A Summer Afternoon Abroad

Decisive, gentle female executive × devoted male doctor

The Mediterranean, a summer afternoon, a white-sand beach.

Yu Shi runs into Jian Hanfeng, the boy she secretly loved in high school.

He is as captivating as ever. His fair skin gleams beneath the Mediterranean sun, his lips are thin, his nose straight, and his eyes are deep as a pool. Standing among a group of foreigners, he looks especially tall and striking, wearing a mask of a smile.

By then, through a twist of fate, she has become the third-in-command at an overseas branch, earning a salary of a million a year. He is married, and his wife is the daughter of the owner of a private orthopedic hospital. He has taken over his father-in-law's business.

He calls her by name.

A colleague asks, “Ms. Yu, do you know him?”

Yu Shi's eyelid twitches. Her heart remains unmoved, and she says coolly, “I've never met him.”

*

Summer 2014. The final exams of her second year of high school. Books are piled on the lectern.

A copy of Shunji Iwai's Love Letter is slipped into Yu Shi's pile of books.

Two months later, Jian Hanfeng goes abroad to study. Afterward, he keeps thinking of that day, like an old wound that repeatedly opens and bleeds. If only he hadn't confessed.

Adrift and alone in Paris, he often sits on a cathedral pew and prays: that Yu Shi never saw that book, and that one day they will meet again.

At last, on a summer afternoon, they run into each other on a Mediterranean beach. She is now a corporate executive, far more beautiful than he had ever imagined.

He watches her face, pink from the seawater, and calls her by name.

She walks away without looking back.

Jian Hanfeng is pierced to the heart. He closes his eyes and thinks that his life was meant to have only two forms, frail childhood and old age. The days when she loved him were the only time he was truly young.

Secret crush / from campus to the city / HE

Content notes: 1. They are not married; it is all a misunderstanding. The male lead has no intimate contact with anyone but the female lead.

2. Twenty-one campus chapters, plus over forty chapters after they start working. Most of the spotlight is on the female lead; everything is about her growth.

3. The title comes from A Walk with Me, a book by my favorite author, Jian Zhen.

4. I had written most of this before. After spending another year in Algeria, I revised it and started posting it again.

Theme: A young woman's growth is her own. No one can stand in the way of it.