Work Text:
Peter arrived at six.
Jean had been at the rink entrance on Forty-Second since five-forty, which she would not be telling him. She'd left the motel at four-thirty for her second trip into Manhattan that day. The 81 north to Exchange Place, PATH into Manhattan, then uptown to Bryant Park.
Cemetery, diner, back to Bayonne, two hours at the motel charging her phone, showering, and changing into the forest-green sweater dress and thermal leggings she'd bought at a thrift store in October, then the whole route north again. She'd spent more than she should have. Somewhere under the Hudson, she'd stopped adding it up.
String lights crossed above the vendor stalls. The rink glowed at the center, ringed by people watching strangers fall down. The crowd around it seemed to exist entirely for that purpose.
She stood with her back to a kiosk selling ornaments nobody needed, bag strap over one shoulder, hood up over her knit cap, scarf across the lower half of her face.
Peter came from the Sixth Avenue side, jogging the last stretch, hair flat on one side. Hat victim. Different jacket than this morning - darker, intact, no beanie. He scanned the entrance, fast, already solving things she couldn't see. His eyes found her, then caught for half a second on the dark green showing at the collar of her coat.
He stopped in front of her. His eyes moved from her face to her hands to the scarf and back. She let him look.
"Whoa. You're, uh... here," he said.
"And you're on time."
He checked his phone against the clock above the rink.
"You said six. It's six."
"I know. I was commenting, not complaining."
He smiled before he seemed to realize he was doing it.
They went into the market. The kiosks ran in rows under strings of white bulbs. The crowd thickened between the rows, and Jean adjusted - bag shifted to her front, her attention sorting the pressure into background the way she sorted traffic noise. It cost something. It always cost something. But the crowd wasn't afraid of anything, and unafraid crowds were easier. A general hum of cold feet, tired children, mild impatience about lines. Nothing specific. Nothing she took.
Peter bought two apple ciders from a stand without asking, which meant she didn't have to decide whether to spend the money. The cup was hot through her gloves. That alone was worth standing in line for.
"So." She drank her cider. "This morning."
"What about it?"
"How did the thing go... the 'work' thing?"
"Frank's finishing up. I think... I hope."
"What happened?"
Peter drank some cider. "Stolen hardware thing. A crew lit a car on fire near the Queensboro to pull responders, which, side note, worked, so I followed two of them back. Frank was already there. Had been for weeks, apparently, and was thrilled to see me."
"Was he."
"He said get out but with real warmth." He rotated the cup in his hands. "It's handled. Frank's dealing with the rest."
"Anyone hurt?"
"No civilians."
Jean looked at him. The distinction sat there, deliberate, and he didn't dress it up.
"Okay." She drank her cider. "How can you be so casual about Frank? I mean... I know you're a simple spider and all, but he did shoot you with a .50 cal."
"Technically, he was shooting at you."
"And you caught it."
"That wasn't the part of the plan I was proud of."
"There was a plan?"
"It was short."
They walked the rows. Two kiosks down, a vendor was selling ties made of wooden slats, and Peter stopped.
"That can't work," he said. "A tie has to drape. Wood doesn't drape."
"You think it's stupid."
"No, I - " He leaned closer to the display. "The slats are linked, so there's some articulation, but the pivot points are all wrong." He held two fingers apart and tilted them. "If you space the hinges differently, it would actually follow the sternum. You'd get real drape."
Jean drank her cider and watched him redesign the tie. "You want a wooden tie."
"I want to know if it can be done. That's a different thing."
"You're still looking at it."
"I'm looking at it critically."
"You've been looking at it critically for a minute and a half."
Peter caught the vendor watching him and lowered his voice. "It's got potential." He was whispering about a tie. He made himself walk away from it, and looked back at it once, and she saw him look, and he saw her see him.
At the rink fence they stopped. Skaters went by in loose orbits under the lights. Near the boards, a kid - seven, maybe eight - went down hard, sat there a second, got up, went six feet, and went down again. Then got up again. Nobody was holding his hand. He was terrible at it and completely undeterred, and the arithmetic of that - fall, stand, fall, stand, no one helping - held her attention longer than she meant it to.
"He's been at it for a while," Peter said.
"You've been watching?"
"A little."
Jean watched the kid get up again. The movement wasn't complicated. Weight, edge, push. She'd been reading the mechanics for five minutes and the mechanics were legible.
