There's been a lot of talk on Tumblr recently about Smiggle and their age gap.
My boyfriend and I are a few years apart and it got me thinking.
This is a near-verbatim exchange where I traded the two us for the two of them.
Yeah.
People gave them funny looks sometimes.
But most of the time, it was just a generally accepted thing.
Felicity Smoak and John Diggle.
The tiny blonde half of this equation smiled to herself as she pushed through the coffee shop door.
"Smoak," came the sharp call.
She turned to the table set near the window seat.
There he was.
"John," she smiled, weaving through a few occupied tables to reach him.
She found it odd that she didn't call him Diggle anymore. It had been the same with a few of her college boyfriends. Any nickname they had was traded for the first name as soon as the first date was over.
Leaning down with a hand placed gently on his shoulder, she kissed him softly on his lips before pecking his forehead.
John pulled a chair around close to him and she sat, their thighs and shoulders trading warmth.
The fitted lilac shirt he was wearing left little to the imagination, but imagine she did. He didn't have the body of boy, a boy who spent all his time in front of mirrors at the gym. Rather, he had the body of man, a man who got his body from the work he did. Soft in the right places, muscular where he needed to be. She could detail just about every inch of his body. They had a hotel booked in Coast City for the night and Felicity was squirming with excitement, blushing from head to toe at where her mind went with these thoughts.
"You right?" John raised his eyebrows, the hand on the back of her chair came to that sensitive spot on her side.
"Mmhmm," she grinned, scrunching her nose up.
"It's just," he returned the grin and leant in so his lips touched her ear, "you've gone as pink as that pair of underwear I tore off you last weekend."
"John!" she squealed, arms flailing, nearly sending a waitress, and the coffees she carried, flying.
Everybody in the café turned to stare at them.
Felicity cleared her throat, straightened her glasses and sipped the coffee that John had waiting for her.
John couldn't help himself as he took in the charming pink that graced Felicity's features. Her eyes watered from trying to hold in her laugh. A laugh, once it started, would never stop.
Her tongue flicked out to catch the crema from her coffee on her lips and John's hand became firmer against her side, pulling her closer.
He kissed the side of her head, still smiling to himself.
John caught the eye of Lara, a waitress who the two were on a first name basis with.
She nodded, offering a little wave from behind the counter.
People were always a little thrown when they found out the age difference between the two of them. They would always laugh it off. It was one of Felicity's favourite things to do.
"When you were starting middle school, I was still eating baby food."
Or.
"When you graduated recruit school, I was in the third grade."
But really, they were on the exact same level.
Felicity surprised him in the first months of their relationship. At times, she was loving and romantic with dinners and wine and little gifts, but other times, he found himself asking her to slow down.
She would slow down, momentarily, but would then demand that he pick up the pace. That he may think he was fit, but he was most certainly not bedroom fit and that he'd want to lift his game if she didn't want her to leave him for a younger man.
This was then followed by a breathless, girly giggle that escaped her bruised lips. He'd swallow the sound, flipping her underneath him easily, his broad shoulders shadowing her from the light through the window.
Felicity was, in the most clichéd of terms, a riddle wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a mystery wearing panda flats.
She always grinned cheekily at him when her friends nudged her in the ribs, joking about how he must be teaching her lots.
Because, really, John was a very straight-forward, missionary style man when it came to bedroom antics. It wasn't for lack of experience by any means, just more what worked for him.
That was until Felicity had showed up at his apartment one night with a mouth-droppingly thick book of karma sutra and very little under her pea coat.