Work Text:
Oliver lies on his stomach, his chin resting on his arms beneath him, held up by the abundance of pillows Felicity keeps on her bed. It hadn’t surprised him when he’d first spent the night in her bed. His mother, or whoever decorated the bedrooms, had always been insistent on the use of throw pillows and decorative pillows.
Felicity’s bed is different than those in his parents’ house, though. Each of the pillows is stuffed with feathers or plush, covered in mismatched pillow cases, and built to be used. To be nested into or propped up against. Comfort over aesthetic.
That surprises him a bit considering the amount of dangerously tall heels he can, even now, see peeking from the rack within her open closet.
Even in the middle of January when most things are covered in a thin sheen of frost from the wet air outside, her bedroom is warm and comfortable. A ceiling fan spins slowly overhead, uselessly cycling while creating almost no air. He’s come to realize she just likes the fan on, even like this. Felicity is not the type of person who manages well in silence.
Despite his musings, he hovers at the edge of consciousness, his eyes drifting shut as his mind slowly eases into silence. The warm weight of Felicity straddling his lower back gives him a sense of comfort, a reminder that he’s not alone. He never feels as alone as he used to lately.
Her hands press down on a particular spot, fingers digging into a knot he hadn’t realized existed and he’s suddenly wide awake with the pressure. He lets out a noise, a low thing in the back of his throat that she must misconstrue as pain because her fingers go still and he feels her sit straight up.
“Sorry, sorry,” she squeaks, pulling her hands away completely. “Did that hurt? I’m trying to be gentle, but I don’t totally know what I’m doing. I mean, I read an article and watched, like, a how-to video on YouTube, but that hardly makes me an expert…”
He chuckles, lifting his head enough to free one of his arms and reach back for her. He finds her upper thigh, draped over his hip, and squeezes it gently. Her hands land on his back once more, not applying pressure, but no longer fearful of hurting him.
“It’s fine, Felicity,” he says, stroking his hand down the soft material of her pajama pants. He likes her name, which he realizes every time he thinks about it is a very odd thing to like about a person. In fairness, he likes many things about her, too many to begin cataloguing. But there’s something about the way her name rolls off of his tongue, the syllables breaking down as he says them.
Yeah, it’s not getting any less weird.
“Are you sure?” She sighs, the edges of her nails trailing over his skin, feather light in touch. He wonders if she even notices the goosebumps she’s leaving in her wake. “Because I don’t want to make things worse. Your physical therapist is probably much better at this than I am.”
“I assure you, she isn’t,” he tells her, grinning into the skin of his arm at her pouting. “You’re not gonna hurt me. That actually felt really good.”
“Really?” She asks warily and Oliver nods, his cheek scraping against one of the pillows under his head. It must be enough, because her hands move back into motion, her thumbs pressing gently into the space beneath his shoulder blades. “While I appreciate you lying, we both know I’m not better at this than your therapist. There’s a reason she’s the best in the city.”
She punctuates the sentence by poking him in the spine with one of her index fingers. He turns his head enough to shoot her a look and finds her giving the knots and tension in his back more concentration than should be allowed. He recognizes the look well enough, the same she gets when he presents her with a particularly difficult favor or she works at the Sunday crossword.
Something she insists on doing in pen, which is just one more reminder that she is much smarter than him. He doesn’t even remember the last time he’d thought about doing the crossword before she started asking him to help her with it. Oliver isn’t dumb, necessarily, depending on who you ask. He keeps up appearances fine for most people, but he’s much smarter than he used to be.
Felicity, though, she’s off in a whole separate category and he can’t figure out why the hell she’s slumming it with him.
This whole massage thing had been her idea and she’d almost immediately tried to take it back. It still makes him nervous sometimes, letting her become so intimately familiar with his scars. Even he doesn’t always recognize himself in the mirror. While he was gone, he didn’t have time to take stock of the horrors that had left their mark. Even in Russia, in China, there had been more pressing matters than his marred and mottled flesh.
In Starling City, though, his scars had become almost too much to bear. One more barrier between the boy he was and the man he had been forced to become. Chosen to become. Whichever it was, even he wasn’t sure lately.
She does it again, finding that knot he didn’t know about and bringing him back to reality. Felicity doesn’t shy away from it this time, using the heel of her palm to put pressure on it and moving it in circles. The knot starts to give under her ministrations and the pleasurable feeling of it travels south.
Felicity must feel the way his body has gone tense again beneath her, because she asks, “You okay?”
