Accidentally Married to the Billionaire 3(27)

If it had been five or ten people who said that, she’d think they were jealous or they were just haters. Hundred. Actually, hundreds of Americans had taken time out of their days to go online and trash her. She had a psych professor who once told the class that if you keep hearing the same story about yourself, it’s time to listen to it. Here she heard the same story again and again. Not good enough. Only for the money. Slutty and ugly and unwanted.

It wasn’t the wine talking. It was the truth. There was no way a man like Brandon Cates really wanted a woman like her. Witness the amount of time they spent together, the frequent references to the six-month time limit. She read them all again, like drinking poison. Then a new one popped up. Because apparently she wasn’t the only person awake and alone late on a Friday night and obsessing about billionaire and society page staple Brandon Cates.

This is so sad. I remember seeing his picture when his mom died. He was small then and looked so lost. I guess that stepmother wasn’t much help if he ended up slumming around Vegas looking for a woman to pay attention to him. It’s such a shame that a fine young man with all the advantages ends up chained to some sleazy little social climber. I bet if his mom had lived, she would never have let it go this far. Shame on that Marjorie for taking advantage of a lonely ‘poor little rich boy’ who had no one to turn to and was about to lose all he had left of his poor father as well. I pity him and hope things work out for him after all, despite this foolish marriage, which hopefully will be short-lived.

It was the concern-troll who really got to her. Bringing up the dead mother, how lost he had been, how desperate he must be. It struck near the bone even more than the slut shaming had. Sure, she needed to take down her Tinder profile. It wasn’t like it was Grindr, for fuck’s sake. But in the court of public opinion, she’d already been drawn and quartered. As if whatever was real between the two of them made no difference compared to the disparity in their upbringing, their socioeconomic status. As if by being born poor and growing up to hold a steady job she was beneath him, with the morals of an alley cat (quoting directly from one of the ubiquitous shaming comments). She shook her head, shut off her tablet.

She tried to sleep but saw those lines of text behind her eyes, how nasty, how infected with STI’s, how Real Housewives of the Trailer Park she was to the public. How, in fact, disposable she was even to her husband. It wasn’t paranoia. It wasn’t chardonnay. It was starting to sound very, sickeningly reasonable.

When she’d gone out on him, had looked for someone to pay attention to her, had swiped that fateful Tinder swipe that was getting her so much grief in the comments, hadn’t Brandon stepped up to the plate with talk about real feelings? Hadn’t he closed the deal, as he referred to himself even now as the ‘closer’? He had taken his game to the next level rather than lose the pawn he needed to win the game. And she had been so absurdly naïve, so credulous. So ready to believe that he had feelings for her, too. Of course, she’d fallen in love with him. Who wouldn’t? The guy checked her Pinterest boards and ordered up custom perfect treats, thoughtful gifts, showed how attentive he could be. How easily a bit of swift smartphone research had been enough to prove he was her soul mate, that he understood her inside and out. Figured out she liked coffee and chocolate, was good in bed, and she fell hard. Marj had never, not once, felt this stupid, this doomed.

She tapped her phone, scrolled through the text archive, the ones she’d saved from Brandon, the screen captures of his photos from gossip sites, everything she’d accumulated to look at and reread and pore over. His messages were hardly a sonnet. She looked at them, wondering what she’d found so swoon worthy about them. Excuses about why he hadn’t returned a call. Instructions about an event they had to attend together. Sexual innuendo. More excuses about being busy with work. There were dozens of nearly interchangeable texts reading: Can’t talk now meeting. Crazy day will be late don’t w8 up. I’ll be late hope ur not tired. Wear the black thing?

Marj started archiving them into separate mailboxes. One labeled #toobusy and the other #bootycall. By the time she was done, there were over two hundred texts saved in the first folder, fifty in the second. That left a total of nine messages that didn’t belong in either. Seven texts giving instructions for what she should wear or say or do. One asking if she was okay because she hadn’t replied to a previous text. And one solitary text that said I miss you. That was the closest she had to a love letter or a declaration. Once he had missed her, or said he had. She felt dumb and easy and damn well alone. Those days together in Mexico when he’d given her his undivided attention—those hours she’d relived a thousand times in her lonely nights—had been damage control. Nothing more. And that secretary that he’d narrowly dodged, the perfect one? It wasn’t that he adored Marj too much to look at another woman. He was quite simply too smart to be tripped up by Lena’s spy.