Four
DID MY COMPANY splurge for a nonstop flight from Dallas to Miami?
They did not. Though they did ship my equipment direct.
Instead, I flew all day—with a random stop in Newark and a plane change. And was there turbulence on both flights? And was I in the middle seat both times with no access to any armrest? And did the aisle guy on the second leg spend the entire time coughing—hacking up one lung after the other every sixty seconds?
Don’t make me say it.
And then as soon as I landed in Miami at last, a lady racing for her gate with a full, Venti-sized Starbucks cup in her hand crashed into me and doused me so thoroughly that cinnamon latté soaked into everything but my socks.
And then! After walking all the way to baggage claim—reeking of coffee and holding my wet, and now very cold, T-shirt fabric away from my chest with pinched fingers—I waited for my bags.
And waited.
And waited.
And then, finally, when the last unclaimed bag on the carousel (hot pink with flowers) was definitely not mine (black with a black luggage tag), I went to the service desk and got the astute commentary: “It’s probably lost.”
And let’s not get started on the thousand-hour wait at the rental car counter.
Let’s just sum up: the getting there was terrible.
But the arriving ? That was something else entirely.
First of all, it was a 58-degree October morning in Dallas, Texas, when I left, and it was an 86-degree October afternoon in Key West when I arrived.
So that’s a start.
I’ve done a ton of traveling for my job. They put you up in one anonymous box hotel after another. And the places you go are all exactly, almost spookily, the same. Same strip malls, same chain restaurants, same hotel art.
I’m not complaining. There’s a comfort in all that sameness.
But I just need to note that everything about going to Key West was… different.
Even the drive to get there was different. The Overseas Highway really is a highway over the seas . I googled it: forty-two astonishing bridges connecting all of the Florida Keys over the water for 113 miles—and one of them is seven miles long.
I mean, come on !
I’d never seen—or done—anything like it, work trip or not. Zooming over the water that way, surrounded by blue ocean and clouds, windows down, ocean breezes just slam-dancing around in the rental car. Just when I’d start to miss land, the bridges would set me down on another key, and I’d zip along past palm trees, and docks, and sun umbrellas, and beachy restaurants with turquoise signs about key lime pie and conch fritters.
Nothing about this felt anything like any job I’d had before.
And that was before I’d even arrived at the final key—Key West—and seen the Victorian buildings with Easter egg colors and metal seam roofs. The second-story verandas, and picket fences, and brick-paved streets. The mangrove trees and coconut palms. Everything was scaled for walking. The stores and restaurants had music playing. Pedestrians strolled along everywhere. Not to mention the wild roosters strutting around like they owned the place, with their red combs and black plumed tails.
The whole town just felt like one endless festival.
So, yeah. Not your average corporate video shoot.
Cole Hutcheson’s aunt, Rue—who I’d never even heard of a week ago—was waiting for me when I pulled into the crushed-shell parking lot at the Starlite Cottages. She came right out to the car and gave me a hug .
That’s exactly the condition I was in when I met her for the first time, by the way: rumpled, sleep deprived, still damp, and stinking of someone else’s cinnamon latté.
Rue, for her part, was the opposite of all those things.
She wore a caftan with hot-pink and white hibiscus flowers printed all over it, and clacky raffia sandals, and a long drapey necklace. Her bright silver hair was short in a pixie cut, and she was sporting the most enormous, thick-rimmed, stop sign–red glasses I’d ever seen—with red tassel earrings that matched.
“Oh, sweetheart ,” she said, taking in the sight of me. “You’ve had an ordeal.”
Just from the sympathy in her voice, it felt like she already knew the whole story.
“Where are your bags?” she asked, looking around.
“Lost,” I told her.
She eyed my shirt. “Is that…?”
I nodded. “A lady in the airport’s full Venti latté.”
She frowned, like she was formulating a plan. “Well, first things first. I’m Rue.” She stepped back to hold out her hand for a post-hug shake.
I took it. “I’m Katie.”
“I’ve got your cottage all ready,” she said then. “But I think first you need some clothes. And some food. Though I’m not sure in what order.”
I wasn’t sure, either.
“Clothes first, I think,” she decided then. “My treat. Then a late lunch. Also my treat.”
I loved her instantly. How could I not? Plus, she said she was going to let me turn in my rental car and “rent” her Mini Cooper—for a very nominal fee. All because Cole had asked her to.
“But don’t you need something to drive?” I asked.
“No, no,” Rue said, shaking her head. “I have a Dutch town bike. It’s all I ever use—unless I’m road-tripping.”
