Chapter Text
Of all the places in the world, Aziraphale is half glad he's free to roam Brooklyn after another boring gala filled with dull smiles.
There's no pretenses in the brick apartment windows and iron-wrought firescapes, nor a shard of hubris in the tired little kitchens and lobbies that peel off his Bentley’s windows as he zips past them. Aziraphale relishes their quiet contentment, the tranquility of mortar and cement that aim to nothing but just be. Funneled through its buildings, he half imagines it's possible to arrow anywhere.
Foreign city in its entirety, it doesn't feel as alien during this night, Christmas Eve with all its glitter. More than that, with its zigzagging skyline, it's easier to shake off the stagnant shape of Clarence House from his mind. To forget for a moment he has no idea where he's going, never privy to his own destiny.
Fourteen months and a string of bitter arguments, his mother still hasn't forgiven him the betrayal of dating a man, a commoner at that, spearheading through protocol, eviscerating the institution of their name. Aziraphale knows he's still being punished. Sent to minor appearances. The farthest, the better. Oceans between them if possible. Luckily with a small entourage that still counts Anathema in its ranks, God knows Aziraphale can barely function without her.
There's not even logic behind the crown’s decision. Frances hadn't missed the opportunity to show him his own worth. Offering Daniel the choice of five million pounds or the possibility of continuing being Aziraphale's partner.
Of course Daniel had chosen the money, smart man that he was, tandem with an airtight NDA, because heaven forbid the world sniffed out the second born prince of England was gay and disenchanted with the jowls of royalty.
It shouldn't even sting– Aziraphale hadn't loved Daniel the way he’d convinced himself he did. There hadn't been a churn in the belly, or a knocked out heart at the sight of him, no palms growing wet when revisiting the lines of his mouth at night, when the inert house slept around him like a coffin. But it’d been the first choice he made for himself and not for the monarchy, finding someone who when asked his opinion did it for the real value of it, and not just for a gesture.
Aziraphale knows it wasn't love, nothing to do with the unthinking constancy of it, the long-yearning for warmth. In hindsight it's clear: there's no slivers chipped off Aziraphale, no gory chunks gouged at the betrayal.
And it should be good, he should be smiling to know himself whole, but he's hit again with that paradoxical smallness and hugeness hooked in his gut since he was a small child. Aziraphale gets dizzy with it, the cosmic-large pull of the weight of his place in this world, and his real insignificance on a larger canvas.
Beyond: that he'll never be able to puncture through the borders of his Estengel cage, that no one will see him as nothing but a coat of arms, the dazzle of gold.
The leather of his gloves whines against the steering wheel, pulse on his knuckles. He drives through streets still crowded with buzzing noises, with people dotting the sidewalks, the green-red-blue of titillating lights strobing like fallen stars.
Christmas spirit in bloom.
Aziraphale really needs a drink.
At least he has a bit of time to dissolve into the evening. He has no idea of the things Anathema must've done to give him an open window of six hours with no bodyguards breathing down his neck, and no Newton fretting over minimal details, excellent valet that he is. It helps that Aziraphale's swapped the cream hues the world knows him for, for a turtleneck and coat all in black, paired with deep grey trousers. Tousled hair combed back and newly grown beard in place, he looks miles away from Aziraphale, Prince of England, Duke of Cornwall, Earl of Inverness, Baron of Rosings. A cosetted arsehole by bloodline.
Twenty minutes later, he's squeezing the Bentley between two cars, a block away from a bar that looks obscure enough to allow him anonymity. As places go, it's definitely an upgrade from the drab luxury of Sandringham, getting sweaty over football with cousin Angus who always had more drive than sense, eating out of Wedgewood plates that hadn't been used in a year, while trying not to think too hard about the overabundance of mistletoes and Christmas trees and lights sprinkled all over the castle, always balancing the brightness that lacked within the family.
The pub of choice is packed wall-to-wall. Aziraphale pushes in, half scurrying away from the outside. On the streets, he's alone, smothered by the weight of backroads leading to Park Avenue, asphalt housing the insidious thrum of disenchantment, but inside, he's only another drop in a sea of people, drifting.
