ROGUE

20 : As I Lay Sleeping

Jason's POV

I arrived at the hospital at around half-past four in the morning with my only intentions being to pick up my gang and get the hell out of there - but in a matter of minutes after walking through the front door, I was hopelessly lost.

I rarely ever stepped foot into public places anymore, and tracing around the maze of clinical corridors felt foreign yet familiar all at the same time. I couldn't risk being seen...
Not by anyone.
So for extra security, these days, I constantly wore a black baseball cap and a dark hoodie to shadow my face, covered by my trusty leather jacket that had stayed with me through thick and thin.
I had almost died in this jacket... Many times.

I muttered irritated profanities under my breath as one turn lead to another, and I was struggling to find the specific room where everyone was waiting for me. We were only here to save Y/n from the mess of a boyfriend she had found for herself, and then we were supposed to leave without her finding out.

That, however, did not happen.
Thanks to Matt and his big British mouth.
"Fucking dick." I hissed under my breath as the hospital swallowed me up further into its puzzle of routes and turns.

Every step brought me closer to the point of frustration and disorientation. Every single door that passed in my peripheral vision started to make me believe that these corridors would never end and I would be pacing for hours...

But that was until a mistakably open blind hooked onto my attention and revealed a familiar patient laying sound asleep on a hospital bed beside beeping machines and parallel wires.

My heart instantly sank.

I hadn't seen her up this close for two whole years, and I suddenly felt dazed and mindlessly confused. My legs stopped walking, my blood stopped racing and my mind erased itself into a temporary blankness, making room for every single shared memory to come rushing back like one long dream. The pain began to come in waves. I felt my throat tighten and the backs of my eyes burning with hot tears. The guilt of ever allowing her to leave stabbed at my stomach and forced me to suffer with a sudden nausea. Then, after the first salty droplet of water fell, the rest followed in an unbroken yet silent stream.

She was here because of me.
Once again, she was in pain because of me.

Something came over me in that moment, and I couldn't resist the urge to rest my hand on the metal handle of the door and quietly push it open. Before I could even think about what I was doing, I found myself walking inside the room until I was standing by the side of her bed - lingering over her like a literal ghost.

Her eyes were tightly shut and her eyebrows were knitted together in a permanent frown. Just above her left cheek, a dark bruise was shaded a deeper purple than I had ever seen before, and it contrasted heavily against her pale and washed-out looking skin.
She didn't look like my Y/n.
She looked sick, lost and broken.

I wanted to blame Sam for it.
I wanted to blame him for beating the life out of the one girl who showed me that mine was actually worth living. I wanted to blame him for driving her completely insane to the point where she lost herself. I wanted to blame him for making her suffer and forget who she was.
But I couldn't.
Because it was all me.

I held my breath in attempt to stop myself from shedding tears as I slowly reached out and gently stroked her face. The feeling of her skin rubbing against mine was enough to give me something to hold on to. One more memory.
This kind of contact would linger at the end of every thought for the rest of my life.
"I'm sorry it had to be this way, baby." I whispered quietly, trying my hardest not to wake her up and startle her. "I should've told you the truth and I... No, screw that." I shook my head in frustration, inhaling a shaky breath. "I should've never had let you go in the first place. There's no excuse for what I did... I'm sorry, Y/n. I'm so sorry."

Taking a step back added to the list of painful things that I had had to do because of Y/n.
As I slowly backed away out of the room, I held on to every single detail. The look on her face, the colour of her cheeks, the feel of her skin.
I wanted to wake her, I really did.

But I couldn't.

And as I shut the door and began to continue my journey through the corridors, that was my biggest regret that I just couldn't do anything about.

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Thanks for reading

i can't believe this book is nearly finished oh my god