“Hey, Cinderella. You ready to ride?”

Layla looked at Gareth over her shoulder. She was sitting on one of the cots set up in a back room for the Marauders when they couldn’t afford to leave the clubhouse, or when they were too drunk to. She’d taken her hair down, letting it fall over her shoulders as she sat in the dark nursing a beer.

“I thought we weren’t going out until tomorrow?”

“We’re not,” Gareth said, leaning against the doorframe. He folded his arms. “But I wanna make sure you’re ready for it, since you insist on comin’ and all.”

Layla shrugged. “ ‘Bout as ready as I can be, I guess,” she told him, shifting against the scratchy, over-starched sheets. He moved away from the door and to her side, stalking through the dark like a wolf on the prowl.

“Here,” he said. “For your nerves. So you can sleep.” He handed her a joint and she took it as he pulled another from behind his ear.

He lit hers first, almost like a gentleman, before he sat down on the edge of the cot and leaned back against the wall, pulling a long drag from the joint in his mouth. It lit up cherry red before fading into the dark again.

“Noticed you got some new clothes. Jesse get ‘em for you?”

She nodded and looked away. “Can’t just wear the same outfit every day, you know,” she said. “Don’t worry. It wasn’t club money. It was his.”

“Shit. Club money. I don’t give a fuck about that,” Gareth said, watching as she took her own shaky drag. She had a hard time not trembling under his gaze, but tonight it was softer, warmer somehow. He looked genuinely concerned. “I wanna know what’s goin’ on, is all.”

“You mean you wanna know if I’m fuckin’ him,” Layla said. She pulled her bare feet away from him. “But it’s none of your business.”

“Maybe not,” he mumbled around the paper. He seized both her ankles and pulled her back toward him, her feet resting in his lap. Layla was about to protest, but then he began to rub them so gently she lost the words. He worked his thumbs into the arches.

“Y’know, if this were any other club, you’d be gettin’ passed around on our schedule,” he said, and of course by our, he meant the men. “But here you are gettin’ shit all mixed up. How d’you do that, beauty queen? How d’you have the club president and his… whatever the fuck I am both chasin’ after you like we ain’t got no other choice?”

Layla held in the smoke and closed her eyes. She felt it swirl in her lungs, filling them to the very top and soaking into her body. She blew it out her nose before answering.

“No one asked you to chase me,” she said at last. “And no matter what kind of club this is now or was before, I was never gonna get passed around.”

“This was s’posed to be a boys club kinda thing,” Gareth muttered. “That’s the whole point of an MC, ain’t it? Bunch’a men and their bikes takin’ no shit from nobody, doin’ as they please, livin’ outside the law like real men. Alpha shit, y’know?”

Layla settled back against the wall. She laughed. “Maybe that’s ‘cause women haven’t had a say yet. Shit, maybe if you’d consulted a few, the rules would be a little bit different across the board.”

“I don’t hear a lotta complain’ over at the Bottle Cap,” he said with a shrug. “Girls over there seem pretty happy with their arrangements.”

“Yeah, ‘cause what other choice do most of them have?” Layla asked him. “MCs attract the outcasts, right? The ones with nowhere to go? So of course most of the women they find are ones who’re desperate for someplace to go, somewhere to belong. I bet a lot of them come from places where there’s a hell of a lot worse going on than anything the MCs inflict on them. When those are your options, what are you gonna complain about?”

Gareth didn’t answer, and Layla took another drag. She could feel her body starting to tingle and hear the rush of her blood steady in her ears. She said, “I’m not like them. I have options. I want more.”

“Yeah, I get it,” Gareth said. He moved his fingers up to her ankles and caressed them gently. “You’re spoiled.”

“See?” Layla said. “That right there—that’s just it. A man says he wants the world on a platter and he’s ambitious. A woman says she wants the same thing, she’s spoiled. Greedy. Whatever. It isn’t fair.”

“Well I didn’t make the world, beauty queen,” Gareth said. “I just live in it. Don’t blame that shit on me.”

“I’m not,” she argued. She could feel the heavy thrumming of her heart now, a beat that threatened to carry her away into the dark if she didn’t force her eyes open. “I’m just sayin’ that you could change it, if you wanted to bad enough.”

“Is that what you’re gonna do?” he asked, now moving up her calves. The pressure was delicious and Layla could feel her mouth water. “You’re gonna change the way the Marauders work?”

“Maybe,” she answered. She blew smoke in his direction and watched it curl into his eyes. “You got a problem with that?”

Gareth looked at her for a moment, his hands both resting on her knees. Then he pursed his lips and shrugged.

“I dunno,” he said with a wry smile. “Guess I ain’t got no complaints so far.”

He ran his hands up her thighs to her hips and pulled her a little closer to him. As she looked up at him, she saw a little flicker in his eyes.

“But you’re gonna make a choice eventually. Between me’n Jesse, I mean. Aren’t you?”

Layla let the joint dangle from her lips. “Are you afraid I’m gonna choose him?”

Gareth didn’t say anything for a while. Then he stood up, letting Layla’s legs drift lazily back onto the cot.

“You’re a smart girl,” he said at the doorway. “And you’re more than I would’ve guessed.” He paused. “And I don’t doubt that whatever you decide you want, you’ll get. You’re right. I would admire that in a man.”

Layla raised her eyebrows. “But in me?”

Gareth lowered his head. When he lifted it again, he grinned.

“Baby steps, Cinderella,” he told her. “Rome wasn’t built in a day, y’know.”

As soon as his back was turned, Layla smiled. It wasn’t much, but it wasn’t nothing, either.

She finished up her joint, drank the rest of her beer, and then settled down into the cot in her ten-dollar pajamas, wondering if she was ready to ride.

More than that, if Jesse and Gareth did expect her to choose, who would she pick? They were so unalike, and that was what intrigued her about them. How could she settle for just one of them, knowing how each made her feel?

Choices. Layla had so many of them. In another time that seemed like forever ago, she would have counted that as a good thing.

But now each choice she made came with unforeseeable consequences, and for the first time in her life, Layla wished she had someone around to make these big decisions for her.