Aziraphale isn't as snobbish as to ask for a Macallan 18 when approaching the bar, though he's craving the heavy peat-rich burn of it, so he settles for a beer, slinking to a dark corner with a tiny booth everyone's ignoring, peeling off his gloves.
The little table is scuffed and dented, a little tilted. Someone has left marker letters across the edge, and Aziraphale finds himself running fingertips over the lines. Back and forth and sideways. Shows of everyday life, simple and difficult and beautiful. And even here, crowded in by a throng’s heat, by their laughter, Aziraphale feels penned out, the outsider; basking in warmth, basking in closeness, basking in uncompromising peace and yet, still preternaturally frozen.
It's the loneliness of growing up walled from the world, kept away from the tangling intersections of other stories, of the beauty and ugliness of free chances and free choices.
A shadow waves over his moving hand.
“Is this seat taken?”
Aziraphale whips his face up, stomach doing a little somersault at the rasp of that voice.
The man sidling to his table is smiling, soft lips curved up, eyes all noon glow and legs going on for miles in dark jeans. He's thin and frankly stunning, soft throat peeking out of a black henley obscured by a well worn leather jacket. His hair shines like garnet, a wavy shoulder length spill, and Aziraphale can't help but wonder if it would be just as smooth between his fingers, silk between his teeth.
Lord in Heaven.
Gripping his public school manners back, he says, “No. Not at all. Please,” hoping the flush on his cheeks will go unnoticed.
The man grins, brilliant. “Thanks.” He sets his own beer on the table with a thud, along with a small notebook he produces from the leather jacket, sliding in the seat across from Aziraphale's with a sort of liquid ease. “You from out of town?”
Aziraphale can't help his own reflexive smile. “Is it that obvious?”
“Just for the new yorkers.” The man lifts his beer. “I'm Crowley.”
He tips back a swig, and Aziraphale destroys the urge to slip a thumb across that rolling neck. The pub seems to wind a bit tighter with warmth when Crowley stops swallowing.
“Nice to meet you, Crowley. You may call me Ezra.”
Hiding, once again. Aziraphale barely stirs at the twinge beneath his breastbone, used to cram himself into nothing on the regular.
“And what's a fancy guy like you doing in this dumpster?” Crowley asks. Aziraphale doesn't miss the glint in his eyes, all naked candlelight. He doesn't miss the subtle lift of a cheek that turns Crowley’s smile a smirk. Aziraphale doesn't miss the heat that bursts in the air when Crowley leans over the table. “Nothing to your liking in Chelsea?”
The attention of those eyes hits like the hazy punch of a hangover, makes him dazed. He's used to people watching him, to the world gorging on him, on his life, but it's been long since anyone has picked him out of a crowd without knowing the string of titles stitched to his name. Even Daniel had known.
And it's addictive.
It's dangerous to step on that road. Aziraphale isn't free to want. But he wants to grasp what Crowley's offering– for a night, a few hours maybe, and make it his. And it's terribly frustrating to know that the distance between them might be infinite, and so easily bridged with only a hand reaching over a scuffed table.
Crowley licks his lips and Aziraphale's heart hurries over.
Damn it all, he dares. “There's plenty here to find alluring if you don't mind me saying.”
Crowley's pupils blow open, mouth shining with a quick flick of tongue. “Is that so?”
Christ, those lips. Aziraphale's thumb flicks around the rim of his bottle. Round and round and round over the wet glass. It's a good proxy.
“Yes, very much so.” He holds Crowley's gaze while the pub’s lights flicker champagne to red and back, and Crowley's hair answers in kind, ruby-gold, until Crowley swings eyes away. Aziraphale mouths at his beer–he's parched–and feels it chill him from the inside out. “And to answer your question, I'm here on business, just for today.”
As warning goes, it's effective. A tight-set boundary. If Crowley's willing, there will be nothing beyond today, there could be nothing beyond today. They could exist together in a minute, a few hours, in the liminal space of an anonymous pub.
Crowley hums, flirting edged away and says, “Must be nice, traveling so often.”
His face turns considering. A little wistful. The condensation rivers of his bottle break between his fingers, a long thumb smearing the wetness.
