May 11, 2007

"Good morning, Felicity."

And, despite the shit-storm that was the rest of his life, he was talking to his Red Pen Girl, so it was good. So, Oliver smiled. And he waited for her response. And he tried to map out in his mind the very best approach to their upcoming conversation, because, for once, he really wanted Felicity to say yes. He didn't hold out much hope, because, although she just had finals left to her spring semester, Oliver had no doubt that she was preparing to take another full semester's worth of courses during her summer break. But it was still early, and three weeks wasn't that long of a trip, and she was Felicity Smoak. She was so smart, and tenacious, and he had no doubt that she could never step foot inside of a classroom and still ace every single exam and assignment. In fact, Oliver really didn't understand why she was going to college at all, because he was convinced that she already knew more about computers, and technology, and cyber security than anyone at MIT could ever teach her. In his book, she could pretty much be ruling the world at eighteen... if she so desired.

"Oliver, just because you just woke up, that does not make it... Holy shish kabobs. It is morning."

He chuckled good-humoredly, anticipating such a reaction. "I might have gotten a D in tenth grade algebra, Felicity, but even I learned how to tell time." Before she could comment, before she could tease him, he added, "and, no, not in the tenth grade."

"It's just... it's morning," Felicity struggled to talk, stuttered. It was quite adorable... even 3,000 miles away from each other and over the phone. "For both of us." And then he could practically see her waving away her own statement, rolling her eyes. "I mean, obviously, it's the morning for both of us and not just you, because you wouldn't have said 'good morning' to me otherwise. Unless you were being ironic. But you weren't. You never really are. And, I guess, technically, it could just be morning for me and only late night for you, but most people don't say 'good morning' to someone at two a.m.. Unless they're cruel and sadistic. And that's not really your bag either."

"Baby."

Oliver heard her suck in a breath, and he smirked. "Excuse me?"

"This kind of thing is my bag, baby."

"Really. You're quoting Austin Powers to me at... eight a.m., your time. How are you, Oliver Queen, even functioning right now?"

"If you were here with me, I'd show you just how well I'm functioning."

And then she barked out a laugh at his line, because it was cheesy, and totally something Oliver Queen would be expected to sincerely say to anyone besides Felicity Smoak. "I can't believe you roll out of bed this way. Are you always just... on?"

"Turned on," he amended, opening the fridge and rooting around Raisa's perfectly organized shelves. She'd be pissed when she came back from running errands to see that he turned a portion of her well-greased machine of a world into chaos, but, if nothing else, Oliver saw himself as an expert at diffusing irate Russians.

"Oliver, stop. I'm being serious now," Felicity chastised him. Lighting up with a grin when he spotted what he was looking for, Oliver pulled the two bottles out and bumped the door shut with his hip. Turning towards the impeccably clean island, he set his loot down as he went in search of a proper glass to mix his... breakfast. "Kind of. I mean, this is a really ridiculous conversation to be having, and I highly doubt you called so early, your time, so we could discuss, well, time, I guess." And then, like he had been waiting for since their conversation had started, he heard the realization dawn in Felicity's tone. "Wait, you haven't even gone to bed yet, have you?"

"Nope." In his giddiness at her frustrated amusement, Oliver even went so far as to pop his 'p.'

"So, um, are you... you know, getting ready to... go to bed?" Oliver paused in his actions. Suddenly, it wasn't enough to be talking to Felicity. He wanted to see her. He needed to see her – to see her blush, to see her bite her bottom lip, to see her lashes flutter down to kiss the apples of her cheeks as, in her embarrassment, she avoided his gaze. Then he wanted to tilt her face up and kiss those cheeks for himself. And her ass as well. He really wanted to kiss... "To sleep. I totally meant to sleep, not... anything else."

"Why," he questioned her, the drink he had been about to mix totally forgotten. Oliver was still buzzing from the previous night out, and he had been planning on unwinding with a poinsettia. Or two. It wasn't just a drink for the holidays. In fact, he liked how the lighter cranberry juice mixed with the champagne better than orange juice, so, if he was going to get polite, white, rich-boy, morning wasted, poinsettias over mimosas for the win any day, every day. "Are you thinking about me getting undressed, about unbuttoning my shirt and pulling its tails from my dress pants, about sliding down my zipper?" Forgoing the glass he had been searching for, Oliver went directly for the drawer where Raisa kept the corkscrews. Those, he had long since learned of their location. "Or maybe you're thinking about me sliding into bed completely naked. Because, Felicity, that's how I sleep – just me, and my sheets, and my thoughts of you to keep me... warm. Hot." Leaving the juice out on the island, Oliver slipped his right hand around the neck of the champagne bottle and strolled out of the kitchen, making his way towards the front of the house and the stairs which would take him to his room. "Yet again, maybe you're thinking about how it felt to have me sliding against you. In your bed."

She didn't answer him. In fact, Felicity blatantly changed the subject, but Oliver allowed her the defensive move, because her voice was an octave or two higher, and he knew that she wasn't unaffected by his words, by what he knew to be the promise behind them. "So, uh, how did your parents react to your grades? Or, well, rather, your incompletes? Are you grounded again, aeronautically-speaking?"

