NOTES: This is yet another version of the events that take place immediately following "An Evening With Mr. Yang," the season three finale. It is a two-parter since it was getting much, much longer than I'd anticipated. I haven't seen much of season three yet ( thank God for DVDs ), but I did see the finale and this is what came of it. I have absolutely no experience writing Psych fanfiction, so I hope it's bearable. Enjoy and please leave feedback!

You Win Some, Some You Really Lose

Part One

You're an idiot, Shawn. Just say it. You're an idiot.

"You're an idiot." There, I'd said it. I had said out loud, which meant that Gus and Abigail were staring at me and obviously trying to decipher which one of them I was calling an idiot. I ignored them, which I knew was hardly polite, but I just couldn't help it. My attention span had never been what you might call lengthy, and Juliet had completely distracted me from what could have otherwise been a very delightful evening. I never would have allowed Gus to tag along if the date hadn't already being completely ruined, but I knew better than to let Abigail think that. Distracted or not, I maintained a certain amount of pride -- and dad had always drilled me about the proper way to treat a lady.

I winced as I saw the look on Jules' face again in my mind's eye. I was good at torturing myself, better at hiding it, but something of my thoughts must have crossed my face because Gus was giving me that look in the rearview mirror. I knew that look. I shifted my gaze to Abigail and smiled, and it was a fairly decent representation of my real smile. I said, too-brightly, "Want me to read your palm?"

And she said, "Again?" and sounded genuinely confused, and I tried to remember reading her palm the first time.

And I shut my mouth, for a moment -- a brief, terribly scary moment the likes of which I hope never to experience again -- I was out of ideas. Out of clever things to say. Hell, out of ridiculous things to say, and that look Gus had went from disapprovingly curious to worried.

"No, right. That would be silly of me." I laughed, and I might have fooled her but I hadn't fooled Gus, or me, and I was really starting to panic. I was grasping at straws, I was searching for air, I was dying of thirst in the Sahara, I was--

"Late! I'm late," I said. It burst out of me without any prior planning, which is how most things burst out of me, admittedly, but this was a delicate situation, and I knew I'd have to reign in my tongue before I talked myself into a real problem.

Abigail furrowed her brow. Gus said, "Late for what, Shawn? What could you possibly be late for? It's almost eight-o-clock."

I stared at Gus, shocked by his disloyalty, shocked by the ease with which he completely, totally sold me out to Abigail. And I mentally flailed again.

"Dad. I'm late for pops, dear old dad." Gus was looking at me like I'd grown a third nipple on my forehead, and I looked at my date. "He's not well. He's getting a bit forgetful in his old age and I, neglectful scoundrel that I am, I forgot to…uh, give him his bath. He used to have a nurse but she quit after he stuck his--"

Gus hit the back of my chair and interrupted my explanation of my father's mental failings. I shot him a glance and he said, sternly, "Shawn."

"But he looked fine to me when I saw him earlier," Abigail said, and I nodded, striving to look sad. Forlorn. Depressed. Anything but desperate to get out of the car and out of this date.

But you finally scored!

I sighed. Scored. Sure. But it doesn't feel like it. Not after seeing Jules so embarrassed…even hurt. Dear God. I may have hurt Jules. Could I be more dastardly? More unworthy?

I realized that I hadn't answered Abigail and gave my head a little shake, trying to get back into the game.

"Some days he's better than others," I confided to her, and I reached out and touched her hand. "Abby, I'm sorry. Really. But I should go." I was rushing the words and Gus was making frantic 'knock-it-off' gestures in the back seat. "Can you forgive me?"

"Well…if your dad needs you," she said, sounding doubtful. I hesitated -- I knew what getting out of the car meant -- but in the end I knew I had to do it. I had to pass Gus the concessions, open the door, and…well, that's where it all fell apart. I didn't know what to do after that. Well, stand. Walk. But other than those things, I had no plan. No direction. Still, I was committed. I would see where the wind took me. I would be guided by chance.

It all sounded wonderfully romantic.