“I suppose it could be,” Aziraphale answers honestly, half mesmerised by those hands, “if I didn't have schedules fit to burst with appointments I have no interest in.”
“You don't enjoy traveling then?” Crowley frowns. “Seeing the world?”
The naivete is a little enchanting. Aziraphale huffs a small laugh. “Maybe the first five times I did, and even then it was quite drab to be hauled about from place to place.”
Crowley gives him an odd look. The corner of his mouth sags. Just like his body.
“I wouldn't complain. I’d like to leave this damn city and see new places. Even if I had to make good on business dates I’d hate.” He darts Aziraphale a glance full of rueful shine, and not for the first time Aziraphale curses his own breeding, his family tree, the barbed wire of his title keeping him always so coddled, so unbelievably sheltered. What a snob arse. Crowley falls against the back of his seat, and his breath folds out a little shivery. “Think of that, a whole wide world and nothing else to see but gray skyscrapers and grime-filled streets every single day.”
Aziraphale blinks. “You've never left America?”
“Nope,” Crowley scoffs, “not enough money for that.”
It's there, in the spark of his eyes. That wanderlust Aziraphale never had, that had been rotted away since infancy amidst infinite trips to a hundred different places that brought nothing new.
The question that pops up in his mind feels unfit for a stranger, but Aziraphale thinks back on Daniel, on the ambivalent punch of his own wealth and misery. Until now Aziraphale could hardly blame him for setting his feet on reality and taking that hush money, because fairy tales lived only within books, and loving a prince in the real world was more a matter of enduring torture than finding bliss. Especially considering the Estengel House.
The stakes had always been exponentially high, and Aziraphale could never feel he was worth it.
It escapes him before he hauls it back down. “So, you’d say you'd prefer to have money over anything else?”
Surely the answer is yes.
But Crowley's lashes flick down and up– a long and dark brush, eyes full of blinking wonder. And then he laughs.
“No, not like that, and you can call me idealistic or stupid, but what I’d like to have is just a little more than enough to enjoy a tour or see the Mediterranean before kicking the damn bucket.” He chugs down another gulp of beer to then say, “I don't care about millions, I don't need millions, because money ties you up to it too, and I don't wanna be tied.”
His face crunches and moves when he talks. Says it all with such a conviction that Aziraphale is a little surprised by. Crowley can't be older than twenty five, and at thirty six, Aziraphale has never felt the burn of belief on anything he's been taught.
He can't help it. He's drawn.
He folds arms over the table. A palm closer. “Money ties you up? How so?”
Crowley quickly pages his notebook open, until he finds the stunning rendition of a charcoal-sketched dragon. He whirls it to Aziraphale. “Remember the old dragon myths? Fáfnir wasn't just a tale of braveness but of greed.” He snatches back the notebook but doesn't close it, only traces a fingertip following the large span of a cartilaginous wing, then tips it until his well filed nail scraps along paper. “We get stupid about it. Just look at how people act around money.”
Aziraphale's pulse skips. Red hair, whisky eyes, words that singe. A nest egg of a man hidden right in the middle of a seedy pub, under a slew of concrete in a frozen city. The moment zings like champagne bubbles through Aziraphale, drives a shiver crawl under his skin.
He remembers being seven, hiding from Gabriel in the Upper Library in Windsor Castle, with The Story of Siegfried in his hands, palms leaving wet marks on the black dust jacket. He remembers being seven and feeling boxed in by a loneliness no child should feel.
Different from now, in this forgettable booth, close to this unforgettable man.
He reaches over to glide a finger over that paper, along the crosshatched ribbon of a body that coils on itself. Allows himself a bit of a teasing smile, “To be accurate Fáfnir was more a Serpent than a dragon.”
Aziraphale lets his finger bump and slide against Crowley's, hit and collapse. It makes his chest band tight when Crowley's cheeks lift, dimple, go flush.
“Pedantic, aren't we? Good thing you're cute.” He chuckles but lets his hand rest on the notebook where their fingers meet. “But if I were to be a Serpent, I’d choose knowledge over wealth.”
On the notebook, their middle and index fingers interlock.
