Happy Holidays, HJBender!
Title: Through the Wire
Gift for: hjbender
Author: vulgarweed
Pairing: Crowley/Aziraphale
Rating: NC-17
Summary: The physical distance between true lovers is merely part of Maya, Illusion-transcendable at the speed of desire. (That’s a nice high-falutin’ way of describing a smutty crackfic about supernatural phone sex gone awry.)
Author's Notes: There’s a Peter Gabriel song somewhere in the inspiration for this, too.
New York City, December 2005
Don’t you go worryin’, he’d said.
I know all about you two, he’d said.
The latter statement might’ve made even Crowley blush if it hadn’t been voiced at the time by an eleven-year-old boy who probably still turned green at kissing scenes in movies, Lucifer’s son or not. But Adam’s reassurances hadn’t gone for naught. None of the threatened eternal torments he’d got before the Abotchalypse had materialised some fifteen years later, and Crowley was still enough of an optimist to live in the moment and trust it had a good chance of continuing.
Hell did, however, persist in sending him to the States every chance it got. And just because Crowley took to it like a duck to insurance peddling on television didn’t mean he had to like it. Though he did have to admit it was pretty easy to rack up the commendations over here.
The ringtone craze, for example. (Currently, his own usually played a tinny, MIDI-d to death version of “Highway to Hell” no matter how often he tried to change it, except when it was a certain angel calling him, in which case it was “The Wind Beneath My Wings,” which if pressed he would admit was much, much worse.) Also the viral spread of the Starbucks Coffee chain. (Though in truth that was a partnership that one Mr. Sable had to admit worked to his advantage as entire populations of affluent urban 20- and 30somethings forewent solid food entirely for weeks on end without noticing; it wasn’t very often Sable actually achieved something by working so creatively with Gluttony).
At the moment, Crowley was spending some time at the studios of a cable news and commentary network supervising the finishing touches on a masterwork-a fictional “War on Christmas” that did a brilliant job of pushing people of all faiths and political leanings into a grumpy, dodgy, slow-burn state of holiday-coloured paranoia. From the Christian inspired by the martial rhetoric into bellowing “MERRY CHRISTMAS” oh-so-defiantly at the cabdriver with the turban and the Q’uran verses, to the mild-mannered Wal-Mart greeter so paralysed with fear of offending someone that he said nothing and got a black mark for unfriendliness, to the atheist convinced that the school holiday pageant had subliminal indoctrination, to the taxpayers’ time spent so freely debating the issue in Congress, Crowley knew he had a gift that would keep on giving, and every bratty teenager who ever stole a baby Jesus doll out of a yard nativity scene was his ally. Although he’d tried to swear off too much “messing people about,” he was a craftsman, an artist, after all. Where one’s Muses go, one must follow.1
Honestly, he had to admit as he looked out the window of his luxury hotel room 23 stories over Central Park, he wouldn’t mind being in America at all were it not for one thing: he was alone in said hotel room, with its fully-stocked bar and its Jacuzzi and its gigantic bed. To a certain extent, he had brought this on himself. New York was certainly a generous city in its way, and Crowley’s human form was hardly unattractive.
But.
It had seemed so unlikely for so long that anything would ever overtake Sloth at the top of Crowley’s ranked list (and frankly Pride had long looked like the likeliest contender). Yet Lust seized the prize the first time he saw it on an angel’s face.
He took his cell phone out of his pocket and looked at it accusingly. It was black and shiny and sleek and so vanishingly slim he suspected Sable of having a hand in its design.2 Although he’d certainly had fun with its camera function, it was actually rather difficult to use as a phone. It didn’t fit very well between ear and shoulder, after all. Bit of a drag if one is hoping to have use of both hands for what one has not yet fully acknowledged to himself he is about to try to do.3
Crowley threw himself down on the immense and empty plane of the ergonomic bed and looked at the hotel telephone on the nightstand. He dialed London. And it rang and it rang and it rang, for it was late.4 When at last the phone was answered, the voice on the other end was thick and sleepy and slightly panicked.
“Hello?”
“Aziraphale,” Crowley said.
“Oh, hello, how are you?”
“Fine, mostly. Were you sleeping?”
“I suppose yes, I was. I acquired the habit from you, I believe. Is something wrong?”
“Yes,” Crowley heard himself saying, in a voice that had significantly dropped in pitch and volume. “Something is wrong. You’re there, and I’m in the sodding Colonies. You’re sleeping, and I’m very restless…”
He heard Aziraphale make a sympathetic noise.
He went on. “I’ve had six Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Lattes today, venti, and I will be up all night. And also, this whole country is covered in Christmas desecrations, and I’ll definitely be up all night after seeing all those tarty plastic angels with pine trees stuck up their…”
“Crowley,” Aziraphale said, much less sympathetically.
Alright, wrong approach. Change tactics and come at this from a different angle (and indeed, that very phrase contributed to Crowley’s determination).
“What are you wearing? Let me guess, the tartan flannel.”
