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“They’ve got some good ideas,” Crowley mused. “Red wine as a daily necessity for all. Yummy.”
“Mm,” Aziraphale agreed. He ate a few more grapes from a glazed dish, then a dried fig. A slice of white cheese followed nicely, on a morsel of dark chewy bread. Petronius really had outdone himself this evening. Those oysters - what a treat.
He reached for his earthenware mug of wine again. “True,” he said, sipping. “Eminently good ideas.”
The warmth in Crowley’s laughing eyes seemed to roll over him, luscious and deep. This might be their fifth or sixth mug. He’d stopped counting.
“Plus, extra wine,” Crowley said, with a flamboyance that suggested he was having a very nice time indeed, “soaked into flowers of myrtle and juniper, is the latest tried-and-tested remedy for what?”
“Ooo, I really have no idea. An imbalance of the humours? Too much black bile!”
“Nope.”
“Give me a clue.”
Wickedness flickered across Crowley’s face. “Give me your hand.”
Bemused, Aziraphale proffered his hand, and Crowley’s eyebrows went up a fraction.
“Gosh, you’re very trusting.”
“Not always,” Aziraphale said, and then, because that felt unseemly somehow, flashed him a winning smile. “You’ve earned it.”
“Huh,” Crowley said, a little guarded, eyebrows still raised as if he were passing his own judgement on that; and then he shrugged and lifted Aziraphale’s hand to his mouth.
For one disconcerting moment Aziraphale imagined that Crowley was going to kiss the back of his hand.
He felt a delicate warmth all over at the mere thought.
But Crowley didn’t kiss his hand, no; he very much drew Aziraphale’s knuckles to his lips and then, quick as a flash, sank his teeth into his knuckles, keeping his gaze fixed on Aziraphale’s the whole time.
Heat roared through Aziraphale at that, even as he protested and snatched back his hand. “Ow!”
Crowley was all gleeful innocence. “What? You asked for a clue!”
“What sort of clue was that?!” Aziraphale demanded, inspecting the neat crescents shining pink across the back of his hand and the base of his first knuckle. He could hear his own pulse in his ears. On some level, that sting of teeth had felt wonderful.
Crowley addressed him like an errant pupil, with an encouraging gesture. “What, my lord physician, might you be trying to treat with a mixture of wine, myrtle and juniper flowers in the year 41AD?”
“Sudden afflictions of the mind?” Aziraphale suggested archly.
Crowley flicked his tongue over his teeth. “Snakebites.”
He looked far too pleased with himself.
“Ohh,” Aziraphale said, rubbing his knuckles. “I might just give the snake a good thrashing, myself.”
Crowley snorted, reached for his wine again. “I’d like to see you try.”
At some point the rest of the diners had migrated from the deepening shadows of Petronius’s back room, but a smiling youth came and refilled their wine jug from the amphora on the counter nevertheless.
He took their plates, then moved around the secluded space, lighting more candles. The few windows were set high in the wall, and it was now entirely dark outside.
Crowley had put his glasses back on as the youth approached, and the room to Aziraphale seemed to dim a little despite the extra illumination.
Of all the eras of human history he’d lived through, this spell in Rome was proving the most enjoyable so far. What he’d found in Crowley’s company felt extraordinary. What was the word…? Camaraderie. Yes. What an excellent example of camaraderie they represented.
Crowley took a slow slurp of wine and rolled it around in his mouth, tipping his head back against the slant of the cushion-strewn couch they’d been banqueting along. He’d become progressively loose-limbed over the course of the evening. His dark toga pooled around his increasingly boneless sprawl, creating intriguing pockets of shadow whenever he moved.
Now the gold leaves in Crowley’s hair flashed, catching candlelight.
“What was it I heard the other day…?” Crowley asked the tiled ceiling. “Baths, wine and acts of Venus corrupt our bodies, but baths, wine and acts of Venus make life worth living.” He hiked an eyebrow at Aziraphale. “Thoughts?”
Aziraphale arranged himself a little more comfortably amongst his own cushions. “Definitely one of yours.”
Crowley cackled, and Aziraphale covered his own grin with his cup. Not speculating on how many personalised opinions Crowley might have on that particular subject matter.
It was a question Aziraphale had been known to ponder on occasion: how much more experience was Crowley wresting out of this mortal form? Compared with Aziraphale’s tendency towards physical restraint.
Food excepted, of course. Food very much excepted. But acts of Venus would be a different matter entirely. Aziraphale himself had not indulged - with his own body or any other.
Asked directly, he would assert an absolute disinterest in the baser urges of the flesh.
Asked obliquely, perhaps deep in his cups, he might just admit he knew not to tug on those threads laced tightly within himself, lest the whole edifice of control unravel.
He was fairly sure that Crowley had chosen the other path, the path of temptation and exploration, although they’d never discussed it. He consoled himself that it was very likely part of Crowley’s job description. Crowley would surely be under scrutiny if he wasn’t constantly out fraternising. He could picture him easily (but of course he didn’t).
“I don’t see why baths corrupt the body,” was all Aziraphale said. “Make it go a little wrinkly sometimes, perhaps, but on the whole I find them quite restorative.”
He frankly enjoyed the ritual of being steamed and slathered with essential oils, rubbed with white sand, and then cleaned off by a burly youth wielding a specifically designed scraping tool. It was certainly a more fragrant affair than the acrid wax-and-ash mixture that had passed for soap back in Mesopotamia.
“I think they’re talking about the baths as a political continuum, not referring solely to the ablutions,” Crowley said, then shot him another sly smile. “Or maybe they meant baths, wine and sex simultaneously.”
Aziraphale blinked. “Quite. That does sound… most corrupting.”
“Oh I don’t know,” Crowley said, in a tone that Aziraphale associated with Crowley’s most playful teasing. “Sounds like a rather fun evening to me.”
Aziraphale gave him the duly scandalised look that he knew Crowley enjoyed eliciting from him.
They were becoming practised in this. Did Crowley know how Aziraphale stored away his casual words to take out and turn over later, revisiting the peculiar nourishment of their conversation during the more sparse times of being a solitary Principality guarding this earthly realm?
