Lassiter wakes up to Spencer tossing and turning on the other side of the bed, mumbling incoherently. Dreaming, Lassiter realizes. Judging from the tension on his face, a nightmare. He reaches over and gently shakes him.

"Shawn, wake up. You're dreaming."

"Jules!" Shawn gasps, his eyes popping open. It feels to Lassiter like a fist clenches around his heart at the sound of O'Hara's name. Shawn's expression softens as he focuses on the person beside him. "Lassie. Dreaming. It was a dream. Hang on."

He goes into the bathroom. Lassiter lies back on the bed, puts a hand over his face. He doesn't understand what he's doing here. The night before, the decision to sleep in the same bed as Spencer had seemed obvious; there was only one bed in the room and he had already decided to let Spencer stay and maybe get a good night's sleep. It wasn't a big deal. He had even congratulated himself, knowing that this way Spencer wouldn't be able to disappear in the middle of the night without Lassiter knowing about it. But waking up beside him this morning had felt achingly intimate, and hearing O'Hara's name had sent an unwanted stab of jealousy through him.

There must be something wrong with me, he thinks. Not because he's attracted to a guy – he had stopped worrying about that when he was in college – but because he's attracted to a guy who made a career out of undermining and second-guessing him. He can't deny though that instead of staying on his side of the bed and shaking Shawn awake, what he'd wanted to do was reach out, pull Shawn to him, comfort him.

Shawn comes out of the bathroom. It's almost five o'clock in the morning and the room is still mostly dark; Lassiter can only see that Shawn is leaning against the wall with his arms folded across his chest.

"Thanks for waking me up. Some nights…well, most nights, actually, I um, have bad dreams. About that day. Only instead of dad, it's Gus, or Jules. Or you. And then I wake up and think 'it was just a dream, everyone's okay' before I remember what really happened. Apparently it was Jules's turn to bleed to death in front of me in my subconscious today."

No wonder he looks like he hasn't slept in a month. Lassiter sits up.

"Do you want to talk about it?" he asks softly.

"Nooo. No, I would really prefer not to. I think I'm going to take a shower, if you don't mind. Just…could you do me a favor? Later today – because it's like, two o'clock in the morning in Santa Barbara right now, and I know from experience that she really does not like it when someone wakes her up in the middle of the night just to chat – could you call Jules and make sure she's okay? I mean, I know she is, but…"

"Yeah. I'll call her later. Are you sure you don't want to come back to bed and try and get a little more sleep?"

Shawn laughs hollowly "You know, in my fantasies, you asking me to come back to bed is always in a very different context. No, no more sleep for me tonight. You should sleep some more, though. I'm sorry I woke you up."

Shawn slips back into the bathroom, and after a minute Lassiter hears the shower come on. He closes his eyes. He's the worst person possible to be here now; Shawn needs somebody capable of comforting him, someone who possesses tact and warmth. It should be Gus here or, even as upset as she had been with Shawn, Juliet, who has empathy coming out of her pores. Lassiter doesn't know how to handle the kind of pain Shawn's in, and he knows he must be a terrible person because a part of his mind has been completely sidetracked by Shawn's comment about fantasies, and by the fact that all he can think about right now is how Shawn is naked and wet in the next room.

Despite his uneasy thoughts, he does drift back off to sleep, lulled by the sound of the shower.

When he wakes up again, it's to the smell of coffee. Shawn has brewed the coffee provided by the hotel in the tiny hotel room coffee pot, and to Lassiter's sleep-fogged brain it smells amazing.

"Oh good, you're awake" Spencer says chirpily, sounding like a completely different person than he had earlier.

Lassiter gets out of bed and stumbles to the bathroom, and when he comes out Shawn hands him a cup of coffee. "Hey, do you mind if I use some of your toothpaste this morning?"

"Don't you have any of your own?" Lassiter asks grumpily, the caffeine having not worked its magic quite yet (not that he's always significantly less grumpy after the caffeine takes effect).

Spencer has already gone into the bathroom and Lassiter can hear the water in the sink running. "Yeah, but all I have is the mint flavored kind, and I wanna use your cinnamon flavored kind."

Lassiter rubs his forehead wearily; it's too early for this. "Why?" he asks, already regretting the question.

Shawn's head pops around the corner to look at him and he smiles cheerfully. "Because I plan on kissing you later today, and it's going to ruin the mood if you have an allergic reaction."

Lassiter chokes on his coffee, but Shawn has already disappeared back into the bathroom.

