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Good! 
But emo Slade doesn't know that at the moment.... Hope you don't mind me throwing in Slade's narrative; let me know if it's not okay to assume that Deirdre listened to the whole thing. You don't even have to read it all; this was more than a page on Microsoft Word, so it's long. :/ / WC: 849
She didn't hate him. In fact, she still considered them friends. That was all he needed to hear. He wasn't comfortable with her Optime form, but he'd get used to it. Slade just wanted to know that he had a friend to rely on, and now she was urging him to do what he'd been wanting to do since he crossed Halcyon: tell his story. Every bit of shame or uneasiness that he had once felt was quickly shoved aside so he could tell his story.
He told her everything... almost everything. He began with how he had gone out to the beach where they had spent an afternoon together to think, but he didn't tell her what he was thinking about. He recounted hearing an odd noise from nearby, and when he turned he saw a large, muscular, heavily-scarred brute, who slowly came nearer and nearer to Slade until he was invading the coyote's personal space. He shuddered as he remembered asking what the wolf thought he was doing, which had been his fatal mistake: hidden figures hidden nearby lunged at him, and though he had tried to fight he had been bagged and knocked out cold. (This was a bit of a lie; he hadn't fought at all and instead tried to run for his life, but he thought that the exaggeration would make the story more dramatic.)
He told how, when he woke up, he found himself with tight rope around his snout and his paws tied together. Slade could remember it all too well: the rough rock road that he had been dragged along mercilessly, the town of prejudiced wolf Luperci who stared at him, jeered, and even threw stones as he was taken helplessly against his will. He remembered the gruff voice of the Luperci who had abducted him, Jack, and tried to imitate it as well as he could. Jack wasn't happy to find out that Slade wasn't a Luperci, and rather than “waste time” transforming him Slade was thrown into the wood, still bound by his mouth and paws, to die.
Right around there Slade realized that he was sounding pretty pathetic; he had begged for forgiveness when there was nothing for Deirdre to be mad about in the first place, and now he was telling the story of his abduction which sounded like a giant sob story. He wasn't fond of sob stories. Slade decided that there was no shame in telling her the truth about how helpless he was. It had taken an escaped slave, a recently-changed female coyote named Sadie, to save him.
Somehow, however, Slade didn't feel comfortable telling Deirdre that his rescuer was a female, and he changed his story. Rather than Sadie letting him live with her until he was well enough to be on his own, Slade twisted the facts and said that a mysterious Luperci had unbound his ropes and led him to a shelter, and from every morning thereafter he found a dead rabbit at the entrance to his shelter.
It wasn't a total lie, was it? In this story, he was alone; not too big of a difference. It is a difference; that's why you're not telling Deirdre. Slade had to shove the thought aside and continue, but from there on there weren't many doubts; he had simply gathered the strength to move on and started his trek home.
“...and that's why I'm out here,” Slade finished. “The plan was to head back to Cercatori d'Arte, but I'm not even sure if I'm going to go back there to stay. I might just check in and see how they're doing, but....” He trailed off. He wasn't going to jump to conclusions and say that Deirdre would be willing to let him follow her on her travels. If she didn't offer, he wouldn't ask. He didn't want to seem pushy.
After a pause, Deirdre offered to shift back into Lupus, but Slade shook his head. “Do whatever you want, Deirdre.” His uneasiness about her new form began to creep back into his mind but he didn't pay much attention to it. Right now, he had just told the story of his life–or at least part of it–and he wasn't about to kill the mood with doubts.
Finally, she mentioned the hawk. That was what the brown blur was. Slade glanced up to the raptor, wondering how on earth one could go about training a bird like that. There wasn't way that he could ever dream of doing something like that himself, not as a Lupus, but there was a long future ahead of him. Things could change. “Reminds me of a certain crow that keeps following me around....” he commented, not really expecting a response. He wanted to leave this talk open and make it last as long as he possibly could, even if it meant that he would have to narrate his entire life story. Right now, the guilt and angst was gone, replaced only by a coyote who enjoyed telling stories and wanted to spend some time with his friend.