The Exception by Lauren H. Mae

Seventeen

“Hey, good call back there,” Sonya said, pointing to the patient’s room where Trav had just caught a potentially problematic discrepancy in the man’s chart.

Trav smiled to himself and allowed Sonya’s compliment to wash over him. Their working relationship had been on the same trajectory as their friendship recently but he still felt like a kid getting an “A” on his report card whenever she praised him for his work.

He rubbed the back of his steadily warming neck and glanced over at her from the corner of his eye.

“Not bad for an almost paramedic, huh?”

That secret smile he’d only seen in more relaxed situations stretched across her lips and he wished he could see it full on instead of in profile. That smile felt like sunshine on a warm day and he wanted to bask in it.

“You’ve still got a lot to learn. I mean, I’m almost 5’5” and I still can’t reach the plates in the cabinet over my refrigerator.”

He chuckled. “You help me learn what I need to know and I’ll help you reach those plates.”

Sonya stopped walking and turned to him, hugging the charts she was carrying to her chest. Her smile had dimmed to a smirk but amusement still danced in her eyes.

“What do you think these heels are for?”

It was an invitation to look at those legs and he accepted without a second thought. When his eyes found her face again, he knew he’d been caught but she didn’t seem offended. He’d have to unpack that later.

Something had shifted between them ever since they’d started spending evenings studying in the break room, but he didn’t want to think about it too much. He didn’t want to risk getting his hopes up about them possibly being more than friends at the end of his rotation.

“Good point,” he said. “But we’re still a good team.”

Sonya cocked her head to one side. “You think so?”

“Definitely.”

Her full lips twisted into a pucker as she pondered his observation. “Hmm… if we’re a good team, we’re the 2015 Cavaliers and I’m LeBron carrying you on my back.”

The smile was bursting across his face before he could even think about stopping it.

This woman.

“You enjoy roasting me, don’t you?”

Sonya lifted one shoulder and grinned over at him. “It is a highlight of my day.”

It was the highlight of his day too, but he wasn’t going to admit that just yet. He was going to get some more, though. “Well, if we’re using basketball analogies, I’d have to say we’re more like—”

His joke died on his tongue when he looked up to see her face stricken. The smile she’d been wearing had turned into an open-mouth gape and the corners of her eyes pooled with tears.

The sight of it cut off his air.

“What’s wrong?” He followed her gaze to see two nurses restraining a patient who was refusing to go into his room. They were struggling with him while a man in a white coat tried to calm him with words Trav couldn’t hear.

The patient looked up from behind the taller nurse’s shoulder, and when their eyes met, Trav knew exactly what made Sonya’s face look like that, because the same emotion washed over him. It was Frank.

He’d only been out a week and he was already back.

* * *

It’s only been a week.

That was the only thought in Sonya’s head as she watched the scene playing out in front of her devolve into something she never wanted to see with a patient, especially this patient. Frank had a knack for being verbally combative but he’d never given anyone on the floor cause to physically restrain him. She knew something must’ve gone terribly wrong over the last week to affect him like this.

It broke her heart.

She gasped as one of the nurses lost his hold on Frank’s arm and paid for it with an elbow to his side. If this went on any longer, they would sedate him and Frank didn’t handle sedation well.

Her training and her feet propelled her forward to help get the situation under control, but something held her back.

She looked down to see Trav’s fingers wrapped around her wrist. Frustrated, she tried to pull away but his grip only tightened.

She growled. “Let me go!”

Unbothered, Trav shook his head. “No.”

She parted her lips to continue her protest but when her gaze traced up his arm to his face, whatever argument she had, died on her tongue. His attention was focused on Frank and the nurses, but even in profile she could see that his face had hardened into a granite mask leaving no trace of the Trav she’d been joking with moments earlier. This was the take no shit version of Trav that Sonya had only glimpsed once before, but she had to imagine was always right there beneath the surface.

Trav’s eyes met hers and the intensity she found there stole her breath.

“I’ve got him,” he promised. “Stay back.”

Sonya’s body relaxed and she nodded, because everything about this version of Trav assured that he would handle it. She wasn’t the type of woman who expected men to step in to save the day, but it felt different coming from Trav.

And confusing.

And something she’d need to do a deeper dive on later.

Trav released her, moving to help the nurses like a man on a mission. Sonya worried when Frank struggled against Trav’s hold too, but Trav’s arms were like iron as he practically carried Frank to his room.

Only then did Sonya start breathing again and the despair she’d felt about Frank’s condition was replaced by a fury she’d never experienced at work. Her eyes narrowed and she searched the area for the person responsible for the mess they’d all witnessed.

Dr. Lewis was warned that Frank’s progress wasn’t where it needed to be and hadn’t listened. Sonya would never know if that was because she was “just a nurse” or for some other reason but either way, he was going to listen to her now.

Sonya didn’t wait for him to acknowledge her. She straightened her shoulders and marched toward him.

“Dr. Lewis? A word?”

