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Maggie could pinpoint the exact night the group chat was born, because she’d been the one to make it, thumbs flying under the table while Crowley gazed across a rack of lamb like it held the secrets of the universe. Aziraphale had been mid-sentence about a first edition Wodehouse. Crowley hadn’t blinked in four minutes.
She’d added Nina first. Then Anathema, then Newt (who took a full day to work out what a group chat even was), then, after some deliberation, Muriel, who worked the counter at Aziraphale’s shop and had once asked Maggie in complete sincerity whether “best friends” was a euphemism. She’d named it the a/c is broken, because subtlety had never been her strong suit and it made Nina snort into her wine.
That had been eleven months ago. What had started as a single indignant message, MAGGIE: did anyone ELSE just watch that, had metastasised into something with structure. Recurring attendance. An agenda, occasionally. A pub, the Duck and Cover, whose corner booth had become theirs by some unspoken and entirely justified squatter’s rights.
Jaime had joined in month three, dragged in by Anathema after he'd rung her in a state about his brother's "phase," desperate for someone else to tell him he wasn't imagining it. Being Aziraphale's older brother came with certain responsibilities, in his view, and chief among them was making sure nobody took advantage of him, even if the culprit in question was a lanky lunatic in sunglasses who'd apparently been in love with him for a decade. Jaime hadn't wanted to be there. He still complained, every single week, that he had better things to do with a Thursday evening than discuss his own brother's romantic incompetence over warm cider. He had never once missed a meeting.
Meeting forty-seven convened on a wet Thursday in March, and Newt arrived twelve minutes late, soaked through, apologising to the coat rack.
“Right,” said Maggie, once everyone had a drink in hand. “Who wants to start?”
“I have an update,” said Muriel, raising a hand as though still getting used to the idea that they were allowed to speak without one.
“Go on, then.”
“Crowley brought Mr Fell flowers today. I was there. He said, and I wrote it down because I thought it was strange,” Muriel produced a small notebook, “he said, quote, they were going spare at the shop, seemed a waste not to.”
There was a silence.
“Going spare,” Jaime repeated, flatly.
“That’s what he said.”
“At a florist’s.”
“Yes.”
“Where flowers are, by definition, the product being sold.”
“I’m only reporting what I heard,” said Muriel, entirely unbothered.
Nina put her head in her hands. “He drove into Soho. In that car. For flowers that were going spare.”
“And what did Mr Fell do?” Anathema asked, though everyone already knew the shape of the answer; they always did.
“He went pink,” said Muriel. “And then he put them in the good vase. The one he usually saves for special occasions.”
Maggie already had her phone out. “That’s going in the spreadsheet.”
“There is no spreadsheet,” said Jaime, with the weary conviction of a man who had said this every week for a month and had never once been believed.
“There will be by Sunday,” said Anathema.
By meeting forty-eight, there was, in fact, a spreadsheet. Anathema had built it with the quiet, patient rigour she brought to everything, tabs colour-coded, columns for date, incident, and what she’d taken to calling the Denial Index, a rating out of ten for how absurd the accompanying excuse had been.
“Crowley’s scarf,” she announced, tapping her laptop to life. “Row twenty-two.”
“Not a scarf,” Nina corrected. “Six scarves. He wears one at a time and rotates them like he’s got a laundry schedule for a boyfriend who doesn’t exist.”
“Aziraphale knitted them,” Muriel said. “All in colours he said reminded him of Crowley’s eyes.”
“He said that?” Jaime looked faintly ill.
“He said it to me while I was pricing the poetry section, yes.”
“And his explanation?” Maggie asked, though she was already grinning, already knew.
“He said it was practice,” said Muriel. “For a jumper he intends to make someone else. He would not say who.”
The table erupted. Newt nearly choked on his lager. Nina banged her palm flat against the wood hard enough to rattle the glasses.
“Practice,” Jaime said, into his cider, with the particular despair of a man watching his own bloodline embarrass itself. “For six years running, Aziraphale has been practising.”
“Denial Index,” said Anathema, already typing, “nine.”
“Why not ten?”
“I’m saving ten,” she said, “for when it actually gets bad.”
It got bad, or at least closer to it, in April, when Crowley and Aziraphale went to Brighton for what they insisted, separately and to different people, was “just a little holiday, as friends do.”
They had booked a double room.
“Because it was cheaper,” Nina reported, doing an admirable impression of Crowley’s low, unbothered drawl. “Direct quote. It was cheaper, Nina, don’t make it weird.”
“It is, however,” said Anathema, “considerably weirder than a twin.”
“I asked Aziraphale about it afterwards,” Muriel offered. “Very casually. I said, was there just the one bed, then? And he went the colour of a tomato and started talking about the sea air.”
“The sea air,” Jaime echoed.
“He said it was very bracing.”
