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"Oh my god, Gus!" Shawn said as soon as Gus walked into the office. "Guess what?"
"You finally got tickets to Christina Aguilera?" Gus said, placing his sample case neatly in its spot, just behind the door. No way he was leaving that behind if they had to run out of the building. (Again.)
"What? Don't be a silly goose," Shawn said. He opened his arms wide. "I'm over Jules!"
Gus put his hands on his hips and looked down at Shawn (he was lying on the couch). "Really?" He'd heard that before.
Shawn nodded. He did look a lot better, Gus had to admit. His eyes were bright, his smile was cheerful again - even his hair looked happier. It had gotten so bad, Gus was thinking of taking Shawn to his own barber, and he was relieved, now, that he wouldn't have to. Rolando could remain purely Gus's secret.
Shawn was blathering on. "I'm in love with someone new," he announced.
"Oh, no you don't, Shawn," Gus said. "I am not putting up with another three years of your insane flirting. You're not ready for that. I'm not ready for that."
"Don't be an Australian cane toad, Gus," Shawn said. He jumped up from the couch and paced the room as Gus watched warily. "That whole Jules thing, well - it would have been great if it had worked out, but let's face it." He whirled and pointed at Gus. "She just didn't get me."
"You got that right," Gus muttered.
"She wasn't willing to overlook a few minor half-truths." Shawn threw his hands up in the air and began pacing again.
"Shawn, you told her you were a psychic for three years," Gus pointed out. "I mean, not that I don't think she's crazy to pass you up," he said, "but you have to admit, it was kind of huge."
"I admit nothing!" Shawn shouted. He glared at Gus for a second. "And it was all in the pursuit of truth, justice and the American Way. And a few thousand dollars in paychecks, and free coffee down at the station," he added.
Gus nodded.
"ANYWAY," Shawn said, exchanging his pacing for bouncing up and down in place, glee washing over his features again, "her loss."
"Absolutely," Gus put in.
"And we're good again, and anyway, now I can see that really, I was just displacing my adoration on Juliet."
"Uh-oh," Gus said.
"Because really," Shawn said, grinning like a lunatic, "really I'm head over heels for Lassie."
Gus's vision went staticky. He heard Shawn say "Isn't that great?," and then, "Gus? Gus?"
It shouldn't have come as a surprise, but mostly it shouldn't - SHOULD NOT - have happened at all.
But things that shouldn't happen happened ALL THE TIME, when Shawn was around. The corollary (Gus thought, while making faces into his hands and trying to stop whimpering) was that abnormal things happened all the time, and then - before you were ready for it - they stopped seeming abnormal, and just felt... normal.
That's usually when he was able to stop whimpering, and it worked that way this time, too.
He stopped whimpering, and Shawn started talking again.
"Don't you think it's perfect?" Shawn asked. He stopped patting Gus's shoulder and leaped up from where he'd been perched on the desk beside Gus's hunched body. "It works perfectly. It's like - yin and yang. Mac and cheese. Peanut butter and pears."
"That doesn't work, Shawn," Gus said sharply, slowly sitting up. This was way too serious for merely curling into a fetal position.
"It so does. And this will, too!" Shawn waved his hands around. "I mean, obviously the Jules thing was a great idea, but it just wasn't meant to be. But this. This," Shawn stopped twirling around and put his hands on Gus's shoulders, looking deep into his eyes. "This. Is meant to be."
Gus knew perfectly well that Shawn meant for that "meant to be" to have capital letters at the start of each word, but Gus mentally refused. He would not debase the beauty of good grammar for Shawn's (bizarre, terrifying - in this case) histrionics.
"Just don't -" Gus squinched his eyes closed, then opened one and met Shawn's earnest gaze. "Don't tell me any more about it, okay?"
"Aww, Gus." Shawn let go of his shoulders and slouched dramatically across to flop onto the couch. "Don't be a grumpy kori bustard." He threw one arm over his forehead. "You're the only person I can tell!"
"You got that right," Gus said, shaking his head.
He considered what might happen if Shawn expressed this new, uh, passing fancy to someone else.
Chief Vick would probably put her fingers in her ears and start singing "Against All Odds" loudly.
McNabb would faint dead away.
Juliet would either laugh hysterically or feel Shawn's forehead, to see if he had a fever. (Better than a month ago, when she'd been so angry at him that she probably would have removed his testicles with a dull butter knife, Gus thought.)
And Lassiter?
Oh man.
What WOULD Lassie do? Gus shivered and shook his head again.
