she's walking on fire
#1 of got our heads in the clouds (and we're not coming down)
Okay, so maybe taking shelter in a cabin that belongs to a fellow shifter during your heat wasn't your best idea...
Oh, but you burn.
Nothing hurts more than a Heat without a mate - or, at least, you'd thought. Now you know, though, that a heat during the full moon - three full nights forcibly, fully shifted - is sheer agony.
You can't do anything to take the edge off. Can't press your fingers inside and get yourself off, can't buy a 'heat aide' and suffer when it's not enough, can only curl up and lap at yourself.
And then you lost your den.
You'd spent the first day of your shifted heat curled up in an old bear's den, long abandoned.
And then the damn thing came back though its scent was months old, and you'd had to bail, bolting into Tall Trees.
You hadn't realized that you'd been following a familiar path - shifters aren't rare per-say, but they're not uncommon either, and you could catch some scents in the air: you were fairly certain there was the lilt of a shifter's tint to that bear's track, that coyote pack was definitely a shifter-pack, and that cougar... you couldn't tell, but it was either a shifter, or had eaten one.
And you avoided shifters at all costs during your heat.
It didn't take you long to reach Tanner's Reach.
You didn't stay in it much - didn't really go inside for more than a few minutes or so, only long enough to pick up whatever work MacGuire had to offer, then would be gone again. The longest amount of time you'd spent in it, thinking on it (which you weren't really doing, honestly) was the first time, when you'd thought it abandoned and MacGuire had held you up at gunpoint.
And you knew Sean was a shifter. He reeked of it, his fox showing through in his... everything. His face, his hair, his movements.
But more often than not he was in a tent down near Quaker's Cove, and your wolf was pulling you to safety, to familiar and friend, so you let her lead you, bounding along a path you usually took on horseback.
Fox-scent was fresh, but the cabin, when you poked your muzzle inside, was empty.
Your stomach cramped - slick ran down your legs, darkened your brown-white fur, and you stumbled inside, not wanting to risk being out any longer than you had to. Looked around, peeling your upper lip back from your teeth at the sound of slick splattering to the wooden flooring, grabbed the corner of the blanket and dragged it off the bed, pawed at it until you were satisfied with the way it pooled on the floor, and curled up, trying to get comfortable with the cramping in your stomach growing worse.