"Worse," Oliver answered, snorting in derision at his parents' latest attempts to do just that: parent. "But that's actually why I'm calling."

"Oh. Okay."

"If you could go anywhere – anywhere at all, where you would go?"

"Oliver," Felicity started to complain about what she perceived to be his mercurial and irresponsible question.

"Felicity," he countered, shaking his head in joy at just how... difficult she was. He liked it. He liked that she never let him get away with anything... even when, for once, he wasn't actually trying to pull a fast one on her or on anyone else. "Just... answer the question. I promise that I'm not avoiding the issue. It's related."

"Of course," she scoffed. "If I received an incomplete in even one of my classes, I'd lose my scholarship, but you get nothing in all of your courses and get rewarded with a dream vacation."

"Actually, for your information – and, for the record, I'm very disappointed that you didn't already hack into my account and learn this for yourself, I got an A in one of my classes."

"What, 'How to be a Playboy 101?'"

"No, weight-lifting, actually," Oliver informed her pertly.

"Oh."

Strolling into his room, he grinned at the small victory that was her breathless response. Quietly shutting the door behind him, Oliver moved towards his bed, uncorked the champagne, and then put his phone temporarily on speaker – something he had learned just for such an occasion with just such a Red Pen Girl – in order to continue talking to Felicity while he stripped out of the previous night's clothes. When she still didn't say anything else... or answer his question, he prompted her, "Felicity?"

"Hmm? What?"

Oliver chuckled. "The trip... to anywhere?"

"Yes. Right. Of course," she exclaimed hastily, and, god, he really wished he could see her blush... and just how far down her neck, her chest, it went. "Space. If I could go anywhere, and, if it was safe, mind you, because no vacation, not even one to the stars, is worth dying for, then I'd totally go to 'infinity and beyond!'"

He could see her in his mind then. Nearly tripping over his own pant legs in his rush to be naked and in the very bed he had taunted her with moments before, Oliver imagined Felicity looking to the sky and preparing for flight as she uttered those well-known and much-beloved words. "Of course you'd pick the one place I couldn't actually take you. Let's keep it to this planet, Smoak."

"Well, you did say anywhere," she reminded him. "And isn't your cousin, 'Rich WhatsHisFace', coming up with some billionaires-only space travel program?"

"Felicity, I'm not related to Richard Branson."

"Please," she dismissed... probably with a dramatic wave of her hand and an eye-roll as well. Oliver toasted her sassiness with a healthy slug of champagne, licking his lips afterwards and wishing it was her tongue on his mouth instead. Soon. "Wealth is so incestuous, especially old money... like the Queens. You dig deep enough, and I guarantee you'll find a common ancestor."

It was on the tip of Oliver's tongue to ask Felicity if her rant was her way of offering herself up as fresh blood to his family tree, but he refrained, knowing that he had already pushed her enough that morning, especially if he wanted to get a straight answer out of her about his invite... which he hadn't even offered yet, because she still hadn't responded realistically to his dream vacation question. So, as he climbed into bed and switched his phone off speaker, Oliver steered them back to the topic at hand. "Felicity, where do you want to go?"

"I'd say Barrons' Books and Baubles, but not even you, Oliver Queen, could take me there. Plus, I did say that, wherever I went, I didn't want to die, and you and Barrons in the same place? A book store, no less. And with me? Yeah, I think my ovaries would explode, which wouldn't work, because, you know, death." Oliver was still choking on a laugh when Felicity sighed and finally admitted, "I guess New Zealand, then."

"New Zealand," he repeated, looking for an explanation, looking for some clarification. Oliver wasn't even sure if he knew exactly where New Zealand was on the map, and, now, Felicity was claiming it as her dream, realistic vacation destination? Perhaps this whole introduction to his invite hadn't been such a good idea after all...

"Yeah. It has almost everything. If I'm only going to make it to one exotic location, it might as well be a place that has beaches and mountains, volcanoes and hobbits. Plus, it's the closest I'll ever get to Narnia."

Sometimes, he only understood about 50% of what she said. But he liked it, because it meant that Oliver was never bored. However, as he took another swig from the bottle of bubbly, he decided to cut his losses and get straight to the chase. "So, how do you feel about China instead?"

It was Felicity's turn to repeat after him. "China?"

"Well, we wouldn't be in China the entire time. We'd be at sea for most of the trip, actually – three weeks on my family's yacht."

In disbelief, Felicity asked, "and this is how your parents punish you for Sodapopping it out of four colleges?"

"Yes. It's to help me start... transitioning into a role at QC," Oliver grimaced as he explained. "I'm going to be shadowing my father, starting with this business trip."

"If this is a business trip, then I highly doubt you're supposed to be inviting strange girls to go with you."

Teasing her, he said, "you're not strange, Felicity; just... unique."

He could practically see her unimpressed look over the phone, and he smirked knowingly. "Very funny. You know that's not what I meant; you know I meant the fact that I'm sure your parents have never even heard my name before, and, now, you're inviting me along on a family business trip."

