Blurb: In Vegas for Isabella's bachelorette party, Catherine wakes up with an heirloom wedding ring on her finger. And why is Henry Tilney convinced they got married last night? Modern AU.
Thanks to Michelle for jogging this idea from my head.
And happy new year to us all. However wonderful 2023 was to you, may 2024 be even better.
What Starts In Vegas
Catherine hated hangovers. They were the worst. Her head
hurt. She just wanted to stay perfectly still until the misery subsided to a manageable level and she could crawl out of bed for a cup of coffee and some acetaminophen.
It was good that her sister hadn't come with her to this bachelorette weekend in Vegas after all. Catherine could barely deal with her hangover alone right now, she definitely couldn't deal with her sister on top of that! Sally would be smug in the way that younger siblings always were when the older one made an obvious mistake. And Sally would tattle to Mrs. Morland that Catherine had gotten drunk, and Mrs. Morland would be terribly disappointed but would try to turn it into a teaching moment. And then Catherine would have to listen to a lecture on the evils of drinking to excess or would have to read some articles that her mother has found via some parenting blogs.
She was grateful that the only people who might suspect she'd overindulged were likely suffering the same fate: Isabella, Isabella's sisters and other bridesmaids, and another random bachelor party that they'd somehow glommed onto.
Catherine groaned quietly and considered turning on her side but stayed put.
One grateful exclusion from her list of accomplices was John Thorpe. He had wanted to come on the bachelorette party too but Isabella had made it clear that her brother was not invited. Then he announced his intention to go to Vegas that same weekend on his own, just because. Unless Isabella and her little party were going to rent out every hotel room in town it wasn't like they could stop him. And if he ran into the party then it wasn't like he'd
planned to hang out with them. Isabella had to speak with James at that point to get her fiancé to schedule his own bachelor party for that same weekend somewhere other than Vegas.
So while James and his best bros were relaxing in a lakeside cabin in the middle of nowhere, Isabella and her girl gang had come to the gambling capital of the world and had done an immoderate amount of drinking.
Maybe if Catherine just laid in the bed very very still until the hangover faded away…
It didn't fade away, not exactly. There were rolling waves of nausea which, when they passed, felt like the pain was fading. But as soon as she shifted position or heard another ping from her phone as a chat thread was apparently blowing up, the nausea returned. She pressed her eyes and mouth shut, waiting for the next wave to crest and then retreat.
It crested. It kept cresting. It --
Catherine threw off the comforter and raced for the hotel room ensuite.
When she was done, wrung out and feeling pathetic, making a list of all the lessons she had learned, all the things she wouldn't do again, she noticed that her toothbrush and the shower were both close at hand. She probably wouldn't feel less hungover but maybe a little normalcy was the first step to feeling human again.
As she brushed her teeth, she heard her phone ring. That was a bad sign. No one her age ever called her unless it was serious; it was always texting. Her parents, on the other hand, were much more likely to call. And her mother had a preternatural sense of when Catherine had done something she shouldn't have, like get a hangover.
She quickly finished scrubbing her teeth and ran to pick up her phone from the bedside table. The ringing had ended but she could see the history. It was not her mom after all but an unrecognized number. This was the same number that had sent her a ton of texts last night and this morning.
The first message was a fairly innocuous greeting, “hi from Henry Tilney,” and it was followed by a selfie of the two of them. They were pressed together, cheek to cheek, and grinning like mad.
After the picture, there was a mention of meeting up for lunch today and then he must have gone to bed. About an hour ago, the man had started texting her again, in earnest. The messages were short, emphatic, and prolific. She scrolled to the end, taking in sections as she went.
this is Henry, btw
Henry, the groom's brother
is this Catherine?She remembered Henry from the bachelor party. And she remembered his brother, Frederick the Groom. Isabella had inexplicably decided to merge her bachelorette party with his for the night. A bunch of the women in her bridal party had paired up with men in Frederick's group and Catherine had somehow been partnered with Henry. Not that she minded; Henry was enjoyable company. He was funny and charming and certainly seemed like he liked her too as shown by his mention of lunch above.
hey, are you up?
sorry, but this is super important.
you gave me your number last night She remembered giving him her number, and posing for that unflattering picture. They had both laughed at it but Henry had saved it with her number just the same.
