Page 12 of Sweatpants & Sweet Tea

DAPHNE

“You feeling all right?You look a little flushed.” Aunt Rhonda asked from the driver’s seat in her F150 pickup truck.

“I’m fine…it’s just warm.”

It was a balmy seventy-two degrees with a perfect summer breeze, but thankfully my aunt didn’t press the issue.

I pulled down the mirror and checked my reflection only to find my cheeks were tinted with a deep blush thanks to the image that was permanently (I hoped) burned into my retinas.

My earlier question had been answered. There is something sexier than a man in gray sweatpants, or even a naked man under an outdoor shower; it was a man in gray sweatpants holding a kitty.

I couldn’t get the visual of Harlan Mitchell, shirtless, with his gray sweatpants riding low on his waist as he cradled Dini, out of my head. My response to it though—I wanted to erase from my memory. I’d gotten flustered.

Me. Daphne Estelle Moore. Flustered.

Thatneverhappened. I was the epitome of calm, cool, and collected. Nothing ruffled my feathers. It was a survival skill I’d picked up at a young age and was part of what made me goodat my job. When I’d started atPulseas an intern, ninety percent of my duties were talent coordination, which meant dealing directly with celebrities.

I didn’t get starstruck or have butterflies when I met Brad Pitt, Michael B. Jordan, Charlie Hunnam, Idris Elba, the Hemsworth brothers, or even my personal celeb crush Ryan Gosling.

Those men all have the “it” factor. They possess inordinate amounts of charm, charisma, and sex appeal. That was not an opinion. That was a certifiable fact. But when I met them, there was no spark, no—as the Brits say—fanny flutters, no physical response to seeing them or being in their presence.

I was sure that I was immune to that sort of thing. But I was wrong. So wrong. Because the moment Harlan answered the door, my entire body lit up like a float in Disneyland’s Main Street Electrical Parade. Tingles and jingles spread through me like a wildfire in dry brush. I had a first-class ticket on a bullet train to Swoon City. My ovaries exploded. I’d never wanted to have babies, but I wanted that man to impregnate me.

I was dumbstruck. Literally. I forgot where I was, what I was doing, even how to speak. It wasn’t just his near-perfect physique that left me speechless; it was something that I couldn’t quite put into words.

Hours later, I was still rattled by the encounter.

“Did everything go okay over at the Mitchell’s? You’ve seemed…off…since you got back.”

I was hoping she hadn’t noticed. When I returned from next door, kittyless, Nadia was in my aunt’s living room picking up her mask. She’d answered the SOS call and arrived with four dresses for me to choose from. After a mini-fashion show, the decision had been unanimous that I wear herHow to Lose a Guy in 10 Daysiconic yellow dress dupe. It was an exact replica of Kate Hudson’s gown in the movie, complete with a low necklineand open back with crisscross satin straps. I’d never worn the color before, but somehow, it worked. And I made myself a custom mask that complemented it perfectly.

Between the fashion show, the mask assembly, and getting ready for the ball, I thought I’d been able to slip under my aunt’s matchmaker radar.

Hoping to throw her off the scent of my Elvis-mania-sized-teenage-crush, I asked, “Did you know Mr. Mitchell had a thing for Grammy Moore?”

Aunt Rhonda’s drawn-on eyebrows pulled into a low V as her eyes cut to me. “Who told you that?”

“He did.”

“Old Man Mitchell told you that he had a thing for Grammy Moore?”

It worked. She was off the scent.

I nodded. “When he saw me, he said that I was the spitting image of Estelle and that he had a thing for her long before my grandfather was in the picture.”

Aunt Rhonda let out a howl of laughter and slapped the steering wheel. “Well, I’ll be damned!” She leaned forward and looked up and out of the windshield toward the sky. “I told you, Mama!” She chuckled as she turned her head toward me. “I guess you must be really good at your job if you got that much out of him in a ten-minute conversation. I haven’t gotten more than a mumbled hello or goodbye out of him in sixty-plus years.”

In college, I majored in journalism, and my dream had always been to be an investigative journalist. But that wasn’t my actual job now. I’d thought it was going to be, especially after I landed the internship at CNN. But once I got hired atPulse, things took a different turn.

“I think I just reminded him of her,” explaining why Mr. Mitchell might have opened up to me. “When he walked out on the porch, he looked like he’d seen a ghost.”

Aunt Rhonda turned toward me and studied me for a few seconds before returning her attention to the road. “Yeah, I guess you do favor her. We’ll have to pull out some pictures before you go.”

“I’d love that, if we have time.” My return flight was tomorrow evening, and I was going to be on that plane despite the Firefly Island-sized hair that was up my boss’s butt. My plan was to pitch boring stories that Alexandra would never greenlight. As much as I loved my aunt and I felt guilty about her running the business on her own, I had a weird premonition that this place would be like quicksand, and the longer I stayed, the harder it would be to get out.

“Did you give Old Man Mitchell Houdini? I thought he hated that thing; he’s always hollerin’ about furball this and furball that.”

“Um, no, I gave her to Harlan.”

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