Izzie Stevens knew better; that didn't stop her from kissing him back. She knew better than to respond to his desperate plea, even after her pretty pink sweater hit the floor. She knew she should halt him, when his trembling hands hesitated, hovering over the dainty clasp of her bra. She knew she should end this before it started, while his head still rested on her shoulder, his tears washing over her delicate skin. She knew they would regret it the moment the clasp gave way, and her sensitive flesh poured into his warm hands, his fingers delicately rousing her beast.
She knew that the pile of clothing growing languidly over her sweater did not belong on the floor, and that her silky hands should not be roaming so freely over his smooth back, gathering him to her. She knew that this was a mistake, and that they were moving much too slowly, and that he was nowhere near ready, and that he'd never harden fast enough without her help, and that her fingers should be anywhere but where they were, and that she shouldn't be making him moan like that as she guided him into her, and that her nails digging into his shoulders were close to drawing blood.
She remembered vaguely, two hours later, that she should push him away, even as he lingered deliciously inside of her, familiar waves of pleasure ebbing into quieter echoes as his lips and fingers still gently explored the traitorous nooks and crannies of her body, which quivered eagerly at his touch. She knew that she was losing and that she had to fight back, and that her hands were in just the right place, and that he was defenseless when he groaned like that, collapsing with a deep, satisfied shudder as his body coiled around hers, engulfing her in a soothing silence, as if a storm had just blown over.
She knew that he was exhausted, and was grateful that she remembered so much of her geography, her hands tenderly tracking a familiar path, a little south of his left shoulder blade, a little north of his eighth rib, bearing east away from his ridiculously ticklish left side, right to a sweet spot. She knew that he was helpless when she stroked him like that, and would drift off peacefully in a moment or two, and that she should not listen to his gentle murmurs as he sank further into her, if she had any hope of staying awake herself.
She knew that she should disentangle herself from him immediately, or they'd never be able to look at each other. She knew that she should be less angry at him for begging, and less aggravated at how his body ensnared hers like a bear trap, and less annoyed at the warm, rhythmic breathing teasing her breasts, while his head lay buried in her shoulder. She knew she could not sleep with him nestled into her so closely, while all their clothes still littered the floor; she knew that she could definitely not let him see her like that the next morning, wrapped only in his scent.
--
Izzie Stevens knew better; that didn't stop her. She knew that - even in Meredith Grey's house - inappropriate sex had rules. But that had never stopped her before, and again she awoke tangled in tear soaked sheets; at least this time, not all the tears were her own. She lay beside him silently, watching as the silver dawn crept into his room. Surveying the floor beside his bed, she searched furtively for her clothes, strewn haphazardly over the judgment, the rationality, that she'd tossed aside with them the night before, when he had pleaded. The past few weeks were a blur of screaming, and blood, and grief, and now, now she had a clinic to run…and Alex. She glanced at the clock on his bed stand, which glowered five thirty eight at her in accusatory red numbers, as if even it knew better.
The past few weeks were a blur, but the evening before was an abrupt punctuation mark, a bewildering tangle of familiar limbs and alien emotions. She knew his body, as he did hers, like a daily route that could be traversed without a thought. But he'd gotten lost along the way, and she'd felt him searching her lips, her thighs, her form – searching her – for something. She doubted he'd found whatever he was looking for amid his slow, sad, eerily quiet meanderings amidst her body, so different from the passionate acrobatics that they'd once shared in bed. But he was still Alex, and he still managed to sate her beast, and she awoke still tangled in him, the discomfiting tear tracks still fresh on his face.
She knew better than to look at him like that, and was relieved that she remembered how he moved when he slept, and how to shift him gently on his side, facing away from her, without waking him. He'd woken long after her, but he still lay where she'd rested him, turned toward the window. She knew that he'd resist looking at her, and that he'd have to grope his own way beyond a night when his usual cure-all had reached its limits.
She lay quietly for a long while, eying the silky wisps of hair along his neck, where her hands had lingered the evening before, when he had unraveled in her arms. She caught herself just short of instinctively returning them, hastily pulling them back even as her stomach churned. She knew that touching him, staying with him, would only humiliate him further, and they were both already late for rounds.