I think I gave you smthg in return
do you still have it?With a grimace, she recalled that Drunk Catherine had different boundaries than Sober Catherine. Sober Catherine would have been ridiculously pleased to meet Henry and hold his attention throughout the evening, and then exchange numbers with plans to get in touch later. There might even be a cringeworthy selfie in the mix, but nothing more regrettable than that.
please respond
just check your ring finger
if you don't have it, pls let me know Drunk Catherine, on the other hand, had done all that plus make sure that Henry knew how much she liked him. Drunk Catherine had kissed him, more than once. Drunk Catherine might not have felt any remorse, but Sober Catherine was not so carefree. She might regret more than just a selfie.
I'm ransacking the chapel now
please CatherineWait, what was that bit about her ring finger?
Catherine looked first at her right hand. The back had the faded stamp from a bar, but nothing else was out of place.
Before she even checked her left hand, she felt a flash of memory and knew what she would find: a vintage wedding ring that had last belonged to Henry's grandmother. He had brought it to Las Vegas to hand deliver it to Frederick the Groom who would bring it home to his fiancée to get it resized before the ceremony. That was the plan. And then he had shown it to Catherine and she had cooed over how beautiful it was. Maybe she had asked to try it on; maybe he had just offered? It fit her perfectly. Maybe she had kissed him at that point? (She had -- multiple times, throughout the night -- kissed that man.) Maybe she had done more to regret than she realized.
Why hadn't she taken the ring off immediately? Why hadn't she given it back to him? Why had they… Why had they been in a wedding chapel?
Catherine hit the call button, figuring this conversation qualified for more than just a text.
Henry answered on the first ring. "Hello, Catherine?"
"I have it," she said immediately.
"Oh, thank god," he answered, relief clear in his tone.
"I am so sorry," she continued. "I didn't mean to keep it. I just got distracted and forgot and then I'm not even sure what happened. But I can give it back to you right now."
"Thank you!" Henry said, “thank you. Where are you? I can be there in 2 minutes to pick it up.” He took Catherine's 'right now' quite literally.
"Um," she hesitated, backtracking slightly. "Can I take a shower first? I'm still…" She looked down at herself and tried to think of the least unflattering description. She was still hungover? Still reeking of alcohol? Still not dressed? Still disgusting?
"How about we meet in 30 minutes?" Henry offered.
Catherine agreed, then gave him her room number and ended the call.
As soon as she hung up, she dropped her phone back on the bedside table and flew to the bathroom. She had grown up in a house with more children than the hot water heater could easily support and had long ago trained herself to be as quick as possible in the shower. But a lifetime of habit was an insufficient counterweight this morning against the natural sluggishness caused by her headache and the increasingly frequent memories of why Drunk Catherine had been too distracted to return the ring last night. She had kissed Henry! And now Sober Catherine had invited him to her hotel room with a king-size bed for a centerpiece! Mrs. Morland would have a
fit if she found out about this, lecturing her about the perils of loose morals and promiscuity.
Then again, what if Henry was really a sociopath who wanted to kill her? What if he was a serial killer who was using his brother's bachelor's party as an excuse to come to Vegas to find his next victim? He didn't seem like the murdering type but Catherine was already imagining her mother’s lecture about the dangers of trusting complete strangers.
All those random thoughts conspired to slow her down. She had finally exited the bathroom, dressed for the day with her hair still wet and feeling like a real person rather than a mere vessel for a headache. She had just picked up her phone to text about maybe meeting in the lobby instead when there was a knock on the door.
It was Henry, five minutes early. He wasted no time with idle pleasantries but thrust a coffee cup into her hands.
"I was just about to text you," Catherine began but he cut her off.
"There's been a complication," he said with the same tone of voice that an oncologist might use to inform a patient that the cancer was back.
Any thoughts of moving this conversation to a more public location fell out of her head. Instead, she stepped aside so he could come in. "That sounds ominous. What's wrong?" she asked.
"
Wrong is a matter of perspective," Henry said with an awkward laugh that did not allay any newfound worries. "As I said, it's a complication. I didn't notice until after you called me about my grandmother's ring, but the hotel billed my room for chapel services last night."
Catherine frowned. That didn't make any sense at all. She remembered that their combined group had crashed a wedding but the newly married couple had seemed to enjoy their audience and invited them to stay for pictures. Isabella had been particularly taken with the idea, and had asked the couple and their officiant a lot of questions until Catherine had gotten bored and turned her attention back to Henry.
