If We Ever Meet Again

“I know that I’ve always been on your case about being more spontaneous,” Maggie said as she sat cross-legged in the middle of the double bed in the spacious, dark blue painted bedroom. “But this wasn’t exactly what I had in mind,” she added as she watched her friend. “I sort of meant go have some one-night-stands, go on a spontaneous vacation once in a while, not…not move across the world.”

“I'm not moving,” Ellie told her for what felt like the hundredth time in less than a week. She knew that she was crazy, but like the brunette sitting on top of her bed had told her many, many times, sometimes you just have to go for it and not think so much.

“Yet,” Maggie commented darkly, knowing that whilst her friend’s sudden move seemed spontaneous to the uninitiated, it wasn’t. The blonde had thought about it, looked at it from every possible and impossible angle so many times in her head, that it most likely would end up permanent within a couple of months. Even if she herself didn’t know it yet…

“Quit it,” Ellie rolled her eyes at her long-time friend. Her concern was one thing, it was kind of sweet actually, but she was a grown woman, she could make her own decisions and all she needed from her friends right then was their support, not accusations about not being truthful.

“Can you promise me that in a year, you're going to be back here?” Maggie questioned frankly, refusing to let this go. “That you're going to be living here and not just visiting?”

“No,” Ellie said honestly. “But I can’t say that I won’t be back in a couple of months either, loudly promising t never go back.”

“If I didn’t know you as well as I do, I might have believed that,” Maggie said softly, watching her friend folding yet another pair of jeans and placing them in the cardboard box standing on the hardwood floor.

After the game there had literally not been time for more than a quick goodbye from her and a last, slightly cheeky plea from Jack to change her mind and come out to LA with him before he had to join his team on the bus and head straight to the airport, their flight for Germany taking off just a short while later. Along with a slightly too intimate kiss for as public a place as the underground garage of the Ericsson Globe Arena…

Getting into her Volvo C30 in the very same garage just about two hours later, when the arena was all but completely evacuated and her job was done for the day, she drove across the dark city towards her apartment, her mind all over the place.

Flying home from Slovakia back in May, she was completely fine with leaving whatever Jack and she had shared behind; keep it as a nice memory, a simple vacation fling…

It wasn’t till she found out that she was pregnant a couple of weeks later that she really thought about him again. She’d known from the moment they started talking in the hotel bar that he was pretty much everything she was looking for in a guy, and had they met in her home city, or simply even under different circumstances, she wouldn’t have invited him back to her hotel room. She wouldn’t even have put out on the first date…

But things weren't different and they had a one-two-night-stand during her vacation, it was supposed to stay like that.

And then the stick turned blue.

Unlike what she told her friends, she had actually checked Facebook just days after arriving back home to see if she could find him, no matter how the small chance was. Of course she hadn't found him, and she’d moved on. At least she thought she had.

The first couple of days after getting the pregnancy confirmed by her doctor, she toyed with the idea of trying to find him, but that wasn’t the rules of a fling, especially a practically nameless vacation fling. Hell, she hadn't even known if Jack was his real name back then.

Deciding to keep the baby, have it and raise him or her to the best of her ability, she’d come to terms with the fact that she would never see him again. Her child wouldn’t have a dad. At least not a biological one…

It wasn’t too bad; she’d know, she’d grown up without her dad around, living with her mother and her older sister by four years. Of course she’d known her dad, she’d seen him a couple of times when she was young, but he’d never played any sort of part in her life. He hadn't helped form her into the woman she was, so she knew that not having a dad around didn’t necessarily mean that her baby wouldn’t have a good life.

She was fine with it, more than fine actually, and then she’d been called into work on her half-day off and everything was thrown out the window.

Because she’d grown up without her father around, she’d always imagined that when she did have her own family, it would the sort of nuclear one she’d grown up idolizing. Mother, father, a couple of kids in a house in suburbia…

As it was she was about to be a single mother, living in a fourth floor apartment in the middle of the nation’s capital.

