The Exception by Lauren H. Mae

Sixteen

The problem wasn’t that Sonya was thinking about Trav outside of work. Mentoring a student was a big responsibility and she would have been derelict in her duties if she didn’t spend some mental time planning his day before they arrived at work and got caught up in the rush.

The problem was she was not thinking about Trav’s progression as a student, or the schedule she needed to make. She was thinking about something else.

She sat up in bed and pressed her fingers to her eyes, trying to rub away the lingering images from the dream she’d just woken from in a flop sweat. She plucked at her tank. She probably didn’t even need to hit the treadmill today.

Ugh. It was all because she’d been stupid enough to climb into bed with him.

A display bed! she reminded herself. It wasn’t real. There were people all around them. But it was weird.

He’d realized it too, the situation they’d accidentally put themselves in, and noticing him notice was the worst part. She’d been embarrassed so she’d forced her expression neutral, pretending it was all normal to be lying in bed with her intern.

Display. Bed.

But the way he’d looked beside her on that pillow—his eyes hooded, hair a mess—it was such a vulnerable moment. Exactly how he must look right before drifting off at night, she’d thought. Or first thing in the morning.

And that was what had seeped into her dream: Trav, sleepy-eyed and bed-headed, rolling over with just the weak, early dawn light that she knew they both saw on a regular basis. Instead of smacking her alarm and hopping in the shower, she’d stayed, stretching her arms over her head.

And he’d given her that smirk-smile, the one she used to hate but now… didn’t. And then, still sprawled out on his belly, he’d reached a hand out and tugged her to him. She’d gone willingly and she hadn’t hated herself for it one bit when his hand skimmed her hip and slipped between her legs.

She threw herself onto her stomach and let out a frustrated growl into her pillow. “Dreams are the processing and sorting of stimuli you take in during the day,” she recited. “They’re not our secret desires. Sorry, Freud (and Emma). And they’re certainly not prophetic. I saw Trav in a bed. I dreamed him in a bed. I haven’t touched a man in a long time and so my brain put him in my bed. That’s it.”

She sat up, feeling slightly better. Except for the part about not touching a man. That might have been a buried secret spilling, at least the way she felt about it. Marcus had been gone for weeks before their planned elopement. And they certainly hadn’t touched that day. That was weeks ago now. A couple months wasn’t a huge long time, especially given the emotional fallout she was dealing with, but it wasn’t recent either.

She glanced at the clock. Seven minutes past her usual shower schedule. Enough of this. She wasn’t going to let a dirty dream make her late, or start questioning whether she needed to add “vaguely horny” to the list of physical symptoms of this breakup.

And she wasn’t going to give another thought to the smile that had been stretched across her face when she woke up from said dream.

* * *

“Come on in. You don’t need a reservation.” Trav stared down at his textbook, eyes blurred as he acknowledged the warm body who’d been behind him for the last five minutes.

Sonya must have thought her Chuck Taylors made her undetectable when she’d come up behind him and hovered in the doorway. Maybe to someone else, but he’d developed a pretty keen ear for an approaching attack. And he’d been hoping she’d show up.

He’d spent the afternoon trying to gage whether or not she felt any awkwardness after their accidental mattress-sharing. She hadn’t seemed fazed at all, and he wasn’t sure if he was glad for it or a little dejected.

He’d taken two cold showers since last night just trying to numb the effects of his new favorite memory. He was like a teenager with a crush. But Sonya had been business as usual all day.

It was probably for the best, even if he didn’t like it.

“Are you sneaking up on me in the break room because you smelled the special of the day?” He waved a hand over the empty Pyrex on the table beside him. “Yours is in the fridge.”

Sonya glided around the table, hands in the pockets of her scrubs. She’d started today covering on another floor so she wasn’t dressed in her usual ball-busting outfit of heels and a lab coat. He might have been disappointed if that look hadn’t been replaced in his favorites by the casual outfit she’d had on when they went shopping.

“You made me dinner?” she asked, opening a drawer for utensils.

“It was supposed to be lunch,” he said, ignoring the way the offer sounded very intimate all of a sudden. A shared lunch had felt less so, since they did it regularly now, but they’d been slammed all day and neither of them had taken one. “What?”

“Nothing. Just… thank you.”

