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.

The climb upstairs felt ceremonial, each step a small negotiation with gravity and intention. I followed Chloe, who had changed into an oversized t-shirt that hung off one shoulder, revealing the strap of her bra. Behind me, Liam’s breathing was steady, but I could feel the tension radiating from him, a low-frequency hum that seemed to vibrate through the wooden steps.

In the loft, the string lights cast everything in amber, turning skin golden and shadows soft. The bed waited, vast and indifferent. I stood at the edge, watching the others arrange themselves with the careful choreography of people who had done this before, just not with so many witnesses. Mark and Sarah took the far left, their bodies already angled toward each other, a private conversation in the language of shared space. Conor claimed the right corner, spreading his sleeping bag with the same military precision he’d used downstairs, creating a small fortress of fabric and intention.

I hesitated, then crawled toward the middle, the same position Chloe had assigned me earlier. The mattress gave under my weight, and I felt the others shift in response, a ripple effect of movement that traveled through the springs and foam. Chloe settled beside me, her bare leg brushing mine as she arranged her blanket. The contact was brief, but I felt it long after she’d pulled away, a ghost of warmth against my skin.

Liam took longer. He stood at the foot of the bed, removing his watch with deliberate slowness, setting it on the floor beside his bag. When he finally lay down, it was on the opposite side of Chloe, close enough that I could hear the soft exhale as his weight settled. Three bodies between us, but I could still feel the exact location of his breathing, could track the rise and fall of his chest without looking.

The lights went off. Darkness transformed the bed into something else entirely—a continent with shifting borders, a map redrawn every time someone rolled over or adjusted their pillow. I lay on my back, arms pinned to my sides, hyperaware of every sound: the soft rustle of fabric as Chloe turned onto her side, the way Mark’s breathing had already deepened into sleep, the small, unconscious sound Sarah made when she shifted closer to him.

An hour passed, maybe two. My body ached with stillness. When I finally moved, turning onto my side, my knee brushed Chloe’s leg. She didn’t pull away, but I did, mumbling an apology into the dark. She made a soft sound—not quite a laugh, not quite acknowledgment—and I felt her settle back into stillness.

Liam was awake. I knew this without seeing him, without touching him. The quality of his breathing was different—controlled, deliberate. I imagined him staring at the ceiling, counting the beams, calculating the distance between his body and mine. Three people, but it might as well have been three miles. Or three inches. The space felt elastic, expanding and contracting with every thought I had about reaching across it.

I drifted into a shallow, uneasy sleep, waking every time someone moved. Once, Chloe’s hand landed on my stomach when she rolled over. She left it there, heavy and warm, until I shifted away. Another time, I felt the mattress dip as Liam adjusted his position, and I tracked the movement like a seismograph, measuring the distance between his body and the place where I was lying perfectly still, pretending to sleep.

The trail was narrow, forcing us into single file. I walked behind Liam, watching the way his shoulders moved under his shirt, the way his feet found the natural grooves in the dirt. The others had pulled ahead, their voices carrying back to us in fragments—Chloe laughing at something Conor said, Mark and Sarah's quieter conversation blending into the ambient noise of the forest.

We walked in silence for a while, the kind that felt deliberate rather than awkward. The physical exertion was good, a way to process the previous night without having to think about it directly. My legs felt heavy from lack of sleep, but the movement helped, each step a small act of forgetting.

"Your dad," I said finally, when the trail widened enough for us to walk side by side. "How's he doing?"

Liam's stride didn't falter, but I felt him register the question. "Same. Worse, maybe. It's hard to tell from a distance."

The last time I'd seen his father had been at graduation, a tall man who'd clapped Liam on the back with the kind of masculine affection that always seemed to contain more force than tenderness. I remembered thinking they looked alike, the same way of holding their shoulders, the same careful way of speaking.

"I didn't know you were still—" I started, then stopped. The sentence felt too large for the space between us.

"Still what?"

"Still carrying it around. All of it."

He glanced at me, then looked back at the trail. "I think about quitting sometimes. Just... stopping. But then I think about what I'd do instead, and it's this big blank space."

