Trial of Error
Chapter Two: Finer Details of Forgotten Events
Description: Set just after Will You Be My Lorelai Gilmore? Logan heads off to Vegas with Colin and Finn, but Rory doesn't let it just pass without having her say. Unfortunately for Rory, what happens in Vegas isn't going to stay in Vegas.
Ship: Rogan
Rating: T
He kept his eyes on her. He watched her walk out of the bathroom with her damp hair hanging down loose around her shoulders as it dried against the terry cloth robe. It was her only option for clothing that didn't smell of cigar smoke and a distillery. He watched her sit down on the edge of the bed, unwilling to be the first to speak. He even glanced over to her while he was tipping the bellman that brought up two silver-domed trays of food, as if he was worried about her darting out the open door while he was occupied.
Rory wasn't about to go anywhere, regardless of what she wanted to do. Her impulsivity never served her well, and she had a mountain of evidence surrounding her to back her up. She was far from home without a change of clothing, wearing a wedding ring, and on the slow recovery from a hangover. As soon as Logan removed the domes from the platters she dug in, grateful that he knew her so well. The thought that the man who knew her so well was her husband struck her in a darkly funny way, and she wasn't successful in suppressing a nervous giggle.
"What?" he asked, jumping at the slightest ice breaker.
She shook her head, intent on not explaining. When her eyes met his she was surprised at how nervous he appeared. He'd been barely picking at his food, to the point that he probably only ordered something because she was in need and he knew she didn't like eating alone. More specifically she didn't like to be watched while she ate, but he'd been unable to stop himself in that regard. Her left hand balled in a fist, feeling the odd bump along her ring finger with her thumb and snuck a peek at his left hand. A lump developed in her throat as she desperately tried to access any memory of having picked out the matching set with him. She came up empty. All she had was what he could tell her.
"It's just… it's crazy, right? I mean, the whole situation is unbelievable."
He tilted his head, in consent. "It's all moved pretty fast."
She put down her fork and wiped her napkin over her mouth. "Logan, it's okay. You can act freaked out by this; it won't hurt my feelings. I'm freaked out. I'd be more freaked out if you didn't have a good attorney on speed dial."
"An attorney?" he asked with an empty echo.
"Do we need two? Should I get my own? I mean, annulments have to be pretty standard procedure in these kinds of situations."
"You want an annulment?" he asked, his surprise making her cringe.
"Don't you?" she asked, just as surprised by his reaction as he'd been by hers.
He rubbed his temples slowly, as he fought for patience. "Don't you want to know the details of what happened last night?"
She pointed at him. "You already told me."
"I told you the bullet points. Look, I've been thinking about this a lot," he began.
She cut him off. "Since you got up? Yeah, that's long enough to contemplate the consequences of our situation."
"Stop calling it a situation," he chastised. "I didn't sleep much last night. We were up pretty late, and then after you fell asleep my mind kept going. I admit, it occurred to me that we could get an annulment and it would be like it never happened. But the more I thought about it, I realized there's no such thing as pretending we didn't do this. Even if we have an amicable annulment, it will still be saying that we don't want to be married."
Her breath left her. She put a hand to her chest at the sensation of being fully devoid of air. "You want to be married?"
"I think that since we are, we should take in all considerations before we do anything out of haste," he explained.
"We got married in Vegas. That's not hasty enough for you?" she cried out.
His head dropped in frustration. "I had no idea you were that drunk. You never drink more than three—you're always in control."
She blanched, holding out a palm toward him. "Wait… you're blaming me for this?"
He grabbed her hand and gave it a squeeze. "No, that's not… I'm not blaming you. I just think that if you remembered everything that happened last night, you might be where I am."
She tried to process what he was saying, but she took a different meaning from his words. "You weren't drunk at all?"
He shook his head. "I had two drinks with the guys, hours before I met up with you. And I had champagne, of course, with you afterward…. But you don't remember the champagne, do you?"
"Logan, I'm so sorry. I was waiting for you to come back, so I hung out on the casino floor, and they were serving drinks, so I had a couple. Then there was this crazy woman in a mink coat who bought a round of shots for our table when I was playing Pai Gow."
