She should have left.
She knew, with complete clarity, that she should turn around and leave before he noticed her standing there gawking like she’d never seen a man’s bare chest before in her life.
Her feet, infuriatingly, disagreed with the plan entirely.
Then it happened — his hand shifted on the dumbbell, weight settling wrong against the still-healing muscle of his injured arm, and a sharp, involuntary hiss tore out of him as the weight dropped from his fingers and clattered against the mat.
“Liam—” The name left her before she’d decided to say it, and she was already moving, crossing the room without a single thought toward caution, toward distance, toward anything at all except the fact that he was in pain and she was the only one there to do something about it.
She reached him just as he braced a hand against the bench, jaw tight, breathing hard through it.
“Don’t move your arm,” she said, dropping to her knees beside him without hesitation, both hands hovering uncertainly over the bandage.
“Is it bleeding again?
Let me see—”
Her fingers found the edge of the bandage, careful, and it was only then, with her face inches from his shoulder and her hands against his bare skin, that she became fully, overwhelmingly aware of exactly how close she’d let herself get.
His breathing had gone quieter than the pain alone should have accounted for.
Camille looked up.
He was watching her — not the careful, composed attention he usually gave everything, but something stiller, something that made the air between them feel suddenly very small.
“You’re not actually hurt,” she said quietly, the realization arriving slow, her fingers still resting against his skin without any real intention of pulling away.
“No,” he admitted, low, unhurried, no trace of apology in it at all.
His hand rose slowly, fingers brushing lightly against the back of hers where it still rested against his arm — not pulling it away.
Just resting there, warm and steady, an anchor neither of them acknowledged out loud.
“Camille.” Her name, not the nickname, quiet and deliberate in a way that made something in her chest tighten all at once.
She didn’t answer.
She didn’t trust her own voice to do anything but give away exactly how much that single word had just undone.