At the beginning of every day, Peter Jacobs makes breakfast. Sometimes he’ll have something simple, like toast with mashed bananas or avocados. Sometimes he likes to make omelets or waffles or, occasionally, when he wakes up very early, Peter makes a soufflé or quiche. But no matter if it’s savory or sweet, decadent or simple, Peter starts every day with a homemade breakfast.

The habit started when he was a kid. His mom used to make the most amazing breakfasts for them, always big and filling and requiring a minimum of thirty minutes at the table. Peter learned to love breakfast because he loved his mom; he thinks he learned to love to cook because of her, too.

Peter is pretty sure he has never skipped breakfast. Even when he was a teenager, running around like a chicken without its head, he managed to sit down with his mom to have the “very most important meal of the day” with her. After he moved from home, most mornings he’d stop by his mom’s small restaurant to have breakfast there. Nearly every day consisted of his mom, breakfast, and the restaurant. Until the day she died, Peter hadn’t gone more than a day without seeing his mom in some kitchen, making something delicious.

Running Amelia’s without Amelia turned out to be harder than Peter anticipated. He had expected life to be hard without his mom; he thought it would be hard to be a son without a mother. He hadn’t thought about how hard it would be to be a chef without her, too. Inheriting the restaurant was always the plan; he just wishes it hadn’t gone like that. He hadn’t thought about how hard it would be to cook and maintain customers without his mom.

He stops that train of thought, immediately cutting it off like a door slamming shut between him and his thoughts.

Hard, Peter reminds himself, is not impossible.

He folds over pancake batter in a large mixing bowl. He might not spend his mornings eating breakfast with his mom anymore, but he spends them making breakfast in her restaurant and that’s just going to have to be enough.

The little bell above the front door rings from the other room, indicating first arrivals. Peter hoists the bowl under his arm and pushes at the kitchen door, peeking his head into the main room to see who has arrived.

His cook and waitress come in together, arms wrapped around each other as they laugh at a joke he wasn’t privy to. The two hadn’t been hired as a couple but Peter turned out to be a pretty good accidental matchmaker. The couple has been together since pretty much the day Peter hired Allison. Damien had been his mom’s cook, so he couldn’t take full credit.

They stop laughing and Damien presses a kiss to the top of her head. Peter decides to take a little credit.

“Morning, Boss Man,” Allison says, waving the hand she had clasped around Damien’s. Both of their arms raise in greeting to Peter.

Damien drops his hand from Allison’s and goes to the counter, hopping up on one of the stools there. Amelia’s hasn’t been redecorated in at least a decade and some of the wear, especially the cracked vinyl on the stools and the fraying edges to the artwork, show. But it’s homey, it’s comforting, and it’s—well, it’s Amelia’s and Peter figures that’s worth enough.

“Morning, guys,” Peter says. He jerks his head towards the kitchen. “I’m just going to go—”

“Yeah, yeah,” Allison waves him off before turning to her boyfriend. “Dam, help me with the chairs before you run off to start being the amazing sous-chef you are?”

Damien rolls his eyes, but a smile twitches the corner of his mouth. “I’m not sure that’s my official title.”

He watches her with a fondness that Peter has never been the recipient of. Something bright like happiness but heated like jealousy pangs in his chest.

Peter shrugs, heading towards the kitchen. “Call it whatever you want so long as you hurry.”

He takes the batter back to the kitchen, setting the bowl down on the counter. He’ll make another batch of batter, and Damien can start prepping the vegetables and heating the griddles and ovens. They need to start on a quiche or two—it’s Saturday and, though business had been down ever since the property across the street had been turned into a restaurant specializing in brunch, Peter’s still hoping to have a good morning rush.

The new restaurant, a stylistically upscale place called Savory Sal, is a little bit the bane of Peter’s existence. They’d opened two months ago and already, business at Amelia’s plummeted. According to pretty much everyone that Peter complained to, Savory Sal could run him out of business permanently. According to his accountant, it’s going to. After all, who wants to go to a homely, aged little place when they could go to somewhere that promises bottomless mimosas? His mom’s legacy and their delicious, family-oriented home cooking are going to be run out of business because a bunch of bored townspeople wanted spiked orange juice.

It makes his head throb.

Peter pushes the thoughts out of his mind, he isn’t going to worry about that right now. Right now, all he’s going to worry about is the right ratio of vanilla to wet batter. That’s all that matters right now.

Damien comes in after a few minutes and starts his prep work without saying anything. The man is a year or two older than Peter who, at twenty-five, is barely old enough to be head chef let alone owner of a struggling-yet-technically-afloat restaurant. Where Peter feels like he’s struggling with every decision, Damien works effortlessly. He’s been working at Amelia’s since he was eighteen, first bussing tables and eventually moving into the kitchen. Peter’s mom saw something in Damien, and while Peter isn’t sure exactly what it is, he thinks he can see it too.

It doesn’t hurt that Damien is one of his best friends, as well. They’d spent too many of their formative years in the small restaurant together to not have bonded, close like family.

“You’re quiet,” Damien notes, not looking up from where he is chopping tomatoes.

“I’m thinking,” Peter says. “Nothing worth mentioning.”

“Probably true,” Damien jokes, then, seriously, “Is it about Kyle?”

Oh, shit.

Peter’s kind of forgotten about Kyle.