Aziraphale was breathing. Crowley could hear it. “Well, yes,” the angel admitted. “It’s cold here tonight. Did you call me all the way across the ocean to criticise my fashion sense again?”
Crowley bit his lip and squirmed, just a little. “The main reason I don’t like those is they have too many buttons.”
And he could hear Aziraphale’s breathing change, just a little. “Well,” Aziraphale said quietly, a bit warily. “As I recall, you usually don’t bother with the buttons.”
Against the mouthpiece, Crowley smiled. “That’s true. I get impatient, trying to get at you.” Nervousness welled up in him from somewhere, and as he’d found, the best way to cope was to crash right through, stream of consciousness style. “You know what I do like, retro as it is, is…that old nightshirt of yours.”
Aziraphale coughed a little. “For…er, ease of access, I take it?”
“Yess,” Crowley said. “But…the fabric’s so thin. I can feel your ssskin right through it. So warm…when you get so sensssitive, I..” He paused for a gasp, let Aziraphale hear it. He also knew he tended to hiss when he was aroused and figured it couldn’t hurt to let Aziraphale hear that as well.
He was uncomfortable now, overheated, pulling at his clothes, but relieved at how surprisingly well this unconventional seduction was going. To Crowley’s great delight, the prim angel had proved himself long ago to be anything but prudish in the bedroom5, yet sometimes speaking it had a way of freezing up in a blush and a choke, for both of them--and when one is forced to whisper one’s desires to a piece of plastic in one’s hand, well …”just can’t stop moving my hands all over you. Do you remember,” he continued, afraid to stop. “that night I wanted to take it ssso slow, and I just held you down and touched you all over, and I could feel your nipples so hard under the fabric, so I just teased them and played with them for…felt like hours…while I fucked your mouth with my tongue…”
“Oh, Je-Crowley,” the angel groaned softly under the demon’s monologue.
“Until you made this noise, I can’t describe it, and you were trying to hold ssstill and you couldn’t, you were so hard…and I pushed my thigh between your legs and moved against you…jussst a little…and you came right then, so fucking hard, all over me…”
“Ngk!”
“That’s my line,” Crowley panted, realising both his shirt and trousers were open now and wondering how that had happened.
“You’re rubbing off on me,” Aziraphale whispered, his voice noticeably deeper and rougher.
“Oh, I wish,” Crowley said. “Up against a wall.”
“Mmm,” Aziraphale said. “You’re touching yourself right now, aren’t you?”
“Fuck yes,” Crowley admitted, starting down at his own cock in his own hand, all too aware of said hand’s insufficiency when compared to Aziraphale. “And I’m half-dressed, and it’s warm in here, and I’m looking at this massive empty bed…”
“My little empty bed,” said Aziraphale. “And no one here, no one to even watch me…”
“I would love to watch you,” Crowley said. “Even more, I want you here - all this ssspace, I want you spread across it, naked and begging me…”
“But I like the way you beg too,” whispered Aziraphale, “Always…hard to decide…”
“Oh!” Crowley cried, stuck in a surge of heat thinking of their fiery-sweet power struggles, allowing himself a teasing tug thinking of winning for once…and he knew, knew like he had known few things, that Aziraphale was stroking himself too; he saw the angel’s head a little thrown back, his erection in his moving fist, struggling to keep his control a little longer…and Crowley lost all regard for distance, geography, the ocean, and natural law.
“Azzzziraphale,” he growled. “I’m going to have you tonight. I’m going to drive you insane with pleasure, and I’m going to feel you against me and around me and under me and I’m going to come inside you. I’m ssserious. I’m coming to get you.”
“Oh, if only you…Crowley?” Aziraphale asked suddenly when he heard an odd and uncanny crackling sound on the other line, a strange vibration in the phone.
“Incubusss Delivery Sservice, pleassse hold,” came an oddly disembodied voice.
This might be the time to insert a brief lecture on the nature of beings of angelic stock and their lack of attachment to the laws of matter. But a demonstration is probably better. Crowley has abandoned his physical body to travel through phone lines under duress before, as we know-but it takes a heroic effort of willpower to abandon it when said physical body is in such a state of, well, extreme physicality, and it is only for the sake of vast pleasures promised to said physical body upon reconstitution that he manages it at all. As we know, such sub-molecular travel appears incredibly fast to us, and indeed it is. But it is slow enough for Aziraphale to realise exactly what his lover is attempting, and to panic just a bit, and to decide, well, fair’s fair and he doesn’t want to be waiting around like some sleeping maiden, and of course he can do the very same thing.
They meet halfway. There is a much larger crackling, and a surge of backwashing electrons zapping madly back down both ends of the open phone connection and threatening to black out communications in both New York and London at once (which would, quite possibly, trap them there although they couldn’t be sure as neither had ever experienced it). They don’t care. They flow and sparkle and buzz around and into each other like…well, there is no simile here.
When writers of erotica (as opposed to pornography, in which this phrase never appears) type “they became one” it is usually a romantic, if trite, bit of hyperbole and euphemism. In this case, it was literally true. And they, to put it euphemistically, freaked out. Too much. Unsustainable. The little death getting a little bit too big before showing a glimpse of a state of being too huge to comprehend.