Probably not.
“Of course, they’re not all good ideas,“ Crowley was saying.
“No,” Aziraphale agreed. “Quite the point of me being here, that not all their ideas are good.”
“And quite the point of my presence to stimulate… variety!”
They shared a private smirk with each other.
“Take Avarice,” Crowley said, swirling dark wine in his mug. “The insatiable desire for wealth or power. Sound like a good idea?”
“Oh no, not at all. That’s a sin, you know. Something of a biggie.”
“Angels don’t sin,” Crowley said.
“No indeed.” Aziraphale swirled his own wine, peering into its hypnotic glossy depths as they spiralled, ever more enticing.
“Not for themselves,” Crowley said.
There was a long pause.
“Occasionally for the greater good,” Crowley added casually, and Aziraphale partially inhaled his next sip.
“No, no,” he said, coughing slightly against the burn. “Certainly not. I can’t imagine that happening.”
“Just so they know what to look out for,” Crowley said, sounding almost soothing. He peered at Aziraphale over his glasses. “A passing familiarity is awfully useful, don’t you know? So as to recognise how the thing works.”
Was that true? It sounded true. Crowley’s eyes had disappeared behind the eye-glasses again. Aziraphale had a sense they looked very wise.
“Obviously everyone knows the big wrongs. Murder, pillage, etc.,” Crowley said, listing them on his fingers. Sounded wise, too. “The obvious. I remember saying as much to Cassius. ‘Cassius,’ I said, ‘my lean and hungry friend – you’ll regret this. Why not just get one over Caesar the old fashioned way by seducing his wife?’”
“Which would still be a sin,” Aziraphale reminded him, and Crowley waggled his hand.
“Ehh. Doesn’t matter anyway, he wanted to go big. So now he’s Down Below,” Crowley lowered his voice, waggled his eyebrows, “alongside, obviously, all the rest of the conspirators and Jules himself. Pretty embarrassing if you ask me. I think Beelzebub’s got them in a room all together, hasn’t bothered with a demon to torture them, figured the sheer social awkwardness would be enough for the first few centuries.”
Aziraphale gave a small pout of distaste at the reminder of Crowley’s colleagues’ penchant for ironic punishment.
“But as I was saying – everyone’s hot on the big ones, but what about the more nuanced end of things?”
“Heaven isn’t particularly partial to nuance.”
“Don’t I know it,” Crowley shot back, but softened it with a jaunty wink that made Aziraphale ever so slightly tense and simultaneously thrilled.
“Of course some sins are very obvious, very specific,” Crowley said. “Can’t commit adultery if you’re not married.”
“Well that is true,” Aziraphale allowed.
“And the wider context is important as well.”
“Mm. Inarguably it should be.”
“Consider the beautiful young woman wed against her will, due to her father’s debts, to a terrible fellow,” Crowley said, and Aziraphale winced because these stories were not uncommon. “And now she’s fallen in love with the kind young man who assists her with the goats,” Crowley said. “Does this make her an adulteress, with all the condemnation that entails?”
“It doesn’t sound like it was her fault,” Aziraphale hazarded. Feeling a wave of benevolence, he imagined he would let that one slide. “And she hasn’t actually—“
“They vigorously consummate their love under the full moon, away from prying eyes,” Crowley breezed on.
“Ah. Well that is more tricky.”
“For the sin of adultery or the sin of unwedded desire?”
“The—I just really think they should have waited,” Aziraphale said, even as Crowley shook his head.
“They would never see each other again. Fortune drew them apart and never more did either speak of their union, yet the memories they shared proved a steadfast buoyancy against the challenges they later faced throughout their otherwise-pious lives.”
“Oh. Hm,” Azipraphale said. He tipped his head to one side, then the other, weighing illusory feathers, then grimaced apologetically. “I think we both know where they’re going, sorry. Adultery is adultery.”
Crowley pouted, then hummed and glanced to the side. “What if they were actually secretly married,” he suggested, “but then they were remarried against their will to cruel new suitors and duly forced to consummate those weddings instead?”
“What, both of them? Sounds a bit far-fetched,” Aziraphale said, and then, at Crowley’s crestfallen look, added generously, ‘but look, no, I take your point, it hardly counts if they didn’t have any choice in the matter.”
Crowley beamed at him and Aziraphale found himself beaming back. Benediction always did feel lovely.
“There you are, see,” Crowley said. “Nuance. Then in a few hundred years time, they’ll be rebranding Sloth as self-care, you mark my words,” he added, tapping the side of his nose. “They’ll reclaim it as a crucial aspect of not burning up in the fires of the civilising machine.”
Aziraphale didn’t really follow, but he was enjoying the curl and flick of Crowley’s intonation around all his lovely words. He could listen to Crowley for hours – opining his off-beat views and making his clever little hand gestures to illustrate his points, that expressive mouth taking Aziraphale on an entirely separate journey of syllable and syntax, utterly delightful.
Crowley was looking at him.
Aziraphale realised he was gazing at Crowley’s lips.
He cleared his throat and resolved again to concentrate. “Hm?”
“I was saying,” Crowley said, with the gracious patience of someone trying not to look pleased, “if you make a nice pot, really take your time over it, get it just the right thickness and smoothness and decorate it properly – and then it holds water and looks right – a moment of Pride doesn’t unravel a person.”
“I… suppose not,” Aziraphale said doubtfully. Their earlier conversation felt like a scroll viewed through a pane of smudged glass. What had they been debating?
“Likewise if someone makes a better pot than you… does it hurt to acknowledge you wish you had their skill?”
“That sounds more like being courteous,” Aziraphale said.
“That’s what I think, too. And if that person then breaks your pot,” Crowley said, sliding the glasses back down over his nose to meet Aziraphale’s eye, his gaze sardonic, “wouldn’t that irritate even the most reasonable sort of chap?”
Aziraphale gave a short laugh. “Irritation is a far cry from Wrath.”
“Sure it is.”
