The Wrong Fitting

Liza arrived at the motel with her jaw already tight, which was mostly Chrissie's doing. Chrissie had sent four texts that afternoon, each one more chirpy than the last. The last one had three heart emojis and the words trust me, he's perfect for you, which Liza knew from long experience meant nothing of the sort. She was forty-three years old and had been on enough of Chrissie's setups to know that perfect for you meant a man who owned a car and had not been arrested.

She pulled her ute into the gravel lot and sat there a moment with her hands on the wheel. The motel sat in an empty paddock on the edge of town, a low line of brick rooms around a pool that glowed blue under lights. The sign out front flickered, the way old lightbox signs do, so the name pulsed on and off like something deciding whether to exist. Liza had shoed horses all day and her shoulders were still in farrier mode, which was to say her back ached and her hands smelled faintly of hoof and iron no matter how hard she scrubbed.

But she'd promised. Promises had this one fundamental flaw. She'd promised Chrissie over coffee two weeks ago, back when saying yes had seemed easier than another twenty minutes of Chrissie's concerned face.

She got out and walked toward the pool, and there they were. Chrissie and Sid, sitting on plastic chairs with their feet up on a cooler, laughing at something. Chrissie had her hand on Sid's forearm in that easy way she had, the touch light and automatic, like she'd forgotten she was doing it. Sid said something and Chrissie threw her head back and howled.

Liza stood at the edge of the light and felt the thing she'd been pretending not to feel for six months. It wasn't that she wanted Sid. Sid was fine, a decent bloke who ran a motel and talked about occupancy rates with genuine passion, which was somehow worse than talking about them ironically. What Liza felt watching them was the looseness of it, the way Chrissie reached for him without deciding to. Liza's relationships had all been decided. Planned, weighed, ended on schedule. None of them lasted past a year and she'd told herself for a long time that this was a choice.

Chrissie spotted her and waved with her whole arm, the way she did everything.

"Liza! You came, you gorgeous thing." She crossed the wet concrete in her sandals and hugged her. She smelled like sunscreen and wine. "Dennis is already inside. Sid, tell her about Dennis."

Sid raised his beer. "Good bloke. Does our signage. Designed the lightbox, actually."

"That explains the flickering," Liza said, and Sid laughed like it was the funniest thing he'd heard all year, which told her a lot about the evening ahead.

Chrissie dug in her bag and came out with a room key, one of the old metal ones with a plastic fob. "Room seven. Right on the corner there, you can see the pool. I've put a bottle of wine in the fridge, white, because I remember. Go say hello, be charming, I'll come check on you in twenty minutes and if it's going badly I'll stage a fire alarm."

"Room seven," Liza said, taking the key.

"Seven. Like a lucky number but not the obvious one." Chrissie squeezed her arm. "And Liza. Loosen up. Please. For me."

So Liza walked along the row of doors counting as she went. Nine, eight, seven, and somewhere past seven she lost count, because the light had caught wrong on the numbers and she read a faded four as her door. This was the story she would tell later, that the numbers were worn and the security light had a moth doing laps of it, and all of it was true, and none of it explained why she didn't double back when something felt off. She slid the key in, turned it, and pushed the door open.

A woman was sitting on the end of the bed.

Liza's hand was still on the door and her brain did a quick tally of options, and then the woman looked up and she was clearly as startled as Liza was, already half off the mattress, a wine glass frozen halfway to her mouth.

"Sorry," the woman said. "Sorry, are you housekeeping? I didn't order anything."

"I'm not housekeeping." Liza looked at the key fob in her hand. Four. A worn four that could pass for a seven if you were tired and not paying attention. "I think I have the wrong room."

The woman was maybe her own age, mid-forties, with short grey-streaked hair and jeans and a shirt unbuttoned over a t-shirt, the uniform of a person who had not dressed up for anyone. She had a suitcase open on the luggage rack and her phone facedown on the bed.

"Are you sure? Because I'm in four." The woman held up her own key fob, also a four. "I checked in an hour ago."

Liza looked from the fob to the woman to the door number, which said 4 in stencilled paint that had faded to something that could be read as either. "They've cut you two keys," she said. "Or the front desk gave mine out. Sid runs this place, he's hopeless with numbers, I can say that because he's here somewhere being laughed at."

"Should I go down and sort it?"

Liza thought about walking back out to the pool, where Chrissie was presumably by now narrating the early stages of the date through the window. "In a minute," she said, and then heard herself and winced. "Sorry. That was rude. I'll go. I'm meant to be in seven meeting a man called Dennis."

"Ah," said the woman, with the tone of someone who understood everything at once. "Blind date?"

