April 27, 2007

It had been four days since he had last spoken with her, but it felt like an entire lifetime had flashed before his eyes in a matter of a few mere hours. Oliver wasn't concerned with how their previous phone call had ended. As he stood outside her dorm room for the first time in months, he knew that he was in the only place he could possibly be that afternoon and that, no matter the rift between them, Felicity wouldn't turn him away. At least, not initially. Not if he didn't do something to hurt and push her away first. Despite this confidence in her, in her compassion, and in her capacity to forgive him which he admittedly took full advantage of far more than he should, Oliver hesitated to knock. While he didn't doubt that Felicity would emotionally be there for him, he wasn't sure if she would physically be available.

He wasn't a good friend. Hell, he wasn't a good brother or son either, and 'not good' didn't even begin to cover how awful of a boyfriend he was. But, with Felicity, he attempted to be different. Better. Or, at least, he had before their fight over winter break. Since then, he hadn't taken the time to learn about her spring schedule – when her new classes met and when she was now working. So, with one fist poised to knock and the other continuously clenching and releasing in an effort to reign in his nerves, Oliver told himself that he was hesitating, not because he wasn't sure about what to say or do when he finally saw her, but because what if she wasn't there, and he had to deal with Peter The Roommate?

But then the door was opening without him having to knock, and then Felicity was there, and then Oliver just found himself reacting instinctively. "Listen up, Jock-Boy, I can hear you breathing... Oliver?!"

He didn't respond; he didn't question her greeting. Lifting both of his hands to cup her face, he tilted her mouth towards his while, at the same time, leaning down and closing the distance their disparate yet not incompatible heights left between them. And then he kissed her. It was something Oliver had been wanting to do since the very first moment he saw her chewing on that preposterous red pen. Her lips, no matter what color they were painted, were always a temptation, but, as she stood before him that late April afternoon, they almost looked bare. They were the palest pink he had ever seen them. The color red was fiery and passionate, and the pink Felicity usually favored was sassy and unpredictable, but this shade was... intimate. It was so close to the natural color of her lips that it was almost like she wasn't wearing any lipstick at all. Whereas Oliver chose booze and pills as his shields against true intimacy, Felicity used bright colors and humor. She was fully dressed in fuchsia and orange, and her nails were a shimmery navy blue, but her lips looked naked, and he couldn't not kiss her.

So, he did.

It was a soft embrace, a light one. Oliver didn't press her for more or even try to deepen the kiss. As he brushed their lips together, their noses also touched, and he smiled against her mouth, his eyes falling shut in contentment. Even after the kiss ended, he didn't pull away. Instead, he held her close, and he breathed her in, and he just savored having her near again after so long. It rocked Oliver to realize that, despite how few of their conversations had actually happened in person, his body recognized hers – its touch, its rhythms, its scent. She was familiar.

He could have stayed right there, holding her, for forever, but, eventually, the noises of her building started to intrude, and Oliver chose to break the moment so that they could fully move inside of her dorm room and close the door behind them for privacy. Once that was accomplished, he turned once more to face her, and words behind his confession and reason for traveling 3,000 miles to see her just started pouring from him. "Sandra lost the baby."

Never could Oliver have predicted Felicity's reaction. "You kissed me," she accused him.

Grinning, he replied, "you kissed me back."

"I'm still mad at you." And, if Oliver had to hazard a guess, she was still hurt as well. After all, he was pretty sure that's where Felicity's anger almost always originated. "You were an ass the last time we talked."

But they'd get to that later. "Who's Jock-Boy?"

Felicity sighed in frustration. "Why are you here, Oliver?"

When he had heard the news about the baby, with Felicity was the only place he could fathom being. "You look, uh, really nice," he complimented instead of answering her, instead of revealing a level of vulnerability he wasn't prepared to share with her yet. "Do you... are you going out?"

"I have a date."

"Right. Of course," he was reacting before he could really absorb her words. But then he truly heard them, and Oliver exploded, "wait? What?!"

And Felicity sighed. "I don't have a date. There is a music event on campus tonight that I was going to attend. This is just... how I always dress. Well, with a coat, because it's forty degrees out there. But it would have served you right, Oliver, if I was going on a date." Before he could protest, she continued to scold him. "You can't just show up here without warning and expect me to pause my life. And you have no claim on me."

"And the mouth breather," he demanded to know.

