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“In memories.”
“I … guess. More like … a dream of memories. Impressions, flashes of visuals, sounds and smells, feelings. Shit like that. A sound or a smell, or an actual memory, can trigger it.”
“How long do you go away?”
Another lopsided shrug. “Differs. A few minutes, half an hour, sometimes longer.” He looked around, checked his wrist, found it bare, and finally realized he was basically naked. “Shit. What time is it?”
Kelsey looked at her own watch. “Almost midnight. How long were you away this time?”
He shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. Did I do anything to scare you?”
“Not unless you mean scared for you. No, you were sitting on the ground behind your shed, curled up like a statue. I couldn’t get you out of it. When you finally did come to, it was just like waking up. Nothing violent.”
He heaved a big sigh. “Good. Good.”
“Have you been violent in that state?”
“I don’t know for sure. I’ve come out of it and found things broken, or I’ve been banged up somehow, but I have no idea if it’s violence or clumsiness or what.”
The next question, she asked with some trepidation. “Are you in therapy, or ever have been?” As a whole, the Bulls were suspicious of psychotherapy. Any group who spent so much time on the wrong side of the law had a lot of damaging secrets, so they didn’t love the thought of patches—or patches’ family members—baring their souls outside the club.
That said, a few people in the family had been in therapy over the years, for grief counseling after a loss, or PTSD, or some other trouble that made them unhappy. Athena had been in therapy for a few years, around middle school and high school, when she first really grappled with the ways being deaf set her apart.
Dex seemed like someone who really needed therapy. It was not okay to be so triggered by trauma he became catatonic.
“I’ve been. I’ve seen a shrink at the VA. Being crazy lost me my military career, but I’ve still got my benefits.”
“I guess your military career is where the trauma started, so that seems only right.”
A bitter smile cracked across his face. “There was trauma from that, yeah, but it didn’t start there. I was crazy before then. Just didn’t know it.”
“You’re not crazy, Dex. I hate that word.”
“Mentally ill, then. Doesn’t matter what you call it, Kelsey. It is what it is.”
She also hated that defeatist sentence.
Before she could formulate another question, or decide to challenge his attitude, he said, “More than you bargained for, right?”
“Please stop deciding what I think and feel. I’ve got that covered, thank you.” She stood, and the dogs, as if they understood what she intended, all got up and made room—Charlie first, then Ripper, then the others. They must have also decided that all was well again, because they wandered off to their own corners. George and Lennie headed to the kitchen, Ripper went to a dog bed at the hearth, Charlie lay on the floor by the slider, and Lizzie hopped up on a chair.
Kelsey sat at Dex’s side, drawing up her leg to sit sideways. He shifted a bit so he could face her.
“How often does this happen?” she asked.
He shrugged again. “I don’t know. There’s not a schedule.”
“Ballpark for me. On average. Once a month? Once a week?”
“No. Nothing like that. A handful of times a year, tops. Some years, nothing. Depends on what’s going on. Certain things trigger it. Those things don’t happen that often.”
“Things related to traumas you’ve experienced.”
His look closed a bit, like he expected her to pry. “Yeah.”
She wanted to ask what had happened today, but it was probably club stuff he wouldn’t tell her anyway. Heeding the warning in his look, she asked something else. “Are you on meds?”
“I got some. I don’t like how I feel on them, so …”