Slipping soundlessly out of the bed, she grabbed a tee shirt from the floor, pulling it on as she gathered her clothes. She glanced back at him, but his ragged breathing was the only hint that he was awake, and he made no move to stop her as she hovered in the doorway, listening for the strained silence she knew was coming. Several moments later, she made her way to her bedroom, dressing quickly as she cursed Meredith for leaving her without a ride. Scanning the dimly lit kitchen, she hesitated before taking his car keys from the table and rushing off to the clinic. She knew he'd follow eventually, but she also knew that, exhausted as he was, he'd still need to run.
Several hours later, she listened as Bailey chewed him out for missing morning rounds. She watched his hands shake subtly as Sloan growled at him for dropping coffee cup number three. She heard him yelling at two nurses, and heard Bailey yelling at him about maintaining professional decorum. She watched as he fumbled to complete easy sutures in the pit, and heard him stammer blankly when asked a simple procedural question by a nervous young nurse who had just started working at the hospital the day before. She knew better than to help him.
Later that afternoon, she noticed him alone in the cafeteria, poking at his uneaten meal as he stared at the medical journal that lay in front of him, unopened. Sometime after six o'clock that evening, she heard him volunteering to be on call that night; anything, she knew, to be out of the house, still stained with Rebecca's blood. She told herself that he would be okay, that he had to be okay, because he was Alex. She told herself that he was better off, no longer stewing in the denial that surrounded Ava or Rebecca or whoever the hell else she had been to him, and his doomed quest to save her from herself.
Izzie knew better the following night, too, when he finally came home, and she climbed into his bed without a word, and again they fed their beasts. She knew better than to ask about Rebecca, or his mother, because any answers she got would have been lies. The counselors had told her, after Denny died, that denial was the first stage of grief; they'd told her that manic activity wasn't a solution; they'd told her that her life would return to normal, when all the other stages – the anger and the bargaining and the despair – had passed, leaving simple acceptance in their wake. The counselors were full of crap.
Izzie definitely knew better. She knew that grief didn't come in predictable stages, but in unruly waves; she knew that manic baking helped; she knew that when love dies, normal dies, too. But she also knew that Alex was much too honest to steep in denial indefinitely. She'd told herself, that first night, that it would be just that one time, and again that second night, that that would be their last. She knew that she was all he had, and that that was all there was to their latest sexcapades, and that he'd know that just as well as she did, as soon as he got beyond just barely holding on.
She knew better the third time, too, and the fourth. She never said a thing to him, because six days after the first, they still hadn't exchanged a word. They didn't need to; she knew it didn't matter. This wasn't the naïve sex she'd had at fifteen, the kind that had gotten her pregnant. It wasn't the clumsy sex she'd had in college, when it was all still so new. It wasn't the athletic sex she'd had with Hank, or the lusty sex she used to have with Alex when her beast broke loose or an apocalypse neared, or the cringe inducing non-sex she'd inexplicably tried to have with George. It had no category, no description, no terms, and they'd done it all before, and this time it was all just too slow and too quiet and too sad and too familiar to count as anything but nothing.
"Are we ever going to talk about this?" she muttered half into his chest, as she tentatively broke their eight day silence. She couldn't see his face in the darkened room, but she felt his body tense against her arms. "About what?" he asked flatly, after a long pause. Izzie froze. She anticipated anger, hostility, even bitterness. She knew he was supposed to be angry, at her, at Rebecca, at his mother. He was terrible with most emotions, but anger he could do. But he wasn't yelling, or blaming, or accusing, or doing anything according to the expert psychological models they'd all learned as medical students. It was pissing her off, as he always did when he withdrew from her.
"You know," she stammered, momentarily disarmed by how remote he sounded, "about what happened." "You know what happened," he replied. That was true, technically. She knew what happened with Rebecca. She knew his mother had killed herself, after he'd run off his viscously abusive father. But the more she learned about his life, the less she understood him. "No," she insisted, "I mean…" "You mean what?" he asked, sighing impatiently. She knew better than to push him when he got like this, at least, she always had before, and it occurred to her then that she had no idea what she wanted to know.
"I mean," she said sheepishly, stalling for time "I stole you car." "Car's parked in front of the house," he muttered, turning onto his side and burying his face in the pillow. "No," she said, ignoring his tone, "that morning that we…were late for rounds." He laughed softly. "I knew where it was, Iz." She stiffened, wishing he'd call her anything but that. "But I took it without asking you," she pointed out. "Since when do you have to ask?" he mumbled, pulling the bulky white comforter around him as he burrowed into his spot.
