The Runaway Bride - A Captive Flame Book One

A Captive Flame:

The Runaway Bride

By Ashley Spector

Copyright 2014 by Ashley Spector

All rights reserved. Except for use in any
review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in
part by any means, now known or hereafter invented, including
xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the explicit
written permission of the author.

Published by Forbidden Fruit Press

All characters depicted in this fictional
work are consenting adults, of at least eighteen years of age. Any
resemblance to persons living or deceased, particular businesses,
events, or exact locations are entirely coincidental.

***

A taste of things to
come:

The man opened up the
shopping bag and withdrew the zipper bag that I had stuffed into
it. Glancing at me, he unzipped the bag and pulled out my wedding
dress. “This is interesting,” he commented, holding my gaze for a
long, uncomfortable moment. My heart was pounding in my chest
still, and my palms were clammy with sweat. I opened my mouth to
speak but nothing came out. “Put it on. Right now.” I stepped
backward, blood rushing into my face. I looked at the wedding dress
I had struggled to get into earlier in the day—the same one that I
had nearly ripped getting out of when I’d changed into my
bargain-basement club outfit—and shook my head. “My plane, my
rules. Put it on.” He held it out to me.

“Can I at least use
the restroom to change?” The man shook his head.

“Change right
here."

***

Table of Contents:

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter One

~

It was only when I
was sitting at the bar, downing my third shot of whiskey—the first
shot that didn’t tremble in my nervous hands—that I realized that
there was something deeply wrong. I was in the hotel bar, in my
wedding dress, my veil left upstairs; on an impulse, seeing myself
in the mirror, I had rushed out of my room, deciding I needed
something very strong to drink. My hands shook and at every moment
I expected the bartender to tell me that I was insane—that I should
be getting ready for the best day of my life, not sitting at the
bar downing shots like an alcoholic. I knew that I should be happy;
I should be overjoyed. I had been groomed for years to think of
marriage as a foregone conclusion in my life, something I had to
accomplish to reach some sacred, perfected form of womanhood.

Instead of filling me
with joy, the sight of myself in a wedding dress, my hair perfectly
done up, my makeup professionally applied, filled me with a kind of
dread that I couldn’t put words to, but which was too much for me
to face. When I’d arrived at the hotel bar, I’d noticed it was
nearly empty—thankfully so. I sat down and ordered my first shot,
asking the bartender for whiskey; I didn’t even particularly like
whiskey, but it seemed like a safer bet than tequila, and not quite
as tawdry as something like vodka. The bartender hadn’t said
anything at all, and it occurred to me to wonder just how many
women in wedding dresses showed up at his bar during his shift,
asking for shots. But I didn’t; there were just some things I
didn’t care to know.

It wasn’t that I had
anything against marriage itself. It wasn’t even a question of
whether or not I cared about the man I was going to marry. Johnny
was a great guy; in fact, on paper I couldn’t have asked for a
better man to end up spending the rest of my life with. He had a
stable job where he made more than enough money to live on, and he
was romantic and caring. He took me on thoughtful dates, and had
invited me to move in with him when we had only been dating for a
few months—a sure sign, my friends had all said, that he was
serious about me.

I hadn’t thought of
it particularly seriously at the time; I just thought that moving
in together made sense, since we spent so much time in each other’s
company anyway. But several months after that, Johnny surprised
me—one of the few times he managed to do that in our
relationship—by proposing during dinner. I was taken so much by
shock that the habit of years worth of instruction prompted me to
say yes before I really even thought about whether or not I wanted
to be married—and whether I wanted a marriage to him in
particular.

Of course, when I
brought that fact up to my friends, I heard chapter and verse about
cold feet, about the fact that I simply didn’t love myself enough
to think I was a good enough wife for a man like Johnny. It didn’t
hurt that that was partially true—Johnny was a great guy, and I
knew that he was exactly the kind of guy who was patient enough to
deal with my flights of fancy without getting annoyed—a real
rarity. Most of my adult relationships had ended with exes who had
no desire at all to ever see me again, much less hear my name; I
would become bored and frustrated, and instead of finding their
praises and compliments endearing, I would start to find them
irritating, until I couldn’t even stand to be told “I love you”
anymore. And then, recognizing the futility of even trying to fix
what had gone so horribly awry, I would leave.

I had managed to last
with Johnny. Even up until the day of our wedding, I was able to
enjoy our life together. In some respects, I realized that I hadn’t
really viewed our marriage as an absolute thing—or even as a real
thing. When I had tried on wedding dresses, it had been like I was
a little girl pretending to get married, and even when I sent out
the invitations, and made the arrangements, and did all the things
that I was supposed to do as a bride-to-be, there was that element
of playing pretend. As though at any moment a camera crew would
rush out and tell me that of course Johnny wasn’t actually planning
to marry me—it was all the set up for some prank show. And then I
would laugh, and then everything would go back to the way it had
been before.

I drank a glass of
water to do something about the tipsiness I was already starting to
feel, only to order another shot of whiskey. If it really bothered
Johnny to have his bride show up at the church half-drunk, then he
clearly wasn’t ready to marry me. I looked down into the empty shot
glass and thought to myself that neither of us was really ready to
marry the other. We had only been seeing each other for about a
year total—hardly long enough to know each other at all. We were
still in the exciting, new phase of the relationship, and I knew
that as things dragged on, we would both change. The thought of how
things could go between us, knowing that I would probably
eventually find myself bored of Johnny, and only after being
married to him, sent a shiver through me. I held off on ordering
another shot; I knew better than to rush into five or more shots of
whiskey on a nearly empty stomach, even with water mixed in.