“Mild irritation is part of the human condition,” Aziraphale said. “Not a whatsit. Sin.”
“Oh I quite agree,” Crowley said. “Matter of degrees, isn’t it? For example, I think we can all agree that Gluttony is a rational response to hunger if you’re suddenly presented with a horn of plenty… especially if you never know when you might eat again.”
Aziraphale preferred not to dwell on Gluttony. He still remembered that ox. “Matter of degrees,” he said, nodding. “Quite so.”
“And oughtn’t a distinction be drawn between sins that cause damage and sins that, well… don’t?” Crowley said, with an insouciant shrug. “Take it from me, plenty of Envious people live virtuous lives and never amount to anything as far as Down Below is concerned.”
“Ah, but the concern is with internal destruction wrought by succumbing to baser instincts,” Aziraphale said, draining his mug. This was a really delicious wine. He dabbed the corner of his mouth with one knuckle. “One thing leads to another.”
Crowley’s gaze travelled from Aziraphale’s mouth to his empty mug, then back up to his eyes. “Does it, indeed?”
“Indeed it may do,” Aziraphale said, fancying that he now sounded like the wise one.
Crowley stretched over with the wine jug to top them both up, then returned to empty the last dark trickle into Aziraphale’s mug. “And that’s your lot.”
It felt unclear if he was talking about sins or wine or something else entirely. “Well,” Aziraphale said after a moment, opting all at once to tug on their previous conversational thread. “It’s not quite.”
“Isn’t it?”
“There’s also Lust,” Aziraphale said, aiming for casual. Factual. Can’t argue with facts.
Crowley gave him a sharp glance. Then he slowly, idly removed his glasses and set them on the table by the wine jug. “How could I forget,” he said, in the tone of someone who rarely forgot. “That’s not a matter of degrees, though. That’s cut and dried. Black and white. It’s fine to want it, but you mustn’t give in.”
A tiny frown formed between Aziraphale’s brows. That wasn’t right. Couldn’t be. “Err… no. Lust is all of it: thoughts, actions, all of it. Forbidden.”
Crowley scoffed. “Come on. If you act on it, with the wrong person, that’s the main issue. There’s no harm in a bit of light… imaginative play.”
“It is forbidden,” Aziraphale repeated, then doubted himself. “Isn’t it?”
“Doesn’t make much sense,” Crowley said. “The sin should surely not be the wanting – alone, exclusively – but rather the giving in.”
As he spoke, Crowley shifted his head from side to side as if trying to ease a cramp in his neck, stretching out the muscles there. It was almost like he was trying to draw Aziraphale’s attention to his shapely shaven throat, the intriguing shadows his russet hair made at the base of his skull, cropped close and almost feathery this year, burnished by candlelight. It suited him. As did the dark toga, especially where the neckline plunged between his collarbones.
What had they been saying?
Aziraphale resolved again to ignore—everything but their conversation. “The sin is both.”
“Interesting you should say that. I just would have thought… never mind.”
“What?”
“Well, I would have thought that having the thoughts would be quite impossible to prevent, sometimes. Take… when I gave you that little bite earlier,” he said, and flashed his teeth when Aziraphale blinked. “Bit of fun. But the sort of thing that might give some people ideas,” Crowley said, with a flick of his fingers suggesting that he and Aziraphale could not possibly be those people. “You didn’t ask for that, did you?”
“…No,” Aziraphale said, uncertain of where Crowley was going with this.
He remembered with startling clarity the uncontrolled wildfire that had seized his body at the brief sting of Crowley’s teeth closing on his knuckle, the brush of Crowley’s lips on the back of his hand, the indentations he’d left in Aziraphale’s smarting skin.
“No, exactly,” Crowley said. “I take full responsibility. You didn’t choose to be bitten, but I bit you anyway.”
Azpiraphale swallowed; Crowley’s words were falling with odd resonance, catalysing a disorientating warmth that Aziraphale felt Crowley could see playing across his face.
“So if,” Crowley said, eyes gleaming at whatever he saw in Aziraphale’s expression, “hypothetically of course, that playful, totally innocuous touch had inadvertently stimulated a sinful thought or two, could you really be held accountable? Morally, I mean,” Crowley added, in a soothing voice that had quite the opposite effect on Aziraphale’s nerves. “Given you had no choice in the matter.”
Aziraphale opened his mouth to reply, but no words came out. He felt like he needed to shake his head to clear it. Was Crowley really saying these things, or had the potent dregs of the wine suddenly gone to his head?
“I just think it’s so unfair,” Crowley murmured. “Ploughing along, minding their own business, and suddenly there goes poor humanity – damned immediately without even a chance to prove themselves worthy, just because some strapping labourer flashed his pearly whites on a hot summer’s day.”
Aziraphale refused to imagine whatever had put that image into Crowley’s head. “But it’s lusting,” he insisted. “Thinking lascivious thoughts. It’s intentional. It’s a verb. It’s—what are you doing now?”
His voice was a touch strangled.
Crowley was loosening the pin fastening his toga so the neckline fell even more open, exposing the angled juts of his clavicles. He was wearing some sort of necklace or fine metal chain, which carded along the muscles of his neck and disappeared into the dark dip of fabric across his chest, catching the light and Aziraphale’s attention.
“What? Hot in here, isn’t it.” The candles flared as if to agree with him, and the gold in Crowley’s hair sparkled wildly. “What were you saying?”
“It’s a verb,” Aziraphale said, dry-mouthed. What indeed. He realised the candles flaring had illuminated an entirely deserted banqueting scene; what time was it? Had everyone left? Had Crowley made them all leave or was it just much later than he thought?
He took another sip, swallowed hard. “Volo, debeo, habeo; to want, to need, to have to.”
“I want,” Crowley murmured, in a voice that stroked the rough edges of Aziraphale’s hearing. “I need… I have to…”
Aziraphale couldn’t tell if he was being teased or revered. Or simply agreed with. “Exactly, they’re all purposeful actions, it’s a very – er – active sin.”
