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“Is that too much butter?” Cassian asked.

“There’s no such thing as too much butter. That’s a myth invented by sad people who’ve never eaten a proper croissant.” Ruari cracked an egg one-handed into a bowl, the shell splitting along a clean line, and immediately cracked a second, then a third. “Your turn. Crack one.”

Cassian cracked his egg. Shell sprayed everywhere, more onto the counter than into the bowl.

“Brilliant,” Ruari said.

Cassian frowned. “I got shell in the flour,” he pointed out.

Ruari didn’t fish the fragment out. He scooped the contaminated flour from the bowl with the side of his hand, grabbed a fresh handful from the bag, and dumped it straight in by eye. “Do another one.”

The second egg cracked cleaner, though a hairline shard still clung to the rim of the bowl. Ruari left it.

“Ruari. There’s shell in the flour.”

“That’s alright. It adds texture, calcium for the bones.” He grinned at Cassian’s expression. “I’m joking. Mostly. In France they wouldn’t care. The French eat things with bones in them that would make an Englishman faint.” He fished the shard out with his little finger and flicked it in the general direction of the bin. It missed, pinging off the edge and landing on the floor. Ruari tipped a bag of cocoa powder directly over the bowl.

“Aren’t you meant to measure that?” Cassian asked.

“Measuring is for the first hundred times you make something. After that, your hands just know.” He tipped in more. Then a bit more. “Actually, that might be too much. Doesn’t matter, though. More chocolate than strictly needed is never a problem.”

Cassian watched the cocoa billow up from the bowl in a dark cloud that settled across the steel counter and onto Ruari’s forearms. The alpha moved to the sugar and poured that in, too, straight from the bag. Then he handed Cassian a spatula and stepped close, his shoulder brushing Cassian’s.

“Now fold. Don’t stir. Don’t whisk.” Ruari reached to adjust the angle of the bowl, his chest pressing into Cassian’s back. “You know what, stir it however you want. I’ve just given you a speech about not overthinking and then I’ve told you there are three different ways to move a spatula and two of them are wrong. Ignore me. Just mix the bastard.”

Cassian mixed the bastard.

The dry ingredients sank into the wet in swoops, and the batter thickened and darkened until it was the glossy brown-black of proper chocolate. Ruari stayed close while Cassian worked.

“See?” Ruari said, looking into the bowl. “Look at that. You’ve made a cupcake! Well, you’ve made cupcake batter, which is the hard part. The rest is just heat and patience, and I’ve got plenty of heat.” He rapped his knuckles against the oven. “Patience is more of a challenge.”

Cassian spooned batter into the cupcake cases. The first two overflowed, batter oozing over the edges of the paper and pooling in the tin.

“Keep going,” Ruari said, when Cassian paused to look at the mess.

“They’re too full.”

Ruari took the spatula from him, scraped the excess batter off the rim of the tin with one swipe, and licked the spatula clean. “See? Problem solved. The batter that escapes becomes a crispy edge, which is the best part, and most people don’t know that.”

He talked the whole time the tray was going in, about how the trick with chocolate cupcakes was pulling them thirty seconds before you thought they were done; the residual heat finished them off. If you waited until they looked ready in the oven they were already overdone.

Cassian leaned on the counter at his side and let him talk.

“—and I’ve been thinking about doing a whole new menu, Cass, a seasonal thing with rotating pastries. The problem with a fixed menu is that it gets boring, and boring is death. Death in a bakery, anyway. I want to do something with yuzu. I had a yuzu tart in Kyoto once that changed my entire understanding of citrus as a flavour profile—”

Cassian had never met anyone with this much energy at nine o’clock at night. Ruari looked like he could bake until dawn and still have enough left over to open the shop, on top of just having given Cassian one of the best days out he’d ever had.

“Ruari.”

“Yeah?”

“Thank you for today.”

Ruari’s hands went still on the counter. He turned to look at Cassian.

“Thank you for telling me things.” Cassian picked at a blob of cocoa powder on the apron. “Nobody tells me things. They ask about me all the time, and I don’t mind, because I know they think they’re being kind. But I already know my story. I’ve lived it.” He rubbed the cocoa between his fingers until it disappeared. “I’d rather hear yours.”

Ruari made a sound low in his chest. His hands came up to Cassian’s face. They covered most of it. His palms were warm from the oven and dusted with cocoa, and his fingertips pressed into the base of Cassian’s skull.