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🎙️SerpentStudios — Private Recording Session | 23:47 GMT
script_draft_v3_FINAL.docx
Title: Your Flatmate Can’t Sleep (M4A) [Boyfriend Experience] [Breathy] [Whispered] [Praise] [Needy] [Mutual Masturbation] Tags: slow build, quiet voice, bed sharing, 3am vibes, soft dirty talk Length (target): 28–32 min Note to self: don’t rush the opening. let them feel the silence first. twelve seconds minimum before the first line.
The red light on the condenser mic blinked once, steady.
Crowley pulled the chair closer, careful not to let it scrape.
The foam panels behind him swallowed every stray sound in the room, his breathing, the rustle of his shirt, the creak of the desk when he leaned in.
He’d rewired the whole flat six months ago, stripped the office down to the studs, lined the walls with acoustic treatment that cost more than his first car.
Worth it. Every quid.
He pulled the script up on the second monitor.
Took a sip of water and another.
Set the glass down on the coaster, not the desk, because the desk picked up everything.
He closed his eyes.
When he opened them, he was someone else.
“Testing,” he said, soft, just above nothing. “One, two.”
He watched the waveform bloom green.
Good levels.
He hit record.
Twelve seconds of silence.
Then, right up against the mic, so close you’d swear you could feel it:
“Oi. You awake?” A pause. A smile in his voice. You could hear it.
“Yeah, thought so. You’ve been doing that thing. That little sigh. You do it when you can’t sleep.”
He shifted, let the chair creak this time, deliberate, and the mic caught it like a body turning over in the dark.
“C’mere. No, properly. Under the duvet with me. It’s freezing in here, what’s the point of a flatmate if I can’t steal your warmth, eh?” A laugh, low, rough at the edges. He let it trail off into a hum.
“There. That’s better, isn’t it? God, your hands are like ice. Give them here. Let me.”
He breathed out, slow, through his nose.
The room was quiet enough that the exhale sounded like wind through a doorway.
“You smell nice. Shut up, you do. That stupid shampoo of yours. I notice these things.”
He paused and let the silence do the work. Twenty seconds was a long time in audio.
He let it stretch to twenty-two.
“Can I tell you something? Something I’ve been thinking about. For a while now.”
His voice dropped. Not in volume. In register. Like the floor of it fell out and landed somewhere warmer.
“I think about you. When I’m in here alone. When the door’s shut. I think about what you’d sound like. If I made you make that little sigh for a different reason.”
A soft, wet sound, a swallow, mic-adjacent, unmistakable.
“You’re not saying anything. Is that a good ‘not saying anything’ or a bad one?” He let his mouth curve.
The smile changed the shape of his voice.
He’d practised it.
“Oh. Oh. That’s the good one. Come here, then. Closer. I want you to feel what you do to me, yeah? Can you, can you put your hand, yeah. There. God. That’s, fuck, that’s—” A real gasp. Not performed.
He’d learned years ago that the audience could tell, every time, and the only way to make a gasp real was to make yourself feel it.
He pressed the heel of his hand against his thigh, hard, and let the sensation pitch the sound true.
“Sorry. Sorry, I’m, it’s just been a while since anyone, since you, fuck. You’re being so good. You’re being so quiet. Are you biting your lip? Let me see. Let go. I want to hear you.”
The whimper came out of him small and splintered, like something he’d been holding back and lost the grip on. He did it once. Twice.
The second one shakier than the first.
“Yeah. Yeah. Just like that. You sound, Christ, you sound like I’ve been imagining. Shh, shh,it’s alright, the walls are thick, no one can, no one’s going to, it’s just me. It’s just us. You can be as loud as you want, angel. Go on.”
He caught the word as it left him and didn’t edit it.
He’d decide later whether to keep it.
He usually did. It landed differently every time.
He let his breathing climb. Measured. A runner pacing himself up a hill.
The trick wasn’t to sound like you were coming.
The trick was to sound like you were trying not to.
“I’m close. I’m, fuck, already? Don’t laugh, it’s your fault, it’s the noises you’re making, it’s the way you’re looking at me, you don’t even know what your face is doing right now, do you? Stop it. Stop. I want to, I want us to, together, can we? Please? Please, love, please.”
