasting. Instead of two front wheels, there was a strut that projected between my legs more than three feet out in front of my knees, with a single wheel on a shock absorber. Whenever I was in my everyday chair, I missed how easily this one rolled.

Once we got out of the immediate area of the Pentagon and were cruising up Richmond Highway towards Rosslyn, I coasted for a moment while I put in one of my Bluetooth earbuds. Technically, headphones weren't allowed in the Ten-Miler, but I'd been told people used them all the time anyway. I needed some beats if I was going to be pushing my chair for an hour or more. My phone was in a holder I'd strapped around my thigh so I could keep an eye on the MapMyRun app as we went through the course. I switched over to Spotify, pulled up my favorite racing playlist, switched back to my running app, and then settled into the tedious task of pushing my wheels over and over. And over... and over.

I noticed from the start that the fastest wheelchair athletes weren't very large people. The ones with the slim, swimmer-looking upper-body build were the racers who had immediately pulled away from the pack. I found it easy to keep pace with the big Marine. In fact, within the first mile I knew I could probably pass him anytime I wanted to, but I decided to play a tactical game. I followed him over the Key Bridge, then down the Whitehurst Freeway through Georgetown and towards the Kennedy Center, conserving my energy.

As we came around the backside of the Lincoln Memorial I started keeping an eye on the side of the road where my friends had told me they were going to camp out. I spotted them standing on the curb, cheering on the other racers, before they saw me. I let out a sharp whistle to get their attention about fifty yards before I reached them, and angled myself towards the side of the road.

They were pretty easy to pick out of the crowd. One was a tall, thin woman with long, bright blue hair standing next to a shorter woman, solidly built, like a CrossFit enthusiast, with a purple flat-top haircut. The taller woman, Jill, was holding up a sign that read, "Liz puts the 'Special' in 'Specialist'!" She started yelling, "W-o-o-o-o-o!" when she saw me.

The shorter woman, Jo, was ringing a cowbell with her right hand and leaning out from the curb, holding out her left hand to me for a high-five and yelling, "Go Liz! You got this!"

I yelled out as I rolled up to them, "Can't stop, I'm running down that jarhead!" and pointed out the Marine ahead of me. He turned his head in surprise as he heard me call out, and then sped up. I held out a hand and slapped Jo's as I flew past, yelling, "Thanks, Chief!"

"You beat that Navy rent-a-soldier and drinks are on me tonight, Liz!" Jo yelled after me. "See you at the finish!" I spared myself enough breath for a laugh as I worked to re-close the gap between me and the Marine. I wanted to be right on his tail when we started the climb towards the Capitol building.

As I'd expected, when we started up the mile-and-a-half long hill he slowed down. He was easily more than three hundred pounds of meat and chair, whereas my total weight was probably under one-fifty. As we started up the hill, I made my move.

"Maybe I'll see you when you cross the finish line," I said, as I passed him, then saved my breath and focused on the road. I decided not to look back the entire hill, but focus on my wheels and my breathing. The Marine had been right; I wanted to ease up on the climb--it was brutal--but I followed his advice and powered through to the top.

When I made the loop at the top of the hill and started back down the other side of the street towards the left turn onto the Nineteenth Street bridge, I didn't see him at first. There was a moment's panic that he was right on my tail but then, as I coasted into the turn toward the bridge, I caught a glimpse of him still climbing the hill, huffing and puffing. He was being passed by two more smaller guys in wheelchairs, and I was at least three hundred yards ahead of him. I grinned and redoubled my efforts. No way I was going to let that jarhead run me down the last few miles.

As I cruised into the area around the Pentagon with maybe a half-dozen other wheelchairs and two of the fastest distance runners I think I'd ever seen, the crowds on the sides of the roads increased in size as well as volume. There were more cowbells than I could count, and I found myself wondering where that particular race tradition had come from.