Rolling her eyes and her shoulders back, Felicity spun around and moved to sit on the edge of her bed. Oliver kept standing where he was just inside of her door. "I told you about my stalker during Freshman year, that he was a lacrosse neanderthal. I never did any research into his identity, because that felt hypocritical, and, frankly, I didn't want to know anything about him. So, I called him Jock-Boy... like John-Boy, only lacrosse instead of farmer, so... yeah." She was twisting her fingers together as she explained her comments from earlier, and, despite his frustration with her less than warm welcome, Oliver couldn't help but find her adorable. Slowly, his glower was replaced with a small, crooked grin. "When I heard who I now know was you outside of my door... just standing there, I thought maybe he was back and bolder than ever."

"I'm sorry if I scared you," Oliver apologized sincerely. And then he let some of his defenses drop. "I was just... nervous." He shrugged his shoulders, explaining further. "As soon as I heard the news about the baby, I realized that you were the only person that I wanted to talk to, to see. But then I was here, and... I didn't know what to say."

For the first time since she opened her door and saw him standing there, Felicity smiled. Patting the bed beside her, she invited him to sit down – an invitation Oliver was more than keen to accept. Once he was seated, she twisted some to face him, their knees ghosting together. "I think you're doing a pretty good job so far. Well, besides that whole jealous putz part." She took his right hand between both of hers and squeezed lightly. "How did it happen?"

"I don't know," Oliver admitted. Before she could reprimand him for not caring enough to find out, he hurried to add, "Sandra didn't say, and I... I wasn't sure if I had a right to even ask her. So, I didn't. She seemed okay, but we really didn't know each other well, and I could tell that she was uncomfortable talking with me."

"And what about you," Felicity asked him. At what must have been his puzzled expression, she clarified, "how are you doing? What are you feeling?"

"Confused mostly," he admitted. Expanding upon his answer, Oliver said, "I'm not really sure what to think or how to feel." Sighing, he confessed, "or maybe I'm just feeling too much."

"Oliver," Felicity prompted, and he looked up to meet her gaze again. Her eyes were warm and welcoming, sympathetic, but they didn't hold an ounce of pity or censure. He found that looking at her in that moment allowed him to take his first deep breath since he had opened the door at his parents' house and found Sandra on the other side, waiting for him. "I have no idea what you're going through. I've never been pregnant. I'm an only child with no extended family. I've never even held a baby before. But I'll listen. Anything you want to tell me – no matter what it is, I'll listen. No judgements."

"What about your concert?"

Her only response was to tilt her head to the side, raise a pointed brow, and glare at him. Oliver chuckled in response. "Okay." He even held up his hand that wasn't engulfed between hers in a sign of surrender. After a moment, however, both his arm and his smile fell back down once more, and Oliver took several minutes to organize his thoughts. When he finally started to talk, he found that he had turned his right hand over and was using it to trace and caress Felicity's much smaller, more delicate digits. He ran the pad of his index finger over the smoothness of her painted nails; he traced the lines of her palm, wondering which was the love line and what the various details of it meant for her future, her passion, his role in her life; and, rather than the middle finger where she wore a large, geometric ring, Oliver found himself fascinated with the bare finger next to it, circling it over and over again with his touch.

"I... When Sandra came to me and told me that she was pregnant, it was the last thing I wanted. I didn't want to have a baby, I didn't want to be a father, and I certainly didn't want the mother of my child to be some woman I couldn't even remember. Maybe it makes me a total bastard, but I wanted her to take care of it." Oliver paused to take a deep breath, glancing at Felicity out of the corner of his eyes, but she hadn't reacted to his less than stand-up statement. Instead, she seemed intensely focused upon the movements of his hands. Though Oliver could tell that she was listening to him, the feel of his skin upon hers seemed to demand her attention. The realization buoyed him, gave him some much needed courage, and he continued.

"But when she told me that she lost the baby, I just... I felt the loss. And it wasn't even just compassion for what she was going through, physically and emotionally; it was more selfish than that. I'm relieved – glad, even – that I'm not having a child with a stranger, and it's not like I'm mourning the loss of my son or daughter. But I do feel... something for that life that was. And now isn't. It's not grief, not exactly," he said as he tried to puzzle through his feelings out loud. "Maybe it's wonder... about what might have been, about how I would have reacted if the circumstances were different." If he was different. If it wouldn't have been Sandra who was carrying his child.

