"Amber Josephine Liu, it's high time you knew I am a lesbian."

It's been three and a half years since Amber heard those words from her best friends mouth, and honestly, she was glad that it happened. Iseul deserved to be herself, and if that meant she'd bring over a girl instead of a boy, then so be it. Who was she to judge?

    Over the past three years, a lot has changed. The duo graduated high school and decided to pursue a college degree. With that, they also decided to get an apartment together. They knew everything about each other, so why not? It worked well, and it came naturally, living with Iseul. She liked to clean and Amber knew how to cook, so the chores were divided pretty easily. 

Even the whole lesbian thing became just a detail of Iseul that Amber grew to not mind. After all, Iseul never made a move on her, nor did she ever try and ask Amber about her uality. Amber said she liked boys, and Iseul respected that. 

    "I'm home!" Amber looked up form her laptop, smiling widely as Iseul stumbled through the door, her baseball tshirt smudged with oil from her Engineering workshop and the smell of hot metal clinging to her as she entered. 

"Hey, Izzy." Amber stood up, heading over to help her wobbling flat mate from falling flat on her face. She laughed at the Engineering major. "Having trouble there? Aren't you a whiz at Physics, shouldn't you be able to calculate how to stand without falling?" 

   Iseul glared down at Amber as she was righted, both feet firmly on the ground. "Haha, so funny. Issac Newton didn't account for shoes with insoles that throw everything off balance." She pulled out the insole, about half an inch thick, to prove her point.

"Why do you even need those, you're like, three inches taller than me without it." Amber asked, heading to the kitchen to start dinner. 

     "I need men to fear me more than they already do as an Engineering major." Was the cynical answer, making Amber chuckle to herself as she pulled out the ingredients from the fridge. 

Iseul's head of curls popped through the kitchen entry. "I'm gonna take a shower and get the smell of metal and oil off of me, okay? Join me if you want~" She teased, pulled her shirt off as she went to the bathroom. Amber laughed again.

     "The answer is no, but thanks for asking!"

"Always polite to ask, you know." Then the door shut and the water started running soon after. Amber shook her head, smiling. This banter was normal now that she had gotten over the initial shock of Iseul coming out. If Amber really thought about it, it didn't matter. Banter like this happened before she came out and it was sure to happen many years after, even when they were married-- er, partnered, and were old. She sighed, ruffling her dark hair before slicing the vegetables.


Twenty minutes later, the table was set and Iseul was attempting to tame her mane before joining her for dinner. Iseul had a terrible complex when it came to her curls, wanting the hair to stay flat, but rarely did it ever obey her command. It was amusing, to say the least, hearing the curses and screeches from the bathroom. It was even more amusing when it was someone's first time at their apartment and they got to listen to the rant without context.

  "Don't you ever want to lay flat?? Just one day? Seriously, come on, it can not be this hard-- DAMNIT." A cracking sound was heard from the bathroom. Amber stood up.

"You okay, Izzy?" 

     Iseul stomped out the bathroom, displaying the brush part stuck within her hair and the handle of the brush in her hand. "No!! Why does this happen to me? I'm a good person, I brush my teeth, I even wash behind my ears! Why must I be cursed with these retched curls?!" She yelled, brandishing the handle around, tugging the brush out of the tangle it had broken on and tossed it in the trash. It wasn't the first time a brush had lost its life to the hands of Bae Iseul's curls.

    Amber shrugged, "I like your curls."

"Well, you take them. I like your hair better anyways, especially when it was blonde. You should dye it again." Iseul noted, ruffling her friend's hair before going to the table. "So what's for dinner?"

She shook her head as she followed Iseul. Leave it to her to get on a tangent. She'd get back to the hair rant before dinner was over. 

    "Vegetable ramen. We need to go to the grocery store this weekend, so write down actual food we need, not just your crappy junk food." Amber noted, remembering the last time she had Iseul write down the food, most of it had been the really salty chips she likes to munch on at 2 AM when she was working on her robotics project.

"Hey hey, it was one semester and you can't let it go. Fine, fine, while you're in class tomorrow I'll look and see what we need. Did you finish your homework for Music Theory?" Iseul asked, blowing on her noodles before eating them.

   "It's the tetonic melody that's catching me this time. I need to finish this composition by next week and I'm only halfway through." Amber complained, glaring over at her laptop. Two hours of work had to be undone because of a misplaced natural, and when removed, it screwed up the key. 

