They say happy girls are the prettiest.

Well, not they—Audrey Hepburn said it first, then every idiot with big hair and emptier brains parroted it like they were spouting Nietzsche or something.

In my oh so jaded opinion, happy girls are not the prettiest.

I’m not Nietzsche. Or Audrey Hepburn for that matter. I’m no one but a whore if we wanted to get down to the ugly truth.

And I lived with ugly truth.

In sadness.

Pain.

Death.

And the first thing people noticed about me was that I was pretty.

Well, the men I hung around with—the men I whored myself out to—didn’t exactly call me pretty. They called me hot. Smokin’. Fuckable. Boner on two legs.

But it’s the same sentiment.

From bikers, at least.

I was pretty. One of the prettiest out of the small collection of ‘club girls’ the New Mexico chapter of the Sons of Templar MC kept on rotation. There were temporary girls that entertained the men for a night, a week. But as hot as the men were—and they were—and as good as they were in bed—and they were—this life wasn’t suited to most girls.

For a start, this life was full of violence, pain, death.

These men broke the law on the daily, lived by principles that would make society blanch in its beige colored confines.

But honestly, with the hotness of these men, it was something a lot of women got over. They were willing to bear it, the ones with stronger stomachs. It usually wasn’t them that defined their presence at the club as temporary. It was the fact that these men didn’t want chains. It was the entire reason one percenter motorcycle clubs existed.

And women were the biggest chains of all.

Or should I say, love was the biggest chain of all.

Women just seemed to chase it more than men. I thought that women were, as a rule, smarter than men in most ways. But not with their ruthless, almost violent search for love.

Love wasn’t something to be searched for, dreamed about, romanticized. Love wasn’t beautiful. It was the ugliest and most dangerous thing on this earth. The only thing more dangerous was arguably the men I fucked on rotation.

And that’s all I did.

I fucked.

No messy feelings.

And more importantly, no expectations.

That’s what got most women kicked out of the clubhouse, the fairy tale that this rugged, muscled and dangerous biker might be tamed. That they might fall in love with the girl who drunkenly put out at a club party.

That shit didn’t happen.

Or it happened once, with Macy. But that was a big exception to the rule.

That was it. The one freaky deaky miracle which got a former club girl her version of a fucked up fairy tale with Hansen. But the rest of the men didn’t want the fairy tale. They’d happily screw the princess five ways from Sunday, but no way would they ride off into the sunset with her. They’d pat her gently on the ass, tell her it was time to leave and search for another princess to defile.

And if they couldn’t find that, they’d find the antithesis of that princess—the club girls. Already defiled from the world.

The core group of club girls was small because of that reason, the world had fucked us five ways from Sunday and no way did we get an orgasm at the end, nor a gentle pat on the ass. More like a series of death blows to the soul. We were looking for the same kind of freedom as the men wearing the cuts were. Because we couldn’t patch in as members, we lived the lifestyle in a different way.

And the group got even smaller when the aforementioned Macy caught Hansen’s eye after pining after him for years. And now they’re married. Had one kid, another on the way. Happy ever after.

If anyone was going to be the princess amongst the club girls, it was her. She had been the prettiest in the group. Precisely because she wasn’t the typical ‘club girl.’ The rest of us were big tits, bigger hair, small clothes and a lot of makeup. She was a fucking pixie with her close-cropped hair and hippy outfits. But she worked it. She had a personality that radiated light and invited you in. I kept my distance from her. From that inviting light. Not because I was jealous. Or maybe because I was jealous.

Not of her appearance.

But of the fact she seemed to know exactly who she was. That she wasn’t whoring herself out to the club to get some kind of vindication from a life that left her aimless and broken. She was just...here. She was a total nerd, liked all sorts of magical and weird shit.

She was her own woman.

With her own demons of course.

But she owned her own demons.

Not many people—man or woman—did that.

Myself included.

Where Macy was willing to go her own way, break all stereotypes with her clothes, with her hairstyle, her taste in pop culture, I clung to my outward persona of club girl. I worked my blonde hair, my God given breasts, my body, my ability to suck great dick. Because I was empty.

