-4-

Oliver saw Felicity from across the street and set off at a jog to catch up with her. He pulled the hood of his jersey down lower over his face – he didn't want anyone recognising him while he was anywhere near where Felicity lived. He could just picture her glowering face when she read the headline: OLIVER QUEEN CAUGHT SNEAKING INTO PERSONAL ASSISTANT'S HOUSE. That was an argument he did not want to get into now or ever.
As she turned the corner into her street, she glanced back momentarily and he saw her peering at him warily as he hurried to catch up; but to his surprise, she didn't stop to wait for him. He frowned, wondering why she wasn't waiting. Increasing his pace to catch up to her, when he turned the corner he found that she was nowhere in sight. What did she do, sprint to her front door?
His frown deepened – maybe she hadn't seen him approaching; but he was pretty sure she had looked straight at him before she turned into her street. He made his way towards her house, the mystery of why Felicity might be avoiding him distracting him just enough so that the sight of the mace spray bottle in his face momentarily surprised him.
Only momentarily, though. Without another thought, he grabbed whoever's wrist it was that was about to loose a spray of mace into his face and lifted it high into the air. With his free forearm, he pushed the person back against the brick fence with a hard thud, causing the person to cry out.
The familiar perfume was the first thing that his mind registered, a split second before other important details came crashing into his consciousness in one horrible instant: the bright blonde hair, the big blue eyes, the glasses, the lipstick.
"Felicity," he said, immediately loosening his grip.
"Oliver," she breathed as he let go of her. He felt terrible for hurting her but he noticed that she didn't look angry at him; more relieved than anything else.
"Are you all right?" he asked, his voice filled with concern. In answer, she simply reached out and hugged him. For a moment all he could do was hold her, the unusual intimate gesture taking him aback. But once he had gotten over the initial shock of it, he tightened his arms around her. Breathing in her scent, he noted how nicely she fitted in the circle of his arms, how trustingly she relaxed into his embrace. Felicity hugged in exactly the same way she approached everything else in life: honestly, openly and sincerely. That overwhelming sense of peace rushed over Oliver again, and he closed his eyes and tucked her head under his chin, pulling her closer. Only then did he notice that she was shaking slightly. Rather reluctantly, he pulled back and studied her face, noticing a tinge of fear in her eyes. Immediately he opened his mouth to ask her what was wrong, then thought against it. She would probably say "nothing", like she always did.
"What were you thinking trying to mace me?" he asked, going for a different approach. He reached for her wrist to check that he hadn't bruised her, then took the mace spray from her still-clenched fist.
"I didn't know it was you," she said.
"Who else would it have been?"
"I don't know! I saw a big guy wearing a dark hoodie eyeing me in the street and I panicked."
A wave of guilt hit him – he couldn't help but feel responsible for making her so jumpy. Diggle's words came back to him then: Oliver, I know you don't want to hurt this girl…but we're asking her to get involved in some pretty dangerous stuff. He had told Diggle that he would protect her, but the way Felicity had just hugged him made him wonder whether he was doing a good enough job.
He thought again to try to ask her what was wrong, but she was smiling brightly at him, the fear that he had seen earlier in her eyes gone.
"It sometimes sucks being so popular with the homicidal maniacs," she said jokingly, stepping sideways away from him. "Never know which one of them you're going to meet on the street. By the way, you can now tell Diggle that it is officially a waste of time teaching me how to protect myself. I didn't even slow you down! Though in my defence, you're a lot bigger than most people. Not that I've noticed. I'm stating it as a mere fact."
He stared at her, wondering what he could possibly say to that. Luckily for him, she never seemed to expect him to answer anyway.
"So you can tell Diggle to stop bugging me to work out," she continued. "If someone is going to attack me, I don't think spraying them with mace and stabbing them with my keys is going to make much of a difference. Considering I can never find my keys anyway so my attacker is already one up on me."
Oliver sighed heavily. Well, he had missed his chance to confront her, judging by the runaway ramble she was now on. She was trying to be perky and happy for him, and although it could be inconvenient sometimes – especially when he was trying to figure out what was bothering her – he didn't have the heart to tell her to stop. He looked down at the ground and saw that she had dropped some things. Bending over to pick them up, she stepped forward and stopped him.
"I'll get that, it's just some stuff from the office. I swung by earlier to pick it up," she said, stooping over quickly. He noticed that an envelope on top was already opened and that she shuffled it to the bottom of the pile.
"So, what are you doing here? Is there some sort of emergency?" she asked.
"Do I need to have an emergency to see you?"
"Well, I guess 'no' would be the right answer to that one, but I can't think of another reason why you'd be here at my house. I hope you haven't come here for dinner, because I think I only have toast to offer you."
He smiled. "Toast will be fine."
Her eyebrows rose in surprise. "Oh." Her expression turned tentative. "Ok then. Come on, I guess."
He followed her to her front door and watched her fumbling through her bag to find her keys.