This is very hard to describe, but if you can picture an infinitesimal and yet actually sizeless energy vibration that is more or less Crowley having a quick dispute with a similar non-object that is more or less Aziraphale, using something that both is and isn’t language (the gist of the argument is “your place or mine?”), and all of this happening in less than the blink of a flea’s eye, you will be in the neighbourhood of close.
But when they decided upon New York, they too were still only in the neighbourhood of close, rattled and agitated and imperfectly-separated and as horny as unincorporated animate aether can be.6 That is why, when they aimed for Crowley’s still-open hotel line, they slightly missed.
They found themselves back in flesh not on the excessive real estate of Crowley’s hotel bed, but crammed into the last phone booth in New York City,7 limbs and wings bent at awkward angles. (As with all public phones in New York City, the receiver was dangling at the end of its cord rather than resting properly on the cradle.)
That was only the beginning of the surprises, for when it came to wings, they would soon discover that Crowley had three and Aziraphale one. They also both had one silver-blue eye and one yellow, slitted one. Aziraphale was wearing tartan flannel pyjama bottoms and a very ill-fitting black Mizrahi shirt (unbuttoned, a demon’s insistent hand already making itself at home beneath it). Crowley wound up with a tartan pyjama top, an Armani tie and a pair of boxers printed with candy canes and holly (already being invaded by the hand of a restless angel).
Crowley moaned and pressed Aziraphale up against the grimy scratched glass, wings pinned in the other direction, and turned the glass opaque to outsiders with a scratch of his nails as Aziraphale caressed his rigid shaft…and then stopped. In the dim light, Crowley could feel Aziraphale’s brow furrowing in puzzlement. “Crowley,” Aziraphale finally ventured, the source of his consternation being the cock in question, and in his hand. “Is that…mine?”
“Er…” Crowley said, looking down. Not that it mattered at this stage but… “I think…you’re right.”
“Thought it was a little…” Aziraphale whispered.
“Don’t say it,” Crowley said, slamming his mouth against the angel’s to prevent that, cupping Aziraphale’s neck in both his hands, pushing himself flush against Aziraphale’s body and moving rhythmically, firmly. Only when he was sure Aziraphale was reduced to inarticulate groans did he start to work his way down, tugging the pyjamas down and kneeling…
“Can’t resist a chance, can you…to suck your own…”
“Er…I have done, before,” Crowley admitted, nuzzling Aziraphale’s thighs, kissing and nipping. “It’s a serpent thing.”
“You can? You’ve been holding out on me…Ohhh!”
“I know what I like,” Crowley murmured, at last closing his mouth and sliding, tugging, licking in a way that made Aziraphale claw his hair.
“Oh, Crowley, that’s soooo good, but…But…”
“Mmm?”
Yank. Ow. Aziraphale could get downright imperious. But Crowley liked it, rising back up slowly (and banging a stray wing on the edge of the heavy metal phone casing) and kissing Aziraphale again, acquiescing to arms wrapping around him, hands sliding up and down his back, maneuvering around the extra limb. Crowley took notice of that one white wing mashed against the glass and thought it had to get better somehow.
“Only you…” he whispered, “would want to take it slow and sweet in a bloody phone booth.”
“Well,” Aziraphale murmured, “it doesn’t have to be…”
“It can be anything you want,” Crowley replied, licking Aziraphale’s ear and reluctantly freeing his hand from between Aziraphale and the glass to make one slightly complicated (and physically impossible for an actual human) hand gesture that turned the Last Phone Booth in New York City into the Largest Phone Booth in the World-but only on the inside.
It was big enough to contain a reasonable approximation of Crowley’s huge hotel bed, as best he could remember it.
“Actually, my dear,” Aziraphale said, “What I meant was that it didn’t have to be…”
“You want rose petals? I can do that,” Crowley said softly. With another wave, he did.
“Not what I meant…just that…I want…”
“You want what?” Crowley gasped, staring at Aziraphale’s face between kisses and finding that eye thing was weird. “Ohh. Oh, I know,” and then his hand was tight around the back of Aziraphale’s neck and then he was tossing the angel down on the bed, crawling over him menacingly, burying one hand in feathers just above his back and running the other over his arse possessively.
Aziraphale moaned in a particularly eloquent way, and Crowley got it, shoving his finger down and in and vibrating like a moth’s antenna at the response he got.
“Fuck me,” Aziraphale whispered. “Fuck me hard.”
One didn’t disobey something like that. Aziraphale had a subverbal summons about him, a command, a force of gravity8; their bodies called to each other on a primal frequency. They got close to this frequency somewhere in the chord of their simultaneous cries as Crowley grasped one hip and pierced him, cautious at first and then quick and deep with a move like a rattlesnake’s strike. Aziraphale shoved back against him with a hiss of his own, and the predator-and-prey dichotomy blurred to delirious static as they improvised rhythm like a particularly aggressive samba crew forever just a bit ahead of the beat. Crowley’s mouth was full of angel skin and sweat and hair and feathers no matter where he put it; Aziraphale’s was occupied with demon fingers and stray rose petals and very unangelic sounds and words. Off-centered, weirdly distributed wings beat and thrashed in the air. The last phone booth in New York City filled with otherworldly light and rocked like a custom van on prom night.
