Page 39 of The Exception

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.

---