Dozens of people on the sides of the course were holding out hands to offer high fives to racers, but I didn't slow down to give any. I didn't want to be that person who let up and got passed right at the finish, so I poured on everything I had left in my tank for the last few hundred yards and kept pushing until I sailed under the finish line archway at full speed, chest heaving with every breath. I looked up at the race clock as I passed it. 1:03:35. Not bad. My best ten-mile time yet, in fact.

I was in the finish area, looking around for Jill and Jo, when the Marine rolled up to me. His face was red and he was drenched in sweat. He held out his hand and, as I shook it, he said, "Hell of a race for your first time out, Army."

"Thanks, Recon."

He grinned ruefully at me. "I expect you might win the women's class in a couple of years if you keep at it."

I arched an eyebrow at him. "The women's class? After I blew your doors off you're still going to underestimate me, Marine?"

~~ Fort Bragg, North Carolina, October ~~

In some ways, I had been looking forward to coming back to the base. In other ways, I'd been dreading it. I wasn't sure if I'd have come at all if Jo hadn't offered to let me ride down with her and Jill.

Our unit was redeploying back to Fort Bragg after a year in Afghanistan the week after the Army Ten-Miler and we were here for the homecoming ceremony.

Jo and I had been deployed with the unit to Afghanistan the previous October. Our helicopter was shot down by a hidden Taliban gun emplacement in April. The crash left my spine severed at the T9-T10 level and I could no longer move or feel my legs. Chief Warrant Officer Jo Collins was one of the two aircraft pilots, and our commander. She took a round in the leg in the initial burst of fire, but she managed to crash land us after we'd lost both turbines. If she had been a less-skilled pilot, we'd probably all have been killed. She lessened the impact enough to save some of us, but we lost Sgt. Jackson and Jo's copilot, Chief Nguyen. No one escaped unscathed. Jo suffered a skull injury, and was in a coma for three weeks; she also lost her left leg from mid-calf down. Our crew chief, Sgt. Ehrens, suffered multiple fractures of both legs and a couple of cracked vertebrae, but in the intervening months he had almost healed up and was ready to go back to active duty.

I'd managed to get my dress uniform mostly in place at the hotel, but I wasn't inspection ready. It was just too hard to get everything settled right while dressing myself lying on a bed. Sliding my ass into my chair had made it worse. But as usual, the Chief had my back.

She'd pulled my chair out of the back of her red Jeep Renegade in the parking lot at the base, unfolded it and set it next to the back door of the SUV. Then she waited for me to slide myself into it and called Jill over.

"Alright Liz, let's get you up," she said, as she and Jill each put a shoulder under one of my arms and lifted me. They leaned down while holding me up, straightening the wrinkles in my uniform pants and making sure they were bloused into my jump boots just right, tucking and smoothing everything just so, and then set me carefully back down in my wheelchair. I eyed myself critically. Squared away, no wrinkles or creases. Jo had seen my need and addressed it without making a big deal of it.

"Thanks, Chief," I said gratefully.

"No problem, Specialist Ch... Ch... Charles. We don't want some sergeant major dinging you on your dress uniform, today of all days," she said, handing me my maroon beret from the back seat. Since the crash and her coma, she'd had trouble saying people's last names. Lingering neurological trauma, they'd told her, but she'd been getting better all year.

Jo straightened her own dress jacket, squared up her beret, and we headed to the parade ground. Jo's limp from her prosthetic leg was barely noticeable now. She'd also had her flat top haircut dyed from purple back to a normal regulation blonde earlier in the week. Not that she'd had to. She and I had both been medically retired. We were in uniform for the ceremony because we wanted to be. Her fiancé, Jill, was wearing a dress befitting a military spouse; a pale yellow number that came down to mid-calf and was set off, rather magnificently, by her brilliant blue hair.

Sgt. Ehrens was waiting for us at the parade grounds. He snapped off a picture-perfect salute to Jo as she walked up to him. She returned it, then embraced him warmly.

"Good to see you up and about, Chief." He hadn't seen either of us since we'd all been in the hospital together at Ramstein Airbase.