"Do you know how to skate?" she asked.
Peter followed her eyes. "I mean... technically. Balance isn't really my problem area." He paused. "You said this morning you absolutely did not want to skate. Direct quote."
"That was true this morning."
"And now?"
"Now I want to try."
He pulled out his phone. "It's Christmas Eve, so it might be booked. Let me check."
It was booked. Then it wasn't - a session slot opened while he was watching the page, somebody's cancellation, and he moved fast enough that she suspected the spider reflexes were involved in the tapping. The form wanted a name for each skater. She watched him type Jean into the second field and let it happen. He put it on his card before she could get her cash out.
"I'm paying for mine," she said.
"You can give me cash. The site wanted a card, that's all."
She gave him the bills. He took them without counting.
They finished the cider at the fence. At the locker bay she took the yellow chrysanthemum out of her coat pocket and moved it into the top of her bag, where a fall couldn't crush it. One petal was already bent from the day. She stowed the bag and their shoes. The rental skates were terrible in a way that felt universal, like every pair on earth came from the same warehouse. On the bench, Peter crouched in front of her and explained the laces - snug at the ankle, looser at the top - with his hands hovering near her boot without touching it.
"You can pull it tight," he said. "The ankle's the part that matters."
"How tight?"
"Tighter than feels reasonable."
"That's not a measurement."
"It's skate math. Skate math is vibes."
She pulled them tighter than felt reasonable and stood up, and the skates renegotiated her relationship with the floor. Standing was no longer a default. Standing was a project. The mechanics had been legible from the fence. The mechanics had not mentioned this.
"Problem?" Peter said, not innocently.
"No."
He was on the ice first, turned, and held out a gloved hand.
One rule, decided before she stepped on: no telekinesis. If she was doing this, she was doing it with the same equipment as the kid by the boards. Same deal. Fall, get up.
"Hand," she said, and took it.
The first lap was bad. Her ankles did things she hadn't authorized. Twice she gripped his arm hard enough that a normal person would have bruised, and he adjusted, kept his speed down to hers, his right arm taking her weight - the left side stiff on the turns. He'd been favoring the left all evening. She wasn't going to be the one to mention it. Between corrections, his body did things on the ice that had nothing to do with the rental skates - balance adjustments that happened before the problem arrived, weight shifts she could feel through his arm but couldn't see. He coached the whole way. Bend your knees more. Lean forward like ten percent. Push at an angle, like forty degrees. Maybe thirty. Some degrees.
She tried the ten percent. It changed nothing.
"Ten percent from what baseline?"
"From - okay, from the amount you're currently leaning."
"Which you can't quantify."
"Look, when I was six I skated directly into a decorative snowbank at Prospect Park because a man yelled 'bend your knees' and I bent them so much I basically sat down at speed, so I'm actually protecting you from over-instruction."
The laugh got out before she caught it, and the laugh took her balance with it, and his hand was the only reason she stayed up. She could have blamed the ice. She didn't.
Ahead of them, a woman in a green coat was making progress with short, ugly, flat-footed steps - no glide, no dignity, forward motion. Jean copied her. It worked immediately. She got ten feet of actual skating out of it while Peter was still explaining edges.
"There it is," Peter said. "See? The knees."
"It wasn't the knees. I copied her." She nodded at the green coat.
"I - okay, but my advice created the conditions for you to recognize - "
"She created the conditions. You were talking about degrees."
He looked mildly wounded.
She fell once, properly, near the boards - caught the wall on the way down and hung there.
"That's a fall," Peter said.
"I'm checking something." From the floor. Voluntarily.
"You're checking the boards? At close range?"
She got herself up. "It doesn't count as falling if I stopped on purpose."
"Did you stop on purpose?"
"Retroactively."
He let it go. Later, when his edge caught on a rut and he grabbed the boards with both hands - the first purely graceless thing his body had done all evening - he looked over at her before she could open her mouth.
"I'm checking something," Peter said.
She had nothing. She skated past him with as much dignity as the rental skates allowed, which was not much, and his laugh followed her down the ice. It was annoying how much she didn't mind it. He caught up and she took his hand again without either of them discussing it.
After that, steadier. He asked what her days were like now and she said the library had turned into a regular thing, that people there knew her slightly and she went back anyway.
