OUT OF THE RED ↝ dave grohl

eighty-six.

"I think she's scared of you," Reagan remarked innocently, resisting the urge to quirk an eyebrow up.

Courtney scowled, looking even more menacing with her lips pulled back into a disgusted snarl. "I wonder where she gets that from."

Reagan opened her mouth to retort that Gracie had every rational reason to be frightened of Courtney's loud blare of a voice and overwhelming personality, but Courtney stalked off. It was for the best — Reagan would have only landed herself in hot water if she'd taken her chance to insult Courtney to her face. If anyone was going to stir up more drama in the Nirvana camp, it wasn't going to be her.

"Is she heckling you?"

Reagan whipped around, half-pressed to tell whoever was inquiring about Courtney to mind their own business, but it was Pat Smear that she came face to face with. She exhaled and reigned her annoyance back in.

"Oh. It's just you."

"Just me," Pat chuckled.

"Trust me, I'd rather it be you right now than anyone else."

"I'm flattered. Everything alright, though?"

As Pat joined Reagan's boxy little square of reserved space, she was settled by his presence, feeling no inkling of the irritation that had been nipping at her earlier. She had only just met Pat, as he was a new addition to Nirvana as a second guitarist, but she'd immediately liked him from the first moment that they'd shaken hands — that is, until Pat had pulled her into a friendly one-armed hug.

It amazed Reagan that Pat had been up for the arduous task of joining Nirvana's chaotic unit, but in the short time that she'd known him, he had proven to be amenable about the whole debacle, content to shrug off the mayhem surrounding Kurt's addiction and all those ridiculous band squabbles. He was easygoing, smiled often and reminded Reagan of Dave in the sense that drama never seemed to attach itself to him.

"Oh, just the usual," Reagan said, dismissing her chance to vent. She wasn't sure that Pat was quite ready for her to really unload onto him. "Where's Dave?"

"Coming to find you right now, I believe. He was asking where you were. I told him you were probably hiding. It's crazy back here."

Reagan smiled wryly. "Hiding is one way to put it."

"Was Courtney giving you a hard time?" Pat asked, his gaze flickering in the direction of where Courtney had trailed off. She'd created a path amongst the backstage crew that had parted like the Red Sea.

"A 'hard time' implies that she has some kind of effect on me, which she doesn't."

"Really? 'Cuz you look kind of tense."

"I'm not tense," Reagan denied, though she must have been doing a poor job of disguising it. She hadn't left the spot that she'd rooted herself to with Gracie in hopes that another phone call wouldn't find her if she happened to drift.

Pat laughed, an easy kind of laugh that made it hard for Reagan not to smile, and nudged her arm with his. "It'll be okay."

His reassurance was dull, at least to Reagan's ears. Pat might have believed in it one hundred percent, but Reagan knew that 'okay' was the last word anyone with common sense would have used to describe what was happening.

It would have set her on edge if someone else had said it. She'd heard that phrase repeated over and over again throughout the summer, always spoken in a soothing voice that never actually calmed her. Dave said it. Krist said it. Even Ginny had said it, rubbing Reagan's arms and looking at her with such a bright sense of hope in her eyes.