“Is that so?” Aziraphale breathes his words just for the two of them. “A proper Serpent of Eden, you are.”
The slant of the shadows, the noise of life around hug them from all places, and in this minute, with this man in this booth, it's easy for Aziraphale to pretend to be someone else entirely. To be only a man ready to drown in brandy-sharp eyes.
Crowley hums, low and soft. “Oh, you bet I’d have told Eve to bite that damn apple.”
Their beers run dry, and Aziraphale quickly slips to the bar to get them two more like a college bloke giddy on a late night date. Aziraphale has never had one of those. In Oxford, everyone had known him to the last strand of hair, and he'd been too afraid to ask any boy anywhere.
Right now, he thrums with the satisfaction of a broken famine.
“So, there isn't anything outrageously expensive you‘d want?” he asks, pushing the bottle toward Crowley. “That you’d change your mind for?”
The glass slides, leaving a wet mark on the table. No coasters. Tacky.
Fulfillingly ordinary.
So unlike Crowley and the beautiful tilt of his mouth when he grins.
“Want is a very strong word, y'know?” Crowley tucks his bottom lip between rows of uneven teeth. A burst of red between white. His fingers descend over the neck of the bottle as if its curve were a staircase, one of those in front of the thousand brownstones in the borough. Down and back up again, cyclical. Aziraphale soaks it all, drinks it all, watching the way Crowley's breath releases in a flare after catching a little. “But uh, if I ever got rich, I’d like a Bentley. But not a modern one–”
“Of course not,” Aziraphale smiles.
“-but a vintage,” Crowley finishes. Then he starts again, wincing, “There. You think I'm a hypocrite, right?”
Aziraphale rushes to shake his head. “No, no. You're putting words in my mouth.” Everyone in the family owns an outrageously high-end car. Gabriel prefers Jaguars, while cousin Michael favours Aston Martins. Why couldn't Crowley want the same? Though he's already suspecting the reason behind might run deeper than only preferences. “May I ask why? It seems so very specific.”
Hand previously on the bottle, Crowley takes it up, scrapes it over his face. Scoops it around his mouth, to then rest his chin over his open palm. His gaze drops to the table.
A strange sort of quiet yearning draws itself in his eyes.
Aziraphale wants so badly to touch him.
“It's not the luxury you know?” Crowley pins his attention on him, and his throat breaks in a groan, a sigh. “God, you're gonna think I'm stupid.”
“I would never,” Aziraphale says and means it.
Around, people hug each other, midnight coming quickly to their clocks. Christmas Eve, Christmas proper, and the gift of a coincidence, the unadulterated thrill of being close to a gorgeous, real man.
Aziraphale's heart kicks in his chest when Crowley folds arms over the table once more.
“Tv wasn't a thing we owned while I grew up,” he says, intimate, “but my dad had a whole collection of Bond’s novels, and I used to spend my days after school with my nose in the pages, reading about this guy and his cool car. It just stuck, I guess. It's an image that stayed, even after my dad left us.”
Sadness flashes, strained, over Crowley's eyes. Once it recedes, a burden remains; Crowley's fingers go back to draw infinite circles on the table. A memory he probably can't escape.
There's a hitch and hurt in Aziraphale's chest. Suddenly, he wishes, more than anything, to scrape him clean of that sorrow.
“I'm sorry.”
“Don't be.” Crowley sips the words between his teeth. “It was a long time ago.”
Aziraphale watches him push the rim of the bottle against his mouth, drink nicely and controlled. Once the base of the bottle hits the table again, Crowley dips his tongue between his lips, parts them, draws air in. The exhale gusts out slowly.
Aziraphale pictures feeling the warm lick of his breath, and the singe of alcohol in the wet shine of Crowley's mouth. Tongue, teeth, the heat of his palate. What would Crowley taste like?
He isn't expecting the gradual awareness of knowing he wishes to find out before the night ends.
“And what part of this fine city are you from?” Aziraphale asks, burning already.
“Brooklyn, but the ugly part.” Crowley makes a face. “Not Williamsburg or Cobble Hill, but the places that don't get into movies.” A silver-fish second-long pause coils in the grooves of the table. “And you?”