"So you had two drinks and a shot?" he summarized.
"Yes. But after the shot, my mouth tasted weird like I'd drank battery acid or something, so I flagged down a waitress and ordered another house drink."
"And after that, you're not sure," he said with an air of disappointment.
After her first sips of that palate-cleaner, things got foggy. Worse, he had been erased from her night entirely. At first she'd been upset that she'd missed having read him the riot act for his bad behavior, but now she felt guilty for making him have to recount such a monumental occasion—even if it turned out to be a mistake. The fact that he wasn't already on the phone with his family's lawyer gave her great pause. If ever there was a man she assumed would be desperate to get out of an unintended marriage—or any marriage, really—it was her boyfriend. Or, for the time being, her husband.
"I'm sorry," she said in a whisper. "Logan, I was really upset and I…," she cut off mid-sentence, not sure what to say to make up for the fact that she'd forgotten her own engagement and wedding in one foul swoop.
"I get that you were upset. I get why you were upset. I shouldn't have taken off like I did."
Her shoulders relaxed and she swung their hands a little. "No, you shouldn't have."
"Look, you like information. So what I'm proposing is that you let me give you all the details, and after we get back home then we'll decide what to do from there."
"You're serious about this," she said, not questioning him so much as reaffirming it for herself.
He nodded. "If it turns out that you don't remember anything and still think it's a bad idea once we're home, then it'll just take a call to one of my father's lawyers, like you said."
She paled at the thought of word getting back to his father about their impulsive elopement. The very nature of her grandmother's backbiting relationship with Logan's mother meant that Shira would undoubtedly pass on the information that Rory had been married and divorced faster than Britney Spear's Vegas-born fiasco, most likely at a society function for upped mortification value on Emily's part. "What about us, then? If we… can we go back to normal?"
He shrugged. "Honestly, I don't know. Maybe, but," he stopped to take a breath. "Do you think that we'll be happy, with that in the back of our minds?"
She had no idea. When she met him, she never believed he'd ever want to be her boyfriend. Once they were committed, after their break-up she assumed he would treat the matter like a failed experiment—but he hadn't. He'd convinced her that what they had was worth working on, worth fighting for. But never once had he suggested that he would ever want to get married—to her or anyone else in the future. The very idea of them as a married couple was only present in that moment, as they sat there holding hands on a bed the morning after the ceremony. She just hoped that Elvis hadn't presided over the ceremony. She had so many questions, she wasn't sure where to start. "Maybe you should start filling me in. And go slowly, please."
He smiled. "Okay. For starters, I would like it noted for the record that you were the one to bring up the idea of getting married."
Her mouth dropped open, and she let go of his hand. "That's not possible!"
He fixed her with a look of wounded pride. "I understand that you're going to have the urge to protest some of what I have to say, but if you could keep some of them to yourself, this might go easier."
She winced. "I'm not saying that it's impossible because of you, but I would never suggest getting married, drunk or sober. We're too young and I'm not done with school, and we're in Vegas, for crying out loud. Do you know how mad my mom will be when she finds out I got married without giving her the option to be there?"
He didn't argue. "I'll get to our families."
"You're being so very oddly calm about all of this," she whimpered.
"I stay very calm in moments of high stress. It's later that I freak out. So you should be prepared for that. I'm going to need you to keep me calm then."
She blinked at him, more than a few times. He was talking to her like she was his partner—his wife, in fact. That was a fact that was going to take more than a weekend to get used to. "I'll do my best."
He smiled at her response. "Remember how I told you we were looking at the fountain and you started yelling at me?"
The desire to defend her actions, even ones she didn't remember, welled up, but she did as he asked and didn't act on it. Her headache was starting to subside, thanks to the food, the water, and the aspirin; and completely in spite of the reality she was being briefed on.
"Yes."
"I didn't disagree with anything you said. I'd been feeling bad about the way I took off, leaving you in the lurch because of my own stupid pride, and when you called I decided that I'd come back early and arrange a red-eye flight back home."
"You were going to come back because of me?" she asked, touched by the sentiment. She made a mental note that next time they fought, she should call first and save them both a world of trouble.
