I have lifted and altered some dialogue from a scene many of you will recognize. Hope you all enjoy!

IX


The sound of someone knocking on her door filled the silence that ensued, and Felicity's head snapped around to look at Gwen. She stopped too, and turned around, meeting Felicity's terrified gaze with narrowed eyes.

"Who is it?" she whispered, her hand reaching inside her coat. Felicity didn't need to wait and see to know that whatever she had underneath there, was not something whoever was at her door would like to be on the receiving end of.

"I don't know," Felicity whisper-shouted back. Gwen appraised her quickly and then relaxed, her hand falling from inside her coat.

"I need to get out of here."

"Fire escape, bedroom." Felicity commanded, already moving toward the door. Gwen's retreating footsteps were followed by the sound of her bedroom door creaking open. Felicity didn't bother to look behind her as she pulled the door open, positive that the other woman had already made herself scarce. "Oliver, what are you doing here?"

Oliver stood on the other side of her door, fist raised as if he were getting ready to knock again. His eyes widened in surprise, not because she had opened the door, but because of the fear Felicity realized too late had managed to seep into her voice. She had no reason to fear him, his presence here. So why should that emotion be there?

"Are you okay?" He asked, concern instantly coloring his tone. Of course he'd be concerned for her, she thought. Oliver only knew her as Felicity, the girl who never kept anything from him, John, or Roy. As far as he knew, she had no secrets; at least not the kind that could be deemed dangerous or as need-to-know.

So much had changed in the last six months.

"There is so much untapped potential in you…"

Gwen's voice infiltrated her thoughts. But what kind of potential could she possibly mean? She'd already stated that Felicity was the best of the best when it came to her field. What was there that Felicity could improve on?

And suddenly Felicity found herself wishing that Oliver were anywhere else but there with her. A shocker really, considering she often wanted just the opposite. Poor William, he really did deserve better than her, especially when she wasn't even sure she could give her all to him while Oliver was still in her life. Oliver's presence now though was exactly the opposite of what she wanted and needed.

Felicity needed time to figure it all out and that perhaps, is what scared her the most. She shouldn't even consider the crazy notion of leaving her team for whatever it was Gwen was offering. There was so much that wasn't right with her for simply entertaining the thought. No. She would absolutely not consider it. Not anymore. What she needed to do now, was figure out how to tell Oliver everything.

"I'm fine," she lied smoothly, feeling anything but. Oliver's eyebrow raised, obviously not satisfied with her answer even though her tone had betrayed nothing of her inner turmoil. She really was getting better at controlling what came out of her mouth. And the lying thing, she suspected that was more due to her overabundance of practice when it came to lying. Something she could definitely credit to the double life she now led. "What are you doing here though?"

"I was thinking-"

"Oh God." Felicity flinched, and she saw Oliver's grimace as he worked through the meaning of her words.

"I was thinking," he began again. "That I've waited too long."

"What are you talking about?"

"I mean, that I want our date now."

"Now, you mean… now now?" Seriously? Sometimes the man had the worst timing imaginable. Or maybe, she thought, it was the best timing. Alone she would have turned her conversation with Gwen in her mind over and over until she reached a conclusion that Felicity wasn't sure she wanted to reach. With Oliver here, now; she felt grounded. Everything had happened too fast in the last half hour, too much to be taken in.

Watchtower.

She'd never had a codename before. Before she had always been just Felicity. Good old reliable Felicity Smoak and she had liked that.

"Oliver you can't be serious." She looked down at her current attire. She was dressed in the same black blouse and dark grey pencil skirt she had worn to work earlier that day. While the outfit was appropriate for the work place, it was hardly something that she would wear on a date. Particularly not her first date with the Oliver Queen. And she didn't mean the as in rich Oliver Queen. She meant the as in the man she had always been so sure would never be more than her friend, a person who looked at her and felt as much sexual attraction as she would feel towards a sack of potatoes, or a lamp.