"Set up by my best friend. She's very invested. She's got a whole plan and probably a timeline."

The woman laughed, a short real laugh, and sat back down on the bed like her legs had decided for her. "Well. Good luck with Dennis."

Liza should have left then. The door was right there. Instead she heard herself say, "How come you're sitting alone in a motel room on a Friday night?"

"Friend of mine was supposed to meet me here. She rang this afternoon, some drama with her sister, couldn't come." The woman turned her glass on the bedside table. "I nearly went home. Then I thought, the pool's nice, the wine's cold, I'll stay. Her name's on the booking so I half expected them to kick me out."

"She cancelled on you," Liza said. "Tonight. That's rough."

"She does that. I keep her anyway. Long history, you know how it goes." The woman looked at her. "I'm Liza, by the way."

There was a beat where Liza genuinely thought she'd misheard. "Sorry?"

"Liza."

"Liza," Liza said. "That's my name."

"Get out."

"I'm serious. L. Liza." She dug her wallet out and showed her licence, which was not something she'd ever done to introduce herself before, and the woman leaned over and read it and laughed again, longer this time.

"Well," she said. "That's a hell of a mix-up. Two Lizas and one wrong door."

Through the window, over the woman's shoulder, Liza could see the pool. Chrissie had both hands on Sid's face now, holding it like something precious, saying something to him that made him grin. The light touch, the automatic one. Liza felt the jealous thing twist, sharp and specific, and it surprised her how hot it came on, like a flare of heat in her chest.

"God," she said, before she could stop herself. "Sorry. I don't know why I told you that. She set me up with this Dennis bloke and I don't even want to meet him. I came because I couldn't think of a good enough excuse not to."

The other Liza studied her for a moment, not the way men studied her, more like she was reading a form and checking a box. "I don't do blind dates anymore," she said. "Gave them up four years ago. Single since, mostly happy about it. You?"

"Lots of men, briefly. None of them stuck." Liza sat down on the corner of the bed opposite, the key still in her hand, the door still unlocked behind her. "I keep waiting to want it the way she does. The way she's got it. And it never comes."

"Mm," said the other Liza, and refilled her glass, and held the bottle out in offer.

Liza took the glass. It seemed rude not to, and also the wine was cold and her throat was still full of dust from the paddock road. She drank half of it too fast and sat with the glass warming in her hand, listening to the frogs in the dam beyond the empty lot, and the flicker of the sign out front, which she could hear through the wall, a faint electric tick.

The silence went on long enough to become a thing with a shape. The other Liza didn't fill it. She just sat there with her glass and looked at Liza in a level way, like she had all night and knew exactly how much of it she was willing to spend. Most people talked in silences. This woman let them sit.

"I've never been with a woman," Liza said, finally, to the wine more than to the woman. "I don't know why I said that. I don't know why I'm still in this room. I'm meant to be in seven, and there's a man called Dennis in seven, presumably, checking his hair in the mirror."

"You could go," the other Liza said. Not pointed. Just a fact laid on the table between them, like the key.

"I could."

She didn't move. She thought about six months of watching Chrissie be happy and pretending it didn't do anything to her, and about how her own relationships had all come apart inside a year, and about how she'd shoed eight horses today and her back was one long complaint and her hands still smelled of hoof and iron, and how none of that explained why she was sitting on a stranger's bed in room 4 with her heart going like a hammer on a nail.

"So why did you stay?" the other Liza asked.

"I don't know." And then, because it was true and because the wine had got at the part of her that usually kept true things folded up: "Maybe I do. Maybe I wanted to see what it felt like, sitting here. It feels like something. I don't have a word for it."

The other Liza nodded slowly, the way you'd nod at a horse to tell it there was no hurry.

Liza moved closer. Not all the way. She shifted along the bedspread until the distance between them was the distance where a decision could go either way, and her heart was pounding hard enough that she could feel it in her wrists. "This is my first time with a woman," she said. Plainly, out loud, so it couldn't be taken back or misread.

The other Liza set her glass down on the bedside table, next to the phone that was face down and staying that way. "Then I'm going to ask you properly," she said. "I've had one glass and you've had a bit more than that, so there's water in the little fridge, and we can wait ten minutes or an hour or until morning. And you can say stop at any point, and so can I. Do you want to kiss me?"

"Yes," Liza said. "I've had the one glass and a half, I'm fine, I'm sure. Yes."

They drank water first anyway, out of the motel's paper cups, and waited a few minutes in a silence that had stopped being awkward, and Liza was still sure. Then the other Liza kissed her. Slow and deliberate, no sudden moves, her