One of the specialists had me wear a tracker when the episodes started getting bad. Most of the time - " She swallowed and drank some of her chocolate. "It's sexual. Most of the time it's sexual. Not always sex but acting out. Acting different. Dressing different."
His claws pushed out slowly through his skin. He had to force them to retract. "Is that why all those men?"
Her face was sad. "Don't try and make me innocent again. I'm not. I never was."
"You were a child then. You weren't responsible."
"But I was responsible for my adult actions. And I did sleep around. You can't erase that!" she cried. "These episodes have only gotten so bad in the last year and a half. The doctors call them dissociative states. There are lots of psychological words to describe what just happened but most people recognize it as a fugue."
He knew less than nothing on this subject, felt as if he were scrambling in the dark. Making it worse was that mixed in with his need to protect was this agonizing, vicious fury. God, but he was mad at her, at how she'd mistreated herself. Didn't she know that no one - not even she - had the right to hurt what was his? And Talin was his, had been since that day twenty-five years ago when she'd first dared tangle with a wounded leopard. "Tell me about these fugues," he grit out. "Tell me so I understand."
"I don't know if I do." She gave him the mug to put aside.
He stopped himself from crushing it by the thinnest of margins. "Start with what you do know."
"Okay." She took a steadying breath. "A person in a fugue is on autopilot, that's how the doctors explained it to me. They can walk, talk, even do complex things like drive, but with no conscious control."
He wanted to hold her so bad it hurt, but he kept his distance. "What brings one on?"
She shrugged. "No one really knows definitively. For some people it's a brain imbalance - hormonal, biological, a tumor. For others, it seems related to stress."
"Which is it in your case?"
"I don't know. But the more the disease progresses, the worse they are, so it's probably biological."
"We were fighting pretty hard, Tally." He was disgusted at how he'd stoked the sexual heat between them when he had known it would be too much for her. But the second she had ordered him to back off, the leopard had taken over, furious and so damn possessive he couldn't fight it. He was getting too close to the edge, becoming dangerous. So fucking dangerous. "Enough to stress anyone out."
"Yes." She swallowed, took another deep breath. "The doctors said it might even be a mix of things. The biological problems making me more vulnerable to the psychological - my brain is already compromised so it takes less pressure to effect a fugue."
It was an effort to remain logical. "Were you able to isolate any triggers when you wore the trackers?"
"Not really." She drew up her knees and rested her chin on them, looking strangely childlike. It was unsettling after the regression he'd witnessed only minutes ago. "Sometimes it's nothing. Or it feels like nothing. I once fugued in the middle of a jet-train with people all around. I went shopping like normal, then sat in Central Park for an hour."
"That's all?"
"Yeah. Weird, huh?" She shook her head. "I wish all the episodes were like that. But I guess you know they're not. Once I woke up in a bar in Harlem about to get into a taxi with two strangers."
The red glazing his vision was starting to burn, but he knew that if he walked away from her tonight, he'd break something very fragile. "Go on."
"Beds, sometimes I wake up in beds. Beside men I don't know." Tears trailed down her face. "I hate it! I hate myself! But I can't stop it!"
"Shh." He ran a hand over her hair, shaking with the need to hurt what had hurt her. But this disease, it mocked him, hiding in the body of this woman he would never so much as bruise.
"Sometimes the blackouts last for half a day. The longest one I'm aware of was sixteen hours." She was crying in earnest now, deep, hiccuping sobs that made him bleed on the inside.
"Come here, Tally." He tried to gentle his voice but that wasn't who he was. It came out rough, almost a growl. "Come on, baby."