The One That Got Away

Oliver closed his eyes and just sort of…not thought. He was good at the not thinking. The thing he had never been able to get Monique to understand was sometimes you just have to turn your brain the fu*k off and deal with what’s in front of you.

What was in front of him was Monique. Monique, naked and curled up against his side. Monique, who he just fu*ked. Monique, who wasn’t and couldn’t be just a hook-up, a one-night stand, a fling, a thing. Monique, who—he thought—just asked him for forever.

Oliver was sort of glad he was not thinking right now, because otherwise some serious tweaking out and punching of walls and other non-resilient surfaces might be in order. He was sort of tired, though. Maybe tomorrow. Oliver sort-of laughed—which sounded like sh*t because his voice was just thrashed—and Monique stiffened.

“Oliver?”

“Yeah?”

“How do you feel?” Careful. Such a careful question. So fu*king Monique it was absurd and Oliver could tell, Monique was thinking.

“I’m good. I’m tired. We should get some sleep. I still have a presentation to do tomorrow y’know?”

“Oh… Yeah.” Suddenly Monique was sliding away from him, sliding off the bed entirely. And the thing was, Oliver could hear Monique’s brain vibe so hard it was practically making the windows rattle. Which…wasn’t totally out of the ballpark, given Monique’s special talents. “I should shower.”

Inwardly, Oliver sighed. It’s a simple equation for Oliver; Monique wanted this, Monique wanted him, Monique was…well, Monique and forever sounded just fu*king fine by Oliver. He had never been picky about the how of how he got what he wanted. Goals got met. The end goal was the thing. Besides, Monique was still his whole entire life. Oliver could do a hell of a lot worse and not much better. He didn’t know if they were gonna discuss the past or not but he was willing to take her lead on that.

Monique… Monique had a knack of always making sh*t complicated. And then it was up to Oliver to straighten it out. And his track record with that was…spotty.

So there he went. The fix.

*****

“Monique.”

Oliver’s voice was flat. Unemotional. The voice he used when ‘He Means It’, but also the voice for when he didn’t want her to see anything more than the words themselves, his shield, his armor. Monique made herself stop, braced herself. Well. Her body stiffened. Inside, she didn’t know if she could brace herself for anything, teetering on a crumbling edge. “Yeah?”

“There hasn’t really been anyone else since you, you know that right?”

“Oh. What about-.”

“I was never interested in Felicity; I don’t even know where you got that idea…” he interrupted.

“She had Bobbi…you wanted a child,” Monique finished dully.

“I wanted our baby, Momo,” Oliver said.

 Then, in the silence that followed, her exhausted brain caught up to the breadcrumb trail of Oliver’s words. “Wait,” Monique said. At her side, her fingers flex and loosen, unable to be still. “Wait. Oliver—”

She turned around. In the semi-dark, she could only see the pyrite glitter of Oliver’s eyes and the vague cut-out shape of his body.

“Yeah.” Oliver said. Which was not an answer to anything or anybody but Oliver. And maybe, maybe Monique, who’s been studying the finer points of Oliverisms for as long as they’d known each other. “So…are we okay?”

Monique couldn’t. She just couldn’t make herself make that leap. It seemed…too much like everything she wanted and that was not… That was not how life worked out for her.

“I don’t know, Oliver. Are we?” Her voice didn’t quaver. That was the important thing. It came out steady and Monique wished she felt half as solid.

Oliver sighed. It was exasperated and frustrated and familiar and it made Monique’s breath bottle up in her throat because she had heard it a hundred times and she knew, knew, without a shadow of a doubt what it means. You’re a moron, Monique.

“Come to bed, Monique,” Oliver said, with an air of world-weariness that only Oliver could affect.

Monique looked down at herself, sweaty-dirty and come-itchy. It took a second—less than a second—and then she was crossing the room in two long strides, to the mattress and down.

To where Oliver was waiting for her.

*****

“Question.”

“Shoot,” Monique said into the phone where she was still sprawled out in bed, completely naked and well-used by the man she was currently talking to.

“If you had to guess,” Oliver started, sounding distracted. “How tall would you say the ceilings in the den are?”

Monique frowned at the ceiling, her fingers paused in their drag through her own happy trail.

“…Why?”

“Like twelve feet? Maybe fifteen?”

“Oliver,” Monique ventured cautiously. “What are you doing?”

“You’re right. Probably twelve.” There’s some shuffling on the other line and the sound of another guy’s voice along with Oliver’s.

“Oliver.”

“Be home soon, you better have dinner started.”

“It’s not dinner time!” was the only thing Monique could think to say.

“It’s after four, you s*x-soaked hooker!”

Monique scoffed, about to come back with a very snappy rejoinder, but one glance at the clock on the nightstand confirmed what Oliver said.

“Fine,” she mumbled.

“Later!” The line went dead, but not before she heard Oliver say to someone, with a dismissive laugh: “The wife. You know how women–”

“Di*k,” Monique muttered, tossing her phone back on the nightstand and curling back around the pillow that smelled like Oliver. She was ripped out of a very pleasant dream about the kid who left One Direction by the sound of her phone ringing. Again.

She fumbled for it on the nightstand and sat up this time, wiping the sleep out of her eyes and pushing her hair back from her face. She hit accept and shoved the phone to her cheek.

“Yeah?” she said around a yawn.

There was a pause.

“You outta bed?”

Monique stood up on wobbly legs, still a little sore from s*x last night. And this morning. And this afternoon, before Oliver left to run errands.

“Yes,” she said, now technically not lying.

“Another question.”

“Okay.” she shuffled out of the room and down the hall toward the kitchen, all the lights in this place just too fu*king bright.

“Do you like the plain white lights or the multicoloured kind?”

Monique stopped walking and frowned down the long hallway, blinking blearily while she processed the question.

“What?” she finally came up with.

“Christmas lights, Monique, Jesus,” Oliver sighed, his exasperation huffing clearly through the phone’s tiny speaker. “Regular or rainbow?”

Monique smirked.

“I don’t know, Oliver, you big queer–”