arwen

This continues on, recipe after recipe, story after story. Buck starts finding the ingredients he needs already stocked in the pantry.

They leave notes for each other.

Tommy leaves Buck breakfast sandwiches and cut-up fruit and pitchers of iced coffee.

Buck buys a polaroid camera. He takes photos of their exchanged foods and scribbles a caption on the photo, leaves it for Tommy to find.

They're always gone the next shift, so maybe Tommy has started his own collection (Tommy's recipe cards are stored in a small cedar box with blueberries painted on the side that Buck found at an antique store).

Buck's feeling...bold, maybe. He takes a selfie. Captions it, simply: Evan

That, too, is gone next shift.

One of the firefighters on Buck's shift transfers houses to be closer to home and there's a new transfer in and some shuffling between shifts.

There was no new recipe card in the drawer, so Buck's making blueberry turnovers.

Everybody knows to stay out of Buck's way when he's baking (they also know if they linger too long, he'll try to convince them to wash the dishes he's dirtied with his baking experiments), but the footsteps crossing the loft are unfamiliar.

He turns around, sees a man around his age with blue eyes and brown hair, a strong jawline and a cleft in his chin. When their eyes meet, when the man smiles and his eyes crinkle, even though Buck has never seen him before, he is familiar.

"So this is where the magic happens."

Buck ducks his head as his face flushes and he laughs quietly when Tommy stands next to him and gently bumps their shoulders.