"This weekend I'll go out with Chaelin and we'll leave you to work on it." Iseul offered after swallowing her mouthful. Amber smiled. "That'd be great. How is Chaelin anyways? I haven't seen her around here as much."

   "Yeah." Chaelin was Iseul current partner, a beautiful blonde majoring in Creative Writing. Iseul was over the moon about this girl, and it made Amber happy to see her. "She's pretty good, but her final project is over 100 pages but it's not close to her goal."

"What was that book called again? The Baddest Girl?" Amber asked, trying to remember the name of the novel that Chaelin was writing.

    "The Baddest Female," Iseul corrected, "And she's considered a new name, but hasn't figured it out yet. Might ask you for some ideas, you're pretty good at titles."

Amber nodded, slurping her noodles. "She's more than welcome to do so." 

    "So how are things going with Kris?" Amber choked on her noodles, coughing before downing her water. Iseul snorted, watching her best friend's face turn from pale to red in a matter of a minute.

"W-why would you ask that?" The younger finally stuttered out, barely making eye contact with the curly haired girl across from her.

    Iseul pretended to think, "Hm, I don't know, you've had a crush on him for about, what was it, a year now? You keep hanging out with him but you won't make a move. What gives?" 

Kris Wu, the current man of the hour, was indeed Amber's object of infatuation. She had met the gangly Canadian-Chinese man in her Basics of Theory class, finding him a goofball instead of the cold man he protrayed himself to be. Of course, Amber had always been easy to get along with, so they became friends fast and before she knew it, she was definitely romantically interested in him. Iseul hadn't let it go, determined to hook them up no matter how many times Amber would insist on letting it go.

   "I.. I don't know, I just haven't found time to hang out with him recently so there's been no developments." It wasn't the whole truth, but not necessarily a lie either. Amber sees Kris about two times a week during the beginnings of lessons before they break off into their private lessons. Amber was a vocal major while Kris played the cello. But they were both so busy preparing for jury that Amber never really had time to say hello or hang out with him.

"After jury you're going to ask him out." Iseul said, sipping her own water. She blushed again. "Why then??"

    "Because then you won't be stressed, and besides, he'll think it's a celebratory thing. The boy's so dense he can't even recognize when someone's flirting." Iseul wasn't wrong, then again, the Bae was never wrong.

"I-I..." Amber couldn't see a way out of this one, so she resigned herself to her fate, hiding her face in her bowl. "Fine. But you and Chaelin have to come with, got it?"

   "Sure sure, just make sure the guy's not homophobic or anything." Iseul waved it off. 

      Amber nodded, "I wouldn't think so since he's rooming with Tao."

"Huang Zitao?" Amber nodded, confirming his identity.
 
    "God, he must love gays more than gays themselves, that boy is such a rainbow that not even Chaelin could make him reconsider his uality. He's in my Robotics lab." Iseul elaborated, and Amber chuckled. Iseul seemed to know everyone, it seemed, but she would say the same thing about Amber. They both were extreme extroverts and loved people.

"Yeah. You finished?" Amber gestured to the mostly empty bowl sitting before Iseul, standing up with her own empty one in hand. Iseul smacked her hand away, reaching to grab her bowl.

   "I clean, remember? Don't make me feel like a freeloader even though I totally am." She complained, taking off to the kitchen to start washing the dishes and utentsils.

"You pay half the rent, so you can't call yourself a freeloader!" Amber called after her.

   " you don't know if that's me paying or not." Iseul stuck her tongue out, and Amber laughed again. "Who's paying then?"

"Maybe Kris is, maybe Joonmyun, or even Luna, who knows who's paying for me. Everyone pays for me because I am a broke college student but I am also cute." Iseul joked, turning the water on and getting the soap out.

   "Yeah, might want to rethink that last part." Amber smiled, ducking as a sponge was thrown at her. 

"Rude." Amber handed the sponge back to Iseul, who just shrugged. "Meh. You deserved it."

    "Depends on how you look at it."

"If you don't get back to your Music Theory homework, I will start throwing dishes instead."

Amber laughed all the way back to her laptop before focusing in on the composition. Soon the water was just background noise and Amber could get through a chuck of the work she had lost. She began to see hope.

Things were starting to go okay.
 

Yoooo I'm Dannie aka symphonies, nice to meet you! Here's the first chapter of Curious. Hope you guys like it, please upvote/subscribe/comment, yadda yadda you know all that stuff the authors always ask you to do.
Uhm, I'm a university student so updates won't be like, SUPER frequent, but I'll try and update whenever I can... so, uh, yeah. Enjoy, and see you next time~

-Dannie