"Thanks, Billy. You're looking good. Going back active soon?"

"Next month, they tell me." He turned and gave me a hug. "Good to see you too, Liz."

"Thanks, Billy. Good to be back. Sorta," I said.

"I hear you."

The Sarge had been a great crew chief. I was going to miss flying with him, which was not to say I was going to miss flying. Jo was trying to get medically cleared to fly again in the civilian world, but I was pretty sure I'd never willingly get in a helicopter again for the rest of my life.

We found seats in the bleachers together, after the Chief and the Sarge had chased off some PFCs from the front row so I could park my chair next to them. I'd been to a few of these, so it felt familiar and comforting to listen to the battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Wilson, as he went through the motions of welcoming the unit back to the States, recognizing our efforts toward the mission, lauding our praises at making a difference.

That last bit caused me to exchange a glance with the Chief. It hadn't really felt like much was different in-country, between the start of our deployment and now. Or the start of the war and now, for that matter. None of us would say that, though. Not here. Not now.

The moment in the program came when the Lt. Col. paused to recognize those we'd lost over the last year. Twelve names, including Jackson and Nguyen. I struggled to remain impassive until I noticed a tear sliding down the Chief's face; then I let myself feel for a moment.

Both Sgt. Ehrens and Sgt. Jackson had taken me under their wings when I'd joined Jo's crew. Jo was a hell of a pilot, and had been an outstanding commander, but she expected excellence from her crew. There had definitely been a learning curve to adjust to the high expectations of everyone on our bird.

A year of hard work, listening and learning from Sgt. Jackson... Ben... had been its own reward. He'd shaped me into an integral part of the crew, and a better soldier than I'd have been under another sergeant. The nods of respect that E6's and E7's had given me when I was introduced as the flight medic on Chief Collins' bird, regardless of me being a lowly specialist, had always been gratifying. Jo had always held her head high and walked tall, and she expected everyone on her crew to do the same. There'd been no better example of that for me than Ben Jackson.

During the awards presentations, I was shocked when the Lt. Col. called out "Specialist, Elizabeth Joan Charles."

Jo and I both gave Sgt. Ehrens a dirty look and I heard Jo hiss at him, "You told them we'd be here?!" but he just grinned at us.

I nervously rolled up to the front. A thousand eyes were on me as Lt. Col. Wilson announced that I'd been awarded the Military Order of the Purple Heart as well as a Bronze Star. He saluted me, presented me with a fancy box holding the medals, and then he shook my hand and thanked me for my service and sacrifice.

Jo and I had both already been presented with the Purple Heart and Bronze Star when we'd been at Reed, but it was different to get official recognition in front of my unit and my peers. Special.

The next name called was, "Chief Warrant Officer Three, Jocelyn Marie Collins." She didn't look happy as I passed her on my way back to the bleachers. The Chief was the type who just wanted to do the job and not get applauded for doing it, but I was happy she was being awarded with her fiancé present. Jill was so in love with Jo, and it was nice for her to see Jo getting recognized in front of the battalion.

When she got up to the commander, he read off her awards. Purple Heart. Bronze Star. Then he announced that it had taken more time for approval but she was also being awarded with the Army Air Medal, with the "V" device to denote an act of heroism; specifically, for controlling her helicopter's descent and saving the lives of two of her crew despite being gravely wounded by enemy fire. The Lt. Col. went on to announce that Chief Warrant Officer Two Eric Nguyen was also being awarded the same honor, posthumously.

When she returned to her seat, Jo didn't speak. She just sat with a stone-faced expression, a look I'd come to recognize at Reed that she used when she was dealing with her emotions. I took it as a positive sign that when Jill reached out for Jo's hand, Jo returned the gesture and gripped her hand tightly.

The reception afterwards was a fairly boisterous affair, with a lot of celebrating for those who didn't depart immediately to go home with their families. Our commander in Afghanistan, Major Seely, came and sat at our table, holding a beer. Jo and I had both tried to salute him when he arrived but he'd waved us off.