Rites of Spring

Chapter 1-3

Okay, if Cameron ignored his personality, Jason was everything Cameron usually went for. He was tall, he was strong (or at least looked strong), and the black leather jacket did things to Cameron that he’d never been able to explain.

He didn’t like the attitude. He didn’t like the contempt that he’d seen in Jason. Jason had clearly assumed that he and Reid could just walk up to him and say, “Boo! We’re ghost hunters, here to rescue you!” and Cameron would roll over and obey. Jason had a lot to learn about people if he thought they worked like that. Cameron had never been very good at taking orders, and the idea that someone was just going to come up to him and say “Do what I say because I said so” filled him with an irrational anger.

He wanted to wipe the arrogance off that smug, self-satisfied face.

Jason might be hot, but he was arrogant. He was also volatile, which Cameron did not need in his life. He’d had plenty of that already. What he needed now was stability, and he could afford to wait until he found it. He didn’t mind going without, even if it had been almost a year since he and Dustin had broken up.

He shook his head and laughed at himself. Putting the cart before the horse, don’t you think? Jason was hot, arrogant, volatile, whatever. Jason was also a con man trying to get into Cameron’s house for unknown reasons, not some guy messaging him on the dating app Grindr. Jason wasn’t attracted to Cameron. Jason wasn’t even pretending to be attracted to Cameron. Jason was probably straight.

Reid came off as the more stable of the pair, but the way that he spoke in measured tones made Cameron uneasy. He sounded like the guidance counselors and “advocates” that kept showing up in school and throughout the system; the ones they used to try to break you down and get you to tell them things you didn’t want to. Reid was probably the least trustworthy of the pair.

All of Cameron’s musings assumed that his mother—that Catherine—had actually sent two con men to try to get to him. He knew that he had issues with paranoia, and that his paranoia issues were well-grounded in his personal history. He also knew that these guys might have been just regular con men. They might have found his name in an old high school yearbook or on the credit list from an old project and targeted him out of the blue. That made about as much sense, in context with the whole paranormal investigator pretext, as anything else.

He laughed at himself. He’d never been important enough to Catherine that she’d target him out of malice. She might target him out of resentment, just because he was breathing free air and she wasn’t, but he doubted that she even knew the first thing about his life once he’d gone into state custody. She’d known he was gay, but she had no idea what kind of guy he liked. That one call had been an anomaly; she’d never tried to contact him before or since.

The con men most likely wouldn’t be back. He’d given them a good scare; now he could get on with the rest of his life. He’d be vigilant, but no one had ever accused him of being anything but.

Cameron went down into the basement and found a replacement frame for his family photo. It didn’t take long to set the photo and mat in the new frame. He hung it on the wall and got back to work on the book cover for a couple of hours before heading to bed.