“But they’re still largely involuntary thoughts,” Crowley said. His eyes were half closed, his voice hypnotic. “Shame to sin just by thinking things you can’t… un-think. But if that’s the case, as you say, if it’s as absolute as all that, then once those earth-shattering thoughts have been had – what’s the point in resisting? The damage to the eternal soul has apparently already been done.”
“There’s always.” Aziraphale’s voice was appallingly husky. He cleared his throat, tried again. He needed more air. “Repenting.”
This heat was oppressive. It couldn’t just be candles. His robe felt heavy, airless. He shifted in his seat, moved his feet apart, dangerously close to a squirm.
Crowley was watching him with open interest now, his smouldering gaze not even holding a pretence of innocence any more.
“Crowley,” Aziraphale said faintly, his face heating as his mind caught up with recent events. “Are you—are you trying to corrupt me?”
With a brilliant flash of a grin, Crowley slid closer on the bench beside him. “Is it working?”
“No! I’m an Angel. I can’t be…”
He trailed off as Crowley reached up and brushed a thumb across his lower lip, silencing him and pressing his lips apart in one easy possessive movement.
“I don’t know about you, Angel, but I’ve been stiff as a marble pillar since you started talking all starry-eyed about lascivious thoughts.”
Aziraphale objected to the vernacular but was appalled to admit he couldn’t deny the principle. The pulse of heat between his legs – which he’d been vehemently ignoring – was in fact the source of some of his discomfort, and the touch of Crowley’s thumb to his lips had only exacerbated the situation.
Crowley’s voice dropped a fraction. “And since you’ve been devouring me with your eyes for the last three hours,” he said, “and are currently arguing that a mere fleeting fantasy is on moral par with any number of illicit acts, can we please get on and fuck already?“
Aziraphale felt like his own voice was coming from a place very far away. “We… mustn’t.” Any number of illicit acts.
“Angel,” Crowley rasped, sounding uneven himself for the first time. “Level with me. Have you or have you not spent this evening beckoning me to come hither with your entire body?”
Aziraphale observed his own semi-sprawled position as if from above himself: generally inclined towards Crowley, the knees splayed, the wrists exposed and apart; his breathing quick, his cheeks undoubtedly flushed; and then something of a bulge hidden in the folds of white fabric falling between his thighs.
Good lord. He looked positively wanton.
“Crowley,” he started, licking his lips again in burgeoning panic, “I—I don’t think—“
“Then don’t think,” Crowley said, sliding a shockingly warm hand up the back of Aziraphale’s neck, and lowering his mouth to beneath his ear.
Aziraphale gasped a laugh, feeling his skin awaken to the brush of lips and warm breath. “Are you trying to take advantage of me in my drunken state?”
“Mmm. That does sound like something I’d do.”
Crowley fixed his mouth to Aziraphale’s throat and sucked, his hand sliding up into Aziraphale’s hair, holding him steady. The simple wet heat of his mouth was a revelation, sending rushes of pleasure deep into Aziraphale’s body, and it wasn’t until Aziraphale was arching against him and gasping that it occurred to him that this – this was obscene.
This was the ox all over again. A towering wave of hunger crashing into him, linking nerve after nerve with pure golden light and obliterating his previous understanding of the world. Everything he had been satisfied by before felt swept aside as reality was re-painted in newly invented colours.
As ever, the voice telling that Aziraphale that he shouldn’t want something was drowned out the moment he realised he truly did. His ecclesiastical unease was sublimated utterly by the sudden urge to rip off his robes and offer his whole body to the ministrations of Crowley’s mouth.
His hands pushed into Crowley’s hair in return, dislodging the metal wreath and sending it clattering unseen to the floor.
Crowley released him and raised his lips to Aziraphale’s ear. “Last chance.” His voice was very low. “Does this seem like something you’d later regret?”
Aziraphale laughed again, breathlessly. In vino veritas and all that. Did it? He knew himself this much, at least.
Something he’d deny, maybe.
Struggle to explain, definitely.
But regret?
Never.
He must have been shaking his head because Crowley gave a satisfied hiss and wriggled against him, almost an undulation. Aziraphale shivered; his body wanted to shove back against Crowley and he didn’t quite dare let it.
Crowley’s mouth nuzzled a tingling pathway from Aziraphale’s ear to his lips and then paused again.
“I can’t breach the sanctity of your body unless you invite me to.”
“The what.”
“The sanctity,” Crowley murmured, tracing Aziraphale’s lips with the pointed tip of his tongue, “of your body,” with an emphatic twist of his fist in Aziraphale’s hair.
Aziraphale opened his mouth to the touch, hardly daring to breathe.
Crowley looked at him with mute exasperation, a slight curve to the corner of his mouth. Waiting.
“Oh… oh! Please do,” Aziraphale said, and Crowley kissed him hard, tongue sliding into his mouth, shockingly obscene. He let himself suck Crowley’s tongue and almost groaned with how intensely depraved that felt, as the last line of his internal defences went up in flames.
Crowley kissed like a mortal meeting a god; with a ragged incredulous fervour that left Aziraphale in no doubt that all Crowley’s restraint was also falling away. Whatever paltry resisting Crowley had been doing until now had been abandoned, and Aziraphale did groan as the kiss forced him back against the bench, Crowley crowding in close to him, hands greedily mapping the shape of Aziraphale’s body beneath his robes.
“Ah, you—oh, Crowley—oh, yes, this is—oh, you—!”
“Angel,” Crowley muttered, nipping his lower lip and then laughing as Aziraphale hissed, “shush.”
“Forgive me if I’m a little overwrought,” Aziraphale said, trying for waspish but barely recognising his own voice. “I’ve never before been helpless in the hands of a—a defiler—“
Crowley drew back from kissing him to look at him, and Aziraphale felt himself melt at the warmth of amusement in those golden eyes.
“Damn right,” Crowley said, guiding him to his feet, and smoothed both hands deliberately down Aziraphale’s sides, then up his chest again. “Best defiler in the business, you’re in for a treat.”