As of a week ago, Kyle became Peter’s ex-boyfriend. Peter forgot he’s supposed to be upset about that. “No,” he answers honestly.

Damien looks up, one eyebrow quirked and his head slightly tilted. His expression shifts to something similar to I’m calling bullshit but he wisely says nothing.

Still, Peter feels the need to defend himself. “I’m not thinking about him.”

“Man,” Damien stops chopping completely, and Peter works very hard not to wince at the incoming emotional talk. “It’s all right if you’re upset. You guys were together for, like, six months.”

“It was mutual,” he says. Technically, it wasn’t, but Kyle had been about ten times as upset as Peter so he feels like it’s okay to elevate his part in the breakup.

Damien’s scoff is predictable but effective. Peter struggles not to cross his arms in a pout.

“He was an asshole,” Damien offers.

Peter rolls his eyes. “He was not. But I don’t care.”

“You don’t need to Strong Man this shit,” Damien grabs a tomato between his hands, rolling it. “Seriously, when Allison and I almost broke up that one time, I was a wreck.”

“You love Allison,” Peter points out. “Kyle and I were just—having fun.”

He winces as soon as the words leave his mouth. That is definitely a jerk thing to say. He keeps talking, hoping he’ll stumble onto something that makes him sound less like a jerk. “I’m just not into anything serious.”

Damien tosses the tomato up. He catches it. “You never are.”

“True,” Peter admits.

Done with delving into his feelings, he turns back to the batter he’s making. Peter grabs a container of plastic wrap, covering the now finished bowls. It sticks a little to his fingers, and he focuses on getting out of that and wrapping it securely.

When Peter finishes, he looks up to see his friend still watching him. He lifts his chin and eyebrows but doesn’t say anything. Damien sighs and goes back to chopping the tomatoes. His face draws in tightly.

The thing is, Peter isn’t reluctant to admit to his feelings. He just—doesn’t have any. Or, at least, any for Kyle. That’s kind of the reason they broke up.

Or, they broke up because Kyle wanted to move in together, and Peter really couldn’t have been bothered with that.

He does feel bad that he didn’t actually care. They had been together for close to seven months, and Kyle had been, generally, a pretty good guy. He was nice and attractive, and really liked Peter, but Peter didn't want anything serious.

Peter isn’t really sure what that says about him. He doesn’t like it, whatever it is.

Maybe he just isn’t a relationship type of guy. Maybe he just doesn’t like being in love the way other people seem to.

Maybe he’s just an asshole who treated a really nice guy so ambivalently that he doesn’t even care that they’re not dating anymore.

“Should we make a vegetarian and a meat quiche like we talked about yesterday?” Damien finishes with the tomatoes and grabs a box of mushrooms, prepping them while he waits for Peter’s response.

Peter hums his approval and Damien starts chopping. Peter grabs a knife and starts to cut the meat for the second egg dish. They work in silence except for the occasional scrape of a chair from Allison getting the front ready to open.

Peter glances at the clock; they open in twenty minutes. “You got this?” Peter asks when he’s done prepping the meat. Damien nods without looking away from what he’s doing, and Peter salutes him, going to wash up and start on the rolls.

The dough had been made yesterday evening right before Peter left to go home, giving it plenty of time to rise and set. He pops them into the already pre-heated oven.

He grabs the salt, milk, butter, and flour, carrying it over to the side of the stove. Then he finds the biggest skillet he has and starts to slowly make a roux.

Peter likes making a roux. He likes the simplicity of it, the way that it completely transforms. It takes patience and time, but it’s worth it.

He grabs a wooden spoon, carefully stirring. The gravy takes the longest to make because he likes to do it slowly from the recipe his grandmother created and his mom perfected.

Time moves by quickly, as it always does in the kitchen. Before long, he hears the other employees arrive—a dishwasher, a busboy, another waiter—and the customers follow not long after. Peter knows better than to get distracted by the sounds and chatter of these people; instead, he turns the roux into gravy and the gravy into a meal, when an order calls for it.

Although the orders come, they trickle in slowly. Allison brings each back individually and chats with Damien as he fries the eggs or slices potatoes for hash browns. At another establishment—even at Amelia’s a year ago—that would have been unprofessional. Peter doesn’t consider it in bad taste because he knows there aren't any customers waiting for her.

There aren’t really all that many customers at all.

When the morning rush comes to an end, Peter leaves Damien in charge of the kitchen and goes out to the front.

His regulars sit in their regular spot: Mr. and Mrs. George, an elderly couple that have been coming to Amelia’s for twenty years. They come in every weekend morning, and sit in the corner booth. Allison’s sister and her three kids sit at the big table in the middle, the kids fighting over chocolate milk—they’re payday regulars. Ernie, a middle aged reporter for the local paper, eats his toast and quiche with a cup of black coffee—he comes in every other day and is the reason Peter added meat quiche to the menu once a week.

There are a few others Peter vaguely recognizes. He stands behind the counter, refilling coffee and trying to mentally pull in more customers.

Peter loves to cook. He loves his restaurant, his staff, and his town. He loves everything about the life he has, even if it is hard work and long hours and his mom is gone.

So even if there is a budding restaurant threatening to ruin his business and he is a little bit emotionally unavailable to the point that he forgot about his ex, it doesn’t matter. Peter loves his life and he is going to fight for it.