OCTOBER 23rd, 1998, LOS ANGELES, CA

IT DIDN'T SURPRISE Reagan that Taylor was the mastermind behind the trip. Only Taylor would orchestrate an extended weekend away in Mexico, picking Cabo San Lucas of all places, as if the lot of them were a bunch of tequila-guzzling college kids.

Dave had told her that it'd been planned in honor of their tour ending. He'd said that it wasn't just members of the Foo Fighters going, either. They'd invited several of the bands who'd either shared a line up with them or served as supporting acts. Reagan suspected though that the went beyond just celebrating the cessation of another tour. She didn't doubt that Taylor was doubly trying to get Dave away from the unhealthy situation that she'd plunged him into.

She was at a crossroads with his decision. He'd been home for good since late August and ever since, they'd co-existed like roommates, occasionally talking but only when it had been necessary. Usually, conversation between them was reserved for when Gracie was there.

It didn't upset her to have Dave out of the house for a few days. Any small shred of hope that she'd had that they could work things out in each other's presence was gone. Trying to be with each other twenty-four-seven was only pushing them father apart.

It was another case of disappointing irony. Reagan had longed for him to be back home since nineteen-ninety-five, only to now want him as far away from her as possible.

She sat on their bed with her legs crossed, watching as he messily packed a suitcase full of clothes. It appeared that he wasn't being selective with what he was bringing; she saw him throw down a tie on a pair of swim trunks.

"So you're cool with this?" he asked, pausing to stand up and face her.

Reagan gnawed on the inside of her lip, angling her eyes away from his. She really wasn't sure how to feel. It did seem callous of him to leave her for fun in Mexico when they were in the midst of a marital crisis, but then again, she'd practically made the choice for him with her no-speaking policy.

"You should do what you want," she said.

She thought that would be the end of it — that he'd go on packing, ignoring her ambiguity as usual. But Dave stayed turned towards her, his eyes burning holes into the side of her face.

"You really don't have anything else to say?" he pressed.

"Not really. If Taylor wants to organize a guys trip for you, you should go."

He scoffed and shook his head. "Alright, Reagan."

"What?" she asked, feeling a prickle of annoyance. "What do you want me to say?"

"I don't know. Something other than the bullshit answers you've been giving me for over half a year."

He couldn't have not possibly seen how deteriorated their relationship had become. By then, Reagan had started assume that they both knew how things would end, even if they weren't willing to say it to each other.

Yet as she edged closer and closer to feeling like it was time for her and Dave to throw in the towel, she pulled back. Every single time that she broached the most painful conversation that they would both ever have, she couldn't follow through with it.

Something kept her hanging on despite how shattered everything surrounding them had become.

"I'm sorry," she said lamely.

It wasn't what she'd really wanted to say and Dave looked as if he knew that, too. He paced once around his suitcase, stopping to collect his thoughts, before climbing onto the bed with Reagan. He grabbed her hands in his and touched their foreheads together.

She couldn't remember the last time they'd been so close to embracing.

"Reagan," he said, his voice shaking. "I love you. I love you so fucking much. I'm always going to love you and you can keep trying to ice me out, but that's not going to change what you mean to me."

"Dave," Reagan began. She started to pull away, but he jerked her back.

"Stop running from me. You've never ran away before, so don't do it now. Do you love me?"

Her heart was starting to beat harder from inside of her chest, quickening in correlation to everything that he said.

"Dave-,"

"Do you love me?"

"Why are you asking me this?"

Pain flashed across his face. She'd thrown him another curveball response, dodging his questions without telling him what he needed to hear.

"Because I want you," he said fiercely. "You're my best friend. I married you not because I had to, but because I would have been stupid not to. It would have been the biggest mistake of my life, not being with you. You're everything to me."

Reagan wanted to push him away but for one fleeting moment, she remembered how precious it was to be so close to him. But it didn't last.

"I just want you back," he murmured. "I can't let you walk away when I need to know if there's still a chance that we can turn this around."

She thought of the version of herself that she once knew from the past. She thought of herself at twenty-one, nestled into the arms of the drummer she hadn't anticipated falling in love with whatsoever. That person, the person she had been, was screaming at her to tell him yes.

