He gets on his motorcycle and drives around for a while, trying to remind himself that he always knew this was going to happen.
He finally does go to Gus's, feeling worn down and depressed, needing a friendly face.
"Oh god, what happened?" Gus asks immediately upon seeing the expression on Shawn's face.
Shawn walks over to the couch and drops onto it tiredly. "Lassie and I had a fight. We're over. Finito."
Gus comes over to sit on the other end of the couch. "You're finito after one fight?" he asks, frowning mightily.
Shawn leans back against and closes his eyes, unwilling to face Gus's distress when his own is so acute. "It's not like it's the first fight we've ever had, but I think it's definitely the last. He pretty much told me to get out."
"He told you that? Lassiter?" Gus sounds frankly disbelieving.
"Yeah, well it can't be that much of a surprise," Shawn laughs mirthlessly.
"Actually," Gus says, "it is. We're talking about Carlton Lassiter here. The man who kept trying to get his wife back for years after she left him. And he told me that Marlowe left him, not the other way around. Lassiter doesn't break up with people."
"Well, I guess I'm special," Shawn says sadly.
"You need to talk to him."
"I don't think so, Gus. He made it pretty clear that he's ready to see me go."
"And what about you? Are you ready for it to be over?"
Shawn wraps his arms around one of the frou-frou pillows that Gus keeps on his couch and hugs it to his chest.
"I've known all along it was going to end this way, so whatever. I'm not surprised or anything."
Gus sighs. "Shawn, when you look at Lassiter, it's like you get little hearts in your eyes. It's always been that way to some extent, but since you came back it's like a million times worse."
"Yeah, so, I'm crazy about him. So what? That doesn't mean anything. You know he hasn't told anyone except Jules about us, right? Which is cool! I wouldn't want him to risk his career for me or anything. But the fact that he's kept it secret is, you know, just evidence that he never expected it to last."
"Shawn, I really think you need to talk to him. Carlton's at least as emotionally stunted as you are. This was never going to be easy, but I still think you could make it work."
"You're emotionally stunted," Shawn mutters in retaliation, then says "I'm not going to be that annoying boyfriend who doesn't know when it's over. I'm going to finish with the house in the next couple of days, get with Hornstock to find a real estate agent to handle the sale, and then I'm out of here."
Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Gus go very, very still. "What do you mean by out of here?"
He shrugs. "Santa Barbara seems to be cursed for me these days. I can't stay here anymore."
"You can't do this to me again, Shawn," Gus says quietly.
Shawn turns to look at him, startled. "What?"
"I understand why you had to leave after your dad…after what happened with your dad. But you can't just take off whenever you want for months or years at a time and think that everything will stay the same between us. I can't stand to spend months not knowing where you are or how you're doing, or if you're even alive. I can't do that again."
Shawn feels like he can't breathe, but he forces out his next words anyway. "What are you saying, Gus? Are you breaking up with me too? Because I don't think I can handle that, I really don't."
Gus sounds like he's on the verge of tears. "I don't know, Shawn. I can't imagine you not being my best friend, but if you leave again like this, things will be different between us."
"Come with me!" Shawn says imploringly. "You can sell pharmaceuticals anywhere! We'll go any place you want to go, just name it."
Gus shakes his head. "This is my home, Shawn. I don't want to leave."
"Please don't do this to me, Gus," Shawn begs. "I can take being shut out by anyone but you."
"I'm not trying to shut you out, Shawn. You think I want that? But I can't do this again. I can't take the not knowing."
Shawn staggers to his feet. "I have to get out of here," he says flatly.
Gus jumps up after him. "Shawn, don't –"
He holds up his hand to stop Gus from saying anything else. "Gus," he says quietly, "I can't take anymore tonight. I promise not to leave town without telling you, okay? But I have to go."
Outside, on his motorcycle again, he realizes he's shaking. He's not in any state of mind to be driving around; he needs to go somewhere. A hotel, he thinks, or maybe a bar. Which is when he realizes that his wallet is still at Lassiter's. Fuck. On a good night he can easily spend hours drinking at a bar without spending a dime, charming drinks out of patrons and waitresses alike with his easy smiles and quick wit, but this is the furthest thing possible from a good night.
Well. There's still one place nearby that he can go. He does, after all, own a house.
It's the first time he's been to the house alone since that Sunday morning right after he came back into town, when he'd had a panic attack. This is probably a terrible idea, coming here when he feels like he's going to break apart, but he doesn't know where else to go.
The house is eerily quiet, leaving too much room for Shawn's thoughts. The TV is already gone, taken to Goodwill the weekend before, but thankfully there's still a radio, so he cranks up some music as a distraction, not that he's capable of being distracted right now.
