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The first time it happened, Crowley almost didn’t hear it.
They were in Athens, in a rented room somewhere, getting tipsy and arguing about Aristophanes. Aziraphale’s cheeks were ruddy from the wine, and he’d sprawled out in uncharacteristically relaxed fashion on the floor next to Crowley. Their thighs kept touching, and Crowley was trying to figure out if it was on purpose or not (the wine wasn’t helping with this calculation, because he kept forgetting that he was trying to figure it out and just focusing on the surge of warmth that went through him at each brush of skin), and Aziraphale was saying something about the presumable lack of efficacy of a sex strike, and Crowley was watching the way that his mouth moved while he talked and only half-hearing the words.
He reached across Aziraphale to grab for the wine bottle, and found his wrist enclosed in an angelic grasp.
“Hey,” he protested.
Aziraphale focused with what appeared to be superhuman intensity on the inside of Crowley’s wrist. “You’re all vein-y,” he said, vaguely.
“Sorry?” asked Crowley, whose veins were currently working overtime to push all his blood in a very particular direction.
“Just—” said Aziraphale, and pressed his lips to Crowley’s wrist.
Crowley jolted in surprise, and knocked over the amphora of wine, the liquid pouring out and staining the hem of his clothing. “What are you doing?” he asked, hoarsely.
Aziraphale withdrew his mouth. “Should I not?”
“Erm,” said Crowley, intelligently.
“I’m sorry,” said Aziraphale, letting go of Crowley’s arm hastily, “I didn’t mean—”
“No,” Crowley said, hurriedly, “no, no, I only—” and, finding words insufficient, leaned over to kiss Aziraphale full on the mouth.
Aziraphale sighed into the kiss, his warm breath filling Crowley’s mouth, and Crowley took that as encouragement to move still closer, crawling on his knees to press himself up against Aziraphale’s half-prone body.
Aziraphale sat up in response, wrapping his arms around Crowley’s waist and drawing him in with easy strength, then letting them skim upward, running over the thin fabric and causing Crowley to shiver. He brushed his own hands gently over Aziraphale’s body, feeling the unexpected solidity of his muscles.
“Mmmph,” said Aziraphale, and broke their kiss to start kissing Crowley’s neck instead, while one of his hands abandoned Crowley’s waist in favor of creeping up underneath his chiton.
Crowley drew in a sharp breath at the feeling of soft fingers on his thigh, and Aziraphale lifted his head, his nose bumping awkwardly into Crowley’s as he said, “Would you like…”
Crowley made a noise like a rooster with laryngitis and nodded into Aziraphale’s shoulder.
Aziraphale slid his hand up further, and Crowley hissed involuntarily and gripped at Aziraphale’s waist, digging his fingers into the soft flesh.
“Ow,” said Aziraphale, shakily, and started to move his hand.
“Sssorry,” Crowley said, “I— oh—”
“This doesn’t count, you know,” said Aziraphale quietly, continuing to stroke.
“What?” panted Crowley.
“What we’re doing. I’m only—helping you out. Lending a hand. It doesn’t count as—as carnal knowledge.”
Crowley, who had something less than an iota of wit available to him at the moment, gasped out, “Yeah, sure, whatever,” and promptly found himself incapable of further speech. Or rational thought.
Aziraphale said it again in Byzantium, when Crowley’s light teasing about the Constantine business had turned, somehow, into light flicks of his tongue against Aziraphale’s ear, and Aziraphale’s toga had found itself bunched up around his waist, and Crowley had gone down on his knees in what was definitely not a genuflection.
“I want to be clear,” Aziraphale said, resting a trembling hand on Crowley’s head, “that this isn’t—that I’m not— oh, yes— that, ah, non te irrumo, sed me fellas. [1] That in terms of activity, I’m not—”
Crowley wasn’t currently in a position where he could utter any sort of verbal response to this statement, but he discovered something new and clever to do with his tongue, and Aziraphale’s eloquence devolved into a series of increasingly indulgent moans.
“This is just friction,” Aziraphale said in 1813.
Crowley left off trying to undo his cravat with his teeth. “That’s a new one,” he said, mildly, and licked the base of Aziraphale’s jaw.
“Pardon?” said Aziraphale, and put Crowley’s index finger in his mouth.
“Aaaah,” said Crowley, and ground him further into the wall. “I only”—he shifted his hips— “Haven’t heard you say that before.”
“Ooh, yes, just like that,” Aziraphale said, and wriggled against Crowley in truly sublime fashion. “I simply mean,” he continued, “that we’re just—we haven’t even taken off our clothes, for goodness’— o-oo-ooh.”
“Speaking of,” said Crowley, “I think you’ll be needing a new pair of breeches. Since you seem to have made rather a mess of these ones.”
