Fly With You

It had been four days since he had met Delia at the beach, and Jonathan still hadn’t received a phone call. He’d been near his cell phone constantly, checking and rechecking it even though he knew it hadn’t rang. He was going to drive himself crazy unless he pushed the girl from his mind, but it was awfully hard to do when all he had to do was look out his the floor-to-ceiling window in his condo’s living room and see the stretch of beach he had met her at. His thoughts immediately went to the tall, tan, blond girl and how she still hadn’t called him.

He was halfway through putting the dishes from the dishwasher into their proper places when his land-line phone rang. It wasn’t one of his teammates, friends, or a member of his family – they all called his cell. Checking the caller ID, he saw it was the security desk from the lobby of his building calling. Furrowing his brows in confusion, he picked up with a questioning “hello?”

“Mr. Toews, this is Greg with security. I’m sorry to bother you, but ah, there’s a young lady here who claims she knows you,” he heard before the security guard’s voice moved away from the phone and into the background. ‘What did you say your name was again?’ “Delia, she says. Do you know her?”

Jonathan grinned, telling the security guard to send her up to his place. He heard Greg tell her to head to the elevators, and then he heard Delia laugh, obviously loving that she had proved the security guard wrong. She did know Jonathan, and she wasn’t some crazy fan trying to sneak up to her favorite player’s condo. Hanging the phone up, Jonathan grinned before rushing into his bedroom to change out of his sweat pants and tee shirt before Delia got to his door.

He was digging through his closet when he suddenly stopped, letting out a laugh at himself. If there anyone who wouldn’t care about his choice in clothing, it would be Delia. There was a soft knock on his door a few seconds later, and he smiled widely, walking over to it. Throwing it open, he took in Delia’s appearance as he ushered her into his condo. A pair of long, black, and loose knit pants rested low on her hips and a white tank top hugged her mid-section. Her long blond hair was still wavy, slightly messy, and hung down low on her back.

“Hi,” she smiled, lifting her messenger bag over her head and putting it on the chair next to her. “I’m sorry I didn’t call… I kind of lost your number?”

“I wrote it on your arm…”

She laughed, “Yeah, don’t ask.”

“How did you find where I live?”

“I asked some girls wearing Blackhawks stuff. It wasn’t really that hard,” she laughed.

He laughed too, ushering her further into the condo and watching as her eyes widened as she took in the space around her. She nodded every so often, silently commenting on the masculine but yet still pretty and well put together place. It wasn’t until she spotted the floor-to-ceiling window that her eyes went really wide. “Wow,” was all she said, her eyes scanning over the skyscrapers all around them, the busy streets below them, and the lake to their left. “That is an amazing view,” she continued, her bright blue eyes locking on his dark brown ones.

“It really is,” he said, moving behind her and pointing way off to the right. “That’s the United Center.”

“Is that where you do your thing?” she asked, laughing lightly. When Jonathan nodded, she continued, “You know, I’d really love to see a hockey game.”

He paused, “You’ve never seen one live?”

“I’ve never seen one at all, actually.” She looked to Jonathan to see him staring at her with a look of disbelief on his face. “Not all of us grew up skating on a pond in our backyard in Canada,” she laughed. He tilted his head and stared at her curiously. “I googled you,” she told him. “Please don’t find that creepy.”

“No,” he laughed. “I don’t. That’s kind of awesome. What else did you find out?”

She shrugged, “Just the basics, really. I didn’t really delve too deeply. I only paid for twenty minutes at the library.” He raised an eyebrow. “I don’t have a computer or a laptop at all.”

“And you don’t have a cell phone?” She shook her head. “How the hell do you survive?”

“Pretty simply,” she said, laughing a bit. “You’d be surprised how free you feel when you don’t have anything tying you down. It’s liberating; you should try it sometime,” she told him, smiling widely.

- - -

Jonathan looked down at his daughter as she sat cross-legged on the park bench, facing him. She looked completely enthralled in his story, but he could tell she was wearing thin, completely exhausted from her three day drive from California. He laughed and stood, motioning for Penelope to follow him.

“Let’s get you home before you pass out. I don’t know if I can carry you anymore, kid.”

She laughed, taking a drink of her water. “I bet you still could, dad,” she told him, pinching his bicep. “When we get home, can we order a pizza and pig out on the couch?”

Jonathan smiled, looking into his nineteen year old daughter’s bright blue eyes, “Of course we can. I can keep telling the story, if you’d like.”

“I’d love that. I had no idea that’s how you and mom met.”

“She was an odd one, Nel. You take after her.”

Penelope grinned, obviously taking pride in the fact she was so much like her mother. Jonathan guessed it was why he and his daughter had always been so close; she was her mother. It hadn’t been hard for the hockey superstar to fall for the free-spirited blond, just like it hadn’t been hard for Penelope to get her father wrapped around her finger. The first time he had held her, and she looked up with him with the blue eyes so identical to her mother’s, Jonathan was gone; completely and hopelessly in love with his daughter. She was going to be his world, he could just tell.

“I can’t believe she just showed up at your place,” Penelope mused as they walked from the park and back to their house. Jonathan laughed, shaking his head, but his daughter continued. “Well, I guess I can, considering what you’ve told me about her.”

“She was something else,” was all he could say. There really was nothing else he could say to describe Delia.

“How come you never remarried, dad?”

“Besides being too busy chasing after you…” he started, making his daughter laugh. “I never met anyone that could compare to your mother.”

Penelope nodded, as they walked up their front stairs and into the cool house from the early summer heat. Immediately the two of them went to their bedrooms, cleaned up from their short run, and changed into clean, comfortable clothes. Jonathan was in the kitchen, on the phone with the local pizza place, when Penelope came into the kitchen wearing a pair of loose, long basketball shorts and a Blackhawks jersey. Catching the number on the side, he could only roll his eyes.

After his ordered had been placed, he caught up to his daughter in the living room, telling her, “I don’t know why you like that kid, Nel.”

She shrugged and said, sarcastically, “People say he’s our generation’s you, dad.”

Jonathan grinned, laughing at his daughter’s crush on the Blackhawks’ star center, one who people said could became captain sometime very soon. He couldn’t deny the similarities between the kid and him when he was that age, and it made him laugh knowing that his daughter was into him. Maybe she was even more like her mother than he had originally thought.

Settling on the couch and waiting for their pizza, Jonathan watched as his daughter popped in a movie. “I doubt we’ll even watch it,” Penelope said. “I want to know more about you and mom.”

Jonathan laughed, nodding his head, “What else do you want to know?”

“Well, what happened after she came over that day? Did you guys immediately fall madly in love?” She asked, a dreamy look on her face.

“Not exactly, kid.” Penelope frowned, looking up at her dad in confusion. Jonathan sighed, running a hand through his thinning hair, wondering exactly what he should tell his young daughter. This was the first time in her nineteen years that she had asked for the details of her father’s relationship with her mother, and he knew, that even though she might be a little shocked, surprised, and hurt by the things that had gone on in her parents’ relationship, Jonathan knew he needed to tell her the whole truth. After all, the things that Jonathan and Delia had gone through only made them a stronger unit and made them fall even more in love with each other.

His daughter wanted to know her parents’ love story, and Jonathan was going to tell it to her.