"I didn't know about your mom," she blurted out, finally, "if I had…" "You had no reason to know," he snapped, "and it wouldn't have mattered, anyway. It wouldn't have changed anything." She wasn't sure what he was referring to, but she knew that any opening she might have had just slammed shut. She knew that that was the last she'd hear of the matter, and she wondered if she'd ever know the stranger who lay beside her. She wondered how it was possible to feel so alone in a bed so crowded – with her, with him, with Denny, with Ava, with Rebecca – and to feel so empty even when he was inside her.
She knew better than to bring any of it up, his past, the mess with Rebecca, her own presence in his bed, again. Sighing quietly, she spied the angry red scratches she'd raked across his back almost an hour before. They looked much deeper than she'd expected, as if they'd really sting, and she almost winced as she reached across to him before abruptly pulling back. He was already asleep, but touching him like that wasn't part of whatever they were doing, these prickly one night stands wedged between sullen half silences.
She knew better then to stay there with him, stewing furiously at his failings as he slept inches away from her. It would get her nowhere, she knew, pulling the comforter up more snugly around his shoulders, carefully avoiding the raw gashes in his flesh. She knew that this was all his fault -- that she was in his bed, that she could hardly move on from there while he was so lost, that the silences between them persisted, that his steadfast refusal to deal with his crap was seriously taxing her patience.
--
She was furious when she'd fallen asleep, and remained so over the next few weeks, mornings especially. They were always the same, those mornings, when she'd wake to find him tangled around her like silly string. When she first noticed it, she'd tried pushing him away, tried sleeping in different positions, even woken him abruptly more than once, but they always ended up in roughly the same position. She suspected then that he didn't realize what he was doing, and she couldn't decide if that made it even more annoying.
She finally resigned herself to it, since she knew it was temporary, and she no longer thought that he could help it. It had annoyed her more the first time they'd been a non-couple, when it seemed so unlike him, so ill-fitting a guy who timed his one night stands as if the parking meter was just running out, and who was always long gone long before daybreak. She probably should have realized even back then, she knew, that it was unconscious on his part, like how she would sometimes grind her teeth in her sleep.
This time around, she'd calmed down about it after the first two weeks or so, pushing him away less forcefully as she arose, more careful not to wake him. She'd concluded by then that it wasn't a deliberate plot to aggravate her, and she saw no need to embarrass him by pointing it out, since they were mysteriously on speaking terms again. She knew that she could solve the problem entirely by sleeping in her own bed. But she was always too tired to move, and the house was too cold, and a warm body's a warm body –harmless, like the cookies she made him because baking helped, and he loved her special recipe chocolate chips, and it couldn't hurt a person to have someone bake them something just because.
She knew that was probably the bigger problem, anyway, that he was just a warm body to her, as she was to him. But she knew that it wouldn't matter, because she understood his own harmless gestures for what they were - the cupcakes left in her locker, the laughter he provoked, the rides he provided, when he'd wait for her shift to end, the help in the clinic when she was over whelmed – she knew that they could never make up for his ominous, brooding silence, his perpetual refusal to communicate. She knew that she could never rely on someone she couldn't talk to, someone who wouldn't talk to her, and could never trust someone who wouldn't allow himself to be known.
She knew better than to bargain. They'd never much gone over that stage with her – the grief counselors – she'd lost patience with them by then. And she never admitted to anyone how much bargaining she'd done when Denny was sick. She'd promised the fates that she'd love him forever, if he just got a new heart; she promised that she'd take care of him, and just days later he was dead. She wondered if the fates still expected her to keep her vow, even to a ghost. But the scientist in her knew better than to horse trade with the universe, and the doctor in her knew that she had done all she could for him.
And none of that had anything to do with where she lay now, awake in Alex's bed, where he slept peacefully curled against her. She knew better than to trace her fingers along the curious curves and angles of his face. But she wondered how he managed those gestures. She wondered how his hands read her body like Braille, and how his eyes read her heart like a public display, and how this stranger knew what she wanted and what she needed, how he just knew her, without asking a question, without them exchanging a word.