Yes, they still had a chance.

But what did that person know in the slightest about everything that she'd been through since then?

"You should finish packing," she said, her voice wobbling.

Dave didn't move. He pulled away from her, but he remained sitting on the bed, staring so hard that she felt close to shriveling up under his gaze.

"So that's it, then? There's no chance?"

"I didn't say that."

"You didn't have to."

He roughly got up from off the bed, going to his suitcase and flinging it shut. Reagan watched, shaking, as he hauled it upright and dragged it towards their bedroom door.

Before he walked out, he turned to glance at her again. His eyes had never looked more unfamiliar.

"You know something?" he began. "After all the bullshit we've been through . . . after all those times you were so happy to see me whenever I came home . . . I really thought we could survive anything."

A few tears escaped Reagan's eyes and as she kept her face hidden, staring at the comforter and wondering if he was crying too.

"It fucking sucks being wrong," he said.

She didn't watch as he walked out of the room.

_______________

12 HOURS LATER, CABO SAN LUCAS, MEXICO

             Dave had a headache. He knew that it wasn't from the countless drinks that he'd already had that night, nor the ones that he'd tossed back on the plane, though he kept that excuse in his back pocket in case anyone asked why he was being unsociable.

The liquor that he'd drained so far had little to do with the aching throb in his temple, though. He attributed that to his brain working too hard, trying to make sense of the fact that in a few days, he was going to be divorced.

Reagan hadn't said the word. She hadn't asked him for one, and he sure as hell wasn't going to ask her, but what laid ahead of them had been written all over her face that morning.

He was no longer actively losing her. She'd already been lost.

"You look like you need this."

Taylor appeared next to Dave at the bar, nudging a glass of Crown Royal, made neat, in front of him. The drink was the only thing that made Dave uncross his arms from the bar top, grabbing the glass and downing its contents in one gulp.

"Another?" Taylor asked, unfazed.

"Yeah."

Dave didn't have any wiggle room in his overcrowded mind to spare any apologies for his drummer. He knew that outside of wanting to have a good time himself, Taylor wanted him to have a good time too, no matter the costs. That was exactly why he'd arranged the trip to Cabo in the first place, telling Dave that it wasn't optional.

He was coming, even if Taylor had to drag him by his legs.

Dave hadn't protested. By the start of the month, he'd been too depressed to haul himself off the couch, let alone tell Taylor 'no.' The trip had seemed like an easy way to elicit a strong reaction out of Reagan, a tactic that would elicit an emotion out of her that wasn't blankness, but the plan had failed. Dave was shell shocked that she'd simply let him go.

"Come on, dude. Don't sit here all night," Taylor coaxed, sliding a newly made glass of Crown Royal towards him.

Dave wondered what the bartender thought of him. Surely he was used to the swaths of celebrities, rockstars included, that descended upon the the resort Las Ventanas al Paraíso for sequestered weeks of heavy drinking and lounging in the sun. It couldn't have surprised him in the least that Dave was single-handedly contributing to his dwindling supply of whiskey, though the bar itself was stocked with every liquor known to man to keep up with the variety cravings of its guests.

Despite that, Dave felt that he didn't fit the stereotype. He must have looked concerning to the skinny bartender serving him, who had already tried unsuccessfully to cheer Dave up in broken English. Dave preferred not having to speak at all, choosing instead to stare through the outdoor bar and out towards the Gulf of Mexico. The sun had set hours ago, but he could still hear the faint rush of waves on the beach below.

"I'm good right here," Dave told Taylor under his breath. His gripped his glass, rotating it on the bar top, before knocking the drink back.

"You're not 'good right here.' You're all by your fucking self," Taylor accused. Shaking Dave's shoulder, he forced him to turn around, facing the backside of the resort. "Look at this place. Look at all the people who agreed to show up here with us."

Superficially, Dave could see the obvious beauty in where they were staying. The outdoor space alone that they inhabited was gorgeous, decked out with crackling fire pits, a waterfall that fed into a huge swimming pool, and crisp white lounge chairs surrounded by glowing lanterns.

