There Was Only One Bed for All Seven of Us

The headlights cut through the trees as we pulled up, seven of us crammed into Mark's ancient Volvo, the suspension groaning under the weight of our collective baggage. I'd been pressed against Liam's shoulder for the last hour, the heat of his body seeping through my jacket, and when we finally stopped, I felt the ghost of that warmth linger even after he'd moved away.

Inside, the cabin smelled like wet wood and something green, alive. The others scattered immediately—Chloe to the kitchen, Eva to the bathroom, Mark and Sarah claiming the couch with the practiced efficiency of a couple who'd done this before. I stood by the door with my duffel bag, watching them move through the space like they belonged there, like they weren't intruding on something that had existed long before us.

Liam appeared beside me, his breath visible in the cold air. "We should check the sleeping situation."

The loft was up a narrow staircase that creaked under our combined weight. At the top, we found it: one massive bed that dominated the entire space, easily king-sized but longer, wider, built into the frame of the cabin itself. No other furniture, just this expanse of mattress covered in a faded quilt.

"Jesus," Liam said, and I could hear the laugh caught in his throat.

We stood there staring at it until the others found us, their voices rising up the stairs in a wave of speculation and disbelief. Chloe pushed past us first, running her hand along the quilt's edge like she was testing for traps.

"There's only one," she announced, though we could all see that plainly.

Mark and Sarah exchanged one of their silent conversations, the kind that happens in the space between shared glances. Eva pulled out her phone, scrolling through the booking confirmation with increasing desperation.

Conor leaned against the doorframe, his practical mind already working through the problem. "We could draw straws," he suggested. "Or rotate. But honestly?" He looked at the bed again, then at us. "It's big enough. We could just share it."

The silence that followed was different from the one Liam and I had shared moments before. This one felt charged, electric, like the moment before a storm breaks. I felt something shift in my chest, a recognition of what we were about to agree to.

"Why not?" I heard myself say, though my voice sounded foreign, like it belonged to someone else entirely.

We formed a line up the stairs, each of us carrying something—pillows, sleeping bags, the extra duvets Eva had insisted on bringing "just in case." I watched the way Chloe took charge without asking, directing traffic like she'd been planning this moment for weeks. She positioned Mark and Sarah on the left side, their bodies already angled toward each other in sleep, their boundaries established through years of shared beds.

"Here," she said, handing me a pillow. "You take the middle."

The middle. I understood what she was doing—placing me as a buffer, a neutral zone between the couples and the singles. Liam had dropped his bag near the foot of the bed, close enough to be part of the group but far enough to maintain his separateness. I wondered if he felt it too, this need to assert individuality within the collective surrender we were making.

Conor spread his sleeping bag with military precision, the corners aligned, his pillow placed exactly in the center. Eva tossed her things down with characteristic chaos, her bra strap visible where her shirt had ridden up during the climb. She caught me looking and smiled, not the embarrassed smile of someone caught unaware, but something more deliberate.

"Comfortable?" she asked, though I couldn't tell if she meant physically or with the arrangement itself.

I arranged my blanket in the space Chloe had designated, noting how the bed's geography was already establishing itself. Mark and Sarah had claimed their corner with the unconscious entitlement of people accustomed to moving through the world as a unit. Their fingers brushed as they unpacked, a small intimacy that seemed to exclude the rest of us by its very naturalness.

Liam sat on the edge, removing his shoes with careful movements. I watched the line of his back through his shirt, the way his shoulders tensed and released. When he turned to place his shoes beside his bag, our eyes met across the expanse of quilt.

"Well," he said, his voice carrying that particular quality it got when he was trying to sound casual about something that wasn't casual at all. "This is cozy."

Chloe had produced string lights from somewhere, and she began arranging them around the loft's beams, casting everything in a soft amber glow. The light transformed the space, made it feel less like an accident of booking and more like a deliberate choice. Like we had chosen this proximity, this surrender of privacy.

I lay back against my pillow, feeling the mattress shift as the others found their positions. The bed was large enough that we weren't touching, but small enough that I could feel the heat radiating from three different bodies, could hear the soft sounds of breathing that weren't my own.

We gathered in the living room with the bottle of whiskey Mark had produced from his bag, the cheap kind that burned going down and left a film on your teeth. I sat on the floor with my back against the couch, watching Liam pour measures into mismatched glasses he'd found in the kitchen. The others arranged themselves in a loose circle—Chloe cross-legged on the rug, Mark and Sarah sharing the armchair, Conor perched on the coffee table like he was chairing a meeting.

The silence stretched between us, punctuated only by the sound of whiskey being poured and the distant creak of the cabin settling. I could feel the weight of what we'd agreed to upstairs, the way it pressed against the edges of every conversation we'd had since. Every time someone shifted position, I thought about how we'd soon be shifting against each other in that bed, how the careful distances we were maintaining now would collapse into something else entirely.

"This is ridiculous," Eva said finally, setting down her glass with a decisive click. "We're acting like we've never shared a bed before. Like we're twelve."

"We haven't," Conor pointed out. "Not all of us. Not like this."

Sarah laughed, a nervous sound that seemed to escape her throat without permission. "It's just sleeping."

"Is it though?" Chloe asked, and I realized she'd been watching us with the same analytical attention I'd been using on her, cataloging reactions and reading subtext.

Liam took a long drink from his glass. I watched the movement of his throat, the way his fingers wrapped around the cheap glass. When he lowered it, his eyes found mine across the circle, and I felt something shift in my chest, a recognition of the conversation we'd been having without words since we'd stood together in the loft.

"Truth or dare," Eva said suddenly. "We need to break whatever this is."

The suggestion hung in the air like smoke. I felt everyone processing it—the juvenile nature of the game versus the very adult tension we'd been navigating. But the whiskey was making everything feel softer, more possible, and when Chloe said "Why not?" her voice carried the same note of inevitability I'd heard in my own earlier.

We arranged ourselves properly, the circle tightening until our knees almost touched. I ended up between Liam and Eva, close enough to smell Liam's cologne mixing with the pine scent that clung to all our clothes. When Eva spun the empty bottle, it landed on Conor, who chose truth with the weary resignation of someone who knew he was going to regret it.

"Who in this room would you sleep with," Eva asked, "if you had to choose?"

The question was a door opening, and I felt us all step through it.