She knew better than to flatter herself. She knew that he was so good at feeding her beast because he had had so much practice before her, and that it required no communication between them for him to know her wants and wishes, but only the simplest observations. Do no harm. That was the vow she'd taken, before Denny, before Alex, before all hell broke loose. The mantra was easy to say, hard to practice. But she knew she had to do just that when he was on solid ground again, and she could remind both of them that she couldn't settle for this, for him, for glimmering gestures placed like delicate candles in dark corners, always unspoken, always half hidden, too fragile to endure.
She knew better than to blame him, at least sometimes, or completely anyway. She knew it had been a matter of grim survival for him, to hover invisibly, always on the edges of sight – just beyond the grasp of his father's rage. She knew that, for him, being seen meant being beaten, and being safe meant always knowing where all the exits were, and that trust was generally covered in blood. And she knew better – this time – than to trust someone incapable of trusting her.
They'd warned her about that, the counselors, that a prolonged refusal to trust on her part may signal incomplete grief, and that to move beyond Denny's death, she would have to shed that reluctance. But she knew that her refusal here was not pathological, and that she would trust again after this latest mess was over, and she could move on.
--
She'd found the letter buried in his top dresser drawer, crinkled under the clean tee shirts she'd just hastily shoveled in atop his medical journals. Dated almost a years before, it tersely described the circumstances of his father's death, and the state sponsored burial Alex had plainly never attended, since the return receipt to the County Clerk's office – in some far flung out post in Michigan – clung stubbornly to the form. She knew better than to read the letter in first place, but she angrily tore the receipt off anyway, leaving it on the top of the dresser with a pre-addressed envelope and a stamp.
It was gone the next morning, without a word, and she waited nearly a week before finally asking him why he'd never acknowledged receiving the original form. It made her mad, really, that he never talked about any of it; it made her madder still that at least he had gotten a form, and no longer had to wonder, as she did, about her own father, if he was alive or dead, or where he had disappeared to, or how it would end with them.
"Could you tell me just once?" she demanded impatiently. She knew better than to ask about what had happened to the envelope, though the rest of the form was still stashed in the dresser drawer where she'd found it. The question hung in the room's chilly air, and she figured that he was already half asleep anyway, his head comfortably buried in her shoulder, nuzzling her neck.
"What do you want me to say?" he mumbled finally. "Just once," she sighed, "just once, can you tell me, what you thought when you read that letter, what it was like to know for sure?" "What's left to say," he asked impatiently. "He was a nasty drunk who beat the crap out of his family and he died with a needle still shoved in his arm. End of story."
"Alex…" she repeated softly, expecting him to pull away, and surprised that he was still wrapped so snugly around her. She waited a long while, idly noticing the weight of his body against hers, wondering if he'd already fallen asleep - closing another door behind him. "Safe," he whispered finally, so quietly she wasn't sure she'd heard it. "I'm a grown man," he added, "and all I could think was that I was safe, that he wasn't coming back."
She felt him working to control his breathing, and she winced at his shamed admission. "Stupid, huh," he said, plainly embarrassed, and she had no reply – not even a lie, or a cliché - and could only listen wordlessly as he retreated into the darkness, where sleep claimed him.
She knew better than to watch him sleep, his head nestled against her chest in the dim moon light, his soft expression echoing traces of the boy he'd been when he struggled, hopelessly, to protect his mentally ill mother from a vicious drunk. She knew better than to wonder if things would have been different – with his mother, with Rebecca, with her, with Denny – if only… The grief counselors had warned her they would come, the what-ifs, crashing down around whatever was left of what might have been.
She wondered wryly if this could possibly count as acceptance for him, if it was normal for him to need a form letter in his top dresser drawer to feel safe from a dead man, if it was normal for him to try to save Rebecca from demons of an entirely different sort – as he had his mother – even if the task was equally hopeless. She wondered if that's just what you did when you loved someone, as she had with Denny. She wondered what the hell normal had looked like before, and why it always seemed so far away now.
She heard him murmur quietly as he settled more closely into her, and she knew better than to touch him, especially under the left side of his rib cage, where he was ticklish, or below his left shoulder blade, where her hands habitually wandered when he was stressed or restless, right before he drifted off to sleep, or along his jaw line, which contrasted so sharply with his soft lips. She definitely knew better than to bring her lips to his, where their problems always began and ended, with his refusal to speak.