“Was it a hotel with sea views?”
“They stayed at a bed and breakfast two streets back from the front,” said Muriel. “There was no sea air to speak of.”
Maggie laughed so hard she had to put her drink down before she spilled it, and even Jaime, who considered himself above this sort of thing, allowed one small, involuntary huff that might, in another man, have been called a laugh.
“Denial Index, ten,” said Anathema, and nobody argued.
Meeting fifty brought its own particular delight, because Nina had been present for the incident itself and told it with the relish of someone reliving a favourite film.
“So we’re at that wine bar on Frith Street,” she began, “and this bloke, tall, very pleased with himself, starts chatting up Aziraphale at the bar. Complimenting his waistcoat, if you can believe it.”
“People do that?” Newt asked, genuinely curious.
“Apparently, yes. And Crowley, who has been perfectly relaxed all evening, goes rigid. Like someone’s flipped a switch. Doesn’t say a word, just sort of, looms, from three feet away, until the bloke gets the message and wanders off.”
“And then?” Maggie prompted, though she’d heard the story twice already and simply liked hearing it a third time.
“Then Aziraphale asks him what on earth that was about, and Crowley spends the next twenty minutes explaining, very seriously, that he was merely being protective. Of his friend. Because friends look out for one another. Because that man had shifty eyes.”
“Did he have shifty eyes?” Muriel asked.
“He had the eyes of someone paying for a round of drinks,” said Nina. “Crowley just didn’t like watching someone else flirt with him.”
Jaime exhaled slowly through his nose, the particular exhale of a man counting to ten. “My brother has never in his life let anyone else fight his battles for him. He once argued with a traffic warden for twenty minutes on principle.”
“Well, he didn’t argue with Crowley,” said Muriel. “He just went a bit soft round the eyes and let it happen.”
“He’s fifty years old,” Jaime added, somewhat despairingly, as though this were the crux of the matter and not, in fact, an aside.
“Fifty-one, next month,” said Muriel helpfully. “The eleventh. At seven minutes past four in the afternoon.”
The table went quiet.
“How,” said Maggie, very carefully, “do you know that?”
“Aziraphale told me. He has it memorised. Down to the minute.”
“Aziraphale,” said Nina, “does not remember his own PIN number.”
“He remembers Crowley’s birth time,” said Muriel, “and once corrected a nurse at a hospital who put the wrong hour on some old paperwork Crowley needed for something. He was quite firm about it.”
Jaime pressed two fingers to the bridge of his nose, the exact gesture, Nina always thought, that Aziraphale made when faced with a particularly troubling crossword clue. Brothers, evidently, carried more than surnames between them.
Anathema didn’t say anything. She simply opened her laptop, scrolled to the bottom of the spreadsheet, and added a new row, then a new column entirely, one she labelled, in small capitals, BEYOND DENIAL.
Meeting fifty-two was called early, on a Tuesday instead of the usual Thursday, because Maggie had sent a message at half past nine that morning consisting only of the words: URGENT. TONIGHT. BRING WINE.
By the time everyone had settled into the booth, Jaime included, wearing the particular expression of a man who’d cancelled a dinner for this, Maggie had her phone out and a look on her face that Nina recognised from every terrible idea Maggie had ever had.
“Aziraphale’s got a work thing next month,” Maggie said. “Some literary society dinner. Black tie. And he needs a plus one.”
“So?” said Jaime.
“So he’s already asked Crowley.”
“That’s not news,” said Nina. “He always asks Crowley.”
“He asked him as a date,” said Maggie, and let that sit in the air for a second before continuing, delighted with herself. “His words. Muriel heard it.”
All eyes turned to Muriel, who nodded solemnly. “He was very flustered about it. He practised the sentence on me first. He said, and I am quoting exactly, I don’t suppose, that is, I wondered whether Crowley might, as my, well, as my date, if he’s amenable.”
“And what did Crowley say when he actually asked him?”
“He hasn’t asked him yet,” said Muriel. “He’s been practising for three days.”
There was a long, groaning silence around the table, the particular sound of six people simultaneously wanting to bang their heads against the wood.
“Right,” said Maggie, “that’s it. We’re intervening.”
“Absolutely not,” said Jaime, at the same moment Anathema said, “Finally,” and Nina said, “What did you have in mind?”
Jaime’s protest went, as it always did, ignored.
The plan, once it had been argued into shape over two rounds and a packet of crisps, was elegant in its simplicity. Maggie would tell Aziraphale, in strictest confidence, that Crowley had been dropping hints about wanting to be asked properly, hints Aziraphale would then, in his own anxious way, take as gospel. Nina would tell Crowley much the same, that Aziraphale had been fretting he’d say no. Newt’s contribution was to suggest they simply lock the pair of them in a room together, an idea dismissed as impractical, though not, Anathema noted, on principle.
