I Found You, Something Told Me To Stay - (Jason Berry/Zacky Vengeance)

Chapter One.

He practically yanked on my hand with all the strength he had, and pulled me up out of my chair.

“You hide and I’ll seek!” He demanded. “I’m good at that.”

“I’m sure you are.” I rolled my eyes, pulling my arm out of his grasp and making my way towards the patio. I wasn’t going to waste time finding a good hiding place. I just wanted to get this over with.

As I passed the outside table, Jade looked at me with a smirk, quickly typing away at her phone. I scowled at her and carried on inside, where my eyes then laid on my dad. He was stood in the kitchen, doing nothing but tapping his finger on the glass in his hand as he stared into space.

“What are you doing?” I asked him, a frown on my face.

“Nothing.” He shook his head, holding his glass up. “Just getting a drink.”

That was about as far as conversation went with my father and I. I suppose you could say we’d never been particularly close, and that was completely on his part, not mine. I’d tried the best I could, and gave in when I was about fourteen.

When I snapped out of my thoughts, I could faintly hear the sound of Max counting up to one hundred from the garden. Sighing, I continued through the house until I got to the hallway. I yanked open the door to the cupboard underneath the stairs, and then crawled in, shutting it behind me so that I was sat in darkness.

There was a light switch in here somewhere, but I had the task of finding it amongst all of the stuff that had been placed in here over the years. Most of it was packed into cardboard boxes, so I lightly sat down on one that was sealed as I felt about the walls, trying to find the light switch.

It was proving to be hard, that was for sure. It was cramped in here as it was, so it didn’t help that I was knocking things over in the process. Finally, my fingers ran over something plastic attached to the wall, and I grabbed hold of the switch, flicking it up and letting light flood through the confined space.

In front of me sat the mess I’d cause while trying to find the light switch. I bent down, a sigh escaping my lips as I began to pick pieces of paper and old toys up, only managing to knock another box down in the process.

This one was open, but seemed pretty empty until about three packets containing developed photographs slid out, landing at my feet. I stared down at them with a frown, wondering why they’d never made it into the family photo album, before picking up one of the packets and reaching a finger inside.

The wad of photographs was quite thick, and I fished a few out, staring down at the first one. It was of my mum. She must’ve only been about sixteen in the picture, because she was holding me in her arms and I was just a tiny baby in a blanket. I turned the picture over, taking a look at the back, where “Carly and baby Jasmine, 3 weeks old, August 1993” was written in someone’s scrawl that I didn’t recognise.

The next couple of photographs were the same, with the same writing on the back. Getting bored of looking at the same shot in practically all of them, I was about to shove the pile back into the packet.

But the last photo caught my eye.

It was the same sort of shot; me as a baby, wrapped in a blanket. Except I was lying in the arms of a guy that I was pretty positive I’d seen somewhere before. He, too, looked about sixteen years old.

I quickly flipped it over to look at the back, where in the same scrawl as the others had been written in, it read “Me and baby Jasmine, 3 weeks old, August 1993.”

I flipped it over again, surveying in the photo as I tried to work out whether I recognised him or not. I knew for a fact that I did, but I couldn’t think from where from, and despite that fact, I could see uncanny resemblances between him and myself.

I studied the way he was holding me tightly to his chest, smiling at the camera. Like me, he had black hair. I could see that his eyes were very much like mine, only mine were a little lighter than his.

It was fair to say that I was starting to feel extremely confused. I mean, in the photograph, he looked so happy, so I didn’t really understand why he, whoever he was, wasn’t in my life.

Shoving that pile of photos back into the packet, I picked up another packet from the floor, opening it up and yanking the photos out. The first one was of me on my own. I was a little bit older, but still a baby; my hair had grown some and I was looking directly at the camera, and I looked the spitting image of the guy in the other photo.

Like I had done with the others, I turned it over. This one, in my mother’s writing, read “Baby Jasmine, 6 months old, January 1994”. I was quickly growing impatient to know who the guy was, seeing as it sort of bothered me that my father didn’t appear to be in any of these photographs.

It was the third one in of that pile that the guy turned up again. He had me rested on his knee as he sat on a sofa, staring down at me with a smile and holding onto my hands. In the background, two younger looking guys stood in a doorway, but it was too dark to properly make out what they looked like.

It was like my gaze was attached to the photo. I found it really hard to flip it around to look at the other side, white blank, except for the photograph company’s name in the corner.

But there it was written, once again in my mother’s writing, right at the bottom.

“Jason and baby Jasmine, 6 months old, January 1994.”

It still didn’t answer my question as to who he was. I was positive I didn’t even know a Jason, but it was just as I was about to toss the photo back into the pile, that I noticed a smaller bit of writing, squished beneath my mothers’ scrawl.

It wasn’t her writing, but the writing that had been on the other set of photos. And the two words that had been written were enough to completely confuse me and shock me at the same time.

“Proud father.”