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“Yeah. I do.”

The answer was so straightforward that I almost laughed.

“How long have you wanted that?”

He looked away. “Does that matter?”

“It matters to me.”

He rubbed his jaw, clearly wishing he had never allowed the conversation to get this far.

“The stairs,” he said finally.

“The first day?”

“Probably.”

“Probably?”

“You smelled good.”

I blinked at him.

He looked genuinely annoyed now, as though I had forced a confession out of him under interrogation. “You also made me laugh.”

“I don’t remember you laughing.”

“I did it quietly.”

A laugh escaped me before I could stop it. “Of course you did.”

His mouth twitched, but I was still trying to understand what he had just told me.

“You never showed any of this.”

“I was trying not to.”

“Why?”

The small trace of humor disappeared from his face.

“Because you were hurt,” he said. “You had just been rejected in front of half the school, you could barely climb, and you had known me for about ten minutes. I wasn’t going to tell you that I liked the way you smelled.”

Put that way, I could see his point.

“No,” I admitted. “That probably would have been strange.”

“It would have been very strange.”

“But that was the first day. What about afterward?”

Silas rubbed his thumb over one scarred knuckle before answering.

“You kept coming to the Pit.”

“Because I wanted to see you.”

“I didn’t know that.”