Sylvie was working her ass off, slamming the bag and really improving her footwork. In fact, I was starting to see that she had real potential—fate had thrown me a bone. This scared, sweet angel, who’d never hit anything her entire life, had the agility and speed to really go places. In some other life, if she’d started young and been paired with a proper trainer instead of a dumb fighter like me, maybe she would have wound up doing women’s boxing professionally. Here and now, though, I just had to pray that her potential and my experience were enough to see her through this one fight. And me? I watched Sylvie. I heard myself speaking, saying things like, “Keep your hands up,” and “Watch your balance.” But the training was almost automatic, happening in some far off part of my brain, because every last scrap of my conscious mind was filled with her. Her hair, long dark strands of it whipping around as she ducked and weaved. Her breasts: soft, perfect mounds I couldn’t drag my eyes from.
