She's filming his world. He's making it impossible to stay objective.
A filmmaker gets six weeks inside London's underground fight circuit, and one rule from the man who runs it: nothing below the ring.
Completed · 18 chapters · 2h 30m
WarmSensual tension; intimacy fades to black.Dark & dangerous · Yearning
Grief, Alcohol, Violence, Organised crime
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Dear Maeve,
My editor told me, before any of this started, not to fall in love with my subject. He said it like a joke. I said, in the tone of someone who had no intention of proving him right,
Marlowe Sinclair takes the assignment to document London's underground fight circuit because her career needs a comeback and this story is the only one no one else can get access to. Getting that access means earning the trust of Kit Bellamy, the circuit's reclusive organizer, a man everyone fears and no one will explain why. He agrees to let her film on exactly one condition: she stays only as long as he says, and she does not ask about anything below the ring. Kit built the circuit out of the wreckage of a life he does not talk about, and it has kept dozens of men out of worse trouble than the fights themselves. Marlowe was supposed to be a camera he tolerated for six weeks, not the first person in years he wants to actually talk to. As her footage starts uncovering the darker business that funds the circuit, debts, threats, men who do not walk away from matches on their own terms, the story she is filming and the man she is falling for turn out to be the same impossible problem.
Six weeks, one camera, and a man who watches doors instead of fights. I have filmed men flinch when he passes and told myself it was only research. I have kept the camera down more than once because filming the truth felt like a worse kind of lie.
Someone told me to ask him about his brother. I haven’t yet. I keep rehearsing the question in the mirror instead of asking it, which is not a thing a filmmaker is supposed to do, and not a thing I can seem to stop doing either.
From Everything Below the Ring
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