“London, ah, Central London that is.” Aziraphale fights down the tingling crawl across his skin. “Do you come here often?”
“Yeah, sometimes. To take a breather before or after a full shift.”
“Oh, and what is that you do if you don't mind me asking?”
Crowley smiles again. Lifts his beer and tips it in Aziraphale's direction. “Bartender. Not in this bar, though. Don't shit where you eat and all that.”
Aziraphale blinks a few times. Then flicks eyes down to the notebook still open next to Crowley's elbow. The level of skill is astounding. The witty pencil lines that make it all seem effortless, no matter how vivid it looks, how beautifully complex.
“I was almost certain you were going to tell me it was something involving art,” Aziraphale says, and whisks eyes away from Crowley to set them on the notebook. “You're very good at it.”
Crowley shrugs, dismissive, but the ridge of his cheekbones turns decisively red. “Thanks, ‘s just a hobby for now, but to be honest? I'm saving up money to apply to art school. Maybe in two years if I save enough.”
“Two years?” Aziraphale boggles.
How costly could this be? The budget of a weekend at Holyroodhouse Palace for his mother’s annual garden party. Aziraphale knows this, knows everything about the massive gorge stretching between him and most of the rest of the world, but not until now he's been knocked down on the head by the clearly baffling confirmation of facts.
It feels unfair, of course it does, and Aziraphale wants to throw money at Crowley's dream and watch it solidify, but he already knows even if he could, Crowley wouldn't accept it. And Aziraphale wonders how it would be to cultivate the patience to wait and persevere in a wish, a want, a craving that turns longing that turns love.
The yearning for it circles around his feet, bites his ankles. Aziraphale wants time to use all his well-crafted patience.
“It's a long time, I know,” Crowley chuckles, eyes creased lovely, “but one can wait forever for a dream.”
Aziraphale fixes eyes on Crowley's– glances over to those long, rough fingers, the worn out heels of his palms, the short and chipped nails. Looks at him whole and feels himself untethered on a yearning to know him in pieces, in swathes of mind, and stretches of body, in troves of secrets.
A night can be a long time too when every second runs filled with no spaces for silence, for the absence of touch.
Aziraphale's mouth slants up. “I suppose.”
Crowley finishes his beer and drags the bottle to the corner of the table. Now, the little notebook becomes the mainstay. “If you like these, then let me draw you,” he says, eyes glittery with just a hint of laxness. He produces a regular pencil from his jacket pocket, and twists it like a magic wand. “Just a token for the drinks.”
Aziraphale giggles. “Alright.”
He's been drawn before, forced to sit on old armchairs, and stand in starched uniforms that caused him a terrible rash afterwards. He doesn't know what to do now, how to fully be– just be.
Crowley must sense his shivery squirming.
“Just stay there, grabbing your beer. It won't take long,” he says, soothingly.
Aziraphale watches him put his hand to paper, fingers on wood, graphite to sheet. Soon, his own outlines are roughed in with scything slashes, a ballet of lines. A stroke to define the curve of his hairline, highlighting the fall of a stray curl. Eyes, nose, mouth, chin. Aziraphale knows his own face, but he's still surprised to see Crowley form the bridge of his nose, shape the delicate indent of his philtrum with uncanny attention to detail, as if he could see things in Aziraphale that he, himself, has missed. Black-white, grey, no colour, but Aziraphale thinks his eyes have never seemed so piercing blue, nor has his jaw ever hinted at the soft runoff of a neck that, hidden now, seems so steady.
He's smiling, he's content. In Crowley's notebook he's nothing but a random man lost to the evening in the warmth of a pub.
And it hits Aziraphale there, that this simulacrum of him isn't tied to his face, but to a moment trapped in dim lights, to seconds offloaded of the daunting, harrowing pressure of being who he is.
Sketched out, Aziraphale looks happy, he's never seemed so vivid.
Something hot and tight writhes in his chest when Crowley finally rips the page off the notebook and handles it to him.
“There.” His smile dims at the corners. Unsure. “Not my best work with so little time, but you have such a handsome face it isn't tricky to capture your best angles.”
