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They never should have taken the Lady Ann case.
Multiple government agencies would have been deeply interested in stopping a terrorist cell from hijacking a yacht full of D.C.’s luminaries, including two cabinet members. Starling City Police Department would have vouched for the reliability of the Arrow’s intel. There was no compelling reason why Oliver had to handle it himself.
“This is my city,” was all he would explain.
Felicity still remembers how loud it was, even over the comm, when the charges blew a hole in the Lady Ann’s hull right at the water line. She flinched so hard her chair squeaked.
“Are you ok?” she demanded after the mandatory three deep breaths.
“Fine,” Oliver answered in a voice that she found not at all reassuring. After a long, unpleasant pause he added: “There’s water coming in.”
“They’re starting evacuation procedures up top,” Dig said, observing from the little zodiac that got Oliver on board in the first place. “Get out of there so I can pick you up.”
Felicity heard the slosh of water with Oliver’s every step. Wading must have been a bitchkitty in that leather.
“Talk to me, Felicity.”
“You need an alternate route to the foredeck?” she said, tapping to pull up the boat’s schematics. “If there’s damage to the port side ladders, I can get you there by the – “
“No,” he ground out. “Just… talk to me, please.”
“Ok,” she said, puzzled. “Um.” Water sloshed, and Oliver’s breath came in long, carefully controlled pulls of air. In a flash of insight, she understood. She felt stupid for not seeing it before. Of course a sinking ship was going to put the man on edge. “Boy, have you come to the right place, mister. Because I can talk as long as you want about whatever you want. Once in fifth grade, I had to give an oral presentation, only I forgot my notes at home, and…”
She babbled about elementary school for the ten minutes it took him to climb up to an open deck. Every time she lost steam, he asked an actual, relevant question, like, “Where did a bunch of fifth graders get six traffic cones and a can of paint anyway?”
By the time he leapt over the railing into the zodiac, he could breathe without having to concentrate. But for the week that followed, Felicity hardly slept for holding him through the nightmares.
“Don’t you know what this means?” she whispered the fifth time he woke up screaming for Sara. “Rescuing a whole ship?”
“What does it mean?” he panted, pressing his sweaty forehead to hers.
“You, sir,” she said very solemnly, “are officially a Grand High Exalted Mystic Birdman.”
That was Robert Queen’s rank when he died; there was none higher. Oliver laughed, and, shaky as it was, she liked the sound of it.
This afternoon, she can hear Abby giggling over the noise of the big diesel engines. Oliver says things like, “Starboard. I said starboard. No, baby, your other starboard.”
Felicity likes the sound of that even better. She bobby-pins her sunhat in place, retrieves her Pimm’s cup from the galley, and heads for the cockpit.
"Your rudder won’t do much for you under 1,000 RPM," Oliver is saying, "so you’re going to have to steer with your engines."
Boosted up on two flotation devices so she can see over the console, Abigail sits with one hand on the wheel and the other on the throttle. Oliver sits next to her on the bench seat, pointing out at the channel markers. “You’re going to need to leave this one to port, junebug. Put your starboard engine in neutral, watch how easy she turns.”
Abby’s right hand moves on the throttle, just barely, and forty feet of yacht swing slowly to the right.
“You’re skipper today?” Felicity asks.
“I don’t think it counts if Dad keeps telling me exactly when to put which engine in gear,” Abby grumbles.
“It counts,” Oliver says. “Get her back in the slip without hitting a piling, and you’re promoted to Birdman Apprentice.”
Felicity leans in and kisses his cheek before she takes her drink out onto the foredeck. The apparent wind dries the sweat on her neck and the sunshine gleams off the white fiberglass. On a beach towel just aft of the anchor, her son lazes with a beer propped against his side. “You saw Dad’s letting the junebug skipper?” he says as she settles down cross-legged next to him. “If we go down, I don’t think there are any islands out here for us to swim to.”
“Not funny, Jonathan.”
“At least it’s not you steering.”
“Oh, honestly. You put one little scratch on one little boat, and you never live it down.”
That actually happened the very first time Oliver took Felicity out on the graceful twenty-foot sloop that once belonged to his grandfather. “I want to teach you to sail,” Oliver said, which was about twenty-five percent of the reason. Another twenty-five percent was the opportunity to kiss his new wife in the great outdoors with an extremely low likelihood of paparazzi preserving the moment for posterity. The remaining fifty percent – well.
“Have you ever been on a boat before?” Oliver asked as they started rigging up. He stuck a funny S-shaped metal thing into a hole in the mast and cranked. The sail inched steadily upward. “Don’t answer that. I can tell by your shoes.”
She looked down at her flip flops, which she thought were quite nautical. “What’s wrong with my shoes?”
“Nothing,” he lied, and in the next breath: “We’ll get you a pair that won’t slide you right off the deck after the cleats cut your feet up.”
“I’m sorry, is this a boat or a death trap?”
The sail reached the top of the mast, shining pearly in the sunlight, and he squinted up at it in satisfaction. Then he gave her the raised eyebrows that meant he was trying very hard not to break out into a smile. “You’re a pollywog,” he informed her.
She glared at him over the tops of her sunglasses. “Excuse me?”
Her indignation only amused him. “It’s what my dad called inexperienced boaters.”
