Page 60 of The Exception

So much for running to clear her head, but she couldn’t tell him not to come. Besides, there was a little part of her bouncing up and down over running with him again. Marcus hated running, preferring his weights to any other workout, so it had been a long time since she’d had a running partner. If she’d had that much fun running next to him on a treadmill, running outside with Trav would probably be even more fun.

And so would beating him like the last time.

“Meet me out front in ten minutes?”

“Sure,” he agreed before turning to go back to his room to get ready.

She watched him walk away, her bottle hovering at her lips. Water was clearly not the only thing she was thirsty for.

* * *

Sonya was stretching when Trav met her outside a few minutes later, wearing a backward army green baseball cap and reminding her of one the frat boys back at UVA. She’d never paid much attention to those guys, preferring to focus her attention on the overachievers with goals similar to her own. Now, she had to literally remind herself to look away so she wouldn’t get caught staring at him. Again.

Everything about him, from his loose running shorts and concert t-shirt with a hole in the sleeve, to the lazy grin stretched across his scruffy face was relaxed and laid back, but it was all wrapped up in an aura of confidence that she couldn’t deny being attracted to.

Maybe he wasn’t so different from the goal-driven men she usually gravitated toward. It was just that Trav’s goals were different—living life, having fun.Beingfun.

Fascinating.

He stood across from her and began his own warmup routine, standing on one leg and stretching his quad. It gave Sonya a clearer look at the large tattoo she’d spotted on his calf for the first time the day before. The black ink sketched out a caduceus with a winged helmet and crossed swords centered inside of a star of life. The words “Do No Harm” were at the top and the words “Do Know Harm” were underneath.

Did he have any more tattoos in places she hadn’t seen yet? She allowed her eyes to drift across his body looking for bits of ink peeking out from underneath his sleeves and at his collar, but she found nothing except tanned skin and taut muscles.

“It’s the combat medic badge,” Trav said, his voice pulling her out of her inspection of his body. She blinked before allowing her eyes to meet his, and the amused twinkle she found there made her face go hot. So much for not getting caught, but she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of acknowledging it.

She cleared her throat. “Oh? What does the saying mean?”

He switched his stretch to the other leg. “Medics are there to treat the injured but we carry weapons and are trained to use them with deadly force. So we know harm even though we’re not supposed to do harm, if that makes sense.”

It did make sense and it sounded like a tough position to be in. She wondered, How many times did he risk his own life to save someone else’s?

“Did you ever have to...” Her words trailed off as she noticed his face harden like he already knew what she was going to ask. “Never mind.”

Trav lifted his eyes to meet hers and she saw the emotion simmering inside his deep blue pools. He sighed. “No, it’s okay. I did what I had to do as a medic and as a soldier to make sure my unit got out of some tough situations. The Hippocratic oath doesn’t carry much weight in the middle of a war zone.”

Sonya understood that and she wanted to know more about his time in the army, but maybe he wasn’t ready to go that deep into his experiences. Her dad never wanted to talk about the time he spent in Iraq, even though he needed to for so many reasons. Hopefully, Trav was talking about it with the therapist she’d overheard him telling Frank about. She decided to keep things surface level.

She asked, “Did you join the army thinking you’d be a medic?”

“Nah. I didn’t want anything to do with medicine, but I scored high enough on the vocational aptitude test that they couldn’t see placing me anywhere else.” He shook his head and smiled almost bitterly. “Only I would join the army to get away from following in my dad’s footsteps and end up being pretty much a doctor anyway.”

“Maybe you just needed to do it your own way,” she suggested.

He shrugged. “Yeah, I guess so. I mean, I got out of the army and chose to stay in the medical field so it must be where I’m supposed to be.”

It was where he was supposed to be. He was good with patients and his reflexes when it came to trauma care had been honed in the army in ways that couldn’t be learned in school. He was going to make a great paramedic and possibly more if that’s what he wanted.

She pulled her arm over her head in another stretch. “You could be a doctor, you know. You’d be a good one.”

That laugh was back but this time it was less bitter and more resigned. “There’s only enough room in D.C. for one Dr. Travis. What about you, though? Did you ever think about becoming a doctor? Because you’d be a great one.”

She smiled faintly and remembered her mom saying those exact words when she’d graduated with her RN. Becoming a doctor had always been the plan until one day it wasn’t.

It was her turn to shrug. “I was originally pre-med but I chose nursing because I wanted more interaction with patients. Doctors don’t get to spend as much time building relationships as nurses do and I think that sometimes it’s those relationships that can help with healing the most.”

He nodded in agreement and asked, “Why psychiatric nursing?”

Sonya was suddenly struck by the memory of how her dad had been so lost when he’d retired from the Air Force and how it got worse until she felt like she’d lost her dad even though he’d been right there. She shook those thoughts away.

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