It was this close. The wine glass was perching at the edge of the nightstand, but it was just out of reach so that Eliza would have to free her upper body from the clingy arms around her neck to grab it. Damn it. She wanted to savor the sweetness of the still silence, but the artificial creatures were honking and braking so recklessly some floors down in the streets that the interjected quietness turned acidic. Gosh, would they just shut up? The automatic air freshener in the bathroom across the hall just gave off another whiff of chemical vapor, making that gassy noise she once mistook as someone cracking open a beer. Every time this happened, Eliza would recount the thought process in her head. Who was that neighbor that cracked open a beer every ten minutes and how poor were these “sound-proof” walls? Oh, it wasn’t a neighbor cracking open a beer; it was just the air freshener. Yup, just that, and she would smell the product of it soon. The inorganic fragrance of lavender and lotus should hit anytime if only the frigid breeze blowing from the broken window wouldn’t dilute the scent, or if only Ally’s room didn’t have a broken window in the first place, or if only—

“It wouldn’t kill you to say the exact three words that I would die for,” Ally’s muffled voice interrupted, bringing Eliza back to the queen-sized bed, “but still you wouldn’t say them, would you?”

She was scrambling for an answer to that the whole time, but all that she could think of was how the fissured window pane was letting the chilly night trickle in.