He on the other hand, didn't seem even remotely fazed by her incredulous stare. In true Oliver fashion, despite the fact that he was one of smartest men she had ever known (because that D he got in tenth grade algebra didn't count, there was a difference between book smart and smart smart), he was adorably clueless sometimes.

"Of course I am."

"And where exactly would we be going?" She crossed her arms in front of her and gave him the best "really Oliver" face that she could muster.

"Giovanni's" Oliver stated, and then proceeded to frown when Felicity flinched. "I thought you liked Italian food, everybody likes Italian."

"As a matter of fact no, not everybody likes Italian. I had a friend at MIT who's name was Chloe and she hated Italian food, something about too much garlic or olives or something or other, I never really understood what her aversion to it was, it always tasted good to me. So I suppose you're right, I do like Italian. Not as much as Thai, but then again I don't suppose there are any Thai places in Starling that are quite up there with what you normally frequent. And speaking of high end places seriously Oliver Giovanni's, you're going show up at my doorstep at," she shook her wrist in front of her and peered at her watch, "seven thirty seven to take me there without giving me the chance to get properly dressed."

"What's wrong with the way you're dressed?" Oliver inquired, smiling widely now as he openly looked her up and down.

Felicity felt herself blush at his shameless appraisal of her. "This isn't something one would wear to a place like that Oliver. I need a better dress and a hairdo that will take me at least an hour if not more and don't even get me started on my makeup-"

Oliver reached out to her, grabbing her hand from where it rested on top of her other arm and took it between his own. He fixed her with a look that instantly - and mercifully - had her shutting up. It was funny how many different emotions his deep blue eyes could express. There was a fire in them that she rarely saw, but there was also tenderness and patience and…

"You look beautiful right now, and nobody will care what you're wearing. I don't care what you're wearing, it'll just be me and you."

Me and you. A tiny voice in her head wanted to correct Oliver, tell him that technically it should be "you and I" but of course that wasn't something that she would allow herself to do. So she settled for sighing in only slightly exaggerated defeat, and rubbed small circles on his fist with her thumb.

"Let me go get my purse."

She moved away from him then, turning back towards her apartment. The coin, the new one that Gwen had left her with, heavy in her hand. She blocked his view of her purse with her body and slipped that traitorous object inside. Out of sight, kind of out of mind. Not for the first time she found herself wishing that her mind wasn't capable of so much thinking, of being able to process so many different thoughts at the same time. It made putting thoughts away impossible, because there was always a small part of her that could still think about it, even while she desperately wanted not to.

Felicity schooled her features. She needed to be happy; she needed to be her usual self. She needed Oliver.

"All ready," she announced, turning once again to look at him. His answering grin made her knees go weak.


The waiter approached them, his expression strictly professional. "Scotch, neat." Oliver said, his eyes never straying from Felicity.

"Just a water for me," His gaze was almost too strong, and she turned to look at the waiter, grateful that she could look at the strangers face instead of Oliver's.

His arm shot out to catch the waiters before he left though, and the look he gave Felicity could be described as nothing but apprehension. She found it rather comical. "A-are you sure? 'Cause the booze might help with the whole…"

"I'm good," she declared, feeling her lips twitch. A flustered Oliver was not something she had been expecting. Truthfully the alcohol was something that she would have been grateful for, and in that moment a little liquid courage might have been just the thing that she needed. But even stronger was her need to experience this entire moment without any sort of alteration. She was a bit of a lightweight after all, and she wanted to remember every last second of tonight.

Oliver nodded at the waiter who quickly left. He shifted in his chair, his hands smoothing the lapels of his jacket down in a manner that was so unlike him Felicity almost wanted to question him to make sure the man in front of her was really Oliver Queen.

"Nervous?" she breathed, her voice betraying a little of her own nervousness. Oliver's eyes flashed to look at her, lips pursed as he nodded. Felicity smiled at him, feeling herself relax just a little. "Line forms behind me."

"Am I being crazy? I mean what do we have to be nervous about?"