Near the end of the session she let go of his hand. Peter kept pace beside her. She got maybe forty feet on her own, slow, arms doing more work than they should, and it was fine, it was almost good, and then the turn came up and her balance went. She had about two seconds. Fall. Or cheat - if she could even hold it steady. Her power was a crowbar, not a level. Or ask.
"Hand," she said.
He gave it to her. She made it through the turn.
He started angling them toward the gate after that, and she checked the session clock.
"There's eight minutes."
Peter looked at her.
"One more lap," Jean said. Her ankles were going to regret it. That wasn't the point.
"Yeah, okay," he said, already turning, and the last lap was the best one - no coaching, no falls, the green-coat steps smoothing into something that occasionally resembled skating, his hand there the whole way.
On the bench afterward, she loosened the first skate and the pressure released all at once. Her arches had cramped somewhere around the second lap. Both ankles ached, and the back of one heel burned where the rental boot had been rubbing it. She'd known about most of it before the final lap and asked for one more anyway.
She paused before reaching for the other laces. One hand had curled into the shape of his glove again. She noticed before she could pretend she hadn't. She opened it and bent over the skate.
They returned the skates and retrieved their shoes and her bag from the locker. Peter checked his phone while pulling his boots on - fast, angled away, the specific speed of a person checking for one thing. His mouth flattened. He put the phone away like he'd been checking the time.
"Not the one you wanted," Jean said.
"It was... a promotional email. Twenty percent off a thing I bought once in 2024." He tied his laces. "I thought it was about the room - not that I'm checking obsessively. I'm checking at normal intervals."
"What would you do with it? The room."
He stopped mid-knot. "Shelves, probably. I could finally put some up where I want them. The workbench could stop sharing a room with my bed. I could have people over without it being..." He gestured at nothing. "I don't know. I stopped the plan at shelves."
The chrysanthemum sat in the top of her bag, one petal bent from the day, and for a second the thing she wanted, sharply and completely, was to tell Sara about the coaching - the degrees, the snowbank, the invented rules. The want arrived and had nowhere to go. She closed the bag.
They walked east, then up Fifth. The store windows were doing their competitive Christmas thing, animatronics and velvet, and they moved past them at the speed of the crowd. Peter slowed at one display, looking longer than he had at the others. His face went somewhere she couldn't follow without asking or cheating, and she wasn't going to do either. He caught up with her.
The crowd near Rockefeller Center got denser as they went - the pressure changing character, packed-close, overlapping, the approach to the tree compressing into a channel of bodies - until she could feel where the edge of tolerable was, maybe a block ahead.
"I can see the tree from here," she said. "That's enough tree."
"Yeah?"
"I have a range. The plaza's outside it."
"Honestly, good," Peter said, turning with her, "because I'm starving, and I've been pretending the tree was more interesting than pizza for like four blocks."
They cut east and found pizza at a place with three tables and heat lamps and a guy who called everyone boss regardless of gender. Two slices each, standing at the counter shelf along the window. Her hands warmed again. The pizza was good in the way that mattered, which was that it was hot and large and cost four dollars. The crowd in here was small enough to ignore - six, maybe eight minds, none of them anxious, none of them paying attention to the girl with the hood.
At ten-fifteen Peter checked his phone.
"So this is the moment," he said. "PATH to Exchange Place, the last 81 on the holiday schedule. If we go now, you make it."
"I know the schedule."
"I know you know the schedule. I'm just... marking the moment. Officially."
She'd made this decision in the diner twelve hours ago. She'd made it again on the walk up Fifth. She made it a third time now, with the actual bus slipping out of reach, which turned out to feel different from deciding in theory.
"I'm staying for midnight."
"Okay." He folded his paper plate in half. "Then the other question is what happens after. I could call Frank. Ask about the houseboat."
"Frank hasn't invited me."
"I know, but I could - "
"You could ask for me. That's not the same as him offering."
His mouth opened, closed.
"What about your place?"
Peter looked at her. "You, uh... want to stay at my place?"
"That's what 'what about your place' means."
"Right. Yes," Peter said. Then, immediately: "It's one room. Like, aggressively one room. Technically a storage room. There's a couch, a bed, more equipment than furniture, and the radiator has opinions, and there's a sign about asbestos that I've been assured is historical - "
"I know what it looks like."
That stopped him.
