The Exception by Lauren H. Mae

Three

“What do you mean you and Marcus broke up?”

Sonya glanced around the bistro to see if Emma’s shriek had actually been as loud as it had seemed, but the people at the tables around them were still enjoying their boozy brunches like a damn banshee wasn’t seated in their midst.

She’d expected an emotional reaction to the news but she wasn’t sure if she’d ever heard Emma’s voice go quite that high.

“It’s fine.”

“It’s fine? You were engaged!”

Shrugging, Sonya said, “Yeah, well now we’re not.”

It was supposed to come off as indifferent, but maybe she shouldn’t have stabbed her fork into the last few strawberries on her plate like they owed her money.

Emma narrowed her eyes and her pale cheeks reddened.

“What did he do? I’ll get Adam to kick his ass. Josh and Dylan can help,” she promised.

“Ha. Try and find him.” That snarky reply flew out of her mouth before she even thought it. But it was true. Marcus was never around before this. There was a good chance that moment in Hawaii was the last time she’d ever see his face. It was either going to prove a useful tool in getting over him or it was about to give her a whole chapter to analyze in the How The Hell Did I Get Here book.

That was the kind of friend Emma had always been, though. She’d go to war for her without asking why until after the battle was over. They’d been each other’s Day One ever since their day one in the dorms at UVA. Cat and Dani lived across the hall, and the four of them had become inseparable. The foursome eventually grew to eight with the addition of the husbands and boyfriends Emma was currently volunteering for duty, but the core would always be her girls.

“I’m serious, Sonya.”

Sonya held up a hand. “Calm down, Corleone. He doesn’t need his ass kicked, and if he did, you know I’d handle it.”

It took a minute but Emma’s demeanor shifted as that anger slowly drained out of her and was replaced by sadness and confusion. She reached across the table and squeezed Sonya’s hand.

“What happened?”

“He decided that we weren’t in love enough, and both of us deserve better.”

There was a pause as Emma processed that explanation before a deep frown became etched in her delicate features. “Are you sure he doesn’t need his ass kicked?”

“Yes!” Sonya sputtered as her first genuine laugh since everything went down spilled out of her, almost making her choke on her drink.

“Sonya,” Emma sighed. “Are you okay?”

That question made the hurt and resentment Sonya had tried so hard to lock away sneak back into the forefront of her mind, and her heart squeezed a little.

Which was completely unacceptable.

Wallowing was not her style, so with a sharp inhale she shoved those feelings away and pasted a resigned smile on her face. “I’m fine,” she replied. “Of course, hearing him say it hurt initially but I’ve had time to think about it, and he was right. We loved each other and had fun together but we were never in love like you and Adam are. Or Cat and Josh. Hell, I think even Dani and Dylan might have had us beat.”

That was hard to admit since their two friends had only been a couple for six months. But there was something about the way they looked at each other that surprised Sonya. She was starting to understand why. “We’d gotten comfortable and we were settling.”

She sounded like she was giving an unfavorable diagnosis to a patient and if she heard it, she was pretty sure Emma heard it too. But her friend just twisted her lips in that way she always did when she was thinking, and squeezed her hand again.

“I don’t believe that. You two loved each other. It was obvious to everyone.”

Sonya thought back to all the gatherings of friends where Marcus had been her plus one, and Emma was right. Everyone always told them what a perfect couple they were; friends, family, even people on the street said it, and on paper, they were. Maybe they’d both let everyone’s adoration of them rose-tint the way they viewed their own relationship, and that was why neither of them was able to see that they hadn’t been completely right for one another until it was too late.

“Was it, though?” Sonya asked. “I mean, seriously, he was always gone. Whenever you all spent time with him it was after he’d returned from a long trip. Of course we seemed in love. Our whole relationship was a series of honeymoon periods.”

Emma chuckled to herself and shook her head. “You’ve obviously been analyzing this in the way that only you can.”

“All I’m saying is that maybe Marcus wasn’t wrong.”

Sonya lifted her glass to her lips as Emma finally turned her attention back to her waffles.

“Well… if you’re fine with it, good riddance to him. You deserve a man who loves you like mad. Maybe it was a sign that you two were never able to set a date.”

Sonya’s glass froze in midair. She hadn’t exactly told anyone that she and Marcus had decided to elope. As far as everyone knew, her trip had been just another benefit of being engaged to a pilot. Now, she was going to have to come clean with Emma about all of it, and she didn’t know how she was going to take it.

So far, Sonya hadn’t been able to come up with a viable recovery plan for conversations like the one she was currently having. Why hadn’t she told anyone she was running off to Hawaii to elope?

Who was she kidding, she knew why. If she’d told anyone that she and Marcus were planning to elope, they would’ve thought she was joking which would’ve made her second-guess her decision so much that she would’ve called it off.

Looking back on it, maybe that wouldn’t have been the worst thing that could’ve happened. Damn. Hindsight really was a bitch.

“Sonya? You disappeared into your head for a minute there. Are you sure you’re okay?”

She nodded and polished off what was left of her mimosa, signaling the waiter for the refill she desperately needed for what was about to go down.

“So… I need to tell you something,” she began, pausing until the waiter moved away to another table after leaving her another mimosa. “The Hawaii trip wasn’t just a vacation.”

There was a brief moment of silence where Sonya thought she was going to have to spell it out, but when Emma went completely still, she knew she’d put two and two together.

“No way,” she whispered.

“Emma…”

“You did not go to Hawaii to elope without telling me!”

“That… that was the plan.”

Sonya watched Emma’s face as she processed that revelation. She could handle her friend’s scrunched up forehead, her slack jaw, and even the flash of anger in her eyes, but when those eyes turned glassy with tears, it made her chest hurt. She and Emma had shared some of the highest and the lowest moments of their lives with one another, but she hadn’t seen fit to tell her best friend that she was running off to get married. To be completely honest, if the tables were turned, she’d be pissed and hurt too.

