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“Come on, Baby,” Felicity pleaded desperately, a whine in her voice. “You can’t give up like this. You still have half of your life ahead of you, and you just can’t leave me like this. Besides, it’s almost Christmas, so it would be the worst timing ever to leave me now and-“
A quiet knock at the window next to her stopped Felicity’s ramble. Letting go of the key in the ignition, she turned her head to find Oliver standing next to the car with one arm resting on the roof of it. He was looking at her with an amused smile playing on his lips, tapping the tip of his forefinger against the glass, before he made a cranking movement to let her know that she should lower the window.
Pushing her bottom lip forward and making a sad face, Felicity lowered the window between them. Quietly she whispered, “Hi.”
Oliver chuckled in amusement. “Need help?”
“I don’t think it can be helped,” Felicity replied with a sigh, moving her hands over the steering wheel in a loving gesture. “I think Minnie is dead for good.”
“Minnie?” Oliver asked.
“Minnie the Mini Cooper,” Felicity replied, sniffling dramatically. “She has been a loyal friend, but now she is dead. How can she do this to me on Christmas?”
“Maybe it’s because you’re Jewish and Hanukkah is already over?” Oliver suggested.
“Hey, you are not allowed to make sense of my suffering,” Felicity replied, shooting him a playfully scolding gaze, and again Oliver chuckled.
Felicity sighed, leaning back in the driver’s seat and moving her fingers over the steering wheel once more. She had known the day would come that Minnie would see her last day, but she hadn’t expected that day to come so soon. The fact that she had survived Hanukkah -- which like Oliver had pointed out correctly was much more her holiday than Christmas -- only spent her little comfort, though.
Releasing another sigh, Felicity pulled the key from the ignition and grabbed her purse from the passenger seat. She didn’t really want to leave the car here on the parking lot behind Verdant because even if Minnie was dead already, she didn’t want her to be damaged by any of the drunk or drugged party guests or any criminal that came across. She would make sure that Minnie was taken care of tomorrow. Tonight she just wanted to go home.
When Felicity reached out her hand for the door handle, Oliver quickly took a step back and opened the door for her. Felicity smiled, getting out. “Thanks.”
“Sure,” he replied and shut the door behind her, so Felicity could lock it. “Do you need a ride home?”
Felicity shook her head, already rummaging around in her purse for her phone. “No, you go home and spend the evening with your family. I will call a cab and-“
“Felicity.”
At the way he said her name Felicity stopped rummaging around in her purse and looked up at him instead. Even in the badly lighted parking lot Felicity could see the intense way Oliver looked at her. When he pushed his hands into pockets of his leather jacket, Felicity bit down on her bottom lip.
Eventually Felicity nodded. “Okay, sure.”
“Thanks,” Oliver whispered. He took a quick look around like he was making sure that nobody was near before he turned back to her and stated, “I’ll get the second helmet from the lair. I’ll be back in two minutes.”
Felicity nodded, watching Oliver leave. She knew he was still shaken from almost dying (again!) and these hallucinations that had haunted him after. Hallucinating Tommy and having his encouragement while he had been out to save Roy might have given Oliver a new sense of hope, but Felicity knew that with the life he was leading and the current threats the city was faced with Oliver still had a lot on his mind. No matter how many girls there had been, he hadn’t been held prisoner on Fantasy Island after all.
Sighing, Felicity looked up in the starry sky. One year ago she hadn’t known Oliver was the Arrow. She might have suspected it somewhere deep in her heart because the explanations for the favors he had asked from her had just been too stupid. She had known they had been lies. She just hadn’t been sure what to think about the Hood. Now he was the Arrow and as she had told him earlier today before he had headed out into the field, wearing the mask Barry had left as a Christmas gift for him, he was a hero.
Maybe that was her wish for Christmas – that Oliver learned to accept that he was a hero. Well, that was if she was allowed to wish for anything on Christmas since she was Jewish after all.
“Ready to go?” Oliver asked when he approached her, his spare helmet under his arm.
Felicity smiled, nodding her head. “Yes.”
Oliver nodded towards his motorcycle and they went to it in comfortable silence. One of the many things she had learned since she had started working with Oliver in the lair was to accept silence. As much as she loved to fill silence with her babble, she had started to accept silence more by now. She was sure that Oliver was grateful for that. He seemed to love silence, so he must have been annoyed by all her babbling and-
“I wasn’t annoyed.”
“Hm?” Felicity asked, looking at Oliver, when they came to stop in front of his Harley.
