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The thermometer on the kitchen windowsill read thirty-six point seven degrees Celsius at half past eleven in the morning, and Aziraphale had already given up on being a functional person.
He sat at the kitchen table in his lightest linen trousers and a short-sleeved shirt he’d owned since approximately 2009, which had gone slightly translucent across the shoulders from too many washes. Before him: half a bowl of strawberries, a glass of water with ice in it that had melted before he’d even sat down, and the increasingly theoretical idea of doing something useful with his day.
The fan on the counter oscillated slowly, hitting him with a warm breath every few seconds that was less “cooling” and more “reminder that the air itself had given up.”
“It’s hotter than yesterday,” he said, to no one in particular.
“Don’t,” said Crowley, from somewhere in the sitting room.
“I haven’t said anything.”
“You were going to say something relentlessly reasonable about hydration.”
Aziraphale considered this. “I was going to say it’s hotter than yesterday.”
“That’s worse. That’s an observation with no solution. Don’t make observations with no solutions.”
There was a long pause during which the fan clicked through another half-rotation and somewhere outside a bus went past, and Aziraphale ate a strawberry and thought about the nature of suffering.
Five years. They had lived together for five years, in this flat with its south-facing windows and its entirely inadequate ventilation and its one small balcony that caught afternoon sun like a satellite dish. Five years of Crowley’s inexplicable collection of trailing plants that had somehow colonised the sitting room windowsill. Five years of Aziraphale’s books migrating gradually into every room, including, somehow, the bathroom. Five years of learning each other’s rhythms, moods, silences. Five years of people assuming, at dinner parties and work functions and the occasional unfortunate meeting with both their families at once, that they were a couple.
They were not a couple. They were, as Aziraphale explained patiently whenever asked, best friends who happened to live together. Crowley explained the same thing, usually less patiently. The explanation never seemed to take.
The fan clicked back towards Aziraphale, and he finished the strawberries, and then Crowley walked into the kitchen.
This was the problem.
This was the problem in a very particular and specific way that Aziraphale had, over five years, developed an extremely sophisticated system for managing. The system involved not looking directly for more than approximately two seconds. The system involved thinking about something else. The system involved the enthusiastic deployment of phrases like well anyway and right, shall I put the kettle on.
The system was considerably harder to implement in a heatwave, when Anthony J. Crowley had apparently decided that clothing was a theoretical construct that no longer applied to him.
He was in his briefs. That was the entirety of it. Black briefs, because Crowley did everything with a certain aesthetic consistency even when he was barely conscious, and nothing else, and he was leaning against the kitchen doorframe with one arm raised against the frame and his head dropped back, throat exposed, eyes shut. The fan turned towards him and he exhaled slowly through his nose, the kind of exhale that was less a breath and more a surrender, and every long line of him was visible in the morning light: the broad flat plane of his shoulders, the slight dip of muscle at each side, the collarbone casting its own faint shadow. His chest rose and fell. The light coming through the kitchen window hit the faint scatter of freckles across his sternum, and Aziraphale looked at them for one moment too many, cataloguing them with the helpless precision of someone who had spent five years pretending not to know exactly where they were.
He looked at the strawberries.
He became very interested in the strawberries.
Five years had been, in some ways, unkind to Aziraphale’s resolve. Because he had always known, in the abstract, that Crowley was attractive. That was an observable fact, like the weather or the softness of good butter, something you simply acknowledged and moved on from. What five years of living together had done was make it specific. Had made it particular, personal, devastating in its familiarity.
The lean length of him. The broad plane of his shoulders, the slight hollow beneath them where muscle gave way to ribs, the lazy geometry of his collarbones. The scatter of faint freckles across his upper chest that Aziraphale had once, entirely accidentally, noticed while Crowley was reading on the sofa. The way the long line of his torso went from the faint definition of his abdomen, the dark trail of hair, down into the waistband of those, those, perfectly ordinary, completely unremarkable briefs that Aziraphale was absolutely not looking at.
He was still looking at the strawberries.
“Any left?” Crowley asked, without opening his eyes.