The “please” cracked. He let it.
He’d written the next minute in shorthand on the script, because the next minute wasn’t words.
The next minute was breath, and the breath had to be earned.
He closed his eyes and let it happen. A rising hitch. A held beat. A small, cut-off sound at the back of his throat, the one the comment sections always lost their minds over, the one that sounded less like performance and more like accident.
When he finally came, he did it quiet.
That was the thing people didn’t understand about audio.
The loud ones were amateurs. The real ones went small. Went inward. A shaky exhale, a whispered oh, a half-swallowed sound that barely made it to the mic.
Then silence. Long silence. He let it run forty-five seconds. Breathing. Just breathing. Coming back down.
“…you alright?” Softer now. Wrung out. A laugh, tender, embarrassed.
“Yeah. Me too. C’mere. Head on my chest. That’s it.”
A pause. A kiss, pressed to the mic, so quiet it was more suggestion than sound.
“Go to sleep, angel. I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”
Twelve more seconds.
He stopped the recording.
Crowley sat back, rolled his neck until it cracked.
The studio was very quiet. “Fucking hell,” he muttered, at no one, and drained the rest of the water.
He scrubbed through the waveform. Clipped the first ten seconds. Moved the “angel” earlier, by instinct. Added a soft noise gate. Exported. Uploaded. Wrote the post.
new drop 🐍 your flatmate can’t sleep. neither can you. free teaser up now (first 4 min). full 31 min version on patreon, link in bio. be gentle w me it’s late x
He hit post.
He did not, as he closed the laptop, think about the username that would show up in the comments first.
He’d stopped letting himself think about that one specifically.
It wasn’t professional.
He thought about it anyway, he couldn't help it.
📱SerpentStudios | Twitter | 00:14
🐍 new audio live “your flatmate can’t sleep” [M4A] soft. slow. 3am. u know the one. free teaser 🔗 patreon for full
💬 847 🔄2.1K❤️11.4K
🎧 Patreon | SerpentStudios — Tier: Forked Tongue (£8/month)
Latest post: Your Flatmate Can’t Sleep (M4A) [FULL 31:04]
Posted: 14 minutes ago Listens: 4,302 and climbing
Royal Free Hospital, Hampstead | End of Shift | 00:26
Aziraphale Fell pressed his forehead briefly against the cool metal of his locker and permitted himself, in the privacy of the empty staff room, a single, heartfelt sigh.
Fourteen hours.
A ruptured appendix, a paediatric asthma attack that had genuinely frightened him, two drunk undergraduates who had concussed each other at a party, and a ninety-one-year-old woman called Dorothy who had held his hand very tightly and told him he had a kind face.
He had, in return, arranged for her to be admitted for observation and pressed a digestive biscuit into her palm from his own coat pocket.
She had eaten it with the solemnity of a sacrament.
He changed out of his scrubs, folded them and placed them in the laundry bag.
Buttoned his cardigan up to the second-from-top button, because the top button was an affectation and he was too tired for affectations.
The Tube was mercifully quiet.
He read six pages of a Wodehouse on his phone and did not remember any of them.
By the time he had unlocked the door to the flat in Belsize Park, shed his coat, filled the kettle, fed the enormously fat ginger cat who was named (with deliberate cheek) Gabriel and who regarded him with the cold disdain of an exiled monarch, and lowered himself into the armchair by the window, it was nearly one in the morning.
He would, he decided, have exactly one cup of chamomile, eat precisely two squares of the good dark chocolate from the tin on the sideboard, and then go to bed.
He picked up his phone to set an alarm.
A notification was waiting for him.
SerpentStudios posted a new audio on Patreon · 43 min ago Your Flatmate Can’t Sleep (M4A) [31:04]
Aziraphale looked at the notification for a long, considering moment.
He looked at the chamomile.
He looked at the notification again.
“Oh,” he said, quietly, to the empty flat. “Oh, dear.”
🎧 AirPods | Max Volume, Noise Cancelling ON | 01:04
He’d changed into his pyjamas.
The proper ones.
Tartan, flannel, a touch too warm for the season but he liked them.
He had drawn the curtains.