"Thank you, Abby. Really." I gave her hand a squeeze, and leaned over to kiss her cheek, and I knew it would probably be the last time my lips touched her skin. I should be sad about that. I leaned back and heard rather than saw Gus gesture even harder. I didn't look at him, thinking maybe if I did I'd lose my nerve, and I got out of the car.

The night air smacked me in the face, cold for Santa Barbara. I took a step. Then another. After that it was easy to keep walking. But I hadn't made it very far before Gus caught up. He drew me around the corner of the ticket office and made sure we were out of sight of his Echo. Then he socked me in the arm.

"Ow," I said, not because it hurt but because it seemed obligatory. I deserved it, but I wasn't about to say so. "What?"

"Shawn, what do you think you're doing? This is the girl you've been dying to date since, since…"

"Forever. Yeah, I know. So?"

"So? Shawn, you just lied to get out of the rest of your date."

I gave him my patented Really, Gus? look. "First of all, it wasn't really a date because you were in the back seat, hardly what I'd call romantic, and secondly I…couldn'tdoit." The last bit was rushed. Gus looked incredulous.

"I've seen you close the deal with a ton of girls, Shawn. That's a lie."

"That's a little disturbing." I frowned. "When you say close the deal, do you mean--"

He socked me again.

"Ow!" This time it did hurt. A little. I would never admit to it out loud, however. "Gus, was that really necessary?"

"What's going on with you, Shawn?"

It's amazing how he can sound exactly the way he did when we were ten and he was chastising me for playing hooky from PE.

I said, "Nothing's going on with me. I just had to get out of there. It's not right. It's not the way I pictured it being. And…"

Gus hadn't been expecting an answer along those lines, and curiosity piqued, he said, "And…?"

"And I ran into Jules while I was procuring the popcorn." I said it more to my feet than my friend, but I could sense him going very still.

"Juliet was here?" His voice betrayed the fact that he had some idea of how serious the situation was. And how much I hated, truly loathed, serious situations.

"She asked me out, Gus. On a proper date." I risked a glance, and he was staring at me, his earlier confusion melting away as the words sank in.

"You turned her down."

"What was I supposed to do?!" I burst, feeling defensive, which always makes me a little angry. I let my voice raise a little, mostly because I was scared about being defensive and angry when it came to the subject of Juliet O'Hara. I shoved that thought away. "I'm already on a date, what was I supposed to tell her? I mean, I was on a date, and now--"

And now. I really wasn't getting very far with this planning the rest of the evening bit.

"Are you…going to talk to her?" Gus asked, unfazed by my temper. He'd been its victim too often to be ruffled by it much.

"Should I?" I asked, desperate, and hated myself a little for it. I tried again. "No. Not…not right now. I need to think about it first. There's a process, you know, my mind goes through a very specific process when I--"

Gus put his hands on my shoulders. "I know." Then he frowned. "What am I supposed to do with her?"

I realized after a moment that he was referring to Abigail, and I grinned at him. "Why, Gus, don't tell me you've forgotten how to behave on a date."

"Shawn!"

"Lemme give you some advice then. It's good, write this down. First, treat her like a person. Then a princess, then a Greek Goddess, then a--"

"I don't need any dating advice, Shawn." He was glaring at me, and this was a good sign. I smiled back at him, innocent as the day I was born, and he continued, "And I don't need your castoff dates, either."

"You might as well make the best of it, buddy," I told him, patting him on the shoulder. "I'm so proud. My friend Gus is about to become a man. Can he get a round of applause? Come on, everybody, let's give him a round of applause!" I was clapping and smiling, every inch the ecstatic best friend, and I wished there was an audience because that had been pretty good. Gus didn't look nearly as amused as me, and that made me smile wider.

"What am I supposed to tell her?"

I shrugged. "You had a sudden and inescapable craving for SnoCaps?" I suggested.

"They don't have SnoCaps here, Shawn."

