AllFreeNovel
Share Us
He was honestly tired of it.
Thankfully, the fried calamari Katherine had ordered arrived, and that provided enough of a distraction for her to allow the conversation to die for a moment. It wouldn’t matter, because he’d have to come up with the next small-talk topic anyway.
Another glance over to Sage found her looking at him, and when his phone chimed, he plucked it out of his breast pocket. “Oh, this is my mother,” he said. “Give me five minutes?”
“Of course, dear,” Katherine said.
Ty didn’t need to step away from the table for the second time to text his mother back. But he took his phone and turned away from the table, away from the booth where Sage sat, and went back toward the waiting area in the restaurant.
Your daddy got a new dog, she’d said. As Ty tried to formulate a response, a picture of the puppy came in. The tan fluffball seemed to be smiling at him, and Ty grinned back at this phone.
Wow, he typed out.I thought he said he was too old to get another puppy.As he waited for his momma to text him back, he quickly started another text string to Sage.
What’s your schedule like this weekend? Are you still walking on the beach in the morning? Would you have time for dinner?
“Can’t send her three questions,” he told himself. He jammed his thumb on the delete key and watched the words disappear from his screen. He also didn’t need to hover in the lobby to text Sage. It wasn’t now or never.
So why did it feel like it?
* * *
Later that night,Ty stood on the balcony that extended his bedroom closer to the sea and let the night air brush his face. He loved the sound of the waves in the dark, because they roared on whether there was sunlight or not. He couldn’t see them, but he sure could hear them just fine.
A feeling of contentment warred with the slip of unrest in his soul. “You got Katherine to sign the letter of intent,” he told himself. He should be happy.
Hewashappy.
But at the same time, he was utterly lonely. Sage had not texted him, and in the end, he’d messaged with his mom for a few minutes about his father’s dog, and then he’d returned to the table just before dinner had arrived.
He’d managed to charm Katherine enough with stories of the dog, his parents, and the upcoming beach volleyball tournament out on Carter’s Cove, a sister island to Hilton Head. Ty did sell some properties there. Not many, as there were no cars allowed on the island. Only golf carts, scooters, or small motorcycles. Everyone had to take a ferry to get there, and most homes stayed in families for generations.
Still, Blake Williams, one of his good friends here on Hilton Head, had asked him to help his ex-wife sell her tiny, two-bedroom home on Carter’s Cove last winter, and Ty had done it gladly. She’d relocated to Hilton Head, and Ty had gotten her into a small beach cottage that would serve her needs.
He knew Sage got up early, but he wasn’t sure he could go to sleep without following up with their conversation. “You get one question,” he muttered to himself. He stayed on the deck and thought through his options.
He could simply invite Sage to dinner. Or ask if he could go walking with her in the morning. He’d kept running with his dogs, but he’d never seen her again.
Outside, his dog nosed his hand, startling him enough to yank it away. “Hey, bud,” he said to the golden retriever. “What should I ask her, huh?”
A simple dinner request felt stupid to him. He couldn’t take her back to Bakersfield, not right now at least. He couldn’t just show up and get a haircut. Could he?
He moaned and leaned against the railing, straining to see the tips of the waves in the dark. Without a moon, though, such a feat was impossible. “I’m too old for this to be so hard,” he muttered to himself. “Come on, Brother.”
After the dog trotted back into his bedroom, Ty followed him. He reached for his phone, ready to ask Sage the one question he had for her. His thumbs flew over the screen, and he practically punched send so he wouldn’t second- and third-guess himself.
A sigh moved through his whole body as he sank onto the bed. Brother jumped up and joined him and Sherman, the black lab who’d already leaned up against the pillows next to where Ty slept.
“All right,” he said as he lay down and reached over to turn off the lamp. “I guess we’ll see what she says in the morning.”
3
Sage had entered the tossing and turning stage of her sleep cycle. It seemed like she could get four or five good hours of sleep. Dead-to-the-world sleep. Then, she had to get up to go to the bathroom, and once she came back to bed, she got very little true rest after that.
Sure, she’d doze off here and there, only to wake when her arm had fallen asleep or her back hurt. Sometimes, she got up and slept on the couch for an hour or two, and that allowed her to get more rest.
Tonight, or rather, this early morning, she reached over and picked up her phone. She silenced it when she went to bed, because sometimes Kayla texted, and her daughter lived in a time zone three hours behind Sage’s.
She didn’t have any messages from her daughter, but she did have one from Ty. She could see the first four or five words without opening it, and she read,I had just gotten outbefore she tapped to see the whole thing.
