Chapter Text
Crowley’s date with Aziraphale (knitting lesson, he kept reminding himself firmly) was set for Tuesday afternoon, at a little café in Soho. He had let Aziraphale choose a location that was convenient to his bookshop; Aziraphale had mentioned in passing that he didn’t drive, and Crowley wasn’t sure if it would be pushing things too fast to offer him a lift.
When Crowley arrived at the café, Aziraphale was standing by the counter, examining the contents of the bakery case with his hands clasped behind his broad back. Crowley stepped up behind him, close enough to look over his shoulder. “That thing with the almonds on top looks good,” he remarked.
Aziraphale jumped and spun round to face him, a hand pressed to his heart. “Crowley! Goodness, my dear boy, you gave me such a start. When did you come in?”
“Just now. You were busy making decisions.” Crowley nodded at the bakery case. “Ready to order?”
Soon they were settled at a corner table, Crowley with black coffee and an almond scone, Aziraphale with cocoa and a slice of cherry cake. For the first few minutes Aziraphale gave his attention to the food, savoring each bite and sip with a gourmet’s enjoyment. Crowley watched him, hiding a smile behind his coffee mug. He liked Aziraphale’s unabashed pleasure in the little comforts of life.
Today Aziraphale was wearing a blue sleeveless pullover with one of those Scandinavian snowflake designs; somehow it didn’t surprise Crowley in the least that he was the sort of person who would unironically wear a snowflake jumper in October.
“Now, then,” Aziraphale said, setting down his fork and wiping his lips with a napkin. “Let’s see about your knitting. Did you print out the pattern as I suggested?”
Crowley produced several folded sheets of paper from his bag. “Yep. Seems simpler to just keep it on my phone, though.”
“Perhaps, but this way it’s easy to mark it up when you need to.” Aziraphale put on his reading glasses and paged through the pattern. “These two pages are the cable charts. Do you see how the symbols make a picture of how the knitted fabric will look?”
Crowley squinted at the paper as Aziraphale’s finger traced the shapes formed by the little criscrossing symbols. They did look a bit like the cables in the photo, he supposed.
“Okay, so the chart shows me what to knit,” he said. “How do I knit the things in the first place? I looked up a few videos, but they were kind of confusing.”
“I’ll show you,” Aziraphale said, reaching into his own knitting bag. “I brought some spare needles and yarn for you to practice with; your cables will likely be rather untidy at first, so it’s best not to start right off on your jumper.” He handed Crowley a set of straight needles that already held several rows in a plain beige yarn. “I’ve started the practice piece for you to save time. I do hope that’s all right.”
“Sure, fine by me.” Crowley got the needles turned around in the right direction to start a new row. “What do I do now?”
Step by step, Aziraphale patiently walked him through the process of crossing one group of stitches over another. Crowley scowled down at his knitting, tongue clamped between his teeth in concentration.
“Dunno how you’re supposed to manage all this with just two hands,” he muttered, trying to maneuver the stitches held on the cable needle to the back of the knitting. “Feels like I’m going to drop something.”
“Just wait until you try double-pointed needles,” Aziraphale said. Crowley was too busy wrangling the needles to look at him, but there was a distinct suggestion of a smirk in his voice. “They’re unrivaled for making one feel like a hedgehog with points going in all directions.”
“Can’t wait,” Crowley grumbled.
Eventually Crowley managed to complete two repeats of the simple cable chart he was practicing. The stitches were loose and stretched out where they crossed over each other, and in one place the cross went in the wrong direction because he had held the stitches in front instead of in back, but he thought he was starting to get the hang of it.
“Very good,” Aziraphale said, inspecting his work. “You’re coming along splendidly. Now, since you knit Continental–”
Crowley blinked. “Hang on. I do what?”
“Knit Continental style,” Aziraphale said with a slight, perplexed frown. “That’s what it’s called when you hold the yarn in your left hand as you knit. Holding it in the right hand is called English style.”
“Huh.” Crowley looked consideringly at his hands. “I just went with how they did it in the first knitting video I watched. Didn’t know there was a name for it.”
Aziraphale nodded. “Most people find they prefer one method over the other. I generally knit English style, but when I’m working with two colors of yarn–” he indicated the snowflakes on his pullover, “–it’s useful to be able to carry one in each hand.”
Crowley picked up his practice knitting again. He wanted to get his cables looking a little less amateurish before tackling the red jumper.
“How come you’re not knitting today?” he asked, jerking his head toward Aziraphale’s tartan bag.
“Oh, my project is at a stage where I need to pay close attention to the pattern, so I wouldn’t be able to attend properly to you.” Aziraphale gave him one of those beaming smiles. “You needn’t worry. I’m quite content to sit here and talk.”
Crowley forcibly pushed aside the potential implications of I wouldn’t be able to attend properly to you (was Aziraphale just being a conscientious teacher, or did he find Crowley particularly worth paying attention to?). “Uh, yeah. Okay.” Talk. Right. He could do that. “So, uh. How’d you get started with the knitting group?”
