Chapter 4
Two weeks later in Los Angeles, CA
“IT WASa roar like you wouldn’t believe. An animal in agony. It made my hair stand up and my breath freeze. I panicked so badly, I went through a whole inhaler.”
Auntie Sand paused with the tea poised halfway to her lips. “What did you do?”
Walter looked down in shame. “I got everyone outside and called 911. It was the only thing I could think of. I tried to go back for Bing and Laddin, but security wouldn’t let me. And the cowards wouldn’t go in either. They waited for animal control.”
As expected, his aunt pursed her lips with a critical frown. “You didn’t investigate?”
“I had to get everyone outside first. Though between you and me, there were a couple of people there who deserved to be bitten by a rabid dog.” He didn’t really think that about the Wus. Okay, maybe he did….
“What did animal control find?”
Walter’s cheeks burned. “Nothing. They think we heard something from a nearby lot.” He gripped his teacup, remembering the way they’d laughed at him. “It wasn’t, Auntie,” he said, repeating the words he’d told himself a million times. “I can tell when something is inside my lot.”
“Did everyone get out?”
Walter shook his head, feeling misery well up, thick and choking. “Bing’s gone. Laddin too. It’s been two weeks and I haven’t talked to either one. We got a message from Laddin’s sister saying he quit. And another from Bing’s agent saying the same thing.”
His voice cracked on his partner’s name. Bing was more than a partner to him. He was the man he’d yearned after, secretly worshipped, and the one he’d turned to when his confidence flagged. And now that the man had finally admitted he was gay, Walter had had even more hope for what they might become. But that would only happen if the guy showed up.
He’d known Bing had a dark side. The man was so disciplined, so tight, that he would sometimes spiral into a dark place. It was all that Chinese suppression of emotion, not to mention the culture’s rampant homophobia. Bing would sometimes sit in a dark room for days on end.
That was when he’d needed Walter to drag him out, ply him with mac and cheese, and get him to watch a stupid movie. How else was he to help a man who exuded confidence and was a martial arts god? If there was one thing that Walter excelled at, it was making Bing smile. It was all in the comic timing. Walter could tease his best friend out of a hole, and he’d happily do it again if only Bing would call him back.
“I’m really worried,” he said, putting down his teacup.
His aunt patted his hand. “Well, it doesn’t sound like there’s much of a movie to get back to.”
Walter pushed up from his chair and paced the back area of his aunt’s Chinatown tourist kitsch shop. She had a tiny sitting area where she had tea with her favorite customers. Walter had become a regular here from the moment he realized he would never become a doctor like his father or bio engineers like his two siblings. His aunt had never asked him to be more than what he was—an art geek who’d fallen in love with Hollywood—and so it had made sense that in his moment of darkest despair, he’d come to her.
Except she wasn’t being supportive right now so much as tolerant. Boy was he tired of people being tolerant of his foibles.
“Never mind my problems, Auntie. Mama says you’ve been different lately. What’s going on?”
She nodded slowly, her eyes on the inside of Walter’s teacup. She was reading the leaves, but what they told her was a mystery to him.
“Auntie—” he said again, but she shushed him, then drained her own teacup. She spent a very long time staring at her own leaves.
Eventually she spoke to him, though her eyes never left the teacup. “Why don’t you accept this Grand Master Wu’s offer? You will have money, a handsome leading man, and everything will proceed as if—”
“As if I’d just screwed Bing, along with everybody else. We worked on the script together. We got the financing together. We built this movie together.” Walter shook his head. “I don’t care if it all goes to hell. I won’t betray him.”
His aunt looked up with a beaming smile on her face. It was more than approval. He read glee in her expression, something he’d never seen before. “Loyalty,” she said, pointing into her own teacup. “That is what I needed to see from you.” She reached out, and he expected her to pat his hand as she had done countless times. Instead, she gripped his fingers tight. “I thought it would be you,” she said, her voice taking on a rhythmic beat. “Long have I watched and waited. A thousand years, it seems, ten thousand possibilities, but I knew it would be you, my most favored nephew.”
That was a next-level speech, coming from his aunt. She had always been out there on the weird edge, but now he saw what his mother was talking about. This was a new kind of strange.
“Auntie,” he said softly as he touched her arm. “Has the cancer come back?” Fear slid through him. That would likely be fatal, as she was old, much older than his parents. She wasn’t even technically his aunt but a more distant relative, though they’d always referred to each other as aunt and nephew.
She frowned at him. “Such doubt! It destroys your good qualities.”
“But—”
“I said the prayer, made the sacrifice, and now I am cured!”
Oh hell. “The prayer is great, Auntie, but your medicine is important too. Are you seeing the doctor? I can drive you—”