More than anything, though, they aggressively loved.
Aziraphale loved the wiry hands sinking into his flesh and placing him here and there, turning him about for just the right angle of depth, of friction, of -oh.
Crowley loved the cushy resistance of those few extra pounds, so generous and welcoming around that fierce tightness, and had only begun to formulate a wicked thought about something he could do with the angel’s cock9 when Aziraphale gasped and came-beneath him, against him, all around him. And it tore a cry out of him too, for that he loved most of all; getting Aziraphale off, forcing those sounds out of him, making him shudder and…
Aaiee.
He thought he blacked out for a second. It was like leaving his body again.
***
“Mmm. Just wanna…lie here.”
“Do you need another latte?”
“Bassstard.” Crowley really didn’t want to move. He knew he had rose petals stuck to him in strange places.
“Crowley, darling,” Aziraphale whispered, “You do know we’re still in a phone booth.”
“Thanksss for the update.” The angel was clearly struggling to get up. Crowley wrapped his arms around him tighter. The kiss he got in response was only a bit mollifying.
“I want my wing back,” Aziraphale sighed. “And my eye.”
“And also your…”
“Not that yours isn’t wonderful, dear…”
“I suppose we have to…”
“I’m afraid so.”
Crowley sighed and sat up. Well, he did want all his own clothes back. Small consolation against the cold and damp of New York in December, and the unnerving buzz in the phone line, the unincorporation, and the frighteningly blurry boundaries there. Who knew but maybe if they tried it again he’d get stuck with Aziraphale’s spare tyre and his duck feet? He shuddered. He liked the love handles on the other party where he could use them for their intended purpose.
“Just…concentrate on being yourself, I suppose,” Aziraphale said a little worriedly.
“You too,” Crowley said. He found himself stroking the round cheek just beneath the snake eye that didn’t belong there but was open and warm to him nonetheless.
“Good luck,” Aziraphale said and took his hand.
They retraced it, through the annoying buzz of a line left open too long and the eerie tingle of the re-creation of their accidental merging, that would have given them goosebumps and raised all their small hairs had they actually had them. But with knowledge and intent this time, it was different and they passed back through one another relatively unafraid. The shocked astral bzzzzt of entirely-too-intimate contact had the particular resonance of laughter.
Crowley called Aziraphale from his hotel room to confirm that he seemed properly sorted. (On his cell phone this time.)
Aziraphale replied in the affirmative from London that, yes, he checked out as well.
There was a long pause.
“That was wonderful, you know,” Aziraphale finally said, in a tone rather like pointing out a sky that was undeniably blue.
“Well, yes,” Crowley said, in a tone that suggested he was taking credit for said colour. Then he sighed. “I’ll be home soon. One more shouting match in Congress and I’m done.”
“Pity it’s not Parliament, they’re so common there.”
“I think the phrase ‘passive-aggressive’ was invented here.”
“I don’t believe I want to know what that means.”
“I don’t think I need to explain it to you,” Crowley said, his voice riddled with deep affection. He still wanted something he couldn’t have-a good week’s sleep spooned around Aziraphale-but the very promise of it, eventually, was defeating the lethal dose of Yank caffeine in his bloodstream. His eyes-both yellow, thank you-felt heavy.
He fell asleep without pressing the ‘end call’ button10. And Aziraphale could not bring himself to hang up.
~end~
1. He had nothing to do with the brief New York transit strike. Whether he would claim to or not depended on who was asking.
2. He was correct in this suspicion.
3. He had been coveting one of those invisible headsets that can make the most power-dressed and put-together executive look like a raving schizophrenic when used anywhere in public, but he also correctly suspected this was a case where he was getting more enjoyment out of coveting than he would out of having.
4. He did indeed own a watch that gave the time in 20 world capitals (including London) and one Otherworld one, but the pleasure in such a watch comes from having it, not from consulting it.
5. Or in the kitchen, or the bathroom, or the living room, or on the bookshop floor, or in the backseat of the Bentley, or in the woods, or even once, memorably, on a platform at Waterloo Station. Etcetera.
6. Which is more so than you’d think.
7. This may come as a surprise to those who have seen a certain Colin Farrell vehicle (although not to those who know the borough-chauvinism of Manhattan screenwriters), but the last phone booth in New York City is actually on Staten Island, in a sleepy and weed-grown residential hamlet near the foot of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. It was never used very much even when it was cutting-edge. It has never been in a movie. Even Superman has never heard of it.
8. As do all heavenly bodies of sufficient size.
9. Well, really his own at the moment as we know, but he was well beyond keeping track of whose body parts were where.
10. It’s not as if he paid by the minute. Or the century.
Happy Holidays, hjbender, from your Secret Writer!
