‘AAAGGGHHH!’ Kate screamed in abject horror.
She did a full one-eighty and ran around the corner towards the girls. This couldn’t be happening. She did NOT just see Trevor Rush standing in that doorway. Maybe she was still drunk? Or lucid dreaming?
‘Kate, what’s wrong?’ Natalie said as she dashed towards them.
‘In . . . in the hall . . . there’s . . .’
‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost,’ Chloe said.
But as Trevor walked around the corner and into the room, they saw why she was so distraught. Kate had seen a ghost. The ghost of summer’s past was standing right in front of them.
‘So The Four Lokos have finally woken up, I see,’ Trevor laughed. He was holding a box of doughnuts and four coffees.
Kate tried to catch her breath. She didn’t have asthma but she suddenly felt like she needed an inhaler. ‘Trevor . . .’ she finally said. ‘What the hell is going on?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Why is there a picture of us in a tacky Vegas wedding chapel?’
‘Hold on, you don’t remember?’ Trevor asked, seeming genuinely surprised.
‘Remember what?’ Kate asked, desperate for answers. But she knew what answer was coming.
A playful grin danced across Trevor’s face. ‘Our wedding, silly.’
‘Our WHAT?’
‘That’s right, wifey. This is the honeymoon suite,’ Trevor said. ‘We got hitched last night.’
Kate wanted the ground to open up and swallow her. There was no possible way it could be true. She was Kate O’Connor. And Kate O’Connor was NOT the type of girl who would get drunkenly married in Vegas. Especially not to the one man she hated more than anyone else in the world!
‘No, no, no, no, no,’ Kate said, hyperventilating. ‘This isn’t happening. This is some kind of joke. Of course! You and the girls planned some hen party prank. There’s a hidden camera somewhere, isn’t there?’
‘Kate, this isn’t a prank,’ Natalie said.
‘Nice try, girls. You all planned it very well. Making me drink the Four Loko, getting Trevor involved, even the honeymoon suite, now that was a nice touch . . .’
‘Kate, we’re not pranking you!’ Chloe snapped.
‘They’re telling the truth,’ Trevor said. ‘Last night you told me you still loved me and you asked me to marry you.’
‘No way, that did not happen!’ Kate said. She tried to take the wedding ring off her finger, but it was stuck.
‘Oh, it happened alright. You got down on one knee and everything,’ Trevor laughed.
‘I don’t believe it. I don’t believe any of this. There’s no way in hell we got married!’
‘You might want to check your phones then. I think some of you put our wedding on your Instagram story.’
Kate nearly died on the spot.
Her drunken Vegas wedding? On Instagram?
‘You girls get up to speed while I go take a leak. Doughnuts are fresh – help yourselves,’ Trevor said before turning around and heading towards the bathroom.
Siobhan walked towards the coffee table to grab a doughnut but remembered her arms were restrained. ‘Could someone put a doughnut in my mouth?’ she asked.
‘SIOBHAN!’ Kate snapped. ‘FOCUS!’
‘Right! The crisis!’
‘Everyone check their stories. Oh God, Norman follows you all on Instagram. That must be why I have forty-three missed calls. He saw me getting married,’ Kate cried. Her life was potentially over. Or at least the life she knew.
The girls immediately began to look through the Instagram stories to see what had happened. Kate looked at her account to see her story was blank. ‘Nothing on mine, thank God,’ she said, beyond relieved.
‘Mine just has an infographic about saving the turtles,’ Natalie said.
‘My story is empty too,’ Siobhan said.
‘Oh my God, there’s stuff on my story!’ Chloe cried.
‘Show me!’ Kate yelled. She needed to do a serious damage assessment. She needed to know how much of her life was salvageable.
The girls all leaned over Chloe’s shoulder and began watching her Instagram story. The first video was of the moment Kate went on stage for her champagne shower. Trevor was rising up from under the stage as Kate’s body was frozen with shock. Finally, when the platform was fully raised, the two of them locked eyes.
‘Oh sweet Jesus,’ Kate said, terrified of what was about to happen next. ‘I think I remember this!’
On the screen, Trevor was staring at Kate in disbelief. The bottle popped from its own internal pressure. Kate stood there on stage for a minute, speechless.
‘Turn around and run, you idiot!’ Kate said to her drunken self on the screen.
But she did not obey. Kate began to walk towards Trevor until they were finally face to face, with barely a few inches between them. Then, out of nowhere, Kate raised her arm and slapped Trevor right across the face. The Omnia crowd gasped, unsure if it was part of the act or not.
‘See?’ Kate said, looking up from the phone. ‘I didn’t marry him, I slapped him!’
But on the screen it seemed as if some kind of switch flipped in Kate’s mind. Instead of charging off the stage like she should have, Kate grabbed Trevor and began kissing him with unbridled passion. And Trevor began kissing her back with nine years’ worth of pent-up desire. The crowd went wild for their dramatic kiss.
