The Runaway Bride

Three(Edited)

Edited ✓

III: Refuge

ON THE WAY SIMONE DECIDED that she would visit Florida. Take a nice, relaxing weekend in Miami where she can dump the car with the plates registered to her grandparents, and enjoy a cocktail or two before catching a flight somewhere, anywhere. Just as long as it wasn't Florence.

With Gotye pounding from the speakers Simone let herself sing (offkey might she add) to a plethora of women empowerment songs. But something began to feel wrong halfway through her woes of "I Will Survive."

Her eyes widened to the size of saucers when the car came to a terrifying stop. With one look at the gas gauge, confirming that she wasn't dumb enough to have run out of gas, Simone got out of the car to inspect the engine. When the hood was popped, she was instantly assaulted by smoke.

Quickly running inside to snatch up her phone, Simone asked Siri her location only to find that she was in the Middle of Nowhere, Virginia. Simone searched for the nearest town and found that it was a ten minute drive. It was too bad her car was currently out of commission.

So she left it parked on the side of the road, and began her long walk following the path the GPS was showing.

The landscape was lovely enough, but Simone would have rather preferred to have been singing to "Single Ladies" as she drove past this wasteland to Florida, but she supposed it made up for her boredom seeing as her iPhone was currently running on low battery.

Simone hadn't stopped to think how frightening walking through a couple miles of deserted grassland would have been (even after she's seen one too many horror films that began just like this), until she heard a car slow beside her. Simone looked up in surprise to find a Ford pickup that has seen better days stop and a window lower to show the face of a young man.

"Hello there ma'am. Are you alright?"

Simone ignored his pleasantries, partly out of fear but also because a part of her impressive pedigree told her women like her didn't speak to men like him. He looked like the type of man that did the landscaping in her childhood home in upstate New York. Maybe like the ones that worked in the summer on the extension to the house, and later on the renovations to the pool house when she was a teenager. Those men never spoke to her, they did not even look at her. They did the job even as she lounged with her friends by the pool, not once uttering a word to her because she was the boss's daughter.

And this man? He looked just like them in his rusty, old pickup truck. So Simone's first response was to keep walking, hoping he would go away. But it was useless. He simply slowed and looked at her with what one might interpret as concern.

But it was probably all an act. Knights in shinning armor wore shinning armor not a plaid button-down. They rode in with a pure-breed stallion...not why she guesstimated was a 2000s truck. And an American truck, at that. Everyone knew the right engineering was German.

No, this man was relentless for another reason other than concern for her well-being. She was probably going to get kidnapped or killed right here on the side of the road.

Simone let out a little yelp when she heard the man's door open and shut, followed by the heavy footsteps of him rounding the car. "Ma'am, are you--"

She clutched the bottle of pepper spray in her hands tightly, but it wasn't until the man approached her that she pulled out the bottle and aimed. She didn't have time to celebrate that she had actually gotten his eyes. Instead of the victorious fist pump instinct demanded, she brought a heel-clad foot up to kick him where the sun doesn't shine and ran away petrified towards the gas station she spotted a few yards ahead.