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Technically there was not a spare table at the Ritz that afternoon. The maître d’ told Crowley and Aziraphale this as they stood at the front of the restaurant, specifying that he could not find their names on the reservation list and unfortunately there was therefore no way to accommodate them. Crowley didn’t like his tone.
They’d both made the mistake of assuming the other would be the one to miracle their names onto the list. Crowley had done the inviting but that usually meant Aziraphale did the reservation-counterfeiting, only the way the asking had been done suggested the reservation had already been made, so to speak.
Sharing a look, the kind of look that you could only share after six thousand years of tumultuous friendship, the angel and the demon had an entire debate about who ought to be the one doing the miracle, condensed into a few short seconds. Crowley lost. He sighed, subtly clicking his fingers up from the floor before plastering on a smile that matched the level of smugness of the maître d’.
“I’m sure I did make a reservation,” he said. “Could you check again? It’s Mr Crowley, spelt C-R-O-W-L-E-Y.”
The maître d’ let out a long-suffering exhale and made a big display of turning his gaze back to the list in front of him. When his eyes fell upon the name, they widened. He was sure it hadn’t been there the first time he’d looked, but he could not deny it was there now. Coughing his way through an awkward apology, he gestured for someone to come and take their coats.
“If you and your husband would just like to follow me this way, Mr Crowley,” he said, leading them through the busy restaurant and to a table that was laid and waiting for diners. It was a shame the couple who had booked it months ago wouldn’t get to enjoy it, but Crowley wasn’t too concerned about that and there was a good chance Aziraphale was too busy thinking about the chocolate torte on the dessert menu and whether it would be improper to order a second slice to take home.
It was only when they were settled at the table, wine orders already placed, that Crowley registered what the maître d’ had actually said to them.
"He called you my husband,” he remarked, trying very hard to look casual about the whole thing.
“Did he?” Aziraphale put down his menu, his cheeks going a little pink. “I can—”
He went to stand up but Crowley’s hand shot out and grabbed his arm.
“Sit down, Angel. It’s fine,” he hissed.
Letting Aziraphale cause a scene with overzealous corrections and apologies would not do them any favours. It would only take one miracle to remove any potential ban from the Ritz, but it just wasn’t worth the hassle. Besides, it really was fine. Crowley didn’t exactly mind the misassumption, and it wouldn’t be the first time it had been misassumed.
“I didn’t even notice him do it,” Aziraphale explained, the blush not yet faded from his cheeks. “To be honest, ever since humanity has adopted a more casual approach to the varied spectrum of sexuality, it never seemed worth the trouble to correct people anymore. There’s nothing wrong with it, you know.”
Crowley couldn’t help but laugh.
“Oh, I know. We were never the ones with the problem. Sodom and Gomorrah was all your lot,” he pointed out.
“Yes, well…” Aziraphale shifted uncomfortably in the way he usually did when he knew Crowley was probably right about something. “I’m sure there was a perfectly good…”
He trailed off when confronted with a raised eyebrow.
“Keep telling yourself that, Angel,” Crowley said with a sigh.
He could have pushed the matter, but he didn’t. He knew Aziraphale had been more relieved than anyone when more and more countries had done away with the death penalty for things like that. The angel had used more than a few unsanctioned miracles to save the lives of those accused. Crowley was guilty of a couple of divine interventions himself, swayed by a very good bad example. The demon reasoned that it was technically in his remit, if it was working against the desires of heaven.
There had even been a few memorable times where the people who needed saving were, well, not even people at all. The maître d’ was far from the first person to assume they were together and they had found themselves in far more trouble for it in the past.
“It’s the nickname, I think,” Aziraphale said, the sentence more blurted out that carefully considered.
“What?” Crowley asked. Sometimes it was very difficult to follow Aziraphale train of thought, even when you had only just been a passenger on it.
The light blush on the angel’s cheeks deepened to a dusty rouge.
“I only mean that to some people—other people—human people, it comes across as rather affectionate. So maybe that’s why they misunderstand what you are to me, what we are, I mean, to each other.” Aziraphale was more flustered than Crowley had seen in a while, barrelling on through his broken sentences as if he was afraid of the ensuing silence. “And humans don’t really have a way to conceptualise ‘natural adversaries but also friends for six thousand years’, so I suppose it makes sense that they’d struggle to interpret what this is.”
Crowley didn’t mention the fact that the nickname, while technically factually accurate, had long indeed become affectionate, or that it should still be notable that humans looked at them and assumed they were that significant to each other, and he certainly didn’t point out the fact he’d not actually used his usual term of endearment in front of the maître d’.
Instead he simply said, “we were certainly not friends for all of those six thousand years, Angel.”
He hadn’t intended to add the nickname but, as it so often did, it tacked itself on the end of his sentence like a reassurance, or a promise. And it came, as always, with the delightful side effect of turning the tips of his angel’s ears pink to match his cheeks. If it gave a few humans the wrong idea then, well, that wasn’t the end of the world. Crowley would know. They’d almost witnessed it.