His phone rings, and without looking to see who is calling he turns it off. It's either Gus or Lassie, and he can't deal with talking to either of them at the moment.
He had known it was only a matter of time until Lassie got tired of him, and still it had come as shock somehow. It was strange, he hadn't realized how lonely he had been traveling around the country until Lassiter had shown up and it had been like a missing piece of himself had been restored. The thing with Lassiter is weird and shouldn't make sense; they shouldn't fit, but to Shawn it felt like they did, and now the prospect of going forward without Lassie makes his heart ache.
He can't even bring himself to think about the possibility of losing Gus. That cannot happen. He can't imagine staying in Santa Barbara with the way things are right now, but he's going to have to figure something out, because a life without Gus as his always reliable best friend is not an option.
He remembers the first time Gus came home with him, how he'd been awed by Henry and envious of how Shawn didn't have to share anything with a bossy older sister. They had spoken a shared language of cartoons and candy and toys, and the bond between them was immediate and eternal. Or, at least he hopes it is.
He flops down on the couch, grateful that it hasn't been hauled away yet. He should do something. Make a plan for how to convince Gus to come with him. He can't stay, Gus has to understand that.
Stupid, fucking Lassiter. Why had he even come after Shawn if he was only going to end it all so abruptly?
Too jittery to stay still, he jumps up off the couch and starts wandering around the house.
The kitchen is where his mom had sat him down one day and told him that she was leaving, something he had known was coming after years of fighting and icy silences. Her voice had broken when she told him, but she hadn't ever let him see her cry.
He goes upstairs, into his bedroom, or at least what used to be his bedroom. Thinks about endless days with Gus, playing games and hatching schemes, then finds himself thinking about just a few nights ago in this room, Lassiter making him come so hard that he had passed out, and in frustration he punches the wall, which only succeeds in scraping his knuckles and making his hand hurt.
What had he expected? What was Lassiter supposed to do, put up with his moodiness and his nightmares and his insomnia forever? He had gone into this knowing that Lassie was not exactly burdened with an abundance of patience. The thing was, he himself had such a short attention span, that in the back of his mind, he thought that he might get bored with Lassie anyway, after they finished working out some of their sexual tension. Lassie was strange and uptight and cranky, but instead of getting tired of all that, Shawn found himself liking it. He had always liked that Lassiter called him on his crap and gave as good as he got, and even in the short amount of time that he had seen Lassie with Marlowe he had found his loyalty and protectiveness attractive, and now, for whatever reason, he finds the combination of all of Lassie's odd little quirks along with all of his genuinely awesome qualities to be…perfect. Well, not actually perfect, but perfect for him.
There's no point in obsessing over it. Lassie deserves someone who isn't so much trouble, someone who can make him happy instead of making him worry all the time.
He takes a deep breath and goes into Henry's room. Lassiter had packed away all of the clothes, but he hadn't yet touched the items on top of the bureau, and Shawn goes over to pick up a picture of himself and Henry, taken when he was about 10 years old. It hadn't been a special occasion or anything; his mom had a new camera that she wanted to try out, and he and his dad had been outside playing catch. Or, Shawn remembers ruefully, more accurately, Henry had been using a game of catch as a way to lecture Shawn on the importance of hand-eye coordination for police officers. It was one of the first steps in turning him into a precise shot with a gun. But still, he'd had fun that day, and that's clearly reflected in the photograph, with him and Henry both sporting happy, genuine smiles.
He takes the picture with him when he leaves the room, starting down the stairs but pausing on the third step from the bottom. This had been where he was standing during what was possibly his worst fight ever with Henry, when he was seventeen and had chosen to stay with Madeline after the divorce. This was where he had told Henry that he hated him and that there was no fucking way he was ever going to be a cop, that the last thing he wanted was to be anything like his old man.
He doesn't regret most of that, exactly; Henry had been a controlling son of a bitch as a father, and Shawn had been every bit as stubborn in his defiance. Most importantly of all, he still believes with all his heart that he was right: he would have hated being a cop. Even in the past few weeks, he's seen some of the cases that Lassiter works on – rape and child abuse and domestic disturbances – cases that reveal all the ugly, evil shit seemingly normal people are capable of, and he's grateful for how he doesn't have to deal with that. As a "psychic investigator" he was able to pick and choose the kind of cases that interested him, and leave the crimes dealing with petty atrocities to cops like Juliet and Lassiter, who somehow had the capacity to cope with all of the cruelty they saw. What he wishes for now though is that sometime in the last few years, after he and Henry had reconciled, that he had somehow found a way to let his dad know that he loved him.
Sitting down on the step and looking at the picture, it hits him all at once how much he's lost in the past year – his dad and Jules and Psych and now maybe Gus and Lassiter too – and for the first time since Henry's funeral, he lets himself cry.