Finally! As it turns out, aiming to finish a chapter immediately prior to a con is just not in the stars for me. Just two left after this!
When the sun rose again over Felicity Smoak's townhome at the edge of The Glades, there was still one person inside who had yet to sleep. With one arm stretched over the back of the couch, Slade watched the young woman beside him snore lightly. She'd fallen asleep before she'd gotten the chance to explain to him just what it was about the Incredible Hulk that reminded her of him, but none of that mattered. After giving her nearly every awkward detail of his conversation with Oliver-including the part where the Arrow had punched him-she'd done nothing more than laugh lightly and order him to start the movie. The evening had been a celebration in companionship like he hadn't known in years.
Felicity shifted, stretching out from the tight ball she'd curled herself in on the couch cushions. Slade's breath caught in his throat as her head came to rest on the outside of his thigh, one hand curling into the top of one of the pockets of his cargo pants. His body knew that he needed sleep, but every corner of his brain wanted to avoid the chance of breaking the sweet magic that had settled over him. For the last few hours, his mind had been blissfully quiet. Peace seemed to be the gift that Felicity's mere presence could give him.
On the kitchen counter, Felicity's phone began to emit a loud screeching that had an immediate and surprising effect on its owner. She shot up from his lap and leaped from the couch in a single motion, bolting to the counter and immediately turning the alarm off. Without a glance at him, she switched on the coffee pot and shuffled out of the kitchen toward the stairs, mumbling to herself the entire way. Slade couldn't help but chuckle. It was as though in the light of the morning she couldn't focus enough to realize she wasn't alone in her home. Her footsteps grew faint as she traveled up the stairs toward her bedroom, and Slade found himself at a sudden loss as to what to do. Following her was the guaranteed way to ruin whatever it was he was finally letting himself start, but if the way she'd reacted the previous night when she'd found him waiting on the couch was any indication that option was also off the table.
Memories of the simple breakfast she'd made him the first time he'd come to her home popped up unbidden, and he began to smile. At the very least, he could return that favor now.
Halfway through lathering shampoo into her hair, Felicity realized with a start exactly how and next to whom she had awakened. Her head had been on his thigh. His very large, definitely quite muscled thigh and there was no way she was seriously going to start following that train of thought right now. Mornings were not her strong suit, and if she combined that with the fact that she wasn't used to having house guests when she had to get up for work, it could lead to disaster. Especially since she'd been gaping at her own obliviousness with wide eyes that were now being treated to a healthy dose of shampoo dripping into them.
"Dammit!" she screeched, splashing her face vigorously to rinse away the soap.
Heavy, booted footfalls echoed up from the stairs, and Felicity began to panic. Like she would any other morning where a former psychopath wasn't hanging out in her living room after cocoa, conversation, and a movie, she hadn't bothered to close the bathroom door. She was naked, blinded by soap, and had her hair piled atop her head in a mountain of suds. And it was entirely likely that said former psychopath thought a ninja had come through her tiny bathroom window to try and murder her and he was going to burst through the open doorway and tear the curtain off the shower rail to try and protect her.
"I'M FINE!" she shouted as loudly as she could, scrubbing at her eyes. The footfalls stopped. "There are no ninjas just evil shampoo dripping where it shouldn't because I got sidetracked and stopped tilting my head back so please don't come up here because I'm already embarrassed that I forgot you were here and we don't need to add a daring but misguided naked time rescue to the pile of reasons why mornings are my mortal enemy."
Even though he was obviously trying to keep it quiet, Slade's chuckle still reached her. "Alright," he called up. "I promise not to come to your rescue this time." The flirty emphasis he put on 'this time' sent her brain straight back to the muscled thigh she'd been using as a pillow even as she heard him retreating back down the stairs.
Once her eyes had finally stopped burning Felicity rushed her way through the rest of her shower. Shutting the water off, she peeked around one corner of the shower curtain and craned her neck to see down the stairs. Reassured that Slade wasn't in sight, she wrapped the shower curtain partially around her body and stretched forward to snag a towel off the rail. She retreated behind the curtain to dry off.
On any other day, Felicity would happily drag through her getting ready routine, shimmying to whatever pop songs filtered out of Spotify radio, but with Slade doing Google-knew-what downstairs she found herself rushing through instead. Something that certainly had nothing to do with the smell of turkey bacon drifting up the stairs while she was blow drying her hair. Nothing at all to do with that. When she finally popped down the stairs and through the archway into the living room, she found the surprising sight of Slade at her stove, scrambling eggs in her wok while the turkey bacon sizzled in her only frying pan. It wasn't so much the thought of him cooking that surprised her as it was the way she felt like him cooking for her was absolutely right.
"Ahem." She cleared her throat to get his attention, giving a flirty little twirl she didn't know she had in her when he looked up. "Do I look like I belong in my day job?"