Aziraphale settled back in his chair, hands folded comfortably over his belly. “Well, I’ve been a regular customer of Tracy’s ever since she opened the shop, so when she had the idea of hosting a knitting group there, she asked me if I might be interested in running it. I wasn’t quite sure at first; I’d been a knitter most of my life, of course, but at that point I hadn’t ever tried to teach anyone else. But Tracy talked me round, and Anathema promised to come – she often visits my bookshop for her research – so I gave it a go. That was two years ago, and it’s really worked out splendidly.”
“Yeah,” Crowley agreed. “You’re a bloody good teacher. Wouldn’t have guessed you’ve only been doing it for a couple of years.”
Aziraphale blushed a faint, pleased pink. “Thank you, my dear. It’s lovely of you to say so.”
Crowley felt his own face heating at being called “lovely”. He cleared his throat. “Ngh. So. You knew Anathema already, and I’m guessing she brought Newt along. How’d the kids get into it?”
“One of them saw a flyer, I believe – just as you did – and talked the others into participating. I rather suspect it was Adam; he’s very much the leader of that little band.” Aziraphale smiled. “There have been others who drifted in and out, but the people you’ve met form the core of the group. I hope… I hope you’ll come to be part of that core as well.” He ducked his head and glanced sidelong at Crowley, his expression suddenly shy.
Crowley fumbled and almost dropped a stitch. “Yeah,” he managed. “Yeah, I’d – I’d like that too.”
They spent another hour chatting and sipping coffee and cocoa while Crowley produced several more repeats of the cable chart. At last he laid the needles down and shook out his hands. “Think I’m going to have to stop for now,” he told Aziraphale. “My fingers’re starting to cramp up.”
“Oh, yes, you must take care of your hands,” Aziraphale said in quick concern. “We can’t have you developing carpal tunnel this early in your knitting career.” He moved as if to reach toward Crowley, then hastily turned the gesture into refolding the napkin he had left beside his plate.
For a moment Crowley entertained a fantasy of asking Aziraphale to massage his sore hands; he remembered how soft and warm Aziraphale’s grasp had been when they greeted each other that first time, and right now that would feel especially nice.
He shook his head to dispel the image, hoping Aziraphale wouldn’t notice him blushing. “Guess we’d better call it a day, then,” he said. “Don’t want to keep you away from your shop any longer than I already have.”
Aziraphale chuckled. “No need to worry about that, my dear. I find that it helps to weed out the less discerning customers if my business hours are, shall we say, erratic.” He got to his feet, smoothing his trousers and giving the hem of his sleeveless pullover a tug to resettle it over the curve of his middle. “But yes, perhaps we should be on our way, if only to let the café have this table back.”
They walked to the door together, carrying their respective knitting bags. “Thanks for the lesson, Aziraphale,” Crowley said, pausing on the pavement outside. “This was fun.”
Aziraphale smiled up at him. “Yes, it was, wasn’t it? Thank you for asking me.” He hesitated. “You’ll be there on Friday, I hope?”
“’Course I will,” Crowley said. Feeling daring, he added, “Wouldn’t miss it, angel.”
Aziraphale turned pink again, but his eyes were sparkling. “Serpent,” he said in a tone that seemed meant to be exasperation, but came out suspiciously like fondness. “I really don’t know why I enjoy your company so much.”
Crowley grinned all the way home. Aziraphale enjoyed his company; Aziraphale hoped he would become a long-term part of the knitting group; Aziraphale had a teasing pet name for him. Granted, “serpent” wasn’t usually considered a term of endearment, but Crowley liked how it sounded in Aziraphale’s precise, cultured voice. And unless he was very much mistaken, Aziraphale liked hearing Crowley call him “angel”.
Over the next few days, Crowley made a point of working on his jumper whenever he had a spare moment so that he could arrive at knitting group with the first dozen or so cable rows completed. The look of delight on Aziraphale’s face when Crowley nonchalantly displayed his work more than made up for the hours of wrestling with the stitches while swearing under his breath.
“Crowley, my dear, this is perfectly marvelous! Look, your cables are already becoming more even; there’s a visible difference between the first repeat and the most recent one. You’ll be an expert in no time at all.”
Even though Crowley recognized the tone as the same one Aziraphale used to encourage Newt and the Them, he couldn’t help grinning in pleasure at the compliment.
Anathema (now wearing her lace shawl and knitting a fingerless mitt in black yarn with sparking crystal beads) looked over his knitting and nodded approvingly. “It gets easier as you go along,” she told him. “Just keep at it.”
“I’m planning to,” Crowley said, taking the needles back from her and getting out the cable chart.
As it turned out, focusing on working the cables correctly was harder in the middle of a chatty group than in the privacy of his flat; Crowley suddenly had a better understanding of why Aziraphale hadn’t gotten out his own knitting at the café. He resigned himself to only getting a few more rows done tonight. The point of knitting group wasn’t really the knitting, after all; it was spending time with his new friends.