"Well, we've already exhausted every topic one would normally talk about on a first date, and a second date, and a third date, and pretty much every date actually, and I've already seen you shirtless," she shifted her gaze from his eyes, finding a sudden and powerful interest in the table cloth as she attempted to hide the flush on her cheeks. "Multiple times, shirtless… all the time."

"There are still…a few things that you don't know about me," Oliver confessed, choosing to ignore her flustered state, for which she was extremely grateful. She might have been getting slightly better at controlling her mouth, but the comment of course had slipped out against her better judgment. Bad habits were the hardest to kill after all.

His eyes searched her face, looking for something she wasn't sure she entirely understood was.

"Please… name one," she implored, taking a sip of the glass of water that was set in front of her by the waiter.

"The five years that I was away… I wasn't always on Lian Yu," if Oliver was looking for some sign of surprise from her, it seemed that he was the one to be caught off guard. Sometimes Felicity was positive that he and John forgot just how smart she actually was. She had already deduced what he had just divulged to her. To Felicity, it seemed painfully obvious that he hadn't spent all five years on the island that was literally dubbed purgatory, and she found herself wondering just how many other people - if any - had already arrived to the same conclusion.

"I thought so," she confessed as well. "Where were you?"

"Hong Kong, for one." That would explain the Chinese Characters that were tattooed along the side of his abdomen, Felicity thought to herself. While the enormous amount of people who got tattoos of Chinese Characters and were only kind of sure that the symbol actually meant what they thought it did was one for the record books, Oliver had never struck her as one to follow such trends. Even before the island, his persona - at least what she had read of it and heard from others - was one of a trendsetter, not a trend follower. "And I have been thinking a lot recently about my time there, the choices that I made…" Oliver paused, his gaze falling from her face to look down at his hands, firmly clasped in front of him.

"Those years sound like they were filled with a whole lot of suck." Felicity suggested, feeling the need to get him out of his thoughts. An Oliver who got too far into his own head and twisted past was an Oliver that tended to think of all the bad, and none of the good. Not for the first time Felicity felt the strong desire of something more for him, for him to find some semblance of happiness.

She wanted it all, but not for herself, for him.

Oliver's eyes were brimming with emotion as he held her gaze, and he reached up to stroke his lips. "I'm sorry," he blinked rapidly, "I'm a little out of my element." He paused for a second, and Felicity saw a new light in his eyes, a light that made her heart give that hopeful little swoop.

"The entire time that I was gone I could never completely trust someone," Oliver frowned, his expression pleading with her to understand him. "And when that goes on for so long you stop seeing people for people. You see threats… or targets, and when I decided to come home I just didn't know how to turn that part of me off." He paused again, and Felicity almost wanted to tell him that it was okay for him to stop. She didn't expect him to open up completely, to divulge each and every secret he had all at once. She did want him to open up to her, to let her in deeper than she'd ever been allowed to go before, but she wanted Oliver to do it because he wanted to, when he was ready.

"And then I walked into your office, you were the first person that I could see as a… person." He looked up and then down quickly, and Felicity felt a small smile tug at her lips. "There was just something about you."

She ducked her head then, the memory of that day coming back to her as soon as the words left his mouth. "Oh yeah, I was chewing on a pen," slightly mortified she began to scratch at her forehead, the notion nothing more than a nervous habit.

"It was red," he murmured, his expression completely open to her, all remains of the wall that had been between them completely gone.

In his eyes, she saw hope.

AN:

A thank you to Lililovingreading for being an amazing beta! And to foxxandbeanz for being an enabler when it come to this story. Also a certain someone by the name of jessspider reviewed every single chapter in the span of one day and made me smiled quite a lot. Thanks to all of you who take the time to review, I very truly and deeply appreciate it! Now I'm going to go and try to figure out how to use a tumblr, and once I do I will begin to post spoilers and such and ramble on about Arrow.

Ten more reviews will unlock chapter 10.