Aziraphale pinches the sheets between tingling fingertips. His breath feels light in his throat. He rubs a thumb over the textured paper and is arrested by the dizzying punch of knowing this is far more intimate than only talking ensconced in a booth: the drawing is smudged dark in a corner by the meat of Crowley's palm, soft from the oil of his fingers, from the sweat of friction.
He has a piece of Crowley now as well.
“That's–” Aziraphale stops. Then starts again, larynx crowding with air, “It's marvelous, Crowley.” His own eyes stare back at him from the portrait, and he can hardly believe this is the man Crowley's seeing. Carefree, nonchalant– striking. Aziraphale’s brows curve down. “Though I should say, I don't think you were quite honest with your pencil. I'm not as dashing as all that.”
Crowley's fingers creep closer over the table. Settle over Aziraphale's. Underneath them, Aziraphale ignites.
“Nah, trust me sweetheart, you're plenty dashing,” Crowley says, dimples coming to life again when his mouth tilts up.
A warm ripple swims along Aziraphale's chest, kissing each of his ribs, and trying to make them collapse.
But a second later, Crowley's brows pitch down, lip going between his teeth.
Aziraphale asks, “Is there something wrong?”
“Dunno.” Crowley tilts his head. His eyes spark. “Your face rings bells like crazy. As if I've seen you before.”
Christ.
Aziraphale's heart ratchets up in a way he's not primed to handle. Beneath Crowley's, his fingers twitch, but he forces them to relax, just as his eyes ski down to hide from direct contact.
“I– I don't think we've seen each other, I’d certainly remember you.”
Crowley laughs and gives his hand a squeeze. “No, I know, there's no way in Hell I could've forgotten that face.”
Aziraphale looks up at him. It's there– winding and lacing around them like the warmth in the room. That pull he can't fight back, doesn't want to fight back. That tug that sizzles across his body, that burrows in a place hungry for a smattering of things just like these. Simple, ordinary things, wrapped in exquisite, unordinary moments.
If he could just only–
There's a rumble and the scratchy rise of a ringtone coming from Aziraphale’s coat. By instinct, he fishes it out.
He can't help the way his face crumbles when he sees the caller ID.
Sandringham line.
Mother.
Aziraphale pulls his hand back from where it's resting under Crowley's. His fingers go numb before he blocks the screen again.
In front of him, Crowley's mouth has gone shock-open. “Fuck, don't tell me you have a partner.”
The dread in his voice doesn't fly too high up Aziraphale's head, but he doesn't register it proper with the rock sitting in his stomach.
“Not at all. It's my family,” Aziraphale croaks.
Crowley's face softens. “Shouldn't you answer?”
All of Aziraphale's life has been a clearly demarcated terrain filled with shoulds, and musts and ought tos. But after so long, his mind rebels, his heart already toeing the line past the fence of obligation.
He stares at his mobile zip black again once the call disconnects.
And starts over.
Just for tonight, just one night to let himself breathe at full capacity, letting the disappointment in his mother's eyes flicker to nothing.
Just one night to drown in Crowley. To choose himself. He's lived too long appeasing people, his mother, the crown– he wants to lever up and knock down whoever keeps breathing down his neck.
“Should I? Perhaps.” He slips his mobile back into the inner pocket of his coat. Then he folds carefully the paper of his portrait until the ragged edge is almost paired with the ruler-clean side. He pockets that too. “Do I want to? Most certainly not.”
“Maybe they're worried about you,” Crowley says, quietly.
Aziraphale laughs at that, full-belly.
“Oh, darling if you knew my family, you'd know that's not the case.”
“Aren't they waiting for you, then?” Crowley asks. This time, there's something brewing under his tone, that Aziraphale can definitely grasp.
Hope in a happenstance.
Aziraphale slides his own hand, palm up, and chooses to offer Crowley the chance to like him, to pick him from a pub as if Aziraphale was nothing but a simple, unremarkable man starving for affection on a frozen night. It's a joke of the universe that down to the brass tacks it's not far flung for reality. Aziraphale is an incomplete, lonely man, parched for a pair of gold eyes, for the curving sweep of long hair kissing a pale neck.