She rested her head against his, listening to the enigmatic silence always coiled inside of him, wondering why he still wouldn't tell her much of anything, and who he thought his silence was protecting. She knew that it wasn't supposed to be like this, that she was supposed to be with Denny, or someone like Denny, someone who could communicate in actual words, someone who could love her as Alex never could – since she knew that he could never even say the word.
They still couldn't talk about whatever it was that they were doing. They said nothing about her presence in his bed, and she still knew next to nothing about the exasperating, inscrutable lump who slept coiled around her. She knew that he did some unspeakably sweet things during the day, when he wasn't aggravating the hell out of her, and that he did many, many unspeakably sensual things at night, and that she needed to stop listening too closely whenever he called her Iz, and every other sound mysteriously dropped away, and she definitely knew better, even that very moment, than to lay too close to him.
That was a problem in the mornings, especially the mornings after he'd fed her beast, since she usually woke first, leaving her with the task of untangling them, of sorting out which bone, and muscle, and curve and sinew belonged to who. She knew better than to let her beast do her thinking for her, or worse, to roam too freely, since Alex might come to know her too well. He already knew much, like how she prepared each type of tea she drank, and the secret ingredients of her cookies, and how to incense her, and when to offer encouragement, and how to sate her beast, and an infuriating number of other things he ought not to know since he never asked her one damn single question about any of it.
That annoyed her, too, his refusal to ask questions, and she shifted slightly away from him, remembering her frustrations. She knew better than to let him sleep too peacefully there, nestled against her, since he obviously didn't trust her, determined as he was to remain a stranger, and she knew that she could never trust him. She knew better than to make her signature mistake again – the wrong guy, in the wrong bed, at the wrong time. She absently ruffled his hair, brushing her lips against his forehead as she drifted off to sleep, reminding herself that they both knew better.
--
"You're going to get splinters," Izzie warned, watching him walk across the old wooden porch, casting shadows in the October dusk. "That's okay," he said, placing a steaming tea cup on the small table beside her, "I know a great surgeon." "Yeah?" she brightened. "Um-hum," he nodded, "she specializes in splinter removal." "I'm sure it's very complicated," she retorted, sipping the tea and returning the cup where he'd set it.
She might have known better, before all this madness, than to settle back into him as he sat beside her on the swing, rocking them slowly. But that was the problem with denial; like grief itself, it ebbed and flowed not in intelligible stages but in bewildering waves, surging imperceptibly against the bedrock of sanity.
She knew the counselors would have warned her, that first night, that sex solves nothing, that grief, like love, must be spoken, that an encompassing silence is a pathology only worsened by feeding the beast. She got their hint that she was still only tangling with her own demons when she scrapped his back raw. But she knew that he listened and spoke with his hands, his lips, his skin, and that he had sought forgiveness in the curves and sinews of her flesh, and that somewhere in those first sad, slow, eerily quiet meanderings amidst her body, he had found whatever he was looking for.
"You're getting fat," she teased, her fingers settling around his waist, stroking him gently. "Can't help it," he objected, "that surgeon friend I mentioned, she's also a great cook." "Wow," Izzie giggled, "a brilliant surgeon and a great cook? She must be homely as hell." "Nope," Alex insisted smugly, "she's totally hot, blonde bombshell supermodel type. You should see her," he raved, adding a wolf whistle for good measure.
"Seriously" Izzie gasped, "looks, too? So why would she be friends with someone like you?" "She drinks," Alex deadpanned, nodding wryly. "That's too bad," Izzie sighed. "Not really," he remarked, a wicked gleam in his eyes. Izzie scowled at him, "Don't tell me - you get her drunk and take advantage of her?" "Every chance I get," he admitted. "Does your friend know you have such a dirty mind?" Izzie huffed. "That's what she likes about me," he insisted, "my mind." "I'm sure," Izzie chuckled, rolling her eyes.
"You don't have to come with me, you know," she said quietly, at least ten minutes later.
"I'm driving," he declared flatly, "it's all set. Everything will be fine." "I know," she said "my mom's really nervous about her angioplasty, but I told her that people have them all the time and have great recoveries. She's just never been very good with medical stuff." "Medical stuff," he teased, "is that a technical term, Dr. Stevens?" "You know what I mean," she huffed, slapping his arm. "Yeah," he said, "that she'll need you there."