“I wasn’t annoyed by your babbling,” Oliver told her. “It might come at bad timing every once in awhile which makes me impatient for you to get to the point, but I am never annoyed of the babbling per se. Actually, I grew quite fond of it in the last months.”
Felicity looked at Oliver a moment longer, wondering if he could read her mind now. Once she realized that she must have said her thoughts out loud, she felt heat rising into her cheeks. She quickly lowered her gaze and bit down on her bottom lip.
“Maybe I am not that good at accepting silence as I thought I was,” Felicity muttered.
She waited for Oliver to say something, maybe laugh it off or something, but he stayed silent. When Felicity lifted her gaze, she found him looking at her with a soft smile playing on his lips. With her front teeth still buried in her bottom lip Felicity smiled back at him.
After awhile Oliver cleared his throat, “Do you have any plans for the rest of the night?”
“If sweatpants, pizza and wine count as plans, then yes,” Felicity replied.
Oliver’s smile widened. “I can’t offer any of that, but what I can offer is a short ride on the motorcycle and a breathtaking view. Maybe we could just… I don’t know… I just… I don’t want to be alone tonight.”
“Are you asking me to spend the night with you?” Felicity asked before she could rethink her choice of words and felt the heat rising to her cheeks in a reaction to her words immediately. “I don’t mean spending the night with you as in spending the night with you in your bed… or a pressed against a wall… or something. I just mean spending the night with you platonically as in you and me at the same play during the night, talking or maybe not talking since I know that you are not exactly a talkative guy and-“
“Felicity,” Oliver interrupted her gently. He didn’t say anything more, just held out the helmet for her.
Felicity didn’t hesitate for even a second. She took the helmet from him and replied, “Well, if this is going to be longer ride, I guess I should be glad that I decided to wear pants today.”
Oliver only smiled in amusement, taking his own helmet from the handlebar of his Harley and putting it on. He got on the motorcycle first, holding out one hand for her to help her getting on it behind him. Felicity kept some safe distance between their bodies, putting her hands to his shoulders. Despite the helmets on both of their heads Felicity could hear Oliver chuckle.
“Felicity would you please hold onto me properly?” he asked.
Instead of giving her the time to do so, Oliver took her hands from his shoulders and wrapped her arms around his waist tightly. The movement made her body slide closer to him until she was pressed against his back. She could feel the hard muscles of his back against her front and had to gulp at how great he felt. During all the hours she had spent watching him workout, she had often found herself wondering how his body would feel. She knew that she had been pressed against him before like when they had been in the elevator well at Merlyn Global, but she had been too distracted by her fear of highs to really find out what he felt like. Now she knew.
“I guess I can be grateful you didn’t ask me to hold onto you tight?” Felicity asked Oliver in memory at that day.
Felicity wasn’t sure, but she thought she heard him chuckle over the roaring sound of the engine. She tightened her arms around him once more, pressing herself as close to him as possible, right before Oliver lifted his feet from the ground and started directing the motorcycle through the city.
They were chasing past the lights of the streets on their way out of the city. Felicity rested her head against Oliver’s shoulder blades, her hands clawing into the leather of his jacket. It had been a while since she had last been on the back of a motorcycle. She had never really been a fan of it because as much as the ride was boosting the adrenaline in her body, she had never felt exactly safe there. Now she did, though.
Felicity had no idea how long they had already been on the ride when there were less and less street lamps. As they were leaving the city, their environment was getting darker. She had no idea where they were since she had never really taken time to explore the areas around the city, but Oliver seemed to have a destination, so she didn’t care much. She knew that he knew the city better than most other people probably did, so she didn’t worry that they would lose their way.
When the motorcycle slowed down soon, though, Felicity frowned. They seemed to be in the middle of nowhere. The street was embraced by dense undergrowth and other than that there was nothing to see here. Oliver stopped the motorcycle and took off his helmet, so Felicity did the same.
“Need a break?” she asked.
Oliver smiled. “No, this is there I wanted to take us.”
Felicity frowned, sliding off the motorcycle with Oliver’s help. He followed immediately after her, pushing his vehicle to the side of the street and parking it there. When he saw her still frowning at him in confusion, he just chuckled, took her helmet and put it over the handlebar.
“You know if I didn’t know you, I’d think you brought me here to kill me.”
Oliver shook his head, his smile widening. “It’s a good thing you know me then.”
Before Felicity could tell him that that wasn’t really a satisfying answer, Oliver already took her hand and led her closer to the undergrowth. When he started pushing it aside, and moving into it, Felicity’s frown deepened.