He's a prince is a man is a mess yearning for a closeness he's never felt.
“I have nowhere to be,” Aziraphale says, glittering with expectation.
Crowley sips a breath that hisses. His eyes are an open flame. “Nowhere?”
Fingers, long and thin thread with Aziraphale's, knuckles on knuckles. A thumb traversing the side of his palm.
“I think,” he says, deafened by the burring of his blood in his ears, “that answer lies with you.”
Crowley's mouth splits on a grin. “Really?”
“I’d go wherever you want to go tonight,” Aziraphale says earnestly. There's an ache in his gut when he sees Crowley stand up and pull him closer. The distance set by the table eaten by the inertial tug of those arms.
Aziraphale is ablaze all over, trembling beneath the herringboned pattern of his coat.
A palm away, Crowley's beautiful to the point it makes his heart squeeze and trip over like a boy with a first crush. The quirk of that red mouth. The drape of that hair. The suggestion of all that fine skin on that delicate neck, hiding under black.
Crowley quickly tucks his notebook away, and pulls him by the hand to wend through the bodies between their table and the door.
They spill into the streets, and when Aziraphale flits eyes to the side, he sees the well-lined shape of Crowley's profile, gorgeous in its offering. Aziraphale's deprived, starved, and he can't but wind arms around Crowley's narrow waist, below the leather jacket. Draws them together until just the cold pulses between them.
Crowley trembles in his arms but his hands sink into the plushness of the coat at Aziraphale's back. The curve of his bottom lip shines with spit. A lush swell. One that Aziraphale wants to flick a tongue over, sink teeth into.
He smells of mint and leather, and there's pure, raw craving in Aziraphale's insides wanting to breathe in his scent from the source.
“May I kiss you?”
It's a confident question. Crowley's already sliding eyes at his mouth as if he wanted to deduce Aziraphale's life based on their taste and shape.
Aziraphale will let him.
Crowley nods. “Yeah.”
The soft thread of acceptance has Aziraphale falling.
He takes Crowley's mouth.
The damp push of them is a buzzing hum in Aziraphale's chest. It's a present, firm, grasping kiss, and Aziraphale clings to it like a lifeline, draws a hand up to tangle it into the glossy fall of Crowley's hair. He feels the warmth of Crowley's neck against the meat of his hand, and the cool slip of the strands between his fingers. Details. A dual punch of sensory flow that sears itself in his mind. Aziraphale judders with a pleasant shudder when he registers the noises punching out of Crowley, buffeting against his lips– little gasping breaths; when the push of their closed lips segues into the wet part of Crowley's mouth that teases him to take.
Aziraphale does, heart skyrocketing in rhythm.
It's a rolling blaze. The burn of a bonfire catching on a hayloft, going gorging.
The world smudges absent.
Aziraphale's hand clutches tight at Crowley's waist, shivering at the faint taste of alcohol on his tongue, at the blunt suggestion of his teeth. He's desperate for the flow of his touch, for more, for everything. Aziraphale wants to be free to chase those red-wet lips in public, fighting for the vertical integrity of his spine each time Crowley whines, clutching him a little tighter.
Without noticing, he has backed Crowley against the side of the pub, hips nudged so close to his, Aziraphale knows it can't be proper. But he loves how his hands fit over the curve of Crowley's waist and neck, how it feels impossible not to kiss him, giving a final little nip to Crowley's bottom lip. Letting his teeth sink there softly, before dragging back.
Exquisite.
He's never kissed anyone like this, so open-hearted, unprompted, without pretenses.
When he pulls back, he's light– helium-brain and his lips pulse, bruise-sore.
Crowley's own aren't faring any better.
Aziraphale gulps the tide of air, feeling his lungs expand. He's dizzy.
“Fuck.” Crowley laughs. Red-cheeked, red-mouthed. Eyes like fairy lights. “Fuck.”
The night is still rolling underneath them, and Aziraphale needs every second.
The hand on Crowley's waist seeks out Crowley's hand, seeks him out.
And finds him.
“Come now,” Aziraphale says, throat dry, fully present in his skin, “I’d like to show you something I think you might like.”