“It’s not lying,” Maggie said, when Jaime raised an eyebrow at the ethics of it. “It’s editing. For clarity.”
“It’s meddling,” said Jaime.
“It’s meddling,” Anathema agreed, “that’s about eleven months overdue.”
Jaime opened his mouth to argue further, then closed it again, and reached for his cider instead. He didn’t disagree. He simply didn’t want to be the one to say it out loud.
The dinner was in three weeks, which gave the group ample time to refine their editing, coordinate their stories, and, in Anathema’s case, prepare a contingency plan should the whole thing collapse. It very nearly did, on the second Tuesday, when Nina made the mistake of telling Crowley his hints had been noticed, at which point Crowley had gone entirely still and asked, in a voice with no drawl left in it at all, “What hints?”
“You know,” Nina had said, improvising wildly, “the usual.”
“I haven’t been dropping hints, Nina.”
“Course you have.”
“I have not,” Crowley had said, with the flat, cornered certainty of a man who suspected he had, in fact, been dropping hints for six years and simply hadn’t noticed himself doing it. He’d left shortly after, and Nina had spent the rest of that evening’s meeting insisting she hadn’t ruined anything, while Anathema quietly updated the spreadsheet with a new tab titled RISK OF COLLAPSE.
But three days later, Muriel reported that Crowley had come into the shop and bought, of all things, a book on the history of formal dress, which he’d flipped through with elaborate disinterest while asking Aziraphale, apropos of nothing, what colour he thought suited him.
“Denial Index isn’t the right measure any more,” Anathema said, that Thursday. “We need a new column.”
“For what?”
“Progress.”
The night of the dinner, the support group did not attend the literary society event itself, obviously, none of them had been invited and Jaime’s employer would have found his presence at such a thing baffling, but they convened at the Duck and Cover regardless, phones on the table, waiting.
The first message came from Muriel, who’d been roped into helping close the shop that evening and had therefore witnessed the departure.
MURIEL: he wore the blue waistcoat. the one Crowley said he liked once in 2019.
MAGGIE: HE REMEMBERED THAT
MURIEL: crowley remembered it too. he said “good choice” and then went very red for someone wearing sunglasses indoors
Nina read this aloud, and the table dissolved. Jaime, despite himself, allowed a small smile, the sort he usually reserved for tax rebates.
The second message, an hour later, was from Anathema’s cousin’s flatmate, who happened to be catering the event and had, entirely without prompting, sent Anathema a photograph of two men at a corner table, one gesturing animatedly with a fork, the other watching him with an expression that several people at the pub described, independently and without consultation, as besotted.
“Look at his face,” Nina said, holding the phone up for the table. “Look at it.”
“He looks like Newt did at our wedding,” Anathema said, and Newt, delighted to be included, raised his glass.
The third message did not come until much later, past eleven, when the pub was thinning out and Jaime had already checked his watch twice in the particular manner of a man who wanted to leave and also wanted, very badly, to know how the story ended. It came from Muriel, who had gone home hours ago but had apparently stayed awake for this exact purpose.
MURIEL: aziraphale just called me. he sounded very strange. he asked if he could talk to me tomorrow about “something important.” then he started crying? but a happy crying, he said. he wouldn’t tell me anything else.
The table went silent, and then, all at once, extremely loud.
“That’s it,” Maggie said, standing up so fast she nearly knocked her drink over. “That’s it, that’s the thing, eleven months and that’s the thing.”
“We don’t know anything happened,” Jaime said, though even he didn’t sound like he believed it.
“Jaime,” said Nina, not unkindly, “your brother does not cry happy tears over the phone course unless something has happened.”
What had, in fact, happened, none of them would learn the full details of until much later, pieced together slowly over subsequent weeks from things Aziraphale let slip and things Crowley very carefully did not, but the shape of it went something like this.
They’d been walking back from the dinner, the night gone soft and cool around them, and Aziraphale had been talking, as he often did when nervous, about nothing in particular, the seating arrangements, a dreadful speech about publishing trends, the excellent quality of the cheese course, when Crowley had stopped walking entirely.
“Crowley?”
“I have to say something,” Crowley said, “and if I don’t say it now I’m never going to.”
Aziraphale had gone very still. “All right.”
“I’ve been in love with you for longer than I know how to say out loud,” Crowley said, and it came out too fast, all in one breath, like he’d been holding it for years and had finally run out of places to put it. “Since before I can properly remember starting. And I know we’ve got this whole, this whole thing we do, where we pretend we’re just friends who happen to spend every evening together and go on holiday together and I know your birthday down to the hour and you knit me scarves and call it practice, and I let you, because I was terrified that if either of us said the actual word out loud we’d ruin it, we’d ruin the only good thing I’ve, “
“Crowley.”