My
phone vibrated and chirped and I looked down.
When are you leaving for the
church?
The sight
of the text message made my stomach churn. I closed my eyes for a
moment. When was I leaving for the church? When was I going to
gather up the courage to go through with this? I wondered abruptly,
my mind flipping over in its slightly tipsy stupor—was it even
something I wanted to go through with? I thought about the fact
that Johnny and I hadn’t been dating for very long. When he had
asked me to move in with him, I should have probably held off on
accepting; it had only been a few months after we had started
seeing each other, and if any other guy had asked me to move in so
soon, I would have likely outright broken up with him. But somehow
Johnny had managed to put it to me in such a way that it seemed
more like a matter of convenience rather than the serious decision
that it really had been. I spun the empty shot glass on its base,
pressing my lips together. Johnny and I didn’t fight—somehow the
fact of that bothered me. We had never had an actual fight the
entire time we’d been together. There had been a few times when I
had been nearly certain that it would happen, that I had steeled
myself for him to start yelling—but he would always change the
subject, rather than confronting the issue, or he would compromise
for me. Something deep inside of me resented that fact.

As I sat at the bar,
pretending not to notice the curious glances that landed on me, I
considered the situation from every angle I could think of. Johnny
was a good guy, but he had rushed me to my decision. I wondered
what it would be like to really, truly live with him as his wife.
He had been sweet and caring to me all this time, but once he had
me for good—or as close to permanently as society would allow—would
he suddenly stop putting effort into the relationship? The sex
wasn’t bad, I thought with a hiccup. It wasn’t the most
earth-shattering sex I’d ever had, but Johnny was good enough to
get me off consistently, which was more than I could say for some
of the partners I’d had in the past. I wracked my brain, trying to
think of what we really, truly had in common. We had a few TV shows
that we both liked, we shared the same general taste in music, but
in terms of the hard, firm similarities, I came up blank. I didn’t
think I even knew Johnny well enough to be able to say what
specifically made us compatible, short of a kind of persistence on
his end.

I
dug a penny out of my purse; all of my shots had been charged to my
room, thankfully—I wasn’t carrying very much cash with me at the
moment. But the penny had been given to me as my ‘something old’ by
one of my friends. It was from 1969, weathered and faintly greening
from all the copper. I thought to myself that random chance was as
good a method as any. I would flip the coin. If it landed on heads,
I would go through with the wedding and make the most of the
marriage to Johnny. If it landed on tails, I would leave it all
behind and find some way out of the resort, some way on the road.
I’d have to go pretty far—my whole family, my friends, as well as
Johnny would be extremely disappointed in me. As I contemplated the
penny, my phone buzzed—I cringed, looking at the screen.
Rhonda, where are you?
Rhonda, did you go down to the pool or something? Rhonda, text me
back.
My friends—my
bridal party—were looking for me, my mom was looking for me,
everyone I knew seemed to be looking for me. It was only a little
more than an hour before the wedding was supposed to start, and I
had slipped out of my empty room after the stylist had left,
rushing down to the bar. I had had the crazy feeling that the walls
of my hotel room were closing around me, that if I stayed in the
room one moment longer I’d lose my mind and start screaming—and
never stop.

I ignored my phone
for the moment, picking the penny up. I reminded myself of the
requirements—heads I would stay, tails I would leave. I flipped the
coin, and held my breath as it flipped and turned in the air,
hovering just an instant before it fell to the bar top. It
clattered and rolled, wobbling on its edges, and I watched it
intently until it finally came to a stop. Heads. I pressed my lips
together; for a moment I thought that it was decided, but then I
felt something like a mental itch. Most times when people settled
things with a coin toss, they did at least two out of three—I
should give myself at least equal odds. I flipped the coin again,
and watched it carefully until it landed, once more, on heads. What
were the odds of that? I picked it up and flipped it again and
again. Heads. Heads again. Heads a fifth time. Eight times I
flipped the coin, and eight times it landed on heads. I turned the
penny over in my hand to make sure that it actually had a tails
side—it did, the Lincoln memorial looking dingy and old, but it was
definitely there. I examined the penny closely to see if there was
more material on one side or the other—there had to be some logical
explanation for why, against all the odds I could think of, it
hadn’t landed on tails even once. There should be a fifty-fifty
shot for one side or the other at any given time.

I set the penny down
on the bar top and ordered another shot. I considered what would
really happen if I married Johnny. He certainly seemed happy with
me, and I supposed I was happy with him, but I couldn’t imagine
being with him the rest of my life. I thought to myself that in
spite of what the penny was telling me, I couldn’t go through with
it. I just couldn’t imagine myself staying happy with Johnny as his
wife—even making him happy was a burden that I couldn’t manage for
much longer, no matter how good he had been to me. I stood up from
the bar stool and signed the receipt accepting the charges for my
handful of shots and left the hotel, wandering around aimlessly
until I could find a good exit that wasn’t likely to result in me
running into someone from the wedding party.