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around the small dressing room space. Trusting people hadn’t gotten me anywhere, had it? So why would I want to get close to Emily? But even as I thought the question, I felt pulled toward her.
                I ran a hand over the fuzz on the top of my head. What was I thinking? I couldn’t even get my brain going in the right direction, or going in any direction for that matter.
                Grabbing my wallet and keys, I headed out into the now empty warehouse. The lights were still blazing, but the space lacked the energy and excitement of the crowd, so it just looked forlorn. I climbed into the ring, and paced from corner to corner. When I had been fighting tonight, seeing Emily had given me the edge that I’d needed to win. That had to mean something. And when she had suggested the qualifying match, I’d actually thought about it in a serious way.
                Being a legit fighter would mean that I could compete for some real prize money, not just the pittances that I earned at my usual fights. When I got to thinking about why I had never pursued a more traditional, less illegal route, I got the uncomfortable thought that maybe I had been afraid. That wasn’t a term I would ever use to describe myself, but that was the only explanation I could come up with as to why I let Martin direct my career for so long.
                I threw some practice punches into the air. I always loved the way my muscles felt when they connected with another person. The bare knuckle fights gave me the intensity of the contact that I seemed to crave, but if I had Emily to spend all my spare time with…then maybe I could get used to using a pair of gloves.
                In these quiet moments in the ring, my thoughts screamed loudly at me. I couldn’t think about these things normally because there was too much noise around me. I didn’t know much at this point. I was suddenly manger-less, and I was into a woman that I barely knew. I couldn’t get my thoughts straight, and I didn’t think that I could ever get more confused than I was at that moment.
                All I really knew was that I had some very big decisions to make.

Chapter 9
    Emily
                The mood at the qualifying match was completely different than Kirk’s other match, but still just as exciting. I had come early to talk to Allen, the gym’s owner. We swapped industry gossip and he asked about my dad, but I hadn’t been able to work up enough courage to ask him if Kirk was registered to fight. Nerves fluttered through my stomach as I found a seat in the bleachers.
                What if he didn’t show up? That was the question that had haunted me over the past three days as I had agonized over what had happened between us. Kirk hadn’t shown up to the gym, but I was trying not to take it personally. He had a huge decision to make, and I didn’t know him well enough to assume that I understood what he was going through.
                “Do you know who’s fighting tonight?” I asked the woman who sat down next to me.
                “I think I have a program here,” she said in a distracted tone as she searched through her purse.  “Here you go.”
                I took the wrinkled piece of paper from her, and smoothed it out on my lap. There were five fights scheduled as qualifying matches, and sure enough Kirk’s name was listed on the last one. I gave a little cry of delight. He had decided to take the step. I felt like that meant that Kirk was who I thought he was, who I saw him as. Just as that thought entered my head, I realized that I wouldn’t have confirmation of that until he came out to fight.
                “Don’t you just love the fights?” the woman next to me asked suddenly.
                I nodded slowly. “My father owned a training gym while I was growing up,” I told her. “And now it’s mine.