The thing with Juliet and Shawn had crashed and burned as soon as Shawn confessed that he wasn't actually psychic.
It was actually kind of a miracle - and a testament to Jules's forbearance - that she hadn't turned him in to the Chief. But after stomping on Shawn's instep a few times, twisting his arm behind his back and up to his shoulder blades until he fell onto his face (on the Santa Barbara boardwalk, which - ouch, Gus thought), and kneeling on his back for a while, she had reconsidered and just left him there.
Gus, who'd seen the whole thing from the office window, had watched her flounce away down the road toward her car. Gus had hovered in the doorway, trying to decide whether to leave Shawn to recover some manly fortitude, or scurry out to help him up.
Shawn's whimpered "Hellllllp," had decided the issue, and Gus had hurried across the road to help him up.
"Well, that didn't go so well," Shawn had said after a while, looking dejected. The thing about Dejected Shawn was that he was so dejected, so down, that it drained the sunlight right out of the sky.
(It was embarrassing that Gus thought those kinds of things, but he did. There was no cure for it. He also cursed himself, mentally, for allowing Dejected Shawn to be capitalized, but he could justify it, just barely.)
Gus had patted him on the shoulder, then submitted to Shawn's need for a hug. They hugged all the time, but the broken-hearted, head-lying-on-the-shoulder, sunlight-sucked-out-of-the-sky hugs were the worst. But the most necessary, of course.
So, Gus had let Shawn hug him - right out there in the open, with most of Santa Barbara watching - and then he'd let Shawn lay his head on his (Gus's) shoulder, and he'd listened as Shawn explained that Jules hadn't taken the news of his non-psychic-ness very well.
"I just hope she doesn't tell the Chief," Shawn had said.
There'd been a period where they'd walked on eggshells down at the station, but Jules, although she'd glared and wrinkled her nose the first time Shawn had a "vision" again, had kept her peace, and Psych's relationship with the SBPD had continued with no cries of "Fraud!" (besides the usual ones from Lassiter).
A month later (and two weeks into what was apparently an extremely sex-positive relationship with a data entry drone Juliet had met at Tom Blair's Pub), Juliet had moved past her anger with Shawn, and they were friends again.
But this new thing - well, Gus just wasn't sure how she'd take it, to be honest. He wasn't sure how he could take it.
On Day Four of "Lassiter Love Watch," Shawn wafted into the office late in the morning. "He's so pretty, Gus," Shawn sighed, and Gus dropped his head to his desk.
"Shawn, first of all, no, he is not. He is not -" Gus held his fingers up and made air quotes, he was THAT SERIOUS about it - "'pretty.' Second of all, ew. Seriously." Gus shuddered. "EW." He hastily stuffed the earbuds lying on his desk into his ears.
"Gus!"
Gus pointed to the earbuds.
"Gus."
Gus pointed again, closing his eyes and swaying to the (purely imaginary) music.
"Gus, those aren't plugged into anything."
Gus opened his eyes and stopped swaying.
"Seriously, dude. What were you pretending to listen to? It looked like Stevie on ludes."
Gus took the earbuds out. "Ludes, Shawn? Really? Did that hip, happening drug-culture reference just arrive here from 1976?"
"Nice one." Shawn raised his fist and bumped it again Gus's.
"What do you want, Shawn?" Gus said as soon as Shawn lowered his hand.
"I just saw Lassie."
Gus groaned. "I do not want to hear -"
"He looked so good, Gus, like somebody just ran him through the detective-wash at the corner of Cota and Anacapa - all sparkly and clean." Shawn got a faraway look. "I'd like to run him through my carwash..."
"Shawn."
"Mmmm, all those suds," Shawn said.
"Shawn!"
"What?" He looked at Gus. "Oh, sorry. Anyway, so I saw him at the Blenders in the Grass down on Fourth and he was all 'Oh, look,'" Shawn said this in a high, fluting voice, "'it's my favorite pain in the ass.' Do you think I'm really his favorite pain in the ass?"
"I think you need to work on your impression of his voice," Gus said, fumbling with the earbuds. If he could get them plugged into his computer, it wouldn't be a lie anymore.
"He's so dreamy," Shawn said, and Gus dropped the earbuds altogether.
"So what?"
"Dreeeeeeeeamy," Shawn said, drawling it obscenely. "You know. A dreamboat. Hot." He licked his finger and drew an imaginary stroke in the air, saying "Ssss!"
"Ew. Stop that," Gus said. "Why don't you just ask him out?"