"I don't think that these thoughts and feelings make you selfish, Oliver; I think they make you human." Oliver looked up and over towards Felicity and found that she was refusing to meet his gaze and that her cheeks were flushed pink. "When you told me that Sandra lost the baby, I wasn't even a part of the situation – not really, and I still reacted in much the same way. Well, except for the vodka part," she tacked on, finally bringing her gaze up to rest upon his face. "Just how much did you drink on the plane?"

He shrugged, unsure and unrepentant, because, for the first time, Felicity wasn't mentioning his drinking in reprimand. She seemed to understand his need to dull the world for once. "Don't forget the limo, too."

"You rented a limo to bring you here from the airport?" And then she was scrambling across his lap and over towards the window that was above her bed and that looked down upon the front of her building. Pushing aside her colorful – always so colorful – curtains, Felicity looked out to see if she could spot his latest splurge.

While Oliver answered her, he watched her very round, very plump, very pert ass. "Cabs don't have fully stocked minibars."

Felicity was already talking once again, changing the subject in fact, when she spun around and settled herself against the mountain of pillows that rested against her headboard. As she demurely tucked her legs beneath her, she lifted her hands up to do the same with a few loose strands of hair that had managed to escape her ubiquitous ponytail. "May I ask you something you're probably not going to want to answer, because you just dodged a bullet, so to speak, and this is definitely not something you're even considering if I...?"

"You can ask me anything, Felicity," he interrupted her. More-so than Oliver feared what was about to come out of his Red Pen Girl's mouth, he was curious.

"Do you want children? Someday?"

He didn't respond right away to show Felicity that he was seriously contemplating her inquiry. "The easy and the complicated answer to your question is that I don't know." He watched her face, particularly her mouth and nose, purse in thought, so Oliver continued. "I know that I shouldn't. My relationship with my own parents is... complicated."

"Aren't they all," Felicity remarked, rolling her eyes. But she didn't expand upon her acknowledging statement, so he pressed onward.

"They're nothing like me. They're responsible, and hard working, and successful, but all those things that they want for me don't make them good parents either. They're very... distant, cold. Their solution to every problem is to always throw money at it. They've been so wrapped up in their own lives that they've been absent from mine and Thea's. So, it's not like I've had a great example. But just because I know that I shouldn't have kids that doesn't actually answer your question. Or mine. Because I've wondered about that, too – if I even wanted children."

"Alright, well, then, let's make it more general," Felicity suggested. "Forget your parents, and babies, and this pregnancy scare. What do you want, period?"

As if he couldn't have this conversation and not be touching her, Oliver reached out and allowed the fingers of his right hand to dance across the silky smooth skin of Felicity's bent knees. She didn't shy or pull away from his touch. In fact, she outwardly didn't react at all, but her body betrayed her by breaking out into goosebumps. Grinning at both her response to him and in light of his answer, Oliver looked up, met her gaze, and said, "you."

She didn't return his banter. In fact, much to the contrary, she pushed his hand away from her leg and rebuked him. "For once, would you actually be serious."

So, he was. "I want to be Oliver," he confided in her. It was the first time he had even admitted this desire... even to himself, but that couldn't detract from its sincerity. "Not Ollie." Turning so that he was fully facing her, Oliver moved so that his legs were straddling hers, though he held himself above her. Caging Felicity in with his arms on either side of her torso so that she couldn't run away from him, Oliver forced her to look up and unflinchingly, unblinking meet his serious and unrelenting gaze. "But I only seem capable of being him when I'm with you."

Wide eyed and speechless, whether he was drunk on vodka or not, Oliver could tell that, for the first time, he had finally managed to get through to Felicity. He could see the belief she had in his confession reflected back at him in her open and teary baby blues. Just like earlier, when he had first arrived, he couldn't not kiss her. However, this time, it was anything but soft and light.

He possessed her, completely and utterly. With his lips, and his tongue, and his teeth, he demanded that she open for him. And she did. As Oliver invaded her mouth and then coaxed her into slipping her tongue into his, he hastily pushed all of her pillows aside and onto the floor. Felicity fell down flat onto her back, her legs still bent and closed beneath them. Continuing to kiss her, he linked their fingers together and then pushed her arms out and up so that were resting above her head. When he let go of her hands, he slowly trailed his touch down her arms. It was when the pads of his fingers brushed against the tender skin of her inner elbows that she squirmed below him. Her torso twisted, her legs pushed out between his own, and then they fell open slightly.