When he comes out a few minutes later, all he says is "Bathroom's all yours!" as he reaches for the remote and starts flipping through the channels. Lassiter gathers up his clothes and quickly retreats for a shower, feeling only as awkward and off-kilter as Spencer can make him feel.

While getting dressed, he gathers his resolve. He is not going to let Spencer sidetrack him with talk of…of kissing or fantasies or anything else. He's waited six long years for an explanation of how Spencer pulls off the psychic act, and today he's getting it, come hell or high water.

When he comes out of the bathroom, Spencer is watching iSpongebob Squarepants/i but the distant look on his face suggests that he's thinking about something else entirely.

"We should get some breakfast," Lassiter says "and then we have to talk. You have to talk. I'm not waiting any longer."

Spencer bounces out of the chair and nods "Yeah, I know. Wow, my stomach feels all flip-floppy, and I don't think it's just because I skipped dinner last night."

Lassiter is putting his wallet into his pocket when he feels Spencer's hand on his arm.

"I have a feeling you're going to be mad at me later, so I'm going to do this now, okay?" And with that, he reaches up to cup the back of Lassiter's neck and pulls him down for a kiss.

This is as different as imaginable from the kiss two nights before; that had been drunken, aggressive. This is slow and soft, Shawn's mouth moving gently over his, his fingers sliding through Lassiter's hair. Lassiter's resolve over not getting sidetracked vanishes at the first touch of Shawn's lips; his hands going to Shawn's waist, pulling him closer, slipping under the hem of his t-shirt to touch the warm skin underneath. Two nights ago aside, it's been a long time since he's kissed another man, and it's shocking to him how thrilling it feels, Shawn's stubble rasping against his face, the strength of the hand at the back of his head, the way he can feel Shawn getting harder through his jeans as Lassiter tugs him even closer. Lassiter feels like his heart is going to leap out of his chest it's pounding so hard. He puts one hand on Shawn's chest, over his heart, and can feel that his is beating just as fast, and somehow that makes everything even better, knowing that Shawn is just as excited and nervous by this as he is.

After a few minutes, Shawn pulls away, flushed and bright-eyed. "Okay," he says breathlessly "okay. That was…even the Russian judges give that a 10. We should go get some breakfast now, so that the blood can start flowing back into my brain."

"Yeah. Yes. Breakfast. Good." Lassiter realizes he sounds like an idiot, but it's hard to focus when all he can think about is how much he'd like to tumble Shawn onto the bed and spend the rest of the day there.

They go to a café a block away from the hotel and Shawn leads him to a booth in the corner, sitting so that his back is to the rest of the diners, while Lassiter can see the restaurant at large from his vantage point.

"So!" Shawn says brightly "Are you ready for this?" He sounds confident, but his arms are crossed tightly across his chest protectively.

"Just get on with it," Lassiter says sharply. He doesn't want one of Spencer's dog-and-pony shows; he just, for once, wants to hear the truth.

"How much do you already know, Lassie?"

"I know your father trained you on police procedure when you were a teenager –"

"Not quite," Shawn interrupts. "You're right about Henry training me, but it started when I was about five."

"Five?" Lassiter asks, astonished. "How do you train a five year old to be a cop?"

"To start with, there was the Hat Game. There are only four hats in this room, which is not nearly enough to impress you with, but I'll show you anyway."

Spencer closes his eyes and raises his hand to put his fingertips to his head, which immediately makes Lassiter want to smack at his hand in irritation. As if sensing his annoyance, Shawn opens his eyes and smiles slightly. "Relax, Lassie. It's just a physical way of focusing my concentration. I've been doing it since I was a kid."

He closes his eyes again and takes a deep breath "Guy in the middle right-hand booth is wearing an Atlanta Braves baseball hat. He's also wearing a Georgia Bulldogs t-shirt, which means he's cheating on one sports team with another sports team, right? At least he's keeping it all in the same state. He's nervous about something, probably the fact that he's dying to talk to that pretty barista."

Lassiter looks at the guy in question, sees that he's chewing on his straw and shredding the napkin in front of him while trying to stare furtively at the curvy brunette serving coffee a few feet away. He looks back at Shawn, who still has his eyes closed and has been facing the wrong direction to see any of this since they sat down.

"Go on," he says carefully.

"Woman at the table beside the front window has on one of those floppy straw sunhats. She's working on her novel."

Lassiter can see that she's tapping away at the keyboard on her laptop, but not how Shawn came to the conclusion that she's writing a book. "What makes you think that?"