"Right," he said. "Then you know about the asbestos sign." A breath. "I want... I want you to come - " He stopped himself. "That's the actual answer. I want you there."
She could have read him. She could have known whether the sentence meant what it sounded like it meant, and whether the hesitation before it was nerves or something else. She didn't. She let the not-knowing sit where it was.
"Okay," Jean said.
Neither of them said anything else about it. One of the three tables opened up and Peter sat down immediately, favoring his left side. They stayed. He was turning a napkin between his fingers, tilting it at intervals, and it took Jean a second to recognize the motion.
"You're still thinking about the hinge," Jean said.
"I'm not still thinking about the hinge."
"You did the thing with your hand. The pivot thing." She reproduced it, badly, on purpose.
"Okay, I was briefly thinking about the hinge, because changing the spacing would actually work, and now it's solved and I've moved on."
"Who would you give it to?"
"What?"
"The tie. If it worked. It's a gift item. Someone has to receive it."
"Nobody. It's a proof of concept. You don't give a proof of concept as a..." He stopped. "Ned. I'd give it to Ned. He'd wear it, too. He'd actually wear it."
"So it's not solved."
"It's - what? It's solved."
"You just said Ned. Now it has to fit an actual neck."
Peter stared at her and pulled the napkin dispenser toward him like he was about to start diagramming. "Okay, so the width of the slats - " and she laughed, and he stopped.
"You're winding me up," he said.
"You wind easily."
"That's - yeah, fair." He didn't put the napkin dispenser back, and neither of them made any attempt to end the conversation, which continued through the tie, the ethics of giving anyone a tie at all, and a long stretch of nothing in particular, until eleven-twenty.
They walked back down Fifth to the station at Forty-Second and took the 7 to Times Square with the rest of the city that had somewhere to be at midnight. She took the end seat. He stood in front of her, holding the rail, his weight shifted right the way it had been all evening.
Times Square at eleven-forty was a pressure system unlike anything she'd let herself stand inside before. She kept the hood up and the scarf high and chose a spot - north end, storefront at their backs, a visible route out, the crowd ahead of them instead of around them. Peter took the position without discussion, which meant he'd been thinking about it too. The noise-that-wasn't-noise came from every direction anyway, thousands of general minds, a broad wash of excitement and cold and restlessness, none of it specific, all of it loud. She breathed through it. Peter stood on her exposed side. They waited. The cold was real and neither of them complained about it.
At 11:57 the screens synced.
The billboards across the bowl shifted - shapes of light drifting upward, blue to white, dozens of displays becoming one surface. The crowd turned. Thousands of separate attentions pointed the same direction at the same moment, and the pressure didn't get louder - it got simpler. One broad shared thing instead of ten thousand jagged ones. For three minutes she stood in the middle of the biggest crowd she'd ever chosen to enter and it was almost quiet.
She didn't take anything from anyone. They were all just looking the same way, and she was one of them.
At midnight the installation ended. A few people filmed the last frames. Someone nearby said Merry Christmas to nobody in particular.
"Merry Christmas," Peter said. Quietly. Just to her.
"Merry Christmas."
That was all it was, and it was the first one she'd meant since Sara. She let it be that.
The subway back was full of the tired version of the same crowd. On the walk from the station, Peter's stride shortened to match hers without him appearing to notice he'd done it. His building's stairwell smelled like somebody's cooking from hours ago.
The room was what she remembered and colder. Couch, coffee table, workbench with an open receiver and two trays of parts. Desk, monitors, work chair. Bed in the far corner, with half the Spider-Man suit and things she couldn't name spread across the space between. All one room. Everything he did and was, separated by nothing except habit.
He went at the radiator while she stood in the available strip of floor with her coat half off. He straightened into her space and they traded places in a shuffle that was about four square feet short of comfortable. Neither of them mentioned it. The radiator clanked twice and began to warm.
She hung the coat on the hook behind the door, unwound the scarf, pulled off the cap, and tucked her gloves into one coat pocket. Her bag went against the wall beside it. She opened it, took the chrysanthemum from the top, and set it on the workbench next to a labeled tray of small screws. The stem was still bent. She left it there.
Peter made cocoa from packets and handed her a mug. Jean took a sip.
"It's too sweet," she said.
"Yeah. The packet has one setting."
"Bad?"
"Festive."