The people that Taylor had invited were a nice touch, but Dave couldn't summon the energy to talk to them. He'd been wary at first of the supposed guest list, but as soon as Taylor had suggested the Stone Temple Pilots, Dave relented control. Most of everyone who had joined them had been his friends at one point on various tours.

"Come over there with me," Taylor said, nodding towards a nook where a knot of people stood, including Franz and Nate.

"I don't know, man."

"You gotta' stop thinking about her tonight."

That was impossible. She was the only thing he could think about, whether it had to do with the painstaking conversation they'd had before he left or the memories that he couldn't seem to hold onto tight enough.

From the moment that he'd left Los Angeles, Dave had been falling apart. He'd spent the flight to Los Cabos Airport alternating between drinking and spilling the mess of his heartbroken, dumped-husband, soon-to-be-divorcee guts to Taylor. Nate and Franz had melt their distance, knowing that in a moment like that, Dave would only exclusively open up to their drummer.

She's going to divorce me, Dave had choked out.

You don't know that, had been Taylor's exasperated response.

I do. I do know it.

As far as Dave was concerned, it didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that he was about to become newly, unwillingly, single.

He hadn't cried on the flight, but the one subject that had made him come close was Gracie. By then, Taylor had assumed the executive power of shutting the conversation down and telling Dave that until the trip was over, he shouldn't speculate about what was going to happen to his marriage.

So Dave didn't. He didn't speculate to him or anyone else. He kept those thoughts private, locked away, speculating to just himself how it would ultimately end once he was home. That was precisely how he'd ended up at the hotel bar, drowning alone in alcohol and lamenting the double standard that was his life. He was allowed to front the kick ass band of his wildest childhood dreams, but he wasn't allowed to have a happy marriage at the same time.

The night had been made even worse by the reminder that exactly a year ago, Reagan had come to visit him on tour and they'd conceived the baby that they'd then lost.

"Más?" the bartender asked, pointing to Dave's empty glass.

Dave looked at the glass questionably. If he wasn't going to escape Taylor's attempts to take his mind off of Reagan that night, then there was still the option of drinking until he passed out. An easy fix to clear his mind.

"Jäger?" Dave asked, pointing to the liquor shelves.

"Ah, sí," the bartender replied, nodding. He pulled down the liter bottle of the drink and reached for a new glass, but Dave waved him off.

"The whole bottle. Please."

He figured that his lackluster friendship with the bartender had paid off in some way when he was handed the Jäger bottle without question. A normal, functioning person might have questioned his sanity, but it was Dave's pity party and everyone was clearly participating.

"Now I know you're going to be okay," Taylor grinned, throwing his arm around Dave's shoulder and dragging him away from the bar.

"You sure about that?" Dave returned drily, unscrewing the cap to the bottle.

"Yep, I always know you're in tip-top shape when you start burning the lining of your stomach away."

Dave was led to a cluster of people, where Taylor carried the conversation and looked expectantly at him when it was his turn to contribute. Between swigs from the Jäger bottle, Dave forced smiles and half-assed sentences, wondering when it would be acceptable to escape to his hotel room.

It didn't matter how hard he tried to talk, laugh, and recall the hilarious stories that had sustained him and the friends he'd made from the bands surrounding him.

Reagan was the only thing that felt real. Her face was the only face that he registered and it wasn't even amongst the people that stood around him. He thought of her laugh, hearing it whisper past his ear, and her long auburn hair fanned out across his pillow in the morning. He thought about the way she looked when she was behind a drum kit and how perfect of a mother she was.

Dave wasn't a fan of perfects. If everything was perfect, then there would have been no reason to keep striving for something better. But she was perfect and always had been; the one perfect thing in his life besides Gracie, and now she was leaving him.

He kept track of time by the lightening weight of the Jäger bottle, drinking faster until he'd finally reached a state of foggy-minded, relative peace. It wasn't ideal, being that he was starting to see double of everyone and everything, but it was better than how he'd started the night.

