Counting On You.

chapter two -

a/n: mild swearing will be shown in this chapter, rarely, but there will be a few words.

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"Secrets I have held in my heart are harder to hide than I thought." Arctic Monkeys.

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Jackson A.
I'm sleeping, or half sleeping, when I feel the spot next to me on my bed sink beside me. I open my eyes and see Jasmine trying to find a way to sleep. I check my alarm clock, 4:19 a.m., she must've had nightmares again.

"Hey Jas, you okay?" I touch her arm.

"Mhm, but I-I couldn't sleep." She turns her little body towards me. "Can I sleep here? Pretty please?" She looks up at me with puppy eyes.

"Okay, I guess." I smile at her. She looks so much like mom, her blue eyes, her curly ginger hair, it's like having a memory that perfectly resembled Mom.

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I still remember the last day mom was with us. In the morning, mom had made her amazing pancakes with a banana and strawberry smoothie. She had dropped me off at Henry's house before practice. She'd kissed my forehead. It was like every other day. Later on in the day, mom and dad were going to pick me up from baseball practice- Dad says they were singing along to don't stop believing, which makes me happy, since it was Mom's favorite song- then all of the sudden he saw headlights from another car, the world started turning, he saw my mom got thrown towards the door, the window, back to her seat- her fragile body shaking everywhere. He says that once the car had stopped flipping, she looked at him, and for a quick second, he saw her smile, and then all at once, the life from her eyes had gone away. If I would've known, if I could've just known, I would've hugged her and told her how much she meant to me. I miss you so much, you can't imagine how much I need you, we need you.

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I wake up a few hours later, 7:23 a.m. to be exact. I rub the sleep out of my eyes, pushing the covers off my body. As I sit on the edge of my bed for a few minutes, my mind is trying to catch up with my body. Jas isn't in my bed anymore, which most likely means she's downstairs or already left for school. I get up, walk out of my room and go towards the bathroom. I knock, no one answers. I open the door and quickly wish I hadn't.

"What the actual fucking hell are you doing?!" My brother Jordan shouts, trying to close the door, while also trying to pull up his boxers.

"Jesus!" I quickly close the door. "I knocked and since no one answered, I thought it was safe to enter." I start laughing. "You should honestly be blaming yourself, you're the one who didn't say anything, by the way, nice Spider-Man boxers." I keep on laughing.

"Fuck off Jackson!" I hear from the other side of the door.

"Fine, fine, but hurry up, I need to take a shit." Geez, at this point you'd think dad would've had another bathroom built into the house, since we are three guys and three girls. Sometimes I thank God enormously for the twins only being 5 and Jasmine being 8, since they're not at that age where they take 3 hours in the bathroom yet. Dad had his own bathroom, which makes it one less person closer to me getting into the bathroom- which still isn't really close, but it's better. I go back to my room and grab my phone, opening a random game to play till Jordan gets out of the bathroom.

It's kind of amusing, that all my siblings' names start with a "J". Jasmine, Jordan, Josie, Jayden, and then me, Jackson. Dad used to say it was an inside joke he had with mom, he never told us what the joke was, but I was fine with it- the joke was a thing they had, only them two. I knew Dad needed that, something only her and him knew.