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Lev is sitting at a coffeeshop, eating a cookie, studying electrical engineering, and absently contemplating suicide in the manner of someone who is not actually going to kill himself but is not quite ready to give up all hope.
He sips at his iced tea. It's weird. It tastes a little fruitier than usual. Maybe they're trying a new recipe? It's good, though, and it doesn't take long before he finishes it.
He can make morning pancakes!
...He can attempt to make morning pancakes.
Sasha wakes up to the smell of something burning.
"I was trying to surprise you!"
Several of the pancakes are practically edible.
"And it's adorable! But, in the future, it might be better to have someone who knows how to not make whatever mistake you made with these?"
"I can!"
Maybe they should start with the teaching right now, in fact.
That sounds like an excellent plan.
Cooking, it seems, is not Lev's strong point.
"...I hate electrical engineering. Despise it. It bores me to tears. Every so often I remember that I'm going to get my PhD and stop teaching and have to do electrical engineering all day and then I think about throwing myself off a bridge."
Okay Lev needs hugs right now immediately.
"Than why are you doing it?"
"Immigrant parents. They care a lot about me being successful. And it's not really like I'm going to be happy either way, so..."
"— please don't spend your life on a career that makes you want to jump off a bridge just to think about."
Sasha doesn't know what else Lev can do either but she does know how to hug him more and tighter and better.
She follows, and tries not to be too worried about whatever it is she's going to find there.
Lev pulls out a large plastic box from under the bed!
Much of the box is filled with the accouterments of crossdressing: wigs and breastforms, panties and bras, dresses and miniskirts, stockings and makeup, shoes and jewelry. Lev's (Leia's?) taste runs towards the sexy, the skimpy, the glittery, and the bright pink; it is unclear whether he can assemble an entire outfit from his collection that neither clashes nor is so tacky that the average Vegas showgirl would turn it down. There's a small collection of dildos and buttplugs.
And there are books.
Books with titles like Personality Disorders and the Five-Factor Model of Personality, Third Edition, or Psychology And The Department Of Veterans Affairs: A Historical Analysis Of Training, Research, Practice, And Advocacy, or Critical Thinking About Psychology: Hidden Assumptions And Plausible Alternatives, or The Social Neuroscience Of Human–Animal Interaction. The titles are dry and universally about psychology; the books themselves have been clearly well-read and well-loved. The covers of some of them are falling off.
She doesn't know what to say.
"We need to get you better clothes than this" is obviously wrong, and besides that Lev (Leia?) is a grad student and Sasha's homeless.
"....they look like good books," she tries.
"That's a nice way to say 'they look really boring and your shameful dark secret is kind of dumb.'"
"I don't think I could get through them, but I'd like to hear you talk about them to me. And it doesn't look like something to be ashamed of but I'm assuming you have a reason, I'm not going to immediately assume things that are important to you are dumb."
"Well. It's not like you can make much money, being a psychologist. --This is what I do, when I'm not working. I put on women's clothes and read about psychology and pretend I'm someone else."
She doesn't know what to do except hug Lev again.
".....I still think you don't have to be ashamed of liking psychology."
"...When I'm around you I don't feel like I have to be ashamed of anything."
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