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Sage smiled, but she kept her face turned away from Deanna, using her long hair to shield her from the other woman. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’m done making plans about this kind of stuff.”
“You’re done making plans?” Bessie pulled in another stunned breath. “Sage, I don’t even know who you are anymore.”
“Join the club,” she muttered. Taking a deep breath, she added, “This is why I’m here. This is why I’m finding my own place. This is why Ty and I are starting slow. So I can figure out what I want and who I am.”
“Sage, you know who you are.”
“Yeah, but…I feel like there’s more for me to discover, and I’m excited to meet her.”
Bessie let a beat of silence go by. “Then I am too.”
Relief sang through Sage for a reason she couldn’t name.
“And don’t think I didn’t hear you say you and Ty are starting something,” Bessie said. “Because I totally did.” They laughed together, and that cleansed Sage’s soul more than anything else could’ve.
“Thanks, Bess. See you soon.” The call ended, and Sage finished up her trail mix while she read the rest of her texts.
Lauren had said,There’s the cutest little house over by me, Sage. I’ll have Blake tell Ty about it.
Funny how she’d just assumed that Sage would hire Ty to find her a house. Of course she was, and not only because then she’d get to see him more often. But because he was the best real estate agent in Hilton Head, and Sage needed the very best property available so she could start her life makeover.
7
Ty’s nerves fluttered through him like a flag at the lifeguard station on a breezy day. He wasn’t sure why, other than he’d never been to Sage’s apartment to pick her up for a date before. He’d seen her earlier that day. Yesterday. The day before even. They’d been out before, and he’d held her hand.
Maybe it was because he wanted to get back to that hand-holding status, and he didn’t know how. He did know how to knock, so he did that, and only a few seconds later, Sage opened the door with Gypsy already leashed and ready to go.
“Hello,” she said brightly, and she wore a pair of shorts that went a respectable way down her leg, a striped black-and-white T-shirt, and a pouch cross-wise across her chest. “You look nice.”
“I traded my white shirt and tie for a polo,” he said, looking down at himself. “I didn’t have much time at home.” He started walking down her sidewalk, glad she and Gypsy came with. “The dogs barely had time to wolf anything down for dinner, and let me tell you, Sherman gave me a glare for that.”
She laughed with him, adding, “He must be the one you were complaining about last night.”
“That’s him,” he said. “He looks at me like I’ve done him a personal wrong about ninety percent of the time. The rest of his life is spent sleeping. Onmybed.” He shook his head, starting to settle into the evening.
He’d said he’d drive, and he’d parked in a visitor space just around to the front of her building. He’d put the seats down in his SUV, but even so, getting Gypsy in would be a tight fit.
“He’s just bushy,” Sage said as Ty raised the liftgate. “He’ll fit.”
“Stay in, boys,” he said to Brother and Sherman, who already had their noses going. Sure enough, Gypsy jumped in just fine, seemingly unbothered about the other two dogs with their noses glued to him.
Once he and Sage had taken their seats, Gypsy put his face right over the netting keeping the dogs in the back. Brother would do that once he recognized where they were, but for the most part, he looked out one of the side windows.
“Stay back there, bud,” Sage said as she buckled. “I like the net. I need to get something like that.”
“Do you take him in the car often?” She drove a sedan, and Ty couldn’t even picture the huge black dog in the backseat.
“Only to the vet,” she said.
“Do you groom him yourself?”
“And the groomer.” She rolled down her window as he got moving, because the AC hadn’t started to blow very hard yet. He touched the button to turn it up, and she rolled up her window a moment later. “I’m super-hungry and hope these French dips live up to the hype.”
“Super-hungry, huh? I think I remember you telling me once that you don’t eat lunch at work.”
“I have a snack,” she said.
“What was it today?”
