Amber stepped off the plane from LA, feeling odd being back on Korean soil. She was coming home after an extended stay visiting her mother in California. Mrs. Liu had built a comfortable life there with her father, looking healthier and happier than ever.

Amber wished she could say the same for herself. While her career was flourishing, she wasn’t so sure about her personal life. Her current girlfriend, Amy, seemed to be drifting away. She’d offered to bring Amy to LA with her since she hadn’t wanted Amber to go on the two-month trip in the first place, but Amy hadn’t been able to get leave from her job.

It bothered Amber that the desire to see her mother didn’t seem important to her current girlfriend. Yes, two months was a long time, but it wasn’t that long. Or maybe it was as Henry said, there was something else actually bothering her, but she chose the trip as something to start a fight over.

Amber sighed, shaking that all off. She only had one day of rest before she would need to be back in the office again, and she didn’t want to spend it stressing over things that she couldn’t change at the moment. Amy had said she would be busy visiting her family in Busan when Amber came back, so instead of stopping off there to finish conversations they couldn’t on the phone, she would go home, take a shower, sleep off the jet lag, then start tomorrow fresh. She knew her parents worried about her, so she didn’t want to give them anything extra on their plates.

“Miss Liu!”

She pressed her eyes shut. It must be a slow celeb day if a reporter was looking for her. She’d released a few songs over the last two years, though it was mostly the songs she wrote for other people that garnered the most attention. She was still a slightly known celebrity, just enough to keep the work calls coming in, but not so much that it typically disturbed her daily life.      

“Miss Liu! This way!”

She posed for a few pictures, but mostly waved them off and hopped into the Toyota waiting for her, Henry in the driver's seat.

Amber laughed and punched him in the arm. “I can’t believe you found the time to come get me.”

He rolled his eyes. “My wife’s gonna kill me when I get home. She’ll accuse me of shirking baby duty again.”

Henry had come to work with her at Antennae music and had been doing great until he set eyes on a pretty makeup artist wandering through the building. He’d barely learned her name before he’d accidentally gotten her pregnant. Su Bin had been scared he would leave her to take care of the baby on her own or force her to get an abortion as her parents wanted, but he’d moved her into his and Amber’s apartment until they’d both gotten on their feet, both working right up until the baby was born. They’d all packed up and moved to a slightly nicer building after that. Them, to be closer to a reliable daycare, Amber just because she could with the raises and royalties she’d been getting. Plus, she liked when she had the spare time to help them look after their baby. She didn’t know when she would be settled enough to have one herself, but she knew it was something she wanted, and the practice would come in handy.

The struggles and sacrifices her family had always made to take care of one another had instilled a deep desire for a family of her own in her. She wanted the chance to share that with children of her own. Thinking of family always made her sister come to her mind and her heart ached wondering if she’d ever see her again. Jackie had to be thirty by now. She wondered if she had a family of her own. Thinking about how wild her older sister had been in her teens, she just couldn’t imagine it.

She turned her attention back to the conversation at hand. “You should double up tomorrow to make it up to her and rub her feet. I don’t know why she insists on wearing heels all day,” Amber snickered. “She’s still barely 5’3”.”

“You know you love a woman in heels,” Henry smirked at her. “The way the calf gets all firm looking. The leg looks extra graceful.” He sighed. “My wife really has the best legs, even if they’re short.”

She giggled.

“How’s Amy? You guys still together? I haven’t heard you talk about her in weeks.”

And, there goes my mood again. Amber focused out the window for a bit. “I thought about asking her to move in,  you know before I left? And now I’m wondering if I even want to try fixing whatever’s gone wrong between us. I know she’s always had a problem with my job because of the uncertain hours and the traveling, but we seemed to have been getting over that until I flew to LA.”

Henry hummed in the back of his throat and nodded a bit.

“What?” Amber asked sharply, knowing he felt like he had something important to say when he did that.

“Sabotage.”

She cocked her head, wondering if she’d heard him correctly.

“Don’t look at me like that,” he said, without even looking at her. “You do this all the time. Try actually talking to your girlfriend this time before pushing her away, or before letting circumstances push her away. Yeah, the crazy hours of your job have been a problem, but I know your heart is still a little scared and you let it get the best of you. She was either trying to keep you or push away with how she fought you over the LA trip. You owe it to yourself to find out which one.”

