My Own Indecision

Long before the Veil Detective Agency, there was no actual agency. Just a garage packed with half-finished projects, a shared folder full of carefully labeled files, and the two of them. 

In those days, their unofficial headquarters was the garage attached to Hazel’s house. The old leather couch with cracked armrests unofficially belonged to Cameron, while the rest of the place was still Hazel’s domain. She always complained how little space there was in there, but whenever Cameron tried to get her to clean up her workspace, she would scoff and go back to whatever she’d been doing. 

There had been nothing different about that night. Cameron had kicked their boots off and stretched out on the full length of the couch, laptop settled on their lap. Hazel was cursing at her current project, holding an entirely one-sided conversation with the mass of metal in front of her. She was working on a ghost-detection device: something like a compass for locating the nearest ghost, from what Cameron understood. She wasn’t going to bother figuring out how it actually worked, though: her explanations always flew entirely over her head. 

That was why they were working together, anyway. They balanced out each other’s weaknesses, and together they could do things neither was incapable of alone. Cameron had lucked out, finding someone like Hazel. She’d known that finding other people with paranormal sight, much less qualified people, would be an ordeal and a half, so she’d been glad to finally end her search.

But they supposed that they were… more than that, in a way. Somewhere down the line, after about a dozen late nights and several messy cases, the previous relationship they’d had (entirely professional) dissolved into something closer. Warmer (a strange word to use, considering that neither of them really qualified as warm, touchy-feely people, but an accurate one nonetheless). Cameron was still trying to figure out how to feel about that, and Hazel probably was too, but it wasn’t bad. Just unexpected and different. 

“Oh, you son of a bitch,” Hazel muttered under her breath, leaning over her workbench. “I’ve started you five times, why aren’t you working? Are there just no ghosts around right now? Do I need to take you for a quick walk? Is that what you want?”

“It’s—“ Cameron consulted the time in the corner of their screen. “One in the morning. The walk can wait until the sun actually rises.” 

Hazel leaned back, turning around to scowl at them. “Why does it have to? What, are you afraid someone’s going to rob me? I’ll leave my wallet here.”

“Nobody’s going to rob you. I just think you should take a breather. …Remember what happened last time you took one of your inventions for a whirl late at night?”

Hazel threw her hands up and turned back to her desk. “I don’t want to hear it.”

“You smashed it on the ground because it wouldn’t work right.”

“I said I don’t want to hear it!” She yelled, without any malice behind her words. 

“Yeah, alright. You can’t handle the truth. We know.”

Hazel shook her head, chuckling quietly. “Whatever you say, darling. By the way, can you pass me that box of spare parts next to you? I need to see if switching some of these idiots out will do anything.”

“Sure—eh?” Cameron’s hands froze above the keyboard, and they jerkily looked over at Hazel. She couldn’t make out her face, so reading her expression was impossible. “What did you just say?”

“The box of spare parts. Give it to me.” Was she imagining things, or did she sound… nervous? As if she’d been caught in the act or something. Now that was just ridiculous. Hazel almost never got nervous, even under pressure, so why…

They swallowed. “That's not what you said. You called me—“

“It was a slip of the tongue.”

It took all of Cameron’s self control not to yell Well, it definitely didn’t sound like one! and start shaking her around. On second thought, maybe she was the one who needed to calm down. This wasn’t exactly the middle of the day, and Hazel had just been complaining earlier about how she’d only had one cup of coffee that day. This was probably like those embarrassing scenarios where people called their teacher mom by accident or something. She should just let it go. 

“You know what? I think you should go home for the night,” Hazel announced, before they could say anything. “I’m not making any progress anyway, and you should work on not waking up at midday all the time.”

“Wh—“

Hastily, she grabbed Cameron’s coat from where it had been hanging on the wall and tossed it at them. They couldn’t help but notice that she looked awfully shifty-eyed. The nervous undertone to her voice still hadn’t gone away. 

“I mean, I can go, but—“

 She didn’t know how to finish the sentence, so she let the words linger in the heavy air. Slowly, then faster due to the nerves, she turned off her laptop and stuffed it in her bag, and then slipped on her coat and buttoned it up. All the while, she stole glances at Hazel, who was standing in place, arms crossed over her chest in something that looked like a defensive maneuver.

“Ok. Good night,” she said, shooing her in the direction of the door, once Cameron was all ready to go. Cameron obliged, walking off in a daze. When she was on the verge of stepping outside, though, she turned in a split-second decision and came face to face with Hazel. She’d been following directly behind them, so now they were… far too close. 

Hazel’s eyes widened as she blinked up at her. It must’ve been the cold air sneaking into the room, but she saw a faint flush on her cheeks. 

“Do you—“ Cameron started. Then she stopped again. 

“Do I what?” She asked quietly, just loud enough for her to hear. 

Things might have turned out differently if she’d taken another few seconds, collected her bearings, and answered differently. But what she said was “…Never mind. Night.”

They noticed the exact moment when Hazel returned to her regular self: as if a window to a deeper, more vulnerable part of her had just had the blinds drawn over it. She nodded, waited for Cameron to head outside, and closed the door behind them. 

Cameron walked about a block away, on autopilot as their head whirred in confusion like one of Hazel’s overheated inventions. When they paused at the crosswalk, they shoved their hands into their pockets, shook their head silently and muttered, “Well, shit.”