title: hold on tight (never let me go)
for: ageofaquarius
category: arrow
verse: we keep all our promises (be us against the world)
genre: romance
ship: oliver/felicity
rating: pg-13
word count: 1,518
notes: So this is just something that follows that general landscape of my au 'we keep all our promises' verse. It'd be set in the future, where they're happily established with each other. I wanted to write ageofaquarius a little ficlet of Olympic-cuddler-Oliver and this happened, lol. I hope you like it!
summary: Felicity enjoys Oliver's Olympic cuddling skills. ['we keep all our promises' verse - future!ficlet]

hold on tight (never let me go)
-1/1-

Felicity smiled as he buried his head a little deeper in her hair, nose nuzzling the nape of her neck. "We're gonna have to move eventually," she told him, quietly, as if she might disturb their peace and quiet if she got too loud.

Oliver gave a disagreeable grunt and tightened his arms around her waist.

They'd been cuddling on the couch pretty much all morning. She was still in her pajamas, her hair a messy tangle tied up in a lopsided ponytail, but it was nice, and warm. There was a draft in her apartment that she could not, for the life of her, figure out the origins of. And since most of her floors were hardwoods, except for the living room, her feet were always freezing as it was. Except not now, because she'd buried her ice cold toes against his bare legs.

He'd flinched, like he always did, but he let her, trapping her feet between his calves and muttering, "Where are your fuzzy socks? Any more exposure and you'd lose a toe…"

It was a running theme. The socks he spoke of were a mismatched pair; she lost the twin to each of them but they were the best at keeping her feet warm so she kept them and wore them together. One was purple with green polka dots while the other was just a solid orange. And she would be wearing them except Jasper took a liking to them and hid them in random places around her apartment when she visited, so Felicity had no idea where they currently were. She once found the purple one stuffed under her tv stand; she wasn't even sure how Jasper managed that.

In any case, much as she knew the world was still spinning outside of her apartment, and they would eventually have to greet it, she was feeling pretty good about where she was. Oliver always seemed his happiest when he had a few hours to just cuddle up on the couch. It was an incongruent image with the way the tabloids often portrayed him, she was sure, but just as drunk!Oliver had informed her quite some time ago, he was an Olympic cuddler and quite proud of it.

So they lazed about, with him wrapped all around her in a tangle of arms and legs. Sometimes he dozed and sometimes he spent long minutes just drawing odd shapes and letters all over her back. And other times he stroked her hair and counted the freckles on her nose and told her bedtime stories that Raisa told him when he was a boy growing up or tales of his own childhood. Her favorite was the story of when he was seven years old and he'd received a bow and arrow for his birthday and went around shooting rubber arrows at his family and the staff, declaring that he was a hero and he was ridding the house of crime. She could just imagine him, his hair much blonder then, a cowlick Raisa could never get to lay flat, his bow strapped over his chest, wearing all green with tights and a hood to mask his face; the cutest hero to ever live, she was sure.

"Not tights," he'd complained when she told him and it only made her chuckle, burying her face against his chest. He laughed, because he always did when she did, and stroked her hair and told her he wasn't kidding, there was no way she'd ever see him in tights. But then Halloween came around and Oliver was a sucker for making her happy, so there he was in all his green glory and those, yes, were definitely tights he was wearing.

She loved him for it. She loved him for a hundred, a thousand, a million different reasons, but she loved that he'd do anything to make her happy. Not in a selfish, make him do crazy, harmful things to test that kind of way. But in a 'what in the world did I ever do to deserve such an awesome boyfriend' kind of way. Because he was. He got down on himself and sometimes he could be really stubborn, and he pouted when he didn't get his way and he could say her name with so much exasperation that his whole person seemed to sigh, but he was a good man and she loved him. She really, seriously loved him. Like Olympic loved him.

"You're thinking too much. There's no thinking in cuddling," Oliver told her, nipping at the curve of her neck and rubbing his chin on her shoulder, his whiskers tickling her.

