Page 5 of Forbidden Billionaires: Vol. 3
A Whirlwind of Color - Chapter3
Tuesday
One couple at a time came into my room and pretended to know me. A me that didn’t exist. A fabrication in their minds. I knew who I was. And I didn’t belong in this hospital bed surrounded by strangers.
They told me story after story, all which sounded made up. And almost all the stories featured the man standing in the corner of the room, staring too intently at me. James. My make-believe husband. Not once did a smile cross his face at hearing any of the funny memories. Not once did his scowl disappear.
I tore my eyes away from him and stared back at the couple in front of me. A blonde with a kind smile and a man with dark eyes and dark hair. They both looked tan like they had just been on the beach. And they definitely looked older than me. Clearly I wasn’t really friends with all these old people. If this was some sort of prank, they should have hired younger actors.
The woman glanced nervously at the man and both their smiles disappeared. I had been tuning them out. Had they said something funny? Something I should have laughed at or remembered?
“First you two ruined my proposal and now my honeymoon too? What am I going to do with you?” The guy named Mason winked at me.
That explained why they were so tan. They had been on their honeymoon. But it didn’t explain anything else he said. Or whohe was. Or why I was friends with either of them in this fantasy world.
“You just got married?” I asked. “Congratulations.”How the hell can I get out of here?
The woman started blinking fast, like tears were threatening to spill. “Yeah, Penny. You were my matron of honor.”
Matron of honor.I stared at her. So we weren’t just friends in this made up reality. We were really good friends. Best friends, possibly. I shook my head. I already had a best friend. Where was Melissa anyway?
The woman put her hand on my blanket covered shin. “Don’t you remember?” Her smile wavered when I didn’t immediately respond. She removed her hand like I had burned her and looked up at her husband.
He cleared his throat. “I know Rob is desperate to see you. He’s probably here by now. We’ll go let him know it’s his turn.”
I would have asked who Rob was, but I didn’t want to hear another story. The two of them walked out of the room, leaving James and me alone.
I didn’t know where to look so I settled on my intertwined fingers. I wished he would leave. Then I could find a way to get out of this room. The silence was heavy between us. I could feel his eyes on me. But I didn’t know what he wanted. And even if I had known, I doubted I could give it to him. I wasn’t who he thought I was.
But the silence was driving me insane. “How long have we been married in this scenario?” I asked, while still staring at my hands.
He hesitated, his eyes boring into me. “A little over four years.”
That was a long time. Four years that I couldn’t remember because they had never really happened. I wished he would stop staring. I wished he’d leave me in peace. “Did we date for a while before that?” I asked, trying desperately to vanquish the awkward tension in the air. I had never been good in situations filled with awkwardness. My mouth usually filled the silence with incoherent nonsense. Or I’d just stay mute until the awkwardness felt physically painful.
“We were engaged for two and a half years.”
That was an odd way to answer that question. I looked up from my hands. “But how long did we date before our fake engagement?”
His eyes locked with mine. “I proposed to you two months after I met you.”
I laughed.
He didn’t.
I bit the inside of my lip. We’d been married for four years. Engaged for two and a half. And my mom had said I was 26.Yeah, right.I stared at him. That would have meant that he proposed to me when I was 19. The same age I actually was. Iracked my brain, trying to remember him. But there was nothing there. Because none of this was real.
Besides, who gets engaged when they’re 19? Not me. Certainly not me. I had never even officially had a boyfriend. Austin and his stupid lack of labels. He was an idiot and surely even he wouldn’t propose to someone when he was 19. But James was older than me. That was obvious. There was no way he had been 19 when he proposed in this twisted fairytale he was spewing.
I stared at him staring at me. “How old are you?”
“Thirty four.”
Thirty four?“You’re fifteen years old than me!”
The corners of his mouth turned up ever so slightly. “Penny, you’re not 19. You’re 26. And you’ll be 27 in a few months. You’ve always been pretty adamant about the fact that I’m only seven years older than you.”
“That doesn’t change the fact that you fake proposed to a 19 year old when you were what...27?”
