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The linoleum was freezing against the back of her uncovered head and calves—not literally freezing, she would have to admit, but cold like the bite of a Slurpee on her teeth. Cold enough that it had her wondering if that could slow down her thought processes, if the active temperature range for her synapses overlapped with operating conditions for standard batteries.
"Felicity," Oliver hissed.
"What?"
"Someone's coming," and she barely had time to parse that before he was on top of her, and a bit more of her skin was pressing back into the frigid floor, and they were breathing cheek to cheek underneath the giant antique cabinet. She thought she heard a door closing maybe thirty yards away, at the end of the hallway outside. She wasn't any closer to figuring out the make and model of the safe, and Oliver ... Oliver was too close, smelling of sweat and flint and dry cleaning. If they got made she'd have to spend at least a night in jail, in this dress, polka-dotted and clinging to the contours of her body.
Footsteps, definitively, approaching. She took a deep breath in, to prepare, and the cold against a new part of her back made her gasp, just barely. Oliver's hand covered her mouth and she felt his lips against her neck, Hold on, the barest whisper or maybe a shared thought, leaping across the connection between them.
The door opened. Lights flashed on. Someone breathed, once, twice. They clicked off the lights and left.
Slowly, Oliver took his hand off her mouth, but the rest of him didn't relax until the footsteps faded away. She tried to tell herself she wasn't tense anymore, wasn't wound up like a spring about to bounce down a frictionless mountain, wasn't feeling every warm hard inch of him where his body weighed into hers. She was never sure if she could honestly accuse him of waiting a cruel few seconds longer than necessary to crawl back out again and let her work.
+
It got easier over time, somewhat, but when he lurched in bloody it always meant a struggle against the bile rising at the back of her throat. She'd lost so many hours of her life to the fantasy of his skin on hers, but in her waking moments in her right mind it was all the slip and slide of his blood between her fingers. It was the fright she had to swallow, to keep her hand steady, that rushed back three hours later like a ton of bricks and left her shaking, violently, on the doorstep of her own apartment. It was the dimness in his eyes when he woke up alive again and found himself in a familiar place.
She could always scare herself all over again thinking maybe one day she'd give up. Maybe he couldn't function any other way but pull-ups in the morning, pull-ups in the evening, pull-ups in the afternoon.
With bonus late night bleeding. She swallowed against any reaction when he stripped off his jacket and shirt, revealing a long spill of blood down his side like an upside-down volcano.
"It looks worse than it is," he assured her.
"Uh-huh." She forced herself to concentrate on the tiny crisscrossing gauze against the pads of her fingers, the painted measurement lines on the container of disinfectant, a controlled breathing pattern for her nose and mouth. She forced herself to ignore the adrenaline still pumping in her system from what she'd heard through her earpiece an hour ago, and the pained hiss Oliver made just once. The wound did in fact look much better when it was cleaned and bandaged.
"Sometimes I think about strapping you to this table and not letting you go anywhere," she blurted out; then stopped, horrified. "I mean not like that—"
He didn't laugh quietly, like always, but stared at her until she stared back and meeting his gaze was such a big mistake.
"You could hold me down," he murmured.
She fumbled the gauze in her hands and felt like she, too, was free-falling when it dropped to the floor.
"Don't tempt me," she said finally, and kneeling to pick up the gauze right in front of him was yet another colossal mistake. He reached for her and she couldn't help nuzzling into his hand, and then he tugged her up and kissed her with such force it was like this whole exhausting night had only warmed him up. She kissed him back until her legs ached from standing and then some, until she was sure enough to mutter "come home with me" against his mouth.
+
"I don't like this," she heard herself say, and it was still like she was floating in another plane of reality, outside of herself, existing only to pity her mortal frame. Perhaps this disembodied consciousness would be her new home after the wooden roller coaster lived up to expectation and tossed her tiny body, in pieces, to the bottom of the valley.
"You'll be fine." He looked amused. She focused on how that annoyed her, and tried to ignore the impulse it gave her to smile back and then jump him.
"You know, though, Oliver, you and I have different definitions of 'fine.' We actually use different dictionaries, I think."
"Engineers built this. You probably went to school with some of them."
"We didn't make stuff out of wood," she snapped. "We went a little beyond carpentry. For junior lab I made a magnetic levitator."
On the platform, someone in a park t-shirt yelled, "Arms inside the vehicle!"
Felicity's vision blurred for a moment, and of course it was the moment Oliver kissed her. She felt him pull her into his side, and she curled around him as much as the harness would allow.
"Hold on to me," he told her, and she tightened her grip on his bicep.
+
It was only a matter of time before an enemy arrow found its way into her arm, she would say afterwards, like it was something she'd expected. When it happened it wasn't that routine, actually; it was pain as unfamiliar as it was intense, more blood than she'd needed to see, and the panic in Oliver's voice ringing in her ears. He left brief white marks on her other arm from holding her so hard all the way back to the foundry.
"This is going to hurt," Diggle warned, and she gritted her teeth against a hundred sarcastic retorts. Of course it was going to freaking hurt.
Oliver tipped her chin up with two fingers, and he knew it made her heart pause when he did that.
"Felicity," he said, "hold on to me." So she did, and she almost managed not to scream when Diggle wrenched out the blade.
Later she noticed periwinkle nail polish, chipped off into one of four crescent-shaped cuts on Oliver's forearm. He wouldn't let her apologize; when she tried he cut her off with a kiss that escalated quickly.
+
It was always going to be awkward, this question.
"You've been, um, tested, right?" she hears herself ask. "No island diseases, or ... other diseases?"
He smiles, the way she's still not used to. "I am disease-free, as of last month." He says it like a come-on, and it works; heat washes over her again as the awkwardness dissipates and her body remembers where they just left off.
"I am also disease-free," she says, running her fingers down his arms. "And fertility-free, or ... whatever. I have a thingy."
She expects him to pick her up, but to slide her onto the nearest table, not to press her against the nearest vertical surface. But the latter is just what he does, so she wraps her arms and legs around him and sucks a patch of skin on his neck between her teeth.
One of his hands leaves her hips, and a plaintive sound escapes her as he pushes two fingers easily—so easily—inside her. His eyes watching her are dark, aroused and amused and something else, she thinks, and then he's breathing her air and teasing her lips with his own and she knows he can smell, too, how wet she is. He presses into her clit with his knuckle and she cries out before he takes his hand away.
She feels the tip of his hardness against her, and hears him hiss through his teeth.
"Hold on tight," he mutters, and fucks her into the wall.