Shawn wishes he had the vocabulary to express the pain he cages within, that agony he dulls with the thirty or forty pills he takes each day. When that mellowness kicks in, it's like flying, and the incessant need to prove he's good enough gets further and further away, until he can almost forget how much of a screw up he feels.

And then he sees the look in Hunter's eyes. That weighted disappointment, and it's back.

And he hates it.

Not as much as he hates himself, but he hates it nonetheless.

So the bravado amplifies itself, the cockiness, the bite to his words, until Hunter hurts as much as he does. Until he's forgotton what he was trying to do in the first place.