Now that Macy was no longer a club girl, I was the prettiest of the group.

And didn’t that, by Audrey’s standards, mean I had to be the happiest?

I wasn’t happy. Wasn’t even close to it. Sure, I smiled with my red painted lips, which were the perfect size and shape for giving head if you wanted to know—but smiles were empty, just like promises.

And happiness. That’s the emptiest of them all.

But this world is kind of empty. Hollow, with everything on the surface, everything so superficial it was sickening. That’s why the world that cited happiness to be the reason for beauty.

Precisely why I didn’t live in that world.

Precisely why I was a biker whore.

Because the world I chose for myself was so much better than the empty one I was forced into. It was violent. Gritty. Dangerous. Ugly.

And it was exactly where I belonged.

The men weren’t bad, in fact, for outlaws, they were the closest version of good you could find. Sure, they were murderers, thieves, and criminals, but we couldn’t all be perfect.

Plus, they never put their hands on women in violence, and not without their permission. Kind of the reason why I decided to stay after stumbling upon the Sons of Templar clubhouse in New Mexico on a bender. Definitely the reason I stayed and somehow slotted right into the role of ‘club whore.’ It fit perfectly. Like it was made for me. I only had to carve small pieces of myself off in order to fit in.

“Scar!” Lukas yelled, jerking me out of my contemplation of my beer bottle.

I had peeled off the majority of the label.

I turned just as the newly patched Lukas sauntered up to me, grinning ear to ear.

He was young and had only been fully patched for less than a month. That smile would leave him soon. It was a miracle he still had it.

A month was a long time in outlaw world.

Enough time to dig many graves, enough time to find yourself in one of your own. We hadn’t had any deaths lately, but shit was going down, I knew that. The men needed more talking and less fucking. They wanted me to stay the night.

Death was coming to the Sons of Templar and the only way they knew to stave off that cold grip was with a warm body. I was more than happy to oblige since that was the reason I was here in the first place. My body may have been warm, but my soul was ice cold.

“Picking at the label of your beer bottle means you’re sexually frustrated, you know that?” Lukas asked, still grinning, though his eyes were darkening as he pulled me off my stool, resting his hand on my bare hip. I was wearing a crop that only just covered my ribcage and a skirt that barely concealed my ass. It was mid-December, so it wasn’t exactly weather-appropriate, but I was a whore, we were supposed to show skin, even in the middle of winter. Plus, I craved the chill, the numbness that came with it.

“No, I didn’t know that,” I replied, my voice husky and body responding. I was getting chilly in more ways than one, all this contemplation venturing too close to the emotional arctic.

Lukas yanked at my body so it was flush to his, eyes on my lips—he knew what they could do, after all. “Want me to help you with that frustration?”

I smiled, empty and false. “Yeah, I’m thinking that’s a great idea.”

He laid his lips on mine, kissing me deeply. He was a great kisser and not at all bad on the eyes, and I immediately leaned into the small amount of desire that flickered at the bottom of my stomach.

He pulled away from the kiss and grinned at me wickedly, snatching onto my hand to drag me back toward the living quarters, through the common room.

I was familiar with almost every man’s bedroom at the clubhouse.

That was my job. My role. Had been for the last five years and it would be until my body started to fail me.

I was the blond with big tits, long hair, no morals and blowjob lips after all. It was made for me.

* * *

It was after three in the morning that I pulled my car into the parking lot in front of my apartment. Lukas had been full of need. Likely need to fuck something out of himself, whatever it was the club had been up to these days.

I knew a little, and a little was a lot more than a club girl should. But I was one of the longest remaining women—Macy didn’t count since she’d taken herself farther up the totem pole—and I was adept with numbers. Grim, the president, had considered me loyal enough to take over the books. Not something that was common for a club girl. In fact, I was pretty sure I was the first civilian to be given the role. And that was just for the legit businesses ran by the Sons of Templar. Levi, one of the oldest members handled the ‘real’ books.

But still, Grim giving me that role was a big deal.

“You know what happens if you get curious or chatty,” he said, voice gravelly, threat woven into the words the first day I took over.

I nodded once. “Not curious or chatty by nature.”