Running into Jack, having him be insistent and adamant about being there for a baby that he could in no possible way know for sure was his, was…having him ask her to move out to LA so that he could see them, see the baby grow and…it was… Honestly, she couldn’t put it into words. On one hand it scared her out of the water and on the other…well, her romantic heart wanted it more than she would ever admit.

Talking both on the phone and over Skype for the next couple of weeks after he’d returned home to LA, his determination to get her out there hadn't wavered the slightest and a part of her was slightly worried.

His excitement and the way he was almost giddy ever time they talked when he knew she’d had a doctor’s appointment during the day was getting her hopes up and she tired with all her might to not let that happen. It only set her up for a heartbreak that she couldn’t afford considering that a little tiny person was going to be depending solely on her in just under three months time.

His nagging wearing on her resistance, her excuses was starting to fall on deaf ears and just a week earlier her very own sister had asked her straight out what was keeping her there.

Family and job aside, was there anything else that was keeping her from flying out to LA and spending time with him, finding out if her intuition had been right. That he was the kind of guy she’d go for, that maybe there could be more to them than just a simple vacation fling.

She hadn't been able to give her and answer because…well, because she simply didn’t have one. She was the responsible one, the one who always thought things through and weighed her options before doing anything. It had taken her three months to pick out the color for her bedroom for crying out loud, she wasn’t going to be able to just decide to move across the world in a couple of days!

To which her sister replied that she’d gotten pregnant somehow…

The second she’d even appeared to be thinking about maybe going against her initial decision of not flying out to LA before the baby was born, Jack had gone for it. A part of her was worried about the way he could read her like an open book; she was opening up too much to him and letting him know things about her that barely anyone else knew.

From there on she’d been fighting a lose battle and less than a week earlier – after he’d found out about her going on maternity leave soon – he’d announced that he was booking a ticket for her, from Stockholm to LA and if she didn’t want him to throw several hundred dollars out the window, she better give him all the details he might need.

Raised to not be a big spender, and genuinely against throwing money around, she’d sighed and reminded him that she was pregnant, she couldn’t just fly across the world – in all honesty, she’d been grasping at straws, scared of the unknown and knowing that she’d already given in.

His reply across Skype from a different continent had surprised her to the point of speechlessness.

It was his mother that had originally reminded him that pregnant women weren't always allowed to fly towards the end of the third trimester and he’d done a lot of research on it, knowing that if nothing was wrong and her doctor gave the all clear, she was still allowed to fly. Not to mention that he’d talked to several of his teammates, getting referrals and whatnot about doctors in the area and hospitals to possibly have the baby.

She hadn't even done that herself…

If anyone asked, she would forever blame her hormones for giving in and during a very interesting phone call gave him everything from her social security number to her whole name.

Her mother hadn't been surprised when she told her, a bit worried, yes, but not surprised. Neither had her sister, but her friends were another story. The guys didn’t really care, simply wishing her a happy flight and promising to update their Facebook pages every now and then…typical guys really.

Tessa had seen her at the Premiere game, she was only slightly surprised that she was actually doing it, seeing at it was so out of character for her, but nonetheless promised to take care of her apartment for her whilst she was gone. In exchange for getting first dibs on being Godmother – even if she knew that that spot was already reserved for the aunt-to-be. As well as regular updates and texts as soon as anything happened, including pictures as soon as the little one was born.

Agreeing with a laugh and a hug, along with a quiet thank you, Ellie had then tackled the much harder task of telling Maggie about the trip. Like she’d predicted, the news didn’t exactly go over smoothly…

And now the scorned brunette was sitting in the middle of her bed as she was packing a lot more clothes than she would need for a simple two week trip…

But then again, she was 29 weeks pregnant, if everything went as it should she would be having a baby out there and…well, she didn’t exactly wear the same clothes no as she did five months ago.

Besides, she never liked going anywhere not prepared for simply everything. That meant that she had to take a lot of things, it did not mean that she was moving.

At least that was what she was trying to convince everyone of…including herself…