Kate felt herself go scarlet as she watched. ‘That’s not me! There’s no way that’s me!’ She continued to stare in shock at her drunken-self devouring Trevor on the Omnia stage. It was as if she was deprived of air and his mouth was her only oxygen supply. It was so utterly uncharacteristic of her usual self that watching it felt like an out-of-body experience. Surely any second now she would push him away and storm off.
But she just kept kissing him. And the crowd kept cheering.
‘Oh my God!!! Chloe, delete this right now!’ Kate begged. ‘Jesus, can you check if Norman has seen it?’
‘Don’t worry, it’s just on my private story. Only the four of us can see it,’ Chloe explained.
Kate let out an almighty sigh of relief.
Norman hadn’t seen it. That meant less damage control. There was a chance she could get out of this shitstorm alive.
The girls watched the rest of Chloe’s private story, which consisted of them dancing behind the DJ deck with Trevor on stage, drinking at several different bars and taking a pit stop at a tattoo and piercing parlour. Siobhan was getting her belly button pierced in one story and Chloe was getting inked in another. Natalie then grabbed one of the parlour’s electric shavers and started eviscerating her eyebrows.
‘Jesus, girls, this is a whole other level of drunk,’ Siobhan laughed at the screen. ‘Even for us.’
But the next story was far worse than the rest combined, at least for Kate. To her horror, she was getting down on one knee to propose to Trevor.
‘No, this cannot be real. There’s no way I did this,’ she gasped. But the evidence was right in front of her. On the screen, she was asking Trevor to marry her.
He had been telling the truth.
Suddenly, they were all inside the Little White Wedding Chapel of Las Vegas. The narrow chamber had cheap white pews, fake stained-glass windows and plastic vases filled with artificial flowers. Kate and Trevor were standing in front of an Elvis impersonator, just as she had seen in the Polaroid.
‘Do you, sexy momma Kate O’Connor, take Trevor Rush to be your lawfully wedded husband?’ Elvis said, in a terribly impersonated accent.
‘Abso-fucking-lutely!’ Kate yelled on the screen.
She immediately cringed at herself. This was a feeling far beyond embarrassment. It was like she had unlocked some new emotion reserved for only the most mortifying of situations.
Trevor waltzed back into the room with a calm, relaxed swagger, as if nothing was wrong. He stood in his stylish black suit with his perfectly groomed hair, completely untroubled by the events of the night before.
‘So wifey . . . are you all brought up to speed?’ he said, his lips curling into a smirk.
‘Are you finding this funny? You married me while I was blackout drunk!’ Kate said, furious. ‘Oh God, did we have sex? Oh sweet holy Jesus, please tell me we didn’t sleep together!’
‘Of course we didn’t have sex. You were drunk. You kept begging and begging but I kept saying no,’ Trevor smiled.
‘I would NEVER beg a man for sex! I’d sooner take my grave.’
Trevor took out his phone and opened a video. ‘Alright, here you go,’ he said, pressing play.
Kate was on the screen totally hammered and slurring her words. In the video she was ripping up the itinerary. The itinerary she had spent months working on.
She was the one who tore it to shreds.
‘I’m finally freeeeee!’ she yelled on the phone screen.
‘Alright, Mrs Rush, it’s time to sleep,’ Trevor’s voice said from behind the phone camera.
‘Pleeeease, Trevor, I need that dick,’ Kate begged in the video.
‘You’re drunk, Mrs Rush. You’re going straight to bed. Alone.’
‘Trevor, please. I want to FEEL THE RUSH!’
The girls couldn’t hold in the laughter.
‘Zip it, you three!’ Kate snapped at them as she looked away from the video. ‘Trevor, turn it off!’
‘You see?’ Trevor said, putting his phone away. ‘We didn’t have sex. Hello? Haven’t you ever heard of informed consent? I would never have sex with someone who was drunk.’
‘Oh, so you just decided to marry me instead?’ Kate said, raising an eyebrow.
‘Hey, you proposed to me. I just said yes,’ Trevor shrugged.
‘Wait a minute,’ Natalie said. ‘If you two didn’t have sex, that means the marriage wasn’t consummated. It can be rendered null and void!’
‘Are you saying there’s a way out of this mess?’ Kate asked.
‘Yeah – if you don’t consummate a marriage or if you get married by mistake, you can get an annulment instead of a divorce. It basically means the marriage never happened,’ Natalie explained.
‘Then that’s exactly what we’re going to do,’ Kate said. She suddenly realized she had no idea how annulments work. ‘So what do we do exactly?’
‘Maybe go back to the wedding chapel. They might be able to nullify the marriage there and then.’
‘Nullify the marriage?’ Trevor said, surprised. ‘Last night you said you’ve been in love with me for the past nine years.’
‘I never said that!’
‘I have a video of that too.’
‘Well . . . I was drunk and I didn’t mean it!’
‘Drunk words are sober thoughts, darling,’ Trevor winked.
‘Nope. My real wedding is in five days’ time, so this one needs to be erased from existence. Girls, I’ll be back soon,’ Kate said, determined to fix the unholy mess she was in. ‘Trevor and I have an annulment to sign!’