Re: Sage & Jasper (early in the party)
Jasper kind of hated all the jocks on principle, but Aaron was pretty cool, so he knew they weren’t all bad. The thought of them all slapping each other’s bare asses in the locker room and pretending they didn’t like it made him snicker though. What Sage said made Jasper glance around to spot Marsh again, and he squinted at him a bit. He did look like a clean cut sort of guy, not someone Jasper would have paired up with Sage in his mind, but ... he and Jules didn’t look like they belonged together either. “Yeah it’s a thing,” Jasper answered as he looked back at Sage again. “Especially if he like, introduces you and stuff. Don’t worry about norms man, that shit doesn’t really matter. I mean ... look at me and Jules.” He didn’t want to draw too much attention to her, because of everything that they’d all gone through, but it was true they were kind of mismatched. “Does he know about ... everything?” he asked Sage, his tone dropping a bit.
“I don’t normally care about what people think, but… I guess I care about him, and what people think of him,” Sage said with a frown. He couldn’t care less of what these people thought of him, but he worried about Marsh. It was stupid, of course; Marsh could take care of himself. “Good for you with Jules, though. She scares the shit out of me,” he said with a little laugh, though it was the truth. Sage was happier with some distance between them. “Marsh knows most of it. Not the worst, and not the details, but the summary, if that makes sense. I don’t know if he really believes me, but I think he knows I believe it, so… there’s that. At least Jules knows, right?” He didn’t know how much Jasper had told her about where they’d been and what it had been like, but there was no reason for her to question his sanity about being there in the first place.
Sage’s comment about Jules made Jasper snort softly, and he briefly flashed back to watching them open the portal at the carnival, when they rescued that little girl. It had been completely terrifying. Worth it in the end, but it had definitely triggered his PTSD, so he couldn’t blame Sage for being scared of Jules. He didn’t know her like Jasper did. “Yeah, that makes sense,” he said with a slow nod. It was good that Sage had found someone he trusted enough to tell, or at least someone he wanted to take that risk on. “She knows, yeah. She feels really guilty about it all, if that means anything to you. So I don’t like to tell her details.” Jasper still had a lot of jumbled feelings about it all, and dating the person who’d closed the door on all of them, but he didn’t want to make her feel worse about it all. Nobody in the whole ordeal had come out untraumatized. “Good for you though, man. I mean that. He’s pretty hot, hope he’s good to you.”
“I don’t really blame her and the others. She probably saved everyone I care about,” Sage said. It didn’t mean he wasn’t scared of her. He didn’t understand how it had all come together, how he’d known she was a threat to him and how she and the others had lured them to the spot to trap them. He didn’t think he would ever give her a reason to do it again, but Sage preferred space between them just in case. “Marsh is amazing. And way out of my league. I’m not entirely sure why he’s slumming it with me, but I’m here for it, you know?” Sage knew it was the sex, or at least it had started that way, but it had to be more than that at some point. Good sex didn’t sustain a relationship forever.