Page 19 of Married to Number 22
Luna
The words takea second to penetrate…mostly because Aidenisn’tdoing any penetrating of his own.
Even though I’m desperate for it. Even though I asked for it.
Even though I can feel him practically vibrating with need as he reaches for a condom.
Even though I’m shaking from my orgasm, my body still humming with aftershocks of pleasure…and the need for more.
Forhim.
So yeah, it takes a minute for the voice, the words, thefootstepsto penetrate.
Aiden reacts faster, jumping off me, grabbing the blankets from the floor and tossing them over me…
Right as the footsteps grow louder, loud enough that I process exactly how close they are—that being directly outside Aiden’s bedroom.
And his door is open.
“Fuck,” I whisper, earning a flash of emerald eyes, one blazing second of contact that sears my insides, sends my pulse skyrocketing, my heart thudding hard against my rib cage.
That quick glance reveals nothing except that he’s feeling something big.
And I don’t know if it’s regret.
Or worry that I’m naked and people are walking toward us.
Or that it’s a woman calling out Happy Birthday.
The last is the worst. Or maybe the first—because if he regrets what we just did…I close my eyelids for a heartbeat, exhale silently.
The only one that doesn’t make me want to curl up into a tiny ball and pretend that the last eight hours—hell, the last eight days, eight months—haven’t actually happened is the middle one.
But it also doesn’t feel great.
Because I made a promise to myself last night that I wasn’t going through with this, wasn’t going to dump my shit on his doorstep…
And I’m still here.
I don’t have time to sit in those emotions, those regrets, because the footsteps come to a crescendo and Aiden is hurrying toward that open doorway.
He doesn’t make it there first.
A woman steps into the open doorway, and that has me clinging to the comforter Aiden tossed over me, wanting to melt into the sheets, the mattress, hoping for the floor to magically swallow me up and deposit me onto the street below.
Preferably with my clothes on.
But I’d take any escape at this point.
A man follows the woman. And then another woman, this one younger, and two more men follow her, both around the younger woman’s age.
No, I think.
Irealize—my horror growing.
Because I know that the younger woman is thirty-two, her brothers—including Aiden—twenty-nine, twenty-seven, and…today, or rather at two-something last night, twenty-five.
Aiden’s family is standing in his hallway.