“I finished them. Sorry.” Aziraphale stood up and moved to the fridge with perhaps slightly more purpose than was strictly necessary. “There are more in here. Also leftover bread and I thought we might do sandwiches for lunch. Cooking is completely out of the question.”
“Cooking is a hate crime in this weather.”
“Strong words.”
“I feel strongly about this heat.” Crowley pushed off the doorframe and opened the freezer, and stood there with both hands braced on the fridge doors, letting cold air wash over him. He made a sound that was genuinely obscene. “Angel, I’m moving in here. I live in the freezer now.”
“You do not live in the freezer.”
“Come in the freezer with me.”
“I’m not standing in the freezer, Crowley.”
“Just for a minute. It’s incredible. It’s like a different planet in here. A beautiful cold planet.”
Aziraphale closed his eyes briefly, which was itself a mistake, because now he was imagining standing in the freezer pressed against Crowley’s bare back, and he snapped them open again. “Sandwiches,” he said firmly. “Sit down. Let me make sandwiches.”
Crowley closed the freezer with evident reluctance and arranged himself in the chair that Aziraphale had just vacated, sprawling into it with the particular looseness of a person who had completely abandoned the concept of posture. He had his sunglasses on, which at least meant Aziraphale couldn’t tell where he was looking.
Aziraphale made sandwiches. He made them slowly and carefully and focused on the architecture of them, the cheese and the pickle and the specific arrangement of lettuce, because this was easier than focusing on literally anything else currently happening in this kitchen.
“It’s meant to get to thirty-nine tomorrow,” Crowley said.
“You just told me not to make observations with no solutions.”
“I was moaning. It’s different.”
“It is not meaningfully different.” Aziraphale put a plate in front of him and sat down on the opposite side of the table. “I rang my mother this morning and she said it’s been like this for a fortnight in Shropshire.”
“Your mother can still make calls in this weather?”
“She has excellent curtains.”
Crowley ate half a sandwich in silence. “We should drag the mattress out to the balcony tonight.”
Aziraphale looked up. “Sorry?”
“It’s cooler outside. My room is like a furnace. I woke up three times last night.” He said it matter-of-factly, utterly unself-conscious, because this was the other thing five years did. It dissolved the edges of what was strange. “We put the mattress on the balcony. We sleep out there. It’ll be fifteen degrees cooler at least.”
“The balcony is not especially large.”
“We’ll fit.”
“We’d be very, ah.” Aziraphale looked at the pickle in his sandwich. “Close.”
“We’re always close. We live in a flat together, we’re constantly close. Last Tuesday you sat on my feet for forty minutes reading your book.”
“That was an accident.”
“You stayed for forty minutes.”
“My feet were cold.”
Crowley smiled, slow and sideways, the way he did when he’d won something he wasn’t going to name. “Balcony,” he said. “Tonight. It’ll be good.”
The mattress went out at nine o’clock, which involved a significant amount of swearing and one moment where it got briefly wedged in the balcony doorframe and Crowley said several things that Aziraphale pretended not to hear. They put a sheet over it and arranged two pillows and the small clip-on fan that had been living in the bathroom and had now been promoted to emergency sleep infrastructure.
The balcony was, in fact, fractionally cooler. The air moved differently outside, carrying something that was almost a breeze, and the city spread below them in its amber and white electric sprawl, and above it the sky was a deep purple-dark with a smear of stars that London usually kept to itself.
Aziraphale sat cross-legged on his side of the mattress, eating an ice cream from the collection they’d bought that afternoon when the heat had finally driven them out of the flat and towards the nearest Waitrose. He had a Magnum. He was eating it somewhat faster than was dignified, because it was melting that quickly.
Crowley was lying on his back beside him, still shirtless (still, Aziraphale thought, still, indefinitely still, apparently forever shirtless), watching the sky with one arm folded behind his head. He had a Solero, which he was eating with suspicious elegance given that they were melting at approximately the same rate.
Crowley finished the Solero, held the stick between two fingers, and then, apparently having thought about it for no more than two seconds, reached into the bowl of ice Aziraphale had brought out to keep the drinks cold, retrieved a cube, and set it against his collarbone.
