YOU LOVE ME LIKE A SECRET

BUT IT WASN’T

The decision to leave Shanghai should have brought relief.

Instead, it felt like another fracture in an already shattered heart.

For the next three days, I did what I had always done when my personal world threatened to collapse: I buried myself in work with clinical precision. As a solicitor specializing in cross-border corporate structuring, private wealth, and high-stakes international transactions, my Shanghai office became my sanctuary. The sleek glass-and-marble space on the 28th floor of a Pudong tower welcomed me each morning with the familiar scent of fresh espresso and the quiet hum of focused ambition.

I closed my office door, silenced my personal phone, and became Lin Yue, Esq. again — the sharp, unflinching lawyer who had built her reputation dismantling complex offshore structures and negotiating impossible terms in London boardrooms before relocating to Asia. Contracts piled high on my desk. Due diligence reports demanded meticulous review. A particularly thorny merger between a European conglomerate and a Chinese state-linked enterprise required my full attention for fourteen straight hours.

For a few blessed stretches, it worked.

The cold logic of law grounded me. Clauses and risk assessments left no room for the memories that haunted me at night — the way Xu Shein’s powerful body had pressed me against rain-streaked glass, thick c**k stretching me open inch by devastating inch while he whispered broken Mandarin against my throat. The way his hand had gripped my hip with bruising possession as he drove deep and slow, making me feel every thick ridge until I came shaking and dripping around him. The way he had always left before dawn, ring back on his finger, leaving me tender, leaking, and alone.

In the daylight of my practice, I could almost pretend those nights had belonged to someone else.

But Shanghai refused to let me disappear completely.

Every time I stepped out for a client meeting or a brief walk to clear my head, the city reminded me how thoroughly I had been erased from Xu Shein’s world. The concierge at the Peninsula — the same man who once discreetly slipped me key cards for Xu Shein’s private suite — now offered only polite, distant nods. The barista at our old café on Huaihai Road no longer gave me that knowing half-smile. Even the doorman at the boutique hotel where we had spent countless stolen nights treated me like any other expat professional.

I had become invisible in the one place where I had once felt most alive.

By the third evening, the weight had become unbearable. I stood in my apartment surrounded by half-packed suitcases, the glittering skyline bleeding gold and crimson through rain-streaked windows. My flight to London was booked for tomorrow morning. Not permanent — three weeks, perhaps four — just long enough to breathe damp English air, sit in familiar courtrooms, and remember who I was before Xu Shein unraveled me.

A temporary reset.

A professional retreat.

A necessary distance to regain perspective.

I told myself this was strategic. Rational. The move any sensible solicitor would make when her personal life had become a liability. London would ground me. The gray skies, the structured rhythm of English legal practice, the distance of thousands of miles — all of it would dilute the memories and quiet the ache.

But as I folded another crisp white blouse into my suitcase, the memories came anyway.

The backseat of the Maybach. City lights streaking past tinted glass like shooting stars. Xu Shein on his knees between my spread thighs, his tongue dragging slow and filthy through my folds while two thick fingers curled deep inside me, stroking that devastating spot until my back arched off the leather and I came hard — shaking, soaking his face and the seat. Then he pulled me onto his lap and sank me down onto his bare c**k in one smooth, relentless thrust. “Ride me,” he had growled against my throat, accent thick with raw need. “Let me feel how greedy this tight little p***y is for me.” I had ridden him desperately, clenching around every thick inch until he spilled hot and deep inside me with a guttural groan that felt like ownership.

I pressed my thighs together, a low, traitorous throb blooming between them. Even now — days removed, heart still raw, preparing to flee an entire continent — my body remembered him with humiliating clarity. My n*****s tightened beneath the silk of my camisole. Heat pooled low in my belly, slick and insistent. I hated how easily he could still affect me from afar. How the mere memory of his voice, his hands, his c**k stretching me so perfectly could reduce a composed, successful solicitor to this trembling, aching mess.

I sank onto the edge of the bed and stared at my reflection in the dark window. A woman who had negotiated multi-million-pound deals across time zones. A woman who had stared down ruthless executives without flinching. Reduced to this — wet, needy, and haunted by a married man who had only ever loved her in secret.

My phone lit up on the nightstand. Unknown number.

I already knew.

“Running away won’t make you stop wanting me.”

I deleted the message without replying, but the words lingered like a hand sliding slowly up my inner thigh.

This trip to London should have been enough.

It should have been the clean break I desperately needed — distance, routine, the familiar gray skies and structured life that once defined me. It should have reminded me that I was more than the secret woman who spread her legs and heart for a man who could never fully choose her.

But it wasn’t.

Because no matter how many oceans I put between us, Xu Shein remained under my skin. Still inside me. Still the only man who had ever made me feel completely, dangerously, ruinously alive.

I closed the suitcase with a quiet, final click and whispered into the empty room, voice barely audible over the rain:

“This should have been enough to let you go.”

It wasn’t.

Not even close.

As the plane lifted into the clouds the next morning, carrying me away from Shanghai’s glittering lies and neon promises, I pressed my forehead against the cool window and felt the ache settle deeper — a slow, relentless burn that distance would only sharpen.

London waited below the clouds.

But so did the memories.

And the man I still wasn’t ready to release.