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"Are you sure this isn’t weird?" Felicity says from inside his bathrobe. She looks extra tiny surrounded by all that material and John can’t help but smile.
"It might be," he answers her, "but is it any more weird than how we usually spend our evenings?"
Felicity nods, considering.
"Okay," she says, "but we’re not telling Oliver, right?"
"I don’t think that would go well," John answers her and she accepts that, even if she almost certainly doesn’t get his meaning that Oliver Queen’s jealousy extends to more than just her time.
"Where do you want me?"
"On the stool," he says, "facing the window."
"I should have known you wouldn’t want to paint my face," Felicity jokes as she makes her way across the room.
"I couldn’t do it justice," John replies, "your back however, I’m willing to give that a shot. Hard to screw up a back."
"Am I really your first ever live model?" She asks, settling herself on the stool.
"Yup. You’re taking my cherry."
"It’s nice to be first at something," Felicity says, seemingly to herself, but before John can reply she drops the robe and he’s left looking at the sweep of her back and the curve of her hip and that glorious blonde hair falling over her shoulders.
And if it takes him half a second to catch his breath, pick up his pencil and start his work, she’s not looking in the right direction to see it.
The invitation comes in the post - her home post. She doesn’t get much in her home post that isn’t a bill and so at first she thinks it must be a mistake.
Or some PR trying to bypass the filters she set up in the QC post room to prevent her desk from being covering in embossed card rectangles inviting Oliver to everything from a charity ball to a seminar at the Apple store.
But it’s not. It’s for her.
An invitation to an opening at an art gallery.
And so of course she googles (and maybe hacks, just a little but the site is so insecure it can hardly be called hacking really) and she then she sees it.
The picture.
Diggle told her it was for practice. He told her it was for fun. A favour between friends.
It was one sunny afternoon when Oliver had a charity polo match (of all things) to attend.
She remembers the sunlight through the window warming her skin and the slow even sound of his pencil on paper. That’s all there was. Pencil and paper.
But the picture she’s looking at is in oils.
She dresses up. She had to go shopping for something new - she wanted a dress unassociated with their night job. She wanted something special. Something… right.
She ends up in yellow. She rarely wears yellow - she would say it’s not her colour. But something about it makes her think of sunshine on her skin and the colours of the picture she saw online.
So she wears yellow. A knee length yellow dress with a skirt that swings around her legs as if it’s just begging her to spin on the spot so it can flare out and she can feel like a princess.
It’s only when we gets to the gallery she realises what a big thing this is. There are faces here she’s only seen when following Oliver around a charity ball. This is the cream of Starling society. All here to see pictures of her.
Because it is pictures of her. The one on the website is just the tip of the iceberg. He took one sketch and he made an exhibition out of it.
Close ups of shining blonde hair and pale pale skin. Colourful nail polish. Bright lips.
It’s a study of her. There’s never one picture that shows her whole face. This one is her lips, that one her fingertips. This one focuses on a curl of blonde hair, that one on the twisted knot of an earring.
She overhears some pompous critic talking about the use of light - the contrast between the golden hair and the blue glow in some pictures. He attributes it to art movement she’s never heard of.
But she knows that’s just how he knows her. Bathed in the light of a computer screen.
She never knew he saw her.
She certainly never knew he saw her like this.
It should be creepy. It should be odd. It should have been weird when she spent an afternoon naked in his apartment.
But it never was. It was easy.
And suddenly she realises - maybe that’s how it’s supposed to be.
She’s the girl in every picture but no one gives her a second glance. No one sees how every frame on the wall contains a glimpse of her.
The crowd move around her as she looks at each canvas. She doesn’t take a glass of champagne, doesn’t reach for a canapé. She takes her time. She reads the love letter he wrote her on her own skin.
She hears the curator say that the artist wishes to remain anonymous. Hears crowd speculation that this was only done to push prices up.
It’s only when she has seen them all, examined each piece, that she lets herself turn to the picture. The one on the website.
A six foot canvas in oils. A blonde woman on a stool, naked, looking away. There’s no expression to be seen but the entire picture is calm. Serene.
Peaceful.
She remembers John telling her how the doctors at the military hospital in Kandahar encouraged him to paint. To draw.
To find peace.
She never thought he would find it in her.
"What do you think?" He says from somewhere behind her. She’s doesn’t turn, not yet. She looks at his memory of that afternoon in oils and she wonders how she could have been so wrong about her own feelings.
"She’s beautiful," she says after a while. She knows John won’t begrudge her the moment to think. She knows he will wait, patiently, until she can put the right words in the right order. He doesn't rush her. He lets her speak in her own time. "You made me beautiful."
"Felicity," John says as she turns. Sees him waiting there. In his suit. Looking for all the world like a bodyguard and nothing like the artist this entire event is in honour of. "You always were."
She thinks maybe she should kiss him. Hug him. Propose.
He’s spent god knows how many hours painting this and it’s wonderful.
But the realisations are coming thick and fast and she needs time to think. Time she knows he will give her.
She reaches out. Takes his hand. And they both stand there. Together.