Aziraphale looked at the city.
He looked very hard at the city. At the amber sprawl of it, the distant blinking lights, the rooftops. He found a chimney and studied it with enormous focus.
In his peripheral vision, Crowley dragged the ice cube slowly down the centre of his chest. It was melting quickly in the heat, leaving a thin trail of water across his sternum, down between the light definition of his ribs, and Crowley made a low, satisfied sound that Aziraphale felt at some embarrassing depth, and tipped his head back, and did it again.
“Better,” Crowley said, to the sky.
“Good,” Aziraphale said, to the chimney.
He picked up his Magnum and ate a large piece of it in one go and thought about literally anything else. He thought about the intricacies of Victorian bookbinding. He thought about a particularly complex béchamel sauce he had once made. He thought about the rules of cricket, which he had never fully understood, and thought about those extensively.
Crowley set another ice cube against the side of his neck and Aziraphale thought about cricket very, very hard.
“See, this is better,” Crowley said.
“It is considerably cooler, yes.”
“It’s almost nice. Atmospheric.”
“We’re eating ice lollies on a mattress on a balcony at nine in the evening because our flat is uninhabitable.”
“Atmospheric,” Crowley said again, firmly.
Aziraphale finished the last bite of his Magnum, crumpled the wrapper, and lay back beside him. The mattress dipped slightly with his weight. Above them, London’s sky was never fully dark, but there was something in the heat that had pushed the haze differently tonight, and he could see more stars than usual. He thought he could make out Orion, but he’d never been entirely certain about stars. Crowley would know, probably. Crowley had a habit of knowing obscure things in the way that seemed almost accidental, as though the knowledge had simply moved in alongside him.
“Crowley.”
“Mm.”
“Do you actually like living here?” Aziraphale asked. “Objectively. The flat specifically.”
Crowley turned his head slightly on the pillow, looking at him sidelong. “Why?”
“I don’t know. Five years is rather a long time. I sometimes wonder if you’d prefer somewhere with a garden. Or, you know, a second bathroom.”
“We manage fine with one bathroom.”
“You have complained about the bathroom approximately four hundred times.”
“That’s called venting, angel. It doesn’t mean I want to leave.” He turned his head back to the sky. “Why are you asking?”
“No reason. Heat makes me contemplative.”
“Heat makes you weird.”
“Those are not mutually exclusive.” Aziraphale shifted, settling into the mattress. The sheet was already warm from the air, but it was softer than the boards beneath, and above him the city hummed and glowed, and he thought, not for the first time, that his life had arranged itself rather better than he’d expected it to. In ways he hadn’t planned for. In the way of someone standing in a room that had slowly, over time, filled with furniture they’d grown to love, and realising they couldn’t imagine the room empty again.
“Marcus rang me last week,” Crowley said.
Aziraphale turned his head. “Oh?”
“Mmhm. His company’s doing a new project in Edinburgh. Six months, possibly longer. He asked if I’d want to consult on it.”
Aziraphale kept his voice very level. “Edinburgh’s lovely.”
“I told him no.”
The fan clipped to the balcony railing hummed its small loyal hum. “You could have, you know. If you wanted to. I’d manage.”
“I know you’d manage.” Crowley sounded faintly irritated by this. “I didn’t want to go. Edinburgh is cold and it rains all the time and my plants would die.”
“You could take the plants.”
“I don’t want to take the plants to Edinburgh, Aziraphale, I want to be here.” He said it flatly, simply, with the particular emphasis of someone stating something so obvious they’re mildly annoyed at being made to say it. “Drop it.”
Aziraphale dropped it. He looked at the sky and breathed the warm night air and listened to the city and tried not to think too hard about the specific quality of warmth that had nothing to do with thirty-eight-point-seven degrees.
It was around half eleven when they went inside to get more strawberries, because the bowl Aziraphale had brought out was finished and Crowley had said, reasonably, that they weren’t actually sleeping yet, so they might as well eat. Aziraphale stood at the kitchen counter rinsing the new batch and Crowley leaned in the doorway exactly as he had that morning and Aziraphale thought: five years and he still stands in doorways like that. Like he belongs in the frame. Like he was built for the specific proportions of it.