She gestured behind her at a sleek black bike—complete with a basket festooned with flowers.
What can I say? I believed her. If she preferred her bike, she preferred her bike. The less money I spent, the longer I could stay, and the longer I could stay, the more footage I could get, and the more footage I could get, the better both videos would be, and the better the videos… the lower the chances I’d get fired.
When Rue led me to a nearby boutique, I followed.
The shop was called Vitamin Sea, and it was like stepping into a kaleidoscope.
It was mostly clothes: dresses and tunics and skirts and sarongs—all in the brightest of bright oranges and pinks and reds and yellows. Blues and purples, too. So much color my eyes had to adjust, like when you flip on the lights in a dark room.
Bob Marley played on the speaker system, and as I followed Rue around the store, my steps fell into the rhythm of the music, and I found myself thinking how very different this was from, say, arriving in Omaha to start a project for Unity Home Mortgage.
Did I say it was like a kaleidoscope? Maybe more like a coral reef.
While we browsed, Rue told me all about buying the Starlite Cottages as an investment property when she’d retired—but then loving the vibe there so much that she moved into one of the cottages herself. Then her best friend from childhood, Ginger, lost her husband, and Rue convinced her to move in next door. She’d fixed the cabins up as vacation rentals, styling them lavishly in a “vintage tropics” look—with banana-leaf-print wallpaper and rattan furniture, and replacing the dated kitchenettes with new ones from IKEA.
of the ten cottages now had permanent residents.
“Not an old folks’ home technically ,” Rue said, “but we’re not exactly teenagers.”
Rue had also bought the last remaining building on the same city block—which fronted onto Duval Street—and so she owned the building we were standing in, too. Other tenants included the Italian restaurant next door, an art gallery, a bar with a whole back wall of pinball machines, and, upstairs, a dentist, a travel agency, and a concierge doctor.
“It’s a lot of math,” Rue said, “but it keeps me out of trouble.”
The boutique was bright, and sunny, and it had—how to put it—a soothing flow?
It had been such a long journey, and I didn’t fully have my bearings, and so it took me longer than it should have to put the pieces together. I was, in fact, subtly mouthing along with the words to “One Love” and totally unprepared when Rue turned around with a pink-and-orange floor-length caftan, held it up in front of her, and said, “This one.”
I stopped walking. “I’m sorry?”
“This is the one. I feel it,” Rue said, now stepping closer to hold this max-brightness, full-bolt-of-fabric garment up to me.
I was shaking my head before it touched me. “No, no, no,” I said.
“I’m thinking yes, yes, yes,” Rue said. “These colors are perfect.”
“I’m not a—” I started, head still shaking. “I don’t really…” I looked around. “Isn’t there anything plain?”
“Plain?” Rue asked, unable to imagine what I meant.
I rotated 360 degrees, scanning the tropical prints. Of course, obviously, I knew there was zero chance I would stumble upon a black T-shirt and jeans section in a tropics-wear boutique. But there had to be at least a piece or two that hadn’t been designed by someone on active psychedelics.
I stretched up my neck for a better view, straining for a glance of maybe a navy blue. “I’m not really a bright-colors person,” I said.
But Rue looked me up and down. “Sweetheart, life is short. Let’s fix that.”
Panic was setting in. Where was my damned suitcase? In vain, I looked out the front window, as if someone from the airport might screech up right now and toss it out onto the sidewalk.
“Okay, okay,” Rue said, reading my face and relenting. “You don’t like colors.”
“I like them,” I said. “I just don’t wear them. On myself. And, plus,” I added, now panic-babbling, “this is a lot of colors. Right? It’s like Lilly Pulitzer threw up in here. After eating some bad key limes. And taking acid. On a tropical vacation.”
Rue was having none of it. “Just think of it as a robe. You’ve worn robes before. You’ve got one at home, right?”
I nodded, but solemnly.
“Don’t tell me,” Rue said, reading my face. “Your robe at home is black.”
“Charcoal gray.” I nodded, with a wave of longing.
Were my eyes filling up with tears ?
“Okay,” Rue said, accepting that she wouldn’t be getting me pumped up about this Astrobrights situation anytime soon. She held up the caftan again. “Just for a little while. Only temporary. It’s better than being naked, right?”
At last, some agreement. “It is better than being naked,” I conceded.
Rue kept us focused, steering me toward the dressing rooms. “Just keep it on while we wash and dry your”—a little pause here—“outfit. And then you’ll be back to your old self in no time.”
She patted me on the shoulder as I disappeared through the dressing room curtain.
Temporary , I thought, okay. Then: Better than naked.