As he and Taylor drifted towards another pair of friends, Dave glanced to his left and almost tripped with the force that he used to drive his heels into the concrete.

Sitting at one of the in-ground fire pits was someone he recognized. Of course he recognized her, as he already knew everyone there, but he hadn't been made aware that she was coming. Taylor hadn't mentioned her spot on his 'guest list' at all.

"Taylor," Dave hissed. He yanked Taylor back, hard, by the cotton of his white t-shirt.

"Fuckin' hell," Taylor said, struggling to retain his balance without spilling the cocktail he held. "What?"

"You invited her?"

He followed Dave's line of sight to the fire pit and immediately knew who they were discussing. With a strained laugh, he shrugged it off.

"I didn't, man. I invited Nina, but I guess Louise decided to come with her."

Louise Post, vocalist and guitarist of Veruca Salt. On a more personal note to Dave, she was also one of the only women to ever pique his interest in the time that he'd been with Reagan.

He had never acted on it. It hadn't even been an option when he'd been one-hundred percent committed to his wife. Veruca Salt had opened for the Foo Fighters several times over the course of nineteen-ninety-seven and that was when Dave had come to know Louise.

She'd captivated him, he was willing to admit. Not enough to lead him astray, but it had confessedly freaked him out to be so drawn to another woman that wasn't Reagan. For the most part they'd only been good friends, something that had given Dave's overactive brain a happy middle between friendship and his obsession with music.

That was the main reason that he'd had to disengage with Louise. The flickers of early attraction had sparked from their mutual love of being musicians and Dave had been intrigued by her lyrics, her voice, her playing. He hadn't thought of her since the last time she'd been on tour, but it was disorienting to see her again on a night that had so far consisted of him mourning his marriage.

He must have been staring for too long. Her eyes slid over to where he stood, connecting with his, and Dave turned around so quickly that he almost reeled.

Note to self, he thought drunkenly, no more spinning.

"What the fuck are you doing?" Taylor scoffed.

"I don't want her to see me."

"Dude, how drunk are you? She saw you already."

"No she didn't."

"Yea she did."

"No she didn't."

Taylor snorted lightly. "If she didn't see you, then why is she walking over here right now?"

Dave's stomach plunged and the feeling was overtly nauseating, intensified by all the Jäger he'd sucked down. He snuck a glimpse over his shoulder and sure enough, Louise had extracted herself away from the fire pit and was headed his way.

"Fuck," he muttered, raising his Jäger bottle to his mouth.

"Hey, uh, I think Nate needs me," Taylor said quickly. "I'll leave you to it."

"What? You're fucking leaving me?" Dave hissed.

"You know how Nate gets lonely."

LONELY? Dave thought in a snarl as Taylor speed-walked away. As soon as he'd disappeared, Dave felt a tap on his shoulder.

He turned around gracelessly, nearly losing the bottle in his slippery grip.

Louise stood in front of him, wearing a soft smile that was lined with coffee-colored lipstick. Half her hair was swept back and the spaghetti-strapped dress she wore, which was a lot shorter than Dave was willing to fully take notice of, hugged her body tightly.

"Hi, Dave," she said.

"Hey," he said. His fingers were twitching to take another long gulp of his drink. "How are you?"

"I can't complain. I'm in Cabo." Her smile never faltered as she spoke.

"It was, um . . . nice of you to come."

"Sorry I crashed your party. Nina begged me to come with her. I pretended that I didn't know about any of her ulterior motives," Louise laughed.

Dave pressed his mouth into a tight line. So it hadn't been a secret to everyone else on the tour that he and Louise were close.

"Yeah, well . . ." He trailed off, unsure of what to say. It could have been the liquor doing his thinking for him, but she looked good in the golden hue of all the lanterns. Really good.

"Wanna' sit?" she offered, gesturing toward a pair of lounge chairs beneath a flower-laced awning. "Talk for a second?"

"Sure."

He followed her over and they sat on the chairs, facing each other with their knees nearly touching. Dave set the Jäger bottle on the ground even though every instinct that he had was telling him to keep it in hand.

"It's been a long time," Louise said. She wrapped her arms around herself and leaned forward.

