"Do you know what Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder is?"

No, Lis, I don't know what it is. Or, I didn't. And now? Now I don't want to know. I don't want to know about its symptoms. I don't want it infesting the timeline of every social media app they way it has in the days since... Since I was weak.

I don't want it to fit.

And yet, it clings to my skin with all its awful implications.

I can't have this. It can't be me. I can't be anything less than perfect or people die, and OCD is... It's too much. So I can't. Lis is wrong. I go by the bar — I teleport — to tell her exactly as much as that.

This visit is less nice.

If not for her opening the door wide and letting me in, I'd have marched right past her. I'd have felt guilty about it in the aftermath, but I'd have done it. I'd be right, too, to have done it, if I did. Because how does she think she knows me this well?

"I can see you're angry," Lis says.

"You can't just accuse people of having things like that!" It's the words I've rehearsed for days, building myself up to make sure that I can deliver this statement without fumbling over myself, or letting the Decay win.

Because it's the Decay. Has to be.

"I offered an opinion about what could feasibl—"

"I don't. Have. OCD."

Lis stares at me for a moment, unperturbed by what I've just said. "Okay, say you don't," she assents, gesturing for me to take a seat on the couch.

"I don't," I say, doing just that. "I really, truly don't. It doesn't fit!"

"Help me understand," Lis says.

"Understand what? That I'm not some freak who is meticulously clean and tidy?"

Lis narrows her eyes. Even as I say the words, I know they're wrong. Inaccurate. Trivializing of what OCD actually is: a complex web of subtypes and symptoms that can't be me.

Despite not wanting to, I couldn't help but read more about it. The lawyer in me wanted to rebut it all.

Go point by point.

And as I read, I felt this wretched sting of recognition in the ways it talked about what it meant to be obsessive. To have rituals that calm me.

To feel compelled.

"Look, I get why it might appear that I have some symptoms, but... I mean, that's just how everyone's wired!"

"How do you mean?" Lis asks it without judgment, but I feel like an animal about to walk into a snare all the same.

"There's not anything wrong with me caring. That's a good thing."

"I agree," Lis says. "Why are you concerned about it, though?"

"Because I... I can't have OCD and care about people like I do. It'd mean that I'm just..."

Wrong.

Bad.

Selfish.

Using others to satiate my stupid brain that's broken. I want to scream. My nerves feel like they're crackling.

"Tiana?" Lis probes, her tone gentle. "Where'd you go?"

I shake my head. "Look, I can't be that is all. I'm... It can't be me. It has to be Kam. It has to be the Decay. You can't let me be this way. It's all vague phrases, anyway. It's scare marketing. I'm okay. Tell me that I'm okay, please?"

"Tiana, you are okay. I can't be your doctor or therapist, so you should get another opinion on what's going on."

"You... What? You can't? Is it because of how I stormed in? Because if it's that I'm sorry, I—"

"No. It's because I'm sleeping with Kam and it'd be unethical for me."

"Oh..."

"And because I find you pretty attractive as well."

It's not that there's never been other women I've been attracted to before Kam. With hindsight, the keen interest I showed in Amal's training and the way she used that sword should've been a hint.

But I didn't think that I'd be so taken with Lis.

That must be the Decay. I can feel its tendrils wriggle just the slightest bit as Lis smirks at me. The temptation of it all is so sudden that I realize only a second later that it's not just me feeling it.

Separated by miles as we are, Kam felt me. Felt my attraction to Lis and mirrored it.

Kam's amping me up, spurring me to try it.

To turn off my brain in a different way while Kam is at work and can't help me.

To have sex with Lis.

"Just how attractive do you find me?" Even if I wanted to push back against it, I'm already soaked at the thought of what Lis might do with those claws.

She rises from where she's been seated, and I see the bulge in her jeans as she does.

I blink towards her. "Bedroom?"

Lis gestures over her shoulder. "That wa—"

I blink the two of us onto her bed. It's accurate enough that only I knock my head against the headboard as we tumble down.

"You ok—" Lis starts, but I don't want caring right now.

I grip her wrists and pull her towards my blouse. "Shred it. Don't be gentle."

Her claws sink in and graze the skin underneath. The pain of it quiets the unsettling presence that's lived with me all my life.

The one I won't name.