Gift for: hjbender
Author: vulgarweed
Pairing: Crowley/Aziraphale
Rating: NC-17
Summary: The physical distance between true lovers is merely part of Maya, Illusion-transcendable at the speed of desire. (That’s a nice high-falutin’ way of describing a smutty crackfic about supernatural phone sex gone awry.)
Author's Notes: There’s a Peter Gabriel song somewhere in the inspiration for this, too.
New York City, December 2005
Don’t you go worryin’, he’d said.
I know all about you two, he’d said.
The latter statement might’ve made even Crowley blush if it hadn’t been voiced at the time by an eleven-year-old boy who probably still turned green at kissing scenes in movies, Lucifer’s son or not. But Adam’s reassurances hadn’t gone for naught. None of the threatened eternal torments he’d got before the Abotchalypse had materialised some fifteen years later, and Crowley was still enough of an optimist to live in the moment and trust it had a good chance of continuing.
Hell did, however, persist in sending him to the States every chance it got. And just because Crowley took to it like a duck to insurance peddling on television didn’t mean he had to like it. Though he did have to admit it was pretty easy to rack up the commendations over here.
The ringtone craze, for example. (Currently, his own usually played a tinny, MIDI-d to death version of “Highway to Hell” no matter how often he tried to change it, except when it was a certain angel calling him, in which case it was “The Wind Beneath My Wings,” which if pressed he would admit was much, much worse.) Also the viral spread of the Starbucks Coffee chain. (Though in truth that was a partnership that one Mr. Sable had to admit worked to his advantage as entire populations of affluent urban 20- and 30somethings forewent solid food entirely for weeks on end without noticing; it wasn’t very often Sable actually achieved something by working so creatively with Gluttony).
At the moment, Crowley was spending some time at the studios of a cable news and commentary network supervising the finishing touches on a masterwork-a fictional “War on Christmas” that did a brilliant job of pushing people of all faiths and political leanings into a grumpy, dodgy, slow-burn state of holiday-coloured paranoia. From the Christian inspired by the martial rhetoric into bellowing “MERRY CHRISTMAS” oh-so-defiantly at the cabdriver with the turban and the Q’uran verses, to the mild-mannered Wal-Mart greeter so paralysed with fear of offending someone that he said nothing and got a black mark for unfriendliness, to the atheist convinced that the school holiday pageant had subliminal indoctrination, to the taxpayers’ time spent so freely debating the issue in Congress, Crowley knew he had a gift that would keep on giving, and every bratty teenager who ever stole a baby Jesus doll out of a yard nativity scene was his ally. Although he’d tried to swear off too much “messing people about,” he was a craftsman, an artist, after all. Where one’s Muses go, one must follow.1
Honestly, he had to admit as he looked out the window of his luxury hotel room 23 stories over Central Park, he wouldn’t mind being in America at all were it not for one thing: he was alone in said hotel room, with its fully-stocked bar and its Jacuzzi and its gigantic bed. To a certain extent, he had brought this on himself. New York was certainly a generous city in its way, and Crowley’s human form was hardly unattractive.
But.
It had seemed so unlikely for so long that anything would ever overtake Sloth at the top of Crowley’s ranked list (and frankly Pride had long looked like the likeliest contender). Yet Lust seized the prize the first time he saw it on an angel’s face.
He took his cell phone out of his pocket and looked at it accusingly. It was black and shiny and sleek and so vanishingly slim he suspected Sable of having a hand in its design.2 Although he’d certainly had fun with its camera function, it was actually rather difficult to use as a phone. It didn’t fit very well between ear and shoulder, after all. Bit of a drag if one is hoping to have use of both hands for what one has not yet fully acknowledged to himself he is about to try to do.3
Crowley threw himself down on the immense and empty plane of the ergonomic bed and looked at the hotel telephone on the nightstand. He dialed London. And it rang and it rang and it rang, for it was late.4 When at last the phone was answered, the voice on the other end was thick and sleepy and slightly panicked.
“Hello?”
“Aziraphale,” Crowley said.
“Oh, hello, how are you?”
“Fine, mostly. Were you sleeping?”
“I suppose yes, I was. I acquired the habit from you, I believe. Is something wrong?”
“Yes,” Crowley heard himself saying, in a voice that had significantly dropped in pitch and volume. “Something is wrong. You’re there, and I’m in the sodding Colonies. You’re sleeping, and I’m very restless…”
He heard Aziraphale make a sympathetic noise.
He went on. “I’ve had six Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Lattes today, venti, and I will be up all night. And also, this whole country is covered in Christmas desecrations, and I’ll definitely be up all night after seeing all those tarty plastic angels with pine trees stuck up their…”
“Crowley,” Aziraphale said, much less sympathetically.
Alright, wrong approach. Change tactics and come at this from a different angle (and indeed, that very phrase contributed to Crowley’s determination).
“What are you wearing? Let me guess, the tartan flannel.”