She jumped, giggling at the sensation, and he tightened his arms around her before she could squirm away.

Turning over to face him, she hitched her leg up over his hip and his hand slid up her thigh, ducking under the fabric of her pajama shorts to stroke her skin. His eyes were closed, but his lips were curved in a faint smile.

Raising her hand, she dragged the tips of her fingers from his temple down to his chin, her thumb drawing the arch of his eyebrow while her pinkie finger memorized the curve of his cheek, and then her lime green nails lightly scratched at the morning's whiskers he'd yet to shave off. She liked him like that, a little scruffy. She liked how it felt when she kissed him and when he kissed her, not just her mouth but down her body. She liked the burn it left on her thighs and how proud he always looked afterwards. She traced under his bottom lip, smiling when he ducked a little to kiss the pads of her fingers.

His eyes finally opened, first one, an eyebrow raised, and then the other. He slid his hand out from her shorts and ran it up her side, rubbing circles on her hip before sliding it along the slope of her body, up up up, until he reached her face. He brushed a few, springy curls back and out of the way, thumb grazing the shell of her ear, and stroked her cheek with his knuckles affectionately before eventually resting his hand on her neck, fingers lightly drawing shapes and patterns at the nape.

"Ten more minutes," he bargained. "Then we can shower and get dressed and take Jasper to the park and eat brunch and be normal, functioning adults. I promise."

She stared at him, half-smiling. "Do you remember that Sunday, three weeks ago, when all we did was cuddle? On the bed and the couch and on the pillow bed you made on the floor?"

"Mm-hmm… We watched Disney movies and ate take-out and you cried every time they lived happily ever after…" He said it fondly, like those were the days and my girlfriend's so cute and let's do it again. And she liked to, she wanted to, but she also appreciated that those days weren't every day. They had jobs and lives and friends and family, so they didn't always get Sundays to sleep in and ignore work and duties and obligations. But sometimes they did. Sometimes they could dedicate a whole Sunday to pajamas and take-out and cuddling. They had errands to run today, and he had to stop by the club around 4 because Tommy wanted to go over a few things, and Jasper was desperate for time outside in the fresh air, so they couldn't stay here like this forever. The bubble had to pop eventually. But later, they'd come back and he'd strip her down to nothing and they'd have sex until she couldn't feel her bones anymore and then they'd cuddle until they fell asleep, breathing I love you into every inch of each other's skin while he held her like the world might end if he stopped. Did she mention she loved him? She did. There were days she wondered if anyone could love someone as much as Oliver loved her and then he would laugh and her heart would swell up and she'd realized that she could. She loved him like he loved her.

She didn't know that he was it when they first met. Good Google, she didn't. But he turned out to be the most amazing surprise her life had ever seen and she could not, would never want to, imagine her life now without him.

So, when he leaned forward and he kissed her nose, she murmured back, "Make it twenty," and then she sank back against him, burrowing her face against his chest, and she let herself get lost in all those Olympic cuddling skills of his. Like she always did, always would, every chance they got. Because life continued, it waited outside her door, eager to interrupt, but they didn't have to answer right away. She was content where she was.

Her cold toes brushed up against his leg and he jumped. When she laughed at him, finding it endlessly amusing, he kissed her, chuckling against her mouth. Twenty minutes became thirty, but that was fine. The world could wait.

{end.}

Author's Note: Look at the complete lack of angst, lol. Just super-sunshiny love over here. I hope you guys enjoyed this! You can thank ageofaquarius for loving Olympic!cuddler-Oliver so much, because that's what inspired writing a little happiness for these two.

Depending on the reception to this and how I eventually end things in 'we keep all our promises (be us against the world), I could definitely be persuaded to add more little ficlets of these two. Lemme know what you think!

I'd be forever grateful if you'd leave a review! They're my lifeblood (and I should be sleeping, lol)

Thanks so much for reading!

- Lee | Fina