I passed him my half-eaten box of candy. "Just go with it." And then I was walking again, quickly this time, and I heard Gus call my name but I didn't stop. I knew he'd give up, and if I had glanced back I probably would have seen him walking back toward his Echo. But I didn't glance back. Instead, I walked and walked and walked, mostly forward. And when I thought my feet were going to fall off, I retrieved my motorcycle and gunned it up and down the streets of Santa Barbara until the streetlights started to blur.

I couldn't face my apartment and I would risk running into Gus at the Psych office, so I collapsed on my dad's couch, exhausted, and had dreams about all the girls I'd been with recently. They were all upset -- angry or crying or some snot-heavy combination of the two -- and wanting to hurt me, and I woke up early. Very early. I was gone before dad even woke up and discovered I was there.

Before I knew what my intentions were, I was at the bakery near the police station. And I was buying a cupcake. The biggest cupcake they had. I asked if they would put a frosting "J" on it and they did. I asked if they had any sparklers I could put on the top and they said no. I asked them if they could frost a perp in handcuffs on it and they asked me to leave, and I found myself trotting down the street to the station feeling oddly resigned to my fate.

But she wasn't there. I didn't know what to do with that. I stood in front of her desk with the cupcake in my hand and I stared at her empty chair, and for the second time in as many days I had no idea what to do. It was an uncomfortable phenomenon and it was going to have to stop. Somehow.

"Spencer!"

I twisted around and there was the head detective, and he looked more sour than normal, which was to say past lemony and on to unripe limes.

"Lassie face," I replied, but without pluck. Without enthusiasm. I had to talk to Jules. I had to fix this. It was really getting scary.

Lassiter gave me a strange look. "Are you feeling alright, Spencer?"

I ignored the question. "Where's Jules?"

He crossed his arms and looked sour again. He said, gruffly, "She called out sick."

My stomach dropped. I think I actually saw stars for a moment. "She…what?"

"You heard me." He was trying to sound pissed, but I knew better. Carlton Lassiter was worried, which was not an emotion he handled well. We were alike in that. I ferreted that bit of information away to exploit at a later time. At the moment, I was much too concerned with the fact that Jules had called out sick.

Because of me? It hardly seemed likely. But then again…

My fingers touched my cheek where she'd kissed it. I had to remind myself not to squeeze the cupcake beyond recognition.

"See ya, Lassie," I said, and he gawked after me. It made me feel a little better, or at least a little more normal, but as soon as I was outside I was lost again. Me. Lost.

I got a pineapple smoothie on my way. I had been by Juliet's place before so I knew where to go, but as I got closer I began to feel…well…nervous.

Other people get nervous, I reminded myself. You never get nervous. You don't even like butterflies.

But there was no help for it. I was nervous. I picked up flowers, too, just for good measure, and juggling this precious cargo, I turned onto her street and marched up to her door and gave it a mighty knock. Or would have. If I had managed to maintain my cajones. But I was nervous for the first time in my life, and my palms were sweating, and I gave the door a small and wimpy knock and waited, hoping she hadn't heard it at all. That she wouldn't answer the door. That maybe she was sick and I could go home knowing I'd tried.

She opened the door. She opened the door in pajamas, with bare feet and her hair like some wild, blond tropical rainforest piled on top of her head, and she had a bit of chocolate smeared on the fingers of her right hand, and her nose was red. I took that all in quickly, hardly noticing that I'd noticed. I couldn't breathe and that was becoming increasingly obvious to my lungs, but breathing just didn't seem to matter much when it was so clear that she'd been crying. Her eyes were still red and puffy. I had done that to her, and so I didn't deserve to breathe.

I thrust out my gift-laden arms before she could ask why I was there, and I had smeared the cupcake frosting a little but not bad. The smoothie was melting but still delicious as only pineapple smoothies could be, but the flowers made her sneeze. Startled, I pulled them back a little -- perhaps they had not been a good idea. But when was buying flowers for a lady a bad idea?

When she's allergic to whatever these are. Right. I'd have to plan better next time. Not that I planned on ever making her cry again.

"Jules," I said, just as she said, "Shawn," and we both stopped speaking. We stared at each other and my heart was trying to hammer out of the cage that was my ribs, and it hurt in that distracted sort of way that let me know this was real and not some horribly long and protracted dream in which I really was a complete jerk.

