iDisclaim: I do not, in any way, shape, form, or even in a dream, own Psych or the characters therein.
POISON
She was his poison, but he couldn't help but feel tempted, as she sat there in her glowing crystal container.
Two weeks, was admittedly, on the longer side of a vacation, but Shawn was sure he'd had longer. It was less the time taken off from work, he could admit to himself, as he'd been admitting things related to Juliette to himself for more than a year, and more of the time away from him. This would be two weeks where they would not see the other. He would be, even more than usual, of his Juliet.
He knew, somewhere, deep within the recesses of his rational mind – the thing he had locked up and thrown away the key to many, many, years ago – that she would be the death of him; that his love for her, no matter how pure, no matter how true, was killing him from the inside out. He no longer looked at other women the same way anymore, knowing that the one woman out there for him was Jules, and that killed him, too. If there were some way to distract himself, he'd have taken it.
He'd tried to distract himself, actually. But other women were, while not hard to find, hard to handle. It disturbed him, the feeling of cheating, when he knew there was none going on. Instead, he tried to delve deeper into solving cases, baking with his EasyBake Oven (delicious flavor, anyone?), and even reading (listening to) those truly horrifying books that were on the top of the Teen Romance list again and again lately.
Nothing worked. Or, at least, the things that worked did so only for a few moments before bringing him back hard to the harsh reality that awaited him. Jules wasn't his. It was doubtful that she'd ever be his.
Although, he dwelled, it wasn't a possession of her that he wanted (although he wanted that in other ways, to be sure), he wanted her to possess him. He wanted her to possess him, and to know it; he wanted his devotion to her to be outshone only by her devotion to him. And even that was doubtful. He just wanted it to be mutual. He wanted a relationship that they could grow old together in. She was the only woman he dreamed of at night anymore, apart from maybe Michelle Pfeiffer, who had been absolutely stunning in the past, and wasn't bad still. At the moment, though, no matter how true the feelings he felt for Juliet, it didn't matter. She was with someone else.
It was just his luck – karma seemed even more in play than ever, now that he was pretending to be a psychic – that the only thing he could think about was the pain of seeing Juliet with another man. And, did it have to be that man? The one that reminded Shawn so much of himself, except better, that it hurt to even look at him without shades on? The one who was so rich that he had his own pastry chef? Who hired Curt Smith to play for him at his own home? Who had just gotten his pilot's license?
No, Shawn had to admit, always admitting, always admitting, and never looking back, it didn't hurt because she was with a man who was better than Shawn. It hurt because the person she was with wasn't Shawn. He knew, in the deep recesses of the spiritual part of his mind – the thing he had locked up and thrown away the key to many, many, years ago – that they probably wouldn't work out anyways. He was always good at screwing things up, with relationships of any kind. He was, after all, the man who had spent five years without speaking to his father, and even longer than that with his mother. If he and Jules had ended up together, it would never end well, if only because that was the way his life worked.
But he couldn't stand it. She was his air, his sun, his everything, and he couldn't stand it to see her –happily, too! – with a man other than him. He would always be her perfect fit, anyone who knew the both of them could see that. They fit each other perfectly. He couldn't even, to be melodramatic as always, say that it was maybe "too perfect," because he knew that "perfect" was "perfect" because there could never be such a part of it.
Perfection meant, Shawn figured, that everything fits, that everything is right. And the way they fit each other was, exactly, perfect. But, even without being melodramatic, he also knew, that perfection was not meant for human beings to experience (except, perhaps, in churros and Chinese food). And, maybe, that's why they wouldn't work out. But all of these were reasons. They were rationalizations for the way that they worked, or didn't, to be more precise.
But no amount of rationalizations was going to make a bad situation better, because it wasn't about logic here. It was about emotion, the pure, intense emotions that poured from Shawn's soul in waves that were just about heavy enough to break whatever they were liable to crash onto. They were ready to crash onto a shore, not much unlike the one they walked on nearly every day, and carry away the pieces of the wreckage they wrought back into the ocean's water where they would drown, drown until they were never able to come back.
So when she kissed him, in the entrance of her rich boyfriend's house, he didn't quite know what to do. He knew it wouldn't happen again – it being a spur of the moment thing that he knew her well enough to know that she would regret soon after – and he knew that it probably shouldn't, but it felt so right. "Shawn and Jules," sounded nice together, something that "Declan and Jules," never could. But Shawn knew, he knew, he knew, he knew, he knew, that this was starting something's end. But he couldn't bring himself to care.
She was his poison, but he'd always been a bit suicidal.