"Did they bill you for crashing the wedding?” Catherine guessed. She thought they had all been relatively respectful despite the fact that the destruction implied in the word
crashing but, again, maybe she had been too preoccupied by Henry to notice. “If one of the bridesmaids did anything, just let me know how much and I'll take care of it." She wasn't exactly sure how she was going to get the money from Isabella's sisters but that was her problem, not Henry's.
"No," said Henry, sounding very strained. "They billed me for a wedding. I think we got married last night, you and I."
Catherine stood there gobsmacked for a bit. Slowly the pieces began to assemble themselves into thought and from there into speech. "That's impossible."
Now that she was awake and showered and sipping the latte that Henry had thoughtfully given her, the key events of the previous evening were not shrouded in mystery. Maybe she couldn't recall minor details like what shade of nail polish everyone was wearing but she would have remembered getting married!
"We both drank too much last night," Henry argued gently. "Maybe we forgot."
"Too much as in hungover, not too much as in black-out," Catherine refused to consider it. "I remember meeting you and talking with you and trying on your grandmother's ring and…" She blushed and lowered her voice as if someone else might overhear… "And kissing you. And kissing you goodnight."
The first kiss had been silly and ridiculously forward, completely out of character for Sober Catherine. Some of the kisses that followed had been quite serious, again far beyond what she would ever have done on a first date. The last kiss of the night had been rather sweet. And when she watched him wave goodbye as the elevator doors closed and separated them, she felt simultaneously grateful and devastated because she knew that it would only be harder to part ways from him in front of her hotel room door and really her mother didn't need to hear about any part of that.
She reflected on how well they had clicked last night, how they had talked and joked and laughed between random bouts of kissing. How she had given away her phone number and how he had offered up the ring. They had spent
hours together and maybe it was a romantic speed run but there were still plenty of things they did not do.
"But we didn't get married. I would never be so impulsive. My mother would never let me hear the end of it!" Drinking to excess, kissing a man she had never met before, inviting the same man into her hotel room to have his wicked (amorous or murderous) way with her… Clearly she had done all that and her mother would be furious with her if she ever learned all the details about this weekend. But drunk or sober, there were lines she didn't cross and she knew this was one of them.
"Look, I admit that it's the height of stupidity not to remember one's own wedding ceremony but that doesn't change the fact that the hotel is billing me for it," he said, stressed and exasperated with the situation. To back up his ludicrous claim, he pulled out his phone and showed her the email from the hotel.
Catherine looked at the screen but it was small and Henry's hand was shaking. She tugged the phone away from him to hold it steady and read aloud the subject line: "Incidental Charge: Thorpe/Tilney Marriage License and Wedding Ceremony, Expedited."
"Yes," said Henry. "I'm obviously the Tilney in this scenario since I must have charged it to my room. And you are the better half in this impromptu partnership."
Catherine made a small noise of disagreement. "My last name isn't Thorpe. It's Morland."
No wonder she didn't remember: he hadn't married
her! It actually bruised her ego a little to think that Henry had kissed her good night at the elevators and then went back to the party and married someone else. Judging from the look on his face, however, Catherine might be hurt but Henry was devastated. He just stood there for a long time looking more and more miserable.
"But you said," he finally began to speak again. "Last night you said that you were the bride's sister."
"Yes," she agreed, "in a way," she backtracked, "through a marriage that hasn't happened yet. Isabella is engaged to my brother. I'm going to be her sister-in-law. That's why I'm a bridesmaid."
"But you said you were her
sister. She said she was here with
her sisters!" Henry's voice rose in agitation.
"She has three real sisters!" Catherine answered in equal volume. "And two sorority sisters. And a future sister-in-law. We're all here for the bachelorette party."
Henry paled and she thought he might be tipping into a panic attack. "You're telling me that I accidentally married some random bridesmaid?"
Catherine tried to comfort him. "I'm sure this sort of thing happens more often than you realize. And then it un-happens. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas after all. I mean, it's not like you, you know, made it official, right?" It was a little mortifying to point it out, but if he had woken up next to another woman, he would have known that it was not Catherine whom he'd married.
"What do you mean by that? There's an official legal document. How much more official can I make it?"