He handed Crowley the bowl and followed him back out to the balcony, and they arranged themselves again, shoulders nearly touching on the mattress, and passed the strawberries back and forth. At some point Crowley got up to get the cold towels. This was something they had, in desperation, worked out on day one of the heatwave: tea towels soaked in cold water, wrung out, draped over the back of the neck or across the shoulders. Practical. Sensible. An entirely reasonable thing to do when the temperature refused to drop even at midnight.
Crowley came back with two, tossed one to Aziraphale without looking, and draped the other across his own bare shoulders, letting the ends hang down his chest. He dropped back onto the mattress and arranged himself with the boneless ease of someone who had entirely made peace with the heat, and Aziraphale pressed his own towel to the back of his neck and stared very deliberately at the stars.
The problem was that Crowley kept moving.
He’d shift the towel, or run a hand through his hair, or reach for a strawberry with that particular lazy extension of arm that Aziraphale had no business noticing, and every time he moved the cold damp fabric would shift against his skin, against the slope of his shoulder or the length of his back, and Aziraphale was supposed to be thinking about stars or bread or something, anything, and instead he was thinking about the exact temperature differential between Crowley’s skin and the cold towel and what that must feel like, which was not a thought he should be having, not remotely, not at all.
Crowley said: “Right, important question.”
“Go on.”
“If you could only eat one food for the rest of your life.”
“Oh, not this game again.”
“Humour me. I’m bored and hot and we have nowhere to be.”
Aziraphale thought about it properly, because he always did, because he took even Crowley’s ridiculous hypotheticals seriously, which Crowley had once said was one of the most endearing and also profoundly frustrating things about him. “Bread,” he said finally. “Good bread. You can do almost anything with good bread.”
“Bread,” Crowley repeated, with the specific tone of a man who had expected something more interesting.
“It’s a very considered answer.”
“It’s the most Aziraphale answer in the world.”
“What would yours be?”
“Noodles. Any kind. Forever.”
“That’s not more interesting than bread.”
“It’s more interesting than bread, angel, bread is what you eat when you’ve run out of everything else.”
“Bread is the foundation upon which all civilisation is built.”
“Tell that to ancient China.”
“Noodles are made from flour,” Aziraphale said, and he heard Crowley start laughing before he’d even finished the sentence, the proper laugh, not the polite one or the performative one but the one that was entirely involuntary and slightly undignified, and Aziraphale felt it go through him like warm water and looked firmly at the stars.
They talked for a long time. They talked the way they always did at night when neither of them was quite ready to stop, looping through subjects in the way of a conversation that doesn’t know it’s a conversation and thinks it’s just two people thinking out loud in the same direction. Films they’d seen, books Aziraphale was reading, some ongoing situation with Crowley’s colleague Beelzebub and their disastrous attempt to learn to drive. An argument about whether Wimbledon was a reasonable thing to care about. A longer and more sincere conversation about a mutual friend’s recent engagement that started as gossip and turned quietly into something more honest somewhere in the middle.
“Do you think you’ll ever,” Crowley said, and then stopped.
“Ever what?”
“You know.”
“I genuinely don’t.”
Crowley picked up a strawberry and examined it. “Get married. Or whatever the relevant version is.”
Aziraphale was quiet for a moment. “I don’t think about it very often, actually. I used to think I should want it more than I do.” He paused. “You?”
“No.” Very simple, very quick.
“Not to the right person?”
“Not to…” Crowley said, and then said nothing else, which was a complete sentence if you knew how to read it, and Aziraphale both did and didn’t want to know what it meant.
“I think I’m quite happy,” Aziraphale said instead. “With things as they are.”
“Yeah,” Crowley said. “Me too.”
The city hummed below them. Somewhere distantly a siren moved through it and faded.
It was close to two in the morning when things went quiet in the particular way they sometimes did between them, not uncomfortable, not waiting for anything. Aziraphale had been lying on his back for the past hour, watching the sky do very little, feeling the air move over him in faint almost-breezes, listening to Crowley’s breathing next to him slow down towards something that might have been sleep.
