Private Getting Away for a Bit

Jasmine grabbed her shoes and stepped back through the portal to their campsite, grinning at Aria as she set to work on setting up their fire. "Those are handy. Too bad you can't just portal up a fire for us."


Or could she? Jasmine wasn't sure exactly how that worked. But she wouldn't have wanted an easy fix for their fire situation anyway. Working with her hands made her feel good. Accomplished. And she actually said as much, almost idly as she worked on making a feather stick to get the whole thing started.

"My dad taught me all of this. He was an outdoorsman at heart, always said that was one of the reasons he moved to Raven's Grove when he married Mom, rather than having her move to New York with him."

"I don't think there's anything wrong with that," Jasmine said as she finished stacking the kindling that she needed to get the fire started. She paused for a moment and grabbed a stick and a piece of wood, opting to make a quick hand drill to get the embers that she needed. Was she flexing a little? Maybe. But she saw the way Aria was watching her and she enjoyed it.

"I've never done like. A spa day, but we did have a bathtub that I liked to soak in when I was sore from hiking all weekend. Dad gave me bubble baths in it when I was little..." Jasmine smiled as she started working the stick into the groove that she'd made in the other piece of wood, spinning it over and over to heat it up.

"And I like the dresses you wear. They're really pretty. I had a dress that a lady from my parish resized for me to wear to dances. I never really went to any, but I wore it once when our troop went to meet the Governor of our State."

She realized that she was turning the conversation maybe a bit too much on herself though, and stumbled a bit as she cupped the embers to coax them into a small fire. "So is what you have planned a surprise? Can I get a hint, or do I just have to wait?"

Jasmine fumbled just a little bit, the redness rising back in her cheeks as she picked up the kindling that she had dropped to put into the ever-growing fire. "That sounds really..."

Romantic came to mind at first. Perfect was another word. Then half a dozen other words that Jasmine couldn't quite settle on until she realized that she was being weird and letting her sentence hang in the air awkwardly.

"...nice. Sorry, it sounds nice though. I haven't done that in, ah, a while."

There was no hiding her embarrassment as she continued stacking the firewood until the flames were sizeable enough that they didn't need to sit right on top of it to feel the warmth. Jasmine peeled off her jacket and hung it near the fire before unrolling the cuffed hems of her jeans so they could dry out more evenly.

"You didn't have to spill all the beans," she said as she sat down and leaned back on her hands. The fire warming her toes was an incredible feeling after the icy cold river water. "I'm used to the unknown. I just tend to overprepare for it."

Then another pause. "But I appreciate you caring enough to spare me possible anxiety."

"Dad used to say something like that: time wasted enjoying yourself is time well spent. I think his dad said it to him," Jasmine said quietly, humming as she brushed her heels through the dirt and let the bottoms of her feet warm near the fire. "I don't know if I ever believed it until recently. I was always rushing around, working on half a dozen projects at a time."

She absolutely had caught the pause in Aria's sentence though and it lingered in her mind. There was a lurching part of her that wanted to lean over and see, just for a second, what kissing her would feel like. But the butterflies that came alive in her stomach thinking about that made Jasmine nauseous and she swallowed them back down.

She couldn't do that to Aria, not right now. She still had stuff she needed to work through and it wouldn't do for her to confuse their relationship anymore than it already was. She knew that Aria liked her, and Aria knew the same of Jasmine. It was... a waiting game now, she supposed.

"I guess though it is a good thing you've got your portals. We can go grab anything we might've forgotten or that we just want on a whim. Not that I need anything, just an, ah, observation. I'm fine right now."

Jasmine flailed at the sudden addition of a towel on her head, panicking for only a second before she started laughing alongside Aria. "No fair," she said with a pout as she took the offered towel to start drying her hair off. That process didn't take long and she ran a hand through the short fuzz on her head, momentarily lost in thought.

"Do you think I still look good like this? Like I'm not too, ah, butch right? I kind of want to grow it back out but... it's silly. There's a part of me that's afraid that if my hair grows back out, I'll go right back to how I was before. Like Samson, but with depression rather than super strength."