Aziraphale was breathing. Crowley could hear it. “Well, yes,” the angel admitted. “It’s cold here tonight. Did you call me all the way across the ocean to criticise my fashion sense again?”
Crowley bit his lip and squirmed, just a little. “The main reason I don’t like those is they have too many buttons.”
And he could hear Aziraphale’s breathing change, just a little. “Well,” Aziraphale said quietly, a bit warily. “As I recall, you usually don’t bother with the buttons.”
Against the mouthpiece, Crowley smiled. “That’s true. I get impatient, trying to get at you.” Nervousness welled up in him from somewhere, and as he’d found, the best way to cope was to crash right through, stream of consciousness style. “You know what I do like, retro as it is, is…that old nightshirt of yours.”
Aziraphale coughed a little. “For…er, ease of access, I take it?”
“Yess,” Crowley said. “But…the fabric’s so thin. I can feel your ssskin right through it. So warm…when you get so sensssitive, I..” He paused for a gasp, let Aziraphale hear it. He also knew he tended to hiss when he was aroused and figured it couldn’t hurt to let Aziraphale hear that as well.
He was uncomfortable now, overheated, pulling at his clothes, but relieved at how surprisingly well this unconventional seduction was going. To Crowley’s great delight, the prim angel had proved himself long ago to be anything but prudish in the bedroom5, yet sometimes speaking it had a way of freezing up in a blush and a choke, for both of them--and when one is forced to whisper one’s desires to a piece of plastic in one’s hand, well …”just can’t stop moving my hands all over you. Do you remember,” he continued, afraid to stop. “that night I wanted to take it ssso slow, and I just held you down and touched you all over, and I could feel your nipples so hard under the fabric, so I just teased them and played with them for…felt like hours…while I fucked your mouth with my tongue…”
“Oh, Je-Crowley,” the angel groaned softly under the demon’s monologue.
“Until you made this noise, I can’t describe it, and you were trying to hold ssstill and you couldn’t, you were so hard…and I pushed my thigh between your legs and moved against you…jussst a little…and you came right then, so fucking hard, all over me…”
“Ngk!”
“That’s my line,” Crowley panted, realising both his shirt and trousers were open now and wondering how that had happened.
“You’re rubbing off on me,” Aziraphale whispered, his voice noticeably deeper and rougher.
“Oh, I wish,” Crowley said. “Up against a wall.”
“Mmm,” Aziraphale said. “You’re touching yourself right now, aren’t you?”
“Fuck yes,” Crowley admitted, starting down at his own cock in his own hand, all too aware of said hand’s insufficiency when compared to Aziraphale. “And I’m half-dressed, and it’s warm in here, and I’m looking at this massive empty bed…”
“My little empty bed,” said Aziraphale. “And no one here, no one to even watch me…”
“I would love to watch you,” Crowley said. “Even more, I want you here - all this ssspace, I want you spread across it, naked and begging me…”
“But I like the way you beg too,” whispered Aziraphale, “Always…hard to decide…”
“Oh!” Crowley cried, stuck in a surge of heat thinking of their fiery-sweet power struggles, allowing himself a teasing tug thinking of winning for once…and he knew, knew like he had known few things, that Aziraphale was stroking himself too; he saw the angel’s head a little thrown back, his erection in his moving fist, struggling to keep his control a little longer…and Crowley lost all regard for distance, geography, the ocean, and natural law.
“Azzzziraphale,” he growled. “I’m going to have you tonight. I’m going to drive you insane with pleasure, and I’m going to feel you against me and around me and under me and I’m going to come inside you. I’m ssserious. I’m coming to get you.”
“Oh, if only you…Crowley?” Aziraphale asked suddenly when he heard an odd and uncanny crackling sound on the other line, a strange vibration in the phone.
“Incubusss Delivery Sservice, pleassse hold,” came an oddly disembodied voice.
This might be the time to insert a brief lecture on the nature of beings of angelic stock and their lack of attachment to the laws of matter. But a demonstration is probably better. Crowley has abandoned his physical body to travel through phone lines under duress before, as we know-but it takes a heroic effort of willpower to abandon it when said physical body is in such a state of, well, extreme physicality, and it is only for the sake of vast pleasures promised to said physical body upon reconstitution that he manages it at all. As we know, such sub-molecular travel appears incredibly fast to us, and indeed it is. But it is slow enough for Aziraphale to realise exactly what his lover is attempting, and to panic just a bit, and to decide, well, fair’s fair and he doesn’t want to be waiting around like some sleeping maiden, and of course he can do the very same thing.
They meet halfway. There is a much larger crackling, and a surge of backwashing electrons zapping madly back down both ends of the open phone connection and threatening to black out communications in both New York and London at once (which would, quite possibly, trap them there although they couldn’t be sure as neither had ever experienced it). They don’t care. They flow and sparkle and buzz around and into each other like…well, there is no simile here.
When writers of erotica (as opposed to pornography, in which this phrase never appears) type “they became one” it is usually a romantic, if trite, bit of hyperbole and euphemism. In this case, it was literally true. And they, to put it euphemistically, freaked out. Too much. Unsustainable. The little death getting a little bit too big before showing a glimpse of a state of being too huge to comprehend.