He had lit the small candle on the bedside table, the one that smelled of fig and something he could never identify and which he only ever lit for this.
Gabriel had been shut out.
Gabriel understood.
Gabriel did not approve, but Gabriel understood.
Aziraphale settled against the pillows, opened the app and pressed play.
Twelve seconds of silence.
He closed his eyes.
“Oi. You awake?”
And there it was.
That voice.
He’d tried, in the early days, to describe it to himself, as if naming it might reduce it to manageable proportions.
Low. Yes, obviously. A little rough, like a road that hadn’t been resurfaced in a while, pleasantly so.
Northern, somewhere, though he couldn’t place it more precisely than that; it had been smoothed down by years in London until only the vowels gave it away.
A smile in it, always.
A laugh that lived just under the surface of even the filthiest line, as though the man behind the microphone was in on a joke with himself and, graciously, with you.
It was, he had long ago concluded, simply a kind voice.
That was the trouble.
That was the real trouble.
He had come for the filth and stayed, God help him, for the kindness.
“C’mere. No, properly. Under the duvet with me.”
Aziraphale’s hand, already, had drifted.
He was not, he wished to be perfectly clear with himself about this, ashamed.
He was a fifty-two-year-old man. He was a consultant in emergency medicine.
He had, in a single shift this evening, held a dying woman’s hand and restarted a child’s breathing and told a very frightened teenager that his hand would, in fact, be fine.
He had earned this.
Wanking, in Aziraphale’s considered professional and personal opinion, was a perfectly respectable hobby, comparable in its innocence to crochet or stamp collecting, and anyone who suggested otherwise had simply not been doing it properly.
What he was, however, was the tiniest bit, well.
Particular about it.
“You smell nice. Shut up, you do.”
He made a small, helpless sound into the dark of his bedroom, and immediately felt ridiculous, and then, a moment later, felt tender, because the man on the recording had made a small helpless sound too, about two weeks ago, in the bit he had listened to perhaps eleven times, and if he was allowed to then Aziraphale rather thought he was allowed to as well.
“I think about you. When I’m in here alone.”
“Oh, you mustn’t,” Aziraphale whispered, scandalised and delighted in equal measure, as he did every single time, as though the man might be listening back.
“Are you biting your lip? Let go. I want to hear you.” He obliged.
“Yeah. Just like that. You sound, Christ, you sound like I’ve been imagining. Shh, shh, it’s alright, the walls are thick, no one can, no one’s going to, it’s just me. It’s just us. You can be as loud as you want, angel. Go on.”
Aziraphale went very still.
Angel.
He had heard it before.
Of course he had.
The word drifted in and out of the recordings like a recurring character, never announced, never emphasised, always just, there, dropped into a breath, sewn into the end of a sentence, and every single time it landed in the centre of his chest like a coin into a wishing well.
He had told himself, very firmly, several times, that it was simply the man’s pet word, that he undoubtedly used it with all his imaginary partners, that it meant nothing, nothing at all, and that he ought not to read into it.
He read into it anyway.
He always did.
He was, in that moment, with his headphones on and the candle guttering and his pyjamas rucked up around his thighs and his hand moving in the private unhurried way of a man who has had a very long day and has chosen to be kind to himself about it, entirely certain of two things.
The first was that he was going to finish, roughly, in approximately forty seconds, which was lovely.
The second was that he was, very quietly, very privately, and with the full knowledge that it was the most spectacularly foolish feeling he had permitted himself in years, a little bit in love with a voice.
“I’m close. I’m, fuck, already?”
“Oh, darling,” Aziraphale breathed, because in the dark, with the headphones on, he was permitted to say things he would never, ever say aloud anywhere else. “Oh, darling, go on.”
The rest of the recording happened.
He came, quietly, with dignity, into a flannel he kept in the bedside drawer for this purpose and which he laundered separately out of residual Anglican guilt.
The man on the recording came too, quieter still, and then there was the breathing, and the little laugh, and the whispered go to sleep, angel, I’ve got you.
Aziraphale lay in the dark for a long time after it ended.
