"Maybe," I say, very low, "stop giving me reasons to look at you."
His smile fades.
Not completely. Just enough.
Enough that I know he heard it the way I didn't mean to say it.
Or maybe exactly the way I did.
For one suspended second, we’re both held captive to this moment, where I let my guard down and let Rhys get another tiny glimpse. Then Cooper drops a plate somewhere behind us with a crash loud enough to make half the gym yell, and the moment breaks so violently I almost flinch. I step back, harshly.
“Careful, Coop,” I bark, severely.
“Sorry, Captain.”
"Come spot me, Nash."
Rhys is already lying on the bench, arms spread wide, fingers wrapping the bar. His shirt's crumpled up, exposing a strip of stomach, the snake's tail curling low toward his waistband. I swallow hard and step in behind his head, hands hovering, ready.
He lifts the bar off the rack. Steady. Controlled.
I watch his chest rise and fall and I disappear into the rhythm of his breathing, the way his abs tense with each rep.
One. Two. Three.
On the fourth, my knuckles brush his bare stomach. Just barely. A graze. But he shivers. Full-body, unmistakable,his whole frame trembling under the weight. He doesn't stop the set. Doesn't say a word. But I felt it. I know Ifeltit.
I tell myself to focus. To keep my hands where they belong.
But Rhys keeps making these low sounds under his breath every time he presses the weight up. Barely audible over the music in the gym, but I hear them anyway, like they were just for me. Small grunts of effort that hit low in my stomach, harder than they should.
And now I can't stop wondering what he sounds like when he's not trying to hold back.
What he'd sound like if someone touched him the right way.
The image flashes through my head and I grip the bench tighter, to the point I feel my knuckles crack. Rhys racks the bar with a sharp exhale and lies back for a second, chest heaving, sweat gleaming on that strip of bare skin.
I can't stop looking at the snake.
It's not even a decision anymore. My eyes are just there, fixed, and the longer I look, the less the rest of the gym exists. The music goes distant first. Then the clang of weights two benches over, dulling into something I hear through water. Then the voices, the footsteps, the door at the far end opening and closing — all of it just falls away one piece at a time until there's nothing left in the room except him.
I should look away. I know I should. There's a version of this exact second where I do — where I clear my throat and check the clock and ask if he wants another set — and that version gets further away the longer I stand here doing nothing about it.
The tattoo starts at his ribs. I've seen it a hundred times in passing, in locker rooms, in the corner of my vision when I'm trying not to look. I've never let myself actually trace it before. Never let myself follow it slow, the way I'm doing now, down across his stomach, over the dip where muscle gives way tosomething softer, down toward the hip where it curves and disappears under fabric. I can't stop staring at the place where it vanishes.
The place I can't see.
I think about it longer than I should. Long enough that I lose track of where I am completely — lose the bench, lose the bar still racked above his chest, lose every rule I've spent twenty-one years building myself around one careful piece at a time. There's just him laid out in front of me, breathing hard, skin slick under the gym lights, and that part of me that never seems to stay buried when he's around.
The gym fully fades out around me.
The music. The voices. Everything.
There's just Rhys breathing hard beneath me and that fucking tattoo and the sudden terrifying realization that Ineedto know where it ends.
My thumb moves before my brain catches up.
Tracing the ink. Following the line down, down, lower, slow and helpless and nothing like restraint, until my fingertip almost slips under the waistband and—