Oliver hums in assurance, his jaw tight as his growing erection presses into the bed. Felicity had suggested this session as a means of making up for his missed therapy session this week. She’s worried about the wounds still left behind from his falsified motorcycle accident more than he is and he’d agreed because he knew it would ease her mind. He doesn’t want to ruin it with how easily she affects him.
Though, in his defense, she’s the one straddling his waist and touching him more tenderly than he’s been touched in years.
Massages aren’t really the type of thing he does with his physical therapist, a kind but unmoving woman who would give Slade Wilson a run for his money in a showdown of hellish training techniques. Oliver is hardly a slacker physically, but regaining his mobility during his recovery has been difficult.
He knows he hasn’t been the easiest person to be around during it, prone to frustration at his inability to do simple things like open a bottle of wine or reach for a high shelf, courtesy of his broken ribs and punctured lung.
Felicity has been stubbornly patient as he’s done his best impression of the whiny brat he used to be. She doesn’t let him get away with his usual bullshit, but she hasn’t walked either. He thinks that’s part of the reason why he’s…
Well, that’s a dangerous line of thought to walk while she’s pressed against him, literally working the pain out of his body. Felicity’s fingers trail slowly over the muscles of his shoulders, tracing across the lines of scars, to reach his spine. The pads of her fingers dip into the spaces in his spine, moving along the rise and fall of his vertebrae like a rollercoaster on a track.
“You’ve still got some bruises healing back here,” she points out and he feels one of her hands move, skimming instead over the spot on the back of his ribs where he knows the skin is still yellow.
“Yeah, but they don’t really hurt anymore,” he assures her. “I think it’s just taking a while to completely fade.”
As if testing him, Felicity prods gently at the spot with the pads of her fingers. He feels the pressure of the digits pushing against him, but no unusual pain. His body had adjusted to the pain surprisingly quickly after the accident - surprisingly for everyone who wasn’t him, anyway. He’d still had to play it up at points and it had taken days of persuasion to convince Felicity it was okay even to touch him.
In the same hour she’d glared him down for being a baby about his ribs - he was, in her defense, being a baby about the great inconvenience the fractures were causing him - she’d been hesitant to so much as sit too close to him on the couch.
“I wasn’t lying,” he chuckles as she prods the area with the slightest increase in pressure. She pulls her hand away, moving her attention to the muscles spanning his lower back instead.
“I didn’t think you were lying,” she argues. “I just think sometimes you pretend you’re more okay than you actually are.”
He hums in response, because he doesn’t really know what to say to that. She’s not wrong, but it’s part of how he has to act for appearances sake. If people started to question him - his mental fortitude, his experiences - it could spell disaster for his crusade, as John likes to call it.
Felicity has gotten even better at reading him lately, though. He doesn’t know how long he can keep his secret from her. Which is bad, because he can’t tell her. What’s worse is that he wants to. It’s crazy, which is saying something for him, but he desperately wants to tell her the truth. He wants her to help with his ridiculous favors and riddles without the smoke screen or lies.
It’d be reckless and rash to tell her. She’d probably run for the hills, think he’d actually lost his mind in the five years most of the world thought he was dead. He lost a lot of things in that time, but had clung to his sanity like a lifeline. He needed it to get home, to do what his father had asked of him.
“You know you don’t have to do that with me, right?” She asks, pulling him from the depths again. Her ministrations are making him introspective and he’d much rather being spending their time together in the present moment. “Pretend, I mean.”
The room goes still for a minute, just the quiet noise of the fan spinning slowly overhead. Felicity’s fingers have frozen in their positions and Oliver thinks she may be holding her breath. He realizes he’s holding his own.
“Yeah,” he says finally, pressing himself a little further down into the familiar comfort of her pillows. Relishing in the familiar comfort of her on top of him. “Yeah, I know.”
He does. Mostly because he’s never been much good at fooling her anyway. Distraction and deflection are one thing and he knows he never fully gets away with them. But, that face he’d used for the first few months to fool his friends, his family, the world? Felicity had seen through it since the beginning.
It had been part of what had kept drawing him to her. The promise of being able to be someone else. Not Oliver Queen, the do-nothing son of a dead billionaire, or the man he becomes under the hood. Instead, he’d felt himself free, no matter how fleetingly, to try and decipher who he’s becoming.
Felicity shifts behind him, stooping forward so that her chest and stomach press against the length of his back. He can feel her hands still splayed over the sides of his ribs, trapped between their bodies. She presses a feather light kiss against the back of his neck and squeezes his eyes shut, suddenly overcome with an emotion he can’t put a name to yet. He won’t let himself.
