It was good to know that while Ian enjoyed being around animals he didn’t actually want to live as one full time; that kind of attitude seemed perfectly capable of inspiring that sort of withdrawal from human company that he kept mentioning. As long as the shifter still held a strong connection to their human form, a desire to remain that way, then hopefully they’d avoid that pull of the animal world. Save for the ability to change their appearance, it didn’t really sound as if the dilemma was all that different from the one that elementals faced – as much as they enjoyed their every day life, the natural world always felt much more comfortable, so much more fulfilling for them. It wasn’t unusual to hear that an earth elemental had moved off the grid, vanished somewhere that no one could find them – probably to the heart of a forest or the Amazon or something equally untouched. It was why it was so important to Eden that she had this little garden outside of her flat, that she live on the outskirts of the city; she had to make sure that she could appease that side of herself without letting it take over and push her into isolation.
“At least you’ve got a bit of advanced healing. It’d be awful to shift and get hurt in that form, only to come back to being a human and recover as slowly as we do sometimes.” Eden didn’t have any sort of heightened ability to heal herself, no super defense mechanism that was brought out by her gifts. Of course, her body always seemed more at ease, more ready to recover when it was in a natural setting, but it wasn’t the same thing by any means. “I haven’t, no. Whenever there was a full moon, when I lived on property, the weres were the only ones allowed out. The rest of us were put on a sort of lock down, for everyone’s protection.” She’d only ever seen Juniper and the rest of them the following day, when they all looked that much worse for wear. “Jun has told me quite a deal about the whole…process, but I imagine its completely different to actually see it.” She couldn’t imagine what it would be like to witness that, not after the detail Juniper had gone into about what exactly went on. “I just remember all of the weres, the next day, looked as though they’d had the tar beaten out of them. They weren’t good for much for a day or so, until they’d come back to themselves fully.” They needed that time to ease back into their human form after their monthly shift. “I can see it,” she laughed lightly, “you as a little trouble maker. It doesn’t seem like that much of a stretch.” He had that ornery glint in his eyes, that trickster curve to his smile – but it was in that charming way, the way that sucked women in by the handful, not in a way that made her doubt his honesty.
First kisses tended to be a little awkward, each person testing out the other’s boundaries; to be honest, that was the part of them that Eden hated and she was a huge fan of a good snog. Moving past that, into the time when you could really enjoy yourself, really sink into a good kiss and enjoy the feel of the other person’s mouth, to really taste them, that was her only motivator for deepening it so quickly. She set her wineglass aside on the little table beside her chair as carefully as she could, her now free hand moving up to rest lightly against his jaw, just cradeling the curve of his cheek.