"Yeah. Since last year."

"You sort of fell off after our last show. I didn't hear from you."

Because you slightly terrify me, Dave thought. His honesty came fast though, helped along by his drunkenness.

"It was a lot," he said. "I felt really . . . close to you. I didn't wanna' give the wrong impression, you know?"

"I felt close to you, too." She spoke politely, but Dave could see the light in her eyes, sparkling as she recalled their shared memories. "I would have never acted on anything irrational, though. I know you have a wife."

"Had a wife," Dave mumbled.

"You aren't together?" Louise sounded surprised.

Yes. No. Maybe. I have no idea.

"Honestly? I'm not sure anymore," he admitted.

"Oh. I'm really sorry to hear that."

"Turns out that being in a band doesn't give you everything you want," Dave said, shaking his head bitterly. "I was away too much."

"It's difficult being with someone who doesn't understand what you have to do," Louise sympathized.

"I guess. I always thought she did understand."

"Let me guess. She got upset when you started touring with the Foo Fighters?"

It was more than that. Dave didn't want to discredit Reagan's breakdown to just her contempt for his lifestyle. He knew that she'd only started falling apart that year, after her miscarriage.

He couldn't have said all of that to Louise. Especially not when he was partially swaying and his vision was swimming.

"Yeah," he said, his Adam's apple bobbing in his throat. "I guess you could say that's when it started."

"I've been there before with guys I've dated," Louise said with a sigh. "It's a hard thing for people who aren't in the business of playing music to accept."

"That's why I felt close to you," Dave suddenly blurted.

She delicately raised both eyebrows at him.

"You understood what I was dealing with," he continued, circling one hand through the air. "All of it. It kind of fucking scared me to feel as close as I did to you, to be honest."

He'd never imagined actually telling Louise that. At the time when he'd met her and they'd gotten too close too fast, it would have only made the situation worse. Now, though, it felt natural to confess to the reason why he'd pulled back from her, effectively ending their friendship in the process despite how much he'd admired her as a person. The undercurrent of attraction between them had been too dangerous.

Now, though . . . it didn't matter. He could say what he wanted and he didn't have to think about Reagan while doing it.

He didn't to think about Reagan while doing it.

Dave abruptly realized that since he'd spotted Louise at the fire pit, his thoughts, for once that night, hadn't been wound around Reagan. She'd come up casually as he'd recalled his history with Louise, and once when Louise had asked about her, but other than that . . . Dave's mind had expanded with the relief of her absence from it.

He looked into Louise's eyes, closer than they'd been before. She had leaned in farther and her elbows were on her knees. Weirdly enough, Dave considered how good she smelled, like lavender mixed with the salty breeze blowing in on the Gulf.

He wondered how good she would feel if he put one hand out and touch her leg, exposed by the short hem of her dress.

"How do you feel now?" she asked, her voice soft.

"About?" Dave replied. His eyes flickered to her cleavage, looking more ample than before from the way she was leaning.

"About being close to me."

"I feel . . . very close to you."

"Right now?"

She touched her fingertips to his hand and the sensation was blistering. He glanced at her fingers, noticing that her nails were painted a bloody red, and he questioned how they'd look being raked up and down his bare back.

Reagan wasn't there. She was in Los Angeles though spiritually, she felt farther away than that. Too far for Dave to reach out and grab her and remind her why they'd chosen each other.

She didn't love him the way he loved her, not anymore. His heart was shredded, maybe even torn beyond repair, but that didn't mean that he couldn't momentarily forget about it in the arms of someone else.

If Louise had managed to get him through the gruel of touring with just her ability to talk to him, he was certain that she could do wonders physically for him that night.

"My room?" he asked huskily, locking eyes with her.

When she nodded, he forgot about everything else and pulled her in by her neck to kiss her.

a/n:
I absolutely LOVE how I glazed right over Dave's temporary stint with Queens of the Stone Age. LOVE that for me . . .
(If you know me, you know I'm completely type A when it comes to historical accuracy aside from the things I make up for the sake of a good plot. So you'd know how batshit crazy this is driving me).