"Do you want me to hold those for you?" he asked, reaching for the bunch of papers in her hand.
"No, I've got them!" she said, pulling her keys out of her bag. He noticed that her hand had tightened around the papers and she was looking away from him rather nervously. He frowned. Something was definitely up.
When she finally got the front door open he followed her inside. As they made their way into the living room, he realised that he had known Felicity for two years and he had never actually been inside her house; so it was with more than a mild curiosity that he looked around the room. The thing that struck him first was how cheerful it all looked. There were bright cushions on the couches, a few potted plants on the windowsills and bright pictures on the wall. Interestingly he could only see one laptop on the coffee table – he had expected to see a few computers lying around here and there – but he suspected that she did most of her computer stuff at the Sanctuary. After all, he didn't exactly leave his bow and arrow lying around his bedroom.
"Come through," she said, leading him to a kitchen mutely lit by the evening light and depositing her bag and the papers on the counter. He sat down at the breakfast bar and watched her moving around, opening cupboards haphazardly and pulling out mugs and coffee and bread.
"I was serious about only offering toast," she said. "Moonlighting as your IT expert isn't exactly conducive to regular trips to the supermarket."
"It's fine, Felicity," he said. The corners of his lips twitched as he watched her making his toast, occasionally hearing her muttering under her breath about "shopping online" and "a grocery budget". He knew she was a little flustered with having him in her house, and it made him smile that he could still surprise her a little. He thought about saying something reassuring to her, then decided against it. He liked listening to her voice.
"I do have coffee, you will be pleased to know," she said. "And I have...oh look that's good, I have a half eaten bag of Oreos. What do you want on your toast?"
"What?" he asked. Some photos on her fridge had momentarily distracted him. There was one of her with an older blonde lady whom he thought could be her mother. Next to it was a picture of two women about her age, smiling brightly at the camera. Below it, to his surprise, was a photo of her, him and Diggle at Verdant, taken unawares. He and Diggle were smiling wryly at Felicity because she had just murmured something about her glasses fogging up "with all the sweat of a hundred people enjoying themselves while we're waiting for a drug exchange to happen like the cool, fun loving people we are". He remembered that photo – Sara had taken it on a whim and given him a copy, which he secretly kept in the wooden chest he had brought back with him from the island.
To remember that it isn't all masks and bad guys, Ollie, she had said when she had given it to him.
"Do you want jam or jam?" Felicity asked him, holding up two identical jars with a smile. "What are you looking at?"
"I didn't know you had that," he said, pointing at their photo.
"Oh," she said, her cheeks flushing a little. "Yeah, you wouldn't believe how much trouble I got into with my friends when they saw that photo. You know, cos you're my boss and everything. But I didn't have the heart to take it down."
"Those friends?" he asked, gesturing to the other photo.
She looked towards the fridge again and nodded her head. "That's Michaela and Jane. I met them at MIT. They came to visit a few months ago before things went all...Slade-y." She put a plate of toast and a mug of steaming black coffee in front of him. "And that's my mother," she said, pointing at the other photo as she made herself a coffee.
"You look alike."
She smiled. "The only thing we have in common." She gazed rather wistfully at the photo, then shook her head. "So…" she said, pointedly looking down at his toast. Dutifully he took a bite.
"What brings you to my house?" she asked, taking a sip of her coffee.
"I…" he struggled to answer her question. What was he doing there? He had spent the better part of the day wandering aimlessly around Starling City and for some reason, he had ended up on Felicity's block.
"I just wanted to know if you slept all right at Diggle's," he finally said.
She raised an eyebrow at him. "It was fine," she told him. "Lyla's really nice. She's so super…you know, super agent, but she's totally nesting."
"Nesting?"
"Buying baby clothes and tiny little baby shoes and putting together a cot." She abruptly stopped talking and her cheeks flushed again. Oliver wondered why, then realised where her thoughts must have gone at the word 'cot'. To his own horror, he felt his own face start to burn as he remembered where he had fallen asleep the night before.
She cleared her throat awkwardly, then brightened. "Hey, I ran into Laurel this morning in the park."
"Really?"
"Yeah. She agrees with me, by the way, about getting a couch in the lair."
"Felicity, we don't need a couch. I don't think we're going to be doing much entertaining."
"You say that, but remember the list of people who started visiting the Foundry grew quite large last year. Roy, Sara, Laurel, a lot of bad guys. Oh, and the League of Assassins."
Somewhat reluctantly he let out a laugh. "We're not getting a couch."
"Fine," she said, giving him a small smile. "Eat your toast, I have to get something from my bedroom."
Oliver watched her walk towards the kitchen door with her coffee in her hand, her ponytail swinging as she walked. As soon as she was gone, he leaned over and rifled through the papers she had been carrying. Finding the envelope she had tried to hide, he pulled it out to look at it.
The return address was from S.T.A.R Labs in Central City. He frowned and pulled out the single sheet of paper inside it. Reading it quickly, he felt his heartbeat double in pace.
Felicity was being offered a job.