You Had Me at Hero

Chapter 1-1

Chapter 1

“Nine-one-one. Where’s your emergency?”

Mark glanced at the clock on his computer. He could log out of the phone, go home, and start his weekend in three minutes. He hoped for something quick and brainless. Maybe a nice parking complaint. He could plug in a vehicle description, a license plate number, and call it a night.

The caller was sobbing and screamed all her words out in one jumbled mess. Very few parking complaints came in at three in the morning. Mark sat up straight and directed his caller to repeat her location.

“I don’t know where I am!” his caller cried. “Some guy just tried to rape me, then threw me out of his house. I don’t have any shoes on and he said he had a gun.”

“Did you see a gun?”

“No. But he went inside. What if he comes out with a gun? Ohmigod, ohmigod, help me!”

“I’m gonna send you some help, okay? Where are you?”

“I don’t know! I’m outside his house. The address is 2236. He has my shoes, he has my purse, what do I do?”

“I want you to get away from in front of his house, okay? Walk up to a corner and read me a street sign. Are you okay to walk up the block? Did he hurt you?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“Do you need an ambulance?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Okay. Can you walk up and maybe read me a street sign?”

Mark had already sent a call up to the dispatcher, Laura-Lee, letting her know that, according to the map that automatically popped up on his computer, police were needed in the vicinity of the university. At this hour, cars would already be rolling, but his computer only gave him an approximate block range; for an exact location, he needed his caller to tell him where she was. Finding a street sign gave her something to focus on besides what had just happened to her, and got her out from in front of the house. If this creep did have a gun, Mark didn’t want him coming back outside and scratching an itchy trigger finger.

“I’m on Frasher Street,” his caller was eventually able to tell him.

“Are you on South Frasher Street?”

“I don’t know! The sign just says Frasher Street.”

“But are you out by the U?”

“Yeah.”

Once they had it sussed out, Mark sent his caller’s exact location to dispatch. He could tell by looking at his map that police were almost on scene. Pertinent information flowed from his ear to his fingers to the dispatcher’s call screen without effort. He’d coded the call as a s*x assault in progress, warned officers of the possibility of a weapon. They’d know what they were walking into and, with any luck, treat his caller with an appropriate degree of compassion.

Which she was going to need. “He said if he didn’t kill me he hopes I kill myself,” she sobbed into the phone. “I had to fight him off me. He said everybody wants him, he was doing me a favor, if I couldn’t be grateful I don’t deserve to live.”

“Which you and I both know is bull, right?”

She sniffled a ragged “Uh huh.”

“Okay, good. I’ve got help coming to you, okay? Tell me when you see a police officer. Do you go to the U?” Mark asked, just to keep her talking. His empathy went into overdrive on calls like this one. He could just see this young woman, standing barefoot and scared, alone on a street corner in the middle of the night, and he hoped his voice—any voice, calm and compassionate—could help her feel less isolated while she waited for help.

Just before the first of three little police car icons on Mark’s computer turned red, indicating an on-scene arrival, his caller told him, “I think I see police.”

“Okay, good.”

Then she shrieked. “Ohmigod, he just came out of his house!”

This information flew through Mark’s fingers into the call screen. “Does he have a gun?”

“I can’t tell. Ohmigod!”

“Does he see you? Are you somewhere safe?”

“I can’t tell. Ohmigod!”

“Does he see the police?”

“He does now! They just ran onto the porch. Ohmigod!”

“What’s happening?”

“Ohmigod, he did have a gun!” Mark was relieved by her use of the past tense. “But they got it away from him. Ohmigod, they’re arresting him. They have him in handcuffs. Ohmigod, you did it—they’re taking him away. One of the cops is walking toward me, some woman.”

This would be Flo Tanaka, according to the unit number of the little police car on Mark’s screen. She’d been Starr’s sergeant when he’d worked graves in District Three. She wasn’t exactly all rainbows and warm hugs, but she was highly trained in working with victims of s****l assault. Mark knew she would at least treat his caller with respect and do her best to help her feel safe.

“Okay. Good. Go ahead and talk to her.” Not that there was anything he could do about it in any case, but Mark often bonded with his callers in high-adrenaline situations, and it made it easier to click them off into the night if he knew they were in good hands.

“Is she right there with you?” he asked. “Do you feel safe disconnecting?”

“I think so, yeah. Ohmigod, thank you. He did have a gun—you just saved my life. You’re like my hero!”

“That’s what we’re here for,” Mark told nobody. His caller was gone, in Flo’s care now. Sergeant Tanaka, call center protocol would have him think of her, but once you’ve watched a police officer shake her shimmy in a sundress down a Soul Train line at your own wedding, as Mark had discovered four years ago, it became quite impossible to consider her on anything but a first-name basis.

He swiftly slid the mouse across his desk and signed out of the phone before another call could drop in, yanking his headset from the jack for good measure. He liked his job, and he was good at it, but three twelves in a row provided quite a sufficient number of distress calls; he earned his time off, and by three o’clock on Monday morning—three-oh-four, to be quite precise—the tires on his wheelchair were practically screeching as he rolled for his locker, then the elevator.

But a guy had to be rolling pretty fast to slip past Coretta Montague when she was on the hunt for a shift trade. The “Bradford!” she hurled across the center hit Mark just before the elevator doors slid open, and he had no choice but to let them slide closed on an empty car while he waited for her to finish her call. Coretta was his buddy, for one thing. More to the point, Mark doubted he could get into his car and out of the parking lot faster than Coretta could get off the phone, run down the stairs, and fling herself bodily in front of him. For a three-hundred-pound grandmother she was pretty light on her feet when time off was at stake.