She drank it anyway, both hands around the mug. One room. One mind. After the square, the quiet of it was almost physical. She had one end of the couch. Peter had the other, with one empty cushion between them.
"So, uh, when's the last time you did Christmas?" he asked.
"Did Christmas?"
"Like... went somewhere. Looked at things. Did Christmas stuff."
She thought about it. "With Sara. Before everything." She looked at the chrysanthemum. "We stole a wreath once. Off a door. She said it was abandoned because nobody was home, which wasn't - that's not how wreaths work. She knew that."
"Did you keep it?"
"We kept it until it dried out. Then she blamed me for the needles because I'd touched it last."
Peter laughed. Jean heard it and wanted more of it.
"What about you?" she said.
"May. We'd look at the windows, eat a hot dog from the cart on Fifty-First, and then she'd pretend we could afford to skate at Rockefeller Center."
"Could you?"
"Never once." He looked at his mug. "Last year I heated a can of soup and sat on the roof. The year before that I think I was on patrol."
"You think."
"I was on patrol." Peter looked into his mug. "It's been better lately, though. Ned's been good. I mean, he doesn't know - he doesn't have the history. But he sends me things. Like, yesterday he sent me a ranking of every bodega cat in a twelve-block radius. Annotated. With photos."
"How many cats?"
"Eleven. He has strong opinions about number four."
"And MJ."
He turned the mug. "She's good. She's - yeah. She's doing well. She has a boyfriend. He seems like a good person, and I'm glad, and... it's weird." He caught himself. "Not weird that she's happy. Weird that I know things about her that she doesn't know I know. Sometimes she'll mention something and I have to pretend it's new."
"That sounds exhausting."
"It is. It's also... I like being around them. I forgot what that was like. Having people who want you there any day for no reason."
She knew what that was like too, now, a little.
"You remember that person who lent me a phone charger, gave me fries, and talked about calculus?"
Peter's eyes lit up. "The one who seems like a friend?"
She nodded. "Her name's Kamala. She keeps dragging me to things."
"And you keep going."
"Apparently." She turned her mug. "I'm in her foodie group chat now. And she was right about the guava pastry - it's awesome."
Peter smiled. "Jean, that's great."
"It's... actually kind of great." She looked at the coffee table. "I don't know what to do with some of it."
"What part?"
"There's a guy from her group chat. Ted. He, uh... asked if I wanted to get coffee. Just the two of us."
Peter shifted. "Oh-kay." The word had about three extra syllables of opinion in it.
"Kamala thinks I should go."
"She seems like she has good judgment."
"You've never met Ted."
"I've met you."
Jean lowered her mug. He didn't mean it like that. Or he did, and neither of them was going to find out tonight.
"That came out... I meant she has eyes." Peter hid in the mug.
He was quiet for a moment. So was she.
"Does it feel the same?" she asked. "With Ned and MJ. As before."
"Sometimes. Then Ned mentions something from college and I have no idea what he's talking about. He's got four years I wasn't part of. They both do."
"You weren't there."
"I was supposed to find them." His voice dropped. "The last spell was my idea. Strange cast it, but I asked. I promised MJ I'd find her and explain everything. I went to the coffee shop where she worked. I had the whole thing written down. Then she handed me a coffee and... I left."
"And after that?"
"After that I stood across the street a lot." She knew what that looked like. She'd done her own version of it - different reasons, same distance. The radiator ticked. "She was okay. Ned was okay. They had their lives, and I'd already taken those away once, and I thought - if I walk back in there and say you used to love me, I'm just doing it again."
Jean held her mug and listened. She had read the letter, searched the apartment, used what she found. Stolen, it had been intelligence. Given, it was a wound with his voice around it.
"I know you know," he said, quieter. "I know you were in here. I know you read the letter."
Her eyes didn't go to the place she'd found it. They wanted to.
"Yeah..." She could have explained it. Needed information. Wasn't personal. But that was exactly the kind of justification she recognized from the inside, and he would too.
Peter glanced at her, then looked away.
Jean set her mug on the coffee table. Neither of them spoke for a while. He'd gone first. He hadn't asked her to match it.
"My mother left the car keys on the counter," she said. "That was the last thing she did that I can actually picture. Not her face or the conversation. The keys, on the green counter, and then she wasn't there."
"How old were you?"