I knew what he meant. After I'd left the master's program, I'd spent months feeling like I was floating above my own life, watching myself perform the actions of a person who knew what they were doing. The others had been sympathetic, but in the way people are sympathetic to things they don't understand—they'd offered solutions, timelines, encouragement. What they'd never offered was the acknowledgment that sometimes giving up is the most honest thing you can do.

"The performance," I said. "You feel it too."

"All the time." His voice was quieter now, almost lost under the sound of our footsteps. "Like I'm playing this version of myself that everyone expects. Even with them. Especially with them."

The trail curved upward, becoming steeper. I could see the others ahead, stopped at a viewpoint, their figures small against the landscape. From here, they looked like strangers, like people we might have met once and forgotten.

"I used to think it was just me," I said. "This feeling of being... unconvincing. As myself."

Liam stopped walking. When I turned to look at him, his face was open in a way I hadn't seen in years, maybe ever. "You were always the real one," he said. "The rest of us were just... practicing."

The waterfall appeared suddenly, a white rush of water cutting through the green. The others were already there, their voices rising to meet the sound of the falls, but for a moment, we stayed back, watching them from the trail. I felt something shift in my chest—not the recognition of attraction, but something more dangerous: the recognition of being understood.

"Come on," I said, starting forward. "Before they send a search party."

But even as we rejoined the group, even as Chloe handed me a water bottle and Conor made some joke about our pace, I could feel the conversation continuing between us, unspoken but present, like a current running under still water.

The hike had metabolized something in all of us. Back at the cabin we moved through the rooms with looser joints, speaking less but listening more, as if the shared exertion had tuned us to the same frequency. I showered first, the water pressure irregular, hot then cold, and I let it sting my shoulders while I watched dirt spiral down the drain. When I came out, towel wrapped tight, Chloe was sitting on the stairs in her sports bra, rolling the elastic of her sock up her calf. She looked up, met my eyes, and neither of us spoke. The silence felt deliberate, like a placeholder.

By the time the sun dropped behind the pines, the living room had arranged itself into a smaller circle than the night before. The couch was abandoned; we sat on the floor, legs crossed or stretched out, shoulders touching when we shifted. Eva produced the whiskey without ceremony, the bottle already half gone, and set it in the center like a centerpiece. No one bothered with glasses.

“Same rules?” Conor asked, though it wasn’t really a question.

“No rules,” Eva said. She twisted the cap off, took a swallow, and passed it left. Her mouth was wet when she handed it to me.

I drank. The burn was familiar now, almost comforting. When I lowered the bottle, Liam was watching my throat. I didn’t look away.

We didn’t bother spinning. People just named names, voices low, the game stripped of its theatrics. Sarah asked Mark when he’d last fantasized about someone else; he told her three weeks ago, a woman on the train, and she nodded like she’d already known. Chloe dared Conor to show the scar on his lower back; he stood, unbuttoned his jeans, and pushed the waistband down just far enough to reveal the raised white line near his hipbone. Eva reached out and traced it with her index finger, a slow drag of skin on skin, and no one laughed.

When it was my turn, I didn’t hesitate.

“Liam,” I said. “Truth or dare.”

He tilted his head, considering. The light from the single lamp caught the stubble along his jaw. “Truth.”

I felt the room inhale. “What did you think about in the shower this morning?”

A beat. Then: “You,” he said. “On your knees.”

The words landed cleanly, no flinch, no apology. I felt the others register it—Chloe’s sharp exhale, Sarah’s hand stilling on Mark’s thigh—but no one broke the circle. The whiskey came back around. I drank again, slower this time, letting the heat pool low in my stomach.

Eva leaned forward. “My turn,” she said, eyes on me. “I dare you to kiss me. Properly. No performance.”

I moved first, knees scraping the rug. Her mouth tasted like smoke and copper, her tongue sliding against mine without preamble. She kissed like she was collecting data, precise and thorough, and when I pulled back her pupils were blown wide.

Behind me, someone shifted. Fabric against fabric. The bottle passed again, cap long gone. I felt the room tilt slightly, not from alcohol but from momentum, the sense that we had already agreed to something none of us had said aloud. Liam’s knee brushed my ankle. I didn’t move away.

“Again,” Chloe said quietly. “But slower.”