"Yes. So when you were yelling at me, telling me all the things I was already thinking about myself, I agreed."
"You agreed with a drunken, angry rant coming from your irate girlfriend?" she asked suspiciously.
"You were right." He said it without pride, something he wasn't entirely great at. Logan was a lot of things, but not necessarily overtly humble. She stared at him with a renewed sense of awe.
"People were watching us, which makes sense seeing as we were yelling and then kissing in front of a huge crowd. While we were kissing, they actually started applauding. You held onto me really tight and pressed your cheek into mine. I figured you were embarrassed, but you whispered in my ear that they were all probably expecting me to drop to one knee right then and there after the show we just put on."
There was no way that he was that suggestible. Even on her best day, which that clearly was not, she wasn't that persuasive. "And so you did?"
He laughed. "Not hardly. But it put it in both of our minds. The crowd broke up and we took a walk. We started talking about the fact that if we wanted this relationship to last, we had to be able to confide in each other about everything."
Her mouth grew dry. "I can't argue with that logic."
"You didn't argue then either, but you did have a question. You asked how long I saw this relationship lasting."
"I had no idea I was so chatty when I drank," she commented, figuring she could find fault with her part in this as long as she kept quips about him to herself.
"You said yourself, drinking tends to highlight a person's true nature, and you are verbose even when you're three-sheets to the wind," he informed her with a measured amusement.
"I'm learning so much about myself today—I'm a loquacious drunk and I'm married." She wondered if she'd upset him as he took a breather. "Not that either of those things are bad," she urged.
"Do we need to take a break? It's a lot to take in, and we've only just finished breakfast. We could get out of here, I mean, it's Vegas, there are a million types of distraction here."
"I'm okay, really. We should at least get to the part where we get married."
He nodded, ready to grant her request. "I told you that I had no thoughts about ending the relationship, and you got kind of quiet before you asked if that meant I wanted to get married eventually."
It wasn't as bad as she'd expected, but at that point she wasn't quite sure what she should expect. "That's not really a proposal."
"It wasn't. But I told you that I'd given it thought, what it would be like to be married to you. Then I asked if you'd ever thought about marrying me."
She almost didn't want to hear what her drunken alter-ego had admitted to, but seeing as they did in fact get married it was water under the bridge. "What did I say?" she asked, her voice barely more than a whisper.
He held up her left hand. "You'd thought about it."
She felt embarrassed at the confession, even in the surreal moment of him telling her something personal about herself that she might never have admitted to him. Nothing felt normal anymore. She wondered if she would ever feel normal introducing herself as Logan's wife. Legally her name was still the same, but would she change it in a show of solidarity, theoretically becoming someone other than Rory Gilmore?
"It's normal to at least think about, isn't it, when you're in a long-term relationship?" she asked.
"I think so. I'd been thinking about it, a lot, actually. So much so that I'd stopped at a jewelry store on my way back from the fight, not with any intent to make a purchase, but once I got inside, I saw an engagement ring and I asked to see it and suddenly I was walking out with it."
Her eyes blinked and her only words came out in starts and stops. "You… bought… yesterday?"
"This ring," he said, gently running this thumb along the underside of the band and her ring finger.
She was beyond speechless. "Logan, I don't even know what to say."
He looked at her with renewed resolve. "Last night, when I showed it to you, you said yes."
She considered the ring. It was perhaps the single most stunning piece of jewelry she'd ever seen, aside from the Crown Jewels her mother had insisted on visiting while they were in London. Never in a million years had she ever envisioned anything of its ilk on her finger. "I can see why. It's amazing. Completely perfect," she assured him. "More than I deserve. I can possibly wrap my head around the fact we got engaged last night, but why did we decide to get married right away?"
His expression didn't give much away. "You made a joke about our families freaking out when we broke the news, except as lightly as you tried to put it, it was more of a concern than anything else. You said that if we wanted to get married without warring relatives and angry socialites, we'd have to elope while we were in Vegas and present it as a done deal after the fact."
"And you thought it was a good idea?" she cried out in disbelief.