“May I remind you that Nevada is landlocked. And a desert.” Felicity resisted the urge to point out that not everybody’s daddy owns a yacht, thank you very much, because neither Robert Queen nor the Gambit were the direction she wanted the conversation to take.
“It wasn’t a criticism,” Oliver said, still chuckling. He moved the S-shaped crank to a different hole, and the smaller sail started climbing toward the top of the mast as well. “By the end of the afternoon, you’ll earn a promotion to Junior Birdman Apprentice.”
“That is not a real boat thing,” she accused. “You are making that up.”
“I’m pretty sure my father made it up.” He held up the taped end of a rope to her. “Here, run this line through that block and cleat it down.”
It wasn’t that hard to figure out, if she just followed where he was pointing. “So if I’m a pollywog, what are you?”
“Grand High Birdman.” Oliver tugged on a few of the smaller ropes, frowning at the sails as if they looked any different at all than they had two seconds before. “Or at least, that’s the last promotion Dad gave me, right before the Gambit went down.”
It seemed Robert Queen and his ostentatious yacht would be on Oliver’s mind whether Felicity brought them up or not. From the moment they shoved off of the dock, his expression darkened the farther they got from shore.
Oliver sat in the back of the boat (“boats have sterns, not backs”) with the stick (“it’s called a tiller”) in his hand, steering them out of the harbor. With his free hand he pulled Felicity close to his side, where he could help her handle the ropes (“that’s a sheet, not a rope”).
“Oh my god,” she said at last. “How is this not a rope? Look at it. All long and braided and ropey!” She held up its knotted end to demonstrate.
“It’s used to trim a sail,” he said distractedly, peering out at the puffs of wind wrinkling the lake’s satin gray calm. “That makes it a sheet.”
“You boat people are insufferable.”
Then the first strong breeze filled the sails, and the little sloop listed heavily. Felicity braced her feet on the big metal thing in the middle of the boat (“centerboard case”) to keep from sliding toward the low side.
Most people would not have thought anything of the slight press of Oliver’s lips, the barest tightening of his hand on the tiller, or the spread of his free hand across Felicity’s back. Most people would not have attached any meaning to his slight indrawn breath. But Felicity knew what it looked like when Oliver tapped one of his fears on the shoulder, waited for it to turn around, and challenged it to a staring contest.
She also knew that it was easier to say, Let’s go fool around on a boat, honey than to say, Being on the water triggers some anxiety for me, and I’d like you to remain in constant physical contact with me while I orchestrate my own exposure therapy.
“Oliver?”
“Hmm?”
She scooted closer, right up under his arm, and for the next hour and a half she did everything he hadn’t asked.
Oliver skimmed them along over the waves at every point of sail, roll-tacked so hard they took on water, let the boat list nearly to the point of capsizing, and generally made the most of the afternoon’s strong, steady fifteen knots of wind. Felicity stayed within arm’s reach. Slowly, the little muscles between his brows and around his mouth unknitted.
“Why don’t we luff up for a while?” he said at last.
“Does that mean stop?”
“Kind of.”
He back-winded the jib, left the main to flutter, and tied down the tiller. Then he grabbed Felicity by a belt loop and slid her toward him across the gunwale.
Half an hour later, he gave her the tiller. He whispered instructions in her ear all the way home, in between kisses to the freshly tender places on her neck. That is why she feels comfortable blaming him for the two-foot long scratch in the hull. What woman can be expected to navigate around barnacle-encrusted pilings with Oliver Queen’s tongue in her ear?
He tried to promote her to Birdman Apprentice despite the scratch, for reasons more marital than maritime.
“Isn’t that skipping, like, four ranks?” she protested. “I’m glad you were impressed and all, but blowjobs are not a nautical skill. Let me earn it fair and square.”
Now she can tie a bowline knot, use a hand-operated bilge pump, locate the North Star, perform an overboard rescue, steer around a mark wide and tight, and trim correctly for any heading. Oliver says that makes her a Grand Birdman. Diggle, who despises boats, says it makes her far more bearable than every other Sperry-wearing yacht club wife he’s ever guarded.
Felicity still has not succumbed to Sperrys, but Abby wears them. Hers are bright pink with white leather laces, and right now they’re swinging happily beneath the skipper’s seat.
“With a boat this size, you don’t want sudden changes in velocity,” her father says. “So you’re going to accelerate slowly and steadily until you feel her get up on a plane. Ready?”
Felicity takes a seat on the white cushioned bench seat behind them, and she swirls the mostly melted ice and the half-muddled cucumber in her glass. Sweat dripping off him, sunglasses on his head, Jonathan joins her. “Is there more beer?”
She toes the ice chest his way.
There’s a crack-hiss, and he sighs down low on the seat. “Thank you, o giver of life and all things good.”
“You’re welcome, suck-up.”
“Forward on the throttle,” Oliver tells Abby, “nice and slow.”
Looking at the two backs on the bench seat in front of her, one broad and the other small and narrow-shouldered, Felicity can almost imagine Robert Queen leaning over little Oliver, pointing at instrument panels and bestowing silly titles.
The yacht picks up speed, bow nosing upward. A few seconds’ struggle, and her hull rises up out of the water. She settles onto a plane, wake churning white behind her.
Her name is Queen’s Peace, and she’s heading home with a fair wind and following sea.