Chapter 5: The Offsite Retreat Has Only One Cabin Left

Subject: Offsite Logistics: Please Confirm Your Cabin Assignments (Small Update) The small update was that the lodge had double-booked. Eight cabins had become seven, and our team of fourteen had to pair off. Management solved it with a spreadsheet and what I can only describe as sadism. Row nine, column two: Daria Okafor and Julian Voss. I read it in the van, between a stretch of pine forest and a man humming sea shanties, and I contemplated the road for several minutes.

The cabin was lovely, which felt like a personal insult. Cedar walls, a woven rug, a stone fireplace the size of a small ambition, and one bed. Julian stood in the doorway with his duffel and the expression of a man composing his will. 'I'll take the floor,' he said. I said the floor was wood. He said he had slept on worse. I said I doubted that, and then wondered why I had said it out loud.

The cabin was lovely, which felt like a personal insult.

Dinner was a team activity involving a bonfire, a guitar and an ill-advised round of truth questions. Someone asked each of us to name the colleague we admired most. Julian looked across the flames and said, with disarming calm, 'Daria. She out-argues me and I don't even mind.' The whole circle made the noise of fourteen people holding their breath. I said, 'Noted,' because apparently I had caught it from him.

Back in the cabin the fire had burned low, throwing amber across the rug. I changed in the bathroom with a determination that bordered on theater and emerged in a sweater that came to my knees. Julian was sitting on the floor with his back against the bed, shirt sleeves pushed up, reading the lodge brochure as if it contained state secrets. 'You're not sleeping there,' I said. He looked up. 'Is that an offer or a condition?'

We negotiated it like a contract. A pillow line down the middle. A rule that neither of us would be charming after midnight. He broke it in under four minutes, with a joke about the thread count that made me laugh into the pillow, and I broke it by not rolling away when his shoulder brushed mine. The fire popped. Somewhere an owl made a remark. I lay awake with my heart behaving like a coworker who refuses to log off.

Meet Daria: open Daria's profile on TheFriend.