“You’re welcome, friend.”

She groaned as she opened the fridge door and pulled out the package he’d put together for her, stabbing a forkful immediately.

“You’re not going to heat it up?”

She shook her head, cheeks puffed out. “Too hungry,” she muttered with a mouthful. “What’s this?” She pointed to his stack of books.

“This, unfortunately, is statistics.”

A slow smile spread across her face as she swallowed her food. “I freaking love stats.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Said no one ever. You can’t be serious.”

“Of course I am! Stats is so, I don’t know, predictable. It’s comforting.”

“You are such a nerd.” My favorite part about you, he thought.

This was getting ridiculous.

“Hey!” she said, slapping his arm and seriously not helping the ridiculousness. “I didn’t get to be the youngest nurse manager in hospital history by being half-assed about my learning.”

He smiled. “Tell me that story again. I think I’ve forgotten the last four times I’ve heard it.”

Her mouth twisted in a grin. “Okay, wise guy. Math and science are part of the nursing curriculum, and I have my faves. Sue me.”

“I think I will,” he said, crossing his arms over his chest. “Plaintiff alleges Defendant is the nerdiest nerd he’s ever met and she’s trying to gaslight him into thinking he’s a failure because he doesn’t have a favorite type of math.”

She scooped another bite into her mouth and shrugged. “Your words, soldier.”

He chuckled. “Okay, well, not all of us are as excited about it. I just need to pass, not become the next Einstein.”

“You mean Pearson. Einstein studied algebra and calculus.” She rolled her eyes. “Everyone knows that.”

He gave her an incredulous look, and she burst out laughing. A full belly laugh that stopped him in his tracks. Maybe it was the combination of scrubs and sneakers, and the way her braids were draped over her shoulder instead of the usual tight bun she wore, but Nurse Pope, Sonya, laughing like that was like meeting her for the first time.

He watched her shoulders shake, and the dopamine receptors in his brain must have lit up like a Christmas tree. Warmth tingled down his arms and he felt his face stretch into a full grin. How long had it been since he’d made a woman laugh like that?

“Why are you here studying?” she asked. “Don’t you want to go home?”

“Uh, I like the noise. My place is too quiet.”

“And void of furniture?”

He laughed. “And there’s that.”

A beat passed and he was sure they were both thinking of that bed.

She turned away, shrugging. “I can help you.”

“Yeah?”

“My place is kind of quiet too,” she said, and it felt sort of like a confession. She held up her fork with a bite of steak. “Consider it payment for the food.”

“The meal’s on the house, but I won’t turn down tutoring from the smartest woman in the class.”

“Flattery will get you everywhere.”

His eyes dropped down her front involuntarily at the word everywhere. Leave it to him to make that dirty. Luckily, she didn’t catch the slip. She took the seat beside him and pulled the book out of his hands.

“The thing about stats is, it’s just a tool. A complicated one, but like all tools, its sole purpose is to make your life easier. To learn it is to love it.”

“Sure,” he said, trying to keep the playfulness in his voice, but damn. School Teacher Sonya might rival Nurse Sonya for fantasy of the month.

He wondered if, when all of this was over, he might have a shot at a drink with her. Maybe a nice dinner. The idea had been stewing in the back of his head since their treadmill run, when his attraction to her had morphed into an actual desire to get to know her. And of course, there was the bed shopping where his head had filled that desire in with all sorts of fantasies as to how that could turn out.

She’d probably shoot him down anyway, given his less than stellar first impression, but she’d seemed to have forgiven him for that. She hadn’t asked him if he wanted a glass of orange juice in at least two weeks. Maybe…

Then again, even if he hadn’t made an ass of himself, he’d heard through the grapevine that her ex-fiancé was a commercial airline pilot who took her on fancy vacations and had a house in Georgetown.

Trav was an ex-medic who was training for a job that would most likely require moonlighting just to pay his bills. And the only traveling he’d done was between warzones. They might be friends now, but when it came to anything else, she was way out of his league.

“Are you even going to take notes?” she asked.

He snapped to, nodding. “Yup. Definitely. Can you just repeat that last part for me?” There I go proving my own point.

Sonya handed him a pen. “Pay attention,” she said, grinning. “This is going to be fun.”