OUT OF THE RED ↝ dave grohl

one-hundred-thirty-three.

It'd been a steady buildup over the last few weeks. She'd spent her nights staring up at the darkened ceiling of her room, her fingers clutching along the sheets that he'd once slept in. It hadn't worked, trying to close her eyes and get some sleep, because Dave would appear in her dreams. He'd been there like a ghost, haunting her for the literal twenty-four hours of every passing day.

Reagan's legs bounced anxiously and somewhere in her psyche, her ego scoffed. There was nothing outwardly silly about the fact that she'd finally realized what she'd denied to be true for so long — she loved Dave, more than she'd love anyone else besides their daughter. When she tried to picture the next thirty or forty years of her life, she could only see him beside her, gray-haired and wrinkled.

The only silly thing about it was that she struggled with how exactly to tell him about her revelation. Even she knew that it came across as exhausting, her never-ending oscillation between commitment versus trying to forget.

But Reagan was finished with trying to forget. The limit of trying had been reached, sparked to life as she'd watched the Twin Towers crumble one after the other on her television screen. The truth had manifested after a summer's worth of struggling to accept that her father was soon never going to be the same. Corny as it was, she found herself with a new appreciation for how fleeting life was, and she didn't want hers to go by without the person she loved.

Mentally acknowledging it made her swallow, fighting the dryness in her throat. She was ready to tell him, ready to lay it all out on the table so that they could be together again, but the idea was still harrowing. It was something she hadn't said aloud yet.

Dave had barely spoken to Reagan since Taylor and London and the inexplicable sadness that he'd been plunged into. If not for Gracie, she wondered if he would have even spoken to her at all. They'd communicated mostly through text messages and the occasional polite phone call, coordinating when and where Gracie would be exchanged between them. Occasionally he had not even gotten out of his car to retrieve her. Reagan had been left to watch him morosely from the front porch as Gracie had slipped down the driveway, duffle bag thrown over her shoulder.

She told herself that it was only fair for Dave to angle that kind of bitterly cold shoulder towards her. It wasn't intentionally cold, she presumed — he was trying, just like her, to move on. The way he must have seen it, at least to Reagan, was that there was no use in being forced to look into her eyes more than necessary, or divulge his truest feelings to her over the phone.

He was being oddly placid, but she could accept that. It was easy to accept when she knew that only she had the power to change it. Telling him how she felt, that she wanted him back permanently, would make them both happy. She'd finally be able to act on the sparks she'd been feeling, reminiscent of when they'd first met.

Reagan's phone began chiming beneath the cover of her hand. She saw the number flashing on the outside screen and inhaled a sharp breath of both relief and pleasure.

"Ginny," she blurted immediately after raising the phone to her ear.

"Hi, honey."

The warm, maternal sound of Ginny's voice soothed Reagan into a calm that was desperately needed. Since she didn't trust her own mother enough to talk her down from the height that her thoughts had skyrocketed her into, Dave's mom was an excellent replacement.

"Everything okay over there?" Reagan asked, running her fingers back through her hair.

"As okay as they can be right now," Ginny answered with a hint of graveness.

It'd been Dave who had shuttled his mother quickly across the country in a tour bus after the eleventh. The proximity of the separate attack on the Pentagon to Ginny had left him uneasy, and he'd sent for her as soon as it'd happened. When Ginny had arrived, Reagan had released Gracie into her care, figuring that she and Ginny both needed the quality time. As badly as Reagan had wanted to hold her daughter in the midst of a national crisis, she'd known that there was no better distraction for Gracie than the loving grandmother that she didn't get to see nearly enough.