She reached across the table and covered Emma’s hand with her own. “Em, I’m sorry. You should’ve been the first person I told.”

Emma sniffed and nodded her head. “You know you can tell me anything, right?” she asked.

That question made Sonya’s heart break a little. She never wanted Emma to think that she was anything but the best friend she’d ever had.

“Of course I know that. You’re like a sister to me. I just…” she paused, trying to collect her thoughts into something she could actually express. “…got too caught up in my own head about it, I guess.”

Emma sighed. “That’s you. Always imagining every possible outcome instead of just waiting to see what happens.”

“You think you know me so well.”

“Oh, I do know you so well,” Emma shot back with a smirk that faded too soon. “Can you at least tell me why you decided to elope?”

Emma was asking the hard questions, and from the way she was sitting there with her head cocked to one side, one eyebrow raised, her lips pursed, and her arms folded across her middle, whatever story she was about to hear better be good.

Sonya sighed. “I had two big reasons.” Written in their own mini-list, but Emma didn’t need the details. “First, the one thing Marcus and I always argued about was my inability to go with the flow. I wanted to prove to him that I could. Second, you know I want my dad to walk me down the aisle, and he’s been a lot better recently, but I don’t want to push him too far too fast.”

Emma’s face softened a bit at the mention of Sonya’s father, and it made Sonya shift uncomfortably in her seat.

She cleared her throat and continued. “I figured if I eloped, he could take more time to focus on getting healthy and I wouldn’t need to worry about him so much.”

Those words weighted the air between them and it felt odd because she’d never allowed herself to say them out loud. Even when Marcus had asked her what had made her agree to elope, she’d just shrugged and said something about always wanting to get married on a beach.

“I’m so sorry, Sonya,” Emma whispered. “For you feeling that way, for Marcus hurting you, for all of it. You deserve better. Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Yeah. It happened, now it’s time to move forward,” Sonya replied, parroting the mantra that had been running through her head for days.

“That’s true,” Emma agreed with a nod, “but even if you two weren’t in love-love, you loved him or you wouldn’t have flown halfway around the world to marry him.”

Emma had a way of seeing right through Sonya no matter how hard she tried to hide it. She had loved Marcus and some of his appeal had come from his stability. That stability was supposed to make her less likely to get hurt, but he’d managed to hurt her anyway and that had her reeling.

“Have you talked to him since you got back?” Emma asked, and Sonya shook her head.

“No. We haven’t spoken since the breakup. I’m kicking myself because I should’ve made him hook me up with a flight home considering it was his idea to elope. Instead, I had to spend hundreds of dollars for a middle seat on a cross country flight.”

“Ugh!”

“And there was a medical emergency on the plane,” she continued, remembering the event that made her flight from hell even worse.

“Really? What happened?”

“Nothing that exciting. A passenger had a hypoglycemic episode.”

“Oh,” Emma groaned, her excitement clearly knocked down a few notches. “At least it was an easy one. They always have glucose tablets in the plane’s first aid kit.”

The mention of those damn glucose tablets brought back every memory of the Almost Paramedic that she’d been trying to block out—his cocky smirk, the wink he’d given her while he was still posing as a doctor, and the way he’d arrogantly dismissed her suggestion to use the tablets.

“You aren’t going to believe this but there was some guy on the plane posing as a doctor.”

Emma’s jaw dropped. “Are you serious? Isn’t that illegal or something?”

Sonya shrugged. “It’s definitely frowned upon, and the idiot was only in his last year of paramedic training so he shouldn’t have responded to the emergency call in the first place.”

“Did he actually tell them that he was a doctor?” Emma asked, her interest back to where it had been or maybe even higher.

“He claimed that the flight attendants just assumed but he didn’t correct them. Why would he, though? I think one of the flight attendants was five seconds from inviting him to join the Mile High Club.” She wasn’t sure what irritated her more. The fact that the flight attendants hadn’t listened to her or that they were fawning all over the poser like he was God’s gift.

“The odds of a paramedic being hot is right up there with firefighters, so I can believe it.”

An unbidden image of dirty blond hair, messy from running his hands through it, cobalt eyes, and tanned, toned arms folded over a broad chest flashed through Sonya’s mind. She quickly slammed the door on that line of thought. She was still kicking herself for the inexplicable attraction that had bubbled up inside of her during their last encounter in Dulles.

Despite her claims to the reverse, the imposter hadn’t been stupid. He knew what he was talking about, it was his reasoning that had been misguided. When he’d stopped her to make his case in the airport, the way he’d held his ground had made her feel some things. Unfortunately, she was going to have to add intellectual arguing to her list of turn-ons.

She snorted. “He might’ve been hot if he wasn’t so annoyingly loud and wrong.”

Emma laughed. “So what happened?”

“When I got there, he was going to just give her orange juice. I mean, really? OJ is a last resort if you don’t have anything else, but we had glucose tablets. Thank God he realized I could end his whole career before it even starts by calling the certification board, and he backed down, but then he found me after the plane landed and argued me down about why his approach was just as good as mine.”

“You should report him anyway just for that,” Emma grumbled, and Sonya nodded her agreement.

“Right? But even if I wanted to, I only remember his first name. I think the last got caught up with everything else about that flight that I’m trying to forget.”

“Well,” Emma began, raising her glass of straight OJ in the air. “As of right now, we’re forgetting all about Marcus, the poser paramedic, and middle seats on cross country flights, and focusing on moving forward.”

Sonya grinned and lifted her glass to clink against Emma’s. “Damn right.”