“and I bought you flowers last month and told you they were going spare, which was a lie, Aziraphale, there was no sale, I asked the florist to specifically find me the ones that looked like you’d choose them yourself, and I have been doing this, this exact thing, for years, and I think everyone else worked it out long before I let myself, and I’m sorry, I’m making a mess of this, I had a whole,”
“Crowley,” Aziraphale said again, and something in his voice made Crowley finally stop talking. “I have known since Brighton.”
Crowley blinked. “Known what?”
“That I loved you.” Aziraphale’s voice had gone soft, unsteady, entirely unlike the careful, precise way he usually spoke. “I’ve known for considerably longer than Brighton, if I’m honest, but Brighton is when I stopped being able to pretend otherwise, even to myself. You fell asleep on my shoulder in the taxi back and I thought, quite calmly, oh. There it is, and I have spent every single day since then being far, far too much of a coward to say so.”
“You knitted me six scarves.”
“I did.”
“You said it was practice.”
“It was a lie,” Aziraphale admitted, and something that might have been a laugh escaped him, wet and startled. “I don’t know who I thought I was practising for. There has only ever been you. I rather think there was only ever going to be you.”
Neither of them, by all accounts, said anything else for a long moment. The street was quiet. Somewhere nearby a bus went past, indifferent to the whole affair.
“So,” Crowley said, eventually, and his voice had gone rough in a way Aziraphale would later describe, to Muriel, as the loveliest sound I have ever heard, and I’ve spent my life around books.
“So,” Aziraphale agreed.
“Bit stupid, isn’t it,” Crowley said. “Both of us. Years of it.”
“Dreadfully stupid,” Aziraphale said, and he was smiling now, properly smiling, the kind that showed all his teeth. “I do hope everyone we know doesn’t say I told you so.”
He needn’t have worried about the wording, exactly. Everyone they knew said considerably more than that.
Meeting fifty-three was, by unanimous and immediate agreement, an emergency session, and Maggie called it before Muriel had even finished relaying the news.
“He’s coming round to the shop tomorrow to tell me properly,” Muriel said, sitting very upright, clearly aware of the gravity of their position as primary source. “But he told me on the phone that they, quote, had a conversation, and that things are, quote, different now, in a good way.”
“Different how?” Jaime demanded, though he’d abandoned any pretence of disinterest weeks ago.
“He wouldn’t say more. He was too busy crying.”
“ELEVEN MONTHS,” Maggie said, to the ceiling, to the pub, to whatever cosmic force had allowed this saga to run quite so long. “Eleven months of flowers going spare and scarves that were practice and a double room because it was cheaper.”
“Fifty-two meetings,” Anathema said, quietly triumphant, pulling up the spreadsheet on her laptop. “I need to close this out properly.”
She scrolled to the very bottom of the sheet, past the Denial Index and the Progress column and the tab labelled BEYOND DENIAL, and opened a new row.
“What do I put,” she asked the table, “for row fifty-three?”
There was a pause while everyone considered it, Nina leaning over Anathema’s shoulder, Jaime frowning into his cider like the answer might be found there.
“Just put resolved,” Newt offered.
“Too clinical,” said Nina.
“Put finally,” said Maggie.
“With how many exclamation marks?”
“All of them.”
In the end, Anathema typed something simpler than any of it, something that made even Jaime go quiet when he read it over her shoulder: Aziraphale and Crowley told each other the truth. Everyone else already knew.
She closed the laptop, and for a moment nobody spoke, the six of them sitting in the same corner booth they’d claimed eleven months ago, drinks going warm in their hands, feeling something that was almost, unexpectedly, like being a little bereft. There would be no more meetings to call. No more flowers going spare, no more scarves called practice, no more double rooms booked for reasons of economy.
“We should still meet,” Muriel said, into the quiet. “Even so. Even without anything to report.”
“For what?” Jaime asked, though he didn’t sound as though he minded the idea.
“Because we like each other,” Muriel said, simply, the way they said most things, without any particular effort at cleverness. “Isn’t that reason enough?”
Nobody argued.
They kept the booth. They kept the Thursdays, mostly, though this one had run a day early and nobody much minded. They kept Anathema’s spreadsheet too, though it went quiet after that, no new rows, no new columns, until, six months later, an entry appeared that made the whole table go misty at once: A. and C. engaged. Ring was Crowley’s grandmother’s. Aziraphale cried for eleven straight minutes, according to Muriel, who timed it.
“Course he cried for eleven minutes,” Maggie said, reading it over Nina’s shoulder, grinning so wide her face ached with it. “The man’s memorised his fiancé’s birth time down to the second. Give him a ring and he was always going to fall apart.”
“In a good way,” Muriel added, because it seemed important to specify.
“In the best way,” said Jaime, and for once, nobody in the group found anything at all to argue about.