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They both own perfectly good beds in perfectly pleasant rooms with perfectly insulated walls. Oliver’s sheets in particular are sinfully soft Egyptian cotton. The last time they made out on his bed, Felicity rolled around and rubbed her face against the pillowcases. “Oh my god, is this made of unicorn hair?”
“The whole pelt,” he said sleepily. “Shot and skinned it myself.”
She rolled over and propped her chin on his shoulder. “If you’re going to joke about murdering unicorns, I can go home.”
Arms snaked around her. Legs too. “You’re not going anywhere.”
“You’re right. That was a bluff. No way am I giving up this bed until I have to.”
But they’re spending tonight in a nasty little motel room three hundred miles from home, with The Real Housewives of Wherever blaring from the TV in the next room. It’s August, and the air conditioner is broken.
They peel off their bloodstained clothing, and their skin glistens in the half-light of low-wattage bulbs. Oliver paws through the plastic Wal-Mart bags on the bed, and he pulls out a box labeled Garnier Fructis. “Do you need help with this?”
Of course not; she’s been dyeing her own hair for years. “If you don’t mind.”
Half an hour later, he stands over her at the bathroom sink, shirtless, and works his fingers through her hair until the water runs clear. This close, he smells of sweat and fear and the iron tang of the blood that dried dark in his hair. She sends him into the shower right after, and she tears the cheap new hairdryer out of its packaging.
When he comes out with a towel wrapped around his waist, Felicity is standing in front of the big mirror in her underwear. Her hair is dry around her shoulders, still pungent from the dye, and it sticks to her sweaty neck. The color on the box was Dark Mahogany Brown. By this light, it looks black.
“You look… different,” Oliver says, coming to stand behind her.
She realizes she’s fingering the ends, and she stops. “That was the idea.”
“It’s very striking with your eyes,” he says gallantly.
On her next blink, the tears spill over, and she tries to smile. “You don’t have to, Oliver. I’m not crying over my hair.”
He smoothes it back away from her face anyway, “I know you’re not.” He tucks her hair behind her ear and kisses her part. “Felicity, I’m so sorry.”
“Put the guilt away. You don’t need it tonight.”
“You just left your whole life behind,” he says, covering her shoulders with his hands, “All I have to offer you is uncertainty and danger, and I know you must be scared, and I’m… I’m sorry.”
“Look,” she says, laying a hand over one of his, “it’s really hot in here, and the A/C is broken, which sucks. There’s a warrant out for my arrest as your accomplice in a string of horrific murders, which also sucks. And I really need you to understand that those two things fall into the same category. The Not Oliver’s Fault category.”
“Regardless of whose fault it is,” he says, gazing into the shadows, perhaps in search of some unattended blame, “we’ll make it right.”
She kisses his knuckles, right there on her shoulder. “We’ll get to Coast City, Cisco and Caitlin will let me use some of their equipment – and you know I’ve been begging for time with the DC52 for months, but no-o, they don’t share until somebody gets framed for murder. I thought we were better friends than that. Especially after the antidote and the – “
“They’ll help,” Oliver agrees. He knows how to derail her gently now.
She takes a deep breath. “Dig’s working it from his end too.”
“We’ll need to switch vehicles tomorrow. I’ll steal us something inconspicuous. Maybe that Toyota Corolla in the parking lot.”
She raises an eyebrow. “I’ll track down the owners and wire them money from your offshore account as compensation.”
“Thank you.” He squeezes her shoulders, and she knows he’s smiling. “We’ll find the real killer. We’ll clear both our names. And then we’ll go home.”
She tips her head back against his chest. “Yeah, we will.”
They lie down on top of the coverlet, limbs spread damp and heavy across the queen bed while the fan throbs overhead. After fifteen minutes, Felicity gets up and turns it off. “Moving the hot air around does not magically transform it into cool air. It’s like a convection oven in here.”
Oliver pushes himself up onto one elbow, regarding her thoughtfully. “Stand closer to the lamp.”
“What?”
He makes a little scooting gesture with his hand. She raises her eyebrows, but she complies.
“You look good,” he says decisively. “You make a beautiful brunette.” The corners of his mouth curl up, just barely. “Twirl for me?”
For a full-on smile, she’d do pirouettes.
He actually laughs when her hair whips around her and she loses her balance on the last step. Two rumbling chuckles, deep in his chest, and he looks like her Oliver again.
For some people he wears a domino mask. For others, brusque professionalism. Playboy charm. Stoic fortitude. Strip them away and underneath you’ll find kind blue eyes and a subtle smile – another mask, of course, because isn’t that what we are? Masks all the way down? Each of them is Oliver, none more real than the others, but she is touched that this, her favorite of his faces, he wears for her alone.
She climbs over to sit cross-legged on top of the covers next to him, and for the first time in hours she doesn’t feel like she might burst into tears at any second. “You’re wrong, you know.”