* * *

After one too many wide-eyed looks in the hallway, Sonya made it her mission to stay hidden in her office until it was time to go home. She was certain that everyone was already whispering about the nurse who’d completely lost her shit on a doctor and she didn’t want to give them a reminder just by being visible.

Then again, maybe she was the one who didn’t need the reminder of her less than finest moment.

Getting into a yelling match with Dr. Lewis would’ve been unprofessional if it had happened without an audience. In front of the entire nursing staff, including her intern, it was elevated to a full blown incident. She still wasn’t sure how Dr. Lewis was going to react and the idea that she could end the day with her first official reprimand had her stomach in knots.

As she walked to the elevator, all she could think about was how much she would deserve that reprimand. She’d let her personal issues overshadow her judgment and she knew better. Her ability to have empathy while maintaining her clinical detachment had been her saving grace for her entire career, but today it failed her all because Frank reminded her too damn much of her dad. So much so, that she’d been willing to throw herself in harm’s way to help him.

Absently, she rubbed the place on her wrist where Trav had held her back from making the situation worse. An image of his face in that moment flashed through her mind and it intensified the phantom touch sensation she’d felt all afternoon. His touch had been purposeful, but that look had transformed it into something intimate. The whole protective, alpha male thing was something Sonya liked in the books she read, but in real life, she’d always found it a little problematic. She’d always thought it would feel suffocating to be around a man like that, but in that moment with Trav, he made her feel like she could breathe.

Maybe Frank wasn’t the only person at work she needed to take a step back from.

Sighing, she stabbed the elevator button and tried to focus on her de-stressing plan that involved a treadmill, Thai food, and a few glasses of wine. However, after five minutes of just standing there, she realized the damn elevator was stuck four floors above her, putting her entire plan on hold.

Fighting her frustration and the emotion bubbling in her chest, she pressed the already lit “down” button a few more times for good measure.

“That won’t make it get here any faster, you know.”

She glared at Trav who had somehow appeared right behind her without her noticing. She must really be bad off if the army of one had managed to sneak up on her.

“I think it’s broken,” she muttered.

“Nah, it’s just slow as fuck. Wanna take the stairs with me?”

With a nod, she hoisted her bag up on her shoulder and headed for the stairwell with Trav falling into step next to her. He was quiet for the first flight, and that was good. She didn’t want to talk about what happened.

Except… maybe she needed to talk about it because something inside of her was begging him to bring it up.

He must have heard it because he commented, “So, that thing with Dr. Lewis earlier was intense.”

She shot him a glare when she hit one of the landings between flights, even though he’d done exactly what she was hoping for.

“It was unprofessional and it set an awful example.”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I think it was pretty badass.”

She rolled her eyes and kept moving. “You would.”

He chuckled. “What do you expect? My preceptor is a total badass who sets the best example by going to bat for her patients even when it isn’t easy.”

Those words brought her to an abrupt stop because they weren’t true. Frank wouldn’t be back in there if she’d spoken up sooner.

She turned to face him. “I should’ve pushed back more when they recommended him for release last week. He wasn’t ready and I should’ve protested more.”

Trav opened his mouth to respond but was interrupted by people coming down the stairs. He pulled her across the landing and they tucked under the flight of stairs above them. They were practically chest to chest and her heart skipped the way it had when he’d prevented her from jumping into harm’s way.

It wasn’t very liberated of her, but she couldn’t deny standing next to him made her feel safer somehow.

Once the nurses passed, he refocused his attention on her. “I get why you feel that way, but he’s in here because of his illness and you can’t beat yourself up over it. You did everything you could for him, but he has to want to get better.”

She didn’t know what she’d been expecting him to say exactly, but it wasn’t that. Usually when she talked to people in medicine about her patients in crisis, she got a lot of professional advice but not a lot of empathy. She was supposed to be able to handle it, and mostly she did. But there was a reason she’d been able to get her mile time down to just under eight minutes. When she was running, the weight of her patient’s well-being wasn’t quite as hard to carry.

“Did you know Saturday is his daughter’s sweet sixteen?” she asked. “Last time he was in here, he talked about wanting to get healthy so he could be there for her party. He said he’d missed so much while being deployed over the years and he didn’t want to miss anything else.

“He could still make it,” Trav offered, but she shook her head.

“No, he can’t. He’s a danger to himself and he’s going to be here for a while.”

Trav nodded. “It’s what he needs right now.”

“Yeah, but he’s still missing a big day in his daughter’s life.”

“He is,” Trav agreed. “But maybe missing this day will help him not miss any more.”

He gave her a soft smile, and she sighed, finding comfort in the fact that Trav agreed with her. If he saw it the same way, then maybe she hadn’t been projecting her own shit with her dad onto this case. All she wanted was for Frank’s family to be spared the same fate, but she needed to keep her head on straight, not let her emotions affect her clinical decisions.

“You’re right,” she said. “This job… I love it but it’s so hard sometimes. I thought… he was getting better, you know? But he does this and I can’t help but wonder what more I could’ve done.”

She absolutely hated the way her voice cracked as she spoke. It felt like she was cracking apart and all of the emotions she’d kept bottled up for so long just seeped out for everyone to see.

