He doesn't read Sasha's response email. He doesn't want to know. 

He cuddles a pillow and keeps his eyes closed tight shut because everything in the room reminds him of Sasha.

He packs. He has enough things to fill more than one suitcase now. Technically the books are all Lev's but he packs his favorite book anyway. He'll. Lev is paying him ten million dollars to leave he probably won't mind much. After twenty minutes he notices his hands are shaking; he takes a break and finds a hotel and books it for a week. He notices absently that he isn't crying anymore. 

He goes down to the kitchen and makes himself breakfast and takes photos of every page of his recipe book. Lev can keep it. More accurately Edith can keep it. He'll copy it out again. 

He goes back to his room and sits on his the bed for two more minutes and then finishes packing. 

For the first time in his entire life, Lev experiences the urge to take drugs. He wants every one of his emotions to be replaced with chemical happiness. He wants to stop thinking.

He has experienced the desire to take drugs to erase his feelings dozens of times, and followed through on enough to them to know exactly why he shouldn't. At least until, until he finds an apartment. Fuck. 

He finishes checking over his the room. Three suitcases and a backpack. There's more that he's leaving behind. 

He goes back to Lev's door. 

Lev hears his footsteps. He braces himself. 

He deserves whatever Sasha wants to say to him.

"I'm packed." 

He shouldn't ask if he can hug him. Lev is paying him to leave. Lev almost certainly never wants to see him again. 

"I. Thank you. For everything." 

He wants to die.

Sasha is thanking him. Sasha is thanking him after everything he did. Sasha thinks he has to be grateful.

He doesn't say anything at all.

Okay. Okay. That's. That's okay. Lev gets to not talk to him. 

He calls an Uber. He's dead silent for the entire drive. He checks into the hotel. He still isn't crying. Why isn't he crying? 

He tries to sleep. He'll start on apartment hunting tomorrow. 

Lev spends the next week in bed experimentally testing how long a human being can sleep. The answer is about sixteen hours a day.

Edith makes him food. Sometimes he eats a few bites. Mostly he just leaves it to get cold. One time she makes him a hot buttered and he throws it against the wall. 

He ponders self-injury. It seems like a good idea, because he is bad and he hurt Sasha and he deserves to be punished, but it also seems like it would involve a lot of steps. In order to get a knife you have to get out of bed. He's not a big fan of getting out of bed. 

He tries, for a while, to distract himself with television, but every show he likes is something he watched with Sasha or something he talked about watching with Sasha or something Sasha had seen before and had opinions on. He eventually decides on playing a dumb pay-to-win video game on his phone and paying every time the opportunity comes up. The numbers go up. It isn't exactly satisfying, because nothing is exactly satisfying, but it stops him from thinking. 

He's supposed to get back to work on Wednesday. He ignores Claire's increasingly concerned emails and texts. Nothing matters. He can just lie in his bed sleeping too much and not eating and playing a shitty phone game for the rest of his life.

He can't sleep. He starts halfheartedly on apartment hunting. He goes grocery shopping and misses having a real kitchen. He has an email exchange with Lev's broker. 

He keeps unlocking his phone and getting as far as Lev's contact before he stops himself from calling him. 

He desperately desperately wants to call Sasha but he doesn't. He can fuck up everything else in his life but he is not going to fuck up this. He's going to stay away from Sasha. 

It involves not doing things instead of doing things so he thinks he can manage. 

Claire decides, regrettably, that it would be a violation of professional boundaries to call Lev's ex and ask him to reconsider this whole 'breakup' thing. 

She ponders whether hiring Lev a therapist would be a violation of professional boundaries and decides the answer is yes but if this goes on for a few more months she might stop caring.

He goes out and buys a bottle of shitty tequila and drinks exactly enough of it that he won't have a headache tomorrow. 

He unlocks his phone. This is a bad idea.

That's a problem for sober him. He calls Lev. 

Sasha is calling him. 

Probably Sasha wants to yell at him. He picks up, because he deserves to be yelled at, and because he wants to hear Sasha's voice one last time.

He opens with "I miss you," because he's already making bad decisions. 

Wait. That was totally not what he expected to hear at all. He recontextualizes some things, rearranges some other things.

It is like the moment when the optical illusion clicks and suddenly you see the old woman instead of the young lady and you can't imagine how you'd never seen her before. 

"...I love you."

"I love you. I can't sleep without you. Can I please come home?" 

"Yes. Yes. I. Yes. I-- I thought you didn't want to be with me."

"Why would — it doesn't matter. We'll talk when I get home. I love you." 

"Can. Can you stay on the phone actually. You don't have to say anything. I just want to know you're there."

The way he laughs makes it very obvious that he's been crying. 

"I have to call an Uber — I'll be right there, Lev, I love you." 

"I love you."

He leaps out of bed and runs to the front door and then paces back and forth in front of it.

He worries that the phone conversation was a dream, or that Sasha will come to his senses before he gets here, but-- but maybe it will actually be okay.

It takes him two minutes to pack and three minutes for the Uber to show up and twenty-one minutes to get to Lev's their house and he's twitching for all of them. 

He left his key when he left. He knocks on the front door. 

And the door opens and suddenly his arms are full of Lev. 

"I'm sorry, I'm so sorry. I really fucked up."

"I don't care, I don't care, I love you, I'm home," and he's crying again and this time he doesn't want to stop.