A comment from Newt about a movie he had seen turned into a heated debate among the Them over which Star Wars character was the coolest, and before long Crowley found himself pulled into a discussion of the Jedi versus the Sith. (Aziraphale left everyone momentarily speechless by remarking primly, “I always rather fancied Han Solo myself. There’s something about a dashing rogue.”) This eventually segued into a conversation about science fiction in general, which culminated in Aziraphale holding forth about Jules Verne at such length that even Newt’s eyes were beginning to glaze over by the time Tracy arrived with the plate of biscuits.
Crowley made a mental note to get Aziraphale talking about old books more often, partly for the entertainment value of watching the others trying unsuccessfully to redirect the conversation, but mostly for the way Aziraphale’s whole face lit up as he leaned forward to make a point, plump hands gesturing animatedly. Even if Crowley didn’t understand more than half of what he was talking about, he would have been happy to listen to him all evening.
This time Crowley got to stay on the sofa instead of being recruited to help bring out the tea. As Pepper handed him his mug, the sight of the serpent coiled around it made him smile and glance involuntarily at Aziraphale. He met a matching glance over the rim of Aziraphale’s angel-wing mug, blue-grey eyes crinkling behind reading glasses clouded by steam from the tea.
This exchange of looks, it turned out, had not gone unnoticed.
“Do you have a boyfriend, Mr. Crowley?” Adam asked through a mouthful of shortbread. “Or maybe a girlfriend?”
Crowley choked on his tea and made a series of garbled noises.
“Adam,” Anathema said, sounding resigned.
“What? I’m just making conversation. That’s what you’re s’posed to do, isn’t it, ask people about themselves?”
“Perhaps not quite so bluntly, dear boy,” Aziraphale said. “That’s a topic that can be very sensitive for some people.”
By now Crowley had recovered enough to wave a hand placatingly. “No, no, s’fine. The kid’s just curious, I can respect that. I’m not seeing anybody, Adam. Haven’t for a while.” Was it his imagination, or did Aziraphale’s shoulders relax slightly at that?
“Then you and Mr. Aziraphale should go on a date,” said Adam, who was apparently unsquashable. “He’s not seeing anybody either, and I can tell you like each other.”
This time it was Aziraphale who choked on his tea. Crowley was fairly sure his own face had gone as red as his yarn.
Wensleydale kicked Adam’s ankle. “You’re embarrassing them,” he informed his friend in a loud whisper. “You shouldn’t talk to grown-ups like that.”
“Someone’s got to, don’t they?” Adam said reasonably. “Otherwise they might not ever get anyplace.”
Anathema very pointedly changed the subject, asking after a story the Them were writing together, and the conversation moved on.
Once the focus was no longer on him, Crowley relaxed slightly. He glanced uncertainly at Aziraphale, wondering how he had taken Adam’s comments.
Aziraphale was watching him with that oddly shy expression Crowley had seen once or twice before. “I do hope you weren’t offended, my dear,” he murmured, too low for the others to hear. “Adam can be… a trifle outspoken at times.”
Even if by some astronomically remote chance he had been offended, Crowley thought, it would have been impossible to keep it up with Aziraphale looking at him like that. “Not offended,” he got out. “It’s. Ngk. Just the truth, what he said.”
Aziraphale blushed a little and looked down at his hands, clasped together in front of him. “Yes, I suppose it was. He is remarkably perceptive for his age.”
“So. Then. Um.” Crowley took a deep breath. “Would you, uh, like to go on a real date with me sometime? Not – not just a knitting lesson?”
“Yes, I would,” Aziraphale said without hesitation. “That would be simply lovely.”
They sat there and beamed at each other for a moment. Then Warlock yelped in dismay as his yarn broke, and Aziraphale sprang up to help.
Crowley picked up his own knitting again, but it was harder than ever to concentrate on the cable chart. He kept imagining having dinner with Aziraphale at some little restaurant; hearing him make appreciative humming sounds over the food; watching his expressive face across the table as he talked enthusiastically about something; maybe even holding his hand or kissing him goodnight. When he had joined the knitting group to get help with making a jumper, he had never guessed that it would lead him to this soft, fussy, keenly intelligent, and impossibly charming man.
Crowley’s thoughts were interrupted as their subject sat down beside him again. It might have been accidental that he settled himself close enough for his round khaki-trousered knee to touch Crowley’s bony denim-clad one, but the tiny upward curl at the corners of his mouth suggested otherwise. If they hadn’t both been holding knitting needles, Crowley would have reached for his hand right then.
Aziraphale held up his argyle pullover and regarded it consideringly. “Do you know,” he said, “I believe it may only take me another day or two to finish this.” His smile turned mischievous. “Perhaps I’ll wear it on our date. One ought to dress stylishly for such an occasion, after all.”
“Angel,” Crowley groaned, but he was grinning too.