"You had a point. My family isn't easy to marry into. It's not for the faint of heart, and even when it starts out as a decision made out of love, it gets trodden on by legal contracts and breakdowns of net worth and the monetary value of matrimony and party details and a million other idiotic niceties."
"You mean they'd want us to use a pre-nup?" she asked, hardly surprised. "Logan, I'm not interested in your money."
He looked at her seriously. "I know, but most other people are."
She sank back. "Oh."
"Yeah. It's not just protection in that regard, there's a whole clause in my inheritance related to marriage, and stipulations on what will be set aside for not only me and my wife, but also future children. It's the same deal that my father had, and his father had, with inflation and changes based on our updated net worth."
She frowned at that particular nugget. "So, you get more money if you're married?"
He shrugged. "It's more complicated than that. Look, the point is, we were happy, and we were impulsive, but we did this because we wanted to. It didn't come out of some ultimatum or panic or some outrageous attempt for me to show you that I was sorry."
He'd proposed and she'd accepted. That was the bottom line. When faced with the question—the kind of question that time to ponder wouldn't help her with—she'd chosen him. And when they thought of anything that might detract from their happiness, they'd chosen to bypass it. She smiled. "It really would have been a big show stopper if you'd pulled out the ring while we were at the fountain with the audience."
"Aw, Ace, you know I'm not showy like that. I got exactly the reception I wanted," he said as he leaned in and kissed her chastely on the mouth.
She put a hand on his chest, feeling the warmth of his skin and his heart beating faster than normal. "We weren't married by an Elvis impersonator, were we?" she asked with distaste.
He shook his head. "No, it was a Cher impersonator. He was really quite good," he said with a straight face, causing abject horror to cover hers. "Relax, Ace, I'm kidding. It was just a guy in a suit, and the next couple in line were our witnesses. They threw rice. You wrapped your arms around my neck and I twirled you around."
She smiled. "That sounds nice."
"Wish I'd sprung for the video instead of the champagne toast," he lamented.
She fervently wished she could make herself remember even the smallest detail of her wedding night, even being pelted with rice. She snapped her fingers. "I read this study, in a psych class I took where they did an experiment with electrical shocks to stimulate the brain in amnesia patients to regain access to memories. I could talk to my professor and see if," she said, stopping suddenly at the comically stunned expression he'd developed.
"I don't want you to have to zap your brain to remember marrying me."
She shrugged. "It was just a thought. I do want to remember. I just," she stopped again, this time out of melancholy.
"Don't," he supplied.
"I believe you. I just can't believe that we acted so…," she trailed off in thought grasping for the right word. Irrational, hasty, and rash all jumped to mind. She tried to temper them with the sweet story he'd told. It almost sounded exactly like them, except for the rushing to get married part. That bit just didn't fit with the them that she knew—at least not the them that she knew of late. The man she was sitting with was the same one that she'd jumped off scaffolding seven stories high with, the one that had rushed off with her without question to steal a boat, and who had driven her to swipe a bottle of champagne and get as undressed as possible in a spare room at her grandparents vow renewal. It wasn't the first time they'd acted on impulse due to their strong feelings for the other. The consequences were always present, save for their big jump—that hadn't resulted in the broken bones she'd anticipated; those had come later for him after an out-of-control jump he'd taken with his buddies. But she'd been there for him even then, despite her fear and her anger, for better or worse so it was. "Can we really do this?"
"Anything's possible," he said with something akin to certainty.
"Just because we cut them out of the process, that doesn't mean our families won't have opinions. Strong ones," she impressed.
He smiled. "Which is why we'll have to present a united, unwavering front."
"Like in war?" she added without irony.
"It will feel similar at times, especially at my house," he agreed.
"You're sure you want to do this? You realize that you'll have to attend Friday Night Dinners, at least when your work allows. And I'm not done with school, so we'll have to figure out a living situation that keeps me in New Haven. The commute to New York is an issue—not to mention if your dad decides to send you back to London or to Tokyo—what then?"
"You have doubts," he said easily.
"Don't you? Being with you is great, don't get me wrong, but we've never had to completely combine our lives. Making time for the other is different than being married."