He wasn’t quite asleep. Aziraphale could tell, after five years, the difference.
The fan hummed. An aeroplane moved silently across the sky, its lights blinking red-green-white.
“I don’t think I’d survive living with anyone else,” Aziraphale said.
He said it quietly, towards the sky, in the particular register of two in the morning when things come out that have been waiting in the dark. He didn’t mean it as anything, or told himself he didn’t mean it as anything, or had stopped being sure whether that distinction still held.
He felt Crowley go very still beside him.
The silence lasted perhaps four seconds.
“I don’t want to either,” Crowley said.
Aziraphale didn’t move. His heart had gone very careful and specific in his chest.
The fan hummed. Somewhere below, a late taxi moved through the street.
“…Not just because you’re organised,” Crowley said.
The words were low and unhurried, and Aziraphale heard them and felt them land in the way that certain things landed when you’d been waiting for them without knowing you were waiting, when something you’d kept very carefully in one part of yourself suddenly turned out to be the thing that mattered most.
He turned his head. Crowley was looking at the sky, jaw slightly tight, mouth in the particular set line it took when he’d said something true and was now waiting, very still, for the world to react to it.
“Not just because I keep a schedule,” Aziraphale said carefully.
Crowley’s mouth shifted. Not quite a smile. But almost. “Not just because of that.”
“Not just because I’m good at grocery shopping.”
“You are good at grocery shopping. That’s a real thing.” Still to the sky.
“Crowley.”
Crowley turned his head, and they were very close on the mattress, they had been close all night, it was only now that it registered differently, and his eyes were dark and wary in the way they went when something mattered, when the performance dropped.
“I don’t think I’d want to live anywhere else,” Crowley said. “Or with anyone else. Or in a different version of this. Of us.”
The fan hummed. The city spread below them, ancient and amber-lit and entirely indifferent.
“I’ve been quite in love with you for some time,” Aziraphale said. He said it with the specificity of someone who has finally decided that the truth is simpler than its alternatives. “I thought I ought to mention it.”
Crowley blinked.
“I didn’t want to ruin the arrangement,” Aziraphale continued. “Because the arrangement is, objectively, very good. You make excellent coffee and you’re very funny when you think no one’s paying attention, and you know where the good light falls in every room, and I like the way you talk to the plants even though they can’t hear you. I like everything, actually. I think I’ve liked everything for quite a long time.”
“Aziraphale.” Crowley’s voice had gone very strange.
“Yes?”
“You’re doing the thing where you explain feelings like a legal document.”
“I’m being thorough.”
“You’re being terrifying.” But his voice was soft when he said it, and he was looking at Aziraphale with an expression that Aziraphale had never seen on him and had absolutely seen on him, had seen assembled slowly over five years in pieces he hadn’t let himself name. “I’ve been,” Crowley stopped, started again. “I’ve been in love with you since approximately year two.”
“Year two.”
“Possibly earlier. Year two is when I admitted it to myself.”
“What happened in year two?”
“You cried at a nature documentary and then immediately made a sarcastic comment about the narrator to cover it up, and I thought,” Crowley’s voice did something complicated, “I thought: right, there it is. That’s the one.”
Aziraphale felt warmth move through him that had nothing to do with thirty-nine degrees. “You never said.”
“Neither did you.”
“Fair point.”
“I didn’t want to lose,” Crowley said, simple and direct and honest in a way he rarely was without camouflage, “what we had. I thought it was better than nothing. I thought this was, you know. The closest I’d get.”
Aziraphale reached out and put his hand over Crowley’s. It was an instinctive thing, the kind of thing you did when you’d spent five years building a vocabulary of small contact. Except it wasn’t small. Neither of them was pretending it was small.
Crowley looked down at their hands, then back up.
“Hello,” he said.
“Hello,” said Aziraphale.
“This is. We’re…” Crowley’s composure was having a visible struggle with the corners of his mouth, which were doing something Aziraphale very much wanted to see complete. “We’re idiots.”