The corner of his wrinkled mouth turned up, but his eyes remained dark, cold. He was getting up there in age, would likely be passing the gavel over soon, but he had life in him yet. More importantly, the ability to dole out death when needed.

“Yeah, know that. Club trusts you. Don’t fuck that up.”

“I won’t,” I promised.

Mainly because it was an anchor to the club for when my looks started to fade, my tits started to sag. But also because fucking it up would likely mean the end of my life.

Since I knew the books, I knew there was an influx of cash in the past year. Which was great for the club. Not so great for the safety of its members.

They needed something to help them forget that, a willing body.

Lukas had made the most of it. He was making noises about me staying with him for longer, making a habit of taking me to bed every night since he’d patched in. It was precisely why I left at three in the morning instead of staying.

I wasn’t about to give him the wrong idea.

The wrong idea that I could be anything more than a warm body. My soul was far too cold for anything else.

So I left the warm, loud, gritty and messy clubhouse for my apartment.

I slammed the door, purposefully, loudly, if only to take away the silence that I knew was awaiting me in my crappy apartment.

Well, it wasn’t really silence, since my crappy apartment had thin walls so I could hear the teenage kid next door watching some sitcom—his mom worked the nightshift and he had insomnia—and the couple on the other side of me screaming at each other. They were either fighting or fucking, the way of the world.

Sirens howled in the distance.

It wasn’t quiet, technically.

But when you were in an empty apartment, with no one waiting, no one coming home, no one left on this fucking planet who gave a shit about you, Metallica could be playing in the living room and the silence of my solitude would be fucking deafening.

I rustled through my purse to find my headphones, shove them in my ears and put on my classical playlist. Looking at me, I’m sure most people would think my tastes went toward Nickelback or the aforementioned Metallica.

I lived a hard life. It wasn’t my choice, but it’s what I was dealt and I sure as shit wasn’t going to whine about it. I leaned into that hardness, from the way I dressed to the way I spoke, the fact I whored myself out to a motorcycle club.

I owned it.

But my secret was, I yearned to have a little softness in my life. To have a little softness left in me. I wouldn’t get that, but I could at least pretend I did from the moment I put those headphones on.

And the vodka I’d just gotten out of the freezer helped too.

* * *

I collapsed on my bed after an hour and a quarter bottle of vodka, expecting sleep to come quickly, as tiredness spread to my every limb.

But no matter how tired I am—to the bone, to the soul—there’s nothing like the silence in an empty apartment, an empty life to serve as an instant shot of emotional caffeine.

I lay flat on my back, shadows watching me as I stared blankly at the ceiling. The feeling of needing to grow wings so I could fly away from this feeling, this fucking life, was so strong I almost cried out. My need to sink so far into my mattress I disappeared was a physical ache.

I wanted to crawl out of my skin just so I could escape myself, the utter fucking loneliness for a second, a moment.

But the night didn’t give that.

In the light, when shadows pretended to be gone, demons hid in corners and there were distractions, it was okay. I could breathe around it. The nights were mostly okay too, since I was on the lap of some biker, surrounded by the motley family I whored myself out to. Then later in the night I was riding some other biker, letting him inside my body, letting him fill me up.

But it was those early hours, the ones where I crawled out of whatever bed I’d landed in, dragged myself home and let the loneliness sink into my bones, that’s when it hit me. That’s when the strong, hard and badass whore disappeared and the weak, soft and bloodstained girl made her appearance. That’s where I welcomed doubts about the lifestyle I chose. The one, in the light, and in the loud nights at the clubhouse, I was sure was saving my life. But in this darkness, I wasn’t so sure. Because how bad did some boring asshole with a boring suit and a stupid haircut sound right now?

He wouldn’t make me happy.

Surely wouldn’t give me the depraved sex I required to not feel so dirty.

It would be a life, in the daylight I’d surely despise.

But in the night, I’d be in a sleigh bed in a beige bedroom with a beige man sleeping next to me.

I wouldn’t be so fucking alone it felt like the very air sliced into me.

At some point I drifted off, to find solace in my nightmares because even nightmares were preferable company than no company at all.

But the nightmare hadn’t even begun.