"It's just my dad and I," Oliver reassured her. He hoped it was reassuring. "Well, and the crew, too, I guess. My mom and sister won't be going. And, trust me, my dad knows me better than to think I'd leave town for three weeks without making... necessary arrangements first." Oliver grimaced at his own choice in words, but it was too late to take them back now.

Felicity sighed, and then her response was like a pin to the balloon of forced levity Oliver had been trying to live within since the afternoon, the champagne doing absolutely nothing to push aside his panic, so he pushed it away instead, settling the bottle on his nightstand and then immediately forgetting about it. "How's Laurel?"

Taking a deep breath, Oliver cast aside his carefree facade, and everything just came... pouring out of him. "A few days ago, I asked Laurel to come over. She'd just finished her finals, so I thought it was a good time to... end things. We got a pizza, and we sat down to really talk, and she just... She asked me to move in with her." Even now, days later, Oliver could hear the sheer incredulity in his tone. "I froze. I didn't know how to react. There I was, planning on telling her that it was over for good. No more hook-ups, no more patching things back together, no more reunions. We really haven't even been a couple for a long time, and she thinks we should move in together, that we're ready to move in together?"

"People, especially those who love us, see what they want to see, Oliver. Laurel loves you. She's in love with you. She takes you back all the time – after all the screw-ups, all the cheating. Of course, she's not going to realize that you might actually mean it this time."

Still frustrated, still lost for an explanation, Oliver insisted, "but how can she not see that the only reason I've been with her at all since I've been home is because, if you can't be with the one you want, want the one who's there?"

Felicity sucked in a breath, and it was in that moment that Oliver realized that he might have said more than what they were ready for, more than what she was ready to hear. But he didn't take it back. He refused to take it back. "That's... that's not exactly how that expression goes."

"I know exactly what I was saying, Felicity."

"So, uh, how did you respond... to Laurel?" He could hear the fluttering of nerves and maybe even anticipation and pleasure in her voice. "To her suggestion that you move in together?"

"I didn't," Oliver revealed. "I panicked, and I got her out of the house as fast as I could." Rubbing a hand over his face, tired now and crashing rapidly, he confessed, "I don't want to hurt her. I never have wanted to hurt her, but that hasn't stopped me in the past, but I'm trying to do things right now. To be better. But I'm starting to think that the only way that Laurel will ever take a break-up between us seriously is if I do it in a way that she'll never be able to forgive."

"I'm sorry to break it to you, Oliver, but shacking up with me on your family's yacht for three weeks won't cut it then. Not that I would do that," Felicity added in a hurry. "Help you cheat on her. Again. We covered this already."

"No, I know you wouldn't, and I wouldn't ask you to; I wouldn't want you to. But if you agreed to go with me on this trip, I'd just tell her it was over, taking care of the immediate for now, and then I'd worry about the long-term later."

"I'm sorry, Oliver, but I can't." As she continued to talk, explaining why, yet again, she was telling him no, Oliver felt his exhaustion and dread turn into aggravation. "It's too far and too soon, not to mention how awkward it would be to live on a boat for three weeks with you and your dad. Plus, I've never been on a yacht before. In fact, I'm not sure if I've ever been on a boat before, and that says a lot, because I've lived in Cambridge now for three years, and these crazy Bostonians take their rowing very seriously. What if I got seasick? And ruined the trip? Ruined the business deal? No, I definitely can't go with you. I don't even have a passport." Just as he was about to cut her off and end the call, because, really, there were only so many times that he could listen to her turn him down, push him away, Felicity said one more word that had Oliver sitting up, his foul mood being replaced with hope so quickly that he felt almost dizzy. Or maybe that was still the booze. "But..."

"But," he repeated, encouraged.

"But... the first time you call me sober, Oliver, and you ask me to do something with you, for you, I'll do it... within reason, of course. As long as you're single."

He smiled so widely that it made his jaw crack and his face feel stiff... like he was using muscles he'd never even moved before. "When I get back home, you have yourself a deal, Miss Smoak."

"Really," she questioned him. "Just like that?"

"Apparently, all I needed was the proper motivation, because, suddenly, I have a plan that will end Laurel and I for good."

And he did; he did have a plan. Five months ago, when Sara came to him all but offering herself on a silver platter, Oliver hadn't been ready to take such drastic actions. But now he was. He needed to get out from underneath his relationship with Laurel once and for all, and if this was the only way he could do it, then so be it. Sara was a big girl. She was a consenting adult. If she was willing to sleep with her sister's boyfriend, then that was her problem. It was a shitty thing for Oliver to do – a classic Ollie move. While he was determined to change... and for the better, he also wasn't opposed to one last hurrah. He was sincere in his feelings for Felicity, but he also wasn't exaggerating when he told her that he wouldn't spend three weeks on a yacht with his father without the company of a willing woman. So, he'd do this. He'd go to China with Sara, he'd have one last fling and end things with Laurel permanently, and then he'd go to Felicity, and she'd help him become the man only she seemed capable of seeing within him.

"Oliver, I have no idea what's in that head of yours, but are you sure it's a good idea?"

"Trust me, Felicity," he promised her. "It's foolproof."