She sits back up, her hands moving across his back again, feeling out for potential knots and tension. The imprint of her lips still tingles against his neck and Oliver takes a slow breath in, trying to keep his chest from shaking with it.
She does it again, finding a particular knot he hadn’t known was there and digging into it with gentle but firm fingers. A sharp warmth runs through him and he groans again, arching up to free his arms and catch her hands with his own.
“Yeah, no, we’re done,” he says, delighting in the surprised noise Felicity makes as he flips them around. He shuffles until he’s got her pressed into the pillows, his hips cradled between her legs.
“Did I hurt you?” She asks, her hands moving anxiously over his shoulders, down his arms. He shifts upwards, grinding his hips against hers so she can feel exactly what she’d done to him. Her eyes widen before a smug smirk turns her lips. “Oh, clearly not.”
“See, I can promise you that Dr. Lang and I never do this,” he teases, moving his hands upwards beneath the hem of her tank top. His fingers move slowly over the soft flesh of her stomach, the ridges of her ribs, and she squirms beneath him, her hips creating friction against his through the thin material of his sweatpants.
“Well, that settles it then,” Felicity says, grinning up at him. He raises an eyebrow in question and her shoulders shrug beneath him. “I’ll never be a physical therapist.”
He shakes his head, laughing at her ridiculousness before ducking down to capture her lips in a kiss. She digs her fingers into his shoulders in a new way now, urging him closer to her despite the lack of space between them already. Oliver can’t deny her, though, shifting upwards in the cradle of her hips until nearly every inch of him is pressed against soft skin or plush fabric.
“If I had known this was the sort of reaction my mad massage skills would get me,” she says, words cutting off with quiet gasps as his mouth moves down the column of her throat, tongue dipping out to taste her. “I would have suggested it ages ago.”
“Please,” he argues. “Like you have to work too hard for me to want you.”
She hums, either in response to his hand reaching the peak of her breast beneath her tank top, his thumb flicking over her nipple, or in consideration of his words. Either way, her head presses back into the pillows, gaining a small amount of distance from him as she studies his face.
“Huh, I guess you’re right,” she says, the cadence of her voice telling him she’s building up to something. He likes this, how she can tease him and call him out. He likes that he can’t always predict her. “You must be really into me!”
He laughs outright, his hands slipping back down her sides to tickle her ribs. She twists under him, arching her back and raising her hips into his, and bats at his arms. Oliver caves easily, figuring there are better ways to leave her breathless as she pulls him back down to her for another kiss.
One thing he’s learned about her over the time they’ve been sleeping together, is that Felicity likes to be on top. He’s not sure why that is, it’s not exactly something you ask. Especially since Oliver is more than happy to oblige. So, when she nudges his hip with her thigh and lifts herself from the bed some, he understands.
Oliver slips his arm into the space she’s created between herself and the bed, wrapping it around her back and allowing her to flip them over. She sits up once they’re situated, lifting her tank top over her head and tossing it towards the end of the bed. It catches the corner of the mattress, holding onto the duvet.
His hands move up her stomach again, seeking out the exposed skin of her as her own hands explore his chest. Her nails scrape lightly over the scar tissue, the effect amplified by the sensitive flesh, and his head falls backwards.
“Fuck, Felicity, I…,” he sighs, catching himself before words he’s not ready for attempt a free fall from his loose lips. The way Felicity’s fingers still in their exploration of his body tells him two things. The first is that she’s not ready for those words either. He sits up on his elbows, wrapping his arms around her back and drawing her closer to him.
“I really like having you around,” he supplies genuinely, earning a delighted grin for his efforts. He knows his slip hasn’t gone unnoticed, but there’s a lot of brain chemistry to be blamed for what he may have said.
“I like having you around, too,” she tells him, her arms wrapping around his shoulders, her thumb rubbing circles into the skin at the back of his neck, the same place she had kissed him earlier. “You’re not planning on going anywhere, are you?”
She says it in the same teasing tone, but her eyes stray from his, down his face, and he can see the genuine vulnerability there, the insecurity. Felicity likes to play things off, but he remembers her face the night she’d come to see him in the hospital. She’s not asking if he’s planning on running off to Vegas, but somewhere much darker that she couldn’t follow.
“Not if I can help it,” he assures her, pressing up to capture her mouth again. She responds eagerly, rocking her hips against his. The conversation goes to the wayside for a while, but as Felicity kisses him sloppily and rides him into oblivion, that second thing is reaffirmed in his mind.
He’s in love with her.