It was me all along ~ Jacklyn

Chapter 27

I found this song while is was doing some things for school (online school is the most awkward thing ever) and it fits really well with this story from Brook's point of view. So you can listen to it while reading this chapter if you want <3

POV Jack

When I wake up the room is dark, and I'm completely alone. I have that familiar cotton-and-shit taste in my mouth, and the pounding in my head clarifies that I'm hungover. I stare up at the ceiling for a while, listening for sounds in the apartment, but there are none. I try to remember the last time I woke up alone in the middle of the night and I can't. Instead, I remember coming home from the bar. I remember slurred words, painful confessions, and the look of horror and pity on Brook's handsome face. Suddenly it doesn't seem so confusing that I'm waking up alone. 

Panic slowly starts to claw at the back of my throat, but I push it down because I don't want to freak out if Brook's just gone for a wee. The bed next to me is cold, there is no lingering body heat. I take a deep breath and when I push myself up onto my elbow my head spins. I grab my phone first and sees that it's half two in the morning. 

I realize they let me sleep straight through, even though it was barely evening when Brook picked me, Rye and Sonny up from the pub. I wonder what Brook told Harvey, Andy and Mikey, to explain why I wasn't going to eat dinner. The room is only lit by the moon, coming through my sheer curtains, and casting shadows. Even so, I can clearly note the absence of Brook's jeans, which were lying crumpled on the floor next to the bed when I fell asleep. 

I try to tell myself maybe Brook just woke up in the evening for dinner and put them on to go eat with the boys. He must have also grabbed a new shirt from his drawer in my dresser because I'm still wearing his shirt. Except when I sit up more, and cranes my neck to look over at the hamper in the closet, the jeans aren't hanging over the edge, like they would be any other time Brook took them off to come to bed. 

I sit up fully and my head hurts more, but not as much as my chest hurts when I realize Brook's iPhone isn't plugged in and waiting on the desk like it would be any other night he slept over. Brook never takes his phone to the loo with him, because he dropped it in the toilet once somehow. That, coupled with the fact that I have already been awake longer than the average wee, rules out Brook having slipped to the bathroom. 

I check my phone again, but there is no text explaining that Brook had to go back to the dorm, for whatever reason. I let myself fall back against the mattress, and I listen with all my might. I can hear Harvey softly snoring in his and Mikey's room down the hall, I can even hear the music Andy always leaves playing on the lowest volume while he sleeps. I don't hear Brook in the kitchen making a cuppa, or in the shower, or watching TV in the living room, though it wouldn't make sense for me to be doing any of those things at two-thirty a.m. anyway. The walls of the apartment are paper-thin, but I don't hear Brook, and that means he's gone. 

Cold washes over me, and suddenly I'm fighting back tears. Brook is gone. Brook has left me. I knew this was going to happen, but I never let myself think about what I would do when it actually did. I had thought I'd feel numb at first, I'd figured it would take a while to hit me. I at least assumed I'd have time to wrap my head around it first. I don't though, it hit me instantaneously, a crushing weight pinning me to the mattress and making it hard to breathe. 

Brook is gone. I have fucked it up. There is no other reason Brook wouldn't be in bed with me right now. He would never leave without letting me know where he was going. I know Brook isn't the type of person to just leave and stop talking to me, but that doesn't change the fact that he's gone now. I know that Brook will be infinitely kind about the breakup because that's just how Brook is. He'll do it gently and maybe slowly, and he'll do his best not to hurt me.