One hand slipped under the winged pin of Aziraphale’s toga and snapped it open, the other encouraging the folds of fabric to slide off his shoulders. Aziraphale shivered at the rush of air to his skin, though it still wasn’t cold, and leaned in again, lifting his chin to recapture Crowley’s mouth. The taste of him, dark and sweet like a memory of red wine, with his wicked tongue and soft, supple lips—Aziraphale found he was ravenous for it all.
There was even something potent about being stood up, now: shoulder to shoulder, his chest brushing against Crowley’s robes, his calves tensing as he pushed up on his toes to kiss Crowley harder. The sensation of Crowley’s hands lighting on his bare back, stroking in parallel down the tender skin where his wings weren’t, kicked up another flurry of sparks inside him.
Aziraphale found himself inclining his head, coaxing Crowley’s mouth back down the line of his jaw to the sensitive spot beneath his ear, shivering as his mouth descended.
Bite me again.
He couldn’t say it.
For a beautiful moment he thought Crowley inferred the instruction from the needy tilt to bare his throat, but the next press of Crowley’s mouth was still just a kiss.
Aziraphale couldn’t find the breath to ask for more. He tried a soft moan of encouragement and felt Crowley’s mouth open, sucking hard enough to bruise, the scrape of his teeth calling up traces of that earlier wildfire - but there was no pressure, no closure, no grip to it, and it simply wasn’t enough of that snakebite sting.
Aziraphale tried another moan, louder, but Crowley was already moving on, returning to Aziraphale’s lips as if addicted to the taste of him, and Aziraphale’s yearning to be bitten was subsumed by other, keener urges to explore Crowley’s reverent mouth. He leaned into it all: the taste and smell of him, the freedom to nibble Crowley’s lower lip and hear his breath catch; Crowley’s hands sinking into his hair, tightening; the fiendish slide of his tongue.
Crowley broke the kiss again, almost panting. “I rather think that bench should be a bed by now, don’t you?”
“Yes,” Aziraphale said because his whole head was full only of yes, and then a moment later, belatedly alarmed, “and the restaurant should be empty? And locked, and the door barred?”
“Fear not, that nice young man shut everything up on his way out,” Crowley said, clicking his fingers; the bench collapsed into the largest, most luxuriant bed Aziraphale had ever seen. A bed literally designed for illicit acts, one might imagine.
Aziraphale tried to sound accusing. “You really have been plotting this all evening.”
“You’re the one who invited me for oysters,” Crowley pointed out, unhooking the fastening of his own toga and tossing it aside, leaving just distended black fabric knotted at the base of his flat, bare stomach.
Before Aziraphale could respond adequately to that feast for the eyes, he found himself being pushed bodily down onto cool soft sheets and kissed again.
And this, then, was how Crowley went about the acts of Venus; all at once, rushing over him like waves, sliding, one hand rising, one leg nudging between Aziraphale’s thighs, his mouth seeking skin, nuzzling and sighing as if there was all the time in the world to set Aziraphale’s body ablaze, as if his hard cock wasn’t already pressing against the side of Aziraphale’s leg in silent urgency.
Aziraphale let his thighs fall apart and Crowley insinuated himself in between them like water rushing into a vacuum – shifting over him and kissing his chest, even as his weight pressed Aziraphale’s knees more open, gloriously filling the space between the slants of his thighs and rubbing against his aching erection.
Crowley’s skin felt incredible, the heat almost otherworldly. Aziraphale pushed up against the weight of him, blindly trying to angle their hips together to get more of that sensational pressure, and then moaned in frustration as Crowley sat quickly back on his heels, holding him still, looking down at him like Aziraphale was a banquet spread across a table.
“It’s hard to believe you’ve never taken this out for a ride,” Crowley said, smoothing his hands up Aziraphale’s bare thighs and pausing at the bulge of Aziraphale’s formerly decent underwear, which had never been tied to contain anything adequately and was not proving up to the job now. “Look at you, you’re—“
“If you compare me to a nebula,” Aziraphale warned, and Crowley grinned at him, a touch wolfish.
“Nebulae are all very well,” he said, “but you are something else. You are delectable.” He lifted a finger to trace the line of Aziraphale’s cock where it strained against white fabric and Aziraphale shuddered. “And this…” Crowley said, slowly untying the cloth, easing him free, “positively makes my mouth water.”
The implication was almost too much for Aziraphale to process. That Crowley might not just plan to touch him, but that his mouth might — and Aziraphale knew the principle of fellatio of course, but the prospect of it being Crowley fellating him — it was almost unbearable.
“Please, Crowley,” Aziraphale said.
Crowley frowned as if the sound of that physically hurt him, and then he was moving again, hot and lean and focused, with that relentless quality to his movements returned, as if he were determined that not an inch of Aziraphale would remain unexplored.
As if he might not have this chance again.
Aziraphale opened his mouth to say that given his track record with temptation he highly doubted this would be an isolated indulgence, but his voice evaporated at the brush of red tousled hair across his collarbones as Crowley’s burning mouth plotted a trail down Aziraphale’s chest. Crowley’s fingernails scratched vibrant patterns down Aziraphale’s sides, softly clawing him, the contrasting sensations building until he was writhing on the bed.
“I’m—this is torture,” Aziraphale said, throwing his head back, and now it was Crowley’s turn to laugh against his navel.
“Oh, Angel. This is just heavy petting.”
The fond arrogance in his voice did something wonderfully wicked to Aziraphale, deep inside, stirring embers he hadn’t known were there.
“No wonder they’re always getting in. Trouble,” Aziraphale managed to say, breathing hard. People, he meant. He hadn’t considered before how it must feel, to want someone in this all-consuming manner and not to be allowed. To be forbidden. To be prevented from leaning in to whatever marvellous sensation Crowley was going to introduce him to next.
The embers were a quick little fire now, kicking up inside him as Crowley’s tongue travelled down.
He heard himself blurt out, “What do you want to do?”
“Everything,” Crowley muttered, against his bare hip, almost to himself, as if this was a discussion he had already been having internally. “I want everything, I want you every which way, I want you on your back and on your knees and in my arms and just—“ He raised his face briefly, threw Aziraphale a rueful smile that made his heart ache. “—tell me when to stop, won’t you, Angel? Because the temptation to ruin us both is getting somewhat overwhelming.”