Something about saying those words made it click for him and he nearly gagged at the possibility. "No! No, absolutely not. I would never --" He refused to speak that horror into the universe. Instead, he set down his own coffee cup and his phone on the most convenient surface and raked his hands through his hair. "But that's impossible. It's impossible! I didn't go back to the party after we said goodnight. I waited a few seconds and then called my own elevator. I couldn't have married anyone."
Catherine didn't say anything but she wondered why, if Henry knew that he couldn't have gotten married, he had been so convinced that he had.
"Then let's just look at the certificate to see which of Isabella's sisters is temporarily Mrs. Tilney and we'll all talk to the front desk about where to go from there."
Following her direction, Henry unlocked his phone and opened the attachment. If the text in the message was small, the attachment was worse. He zoomed first on his name and his dread transformed into disbelief and then outrage. "He did
what?" he said, gripping the phone tightly. "And he charged it to
my room? Oh, that is pure Frederick!”
“Frederick
the Groom got married?” Catherine translated. She felt a giddy moment of relief. Henry hadn't done anything wrong. No, “wrong” was a matter of perspective. Henry hadn't done whatever it was he thought he did. “You came here for his bachelor party and he got married to someone else last night?”
Henry groaned in acknowledgement but the answer was too obvious to put into words. “I am going to kill him,” he said wearily, “or at least tell Vivian and my father so they can kill him. Put him out of my misery or something like that. I think I've aged 20 years this morning between waking up to the panicked realization that I had lost the ring and finding a wedding license with my name on it.” He looked like he needed to sit down.
“Which Thorpe sister did he marry?” asked Catherine although none of them was appropriate for someone who already had a fiancée.
Henry's face did this complicated thing and she was able to recognize a lifetime of sibling rivalry and teasing and pranks gone wrong or taken too far. From that slim glimpse, it didn't look like the best and healthiest of familial relationships. “Does it matter?” he asked. “Because I don't want to deal with this right now.”
Her first instinct was that
of course it matters but the beseeching look on his face made her think twice before saying anything. A wedding had happened but Catherine hadn't married Henry, and Henry hadn't married anyone else. Isabella would be coolly furious at whoever had upstaged her celebration getaway, then Catherine and the other bridesmaids would probably have to work hard to lift her mood so they could salvage the weekend. Isabella was a great friend, and Catherine was genuinely happy that she and James were so in love, but she could be high maintenance even when she got her way. Maybe Catherine didn't need another headache right now. Maybe she should just focus on the headache she had woken up with before taking on a new problem.
“Um, I mean, eventually,” Catherine conceded. “The damage is done but I'm sure your brother will want to undo it as soon as he realizes what he did.”
“Yes, he will, obviously,” he agreed emphatically. “Frederick must have done it as a joke or something. I just want to catch my breath for a moment before I have to track down my brother and his entirely random and accidental wife and help them figure out how to get an annulment in Vegas. It won't do any good if I collapse from hunger in the middle of my search.”
Hearing Henry's comment, Catherine realized that she must be feeling better because the concept of eating did not disgust her. In fact, she remembered his texted offer from last night.
“What about we get some lunch?” she offered. “Or breakfast?”
Henry accepted with a smile that sent butterflies flapping in her stomach. “Let's split the difference and call it brunch,” Henry agreed. “I could really go for some blueberry pancakes.”
Pancakes were one of Catherine's favorite foods, and liking them was just another plus for Henry in her estimation.
Then his smile hooked into a mischievous turn and he added, “with some tuna salad on the side.”
The butterflies which had been floating pleasantly in Catherine's stomach instantly reverted into squirming caterpillars. She felt like she just might throw up again at the mere idea of that horror. Before she could invent an excuse to skip the meal and block Henry's number for good, she caught the teasing glint in his eyes. He tried to hide a snicker behind a cough but he had been found out and soon she was giggling too.
“How can you,” said Catherine, laughing, “be so --” She had almost said “strange” but “wonderful” worked equally well in this case. Refusing to choose one adjective and have him hold it against her later, she gave up trying to categorize him. “Fine, let's go to brunch,” she agreed good-naturedly.
With a gesture, she directed him to the front door. He opened it with a flourish and waved her through. In the hotel’s hallway, they headed to the elevators, hand in hand.
// THE END //