A/N: I guess this chapter is more of a setup for things to come, but the level of drama is already a notch higher than previous chapters. I hope it doesn't disappoint. BTW-- two chapters down the road, you will see the first major consequence of this, so stay put, and enjoy!

Eunbi is sitting crossed leg at the couch, her hands clutching onto a mug of warm milk, as she take sips and looks at the clock every other minute. It is just past one, and Sakura is still out in the launch celebration party. Perhaps she should go pick her up? The last time they texted, the team has moved on to karaoke, and Sakura has stopped replying to her messages. In fact, the reason why she’s staying up to wait for her is not because of worry. She was practically fuming earlier when she discovered she might have actually exposed her body to a bunch of strangers, and Sakura was trying to lie about that all this time. I’m going to punish her and make her beg for my forgiveness! 

The anger is all but dissipated now, as she misses seeing her face. Her thoughts wander about from the sensation of Sakura’s body embracing her from the back in the scooter, to distant memories like all the nights Okaasan had waited for her to come home after late nights of frolicking with her dance crew friends. To be honest, that was the closest thing she considered as rebellion in all of her life, but her new mother didn’t seem to be fazed at all by this cool outer act. She chuckles at all the fuzzy feelings this pair of mother and daughter has given her, and that is when she hears the front door open.

“Unnie~~I got promoted!” Sakura stumbled into the living room and  practically threw herself over Eunbi while kicking off her shoes.

“Congrats Kkura! But... are you drunk?”

Sakura pulls back and found something crushed in her hand when she went in for the hug. She just shrugged and hands Eunbi a wilted purple rose.

“For you, a red rose, for my beautiful angel!” She announced loudly. Idiot...she even got the color wrong...she’s definitely dead drunk.

“Lower your voice...oh man…” Eunbi put Kkura’s arm across her shoulders and tried to nudge her into their bedroom. “Nako is long asleep already…” “Nako-ya!” “Shhhhhhhh” Eunbi immediately covers the rowdy drunkard’s mouth.

She tried her best to coo this spineless blob of body mass that Sakura is and pulled her again, but Sakura dragged her into the store room instead and closed the door.

“Unnie, unnie! I promised to open up to you.” She pushed the shorter girl to sit down. 

“Open up?” Eunbi can’t quite follow her thoughts. 

“I’m going to start up...Counter Strike….now…” She mumbled and tried to pry the laptop lid open, but it remains stubbornly stuck under her clumsy fingers. Oh! She is referring to the promise she made at the park when I danced for her...Eunbi realized.

“Kkura…” Eunbi pulls her arms back to stop the girl. “It’s all right...you don’t have to show me your expertise right now. You’re way too drunk, you know. Let’s go to bed.”

“Really?” Kkura pauses and looks up with a goofy smile. “If I’m drunk, heh heh, then I might lose!” “Okay then...let’s”

“But Unnie! I still need to apologize. I accidentally showed you to my friends…” She’s bringing this video thing up in this state?! “I’m sorry we saw everything without your permission...but wait..” Kkura raised a finger up like she has thought of a great idea. “I can compensate…” A drunk person’s idea can never be good...Eunbi facepalms herself mentally.

Suddenly, Sakura springs up from her sitting position and tries to reach to the bookshelf, but Eunbi is afraid that she’ll knock things over, so she pushes her arms down and a little wrestling match begins. 

“Unnie…” “Comon, Kkura baby~” But Sakura is so determined and she finally pushes Eunbi down, leaning over her and got a magazine out of the shelf.

“Look!” She smacks the cover practically onto the older girl’s face, who’s now lying below her and struggling to get off from Sakura. “Let me show you my collection...look! My oshimen!”

“Oshimen?” Eunbi doesn’t understand and tries to take the book off Sakura’s hands to have an actual look.

“She’s….beauuuuuutiful… She has nice boddddyyyyy… like you!” 

Sakura laughs as she sees her unnie’s face turns red at her drunken directness. The flustered Eunbi is now quite conscious that she is locked under Sakura at the hips, especially when the magazine is kind of up against her line of vision, so all other sensations are heightened up. She is very conscious that their bare thighs touching each other, and Sakura’s drunken body heat is radiating onto her skin. What...what did she think of my body when she saw me like that last time? Eunbi is surprised that she will muse about Sakura this way. Then suddenly she flings the magazine with a good looking model away, revealing her delicate face with pink cheeks and watery eyes as she leans down slowly. Wait, what’s she gonna do? As Eunbi panics, she felt her face cupped by a warm pair of hands.

“But you are soooooooooo much MORE beautiful. I can look at you all day…You are so pretty...”

Eunbi feels her face heat up again, but all her short-circuited brain can think of is how stunning the girl above her looks. She stares into the red, searching eyes of her dazed sister. She seems genuinely struck by Eunbi’s beauty.

“Do you remember when we first met, at the wedding?” She now took her hands off her face and started one side of her cheek dearly with the back of her palm.

Actually...it is earlier than that. Eunbi reminisced for a brief moment, but tried to shut down the thought immediately. There is no way she will realize that though.

“You were wearing a long purple dress, with open shoulders and back. Do you know...I saw your back first before I saw your face. Those shoulders… wow” She starts tracing her fingertips down her face, along her neck and reaches her shoulder. Eunbi gulps as she follows the movement of her hand. If she wasn’t sure that it was her own imagination, she would have sworn that Sakura’s fingertips are burning.

