Page 40 of Angel

‘I’m writing our future, Angel. Do you like it?’

‘Love it,’ I murmured, leaning down to press my mouth on her warm cheek.

Two years later, behind the burgundy barns on her father’s horse farm, she and I shared our first true kiss.

Her lips were soft, lush, and sweet, and from then on we became the ultimate high school sweetheart story, a fairy tale.

She showed up to every single one of my football games and local music gigs while I sat front and center for all her ballet recitals and cheerleading expos.

We spent our summers wrapped up in each other, living the peak Nashville teenage lifestyle.

We attended expensive lakeside barbecues, late-night movies, and endless dinners at country club patios where the sweet tea flowed like water.

Her father, Reese, wasn’t my biggest fan, to put it mildly.

The man had his sights set on her marrying into Nashville royalty, pushing his billionaire best friend’s son, Payton Deering, onto her at each formal function.

Evangeline was a rebel, though.

She was having none of Reese’s matchmaking, and she stuck to me like glue.

Not everything was rosy between us.

We had fiery, toxic breakups all instigated by her roller-coaster emotions.

She was wild, impulsive, and spoiled by Reese’s deep pockets.

Still, she was passionate and independent, and her magnetic energy had me hooked.

After high school, she enrolled in an elite Ivy League university and moved into a sorority house with manicured lawns and marble pillars.

At my dad’s urging, I signed my life over to the Australian Army, enduring boot camp and the blistering heat of foreign deployment.

Evangeline and I kept our bond alive through letters, static-filled phone calls, and hurried emails typed from dusty desert base computers.

Our early twenties introduced a much darker rhythm to our romance, transforming our love into a battlefield.

The crushing pressure of her father’s toxic expectations took a toll, and Evangeline began to fracture under the burden.

She disappeared for months at a time, ghosting everyone and severing all contact.

She abandoned her sorority house and her university lectures without a single syllable to her family.

Every time she vanished, I caught a flight if I could from wherever I was in the world.

I even burned through my military leave to hunt her down through Nashville’s underbelly.

I combed through dingy motels and dangerous crowds, pulling her out of the shadow of squalid rooms and sketch dens to haul her home.

Back to her luxury townhouse, one that Reese bought for her in the city.

I spent weeks with her through various brutal withdrawals from alcohol, coke, and one time, meth.

I held her shaking frame while she suffered through the cold sweats; I never left her side until she was clean.

Her demons persisted anyway.

If she didn’t get her way, she resorted to hitting, slapping, and kicking.