"The three books she has on the table beside her. They're all guides to writing romance novels. I wonder if she's written any dirty parts she would let us read."

"How do you know that? The spines are facing the wrong direction."

"I saw them when we walked past the window outside. On the opposite side of the room, there's a guy in a trucker's hat that has one of those naked woman silhouettes on it, the kind you usually see on eighteen-wheeler mud flaps. It is super classy. The pretty barista was so grossed out by it and him that she could barely stand to look at him when he ordered his coffee. Actually, every woman in the room is doing her best to avoid looking at him, so the only action I see in his future is with his naked lady hat."

"Spencer!"

"Sorry," Shawn says, not looking the least bit repentant. "Finally, there's the barista herself, wearing a cap with the café logo on it. Her shoes are too tight and her feet are killing her. I can tell by the way she's walking."

He opens his eyes and adds "Incidentally, it's not a hat, but the woman sitting at the table closest to the door is carrying concealed. She's a cop, probably a detective, judging from her suit and shoes."

Now that he knows it's there, Lassiter can see the faint outline of the holster under the woman's jacket.

"Okay," he says slowly "Your back has been to the room all this time. I don't see any reflective surfaces where you could see what's going on behind you. When did you notice all of this?"

"When we walked in, the time it took us to get from the front door to the booth."

"That couldn't have taken more than twenty seconds!"

"Yeah," Shawn smiles a little uneasily "Scary, huh? I have an eidetic memory. Basically, I remember nearly everything I see. What Henry did was train me to pay attention to all of it and interpret it into facts."

"Since you were five?"

Spencer shrugged. "Some kids play hide-and-go-seek, I…well, I played hide-and-go-seek too, but it was like a scary military version where dad got irritated if he found me too easily. Unlike the rest of the five year olds, I also played games invented by my dad to heighten my observational skills, along with lessons on things like reading body language."

"So, walk me through how this leads to Psych."

"It was your fault, Lassie! You tried to arrest me! All I wanted was the reward money. But with you threatening to put me in a holding cell because you didn't believe me when I told you the truth, I had to improvise. Officer Allen had all this woo-woo stuff, which is what gave me the idea to go with psychic. Everything just sort of snowballed from there."

"iFor six years?/i Six. Fucking. Years. That's the part I don't understand, Spencer. Six years of lying to me, and O'Hara, and Vick. Wait, Vick doesn't know, does she?"

"No. Or, well, I've certainly never told her. I think she suspects the truth but maintains a "don't ask, don't tell" policy where I'm concerned. One that has nothing to do with how I like to sleep with guys."

"And O'Hara? How do you justify getting into a relationship with her, sleeping with her, when you were lying to her the entire time?"

Spencer looks down at the table. "I can't," he says softly "I can't justify it. By the time I started dating Jules, it felt like it was too late to tell her the truth. I was afraid it would bring everything crashing down".

He rubs a hand across his eyes "Even I don't know what I was thinking during those last few months. I had an engagement ring for her, did you know that? What kind of idiot was I, thinking about marriage when I couldn't bring myself to tell her the truth? It was like…I had the perfect girl, and the perfect job, where I got to show my dad all the time how smart I was and how good I could be, and it was like I was on track to finally being the son he wanted me to be, and marrying Jules would have been a part of achieving that. I spent so long rebelling against him that I don't even know when it was that I started trying to get him to approve of me."

"I could arrest you," Lassiter says quietly. "I probably should. You defrauded my department. You insulted and belittled me on what felt like a weekly, if not daily basis."

"If you really feel that way, then why are you even here?" Shawn asks, looking up at him. "You knew before you came that the psychic thing was a lie, and not because of anything Jules or Gus or anyone else told you, but because you've always known. One of the things I like best about you, Lassiter, is your skepticism. You have always called me on my bullshit. So I'm going to return the favor and call you on yours: you know that I was good at what I did, and that I closed cases that might otherwise still be open. Yeah, it was all based on a lie, but the end result is the same. If this were as simple as you just being pissed off about the lying, you would have already arrested me or given it up as a lost cause, but instead of doing either of those things, you're here having it out with me now. So don't pretend that you haven't already made up your mind about this."

Lassiter stands up abruptly. "I'm going for a walk. I need to clear my head."

"Lassie –"

"Don't, okay Spencer? Give me some time to wrap my head around all this." Lassiter hesitates, then adds "And for god's sake, don't run off. I really will arrest you if you disappear on me."