“You’ve gotten smarter since you married Su Bin.”

“Thank God,” Henry said.

Amber shook her head at him, then sighed and slumped down in her seat, wishing the airport wasn’t such a long way from her home.

He was right. Her heart was scared. And because of that, she knew she sometimes asked of her girlfriends more than she herself was willing to give back to them like they all had something to prove to her. It wasn’t fair to them or to herself.

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Amber sat across from Amy in the dark corner of an afternoon café. The scent of coffee reminding her of her years behind the counter selling to college students, her head empty of dreams, just full of making it one more day and paying bills on time.

She really wished Amy hadn’t suggested they meet here.

“Are you finally going to talk to me?” Amy asked, leaning back in her seat and folding her arms across her chest, plumped by what Amber knew to be a very padded push-up bra. The girl barely had more than Amber in the chest region but liked to pretend otherwise.

“I feel like even when I do talk you don’t listen,” Amber huffed, knowing that her poor attitude wouldn’t help matters. Seeing Amy’s brow pull together, she scrubbed a hand through her hair and spoke again to forestall whatever she’d been about to say. “Sorry. Still jet-lagged.” She supported her weight on the table with her elbows. “I should’ve called more while I was away.”

“Yo-“

“Every time I was away,” Amber amended, thinking about the times she’d traveled for work and left it to her girlfriend to initiate all the contact. “And…” she swallowed. “I’m really sorry about the things I said when you told me you couldn’t get leave.”

“I know you care about your mom-“

“I know. Two months is a long time. My job only let me get away because I could still do work from there. Or I should’ve waited until school was out so I could bring you with me.”

Amy’s face softened, her sweet brown eyes finally relaxing. “I’m sorry about the things I said too,” she said with some regret. “I was scared, thinking about traveling to LA. You know I don’t speak English. It would’ve been so scary. I shouldn’t have looked so relieved when I told you they wouldn’t let me know, but I couldn’t help that I was. I want to meet your parents, just…” she winced. “Maybe over facetime.”

Amber huffed out a little laugh and reached across the table. The first time she’d seen Amy, she’d been wrangling a herd of kindergartners in an ice cream shop, looking amused but stressed out. It was why Amber had darted across the room and asked her out. Amy had been a bit resistant to seeing another woman, but Amber had somehow charmed her into one date and then another.

Amy shyly took her hand.

“I’ve been a pretty crap girlfriend to you,” Amber said. “I’ll try to do better from now on.”

Amy bit her full lower lip. “I haven’t been that great myself.” She glanced up through her thick lashes. “I’ll work harder too.”

Amber squeezed her fingers, satisfied on the surface but something deeper niggling at her that something was missing.

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“Glad to be back at work?” her assistant asked, dropping a file off on her desk along with a cup of coffee.

“You know it,” Amber said, sinking into her desk chair and giving it a spin before going through any missed messages that hadn’t been forwarded to her in LA.

“So, they’ve decided to get that new group off the ground?” she asked.

Her assistant, Erin, nodded. “They want to look over a few of your songs for the debut project.”

Amber nodded. “Alright.”

“And a pretty big client dropped off a proposal to be looked over. They need jingles or promotional songs and some of our talent for some sort of commercial. They were going to go with another company, but then came to us because we could off up some quality fresh faces.”

That brought a big smile to Amber’s face. Their company had worked up from ‘possibly a scam’ to ‘respectable’ over a very short amount of time. And even in the few years Amber had been there, it was still reaching new heights. Now they were a good first choice for some of the bigger brands.

“It’s this folder here,” Erin said, tapping a pale blue plastic binder. “Glad to have you back,” she said before turning on her high heels and leaving the room. Amber was always in awe of women who could do that so easily.

A smile still dancing on her lips, she pulled the folder to the top of the stack and flipped it open, her face freezing. A woman she hadn’t seen in over two years smiled confidently back at her, a light brown business suit hugging her frame perfectly.

Jung Resorts. Creative Director, Krystal Jung.