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Aziraphale huffed as he placed another book back on the shelf. The last two hadn’t been what he was looking for. At this rate, he might never find it at all!
“Hey, angel. Saw this outside and—” Crowley halted in the middle of his entrance and sentence, watching Aziraphale first blanch, then flush. In one soil-blackened hand was the very thing Aziraphale had been in search of. Crowley noticed, his lips curling deviously. “Oh-ho. Looking for this, were you?”
“I, actually, um. Yes. I was. I’ll just… take that from you—”
Crowley stepped around Aziraphale’s outstretched arm, one eyebrow raised as he glanced over the innocuous blue words—The Gardener’s Notebook—surrounded by the outlines of a few leafy plants and one enormous watering can. He waggled the book, grinning. “What treasures am I going to find in this little beauty? Must be good, to get you so flustered.”
“Please don’t.”
The words burst from Aziraphale in a rush, panic spiking the rise and fall of his chest. Crowley’s eyes shot over to his, wide with surprise. Whatever Aziraphale’s face was doing made concern fall across Crowley’s like a shadow.
“Yeah. Alright. Here.” Crowley’s smirk slipped away as he held out the notebook. “You can put it anywhere. I won’t look, Scout’s honour.”
“What did you ever have to do with Scouts?” Aziraphale asked with an incredulous, slightly watery laugh. He pulled the notebook to his chest, heart seeming to pound straight through the paper.
“The blood circle1, obviously,” Crowley said, smile wolfish. Then it faded. “Didn’t mean to upset you.”
“No, no, darling, I’m perhaps overreacting.” Aziraphale settled in his favourite library reading chair and set the book on his knee. Crowley followed, a ghost in black. “I trust you in everything, my dear, but I find that I’m not necessarily prepared for you to know everything.”
“Then I won’t,” Crowley said simply, making as if to dust his hands off and grimacing sheepishly when a few small clods of earth fell.
“This is silly—”
“Nothing about your interests are silly, Aziraphale,” Crowley said, voice sharp enough to cut through six thousand years of being told otherwise.
“But I want you to know,” he finished, knuckles tight around the cloth edge.
Crowley, still covered in loam and smelling of cut grass and sunshine, sank to his knees. “Okay. I’m listening.”
The back of Aziraphale’s neck heated, ears turning red even as his slumbering libido began to rouse. “It might be better to show you.”
Aziraphale glanced through the book until he came to a familiar page, then presented it to Crowley. Crowley wiped his hands on his thighs and gingerly took it. His eyebrows climbed above those darling yellow eyes, taking in first the sketch in the space to the left—of Crowley himself, shirtless and half-bent in the summer sun, hands raised in argument with a very stubborn lavender—while the lined right-hand side detailed Aziraphale’s desire to slide Crowley’s trousers down his slinky hips.
“All like this, are they?” Crowley murmured, turning pages slowly.
“Some more erotic than others,” Aziraphale admitted, feeling heat across his cheeks and the bridge of his nose. Frankly, most of them fell on the more side of erotic; the page he’d given Crowley was paltry in comparison to what lay deeper within.
“Mm,” Crowley said noncommittally, tapping his tongue against his teeth. “This is good stuff. I didn’t know you could draw.”
“It’s a hobby,” Aziraphale responded carefully. Crowley’s mildness felt like a trap.
“Didn’t know you could write either.” Crowley flipped another page, blinking up at Aziraphale with a gaze so intense that his breath caught. Crowley’s eyes were huge and gold, not a hint of white to be seen, his dark pupils as tiny black holes. “Makes a person want to know more.”
“Oh?” That single syllable wavered with sudden anticipation.
“This one right here?” Crowley pointed to a fantasy halfway through the book. “Going to try that one.”
“Right now?”
“Oh, yeah. Right now.”