Page 16 of Best Woman

Ben answers the door looking far better than someone who voluntarily lives in Florida deserves to.

“Hey, Jules,” he drawls with a smirk. “Come on in.”

It would be so satisfying if Ben’s townhouse were full of framed Quentin Tarantino movie posters and gravity bongs, but it’s infuriatingly tasteful.

The furniture is a mix of Ikea and West Elm, but it’s been carefully selected, maintained, and styled.

I do take pleasure in noticing that the candles have only just been lit—the sting of sulfur from the matches hangs in the air—but otherwise, the scene is perfectly casual, cool, and undeniably masculine.

And that’s Ben Otsuka in a nutshell. He wears his white T-shirt and scruffy jeans like an off-duty model—catalog, not runway—and his hair is just the right amount of tousled.

He’s barefoot, which I find strangely sexy despite not having a foot fetish.

OK, there was that six-month period when I was twenty-three and frequenting this one sex party in Washington Heights…

Ben leads me to the living room, where vibey electronic music is playing, and saunters off to grab me a sparkling water.

There’s a book face down on the coffee table, something Kyle had been going on about at dinner two weeks ago that sounded mind-numbingly dull and excruciatingly intellectual.

I like to read, but my tastes are far more mainstream—I’m the kind of philistine who considers Gone Girl to be peak literature.

Thank god I never got that Rosamund Pike bob. I don’t have the bone structure for it.

“When did you get in?” Ben hands me my LaCroix—decanted into a glass, can you believe—and settles into an armchair across from the sofa. “A few hours ago,” I admit, wishing I’d showered instead of gossiping with my mom about the women in her yoga class.

Ben’s face is smug. “That didn’t take long. I’d say I’m flattered but I also know your mother.”

We work our way through the requisite small talk, updating each other on whatever details Instagram and our gossiping parents haven’t covered.

Ben is a dentist with a small practice he runs with his dad, who has finally announced he’ll be retiring next year.

His mother has, for as long as I can remember, worked at Bloomingdale’s one day a week “for the discount” and because she’d probably be there one day a week anyway.

I tell him about my job, my friends, and my apartment, mentally checking off a list of everything I need to say before we can stop stalling and start getting naked.

The first time I ever wanted to kiss Ben Otsuka, I was fourteen, we were on a trip to Disney World, and he’d told my brother to stop teasing me for listening to Michelle Branch.

We’d each gotten to pick a friend to bring, but none of my friends could come.

I’d expected Ben and my brother to spend the entire trip excluding me, but instead, he’d gone out of his way to befriend me.

He sat next to me on Splash Mountain and we shared his Mickey Mouse–shaped Rice Krispies Treat after I tragically dropped my Minnie Mouse–shaped ice cream bar.

My crush was incendiary, debilitating, and, so I thought, useless.

We were merely two slightly weird kids who noticed something similarly off in each other.

Ben, whose father was Japanese, was the only Asian student at our temple’s Hebrew school.

I was a lonely goth who everyone assumed was listening to Slipknot when I was really listening to Tori Amos.

The first time I kissed Ben Otsuka was the summer after my freshman year of college.

Mom, Randy, and the twins were on a trip Aiden and I hadn’t been invited on and we (well, Aiden) decided to throw a party in the empty house.

Ben, a year older than my brother, had just graduated and seemed so mature and thoughtful compared to Aiden’s other friends.

I had just spent my first year in New York and felt happy to be back somewhere I knew without a doubt I was the coolest, most interesting person for miles, but also like I’d been shoved back into an ill-fitting suit long outgrown, a metaphor that would become much more appropriate in a few years.

We’d left the party to get stoned on the small balcony outside my bedroom, and in the middle of arguing over Britney Spears’s shaved head and what it said about the state of celebrity surveillance, Ben leaned over and kissed me.

We spent the rest of that summer hooking up in any empty house, car, or moonlit beach we could find.

It was never necessarily a secret: I’d been out since high school, and Ben had told Aiden he didn’t care about gender when it came to sex during a game of truth or dare—I think he currently identifies somewhere around pansexual.

But we certainly didn’t advertise that we were hooking up, mostly because it was just sex and I had absolutely zero desire to talk to my brother about my sex life.