This is very hard to describe, but if you can picture an infinitesimal and yet actually sizeless energy vibration that is more or less Crowley having a quick dispute with a similar non-object that is more or less Aziraphale, using something that both is and isn’t language (the gist of the argument is “your place or mine?”), and all of this happening in less than the blink of a flea’s eye, you will be in the neighbourhood of close.
But when they decided upon New York, they too were still only in the neighbourhood of close, rattled and agitated and imperfectly-separated and as horny as unincorporated animate aether can be.6 That is why, when they aimed for Crowley’s still-open hotel line, they slightly missed.
They found themselves back in flesh not on the excessive real estate of Crowley’s hotel bed, but crammed into the last phone booth in New York City,7 limbs and wings bent at awkward angles. (As with all public phones in New York City, the receiver was dangling at the end of its cord rather than resting properly on the cradle.)
That was only the beginning of the surprises, for when it came to wings, they would soon discover that Crowley had three and Aziraphale one. They also both had one silver-blue eye and one yellow, slitted one. Aziraphale was wearing tartan flannel pyjama bottoms and a very ill-fitting black Mizrahi shirt (unbuttoned, a demon’s insistent hand already making itself at home beneath it). Crowley wound up with a tartan pyjama top, an Armani tie and a pair of boxers printed with candy canes and holly (already being invaded by the hand of a restless angel).
Crowley moaned and pressed Aziraphale up against the grimy scratched glass, wings pinned in the other direction, and turned the glass opaque to outsiders with a scratch of his nails as Aziraphale caressed his rigid shaft…and then stopped. In the dim light, Crowley could feel Aziraphale’s brow furrowing in puzzlement. “Crowley,” Aziraphale finally ventured, the source of his consternation being the cock in question, and in his hand. “Is that…mine?”
“Er…” Crowley said, looking down. Not that it mattered at this stage but… “I think…you’re right.”
“Thought it was a little…” Aziraphale whispered.
“Don’t say it,” Crowley said, slamming his mouth against the angel’s to prevent that, cupping Aziraphale’s neck in both his hands, pushing himself flush against Aziraphale’s body and moving rhythmically, firmly. Only when he was sure Aziraphale was reduced to inarticulate groans did he start to work his way down, tugging the pyjamas down and kneeling…
“Can’t resist a chance, can you…to suck your own…”
“Er…I have done, before,” Crowley admitted, nuzzling Aziraphale’s thighs, kissing and nipping. “It’s a serpent thing.”
“You can? You’ve been holding out on me…Ohhh!”
“I know what I like,” Crowley murmured, at last closing his mouth and sliding, tugging, licking in a way that made Aziraphale claw his hair.
“Oh, Crowley, that’s soooo good, but…But…”
“Mmm?”
Yank. Ow. Aziraphale could get downright imperious. But Crowley liked it, rising back up slowly (and banging a stray wing on the edge of the heavy metal phone casing) and kissing Aziraphale again, acquiescing to arms wrapping around him, hands sliding up and down his back, maneuvering around the extra limb. Crowley took notice of that one white wing mashed against the glass and thought it had to get better somehow.
“Only you…” he whispered, “would want to take it slow and sweet in a bloody phone booth.”
“Well,” Aziraphale murmured, “it doesn’t have to be…”
“It can be anything you want,” Crowley replied, licking Aziraphale’s ear and reluctantly freeing his hand from between Aziraphale and the glass to make one slightly complicated (and physically impossible for an actual human) hand gesture that turned the Last Phone Booth in New York City into the Largest Phone Booth in the World-but only on the inside.
It was big enough to contain a reasonable approximation of Crowley’s huge hotel bed, as best he could remember it.
“Actually, my dear,” Aziraphale said, “What I meant was that it didn’t have to be…”
“You want rose petals? I can do that,” Crowley said softly. With another wave, he did.
“Not what I meant…just that…I want…”
“You want what?” Crowley gasped, staring at Aziraphale’s face between kisses and finding that eye thing was weird. “Ohh. Oh, I know,” and then his hand was tight around the back of Aziraphale’s neck and then he was tossing the angel down on the bed, crawling over him menacingly, burying one hand in feathers just above his back and running the other over his arse possessively.
Aziraphale moaned in a particularly eloquent way, and Crowley got it, shoving his finger down and in and vibrating like a moth’s antenna at the response he got.
“Fuck me,” Aziraphale whispered. “Fuck me hard.”
One didn’t disobey something like that. Aziraphale had a subverbal summons about him, a command, a force of gravity8; their bodies called to each other on a primal frequency. They got close to this frequency somewhere in the chord of their simultaneous cries as Crowley grasped one hip and pierced him, cautious at first and then quick and deep with a move like a rattlesnake’s strike. Aziraphale shoved back against him with a hiss of his own, and the predator-and-prey dichotomy blurred to delirious static as they improvised rhythm like a particularly aggressive samba crew forever just a bit ahead of the beat. Crowley’s mouth was full of angel skin and sweat and hair and feathers no matter where he put it; Aziraphale’s was occupied with demon fingers and stray rose petals and very unangelic sounds and words. Off-centered, weirdly distributed wings beat and thrashed in the air. The last phone booth in New York City filled with otherworldly light and rocked like a custom van on prom night.