"I admit it won't be as easy as the wedding. I realize it takes work and commitment and compromise. The question is, are you willing to do that?"
They were qualities she was usually fairly adept at, at least when it came to her school work. To put them into play in this way was an unknown factor; to apply them to a person for a lifetime. "I just need time to think about it. I'm not saying no, but," she said, praying that he'd accept her honesty for what it was. A promise of that magnitude deserved more than a drunken, if well meaning, acceptance. "I want to be sure, more than just us thinking it was a good idea last night. What if in a month from now we're both miserable and wishing we could take it back?"
He considered her question. "Maybe we need more than a weekend to decide. How about a month?"
"A month?" she parroted.
He nodded. "To try this out."
"You want to institute a trial period for our marriage?" she asked, just yet another thing she could barely believe was happening.
"It will give us time to see if it's working. And it'll take me at least a month to figure out what I'm going to do workwise. In a month you'll have a better idea of what you're going to do after graduation."
She wasn't quite sold. "So, we'll stay married and see if we like it?"
"We'll stay married and give it a real chance."
Panic washed over her anew. "Stay married." She stood up and paced for a minute, unable to sit still any longer. "If we do this, I have some conditions."
If he wanted to argue, he held his tongue well. He gestured for her to continue.
"I need to tell my mom alone."
He stood up as well, now ready to argue. "We should tell everyone as a team. Rory, everyone's going to try to talk us out of this. If we don't go together, telling them that this isn't negotiable, then someone's going to get to one of us."
"If I go to her and tell her that this is what I want, then she's going to be on our side. If we show up and ambush her with the fact that we got married in a blink of an eye like this… she's going to freak out. And she's going to be at the dinner when we tell my grandparents. We need her to not be sitting in the room, bringing up every last little reason that we shouldn't do this. You know my mom can't be quiet when she's mad. It's physically impossible. And," she hesitated, not wanting to bring up her mother's personal life with Logan without merit. "Things haven't been easy for her, with my dad leaving. I don't want to give her something else to be upset about right now. I want her to feel like she still has me, if she needs me. And she always needs me after stuff goes down with my dad."
He relaxed in surrender. "You handle Lorelai. But we tell Emily and Richard together. What about your dad?"
Rory crossed her arms. "I'm not sure yet. We're not talking a lot right now."
He put his arms around her, and she leaned into him while keeping her own arms locked around her body. She rested her cheek on his shoulder, relieved for the silent support. If they'd agreed to communicate more openly, it was a reassuring to know that everything didn't have to be expressed out loud. Luckily, she was used to her father disappointing her and the waves of emotion passed nearly as quickly as they came at that point in her life.
"We can figure that out later," he said softly as she pulled away, wiping away a couple of stray tears.
"What I do know is that until we're sure that this is what we both want, we need to keep our finances separate," she moved to her next condition to change the subject.
He was ready to argue again. "Rory, you don't have to prove anything to me in that regard."
She wasn't going to cave at his loving reassurance. "As things stand right now, as they stood last night," she emphasized, "We've shared expenses when we lived together, but we never combined our money. It would make things more complicated, later on, wouldn't it? I mean, it wouldn't be a simple annulment, it would be a separation of assets. That sounds like a divorce to me."
"We need to be realistic. Do you realistically think that keeping our money separate will make a separation feel easier?" he probed.
She tossed her hands in the air. "Honestly? I have no idea what would make any of this easier, but I'm making the best suggestions I can."
He backed down. "Okay, I get it. But you don't need to make the offer because you think it's what I want to hear."
"It's what I want, for me. I never want to be a kept woman. I want to be a contributing partner," she argued adamantly.
"Fine, for the time being, we'll keep our money separate. Got anything else?"
She came up empty then as she gave it thought, wondering when her mind would feel back at capacity. "Nope. I guess that covers it."
He wagged a finger at her. "Not so fast. Now it's my turn."
Her eyebrows shot up. "Your turn?"
"You get to name ground rules, then so do I. We're partners, remember?" he asked with his boyish smile.
Now it was her turn to watch him, her new husband, while wondering just what his conditions would be. She had a feeling that whatever he had on his mind would be a hurtle she'd have to work to jump.