He took out his iPhone from his Ghurka's Cavalier II No. 97 vintage chestnut leather duffle bag, connected the device with the room's audio to play his workout mix on shuffle. 'Elastic Heart' by Sia & The Weekend was the first to resonate through the speaker. He placed his iPhone on the bench and took another pair of gloves for himself.

He led me into centre of the floor on the padded area, facing each other within one metre distance for some stretches. We spread our legs apart to a sumo squat, holding our posture for half a minute before moving our knees left to right for another minute. We switched to side lunges, alternating our movement from left to right and then going for low lunges for each leg.

I heard the notification ping coming from my phone, thinking it might be Abs' update on his larger than life lifestyle via Instagram. I glanced over for my phone, but Nick chastised me to stay focused.

"You've been busying yourself following his updates like you can't move on," he commented, as though he could read my mind.

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

"That thing is eating you alive. Whenever that sound came up and you responded to it, you'd either lose focus or went temperamental. That's jeopardising yourself and your work," he rebutted.

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

"Controlling isn't good enough, Zahida. You need to learn to forgive and forget him. And then, you 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.

"I'm not but he has something that belongs to my family."

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

"That's not true," he replied. "He took the startup money we both saved when we were young. 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 just 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 warmup drill and we're doing it slow before increasing our speed."

The warmup drill comprises combinations of punches and kicking from the easy ones to the slightly challenging but practical ones. He started with a parry, as I took a few light pounds and punches on him while he varied his defense from blocking his face with his forearm to ducking and tapped me by 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. Then Nick patiently guided me on the position of my forearms, the shins and my body posture during defence which took me a while to master. We had a few more rounds before moving on to the next set as my breath intensified.

"Defence, Zahida. Remember the drill?" he said firmly when I began to lose my coordination.

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 warmup," he announced 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."

We began our second session a minute later, repeating three sets with an increased speed and a minute break at each set. Although the session meant to intensify our strikes, Nick was making sure his strikes were not made to harm me. His constant yelling and relentless shouting at my every move made me want to cry at every round but I held my prowess firmly, holding back the tears and enduring the pain from the training and the languishment that came with it.

When the entire sparring session 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.