He thought, as he always did, about how strange it was to feel held by a stranger. How strange, and how precise. How the man, whoever he was, whatever he looked like, wherever he lived, had worked out exactly the shape of the thing a tired person needed at one in the morning, and had made it, and had given it away for eight pounds a month, and had done it so well.
He thought: he is probably nothing like his voice. He is probably twenty-two and Canadian and has a girlfriend called Brittany.
He thought: it doesn’t matter. It’s the voice. The voice is the thing.
He got up. Cleaned up. Washed his hands with the nice soap. Returned to bed.
Then he picked up his phone.
💬 Patreon Comment Thread
Your Flatmate Can’t Sleep (M4A) [31:04] posted by SerpentStudios · 1h ago
forkedtongue_devotee · 58m ❤️ 412 absolutely unhinged drop thank u king
lilith_mmm · 52m ❤️ 289 the gasp at 14:02 i am in PIECES
anon_sub_4471 · 47m ❤️156 the “please, love, please” will be studied by scholars
A.Z.Fell · 3m ❤️47 (and climbing) My dear SerpentStudios, I do hope you won’t find it odd, a comment of this length at such a late hour, but I find I cannot go to sleep without saying thank you, which I realise is rather the point of what you do, so perhaps that is not, in fact, odd at all.
I listened to this after a particularly long shift at work, and I wanted you to know, if it is useful to know, that the moment at approximately 21:40, where you say “the walls are thick, no one can, no one’s going to, it’s just me, it’s just us”, was very kind.
I don’t know if you think about kindness when you write these. I expect you do. I hope it is not presumptuous of me to tell you that you are extraordinarily good at it.
The small laugh at the end was also quite perfect. Please do keep doing that.
With great admiration, and an additional tip because I was paid on Friday, A.Z.
P.S. I am aware “darling” is not in your usual vocabulary. Please consider this a suggestion from a grateful listener.
Tip attached: £15
🎙️ SerpentStudios — Studio | 01:47
Crowley was supposed to be asleep.
He was not asleep.
He was lying on his stomach on the studio floor, because the chair had lost its appeal, scrolling through the comments on his phone with the kind of glazed, post recording focus that comes from still having adrenaline in your system three hours later.
Most of the comments, he skimmed. Heart react. Heart react. Heart react.
Then he stopped.
He read it again.
He read it a third time.
“A.Z.Fell,” he said, aloud, to the foam panelling. “You absolute menace.”
He read it a fourth time. Snagged, particularly, on darling.
He rolled onto his back. Stared at the ceiling.
The condenser mic hovered above him like a satellite, disapproving.
“Don’t,” he told it. “Don’t start.”
A.Z.Fell had been commenting for nine months.
Crowley had, without ever quite admitting it to himself, read every single comment the man, or woman, or person, he had no idea, had ever left.
They were always like this. Polite. Specific. Embarrassingly well-written.
They noticed things. Small things.
The exact second where a breath caught.
The choice to leave a word in.
A slightly different tone in a certain line.
They left tips, small ones, always with a note, always with a reason.
Crowley had, twice now, looked at an unfinished script and thought would A.Z. like this before he’d written the next line, and then been deeply annoyed with himself about it for the rest of the afternoon.
He opened the reply box.
He typed: darling, noted. x
He stared at it.
He deleted the x.
He put it back.
He deleted it again.
He left the reply as: darling, noted.
He hit send.
Then, because he was an adult and a professional and not at all going to dwell on this, he closed the app, switched off the studio light, went to bed, and lay awake for forty-seven minutes thinking about the word darling in a voice he had never, in his entire life, heard.
📱 Patreon | 01:53
SerpentStudios replied to your comment: darling, noted.
Aziraphale, who had, against all his better judgement, still been awake, stared at his phone.
He made a sound.
It was not a dignified sound.
Gabriel, from the other side of the bedroom door, made a corresponding sound of contempt.
Aziraphale put the phone face-down on the bedside table.
Picked it up again.
Screenshotted the reply.
Put the phone face-down again.
“Oh,” he whispered, to the dark, to the candle, to the fig-scented air, to the enormously fat cat who did not care, to the man, somewhere in London, somewhere in the world, who did not know him and had just, somehow, replied to him. “Oh, this is going to be a problem.”