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A jewelry case.
"Drake…"
I opened it to find a velvet choker with a pendant attached. A single teardrop diamond in a white-gold setting. It must have been several carats in weight.
"I had it made specially for you back before all this happened. I thought a black velvet choker would substitute pretty well for your leather collar and would be more appropriate to wear at special events like tonight." He went behind me and slipped the choker around my neck, fastening it, his eyes meeting mine in the mirror.
I covered my mouth, tears once more springing to my eyes.
He remained behind me, adjusted the choker so that the diamond fell in the hollow at the base of my throat, watching in the mirror.
"Beautiful…" he whispered in my ear, his breath warm on my skin. Then, he pushed me forward so that I leaned over the vanity facing the mirror. He lifted up my dress, groaning when his hands slid over the garters, and he gave me my Christmas present.
He tried to give it to me just the way I asked.
He really tried but he couldn't stand not seeing me fulfilled as well.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Packing up my apartment was harder than I thought. I'd been there since I left the dormitory in my senior year and although it was tiny and had little closet space, I had amassed a lot of stuff. It took a week just to go through everything and sort it into send, store, donate or junk. Most of it was in the store category. I wasn't going to take very much with me. Having lived in Africa briefly, I knew a lot of extra baggage was a burden rather than of benefit.
Besides, when you lived in an impoverished land where people survived on very little, having a lot of superfluous stuff was disrespectful.
The very last things to go through were my pieces of art, the ones I did and those of friends and fellow art students.
I held up a framed photograph of Dawn taken when she was in India at the hospice run by Mother Theresa's nuns. She wore traditional dress of the region, a shawl over her head, and a Sari. She stood with a nun and smiled at the camera. I would keep this, despite the fact that the two of us had not mended our fences. I tried, explaining how I felt, that my father already knew, and how Drake was leaving NYP for a year and that his boss knew about the restraining order.
"You can't hurt him," I said. "All you can do is hurt our friendship. Is that what you want?"
She hung up on me. I called back, wanting to force her to listen, but she wouldn’t answer. Finally, I phoned her sister, Brenda, whose number I had on my contact list from when Dawn had stayed with her for a while after her wedding. We spoke about our friendship breaking up, about Dawn's fears for me. Brenda explained how her first relationship had been abusive and how the much younger Dawn had witnessed the abuse.
"I can understand her being worried about you, Kate. She's very stubborn and fixed in her thinking. She hasn't really forgiven me yet for putting her through that."
"She never said anything," I said, trying to think back to our conversations from right after we first met in college. "I knew she didn't like your boyfriend."
"She went pretty religious afterwards," Brenda said. "Well, as religious as she felt was necessary. Give her time."
We said our goodbyes after I asked her to try to explain things to Dawn. She thought it was highly unlikely to work.
Everything seemed to find its place in my life except for Dawn, and that left a hole in my heart that I knew time would never heal.
I sorted through my artwork, taking down the framed pictures and stacking them against the wall. Drake stood at the sound system, hooking his iPhone into it, selecting a song to play.
Something soft came on, and it wasn't his usual sixties music.
"What's this?" I said, liking its somber tone.
"Please Don't Go by Barcelona."
I listened for a moment. "Sounds awfully sad for you."
"I listened to this a lot during those days between Christmas and New Years."
I smiled, amazed that he admitted that. I turned back to the pictures and started to sort through them. He came and stood beside me.
"I want to keep all of these, but none of them have to come with us."
"I want this one to come," Drake said. He stood and examined my pencil drawing of the knight and his lady.