“Just so you know, I might start to think that you want to kill me after all,” Felicity told him. “I mean apart from the fact that we really are at the end of the world and nobody could hear me scream for help, this shrubbery kind of freaks me out. I don’t know what I had in mind when you asked me to spend the night with you, but this is not what I had in mind and-“
Felicity’s ramble came to a sudden stop when they reached the other side of the shrubbery.
“Wow.”
From their spot here they had a perfect view over the city. Felicity could barely remember when she had ever seen something so beautiful. Seeing the bright lights in the dark of the night spend some feeling of warmth and comfort that Felicity could feel deep in her chest. Smiling, she turned her eyes to look at Oliver and found him standing beside her slightly tensed with a strained expression on his face.
“Everything alright?” Felicity asked.
Oliver took in a deep breath, shaking his head. “No.”
Felicity nodded slowly. Of course he wasn’t alright. Why did she even ask that? Hadn’t he said back in May that he wasn’t going to use the word ‘okay’ again anytime soon? Okay, it had been seven months now, so one could argue that seven months had been long enough to change his mind on that, but then on the other hand maybe-
“A lot has changed this past year,” Oliver’s voice cut through her thoughts.
“Last year this time I wasn’t on the team yet,” Felicity agreed with a nod though she knew that for Oliver it was probably the smallest of things given the destruction of the city, his mother’s time in prison, his best friend’s death and all the other heavy stuff that had happened to him in the last months.
“You might have not been on the team officially,” Oliver replied, smiling at her softly, “but you have been a part of the team already. I came to you with Malcolm’s arrows a year ago today.”
“And then you promised me a bottle of wine,” Felicity remembered and smiled back at Oliver teasingly. “I am still waiting for that by the way.”
Oliver chuckled. “I will keep that in mind. I promise.”
They smiled at each other for a moment longer before they turned their gazes back to the city. Silence settled between them. Only when Felicity was met with a cold gust of wind and she wrapped her arms around herself to keep herself warm, Oliver broke the silence.
“Are you cold?”
“No, it’s fine,” Felicity replied.
The shiver that ran through her body when she was met with another gust of wind betrayed her, though. Oliver immediately took off his jacket and put it around her shoulders. Felicity could smell the scent of his skin on the leather and she felt embraced by the warmth the fabric offered.
Felicity smiled at Oliver, whispering, “Thank you.”
“Sure,” Oliver replied, smiling back. He rubbed his hands up and down her arms gently. “I can’t have you catch a cold. What would I do without you in the lair?”
“You managed to do things on your own before I joined the team too,” Felicity told him.
“Yes, but I still had to come to you for help quite early,” Oliver replied. “I feel safer with-“
When something fell to his hair, Oliver stopped and lifted his hand to his head. He pulled out whatever was there and lowered his gaze to it.
“Is that…?”
Oliver lifted his gaze to the tree they stood under and frowned. “I am not good at biology, but I think we are standing under a mistletoe.”
Felicity followed Oliver’s gaze and had to agree. It looked like they were indeed standing under a mistletoe. How had chances been that that was going to happen, huh? Slowly Felicity looked back at Oliver. His intense gaze seemed to burn right under her skin. His eyes were glued to her face, a small smile playing on his lips.
Then he slowly started to lean forward. He had been standing close to her already, but he was moving even closer now. Felicity wet her lips, and the way Oliver’s eyes flickered down to them for a split second made her stomach tingle. Then his eyes were back on hers as he was leaning closer and closer towards her. She could feel his warm breath ghosting over her face and the warmth radiating from his body when-
“I don’t think the tradition of kissing under the mistletoe is something that belongs to Jewish tradition,” it suddenly bubbled out of her, and Felicity could have face-palmed herself for not being able to keep her mouth shut for once. When Oliver stopped, his face just a breath away from hers, her nervousness increased and she quickly added, “I don’t know of course. I never really researched that though I probably should have because I wondered about that a few times already. Somehow I always forgot about it again. Maybe I should research this now though I highly doubt that there is good-“
Oliver’s smile widened and he kissed her cheek chastely, his lips almost brushing against the corner of her mouth. Felicity’s breath hitched in her throat. His lips still gently pressed to the right side of her face, Oliver brushed the knuckles of his hand against the left side and Felicity’s heart stumbled in her chest at the loving touch. When he pulled back, his eyes were on her face immediately, his lips widened to a smile.
“Merry Christmas, Felicity,” Oliver whispered.
Felicity smiled, took his hand and squeezed it. “Merry Christmas, Oliver.”
They kept looking at each other without saying a word for a long moment. When the tension grew between them, they turned around at the same time to face the city once more. They stood there in silence, watching the city they had protected for the last year and that they knew they would keep protecting as long as it was necessary.