“Profound idiots,” Aziraphale agreed. “Nearly a decade of knowing each other, five years of cohabitation.”
“All that time.”
“All that time.” Aziraphale looked at him. “Though I rather think we were building something. Just, ah. Slowly.”
“Very slowly.”
“We’re thorough.”
Crowley laughed, and there was something different in it now, something lighter, the slight edges of relief. He turned his hand under Aziraphale’s and held it properly, loosely, the same way he’d held things for five years, his keys, his coffee cup, the TV remote, but different. Unmistakably different. “Can I,” he said, and then stopped.
“Yes,” Aziraphale said.
“I haven’t asked the question yet.”
“I know.”
Crowley looked at him for a long moment, then tipped forward the few inches between them and kissed him. It was very careful and very warm and tasted faintly of strawberries, and it lasted a few seconds and then he pulled back, and they looked at each other at close range, and Aziraphale thought: five years and we’ve been sleeping eight feet apart.
“Right,” Crowley said. His voice was slightly wrecked, which Aziraphale found extremely interesting information.
“Right,” Aziraphale agreed.
“So.” Crowley settled back onto the pillow without letting go of his hand. “That happened.”
“That happened.”
“How do you feel?”
Aziraphale considered this with the seriousness it deserved. Below them the city moved through its small hours: a couple walking, a fox crossing the end of the road, light in a window across the way. Above them the stars were doing what stars do, which was nothing spectacular but consistently, which was perhaps its own form of comfort.
“Like I’ve been carrying something very heavy for a long time,” he said. “And I’ve just put it down.”
“Yeah. That.”
They lay side by side in the warm dark, hands loosely linked between them, and the fan hummed, and the city carried on, and the heat, which was still thirty-eight degrees even at two in the morning, seemed somehow less pressing than it had a few hours ago. Or perhaps the same. Aziraphale couldn’t tell anymore, because there was a different kind of warmth now, distributed differently, the kind that had nothing to do with weather.
“We’re going to have to tell people,” Crowley said eventually.
“Mm.”
“They’re all going to be insufferable about it.”
“They’ve been insufferable about it for five years regardless.”
“Fair. Warlock owes me twenty quid.”
Aziraphale sat up slightly. “Warlock bet on us? You bet on us?“
“He bet we wouldn’t work it out before year seven. I said it would be year five.”
“That’s...I don’t know whether to be flattered or mortified.”
“I’d aim for something in the middle.” Crowley sounded deeply fond. “Go to sleep, angel. It’s two in the morning.”
“I’m not tired.”
“You’re always tired at two in the morning, you just don’t admit it.”
“I’m contemplating.”
“You can contemplate horizontally.”
Aziraphale settled back down, and the mattress was warm and slightly soft in the way of a mattress that had not been designed for alfresco use, and Crowley’s hand was still in his, and above them London’s sky did what it always did, which was glow and hum and keep going.
Aziraphale smiled at the sky. He felt Crowley shift slightly, closer by a fraction, and didn’t move away, and the fan hummed on, and somewhere in the small hours they both slept, and it was still thirty-nine degrees, and neither of them noticed.
The next morning Aziraphale woke to the sound of traffic and brilliant white heat and Crowley’s arm across his chest in a way that was absolutely an accident and absolutely not.
He looked at the arm. He looked at the sky, already fierce with ten o’clock sun and looked back at the arm.
He stayed very still and let him sleep.
Later, when Crowley woke up and went very briefly rigid and then said, “Right, yes, this is, we’re, hi,” and Aziraphale said “Good morning” with the equanimity of someone who had arrived, finally, exactly where they were going, and Crowley said, “You’re annoyingly calm about this,” and Aziraphale said, “I’ve had years to practise,” there was a moment, just before Crowley started laughing and gave up and kissed him again in the bright hot morning on the balcony, where Aziraphale thought:
There it is. That’s the one.
He suspected he’d been thinking about it for quite some time.
The thermometer on the kitchen windowsill read thirty-eight point nine degrees at eleven o’clock that morning. Neither of them looked at it.