"Nine. Sara was eleven." She looked at him. "Sara got us through. Foster homes, hospitals, the street. She was better at everything - people, control, sleeping." Her eyes went to the chrysanthemum's bent petal.
The rest of it was right there. Damage Control, the van, the years of looking. She felt it gathering and knew where it was headed.
"Not tonight," she said.
"Okay," Peter said. No push. No follow-up question.
The mugs were cold. Peter took them both and rinsed them. While he was at the sink, Jean unlaced her shoes and set them beside her bag by the door. Peter kicked his boots off beside the radiator.
When he came back, he brought the receiver from the workbench and set it on the coffee table. Then he sat in the middle of the couch instead of returning to the far end. Jean took the cushion beside him. There was still space between them, just not a whole empty seat anymore.
She asked about the output stage. Peter told her what the receiver should have done, what it had done instead, and why those were apparently very different things.
Jean pulled her hands into the sleeves of her dress.
"I'm cold," Jean said.
He planted one hand on the cushion and started the careful process of getting up. The blanket dragged itself off the foot of his bed, caught on the frame, and flopped into Jean's lap half unfolded.
He looked at the blanket. He looked at Jean.
"Did you just - "
"You were too slow." She hadn't meant to. Or she had, and the line between the two was getting less clear around him, which was its own problem.
Peter settled back onto the couch and laughed, and the laugh turned into a yawn, and he leaned his head against the back of the couch. Jean unfolded the blanket and he caught the other end, and they pulled it across both their laps.
Their shoulders touched when she shifted beneath the blanket. Neither of them moved away.
"I'm, uh, falling asleep, for the record."
"You're still talking."
"I can do both." He closed his eyes. "The resistor I ordered was the wrong tolerance, which is - it's a whole thing, the seller lists them by - "
The whole day arrived at once - the cold, the miles, the crowd-pressure, the hours of talking. She was falling asleep before she could talk herself out of it.
The radiator ticked. Peter's voice was quiet and winding down, not requiring an answer and eventually not getting one.
She closed her eyes.
Jean woke on her side facing the coffee table, with Peter's arm around her middle. She did not remember either of them lying down.
The room was still caught in the dark that passed for morning in December. Streetlight came through the high window in one pale stripe, crossing the receiver Peter had left on the coffee table. The three monitors were dark. His bed in the far corner was untouched.
She knew where she was before the room finished registering, which was new. Usually waking anywhere started with exits, distance, threat.
This time Peter's arm was in the way. In the way was the wrong phrase. She used it anyway.
She should have woken when either of them moved that close. She had woken for less.
He was asleep behind her on his right side. His hand rested loosely against the blanket over her stomach. At some point during the night, her fingers had closed around the sleeve at his wrist.
She should have wanted his arm gone. Instead she was looking at her own hand.
Jean let go first. She always went first. She lifted his wrist carefully and set his hand against his chest. Then she sat up, found the gap between the couch and the coffee table with her feet, and stood. He made a small sound but did not wake.
The blanket slid from his shoulder. Her hand stopped halfway toward pulling it back. Don't.
She left the blanket and went to the kitchen corner.
Eggs, leftover rice, a nearly empty bottle of oil, and a pan with a warped bottom that wobbled when touched. She opened the butter container in the refrigerator door and found it full of small machine screws, sorted by size. Of course.
She was still looking at the screws when Peter's voice came from the couch, thick with sleep: "That's the M3 tub. Butter's - there's no butter."
"You have a labeled tray of screws on the workbench."
"Those are different screws."
"There's a system."
"There's a system." He pushed himself upright by degrees, wincing halfway, and came over. She started the eggs and rice her own way - the way she'd learned in a motel with a hot plate, rice fried a little, eggs through it. He hovered at the edge of the process.
"The pan wobbles toward the burner edge," he offered. "You have to kind of..."
"I've had worse pans." She didn't look up. The pan rocked on its warped bottom. She caught the handle and held it level, and he closed his mouth and got two plates from a stack of three. Three plates. That was his whole inventory.
Her bag was by the door where she'd left it. The 81 ran again at noon. She'd checked the day before.
Outside, the streetlight was giving way to the first blue edge of morning. The chrysanthemum sat on the workbench, bent stem and all.
"Merry Christmas," Peter said.
"Merry Christmas," Jean said, and they ate standing at the counter.