The dressing room felt strangely smaller than usual, until I figured out why. “There’s no mirror in here?” I called to Rue through the curtain as I unbuttoned my jeans, noting that my coffee-stained (black) underwear was still wet.
Should I take that off, too? I wondered, thinking maybe I shouldn’t get coffee on the merchandise. Ultimately, I wrapped my bra and panties up neatly in my T-shirt and set the pile on a little bench, sneakers on top, and then, feeling more naked than I’d ever felt in my entire life, lifted the caftan up over my devoid-of-undergarments body, dropped it over my head, and let it undulate down like a silk parachute.
“The shop owner doesn’t believe in mirrors,” Rue called back. Then, unrelated: “I grabbed you some flip-flops.”
“The owner doesn’t believe in mirrors ?” I asked, adjusting to the watery cool of the silk.
“She thinks fashion should be more about how you feel than how you look.”
What an appalling idea.
In a tone like We can outsmart this lunatic , I asked, “Do you have a pocket mirror?”
“I happen to agree with her,” Rue said.
And then, in that instant, I just knew.
Rue… was the shop owner.
I peeked my head through the curtain. “Rue,” I said, squinting against her inevitable answer. “Are you the owner?”
“Of course I am, sweetheart,” she said. “Now get out here.”
Reluctantly, I stepped out, draped shoulders to ankles in a long, bell-sleeved, silky, orange-and-white, patterned-so-aggressively-it-was-almost-violent caftan.
Feeling like I’d been body-snatched.
“Stunning,” Rue proclaimed, taking in the sight. “How do you feel?”
The only word that came to mind was “Surreal?”
“Don’t think,” Rue said, implying I was doing it wrong. “Just experience .”
I gave it a second. Then I said, “My experience feels surreal.”
“Try spinning,” Rue said, like that might help.
“In a circle?”
“Yes,” she said, turning me by the shoulders to wind me up.
I did it, but clompily.
“Faster,” Rue said.
Obediently, I turned faster. She was my new landlord, after all.
And then a fun thing happened: the fabric started to glide on the air and float out around my calves, like a pinwheel. For a moment, until I got dizzy and stopped, I felt several things other than weird: the smooth wood floor under my bare feet, the wind swirling around my legs, the very bizarre—but not totally unpleasant, if I’m honest—sensation of having no underpants on … and, as I looked down at the bright fabric fluttering below, a micro-flash of the delight you can only get from glimpsing something beautiful.
Genuine delight—just for a half second.
There, and then gone. Like a firefly.
As I came to a stop and watched all the fabric settle around me, Rue held up a hair clip with a hot-pink hibiscus flower hot-glued to it.
“I want to put your hair up,” she said, and it didn’t even occur to me to protest.
“Rue,” I said then, as she twisted my hair. “I’m very sorry about the Lilly Pulitzer commentary. From before.”
But Rue patted my shoulder as if it hadn’t bothered her at all.
“Don’t even think about it,” she said. “It’s a lot for a chromophobe.”
“For a— what ?”
But Rue just nodded.
“A what kind of phobe?” I asked again.
“Chromophobia,” Rue explained then, gently, like she was breaking the news of my diagnosis, “is a fear of color.”
“I don’t have chromophobia!” I said.
But Rue gave me a minute to consider it.
I thought about all the neutral colors in my apartment. My Harbor Gray living room and my Abalone curtains and my Pearl River cabinets. Not to mention my black underwear. And then I thought about Beanie’s safety-cone-orange throw pillows that were still—eternally—stacked in my closet.
“I’m not afraid of color,” I said. “I just don’t wear it. Or enjoy it. Or have it in my house. Disliking something is not the same thing as being afraid of it.”
Rue nodded like she was more of a lover than a fighter. “Maybe we should get you a bite to eat,” she said. Then she snipped the tags off the caftan and dropped some rhinestone flip-flops at my feet.
“I’ve got my sneakers—” I started to protest, but Rue was already gathering them, along with everything else, into her arms.
“I’m just going to pop it all in the wash,” she said, disappearing toward a back room and leaving me alone in the store.
Alone, with Bob Marley still slow-jamming on the speakers.
Not to mention braless and underwearless, with a silk hibiscus in my hair.
We were not in Dallas anymore, so to speak.
As I waited for Rue to come back, I let myself float around the merchandise, idly touching the fabrics as my silky caftan tickled the skin of my calves, with nothing else to do but experience my body in a whole new way. Beanie would hear a lot about this later—if I survived to tell the tale.
At least, thank god, there was no one else in the store.
And then, as if I’d given a cue: the shop door opened with a jangle of its handle bells.