Trav stepped closer, ducking his head to look her in the eye. “Sonya, you care about your patients. I’ve only been working with you a short time and even I can see that it’s because you have the biggest heart. But you can’t blame yourself when things go wrong. It’ll eat you alive.”

“You don’t understand,” she interrupted. He didn’t understand how hard it was for her, especially with patients like Frank, and she couldn’t explain it to him without completely breaking down.

Her eyes stung with tears and she tried to step around him, needing to get out of there before the grip she had on her control loosened completely. But Trav’s hand gently wrapped around her fingers and stopped her progress. She glanced down at where their bodies were linked and her instincts screamed at her to pull away. This was beyond unprofessional and anyone could walk by and jump to the wrong conclusion.

But when her eyes traveled from their hands, up his arm, to his face, any thoughts she had about pulling away vanished. His eyes were full of compassion but they also burned right through her and rooted her to the spot.

His voice was low when he finally spoke. “I understand what it’s like to think you’re helping someone, how you can think you’re doing everything right for them. I understand how everything can be going as expected one minute and the next… you’re watching your friend bleed out and there’s nothing else you can do.”

The anguish on his face sucked the air out of the stairwell. She recognized that specific kind of pain like it was a member of her family. Because it was.

“What happened?” she whispered.

He ran his free hand through his hair and blew out a breath. “We were out on patrol and got ambushed. My buddy Nate was hit in the leg, and upon assessment, it looked like the bullet passed through. I gave him shit about being such a baby about a scratch and started cleaning off the blood to wrap him up…” he paused and blew out a whoosh of air. “That’s when I saw it was way too much blood. The bullet nicked his femoral artery. I did everything I could—compression, a makeshift tourniquet, everything. But I was only able to get him seventeen minutes before he bled out.”

A few of the tears she’d been trying so hard to hide slipped down her cheeks. For once, she didn’t care about professionalism or about showing weakness. Trav’s pain radiated off of him and all she wanted to do was soothe it somehow. Her fingers wove through his, and she held on to his hand, her thumb rubbing tiny circles at the base of his.

“Oh God, Trav… I’m sorry.”

He was squeezing her hand so tightly that she vaguely worried about her circulation, but in that moment, she wouldn’t have let him go for anything.

“He was a good man who didn’t deserve to die like that and I blamed myself for not realizing he was hemorrhaging sooner, for teasing him. But the thing was, we were pinned down miles from the field hospital and there was nothing more I could’ve done for him even if I had realized it.”

His eyes found hers again and her heart skipped a few beats. “So I get it,” he continued. “I know what it’s like to beat yourself up for something you had no control over. It breaks you, and every time a few of those pieces of yourself get lost, making it damn hard to keep putting yourself back together.”

Sonya’s breath caught in her throat because he did get it. There was something different about talking to someone who’d experienced the same things, wrestled with the same feelings of responsibility and helplessness, professional detachment and crippling loss. She walked a tightrope everyday between caring for her patients and caring too much about them; between being satisfied that she was able to help them and devastated when she couldn’t. And now she was staring into the face of a man who understood her completely.

For the first time since their accidental bed-shopping, she allowed her gaze to linger on his face; from his slate blue eyes, to the smattering of freckles across his nose and cheeks, down to his lips that were more full than they had any right to be.

When those lips quirked up in a half smile, she knew she’d been caught staring and she lifted her eyes to meet his.

The way he was looking at her stole her breath. What would it be like to have those lips pressed against hers? To let him hold her with those arms that had so capably taken care of the situation with Frank? At that moment, she thought she must truly be falling apart, because all she wanted to do was find out.

The sound of voices filtered down from the landing above them and Trav cleared his throat, taking a deliberate step back. His cheeks had turned a bright pink and she felt the blood rushing her face too.

Two nurses who Sonya recognized from the ED trotted down the stairs, falling into single file so they could pass between her and Trav. Sonya smiled politely, willing them to move faster and to not take notice of the way she and her intern had been staring at each other.

Her heart was still in her throat even as the moment passed. The moment she’d felt all the way to her toes.

“Um…” Trav shifted his bag higher up on his shoulder once the nurses passed. “Anyway, I just thought you should know that I’m here, if you ever want to talk.”

“Right. Yes, same here.” She pressed a hand to the side of her neck. Still on fire. “I should go.”

“Right. Um… will I see you at the event Saturday night?”

She’d intentionally forgotten about the gala for the new wing happening that weekend, and she still wasn’t sure if she could take showing up there alone.

“Not sure. You’re going?”

Trav rubbed the back of his neck. “My dad thinks I should be there.”

She nodded. “Maybe I’ll see you.”

“Yeah, maybe. Good night, Sonya.”

“Good night.”

She turned to head down the stairs ahead of him, but a different warmth lingering in her chest made her pause. Despite the turn that had taken, his words meant a lot. She looked over her shoulder to see him slouched against the wall, a hand in his hair. “Trav?”

“Yeah?”

“Thank you.”