But it wasn't enough.

It would never be enough.

Tearing his mouth from hers, Oliver watched in satisfaction as Felicity struggled to take in deep breaths. He relished every single rise and fall of her chest. He only managed to look away in order to trail his eyes down her soft with arousal body, eventually focusing on where their lower bodies were touching. It was pleasurable but awkward, so he repositioned them, sliding his own legs between Felicity's and then smiling widely when, with a sigh, she allowed her legs to part completely as she opened herself up to him. In the process of her movements, her full, short skirt slipped that much higher up against her supple, bare thighs.

Despite the invitation she presented, laying before him like that, Oliver refrained from surging forward into the embrace her open hips made. Instead, as his right hand found the sliver of bare skin along her abdomen, dipping below her shirt to kneed and massage her quaking torso, his left walked the long line of her right leg until it disappeared beneath her skirt. At first, he just traced the edges of her panties – around her thigh, across the face of her pelvis, and then back around over her ass. But Oliver was quickly distracted by the damp heat he could feel pooling between her legs, and his touch inevitably sought that heat out, initially dancing over top of her panty-covered wetness before he completely palmed her, pressing the heel of his hand up and into her mound.

She whimpered, bit her bottom lip. "Oliver." He wasn't sure if she was begging him to come closer or attempting to find a reason to push him away. So, he decided for her, finding the seam of her panties once more and pushing it aside to really and truly touch her for the first time. Felicity was breathing shallowly, and her voice was of a slightly higher pitch when she struggled to say, "oh, god. I can't. We can't."

"We are."

She moaned, but then she pulled her legs up so that her knees were bent around him, her feet, still encased in her little floral flats, planted firmly upon the mattress. Although her movements were meant to discourage him, they, in fact, trapped Oliver exactly where he wanted to be. "I won't help you cheat."

He inhaled sharply, caught off guard by her voiced reservation. "Felicity, I almost had a child with another woman. More importantly, I haven't been in love with Laurel for a really long time now. If ever. Things between Laurel and I are as good as over – have been for months."

Before Felicity could respond, before Oliver could find out if she'd finally let down that last and final wall between them, his cell phone rang. He didn't need to look to see who was calling, and he didn't have to ask to know that, whatever it was that had been happening between he and Felicity that late April afternoon, was now over. But, still, Oliver refused to let go of her, to stop touching her, until she either asked him to or forced the issue. So, while Felicity sat up and reached into his back pocket, Oliver remained between her legs; and his hand remained inside of her underwear; and he continued to trail his fingers up, and down, and through the wetness between her legs that his touch, his kiss, his presence in her life and, in that moment, her bed had inspired.

When his phone finally stopped ringing, Felicity dropped it beside them on top of her rumpled comforter before sitting up, pulling her legs up towards the rest of her body, and then sliding off the edge of the bed. Oliver clenched his jaw as he watched her shut down on him, moving as far away from him as she could. Defensively, her arms came up to wrap around her suddenly tense body, and she refused to meet his eyes. "You should go. You need to leave now."

"Felicity..."

"No," she cut him off. But it wasn't like Oliver knew what he was going to say to her anyway. "I'm not pushing you away, and I'm not running away either. I'll still be here, waiting to help you be the man that you want to be, but Oliver," she warned him. It was then that her gaze cut towards him, catching his. "That can't happen until you stop being the boy you don't want to be."

Nodding, he stood up, re-pocketing his phone. He would leave. He would listen to her. While Oliver doubted that he'd be able to get a return flight to Starling immediately, for he had flown commercial, and while he had no idea what he would do in Boston until he could go back home, he knew that he couldn't stay there any longer. He'd respect her enough to honor her wish and back off. At least, for now. As he was walking by her desk, however, he paused long enough to pocket one of her red pens. "I'll go, but I'm taking this with me."

"Oliver, it's just a pen. I can get a pack of ten for two dollars."

With a half grin, he argued with her. "That's where you're wrong, Felicity. It's not just a pen; it's your red pen, and that's one of the first things I noticed about you that morning all those months ago."

She seemed flustered, at a loss for words, but he didn't push her; he just quietly slipped out of her dorm room, his right hand never once letting go of that pen.