"You're not sick," I said, and she stiffened. I had meant to go with something a little more elaborate, something that would impress her with my powers of observation and deduction, something Sherlock Holmes worthy. But I was still really slow. I had been since she'd asked me to dinner the night before.

"Shawn--" she started again. I shifted all the gifts into the crook of one arm and touched her hand with the other. It was probably not one of my more genius moves, but she didn't resist.

"Jules," I said, and took a breath, and sealed my fate, for better or worse. "Jules, I'm not psychic."

I'm sure she had been expecting a hundred million thousand other things to come out of my mouth, most of them some variation of, "I'm so sorry please forgive me, how 'bout a hug and some pineapple smoothie?" But I knew in my bones that if I didn't tell her everything now, I'd lose my only shot at being with her. Maybe I already had. And the only thing that really mattered to me, the only thing I'd ever wanted to see all the way through, was being with this beautiful, smart, and at times fierce detective.

There was a long silence which let me contemplate my fears of being with one person ( besides Gus ) in any sort of relationship for any protracted amount of time, and I suspected it had something to do with the destruction of my parents' marriage, and that was about as deeply as I wanted to psycho-analyze it. But Jules…Jules made me want stuff I had no business wanting, not when I was lying to the world and better, getting away with it. I had a good thing going here, a job I liked and was good at. Kept me on my toes. But I had just ruined it, just ruined three years of work and carefully maintained fallacies, for this girl.

You might as well say you're an idiot again. But I kept my mouth shut this time. And I waited. I waited and waited, and when three seconds had passed like eons and I was starting to feel squirmy, Juliet finally caught up with me.

"What do you mean, you're not psychic?"

"See, here's the thing. The thing is…" I had explained my hyper-observational skills before, and well, but I wasn't able to find the words…not with Juliet staring at me like I'd just personally betrayed her. Maybe I had. "This is the thing. I don't have psychic episodes, I don't sense things, and spirits don't speak to me."

She continued to stare. I stumbled through an explanation of my father's thorough, almost torturous training, the years of developing my observational skills and my reasoning processes to the point where, had I any sort of discipline to speak of, I might have been the perfect detective.

She never said a word.

When the words finally stopped pouring out of me, we stood there on some terrible precipice. I could almost literally hear the wind howling. What I could not do was read her expression, and this was more distressing than it had any right being. I really was squirming now, and hoping, and dreading. My central nervous system was so confused I think it might have preferred being tazered to waiting for Juliet to say something.

But she didn't. And there wasn't anything left for me to say either, which didn't normally stop me from trying, but I didn't have any cards left to play. No tricks up my sleeve. No charming anticdotes to distract her with. I was just me, standing at her door, exposed. It wasn't much to offer her. The cupcake was now beyond hope and the smoothie was more of a sludge-ie and the flowers had only made her sneeze.

Finally, slowly, Juliet closed the door. I would remember that she never took her eyes off me the whole time the door was swinging shut, which seemed to take an eternity. I would remember how expressionless she was, except for in her eyes, where there was still hurt.

But at that precise moment I wasn't remembering any of it. I was just there, with my flowers and my cupcake and my sludge/smoothie. I stood there for a long time. And then I set the gifts on the ground and I left.

There just didn't seem to be anything else to do. Except for break it to Gus that Psych was done, that I'd discredited us and we were probably going to be run out of Santa Barbara by Buzz McNabb and a squad of police cars. I didn't even want to think about what the Chief might do. Or say. Or, with what was certain to be a fair amount of pain, both.

And then, of course, there would be the showdown with my father.

But all of that was to come later. For now, I went to the beach and sat in the sand, and I stared at the waves and realized I was too depressed to even drink a fresh pineapple smoothie, and I didn't think about the future. I just thought of Juliet. It was the worst afternoon of my life.

Go ahead. One more time since it's still true. Say it.

"You're an idiot," I muttered, and buried my shoes in the sand, and wished I could bury my heart right next to them.