Title: Breakfast
Author: amazonqueenkate
Rating: G
Warning: None.
Summary: Nick gets a morning surprise.

Greg’s always the loudest when he’s trying to be quiet, and – on a what should have been a lazy Sunday morning – Nick wakes up to the sound of pots banging together in the kitchen. The sound startled him enough that he initially sat straight up and groped for the nightstand, the drawer halfway open before he realizes that the bed is empty and there’s no robber in the condo. Mentally, he curses Greg’s habit of waking up early on the weekends and rolls over, pulling the covers up over his head and praying for silence.

The silence comes about a half-hour later, and Nick’s just about asleep again when there’s a familiar weight on the edge of the bed. “Good morning, sleepy head!” Greg chides, pressing some body part – given the sharpness of it, Nick guesses it’s his elbow – into the covers and hitting Nick squarely in the gut. He exhaled in a half-groan and curled further into the comforters. “C’mon. Don’t you want to see what I made you?”

No one at work would guess that Nick is so attached to his sleep, but he really is, and he reluctantly scoots to sit up in bed. Greg grins the special, there-is-no-pain-in-the-world grin that’s reserved exclusively for Nick (and whatever waiter they get at that bistro that serves Greg’s beloved plum-glazed rack of lamb) and sets a tray down on the bed.

It’s not exactly perfectly arranged – Nick knows that Greg worked as a lab proctor in college, whereas Nick spent his summers as a server at the local Applebee’s – and, in fact, the oatmeal burbles dangerously. And, now that he’s really focusing, the egg looks undercooked and the bacon could probably be hammered into the wall and used to support a shelf or something, but Nick smiles anyway. Because, as warm and affectionate as Greg is, physically, it’s rare that he goes out of his way to do something he’s not particularly good at.

Like cooking.

“You made me breakfast?” he asks, rubbing at his eyes. Greg grins and clambers over his outstretched legs to curl up in his empty side of the bed. “What’s the occasion?”

He’s still grinning. Greg, Nick has noticed in the last year or so, is the kind of person who can grin through anything, even great depravity. At those times, the grin is small and forced, but right now? Right now, Greg is glowing, and he’s pulled up the blackout shades on the windows so that the sun catches on his blonde-tipped hair and just makes the room that much brighter.

Nick drinks in the sight of him, as well as a mouthful of orange juice.

“Why not?” he smiles, and wriggles his toes up against Nick’s calf. “You do most of the cooking. I thought I’d return the favor.”

There are a thousand things Nick wants to point out, as he watches Greg smile and fill him with that radiance. Like the fact that he does all the cooking because Greg is not exactly Julia Child or any semblance thereof. Like the fact that, really, he doesn’t need anything more than Greg’s company to repay him for his cooking. Like the fact that it’s moments like these – little, domestic moments, where the lab seems a thousand miles away, and their pagers are quiet, and the city of Las Vegas lets them be – that makes him love Greg more than words can really say.

But Nick knows there will be time for these things later. Right now, what he has time for is Greg, Greg’s smile, and the warmth he feels in this room, at this moment, with him.

Well, that, and breakfast.