“Ruin?” Aziraphale said faintly, remembering the saying Crowley had not-so-innocently mentioned earlier, about wine and sex and steam baths. “Do you mean corrupt?”
“I mean ruin,” Crowley said with relish, dropping to take Aziraphale’s cock in his mouth, pushing the heel of his hand between Aziraphale’s legs, and humming.
Aziraphale made a noise that was not really a noise, lights flashing violently behind his eyes. Crowley’s mouth, and the uncomplicated pleasure of him using it, on Aziraphale, as if he’d been waiting an eternity to get his hands on him—was unbelievable.
He made a noise that definitely was a noise – somewhere between protest and invocation – when Crowley’s clever fingers nudged at the area behind his balls, pressing, exploring.
Crowley hummed again around Aziraphale’s cock, his tongue swirling like calligraphy even as his fingertips spiralled inwards, teasing across oh-so-sensitive skin, and then pushed.
Aziraphale gave a soft yowl.
“Too much?” Crowley whispered, pulling off his cock and leaving him waving slick in the air.
Aziraphale didn’t know how to answer that. This was all too much, whilst also being not nearly enough, but he didn’t have time to try and get that into words before Crowley ducked his head to lick him down there as well, getting his fingers wet and getting Aziraphale wet and then slowly spearing his tongue inside him.
“Crowley—“ Aziraphale said, shocked at the intrusion and even more shocked at his own hips, lifting to welcome it.
Crowley made a low pleased noise, licking into him again, another slow obscene breach that make lights sparkle across Aziraphale’s brain.
“Please,” Aziraphale said again, turning his head from side to side. “You—“
He broke off as Crowley pushed deeper, the slide of his tongue as potent as three glasses of libation-destined temple wine. Aziraphale craned his hips upwards, splaying his thighs wider apart, anything to give Crowley more access, to make this easier, to make it deeper, to take more. I want, I need, I must…
Crowley’s other hand found his cock again, gave it a careless squeeze as Crowley’s tongue started to pulse, and Aziraphale cried out, clamping down on that filthy-sweet intrusion, the push and the pressure making him crave something indefinable.
I have to.
Crowley made another pleased noise and replaced his tongue with his hand, two newly-oiled fingers sliding smoothly into Aziraphale’s body as Crowley licked a slow purposeful stripe back up to his cock.
“Fuck,” Aziraphale bit off, as the strength in his hips faltered—and okay, that was definable after all, he could name it now, he wanted his first experience of fellatio to be entwined with the unholy pleasure of having two fingers in his arse, stretching him open as Crowley’s lips and tongue worked over the head of his cock. And still the unbearable choices—did he push up into Crowley’s mouth, or grind down on those long, slick fingers? Did he stop his own cries with his arm or scream to the rooftops? Did he bother to breathe?
Crowley sucked rhythmically on the tip of his cock and fucked him gently with his fingers, deep but not too fast, and Aziraphale opted to bite into his forearm rather than swear so loudly it might get Heaven’s attention.
The sting of his own teeth didn’t have quite the same effect as Crowley’s, but it was better than nothing.
He wasn’t sure if Crowley was being generous or had a point to prove or just loved doing this, but as a gathering sensation started to build in Aziraphale’s core Crowley didn’t slow down. Aziraphale found himself releasing his own arm from his teeth, lying back, and panting helplessly at the ceiling as Crowley devoured him with the force of an exploding star.
Crowley was starting to make low desperate noises of his own, full of breath and effort, and the unguarded sound of him ratcheted Aziraphale’s arousal up to intoxicating new heights. His mouth was a silk furnace around Aziraphale’s cock, moving like choreography designed to take Aziraphale to the edge of his seat and keep him there.
“That can’t be—this can’t be what they do,” Aziraphale gasped, as the gathering sensation built, threatening to explode. “Surely.”
Crowley pulled off for a stark breath-taking moment that made Aziraphale’s heart plummet. “Oh, they do all of this and so much more.”
“But it can’t feel like this to them,” Aziraphale said, protest drying in his mouth as Crowley bore down on him again. “They’d never—they wouldn’t survive. This can’t be what they feel. You must be adding something.”
Brimstone, he was thinking. Crowley must be adding magic.
“Just enthusiasm,” Crowley said, and swallowed him again, nails of his free hand clawing into Aziraphale’s hips to keep him still as he worked him over, up and down, eyes flickering closed, mouth eager and wet.
The gathering sensation built again, and Aziraphale started to plead under his breath, eyes closing in a scowl of searing anticipation.
“You really are unbelievably gorgeous,” Crowley said suddenly, pulling off again before Aziraphale could tip over whatever magnificent precipice it felt like he was climbing towards. “Do you want me to fuck you?”
Aziraphale heard his own voice come out rough with disbelief. “Aren’t you already?”
“By some definitions,” Crowley agreed. “But there are other—there are so many ways to find pleasure, Angel, and seeing you like this makes me want to introduce you to them all.”
He crooked his fingers and Aziraphale gasped as a jolt of incandescence shot through him. “And I could finish you off like this,” Crowley said, “and believe me, part of me wants to watch you come apart right here in my hands…”
The way he said it left Aziraphale under no illusion that Crowley could achieve that with one hand tied behind his back.
“…but another part really wants to flip you over and fuck you senseless, and I have the strongest suspicion you would enjoy that even more.”
“Anything,” Aziraphale said, knowing it was unwise and saying it anyway.
Crowley heard the contract in his voice and deflected it with a soft laugh. “Careful,” he said. “You don’t know what I’m thinking.”
“So tell me,” Aziraphale hissed, trying to rock deeper onto Crowley’s fingers again.
For a long moment, Crowley was holding himself still as Aziraphale moved.