“Indeed,” said Aziraphale, when he’d caught his breath enough to speak. “Have you—” He rubbed into exactly the right place, and Crowley found himself in something of a glass house when it came to the necessity of breeches replacements.
“Dreadful stuff,” said Aziraphale, tapping the front page of one of the newspapers that were delivered daily to his shop.
Crowley squinted at the headline— CLINTON ADMITS TO AFFAIR WITH INTERN. “Oh yeah,” he said. “Wild.” He picked up the paper and skimmed through the cover story, remembering the clips he’d seen on TV, the references on talk shows. The carefully worded denials—his eyes caught on one of Clinton’s justifications, and he snorted.
Aziraphale, who’d been saying something about public morality in America, stopped. “What?”
“Nothing,” said Crowley.
“What?” asked Aziraphale, more sharply.
“It’s only,” said Crowley, gesturing to the paper, “that he sounds—well, like you.”
“I’m sorry?” Aziraphale asked.
“What is it you always say?” Crowley asked. “This doesn’t count? He’s been using evasion, some, some made-up definition of what counts, to lie, just like—” It occurred to him that this was very likely a dangerous topic, and he broke off.
“I don’t lie,” said Aziraphale, quietly. “It doesn’t—what you and I do, do for each other, do to each other, it’s not—”
“You really think that?” Crowley asked, words tumbling out, hasty and unwise. “That we’re not—”
“There’s no—penetration,” Aziraphale said. “We only—we never—”
“Oh, come on, heteronormativity was my lot and you know it,” Crowley said. “It doesn’t take penetration to—”
“I believe,” said Aziraphale, voice growing brittle, “that in a technical sense, it does.”
“So,” Crowley asked, incredulously, “if someone were to ask, you’d say, what—” he put on a very bad Arkansas accent— “ I did not have sexual relations with that demon?”
“Yes,” said Aziraphale.
“But it’s just semantics,” said Crowley, shaking his head, “why’s it matter so much whether we, exactly—”
“Because,” Aziraphale burst out, “what if someone does ask, Crowley? What if—” his eyes flitted Heavenward— “they ask? I need to be able to say, truthfully—”
“You don’t want to lie?” Crowley asked. “You lie all the time, angel. You lie to them all the time. You embellish reports and pretend you’re doing work you’re not doing, and pretend you’re not doing my work when you are doing it, you lied about your sword directly to Her face—”
“That’s all—” said Aziraphale, waving a hand. “That’s not—I don’t want to—I can’t—lie about this.”
“Why not?”
“Because this can’t be the lie I get caught in. Not when it’s not just me—” He broke off.
Crowley shook his head. “You think that makes you safe? You think they’re only going to ask you, if they ask you, questions that you can pussyfoot your way around? What’re you going to do if they don’t stop at did you have sex with the demon Crowley? Are you going to not lie when they ask do you kiss him, do you let him touch you, do you cry out his name when you’re coming, do you lo—” He stopped.
“I think,” said Aziraphale, his voice breaking, “that you should leave.”
“No, look,” Crowley said, half-heartedly, “I didn’t mean to—it’s whatever, it’s whatever you want, if you say it doesn’t count then it doesn’t count, why do I care, it’s fine.”
Aziraphale shook his head. “You need to go.”
“Right,” said Crowley, “I—fine,” and left.
There wasn’t any more—friction, after that. Not for a good twenty years. Not until, walking into the bookshop together after the best lunch of Crowley’s life, Aziraphale turned and said, “It counts.”
“What?” Crowley asked, automatically, even though he’d heard perfectly well.
“This,” said Aziraphale, and kissed him in remarkably decisive fashion.
“Oh,” said Crowley, after a bit. “Ah—counts as what, exactly?”
Aziraphale shook his head. “Anything. Everything. Whatever you want it to. It always did.”
“I know,” Crowley said.
“I meant it, though,” Aziraphale said, placing a hand on his cheek. “I know it seems ridiculous, it’s as you said, it’s only semantics , but I thought—that was the bargain I made with myself. To keep you safe. So I could feel like I was holding something back, that there was a line we hadn’t crossed, so I could feel like I’d made some sort of, I don’t know, some sacrifice… But the thing was, I didn’t—it wasn’t the physical actions, or lack thereof. It wasn’t ever that. It always counted. Because it was you.”
“Oh,” said Crowley, faintly. “That’s—good, then.”
“So,” said Aziraphale, his smile taking on a distinctively mischievous cast, “could we…”
“Do something that counts?”
“Precisely.”
“To be clear,” said Crowley, wrapping his arms around Aziraphale’s waist, “this counts as sexual relations? As carnal knowledge?”
“I’d swear to it,” said Aziraphale.
Footnotes
1 I'm not face-fucking you, you're sucking me. [return to text ]