And in walked a man.
A man that I could tell—before I’d even fully seen him—was very… tall.
Six-two, I decided on the spot. I’d put money on it.
Six-two, with big buzz-cut energy, and… manly.
Had I ever used the word manly to describe anyone before? Did people even still use that word? And yet there it was. I felt it the way you feel heat from a fire.
How tall—and manly —exactly did this guy have to be for me to sense all that without even looking directly at him ?
Disaster! Right? I mean, could there be a worse person to have walked in at this moment? I would’ve happily traded him for any other kind of interloper. A blind grandmother would have worked great! A distracted mom on her cell phone! A myopic child with very thick glasses!
Anything but this guy!
Oh, god! And I didn’t have any underwear on!
I held very still. Maybe the bright colors could function as camouflage?
Or maybe, if I got really lucky, he’d think I was a mannequin.
And—hey—that wasn’t the worst idea in the world. I kept my eyes on the floor and stiffened my joints. I was standing right next to the register, by the jewelry counter. A perfect spot for a mannequin. People don’t pay attention in stores, anyway, I told myself. This manly man surely had his own urgent island-wear shopping to do.
I tried not to breathe. Be the mannequin.
What was this guy doing here?
Didn’t matter—didn’t matter! Just stay still.
And then, just as I was daring to hope for the best, he took a step closer to me, peered over, and said, “Hey there.”
His voice had just the slightest roughness to it. Kind of sandpapery.
As if listening to enough of it might smooth you down.
In a really good way.
That settled it. I’d have to start moving my limbs. But I drew the line at eye contact. “Hello,” I said to the floor.
“I’m looking for Rue?” he said then. “Is she around?”
“She’s in the back,” I managed to rasp out. Was my throat closing up? Could not having underwear on in a moment like this cause you to suffocate?
“Thanks,” he said, slapping his palm on the jewelry counter a couple of times before heading off in that direction. I think I was actually holding my breath when he turned—still walking, backward—and said, “Great hibiscus, by the way.”
Hibiscus? I looked up.
And there he was.
My gaze snapped to his like a magnet. And then all questions of tallness or manliness or anything else disappeared. All I could see at first was his face—dominated by big, serious, dark eyes. Eyes are not an uncommon feature, of course—but I had never seen a pair so buttery brown—or such a combination of friendly, and intrigued, and… somehow melancholy.
Maybe it was the shape of them? Or the slight frown at his brows?
Can you smile and frown at the same time?
Apparently yes.
Other features appeared after that. Tan skin, with a plum-red mouth, and a defined jaw that pulled my gaze down to a truly mesmerizing Adam’s apple.
Had I ever been mesmerized by an Adam’s apple before?
Or even noticed one?
I’m sure this face-to-face contact lasted only a second. But it felt like Matrix -style bullet time. As though I was taking in the angle of his eyebrows, and the slope of his nose, and the deep intensity of those eyes, frame by frame, in ultra slo-mo.
It wasn’t love at first sight. You can’t fall in love with a person you don’t even know.
But it was… something.
Longing at first sight, maybe? Yearning?
Salivating?
That face of his was beautiful .
I felt positively overtaken by the sight of it.
I wanted to buy it, and own it, and take it home.
And then, with what could only be described as the most charming, earnest, barely there smile in all of history, the guy touched the back of his own head—and yes, it was a longish burr cut—to indicate the hibiscus hair clip. Great hibiscus.
Ah. “Thanks,” I said—and then, like a hopeless overachiever, I eked out a few more syllables: “Rue picked it out.”
“Of course she did,” the guy said, as if Rue beflowered every person she met.
Why was everything happening in slow motion?
Why were those melancholy eyes of his the most dreamy things I had ever seen?
And when he gave me a little goodbye wave and left to go find her, why did I feel a momentary flash—despite everything—of wishing he would stay?
Questions to ponder.
Especially once I realized something else about that face.
I’d seen it before.
That beautiful face, those serious eyes, that hypnotizing aura… belonged to Tom Hutcheson. Also known as Puppy Love. Also known as Hutch.
Hutch: Brother of Cole. Nephew of Rue. Rescuer of Jennifer Aniston’s dog.
Hutch. The frowner. The love hater .
The guy I was here to profile.
I put my head down on the glass top of the jewelry case then, and I tried to keep breathing, wondering if my new subject was the most scientifically good-looking human I’d ever spotted in the wild… and I waited for Rue to show up. Which she did, a thousand hours later, and found me still there , slumped over the counter, only to say: “Oh, sweetheart. You must be starving .”