The Exception to the Rule (The Improbable Meet-Cute, #1)

by Christina Lauren

She picks up a dumpling and holds it aloft, studying it. “We get soup dumplings when we’re thinking about each other.” She was thinking about me.

“Do you ever have a feeling about someone? Like they’re your safe space and, I don’t know, like someday it could be more?” I swallow, nodding. “Yeah. Of course.” I’m looking right at her. “I have a feeling about him.” But the thing is, when she looks up at me and our eyes lock, I’m pretty sure she has a feeling about me, too.

As if it isn’t enough that it’s Callum Sundberg picking me up in—oh, shit—five minutes, it’s also that it’s C. It’s the boy who thanked me for replying to his typo email and who sent me a note the following year to make sure I got at least one valentine. It’s the guy who gave me advice about going away to school and asked me how my mother was doing after having breast cancer. It’s the man who lost his father to cancer in the depths of the pandemic and worried about how to best support his mom and his sisters while still pursuing his dream of going to graduate school. It’s my soup-dumpling buddy. It’s my conundrum wrapped in a mystery tied with a puzzle shoved in a pickle jar.

then he cups the side of my neck with his non-cupcake-holding hand and leans in. “Too soon?” he asks, breath minty, his lips only an inch from mine. “I don’t normally kiss before the first date,” I tell him. “But you’re the exception to the rule.”