Page 18 of Best Woman
I steal a sip of Mom’s Diet Coke, which is mostly melted ice at this point. “That’s disgusting.”
“So are your shoes,” she counters, eyes on her phone. “We’ll go to the mall tomorrow and get you a new pair. Youcannotwear those to the club.”
“I did bring another pair, you know. It’s not like I was planning to wear these to the rehearsal dinner.”
“Well, whatareyou wearing to the rehearsal dinner?” I’ve fallen neatly into her trap. “You’ve been so cagey.”
“It’s mostly to avoid prosecution. River helped themselves to a few things from Hannah G’s closet and let me borrow them.”
Mom gasped. “Oh, IloveHannah G. That one song isalwaysplaying in Publix. What’s it called, it’s the one with that chorus that goes like,hm hm hmmm hm hm.” I’ve gotta admit, she has good taste. That Hannah G song was one of my most-listened-to songs three years ago, meaning it’s just the right time for it to go triple platinum in a Florida grocery chain.
We stand around the kitchen island gossiping for a bit, Mom filling me in on the latest drama with her friend group. This summer they went on a Mediterranean cruise and one of them almost fell off the boat in an incident involving too many margaritas and a broken flip-flop. In turn, I catch her up on work, showing her photos on my phone of Everett’s new brownstone, which she oohs and aahs at, insisting that one day I’ll have a home just as nice. And the nice thing is, she believes it.
An hour of chatting later, I check my phone.
I’m home, come by whenever :)
“I’m going out,” I say, wondering where I can possibly pretend to go on a Sunday night in Boca Raton. “I forgot to bring toothpaste, I’m going to run to Publix.”
She hands over her keys without question. “Can you grab me another Diet Coke while you’re out?” Even if she’s asleep when I get back, she’ll drink it first thing in the morning. I send a text back.
Same address?
I haven’t even pulled out of the driveway when the response comes in, blown up on my mom’s navigation system, where I’ve connected my phone.
Yup,writes Ben Otsuka.See you soon.
Ben answers thedoor 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 onlyjustbeen 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, therewasthat 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 considersGone Girlto 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 similarlyoffin 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 Iknewwithout 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 duringa 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 saidvery excited re: boobsand the only thing that changed was now I have longer hair for him to pull.
“You look good,” he says, giving methe 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 withhim. There’s very little need for small talk. Our bodies have the conversation.
