Page 1 of Married to Number 22
One
Aiden
I wake up to a heavy knock on my condo’s front door and glare blearily at my phone in the charger.
“Two in the fucking morning,” I mutter, grabbing a pillow and clamping it over my ears. “It’s two o’clock in the morning on my fucking birthday, and I have to deal with this shit.”
Thisshitbeing my neighbors.
It’s not the first time they’ve pounded drunk on my door, desperate for their roommate to let them in to what they think is their condo.
This was sort of funny the first time.
I remember those days, drinking too much, being dumb.
But after the second and the third—where I gained status into the inner circle and a code to the keypad to their apartment door—it was no longer cute.
Now, six months and countless times of bailing them out later, I’m so not in the mood.
Especially when it’s my fucking birthday.
The knocking cuts off and I think—pray—that they’ve gotten the hint.
But it’s approximately two seconds later when it starts up again.
I glance at my phone again, see that really five minutes have passed, making it two-seventeen and officially my twenty-fifth birthday.
Some present.
Twenty-five years old and…still living next to a bevy of drunk morons.
Yup. Pro hockey player. Single. Relatively good-looking. Andstilldealing with annoying drunk frat boys.
I’m living the life.
Fucking hell. I need to buy a house, get away from neighbors above and below and on all sides of me.
But that’s a tomorrow Aiden problem.
Tonight it’s weighing answering the door, shuttling the dumbasses to their apartment across the hall, or clamping another pillow over my head and hoping for the best.
The first is annoying. And necessary.
Mostly because the second is just annoying. Ignoring the knocking only means extending the torture. They won’t give up, not now that they’ve begun, not now that I’ve been the person seeing them home when they’re drunk and disoriented (and disorderly, really) over the last half year.
So really, it’s less choice and more…an annoying necessity.
Sighing, I toss back the blankets and stomp to my apartment door, whipping it open to reveal…
Not Benny, the messiest of the frat boy quad from across the hall.
But rather…a slender brunette.
She’s standing on my doorstep and her gaze drops from mine, sliding down my body in a slow perusal. “Ho, mama,” she whispers.
Jesus Christ, it only gets worse.
And even more worse because the dragging of her gray eyes—gray eyes that seem semi-familiar—has my cock twitching.
