50 Shades of Drake 3 and 4

Chapter Twenty

    ...And just like that, came the moment of truth: the moment when Destiny felt like her heart was being ripped from her chest. She watched Aubrey as he got dressed, temporarily forgetting her own state of undress. How could she take her eyes off of him, knowing that these were the last few moments she would get to see him, for only God knew how long?

    He pulled his sweatpants up his legs and glanced at her. "There's something that I want to talk to you about."

    "That sounds cryptic," she commented, snapping out of her reverie and bending at the waist to collect her shirt from the floor.

    "You're not going to like it, but it is something I've told you before," he said, adjusting the hem of his shirt so that it fell perfectly over his sweatpants.

    After putting on her shirt, she grabbed her jeans and stuck one foot into a pant leg. "Okay."

    "I don't know how long we're going to have to be apart for."

    She rolled her eyes.

    He frowned. "Just because we don't have a contract between us doesn't mean you can disrespect me when I'm trying to talk to you."

    "I'm sorry," she told him, her eyes downcast. "But I already know what you're going to say. I don't want you to say it."

    "What am I going to say?" he asked her.

    "That you don't blame me if anything happens while you're gone, you just don't want to know about it."

    "That's...what I was going to say, yes."

    "Nothing is going to happen while you're gone," she said emphatically, combing her fingers through her hair. "I want to be with you. I can wait for you."

    He closed his eyes. "You're young. You should be out there living your life. I don't want you sitting around waiting for me."

    "Too bad," she told him. "And it's not like I can be out there living my life anyway. You said I can't leave Brian's house unless I have a chaperone with me."

    He approached her and smiled sadly at her. "Unless you have someone who can help protect you," he corrected softly.

    She raised a hand to his chest and gave it a loving caress. "When you're standing in front of me like this...I can't imagine ever being with anyone else. I can't even fathom it. You're here, and you're this person who is larger than life. Sometimes I don't even think you realize how strong your personality is, how strong your presence is. When you're around, even if you're not speaking, not moving, not making a sound...I can feel it. I can feel you there. Your presence fills a room. But...that also means that when you're not around...I feel that too. I feel it, probably ten times more strongly than the average person would."

    "Which is why I can understand that if you get lonely without me...you might need someone there to-

    She covered both ears with her hands. "Please stop."

    He took a deep breath and pursed his lips shut.

    "I feel childish, doing this," she said with her ears still covered. "But we just had a beautiful moment and you're ruining it. I don't want to talk about anyone else or the possibility of being with anyone else. I'm here with you. We don't have much time. I want to talk about you. And me. I want you to tell me that you're going to come back to me. I want you to tell me that you love me, again. I want you to tell me that Palmer is going to get what he has coming, and we're going to get through this. Now that I think about it, I don't want you to tell me those things. I need you to tell me those things."

    His eyes were intense as he looked down at her. He reached out and gently removed her hands from her ears. Then he vowed, "I'm going to come back to you. I love you. To the moon and back, I love you. You'd better believe that Palmer is going to get what he has coming to him, whether it's at the hands of the law or at my own hands. I would rather let the law handle this, but trust me when I say that before allowing him to ever touch a hair on your head, or my mother's head, or anyone else that I care about, I would take him out. So yes. We are going to get through this. One way or the other. Do you understand me?"

    Tears burned in her eyes as she nodded.

    He wrapped his arms around her and held her.

    "I'm going to miss you so much," she said, her voice muffled because her face was buried in his chest. "I was already having a hard time and I can't even imagine being apart from you longer than I already have. This is going to be torture, Aubrey. I mean, Sir. I mean..."

    "It won't be easy," he admitted. "But it's necessary. Now, more than ever, I think you understand that."

    "Yes."

    "We'll be back together before you know it." He glanced at his watch. "I have to get up early tomorrow, so I can meet with my mom. Do you have everything?"

    She continued to cling to him.

    "Destiny..."

    "Just one more minute," she begged. "Please?"

    He sighed and slid his arms around her again. "I'm putting on a brave face for you, but I feel the same way you do. A part of me feels like an idiot for walking away from you."

    Then don't, she thought, pulling back and looking up at him.

    "Need I remind you that Palmer had someone sneak into a hotel room through a balcony?"

    She shook her head and then leaned on his chest again. "I'm seriously close to the point of buying a gun and hunting him down myself. Enough is enough."

    "You'd give me a heart attack if you did anything like that."

    "It has to be easier than sitting around and waiting for him to try to pick one of us off," she muttered. "We've had this conversation before, and you asked if I could live with you, knowing that you'd killed a man...and when you first asked...I had to really think about it. A question like that, you usually have to live through it before you know what your answer is. But the longer I spend apart from you, the more I think that I could live with it. He's out there killing people. People, Aubrey. Plural. The cops are dragging their feet. So is your private investigator, or else they'd have him by now."

    "He's a politician who has his claws pretty deep in a lot of government agencies," he told her in a firm tone. "Every time we looked into him, he was aware of it. If it's taking time to get something to stick on him, I can understand why. He's a powerful man. We're now finding that out the hard way." He pressed a chaste kiss to her temple. "Brian and Carlos are still waiting for us. Come on."

    She didn't budge at first. Staring at him with sad eyes, she whispered, "I love you."

    He looked like he was fighting back his own tears as he told her, "I love you, too. Come on, Destiny. We have to go."

    There were stories that her mother used to tell her, about how when she was a child, she used to hate leaving Chuckie Cheese's. Chuckie Cheese's was an indoor extravaganza for children. The establishment had everything from arcades to Skeeball to crawl spaces to ball pits to singing, guitar- and banjo-playing mechanical animals. "Whenever it came time to leave, you would just stand there," her mother used to tell her. "You would just stand in the middle of the place and just cry, and cry. You would cry your little eyes out, because you didn't want to leave. We usually wound up staying another half an hour, because you wouldn't have it any other way." Destiny stood in the middle of the atrium now, quite tempted to throw a tantrum. Ultimately, she knew it would cause unnecessary embarrassment to herself. For one, she was a grown ass woman now and grown ass women didn't throw tantrums. Secondly, throwing a tantrum would not change the end result. Aubrey would still have to walk away from her...he would just walk away from her with a lot less respect than he had now.

    He offered her his arm with a solemn expression on his face.

    Hesitantly, she took his arm and leaned into him as they walked back towards the elevators.