“Your skin was like... marble.....you glowed more brightly than the gloss that was reflecting off your dress. Then you turned around, and...Yabainde. Your eyes, your nose, your lips, your collarbone…” Sakura eyes followed each feature she was describing, as she traced those fingers from her shoulder tips along her collarbone, reaching all the way above the center of her chest, where Eunbi could feel herself heaving up and down from the slow, long breaths she is taking. “How can you be this beautiful…” She paused and utter something she almost couldn’t hear.

“Oneesan.”

Feeling that Sakura’s movements have slowed, Eunbi gingerly pushes her own body back from the girl who was now only loosely straddling on her to sit up and face her properly. She’s looking much more serious and somber now, but her eyes are still glued on Eunbi, making the older girl rub her own arms consciously.

“Are...are you okay, Sakura?”

Sakura just lowers her head in agony and shakes it slowly. “I...I just want to tell you so badly.”

“What?” Eunbi doesn’t understand it, but the mood and the tension somehow makes her heart race quickly. Whatever she’s trying to say, has something that excites Eunbi to no end. She does not even realize she is holding her breath.

“I think I have a….I like….I” Sakura finally looks up and finds Eunbi’s expectant face and innocent eyes staring back at her. “I like women.”

Eunbi closes her eyes and exhales, trying to take the information in. Her mind is so confused, as she cannot understand why there is a tinge of disappointment when she heard what is possibly one of Kkura’s biggest confessions, an intimate part of her identity. She’s finally opening herself up to her, and what was she expecting her to say anyway? Obviously, she has been suspecting for a long time that Sakura swings that way, what with the numerous times she would walk into the empty storeroom just to find an open magazine with some swimsuit model showing off their assets to her. She even flipped through some of the pages out of curiosity, and put it back exactly as she found it so that Kkura would not know anyone has seen it. But now, to actually hear it from Sakura herself? That should be big. Eunbi brushes those feelings aside and works up some words of encouragement.

“Kkura-ya…” She smiles softly and pats her head gently. “That’s very good. You should be able to love whoever you want, and I know it is not easy here in this country, but you have me. You have all of us here to support you, and surely, you will find the person that makes you happy.”

Sakura looks quite sobered up after letting out such a big secret, and she is just sitting silently, listening and giving a small smile. 

“Com’on, let Unnie give you a hug...now chin up, you silly thing.” She moves in and embraces her.

“Thanks.” Eunbi can tell that Sakura has relaxed her body in her, showing her that she is relieved at Eunbi’s reactions. “I was kind of afraid of how you would think. I...never knew what you thought of our mums’ marriage.”

“What do you think I am, Kkura...some bigoted religious nutjob who likes to poke their nose into something that is totally none of their business? I don’t understand why people have an issue with happy couples.” She chuckles and snuggles into Sakura’s chest. “Omo, did you lose weight? Come on now, let’s go to bed, I will make you two sunnyside ups for breakfast tomorrow to put some fat in you.”

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It has been one month since that fateful day, when Eunbi and Sakura went on the scooter date, and they both bared their thoughts and secrets out to each other in the park and the store room. Ironically, they haven’t been able to talk much since, as Sakura’s hours got busier, and Eunbi barely saw her during the day. They still managed to joke around with each other, especially on the weekends when they spent time together with Nako, or on some days, when Eunbi drove her to the train station if she was running late. Mostly, it was just talk about work, or random customs that Sakura was still getting used to. Sakura has been working extra hard on Korean too, so sometimes, she would even just memorize flashcards in the car silently, and Eunbi become relegated to a walking Korean dictionary, something she isn’t too happy about, although she is amazed at how good Sakura’s Korean is getting.

Today is the end of a promotion period that Eunbi organized at her cafe after the minor renovation. They had cleared out some sections of the walls, so that in addition to their mothers’ permanent photo collection, there is space to house more photography pieces by budding artists. The first round was a success, and now she is taking a break at the cafe after the lunch rush to admire the new set of polaroid photos of portraits. 

The cafe is named Flowerz because it features a lot of photos of the scenery in vast flower fields that Okaasan and Eomma took over their years of travel. There are lavender fields from the Furano area in Hokkaido, and rows of green tea under the glistening sunset in Jeju. These are nicely tied with the teas they serve in the drink menu, but one certain set of photos were taken by both of them, and took up almost half of the photos from their collection. It was photos and photos of sunflowers in Andalucia in Spain, some in great blue sky backdrops, some with distant windmills, some wilting with poetic beauty as the sun shines on the yellow petals after they had been weathered by a storm that you can still see in a far horizon. Even as a novice in art, Eunbi can tell the distinctly different styles of her mothers apart from each other. It was supposed to be the place where they met and fell in love. Eunbi smiles at the thought of imagining how the two standing behind the cameras that took those pictures were like. Originally, she was shocked when her mother came back one day, and announced that she has found someone, another woman nonetheless. She did not know how to face suddenly having a new mother, but she never questioned the happy look on Eomma’s face. She’s endured years and years of sadness, and the burden of this sadness in the form of Eunbi herself. She never let her in on much since she was a kid, even when rumors about her father, whom she’s never met, reached her ears in the form of jeers from her bullies or careless whispers from her relatives. When she was twelve, her mother sat her down and told her the name of her father, and the story that they were with each other for a while but things didn’t work out. She apologized to Eunbi profusely