Then he spoke, voice cracking. “Well, mostly I’ve been thinking about how impossibly hot it is, watching you fuck yourself on my hand,” he said, the low rush of his words revealing so much more than his carefully controlled posture, “and then I’ve been thinking about fucking you like this, just lifting your legs over my shoulders and then driving inside you—“
Aziraphale shuddered against him, wrapped his arm over his mouth again, biting down.
“And I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t thought about crawling on top of you and pushing myself into your beautiful, careless mouth.”
Aziraphale groaned against his arm, imagining that, the weight, the heat, the taste of him.
“But right now,” Crowley said, sounding hoarser than he’d ever heard him, “I’m thinking about working you open like this and then, when you’re at the brink of losing your senses, turning you over and taking you like no angel’s been taken before. On your hands and knees,” Crowley added, the intensity of his gaze flashing molten gold.
Aziraphale made a small sound in his chest as Crowley’s fingertips stroked over something inside him that set off another low jolt of sensation.
“Of course you might be expected to have a few qualms about that,” Crowley said, audibly getting his voice back under control, “so I’m going to need you to show me this is more than just my idea.”
Aziraphale wasn’t sure if he wanted to laugh or swear. How could Crowley ask him things like this? He couldn’t even think about answering Crowley’s impossible questions. He was focused only on Crowley’s slick fingers stretching him, pressing in and sliding out, hypnotic, maddening. He started rocking harder against them, trying to meet the in-stroke with enough force to send those pleasurable jolts through him again.
He wanted Crowley’s mouth back on him, but didn’t know how to ask for that. But then, everything Crowley had been suggesting sounded good too. And overall he wanted to get to—wherever this internal peak was, the top of this infernal crescendo that kept building and building before being cruelly dismantled every time Crowley stopped.
“I don’t know,” he said eventually, squeezing down on Crowley’s fingers, shutting his eyes and arching his back. “I don’t know, I can’t find the words, I just want you to keep going.”
Crowley went completely still at that, then withdrew his fingers, and Aziraphale almost cried out in frustration.
“Aziraphale,” Crowley said softly – and his name, not some nickname or honorific – made him force open his eyes and pay attention. Crowley’s gaze was very bright, and his voice was exceptionally careful. “If it would be simpler… if you really do trust me… I could make the decisions for you.”
Let it be all Crowley’s decision. Take the impossible choices away.
Aziraphale swallowed, his cock pulsing at the thought, and managed to croak out, “Yes.”
Crowley’s eyes flashed, and made a noise that was almost a growl.
“Angel,” he said, his voice harder than Aziraphale had heard directed at him in years. “Turn over.“
Aziraphale dragged in a breath and rolled onto his stomach, the world narrowing down to Crowley’s words and the sensations flooding his body. Oh this was better, this was beautiful, this was so fucking easy.
He could barely breathe as Crowley leaned over him from behind, pushing his knees apart, the line of his cock rubbing against Aziraphale’s inner thigh. The heat of his body was powerful, intoxicating: the entire amphora of temple wine, poured down his throat in one go.
Aziraphale swam in it, the heady sensation of having opted out of responsibility, letting Crowley arrange him, drawing him up onto his knees – and then slammed back into himself at the feeling of Crowley’s cock resting against the entrance to his body. This couldn’t be happening, not him, not Crowley, not free to feel however they felt, do whatever they liked—Oh, but it was. Crowley pushed inside him, a slow burning stretch that became almost too intense, before giving way to startling raw pleasure as Aziraphale yielded to him.
“Ah, fuck,” Crowley muttered, clamping a hand on Aziraphale’s shoulder and squeezing, clearly forcing himself to stillness with a Herculean effort. “Do you—need a minute?”
Aziraphale shook his head, and Crowley groaned his appreciation, sinking in to the hilt and ghosting his mouth across the back of Aziraphale’s neck, calling up that dark, wild craving again. Aziraphale could feel Crowley’s chest hair scratching his shoulder blades, feel his own thighs burning as he took the weight of them both, could feel Crowley’s heart pounding inside him at the point they were joined—it was so close to being exactly what he needed. So close. But there was still one more thing.
“You feel so fucking good,” Crowley hissed, his breath hot against Azpiraphale’s shoulder, shifting his hips. “Do you feel that?”
Aziraphale nodded, then scraped the last shards of his voice together, flung his request into the heaving air between them. “Crowley, please, there’s something I need.”
He could feel the exertion it took Crowley to hold still now. “What?”
“Bite me again.”
Aziraphale could barely hear his own whisper but Crowley’s reaction was instantaneous: the proprietary sinking of his teeth into Aziraphale’s shoulder closed a heated circuit beneath his skin, even as the rest of his body lit up beneath a slow, achingly deep thrust that shoved them forwards together.
Claimed.
“Yes,” Aziraphale said, almost a sob, trying to encompass everything he was feeling and more.
“You like that,” Crowley muttered, biting the back of Aziraphale’s neck and then rubbing his shaven chin against it, and Aziraphale almost collapsed beneath him, his whole body pulsing in reply.
“Yes.”
“Mine,” Crowley said gruffly, underscored with another possessive bite; “no one else gets you like this.”
Aziraphale shook his head, then got confused and nodded, then groaned again as Crowley started to move.
“And you’ll do whatever I say,” Crowley said, and Aziraphale couldn’t help it, he had to reach down for his own cock at that thought.
“Yes,” Aziraphale gasped, sensing that Crowley needed to hear this one, needed Aziraphale’s agreement in triplicate. “No choice.”
“No choice,” Crowley repeated hoarsely, pushing his fingers into Aziraphale’s mouth and fucking him in frenzied short strokes, “only me,” swelling inside him, rubbing at that deep and glowing point inside him that made Aziraphale’s head spin. No choices, only him.
Aziraphale sucked Crowley’s fingers and pushed back against the thrusts, feeling the pleasurable ricochet of force ring through his body like reverberations through a bell.
He made a broken noise and Crowley withdrew his fingers, gripped his hips with both hands, and pounded him.
Aziraphale sank under a wave of pleasure, daring suddenly to imagine what they must look like: Crowley fucking him like he was his master, his lord, the only one on Earth who could claim him. The only one who knew him, anywhere.
