I heard the notification ping coming from my phone, which I turned to look but Nick chastised me to stay focused.

"You've been busying yourself checking up on him like you can't move on," he commented, as though he understood the situation.

"I am moving on, Abs just happened to pop on my Instagram," I excused.

"You had him on notification, he doesn't just happen to pop in your feed," he rebutted. "That thing is eating you alive. Whenever that sound came up and you responded to it, you would either lose focus or went temperamental. That's jeopardising yourself and your work."

"Alright, I'll try to control myself," I conceded.

"Controlling is not good enough, Zahida. You need to learn to forgive and forget him, then move on," he said in his firm but temperate voice, like the Hmong kid in the garden scene of the film Gran Torino where he was lecturing Clint Eastwood's character to quit smoking.

"But you still have grudges against him too," I objected.

"It's because he has something that belongs to my family."

"He said he owes you nothing," I corrected.

"He did," he replied. "He took the startup money we both saved for ShipGo. But that wasn't the reason why I was after him. He still has my late mother's ring."

The room felt silent coincided with the song fading out before Justin Timberlake's 'Filthy' echoed in. I was confused by his explanation. I thought he was the one with Abs' mom's ring. My brain made a sudden recalibration in which it no longer wanted to believe any facts by just hearsays.

"Okay, chop-chop," he urged. "We'll start off with a warm up drill and we're doing it slow before increasing our speed."

We were warming me up first, using my combinations of punches taught by Nick while he worked his various defences. He varied his defence from blocking his face with his forearm to ducking and punch me gently to my ribs.

We repeated this set for a couple of times until I was able to grasp the rhythm, slowly skipping to each side to increase our body heat. Then with the same set, we switched roles. I flopped, oftentimes I had his soft punching on my face, I tripped when my shins were compromised and lost coordination of my body. 

The next set had more movement to it. He became the fighter while I defended. We moved around the carpeted square in circles with him taking the steps backwards while I came pressuring. 

We moved on to the third and final set which to me was trickier than the first two because it involves right coordination, speed of reaction and movement. We mixed kicks and punches and increased our speed until I lost my steps and panted out of breath. The soft tap and kicks became harder by each round that I felt actual kicks on my body.

"Come on, fight me, Zahida," his stern voice went up a notch, making my body push harder than before.

Then we switched roles and repeated for a few more rounds. The seven minutes of warming up felt like two hours. I became disoriented that I was doing some punching rather than kicking. Seeing to this, he decided to take a break.

"Okay we're done with the first session," he said over his heavy breathing. "We're gonna start our actual session in a minute. This time we need to speed up a little with actual kicks and punches."

"What? We weren't even starting our actual session yet?" I asked out of breath.

"Those were just warming up," he replied.

"Oh, it felt real, alright?" I said, wiping my sweat away. "It felt like an hour."

When everything was over, I got murked because I was so damn tired. Nick walked out of the room and came back with a couple of bottled water, gave one to me and opened the other one for himself. We ended our session with a few cool downs and stretches.

"You're out of orientation," he debriefed. "Your coordination is frailing, your focus is out of place. You need to beef up on your attacking. With that kind of agility, I don't think you can even survive a rooster attack. We'll continue this after your exam week."

I groaned, lying flat on my back feeling dizzy and drained from the intensive training. My chest rippled up and down in fast motion, inhaling the odour of our sweats and faint of his Christian Dior's Sauvage scent before my respiration regained its normal beat.