With a little over six years under his belt, Mark enjoyed some seniority at a job with such a high burn-out rate—a full two-thirds of the city’s 911 call takers had been on the phones for under two years. Coretta had started in 1990, a few weeks before Mark turned three. She knew the ins and outs of 911 as if she’d written the employee handbook. Which she had, in 1998 and again in 2007. In what she referred to as her “real life,” she showed champion Corgis and ran a booming online organic dog treat business, with which her obligations to the City occasionally interfered. She was relentless when her schedule needed rearranging, but equally reliable for paybacks. Mark had cobbled together more than one extra vacation with Coretta’s help, and he knew it would be worth his while to hear her out. While he waited for her to wrap up her noise complaint, he carefully avoided calculating the snuggle time with Starr that was ticking away.

Shortly Coretta signed out of her phone and lumbered across the room. “How you been, baby?” She bent to peck Mark on both cheeks. “Those babies must be keepin’ you boys busy. I never see you around here anymore.”

“That’s ‘cause you never come to work,” Mark teased her. “You’ve always got something better to do.”

She laughed. “Funny you should mention that.” She launched into the preamble of an elaborate three-way trade scheme that would allow “Indiana,” some new girl on day shift Mark had never met or heard of who apparently spoke Spanish, to accompany Coretta to an upcoming dog show in Mexico City.

“You know I can’t function at seven o’clock in the morning,” Mark reminded Coretta when she wrapped up her pitch.

She scrunched her lips to the side of her face and said, “Please. Don’t give me that. You’re a daddy now, you function when you’re told. You trying to tell me you’re sending those babies off to school with no breakfast?”

“I got a husband takes care of all that.”

“Well, perfect. He can take care of all that, you can help me take care of this.”

“Yeah, but…seven o’clock?” Mark whined.

“It’s just an eight-hour shift, and it’s straight overtime for you. C’mon, baby. I’ll owe you big, and you know I’m good for it.”

The shift in question was on a Wednesday. Smack in the middle of Mark’s days off, and he really did try to switch his body clock back to something like normal during the week. With a three o’clock logout, he’d still be able to scoop the boys up after school, and it never hurt to have a favor from Coretta up his sleeve.

“Fine,” Mark said. “But she has to put it in the book. I’m going home.”

“She already did!” Coretta gleefully exclaimed. Mark laughed. “You’re a hero, Bradford.” She kissed his cheeks again. “Have a good night.”

Since his second wedding—the legal one, a little over a year ago—he was “Bradford-Potts” on paper, of course, but Mark wasn’t a big stickler on this point. Everybody Mark knew who wasn’t Coretta and didn’t call him “Daddy” called him “Mark,” for one thing. And he kinda liked being called “Bradford,” proof, as it was, that his love for Starr was a foundational part of his identity. Coretta had never called Mark “Potts” before Starr came along; he’d always rather suspected that with “Bradford,” Coretta was bestowing upon him, as the husband of one and now the father of two, a certain status as an Honorary Black Guy.

The 911 call center was tucked into a park in the middle of town. Mark and Starr lived in a neighborhood of post-World War II brick ranch houses east of the park, barely a five-minute drive at three in the morning. Even after being corralled by Coretta, Mark was out of his clothes, out of his chair, and into the bed by three-thirty, with his arms around his husband at three-thirty and about two seconds. Geeze but it felt good to cuddle up next to Starr. Any trace of a world that might exist outside their bed fizzled away as soon as they were in it together. Even if he tried, which he had long given up doing, he couldn’t focus on a worry, couldn’t retain the residue from even the most stressful call. With Starr in his arms, there was no room left for fear, no way to also hold on to doubt. With Starr in a patrol car and two sons careening through life in America while being black, these things were easy enough to find during the day, but in the quiet dark, Starr’s body throwing heat like rocks in a sauna, Mark’s defenses—which Starr assured him were more finely tuned than most people’s—melted away.

When Starr rolled over with the whoosh of a contented sigh to take Mark in his own arms, Mark knew he was safe. He knew he was loved. And when his hand followed a hunch along the ridge of Starr’s muscled belly, he knew he was desired. He took a great handful of Starr’s warm, heavy balls and watched a sleepy grin spread across his face.

“Marky?”

This mumbled verification always made Mark laugh. As opposed to…? “No. It’s a jewel thief,” he said, gathering Starr’s balls and giving his sac a tug. “I just struck it rich.”

The grin grew and Starr rolled onto his back. “Take whatever you want, just please don’t hurt me.”

“We’ll see.”

Toying with Starr’s balls all the while, Mark began by kissing him. On the mouth, on both cheeks, on the neck; he licked at his tangy pits, nibbled at his n*****s, and tongued his navel until really there was only one place left for his mouth to go. Starr wasn’t especially long, but he was fantastically thick, and Mark loved taking a big faceful of him. It was the start of his weekend, he could sleep as late as he wanted—there was no reason at all for Mark to hurry. He luxuriated in the taste, the feel, the smell of Starr’s balls, his butthole, his in-between. He licked at the length of him, sucked at the swell, teased his head, and tickled his base. He took the tip in his mouth, worked it with his tongue until he released a loud, low moan, then took Starr’s entire shaft in one slow, smooth swallow. Up and down, gently in and out, Mark coaxed a surging load from Starr’s c**k and greedily guzzled every drop. Then, with a belly full of c*m, he retraced his trail, up Starr’s chiseled stomach, over his heaving chest, along his stubbled neck for another taste of his smiling lips.

With Starr still on his back, Mark snuggled into him, resting his head on his broad, brown chest, flinging his arm across the plank of his belly. Starr took in a big breath and let out another expansive sigh. Sleep was only seconds away when Starr kissed Mark on the top of his head and swooned.

“My hero.”