Erin Napier remembers the exact moment Ben Napier first made her “heart race” 20 years ago while they were attending college in Mississippi.
The HGTV Home Town Takeover star recounted the memory on Instagram on Sunday, Dec. 8, to commemorate two decades of knowing her husband.
“December 8, 2004. As of yesterday I’ve been with @scotsman.co most of my life. That’s a crazy milestone. #loveweek” Erin captioned the post.
Erin, 39, detailed her first encounter with Ben, 41 — whom she married in 2008 — in her retelling of the 2004 memory, which involved a Labrador puppy, wet clothes and a heart-pumping yearbook interview.
“On the day we met, I had been on some dates with a guy I worked with at the hospital pharmacy — let’s call him Charlie. And I was dating him because he looked a little bit like Ben Napier, this guy I had a crush on,” she began, before explaining that she went to Charlie’s house after work one day to watch Mystic River, but her phone kept blowing up with texts.
“I kept getting texts from Ben, whom I’d only finally really met that day,” she recalled. “He was offering to see me the next day so he could check the brakes on my Volkswagen because I’d told him that afternoon, a car guy, they’d been making a weird sound.”
“I did not care about my brakes at all, reader,” Erin noted. “I wanted him to lean against my car in the dorm parking lot and tell me about himself while he easily ignored the other girls who would pass by and whisper ‘What is he doing with her?’ ”
But Erin wasn’t the only girl who caught Ben’s eye.
“We agreed to do that after the photoshoot of him for the yearbook, and the morning of December 8, 2004, my friend Kristen told me she’d been texting him all night too,” she remembered “And I felt so washed out — I guess he was a flirt who made every girl feel this way, that I had imagined being special to him for one perfect day.”
Erin then described the Jones County Junior College yearbook photoshoot, which involved him standing in a lake while posing with a puppy in his arms and a pipe in his mouth to “look academic and sophisticated,” a getup that “looked like Robert Goulet.”
“Afterward, in the yearbook room while we were editing photos, he came and sat beside me soaking wet from the lake in the hard molded plastic and metal chair at my desk,” she wrote. “My heart filled. At one point once we were alone, while I was interviewing him, he leaned in closer to me — he smelled so nice — and I noticed how exactly straight his teeth were.”
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“My heart raced now because he tilted his head as if he would kiss me and I wanted him so badly,” she said. “He came half a inch closer and was answering the question I had asked him quietly and I knew this was it and then he stopped. He grinned and said ‘You were gonna let me kiss you.’ ”
“I denied it obviously, because you can’t fall in love and kiss someone 12 hours after meeting them can you?” Erin concluded, adding, “He leaned back in his chair and we finished the interview and he said ‘I’m going to change clothes and then let’s go for a drive.’ ”
After that moment, Erin previously told PEOPLE, “Six days later we decided we would get married, and that was that.”
The first two seasons of Home Town Takeover, which Erin and Ben co-host, are available to stream on Max, with season 3 slated to come out in 2025.
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