"Hahahaha HA," Shawn said flatly. "That's hilarious. NO." He flopped down onto the sofa, swoonily, and made a thoughtful face.
"Swoonily isn't even a word," Gus said.
Shawn looked at him. "What? I never said it was. Although," he cocked his head sideways on the cushion, "it should be."
"Oh my god," Gus said. "My inner monologue is making up words because of you!" He jumped up. (The earbuds tripped him and he turned his sprawl into a graceful-but-swift sitting motion, perching on the edge of the desk.)
"What? Swoonily? Gus, there are bigger things at stake here!" Shawn sat up, then abruptly began to giggle.
Simultaneously with Gus, of course, but Gus choked out "That's what she said!" before Shawn could.
"Oh, man," Shawn sighed, wiping his eyes and flopping back onto the couch again with one last, stray giggle. "Seriously, though, no - you can't just ask Lassie out."
"I don't want to ask Lassiter out," Gus said, straightening from the hunch his laughter had left him in.
"Right, I know. Thank god," Shawn said, "because you know if you did he would so go for you."
"Shawn -"
"You're all organized, and intelligent, and you're a big old geek, just like Lassie" – Shawn sat up, poised to leap off the sofa. "Don't ask him out, Gus!"
Gus looked at him. No – Gus looked at him.
"Okay," Gus said, when the pause had grown long enough to make his sarcasm really, really noticeable.
"Good," Shawn said, sinking back into a supine position. (Supine, Gus thought. Ha. At least I still have vocabulary.) "Because once you go Gus -"
"It's all ova but the fuss," Gus finished. Shawn raised his fist, but Gus waved him off. "So if you're never going to ask him out, what are you going to do?" he asked.
"Well, I have a few ideas on that," Shawn said. "I could get him drunk. The last time he was drunk he said I -"
"Astounded him, yes, I know," Gus interrupted, before Shawn could tell him for the eighty-seventh time, possibly with fluttery lashes.
"He said I astounded him," Shawn said anyway, and fluttered his lashes.
Damn, Gus thought.
"So I could get him drunk, sweet-talk him a little, see if I could get somewhere," Shawn continued.
"But then you'd still have to deal with him the next day. And," Gus said, pointing at Shawn, "remember last time he was drunk -"
"- He totally didn't remember anything," Shawn finished. "Yeah, that would suck. Plus if the sweet-talking worked, and then we ended up back at his place, and then he'd wake up the next morning and - um."
"Aaaawkward," Gus sang.
"Yeah." Shawn rolled onto his side on the couch and looked thoughtfully at the far wall. "Also he has a lot of guns in his house. So if we go with Plan A, we definitely need to end up at my place."
"Which means he'll never go out with you again no matter what," Gus said snidely.
"Don't be a half-full mop bucket, Gus," Shawn said. "My apartment has character."
"Your apartment has bacterial growths," Gus muttered.
"I guess I'll just have to make the sex extra good," Shawn smirked, and Gus put his head back down on the desk.
"Shawn," he said.
"Oh, what, like we don't have awesome chemistry," Shawn said.
"You and me?" Gus asked, lifting his head and squinting at Shawn.
"Well, yes," Shawn said. "But I meant me and Lassie."
"Lassiter and I," Gus said.
"You said you wouldn't ask him out!" Shawn cried, sitting up straight.
"SHAWN." Gus glared again.
"But -"
"You should have said 'Lassiter and I," Gus said. "And before that, you used a nonspecific pronoun, which is why I thought you meant that you and I had good chemistry, instead of what you actually meant." Gus inspected Shawn. "I can't remember your grammar going this far south when you were drooling all over Juliet."
"I did not drool all over Juliet," Shawn sniffed.
Gus raised an eyebrow.
"Fine, once or twice," Shawn muttered. "But this is different, Gus," he said, getting excited all over again. "This is the real thing!" He sprang up and paced, rubbing his hair into crazy cowlicks. "I can't sleep, I can't eat, I'm distracted -"
"Your sentence structure's gone to hell," Gus added.
"Exactly!" Shawn stopped pacing. "I'm hungry. Let's go get some churrrrrrros."
"You just said you can't eat," Gus said.
"Well, then it stands to reason that I'd be hungry, doesn't it?" Shawn asked, hands on his hips.
"Fine," Gus said, rolling his eyes. He stood to follow Shawn out the door. "But I want something healthy. No more churros this week. I need Thai food."
"Oooh, good," Shawn said. "Let's go to Zenyai. Lassiter and Jules go there for lunch all the time."
Gus sighed. It was going to be a long three years.