In the years since, when I’m visiting, if we’re both single, I’m usually in Ben’s bed within twenty-four hours of landing.

I thought it would be too weird to keep it up after I transitioned, but on my first trip home as Julia, I’d gotten a text that simply said very excited re: boobs and the only thing that changed was now I have longer hair for him to pull.

“You look good,” he says, giving me the look . You know the one. I set my glass down on the coffee table—where of course there is a coaster waiting for it—cross to his chair, and lower myself into his lap.

His hands grip my hips. “Hi,” he says, nuzzling against my nose.

“Hi,” I repeat, muffled against his lips.

It’s easy, so easy to kiss him, an intimacy as well-worn as my oldest pair of jeans.

We kiss and grapple and grind against each other.

I break away to tear off my shirt, and he trails kisses down my throat and lower, catching a nipple in his teeth.

I tug at his hair with one hand, working the other between our bodies to palm at his dick.

We’ve rehearsed this so many times that the choreography is effortless.

Together we get our jeans unfastened and the combination of skin and friction and knowing what this man has wanted for years is too good to be believed. It only takes a few minutes to come.

I settle next to him in the chair, smushed against him with one leg still hooked over his waist. He draws little patterns against the skin of my stomach. It’s always been this easy with him. There’s very little need for small talk. Our bodies have the conversation.

Ben steals one more kiss and pulls back, swiping my bottom lip with his thumb. “It’s such a relief to know I won’t have to spend Aiden’s wedding cruising for someone to take home after.”

I nip at his fingers. “Got a hot date lined up?”

“No, but I happen to know the best woman has a dirty mind and truly incredible stamina.”

“I hate to break it to you,” I say, pulling back to stretch out a kink in my neck, “but though you’re correct about my stamina, you’ll have to make other plans. I have my sights set on someone even prettier than you.”

“No one is prettier than me,” he says, and he’s charming enough that it isn’t obnoxious. It’s also kind of true.

“Kim Cameron is.”

His eyes widen and he scoffs. “As in newly minted maid of honor Kim Cameron?” He draws back, looking thoughtful. “I suppose it does have a nice symmetry to it. And it’s sort of full circle. Didn’t you have a thing for her in high school?”

“I guess.” There’s a part of me that wants to spill my guts and tell Ben everything.

He knows me so intimately, in every sense of the word, and we’ve had fun over the long years of our entanglement, keeping each other up-to-date on our various sexual exploits.

There’s no jealousy built into our relationship, just a mutual appreciation of pleasure and years of history.

He’d understand how much I wanted to get close to Kim, and he knows me well enough that he might even understand the lengths I’ve gone to in the hopes of making it happen.

But Ben is also, unfortunately, a genuinely good person.

He used to bring my mom flowers when she was pregnant with the twins, drove down from school for Aiden’s high school graduation even though he was in the middle of finals, and talked me down over the phone when a longtime fuck buddy rejected me post-transition.

I can imagine telling him the story I concocted for Kim, and the disappointed look on his face as he realized that not only had I lied to someone to get in their pants, but that I’d used Aiden to do it.

He knew how close we were, and while he cared about me deeply—maybe more deeply than I sometimes wanted to admit—he loved Aiden like a brother.

I wish, not for the first time and I’m sure not for the last, that I hadn’t lied to Kim.

A few minutes later, after some rushed cleanup in the bathroom, I’m on my way out the door.

Ben is used to abrupt exits after a decade of hookups, but he stops me with a hand—the one that was just down my jeans—on my arm.

“Is everything OK?” He knows me too well, he’s too perceptive, too good . Far too good for me, just like Kim Cameron.

I kiss his cheek, feeling the downy fuzz of his facial hair.

I wonder what it would be like to be a simpler girl who could live down here and let Ben Otsuka love me.

We’d grocery shop at Trader Joe’s and meet Aiden and Rachel every weekend for bagels, which I’d always complain about because you can’t get good bagels outside of New York.

We’d go to the movies and he’d remind me how much popcorn made my stomach hurt, but I’d eat it anyway and he’d rub my belly in bed, spooned up behind me when we got home. It sounded nice. It sounded boring.

“Everything’s great,” I tell him.