"If you ever need someone to talk to about your day... you can talk to me."

Oliver needs some normality in his life, she thinks. He needs a few moments in his day which are not about saving the city or pushing back the darkness. She thinks he knows that or he wouldn't have made the offer in the first place.

But she still doesn't take him up on it right away.

Her days are long. Her supervisor at QC is obsessed with time keeping. Felicity must be at her desk, logged on and ready to work at 8.30. Never mind the fact that most evenings she's still there until a security guards comes to force her out. She must be at work at 8.30.

She thought once about complaining to Oliver about it. Then she realises that if the supervisor (she doesn't think of him as her boss, merely a colleague with a more senior title) was forced out, the majority of his workload would probably fall on her. And she has more than enough to do already.

Her days were long before Oliver came into her life. Now they're twice as long, and she still has to start at 8.30.

She starts by complaining about the coffee. The office kitchens at Queen Consolidated are well stocked with culinary gadgets, but the quality of the ground coffee packets is closer to what she remembers from her student days (when any kind of coffee was welcome so long as it was strong) than what should be provided by one of the most successful companies in the city. She's not looking for espresso, but beans and a grinder wouldn't go amiss. She can bring in the one-cup vacuum press she got in the office Secret Santa to make it with but she draws the line at buying her own beans.

Oliver raises an eyebrow.

"They don't provide coffee?"

"Oh, they do," she explains, "but its not the sort you should drink. It's more the type of coffee that could be used to plaster walls. Or make bricks. It's not coffee. It's sludge."

He pulls a face. She knows he survived on an island for five years without even the worst kind of coffee to keep him warm, but he's so obviously a man who appreciates quality. She knows he'll come down on her side. Eventually.

"You know that I don't technically work at the company," he points out. "Beverage requests should really be handled by your office manager."

"It's your name on the door," she retorts, "can you really live with people associating your good name with the worst coffee ever?"

"You obviously never read the gossip pages," he says.

"I did," she banters, "but I never believed them. No one has that much stamina, and surely the thing with the goat, the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders and the whipped cream was entirely made up?"

He makes a strange choking noise and she looks up to see an expression on his face that's halfway between a blush and a laugh.

"How did you hear about that?" He asks.

"The Internet never forgets, Oliver."

"I don't know what you're talking about," he says very formally, "but if I did, I'm sure it would be entirely Tommy's fault." But he's grinning when he says it and the next day she arrives at her desk at 8.25 to find a large bag of coffee beans, a goat soft toy and a note that says "Can I buy your silence?"

The beans are delicious. They make the best coffee she's ever had. She keeps the goat toy on her desk until her supervisor makes a crack about the company's clean desk policy.

Then the goat goes home with her and sits beside her home PC. She keeps the note in her desk drawer, inside the out-of-date print-out of the company phone directory under Q.

It always makes her smile.