Aziraphale was still distantly aware that he ought to be feeling some sort of shame – an embarrassed horror that he was allowing his body and mind to be defiled by a literal demon, perhaps – but there was nothing, only sweat and friction and fantastic light, and it occurred to him that only God’s displeasure mattered and she—wasn’t here. Not in this room, maybe no longer anywhere earthly, but definitely not in this room, definitely not watching him give up every corner of his corporal form to the pleasure of being taken and the euphoria that it was Crowley who was taking him.
That realisation made him curl backwards and moan, the gathering sensation hurtling finally and thrillingly towards climax; he could hear himself babbling nonsense, no idea if it was out loud or not; his forehead dropping to the bed as he met Crowley’s deepest thrusts, his hands stretching forwards, clasped together in the rumpled sheets above his head in silent, fervent supplication as the bell of his body rang out in peals, again, again, again.
Crowley groaned back at him and moved faster, stiffening inside him for a long and gloriously staggered moment before collapsing over Aziraphale’s back; and it felt like an affirmation branded into him, all of him, Crowley’s handprints and the indentations of his teeth and his hot breath on Aziraphale’s over-stimulated skin; the imprint of the noises he’d made burned into Aziraphale’s memory, his glowing core; his whole damned entity imploding to contain him, perfect.
Aziraphale collapsed as well and felt wetness spreading beneath him even as a tidal wave of warmth washed up over him.
“Oh,” he mumbled anew, feeling like dawn was breaking across his whole body, only vaguely aware of Crowley slipping off and out of him and clicking his fingers before stretching out alongside him – now miraculously warm and dry – in a sinuous catlike slump.
No: like a recently fed python.
Minutes of warmth rolled past.
Eventually Crowley hummed and rearranged them, shifting Aziraphale’s head in the anterior hollow of his shoulder.
“Afterglow, they call it.” The rasp of his voice was almost conversational.
“Apt.“
“Yes.“
There was silence for a few minutes as Aziraphale adjusted to the honey-sweet exhaustion of his limbs, the thud of his own pulse tapping away next to Crowley’s slightly faster one. He shifted gradually until Crowley’s arm came around him, apparently to hold him still. Aziraphale was fine with that. Still and close were both good.
Experimentally, he tipped his face up and kissed Crowley’s neck, and felt an intense spike of satisfaction when Crowley’s arm tightened to jostle them closer.
“No wonder they…” Aziraphale was thinking about humans. He couldn’t think what word to use—no wonder they damn themselves if it feels like this, he wanted to say, except he didn’t want to name what they’d done as something worthy of damnation. He was increasingly convinced that it wasn’t.
“Yeah,“ Crowley said. He got it.
Aziraphale waited for a few more moments and then shifted, stretching his leg out and wincing. He chose his haughtiest voice. “Well, I must say the sanctity of my body feels thoroughly breached.”
It startled a rumble of a laugh from Crowley, which felt fantastic.
“I daresay. So… do you feel… terribly sinful?”
His tone invited another laugh, but Aziraphale considered it seriously. “To be completely honest, no more than when I was having palpitations while staring at your neck in the bar.”
“Huh,” Crowley said, and it was still only a tiny noise but something in it was sounding awfully unguarded now.
Crowley cleared his throat. “There you go then,” he said, softly. Aziraphale heard him swallow, then Crowley continued in a more normal tone, “Well – furthermore, I’m now in such a good mood that I’ve decided to waive all the rest of my business in Rome. So you’ve actually gone and secured a significant net positive gain for Heaven by keeping me occupied.”
“And in a good mood.”
“And in an exceptional mood,” Crowley purred, rounding on him and pressing him back into the pillows, kissing a trail up Aziraphale’s neck and then turning his face, kissing his mouth as well.
Aziraphale sighed into it, opening his mouth and meeting Crowley‘s tongue with his own.
The hitches of their breathing filled the room, growing harsh, and Aziraphale began to wonder dimly about starting up again in earnest when Crowley broke the kiss and pulled back to smirk at him.
“You certainly seem converted.“
“I might be,” Aziraphale said primly. “Or it might be like that ox: quite the feast, once a century or so.”
Crowley reared back as if hurt. “Once a century! Angel.”
Aziraphale grinned.
“You wound me,” Crowley said, and was clearly willing to continue in this histrionic vein unless diverted, so Aziraphale reached up and cupped his cheek.
That made him go still, slit pupils enlarging.
“Maybe more often than that,” Aziraphale said, letting his own voice go as slow and deep as he dared, leaning up until their noses brushed. “You have to remember I’m new to all this. I will need some… guidance.”
“Oh, hmm. Good point,” Crowley said. “Perhaps an… extensive education from a private tutor.”
“A practical scholarship tailored to convey a mastery of the arts?”
“Certainly enough tactical experience to support a robust exchange of views, should it be required,” Crowley drawled, and then, apparently mollified, settled down next to him again.
Aziraphale drifted, Crowley stroking his arm, until he realised he was shivering, then grimaced as he tried to rearrange his limbs under a blanket.
“I am aching,” he said, wondering at it. He ached from his calves to his pelvis, at some points with increasing insistence.
“That’ll happen,” Crowley said lazily, but made no move to miracle the pain away. “So, you know what you need.”
“What?”
“Late night Roman Bath,” Crowley said. “And as luck would have it, I happen to know just the place that is opening up right now. Lovely steam rooms.“ There was a dull thud of fingers being clicked out of sight. “Not far away at all.”
“Do you indeed?”
“Indeed I do.”
Aziraphale couldn’t resist. “How marvellously convenient – do you know, that really sounds like it would make life worth living?”
Crowley’s smile was pure mischief. “I did hope you’d come round to my way of thinking.”
They clambered to their feet, just like a pair of sated, flushed, unsteady mortals, and helped each other to don togas and fix their hair-dressing. Not speaking about what had passed between them, nor of fantasies made real or desires revealed; and then they left the now-restored restaurant’s back room, arm in arm, the fair one leaning on the dark one a little more heavily at times, and strode out together into the night.