He reaches for her hair. “You’re beautiful. Don’t argue.”
“Not that. You said I walked away from my life.”
He lets a lock of hair run through his fingers. “I’m glad to have you with me.” Picks it up, does it again. “But I wish to God you weren’t.”
She wants to say this, and she wants to say it right. No tangents, no babbling. “I didn’t leave my life behind. I followed where it led. Okay?”
He drops the lock of hair on her shoulder. “Felicity.”
“Do you know what I mean?”
He licks his lips. “I’m not sure I do.”
“What I mean is…” she starts. But she’s going to say it wrong. She can feel the traffic jam piling up in her brain, clarifications fender-tapping disclaimers rear-ending addenda. An innuendo will probably bring up the rear, because a bead of sweat just ran from his neck down his bare chest, and what are the odds her subconscious will ignore that?
She silently counts down from three, blocking out the Taco Bell commercial blaring from the next room.
She needs words with weight, with the gravity of Oliver’s voice when he’s making promises or asking forgiveness. Her vocabulary does not ordinarily include the language of vows, so she reaches deep into her memory for a straight-backed wooden chair at her grandmother’s kitchen table on a candlelit Friday evening. For Bubbe’s voice, saying, Don’t fidget, girl, before it took on a resonance that made it strange and a little holy.
“Entreat me not to leave you, nor to return from following after you,” Felicity says, eyes closed, and she might be misquoting because it’s been years since she’s thought of these words. Tonight no others will do. “Where you go, I will go, and where you live, I will live. Where you die, will I die, and there will I be buried.”
Oliver stares.
Her hands are shaking. She whispers, “It’s like that.”
He has picked her up and pulled her into his lap before she quite knows what’s happened. He kisses her as if he’s Bogart putting her on a plane, as if he’s a sailor bending her backward in Times Square on V-J Day. He splays one hand behind her head, wraps his arm around the small of her back, and crushes her to his body. It’s the kind of kiss that ought to feature a swelling orchestral score and a matte painting background, and if he were any other man, Felicity would laugh at him and his melodrama.
But he’s Oliver, and he means it. She’s soaking wet in seconds.
It’s too hot for this. They’re flushed red and panting, skin sliding and sticking. The press of his mouth is nearly unbearable, she can barely breathe for the heat of his tongue, and it’s not enough. She imagines if she could only pull him closer, she could feel his body humming for her like a live wire.
Her back hits the mattress, and he plants his hands on either side of her head. She crosses her ankles over his tailbone and tries to pull his hips flush with hers, but he levers himself off her.
“Where you go, I will go,” he says, and he kisses her very solemnly.
After a month of not-quite-ready and not-quite-daring, in this moment she is utterly certain: “I want you.” She rolls her hips and gives him her best Bacall eyes, confidently expecting him to tear her panties off.
But Oliver glances around the water-damaged walls, the threadbare carpet, and the scratchy bedclothes. Their neighbors are enjoying Supernanny now. “Felicity, not here.”
“What?”
“We are not having our first time on four hundred thread count sheets.”
She gapes at him. “Then in the shower! On the floor!” A note of hysteria creeps into her voice: “On a towel by the door!”
That surprises a smile out of him. “Felicity.”
She lets both her hands flop onto the mattress in exasperation. “If you’re not careful, you could give a girl a complex.”
His expression turns serious, and he lets his hips settle against hers. “I think you know how much I want you.”
Oh. Oh. Yes, that is some compelling evidence right there. Her mouth twists into a moue, acknowledging the validity of that point.
“Tomorrow morning we are driving to Coast City,” he continues calmly, “where you are going to run a quick lingerie errand.”
“Oliver,” she says, deeply unimpressed, “I am a wanted fugitive.”
“Exactly. Who’s going to believe a wanted fugitive is in the dressing room at Victoria’s Secret? Now, I am going to pay off a guy I know at the Royal Sonesta to slip us in under fake names.”
“That’s really high-profile and risky and I’m not sure we should – “
“And then I am throwing you down on the California king and fucking you til you forget your name.”
Something flutters extremely low in her belly. A noise escapes her. It sounds like: guh.
Oliver smiles. “Then we hunt down the serial killer.”
She nods. In a small, breathy voice, she says, “Okay.”
“Okay.”
And that is exactly how it happens.
Dig crosses his arms at them their first night back in the Arrow Cave. “The honeymoon suite at the Sonesta?”
Felicity explains airily: “It’s the last place anybody would look for us.”
“One thousand thread count sheets,” Oliver adds.
His are twelve hundred. They spend two days in them.
She lets her blonde hair fan out over his pillows. He collapses with his head on her shoulder, and he whispers beautiful things into the hollow of her neck. She will never, ever forget her name, the way he says it right then.
"We’re not going anywhere," she whispers back.