She did know better than to let him nuzzle her neck like that, and the experts would no doubt warn her against bargaining with herself, against settling for whatever scarps of affection she could scavenge after Denny's death, settling for whatever reassurance she could find amid her mother's recent illness - settling for an enigmatic love offered in shy gestures left surreptitiously in half-hidden corners.
"I'm not actually too worried about her angioplasty. I think she'll be fine," Izzie said. "It's just that we've never gotten along all that great, and it'll be worse since she's so nervous, and I haven't really kept in touch as much as I should have, and I don't even know what to say to her about that. It's not like I want to get her even more upset than she already is..." she added, her thoughts rioting in her head. "She's still your mother," he shrugged calmly, as if that was the only relevant point.
"I just," she stammered, "I'd understand if you didn't want to, you know, because of your mom…" "That won't happen again," he said, so quietly that she could barely hear his strangled promise. "It's okay," she insisted, knowing that that was all she needed to say.
"I just wanted to check," she added, gently gathering him closer to her, knowing that that was all he needed. She sat quietly, listening as his breathing mingled imperceptibly into the peaceful cadence of the leaves rustling lightly around them.
"She's your mom, Iz" he repeated flatly, "whatever it is, we'll take care of it." She knew better than to read too much into the "we," which always hovered silently in the back ground. She knew better than to have too much confidence in the "take care of it" part, too, since she knew how badly cardiac matters could go awry. But she knew that that was who he was, he took care of things, of people - his mother, Rebecca, Meredith's lawn, the screen door and the snow shoveling, grocery lists and rides to work and over flow at the clinic - and he was gruff enough about it all to keep people at a safe distance – and sometimes she wondered if knowing that about him was knowing enough.
She shivered slightly, and he drew her shawl more closely around her shoulders, absently stroking her arms to warm them; she watched his hands as his words echoed around her. "She's your mom," he'd declared, as if that said it all, and she knew that for him it did. The statement posed no unanswered questions, because there were no questions to ask. It roused no second thoughts, when no decisions were needed in the first place. She was Izzie's mother, and that meant they would go, and he would drive, and she should bake some cookies for the trip, since he'd be hungry and he loved her cookies, and why was she looking at him like that, anyway, as if any of this wasn't perfectly obvious.
Brushing her fingers against his, she watched the sun sink into the horizon, its brilliant orange and red and purple plumes trailing behind it. She could almost hear their descent as a light breeze stirred around them, and she wondered when it would be too late to pull away from his hands. She'd known better right from the beginning, known better than to let him touch her, to let his fingers and his lips and his body fill in the cracks left by the other things she should have known better than to do.
She'd known better than to let his maddening, enigmatic silence wash over her, like the heat of a crackling fire on a cold evening. She'd known better right from that second night, when she'd slipped out of her robe and between his sheets, sinking into his bed
and into his body, which warmed her like no fabric or no words ever could. She might even have known better than to start any of this, had she been thinking at all clearly that first night, in the midst of his unspeakable despair, amid his burning tears and trembling hands, when really, the experts would say, all he had really needed was to talk.
But she knew better. She knew that having nothing left meant having nothing left to say. She knew that they belonged nowhere else than in that bed, where they could clumsily ignite the stirrings of a fragile peace. She knew that she belonged nowhere else, that first night, than beside him, wrapped only in his breath, his scent, his body. She knew that he belonged nowhere else than curled around her all those mornings after, him with his wants so simple, and his needs so obvious – for warm cookies and cool surgeries, for a warm body and a safe place to sleep, for her - that no words were necessary.
"You know I love you right?" she whispered sheepishly, staring at her hands, under the twilight, catching them both off guard. She knew better than to say it, had always known better than to say it, and knew that now, all bets were off. "Don't say anything," she insisted immediately, placing a soothing hand on his arm, "I'm pressuring you to say it back…" "Iz," he stammered quietly, his voice quavering as she cut him off. "No. Stop," she protested, squeezing his hand, "I know. I do. I promise."
She'd known better than to say it, and was relieved when she felt him finally exhale several moments later. "You know," she said casually, sliding her arms more closely around him, gently poking his ribs, "I take that back. You're not getting fat. Want me to bake you some cookies?" "Chocolate chip?" he asked hopefully, his voice still trembling slightly. "You're so predictable," she chastised, "come on, come help me." "You sure they won't make me fat?" he asked, helping her up and shyly meeting her eyes. "Oh, come on," she smiled, "what harm could a few cookies do?"