Don't I Know You? by Karen Shepard

adoor onto a tastefully furnished room with a well-stocked refrigerator, and said, “Stay as long as you like.”
    She’d found her professors intelligent if not always interesting, and her peers neither, but inoffensive, for the most part, and willing to let her be. For the first year, she’d lived at home, twice a day riding what the regulars called the International Express, the number seven from Manhattan to Queens, which passed through some of the most ethnically diverse neighborhoods around: Sunnyside, Woodside, Jackson Heights, Elmhurst, Corona, ending at Main Street, Flushing.
    She’d had the same roommate for the next three years, an earnest and enthusiastic softball player from Minnesota, whom she hadn’t spoken to since, a situation about which neither of them harbored ill feelings.
    Her senior year, she slept with a tall, shy boy from Nebraska the week before he left to join his father’s insurance company in Omaha. He was blond and Nordic and she’d been neither pleased nor traumatized by their quiet lovemaking. She was glad to have her virginity behind her, but had no energy to pursue further lovers.
    Matthew Cullen had been a friend of a friend of a friend, whom she’d met the one and only time her fellow graduate students had been able to convince her to go out with them. A good-looking perpetual Columbia student with a soft southern accent. She thought at first that she’d met him before, but there’d been dozens of boys like him at school, southern trust-fund boys going to the proper northeastern colleges, always on the verge of getting kicked out, buoyed by the luxury of the family oil or tobacco business as safety net.
    He, however, had kissed her hand, said, “How’d the picnicgo?”, enjoyed her confusion, and then reminded her that he’d flirted with her a year or so back. She’d been walking down 102nd street, carrying a bowl of something, on her way to the park.
    â€œFlirted?” Lily had said, and he had laughed, remarking that it was true, sometimes what he intended to communicate wasn’t all that clear.
    Her knowledge of and vague contempt for his type were not enough to tamper with the feelings he inspired. He was the good-natured dog she had wanted and been forbidden as a child. The one who tilts his eyebrows at you, letting you know that all he wants in the world is your hand on his head. She had more to drink than she usually did. She smoked a joint for the first and last time in her life. But when they closed the door to her apartment behind them, her head was not spinning. She was, to her considerable surprise, in perfect control of her desires and the behaviors they elicited.
    Everything about him said: If you come to me, I will save you , and so for months she had gone to him, and gone to him, feeling taken care of in ways that suggested she might never touch the earth again.
    And then he had betrayed her with someone about whom Lily knew almost nothing. She had called Lily, and Lily had been reminded of what she had, of course, known all along: asking someone to save you was the same thing as asking for a certain kind of destruction. His genuine sadness about his own behavior did not temper the damage, though it had taken all she had to tell him to leave, to refuse the phone calls, to deny the ache of missing them when they stopped.
    And so he returned to her often. The crisp citrus smell of hischeek, the thick denim of his jeans against the cotton of her underwear, his hand on her hip like a hinge. The way he would say, “I know what you’re thinking,” and be right. The version of herself he had revealed, from which she’d chosen to look away.
    She’d put herself back on track. Teacher’s College for graduate school, an apartment within walking distance, and then a job working at a private preschool in the same neighborhood.
    She trusted people until they gave her enough reasons not to. This was