Slade's eyes drifted all the way down to her feet and back up, raking over her body slowly as one corner of his lips quirked below the eyepatch. "Entirely too beautiful to be wasted as the kid's assistant if you ask me."
The heated flush crawling over her body burned out any resistance Felicity might have had to a flirty breakfast. "So long as you aren't thinking what everyone else at QC thinks about this bit of beautiful as an assistant. I mean, yeah, Oliver's got the brooding, cut, billionaire thing going for him, but I have a feeling you might deny me food and coffee if you start getting into the belief that I slept my way to the top or something." She squeezed her eyes shut. Mentioning that she thought Oliver was hot was definitely not the best way to start the morning with the crazy guy who'd just kind-of-sort-of confessed the night before that he might just have a thing for her. "And with that I have successfully proven that I cannot be human before coffee so I am going to shut up and get myself a cup and work on giving you puppy eyes until you let me have food."
Slade gave another of his soft, snorting laughs. "You sit. I'll get the coffee," he insisted. By the time she'd settled in at her own kitchen table, he'd settled a large mug of coffee, the bottle of creamer from her fridge, and a plate piled with scrambled eggs, toast, and turkey bacon in front of her. "I hope it turned out alright. It's been a while since I've cooked for someone." Hoping to reassure him, Felicity took a bite of the eggs, closed her eyes, and outright moaned.
"Did you use butter? Because this definitely tastes like you used butter which is something I don't let myself do but always love." She shoveled in another bite with a sigh. "Don't cook for anyone. Seriously, if you do you're going to lose your manic slice-and-dice career to someone forcing you to be their personal chef." When she opened her eyes to fix him with a beaming smile, she found that he'd settled across from her with a plate and mug of his own, the faintest hint of a blush on his cheeks. "You didn't have to make me breakfast, you know."
"I know," Slade admitted, stirring a tiny bit of creamer into his coffee. "I wanted to." They ate in companionable silence for a few moments, Felicity practically inhaling her first mug of coffee before sliding from her chair to pour another. She topped off Slade's mug without being asked, frowning at the coffeepot when she realized how easy the pattern was to fall into. The sound of Slade's voice drew her back to the table. "May I ask you something?"
"Sure thing!" she chirped, pouring creamer into her coffee until it was nearly as light as chocolate milk.
"May I cook you dinner?"
In that moment, Felicity decided that hot coffee being snorted through one's nose could easily become a preferred form of torture. She coughed a couple of times before looking up at him with wide eyes. Slade was staring at his plate, fork moving idly through his eggs, and she realized with a sudden flutter in her stomach that, despite his bluntness, he was actually nervous. "Is this you asking me on a date?"
"It is." He started fiddling with his fork, twirling it between his fingers. "My apartment doesn't have a full kitchen, so I'd have to cook here, but if that makes you uncomfortable I could take you out to a restaurant. It's just..." he trailed off before finally looking back up into her eyes. "I have no intentions of returning to my previous plans, but there were others involved. I would not have you put in harm's way by appearing publicly with me before they are neutralized."
Of course, her brain snarked. I might as well install my own microchip tracker, since every man in my life seems to be the crazy overprotective type. "I can understand that," she admitted with a sigh. "Thus is my life: always in danger for the weirdest of reasons." She chewed on her lip for a moment, watching as he returned to his nervous fiddling. The whole situation was beyond weird, but he was sweet, and he liked her so much that he'd actually started to make an effort with Oliver. "I would love to have dinner with you, Slade. Especially if you're planning to cook."
He stared at her for a long moment before a wide smile crossed his face. Unlike the smirks and grins she'd seen before, there was no hint of the weight of his grief in this smile. "You'll have to tell me what kind of foods you like. I'm not bad at Italian, but I can follow a recipe, so nothing's outside the realm of possibility." He stood to gather their plates, taking them to the sink. Without another word he turned on the faucet and started to clean up.
"Sara would flip if she saw this," Felicity muttered, leaning back to check the time on her kitchen clock. If she stayed any longer, she was going to be late getting to work. Pushing herself back from the table, she stepped into her heels and straightened her skirt. "I've got to get out of here, so text me and we'll work out the details." Absently, she stopped beside him at the sink and pressed a kiss to his cheek, not even registering the way he froze as she never lost momentum on her way to the door. "Don't forget to lock up if you go out. I don't need some desperate thug thinking my collection of troll dolls is up for snatching and Ebay sale!"
She'd been at her desk for an hour before it all actually registered in her brain.
Behind the glass walls of his office, in the middle of a meeting with Isabel Rochev, Oliver Queen quirked an amused eyebrow when his assistant let out a loud, frustrated groan and thumped her head against her desk.