More than anything, though, they aggressively loved.
Aziraphale loved the wiry hands sinking into his flesh and placing him here and there, turning him about for just the right angle of depth, of friction, of -oh.
Crowley loved the cushy resistance of those few extra pounds, so generous and welcoming around that fierce tightness, and had only begun to formulate a wicked thought about something he could do with the angel’s cock9 when Aziraphale gasped and came-beneath him, against him, all around him. And it tore a cry out of him too, for that he loved most of all; getting Aziraphale off, forcing those sounds out of him, making him shudder and…
Aaiee.
He thought he blacked out for a second. It was like leaving his body again.
***
“Mmm. Just wanna…lie here.”
“Do you need another latte?”
“Bassstard.” Crowley really didn’t want to move. He knew he had rose petals stuck to him in strange places.
“Crowley, darling,” Aziraphale whispered, “You do know we’re still in a phone booth.”
“Thanksss for the update.” The angel was clearly struggling to get up. Crowley wrapped his arms around him tighter. The kiss he got in response was only a bit mollifying.
“I want my wing back,” Aziraphale sighed. “And my eye.”
“And also your…”
“Not that yours isn’t wonderful, dear…”
“I suppose we have to…”
“I’m afraid so.”
Crowley sighed and sat up. Well, he did want all his own clothes back. Small consolation against the cold and damp of New York in December, and the unnerving buzz in the phone line, the unincorporation, and the frighteningly blurry boundaries there. Who knew but maybe if they tried it again he’d get stuck with Aziraphale’s spare tyre and his duck feet? He shuddered. He liked the love handles on the other party where he could use them for their intended purpose.
“Just…concentrate on being yourself, I suppose,” Aziraphale said a little worriedly.
“You too,” Crowley said. He found himself stroking the round cheek just beneath the snake eye that didn’t belong there but was open and warm to him nonetheless.
“Good luck,” Aziraphale said and took his hand.
They retraced it, through the annoying buzz of a line left open too long and the eerie tingle of the re-creation of their accidental merging, that would have given them goosebumps and raised all their small hairs had they actually had them. But with knowledge and intent this time, it was different and they passed back through one another relatively unafraid. The shocked astral bzzzzt of entirely-too-intimate contact had the particular resonance of laughter.
Crowley called Aziraphale from his hotel room to confirm that he seemed properly sorted. (On his cell phone this time.)
Aziraphale replied in the affirmative from London that, yes, he checked out as well.
There was a long pause.
“That was wonderful, you know,” Aziraphale finally said, in a tone rather like pointing out a sky that was undeniably blue.
“Well, yes,” Crowley said, in a tone that suggested he was taking credit for said colour. Then he sighed. “I’ll be home soon. One more shouting match in Congress and I’m done.”
“Pity it’s not Parliament, they’re so common there.”
“I think the phrase ‘passive-aggressive’ was invented here.”
“I don’t believe I want to know what that means.”
“I don’t think I need to explain it to you,” Crowley said, his voice riddled with deep affection. He still wanted something he couldn’t have-a good week’s sleep spooned around Aziraphale-but the very promise of it, eventually, was defeating the lethal dose of Yank caffeine in his bloodstream. His eyes-both yellow, thank you-felt heavy.
He fell asleep without pressing the ‘end call’ button10. And Aziraphale could not bring himself to hang up.
~end~
1. He had nothing to do with the brief New York transit strike. Whether he would claim to or not depended on who was asking.
2. He was correct in this suspicion.
3. He had been coveting one of those invisible headsets that can make the most power-dressed and put-together executive look like a raving schizophrenic when used anywhere in public, but he also correctly suspected this was a case where he was getting more enjoyment out of coveting than he would out of having.
4. He did indeed own a watch that gave the time in 20 world capitals (including London) and one Otherworld one, but the pleasure in such a watch comes from having it, not from consulting it.
5. Or in the kitchen, or the bathroom, or the living room, or on the bookshop floor, or in the backseat of the Bentley, or in the woods, or even once, memorably, on a platform at Waterloo Station. Etcetera.
6. Which is more so than you’d think.
7. This may come as a surprise to those who have seen a certain Colin Farrell vehicle (although not to those who know the borough-chauvinism of Manhattan screenwriters), but the last phone booth in New York City is actually on Staten Island, in a sleepy and weed-grown residential hamlet near the foot of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. It was never used very much even when it was cutting-edge. It has never been in a movie. Even Superman has never heard of it.
8. As do all heavenly bodies of sufficient size.
9. Well, really his own at the moment as we know, but he was well beyond keeping track of whose body parts were where.
10. It’s not as if he paid by the minute. Or the century.
Happy Holidays, hjbender, from your Secret Writer!